"The Air That Touched Things"

Claude Monet
"La Pie (The Magpie)"
1868-69
Oil on canvas
35 x 51 inches

"Monet once revealed that he wanted to paint not things in themselves but the air that touched things - the enveloping air. The enveloping air offers continuity and infinite expansion. If Monet can paint the air, he can follow it like following a thought. Except that the air operates wordlessly and, when painted, is visibly present only in colors, touches, layers, palimpsests, shades, caresses, scratches."

- John Berger, "The Enveloping Air," Harper's Magazine, January 2011

I'm not sure which I like more, Monet's wonderfully quixotic desire to paint "the air that touched things" or Berger's evocative prose. In any case, Monet nailed the light in his magpie painting.

Image credit: ripped from SeineValley.com

The Propagandist's Purpose

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."

-Aldous Huxley, The Independent

Photo credits: ripped from Jim Gogek's blog

Originality and (Re)cognition

Xie Zhiliu (Chinese, 1910–1997)
"Ducks and Blossoming Branches"
Pencil and ink on paper
20 1/2 x 30 3/4 inches
In his recent review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition of works on paper by the late Chinese artist Xie Zhiliu ("Tracing the Path to Chinese Finesse," New York Times, February 14, 2010), art critic Ken Johnson reminds readers that imitation is often a prerequisite for originality. Johnson's piece begins with a Western commonplace,

"Copying is bad; originality is good. That’s what we learn from toddlerdom on. In art as in life, be yourself. Don’t pretend. Nobody likes phonies, fakes or frauds. Forgery is illegal. Authenticity is holy.

But wait. Copying and imitating have been the rule for most of the history of human civilization. In the West artists from Raphael to Picasso have profited from copying the works of others. In art there is no such thing as pure originality."

Or is there?

I suppose it depends on one's definition of originality. Having recently come under the intellectual sway of George Steiner, I wholeheartedly endorse the philosopher-critic's distinction between originality and novelty, detailed in his book Real Presences.

"Originality is antithetical to novelty. The etymology of the word alerts us. It tells of 'inception' and of 'instauration,' of a return, in substance and in form, to beginnings. In exact relation to their originality, to their spiritual-formal force of innovation, aesthetic inventions are 'archaic.' They carry in them the pulse of the distant source."

Put another way, novelty is self-conscious invention or difference for the sake of invention or difference (that is, mere newness), whereas originality is an individual's expression of a primordial and universal resonance.

What better way to absorb the lessons of your predecessors (to better prepare yourself for originality) than by reproducing the work of those artists? More from Johnson's article:

"Maxwell K. Hearn, the exhibition’s organizer and a curator of Chinese painting and calligraphy at the Met, explained in an interview that the show’s main significance is in what it reveals about methods used by traditional artists. It turns out that the kind of graceful naturalism that Xie achieved in his best works came not from extensive study of nature but by tracing over and over the works of other artists on sheets of semitransparent paper. [...] Repeatedly tracing the works of old masters as Xie did might be compared to a pianist practicing a composition by Bach. This may sound suffocating for a modern artist, but it is not unlike how many young artists learn to draw: by copying their favorite comic-book characters over and over."

I was no exception. I spent countless teenage hours copying comic strips and, later, comic book characters. The graphic line and compositional sense that I learned from emulating those comic artists significantly informs my artwork today.

Johnson is correct, however; these ideas "may sound suffocating for a modern artist." That copying (a casual form of apprenticeship) might offend contemporary sensibilities is further evidence of the excesses of modernism and postmodernism. Too much was purged in the revolution of modern aesthetics; the rabble is today without coherence.

Fortunately, the art world is undergoing a sea change. The majority of artists under 40 years of age (and an increasing number of those over 40) do not mistake novelty of expression for originality, and they will readily acknowledge the value of copying, especially for the young artist. In fact, we realize the genuineness of Steiner's insistence that such activity is vital in all aesthetic disciplines.

"To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force. Ben Johnson's term, 'ingestion,' is precisely right. What we know by heart becomes an agency in our consciousness, a 'pace-maker' in the growth and vital complication of our identity.

[...] Accurate recollection and resort in remembrance not only deepen our grasp of the work: they generate a shaping reciprocity between ourselves and that which the heart knows. As we change, so does the informing context of the internalized poem or sonata. In turn, remembrance becomes recognition and discovery (to re-cognize is to know anew)."

Image credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Logical Consequence

"'Art for art' is a tactical slogan, a necessary rebellion against philistine didacticism and political control. But pressed to its logical consequences, it is pure narcissism."

- George Steiner

Sunset, Sunrise

Heron Hope sunset; November 2009

"Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be."

- William Wordsworth, The Prelude

"Indeed, from within the murkiness of human knowledge and experience, we rightly wonder, is there any room for theology as such - or has it gone the way of all heavenly things? Perhaps all that remains is some mode of natural piety, such as the shudder before the mortal mysteries (with Goethe), or the felt ecstasies of springtime (with Wordsworth). Surely this is a lot, and unsettles the mind from its human habitudes. But is there more?

[...] Like all matters human, theology must be grounded in earthly experience and understood from within its forms. The phenomenal world is all that we have. This is the sphere that lies before us in our everyday existence; it conditions the products of aesthetic perception; and it provides the sphere for theological experience and reflection.

[...] As natural beings we are, in the most elemental sense, coextensive with this realm: our bodies are composed of it, our stomachs take in and digest its matter, and we traffic with this world all our days until we die and are decomposed into its elements. [...] To more properly sense [the] unfolding of the Godhead into world-being, so to speak, or to perceive or intuit its penetrations therein, we must first return to our ordinary experiences."

- Michael Fishbane, Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology


Sunrise at Heron Hope; November 2009
Happy Hanukkah, folks.

Photo credits: Hungry Hyaena, 2009

The Most Fundamental Form of Passion

Charles Burchfield
"November Sun Emerging"
1956-59
Watercolor on paper
37 3/4 x 31 7/8 inches

"[How] can we account for that irresistible instinct in our hearts which leads us towards unity whenever and in whatever direction our passions are stirred? A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music - these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence. [...] Resonance to the All - the keynote of pure poetry and pure religion. Once again: what does this phenomenon, which is born with thought and grows with it, reveal if not a deep accord between two realities which seek each other; the severed particle which trembles at the approach of 'the rest'?

We are often inclined to think that we have exhausted the various natural forms of love with a man's love for his wife, his children, his friends and to a certain extent for his country. Yet precisely the most fundamental form of passion is missing from this list, the one which, under the pressure of an involuting universe, precipitates the elements one upon the other in the Whole cosmic affinity and hence cosmic sense. A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love."

- excerpt from The Phenomenon of Man, by paleontologist, geologist, philosopher, and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Image credit:Burchfield image ripped from Mark Harden's Artchive

A Practice of Naming

Christopher van Donkelaar
"Adam Naming the Animals"
Handmade pigments and mixed media
2008

"Praise to the first man who wrote down this joy clearly, for we cannot remain in love with what we cannot name."

- Robert Bly

A lover of etymology and taxonomy, one of my most cherished reference books is Arthur Frederick Gotch's Latin Names Explained: A Guide to the Scientific Classification of Reptiles, Birds and Mammals. In it, Gotch catalogs and dissects the scientific names of some 4,000 animal species. That number appears relatively insignificant when we consider that biologists estimate 25,000 species of bird, mammal, and reptile currently exist on Earth, but Gotch's record is so far unparalleled. Each entry provides the animal's common and scientific names, followed by an explication of the Latin and Greek and, sometimes, a blurb about the species' range and habitat.

For example, consider Gotch's entry on one of my very favorite North American snake species:

Copperhead Agkistrodon contortrix
agkistrodon (Gr) a fish-hook; odon (Gr) a tooth; a reference to the curved fangs, though of course they are not barbed; contorqueo (L) I twist, turn; contortus (L) full of turns, twisted; contortrix (L) one that is able to turn, twist. Inhabiting the south-eastern part of the USA including Florida. The top of the head is reddish brown.

Although the range information suggests that the copperhead is more confined to the southeastern United States than the species and subspecies actually are - they thrive in New York State, for example - Gotch's entry informs readers that the snake commonly called a copperhead is universally and technically named Fish-hook shaped tooth twister or, if you prefer, The Twisting One With Hook Shaped Teeth. Knowledge of this name allows me to appreciate the beautiful reptile from another angle.

But what's in a name, really?

Although I'm generally baffled by Biblical literalism, I appreciate the Genesis accounts of creation for their gratifying metaphor. In particular, I'm drawn to rabbinic and Jewish mystics' interpretations of the conjoined, aboriginal narratives. More so than their Christian counterparts, Jewish theologians and mystics endow language and names with ontological significance. The Hebrew alphabet is understood as a powerful code: the written word is creative potential, and the spoken word, procreative. The god of Genesis 1 creates neither with a wave of the hand nor by shaping raw material, but by speaking the world into being; annunciation and incantation are the means of creation. Because of the vocative nature of naming, observant Jews place great value on words and speech. (They are even prohibited utterance of the tetragrammaton, the four-letter Hebrew name of God, transliterated as Yahweh. Appropriately enough, the colloquial name for God is Hashem, or "the word.")

In Genesis 2, the creator god is anthropomorphized and physically involved with creation, shaping man and the other animals from earth. Yet the power of language and names remains significant in this account. God asks Adam, the first naked ape, to name all of the other animal species. That's no mean task, and apparently Adam died before he finished the job. His descendants, at least the taxonomists among them, are still working at the task of naming.

But even those individuals who do not share my affection for taxonomy will find value in a practice of observation and naming. As Carol Kaesuk Yoon writes in her recent New York Times paean to taxonomy, "Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World,"

"Even when scads of insistent wildlife appear with a flourish right in front of us, and there is such life always — hawks migrating over the parking lot, great colorful moths banging up against the window at night — we barely seem to notice. We are so disconnected from the living world that we can live in the midst of a mass extinction, of the rapid invasion everywhere of new and noxious species, entirely unaware that anything is happening. Happily, changing all this turns out to be easy. Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound. Give a nod to Professor Franclemont and meditate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. Learn science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own. To do so is to change everything, including yourself. Because once you start noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you."

Beautiful. Let's name something.

See also "The Plant Whisperer," another brief HH essay considering similar ideas.

Image credit: van Donkelaar painting ripped from the Nurturing Faith website

Offerings, Tallies, Records

Christopher Reiger
"cost benefit analysis"
2008
Pen and sumi ink, gouache, watercolor and marker on Arches paper
12 x 12 inches

"What if, while you read the last few paragraphs, something in the world has changed? What if, during the past five minutes, someone, somewhere, sent you a text? Shouldn’t you go and check?

Being addicted to the wired universe might be perfectly healthy, of course, and it’s certainly defensible beneath the triumvirate of technology, curiosity, and progress. I’m the first to admit that there’s something enchanting and invigorating about my computer. There’s magic in reading a note from a friend in Rome and clicking through Halloween pictures from New Jersey and verifying John Steinbeck’s birth date in two clicks. The Internet is indeed its own strange, blessed fountain of light.

[...I'm] not the first to wonder about all this, [...] not the first to sense that maybe our shared life is rushing by too quickly, too feverishly. [I'm] not the first to feel as if [I'm] scrambling to make [my voice] heard against an infinite and obliterating silence.

During the five days [...] I spent in the mountains, [I] saw lots of Shoshone pictographs, paintings made in caves mostly, and under overhangs: finger-painted elk and owls and dogs and triangle-bodied hunters with bows. Many of the pictographs in that area include hash marks, like rows of fence posts scratched downhill, but it’s anyone’s guess as to what these marks originally meant. Maybe they were offerings to the spirit world, or tallies of successful hunts, or records of vision quests. Maybe they were the consequence of someone sitting beside a fire and thinking happily away.

Whatever they once meant, they mean something else now. They mean memories are fragile, beliefs are tenuous, contexts are temporary. They mean nothing is stable—not mountains, not species, not cultures, not e-mail."

- Anthony Doerr, "Am I Still Here?" (from the January/February issue of Orion Magazine)

To Philosophize

Christopher Reiger
"a mode of becoming"
2008
Watercolor, gouache, pen and sumi ink on Arches paper
16 x 12 inches

"To philosophize is to articulate and express our personal reactions to the mystery which we call life, both with regard to the nature of that mystery and with regard to its meaning and purpose.

My answer to the question 'Why do we philosophize?' is as follows. We philosophize for the same reason that we move and speak and laugh and eat and love. In other words, we philosophize because man is a philosophical animal. We breathe because we cannot help breathing and we philosophize because we cannot help philosophizing. We may be as sceptical as we please. Our very scepticism is the confession of an implicit philosophy. To suppress the activity of philosophizing is as impossible as to suppress the activity of breathing."

-John Cowper Powys, "The Complex Vision"

A Simple Idea

View of the Catskills from Mohonk Preserve, NY; March 2009

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed...We need wilderness preserved-- as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-- because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simple because it is there -- important, that is, simply as idea."
-Wallace Stegner, 1960

Even those of us who struggle to accept romantic notions of wilderness are moved by appeals such as Stegner's. And with good reason.

Photo credit: Hungry Hyaena, 2009

Like Brushstrokes

Christopher Reiger
"from the tangled vegetation"
2006-2007
Watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on Arches paper
22 x 22 inches

"The great birds paced their own glassy reflections before pulling up like brushstrokes to stand in the shallows of the far shore."

- Matthew Power, "Mississipi Drift: River vagrants in the age of Wal-Mart"

Everybody's talking about it...

...but few folks have anything this worthy to contribute.

Bosko Blagojevic's "Hard to See, Harder to Imagine" post at ArtCal Zine is only a modest taking-stock, but it reads like a prose poem. It isn't just our ailing economy that needs examination; indeed, the capitalistic economic machine always operates in a fugue.

"Financial journalism, and economics since around the mid 17th century, has increasingly been about abstractions: intricate movements of people, money and material described and occasionally visualized, but remaining essentially invisible. They endure, like climate change and remote international conflicts, as that which might inspire excitement, worry, fear, or action - and yet necessarily demand a kind of belief in order to do so. Belief in the economy, as belief in anything else, becomes a certain emotional temperature that elevates a thing from an idea to a fact. It cannot be anything but this. So it may be with a sense of puzzled anxiety, an anxiety without an image or a face, that one reads in today's Times of the $85 billion Federal loan to save A.I.G., the capsizing international insurance giant. Equal puzzlement or slightly chastened awe, perhaps, might be inspired on the same day upon reading, on top of Artforum.com's news page, of Damien Hirst's potentially precedent-setting 2-day primary market auction sale, collecting for the artist $200.8 million in the sale of all but three of the 167 works to see the auction block. These numbers in their excess, of profits or deficits, seem to become less real with each shift in the order of magnitude, or move of the decimal point."

Note: This post follows an auction announcement, albeit a benefit auction. As Alanis would say, isn't it ironic?

Keys

Ernst Haeckel
"Stephoidea"
1904
Lithograph

"A key has no logic to its shape. Its logic is: it turns the lock."
-G.K. Chesterton

Ernst Haeckel
"Prosobranchia"
1904
Lithograph

Photo credit: via Wikipedia Commons, from Ernst Haeckel's "Kunstformen der Natur" ("Art Forms of Nature")

Spilling Ink

Zhang Huan
"Family Tree"
2001
Portfolio of 9 images
25 x 20 inches

"'Everyone is entitled to know everything'...is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one....A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Photo credit: Reproduction of Zhang Huan's "Family Tree" ripped from Art Core Gallery

Catharsis

Fourth of July Fireworks; Viewed from Red Hook, Brooklyn; July 2008

"Catharsis is properly effected not by works of art but by religious rites. It is also effected, less properly, by bullfights, professional football matches, bad movies, military bands, and monster rallies at which ten thousand Girl Guides form themselves into a living flag."
- W.H. Auden

Photo credit: Hungry Hyaena, 2008

Scraping Up

Saint Patrick's Cathedral; Manhattan; June 2008

"The tall building is itself artistically akin to the tall story. The very word skyscraper is an admirable example of an American lie."
- G.K. Chesterton

Photo credit: Hungry Hyaena, 2008

Tremendously, Excitedly, Perversely Bored

Kids Playing Under Northwest Freeway; Rocky River Reservation; Lakewood, Ohio; June 2008

"That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

- George Eliot, "Middlemarch"

Happy Independence Day, America. Here's to the ignored roar.

Photo credit: Hungry Hyaena, 2008

Shrieking Animal Sounds

"It reminds me of a story told about the great soprano sax player Sidney Bechet, who lived in Paris in the 1950s. He would practice scales and arpeggios for hours every day, but at the end of his sessions he would pause, and then launch into wild, shrieking animal sounds for the final minutes. A neighbor once asked him about this and Bechet responded, 'Sometimes I think what we call music is not the real music.'"
-David Rothenberg, "Serenading Belugas in the White Sea," Orion, January/February 2008

Commonplace books

"Cobbled together by literate peoples, commonplace books served as repositories for whatever someone thought fit to record: medical recipes, jokes, verse, prayers, mathematical tables, aphorisms, and especially passages from letters, poems, or books. Ben Johnson kept one; so did John Milton, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. In fact, one might think that most writers would have fashioned such handy compendia, yet Shakespeare's has never been found."

-Artur Krystal, "Too True," Harper's Magazine, February 2008

Small wonder blogging suits me.

For years I diligently updated my commonplace books, carefully taping into place images and passages clipped from magazine articles or transcribing those found in books.

Blogs might be considered the contemporary equivalent to the commonplace book, but where the books are tools of edification, blogs are essentially ego-driven affairs. Still, since I started posting to HH, my commonplace books have been neglected. Maybe I'm just an egotist.

"His knowledge is fragmentary, his righteousness is illusory, his motives are tainted, but, aware of the precariousness of human striving, he must strive nevertheless."
-Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Remind anyone of the studio? Hmmmm?