Praeterita

This photo was brought to the latest workshop that Patty and I conducted last Saturday for the community memoir/public art project. The person who brought it is the little baby in the photo. She is being held by her father, who is the soldier in the uniform. It was taken some time between 1943 and 1945. Gretchen's father was on leave. He had already been fighting in Europe. He came all the way back by boat and train to this tiny town in rural Illinois, and he would make the return journey all the way back for a further tour of duty. Look at the 1940s hairstyle of Gretchen's mother. Look at the dress, the close hairstyle, and the wire-framed spectacles of her grandmother, who was standing off to the side, mistakenly believing that she was out of frame and could relax now that she thought she wasn't being subjected to the discomforting gaze of the camera lens. She is clearly a woman who was born in the nineteenth century, and whose experience of farming life in America is pro...

From a journal entry dated February 4, 1847: “How sad it is that we reach the age of experience just as our strength begins to fail! What a cruel mockery on the part of nature is this gift of talent! It only comes after years of study have exhausted the strength needed to carry out the work.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Meditation number 33 talks about my enthusiasm for the ceramics of Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, where I spent five days recently.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated July, 1885: “I can’t predict the future, Theo—but I do know the eternal law that all things change. Think back 10 years, and things were different, the circumstances, the mood of the people, in short everything. And 10 years hence much is bound to have changed again. But what one does remains—and one does not easily regret having done it. The more active one is, the better, and I would sooner have a failure than sit idle and do nothing.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

As I’ve been re-reading and posting from Van Gogh’s letters, I’ve been struck by how often he mentioned the name of the French painter Eugene Delacroix. Delacroix, born in 1798, died in 1863 when Van Gogh was ten. If we look at Delacroix’s first paintings from the 1820s, it appears that they couldn’t be more different from Van Gogh and his contemporaries: Yet many of the Impressionists claimed Delacroix as a pioneer in their method of eliminating what painters refer to as ‘half-tones’, and using small strokes of pure unmixed colour. Delacroix also kept a journal, which he wrote in almost daily for the last 16 years of his life. There is a big contrast in personalities between the Delacroix of the journal and the Van Gogh of the letters, so I thought it would be interesting to start posting entries from the older painter’s writings too. Delacroix was a success from the beginning. You might say he was born to it, being the son of a military man who fought both for the French revolutio...

Giraffe at the zoo, which I just discovered for the first time in my eight years here is free of charge . Chicago is pretty good, too.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

In contrast to other travel article assignments this year, I didn't get the time to arrange visits to any artists' studios in advance of the trip to Albuquerque. But I did see some great things as we walked around the city. Such as, the bunches of dried chilis suspended from the frames of colonnades: Beautiful old pottery in the Albuquerque Museum of Art: Crushed tin cans decorated by children and fixed to the walls of an old downtown cinema, now being used as a religious meeting place: Navajo Code Talkers sitting at a table in Old Town, publicising a book about their exploits in WWII: The cool, shaded interior of the Iglesia de San Felipe de Neri on the Plaza in Old Town: And to cap it all off, on our last evening, there was a terrific thunderstorm, followed by a double rainbow. I shot this photo out of our hotel room, looking towards the Sandia mountains at 8 pm:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated June, 1885: “My contention is simply this, that drawing an academically correct figure, and having a steady, well-judged brushstroke, has little to do, or at least less than is generally supposed, with the needs—the pressing needs—of contemporary painting.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

About a half hour drive south of Santa Fe, Madrid is an old mining town that still consists of a single winding street lined with old wooden cabins and small houses: After the mines closed, Madrid became a ghost town for a while, before being revived by artists, gallerists, musicians, and assorted eccentrics. This ceramic totem outside one house gives you a flavour: We were there to see John McNair, Patty's nephew-who-is-four-months-younger-than-me, play with his band at a place called The Mineshaft. The band is called  The Family Coal , and if you click on that name you'll go to their website. That's Johnny, below, with the shades and the white shirt, playing the mandolin and looking every inch the folk-roots god that he is: The Mine Shaft Tavern used to be, believe it or not, a mine. It's built around all the detritus and left-over paraphernalia of a mining operation, such as boardwalks leading into the hill sides, odd bits of machinery, and a giant steam locomo...

Old Town, Albuquerque.  

Last Saturday, I spent some time at Indian Market in Santa Fe, and took lots of photos, of which the following slideshow is a selection: Hundreds of vendors set up shop in booths that went all round the Plaza in Santa Fe and into the streets around it. There were musicians, fairground booths, a tent hosting an awards ceremony for the most outstanding craftsmen and women, and of course thousands of pieces of pottery, weavings, jewellery, sculpture, and other forms of art. There are more than 19 pueblos in New Mexico, each with its own distinctive artistic traditions and iconography, and they were all represented at the market. My favourite style of art is from Acoma Pueblo. The pueblo itself, which I visited a few years ago, is a collection of adobe buildings dating back more than 1,000 years, sitting high up on a mesa that looks from afar like a gigantic slab of clay laid down on the desert floor. The Acoma style of pottery is known for its thin clay walls, its off-white and black ...

12th century Indian pot.

From a letter dated c. April 30, 1885: “I believe that The Potato Eaters will turn out well—as you know, the last few days are always tricky with a painting because before it’s completely dry one can’t use a large brush without running a real risk of spoiling it. And changes must be made very coolly and calmly with a small brush. That’s why I took it to my friend and asked him to make certain I didn’t spoil it, and why I’ll be going to this place to apply those finishing touches.”     Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Meditation number 32 considers a beautiful painting from 1460 by Piero della Francesca. I've always loved the chilly perfection of Piero's work, without ever quite knowing why I was drawn to it. In this talk, I've attempted to answer that for myself.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated October, 1884: Just slap anything on  when you see a blank canvas staring at you like some imbecile. You don’t know how  paralyzing  that is, that  stare  of a blank canvas, which says to the painter:  you can’t do a thing . The canvas has an  idiotic  stare and mesmerizes some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are  afraid  in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas  is  afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of ‘you can’t’ once and for all.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Patty and I flew to New Mexico on Thursday for the wedding of her nephew, John McNair. That makes me technically his uncle, even though I am only four months older than he is. And Patty is only three years older than him, due to the fact that Patty's father sired children over a period of twenty years, which produced the result that Patty has brothers who were having their own families when she was born, and so ... you get the picture. After a family dinner on Thursday night, we all drove up to Santa Fe on Friday for the larger party. Santa Fe is saturated with arts and crafts. A lot of it, particularly around the Plaza, is very crap indeed. There are scores of galleries on the Plaza and surrounding side streets, and many of them I have been told sell high quality Western-themed art. I can't really judge, as it's not a genre I like. There is a lot of Western-tradition art - pseudo Impressionism and Abstraction - and I am familiar with that, and almost all of what I'...

From a letter dated March, 1884: “ ‘Let your light shine before men,’ is, I believe, the duty of every painter, but in my view it does not mean that letting the light shine before men must be done through exhibitions. Believe me, I just wish there were more and better opportunities than exhibitions to bring art to the people. Far from wanting to hide the light under a bushel, I would sooner let it be seen.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

My opera-singer reader Faith Puleston replied to my dig at the level of acting in opera as follows: "There are acting singers and singing actors in opera. Some opera singers can't act at all (and often don't know it), while others, like me, love the dual challenge of being both actor and singer. It was reflected in reviews of my work. I'll look for some and post them to my website.  These days much more is expected of opera singers than used to be the case, but I know that for me it was always of paramount importance to get under the skin of my character, sometimes at the expense of purity of vocal line etc. The problem is that there are moments in opera when it is impossible to gamble around and sing, when time stands still. Opera arias are more or less the equivalent of monologues in a play." In my original post on this subject , I was kidding slightly, but I take Faith's point. There are and have been great dramatic actors and actresses in opera. Maria ...

Beautiful Colonial style (?) wooden building and vibrant garden.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Meditation number 31 is on a video piece by Bill Viola. As I say in the talk, I don't really like video art, or rather, it fails to move me much, but Viola's work, while teetering constantly on the edge of pretentiousness, has had some effect on me whenever I've seen it.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated March, 1884: “Just consider whether it is sensible to talk a great deal about technique nowadays. You will say that I myself am doing just that—as a matter of fact, I regret it. But as far as I am concerned, I am determined, even when I shall be much more master of my brush than I am now—to go on telling people methodically that I cannot paint. Do you understand? Even when I have achieved a solid manner of my own, more complete and concise than the present one. . .   “That thought, I can’t find the right words, is based not on something negative but on something positive. On the positive awareness that art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which, thought produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from man’s soul, while much of the proficiency and technical expertise associated with art reminds of what would be called self-righteousness in religi...

Dobar den! Or less formally, Zdravei. Or, hello to my reader(s) in Bulgaria. Seeing that country come up on the readership statistics for this blog rang a bell in the far reaches of my brain somewhere. So I checked on the internet, and my vague memory turned out to be correct: Christo, one of the most famous, some might say notorious, artists of the late twentieth century was born in Bulgaria. Christo, 'Wrapped Reichstag', 1995 He left for the west when he was in his twenties and studying in Prague. Before he met Jeanne-Claude in Paris in 1958 and began the lifelong collaboration with her, he painted portraits to make a living. I thought it would be fun to try and track down one of these pictures on the internet, but so far I've had no luck. Maybe I didn't search long enough, but I wonder also if Christo destroyed his early work once he started getting known for wrapping things up. Many well-known artists have these dark pasts, or a line of work which completely c...

Looking out at the Place de la Bastille at night, Paris, 1990 “My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It's about making the best kind of image I can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can.”—Jim Dine.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter by Van Gogh, second half of March 1884: "So the reason why one must work on one's technique is simply to express better, more accurately, more profoundly what one feels, and the less verbiage the better. As for the rest, one need not bother with it."   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader