Praeterita

A slightly grainy film, but fascinating nevertheless. Thanks to OtipodasHistorias for posting this on YouTube.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Six drawings of the Malecon, Havana, Cuba, 2001 (click on image to embiggen) "Drawing and colour are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more the colour harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes."---Paul Cezanne.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Thanks to snakeBISHOP for posting this to YouTube. No subtitles, but he starts by saying "For me, painting and drawing are the same thing."   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

"Bound", acrylic on canvas, 44" x 60" Artist Rebecca Moy is currently showing a series of abstract paintings at Gallery 180 in Chicago in which open, flat areas of colour, a profusion of hard-edged shapes, and all kinds of drawn marks and textures are layered to produce an optically spectacular experience. The exhibition of her work continues at Gallery 180, at the Illinois Institute of Art, Chicago, through January 2011. Philip : How long have you been painting, and what led you to your life in the studio? Rebecca : In some ways, I’ve been painting ever since I can remember. My mother would say that I took ‘Lite-Brites’ to a whole new level. I’ve been painting professionally for four years, but of course there’s this thing called life that happens while we’re living it and the dots are in multiples and take some time to connect. Once I decided to embrace painting fully, I’ve been free. Philip : Your paintings are bursting with contrasting colours, flat are...

After posting all those extracts from Delacroix's journal, I thought I would talk about one of his paintings in the weekly Meditation on Art. Is this painting in the Louvre? I think I remember seeing it there on my last visit. One thing that the internet can never replace is the experience of seeing a huge canvas like this one, nearly eight feet tall, and all the physical space that this allows the eye to explore.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

On Monday I'll be doing a class with some writing students in which I take them through some basic drawing techniques and then lead a discussion on how this might help their writing. I believe deeply in the idea of drawing as 'expressive mark making', and that you can start drawing using the simplest gestures and shapes. But I also thought this diagram, which I saw on Andrew Sullivan's blog 'The Daily Dish', was pretty funny:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a journal entry dated June 22, 1863: "The first quality in a picture is to be a delight to the eyes. This does not mean there need be no sense in it; it is like poetry which, if it offend the ear, all sense in the world will not save from being bad. They speak of having an ear for music: not every eye is fit to taste the subtle joys of painting. The eyes of many people are dull or false; they see objects literally, of the exquisite they see nothing." The journals ends on this date. Seven weeks later, on August 13, 1863, Delacroix died at the age of 65.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Ava, a friend who lives in Texas (though she always points out that her heart belongs in San Francisco), pointed me to the above print by Winslow Homer. It was commissioned in 1860, when he was 24 years old, and it's actually an acid political cartoon about the starving poor and the gorging rich. So nothing much has changed there, then. Here's a link to the New York Times article, too: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/an-american-thanksgiving-skewered-and-roasted/ Gobble Gobble!   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a journal entry dated March 8, 1860: "An artist should not treat himself like an enemy. He ought to believe that there is value in what his inspiration has given him."   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

This is just a group of the Abstract Expressionists Marsden Hartley. Milton Avery. Alexander Calder. Mark Rothko. Jackson Pollock. Franz Kline. David Smith. Philip Guston. Louise Bourgeois. Andy Warhol.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a journal entry dated January 27, 1860: "The practice of an art demands  a man's whole self. Self-dedication is a duty for those who are genuinely in love with their art."   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

When Patty and I were in London 10 days ago, we were staying in a hotel in Lancaster Gate, overlooking the northern side of Kensington Gardens. We took a stroll through the gardens in the hour before it got dark, enjoying the autumn leaves strewn over the pathways, and the feel of the warm moist English November air on our faces. As we walked down to the Serpentine, the river that snakes through the gardens (really a big park adjacent to Hyde Park), we saw this on the opposite bank: It was a huge stainless steel disc, easily at least twelve feet high, looking boldly out of place in such a leafy setting. I wasn't sure what it was, but I guessed that it must be a sculpture of some sort, and I had the feeling that I'd seen it before. Sure enough, when I got back to the USA, I looked it up and found out that it was Anish Kapoor's 'Sky Mirror', which I had seen several times on Rockefeller Plaza in New York City: I think it worked better in New York. On the evening...

From a journal entry dated January 15, 1860: "It takes great audacity to dare to be oneself, and this quality is particularly rare in a period of decadence like the present."   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Vermont woods, 2000 "The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities ."---Alain de Botton.     Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

One thing I've noticed when I 'google' myself (and who doesn't, from time to time?) is that what I think are fresh mentions of my name, or information about me, are really more like reprints of existing information that are picked up by these sites or blogs that just trawl the internet and aggregate together articles on similar topics. This seems to be happening with the article about the luminaries on Inhabitat, the green website that published an article about the project last week. It seems to have appeared on another site called agreenliving.org . It's basically the same information in a different place, but I'll take that as more publicity for the Carroll County public art project. http://agreenliving.org/index.php?s=hartigan  Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I saw this when I was in Dublin at the beginning of 2010, and had no idea it was there when I went into the Hugh Lane gallery for a look around. Bacon was one of the early additions to my pantheon of painters when I was a teenager, so it was a welcome surprise to see the studio that I felt I knew so well from reading so many accounts of it.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Nathan Oliveira, a great painter and printmaker, has just died at the age of 81. My etching teacher introduced me to his work in the 1990s, and I always loved the way he combined figuration with abstraction. Click the following link to see some of his work: http://www.crownpoint.com/artists/oliveira And click the next link to see some nice interviews with him, recorded for the SFMOMA in 2000: http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/83   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Last night in the Story in Fiction and Film class, we screened 'Tsotsi', the recent film made from Athol Fugard's 1962 novel. The novel was the assigned work of long fiction for this semester, and as part of the festivities I gave away the above cartoon drawing to the first student who answered a simple question about South Africa. Note that I always sign these little things, in the hope that the winning student will treasure it for decades, and then one day will be able to sell it at Sotheby's for thousands of U.S. bucks.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

In honour of posting my last extract from Van Gogh's letters, here is early 1970s schmaltz-and-cheese-meister Don McLean's horribly sentimental, and of course utterly beautiful, song about you know who (thanks to folkman123 for posting it on the You Tubes):   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

New York gallery owner Edward Winkleman recently wrote a post on his always-interesting and entertaining blog about the importance of accidents and play when an artist is working in the studio. It comes in a blog post subtitled "Scratch a Conceptual Artist, Find a Painter." Not that I have anything at all against conceptual artists. Some of my best friends, etc ....   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

(Apologies to email and Facebook friends who have already seen this). A short article about the giant luminaries for the recently-completed Carroll County Community Memoir project has just been published in InHabitat, a great web magazine devoted to all things green in architetecture, design, art, technology. http://inhabitat.com/2010/11/12/giant-solar-luminaries-highlight-a-communitys-history / I've been following Inhabitat for nearly a year now, and it publishes information on the most amazing things. I guarantee that if you spend a few minutes reading its pages, you'll discover possibilities with sustainable design that you've never even dreamed of. The things that artists do, too, can be spectacular, so I'm quite chuffed, as we Anglos say, that the luminaries created by me, Michael Johnson, and Ryan Bess have been included.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a journal entry dated March 1, 1859: "There is something naive, and at the same time daring, about the dawn of an artist's talent, not unlike the graces of childhood and just as happily careless of the conventions that govern grown-up people. This is what renders still more astounding the daring which the greatest masters displayed towards the end of their careers. To be bold when one has a reputation to lose is the surest sign of strength."   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Coniston Water, UK, 2000 " I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen." -- Frederick Franck.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated July 24, 1890: “As far as I am concerned, I am giving my canvases my undivided attention. I am trying to do as well as some painters I have loved and admired.” Three days later, either in the grip of an attack or in fear at the onset of one, he went out into the wheat fields near Auvers in northern France and shot himself. He did not die immediately, but stumbled back to the house of Dr. Gachet, with whom he was supposedly recuperating from previous attacks. Theo rushed from Paris to be with his brother, and two days later, on July 29, Vincent Van Gogh died in his brother’s arms.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Kudos to nickwallacesmith for posting these rare clips of Claude Monet, talking to a chap in a straw boater (look at Monet's nose: do you think he drank much??), and then painting in his Giverny garden.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From an inscription in the flyleaf of his 1859 Journal: “Addresses of models given to me by Corot: Madame Hirsch, rue Lamée, No. 6. Superb head, brunette, same type as la Ristori. Adele Rosenfeld, rue du Marché-Sainte-Catherine, No. 5. Reclining pose seemed to me superb. Josephine Leclaire, rue de Calais, No. 4. Very elegant, beautiful figure, thin arms. ”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated June 3, 1890: “I should like to do portraits which will appear as revelations to people in a hundred years’ time. In other words, I am not trying to achieve this by photographic likeness but by rendering our impassioned expressions, by using our modern knowledge and appreciation of colour as a means of rendering and exalting character.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader