2007
October 7, 2007
I don’t know if it’s a talent, like perfect pitch, or an acquired skill, but I can easily mix any color I need—except grey, which is the color I’ve wanted this painting to be all along. "That’s because," Ann said this afternoon, "there’s no such thing as grey; there’s only green, blue or violet." Now she tells me! Is this one of those things, like Santa Claus and snipe hunts, that everyone else found out about in second grade, and no one clued me in on? Obviously all those labels on paint are just a joke, and when someone comes into, say, Pearl Paint and actually purchases a tube of Holbein Grey of Grey, the salespeople are cracking up behind the cash registers. Well I’m nothing if not determined, so I looked up “mixing grey oil” on Google, and up came a bunch of sites that are obviously perpetuating the myth. But I fooled them! I took all of the colors mentioned on all of the sites and mixed them together and got...GREEN.
Comments (1)
October 7, 2007
It’s clear that one of the reasons for our art malaise is that we have no definitions for art and, in fact, resist any discussion about what our expectations of art are. I wrote about this in a piece called The Wow for Review in 1999, and now, re-reading it find, sadly, that it hasn’t lost currency for being nine years old. In a further effort to define art in our times—for an article or book, I don’t know yet—I’m delving into what others are writing and have written and will collect what I find here.
I'm currently purusing the second volume (1815-1900) of Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. This, found on pp. 17-18 is a snippet of Originality and Genius by Arthur Shopenhauer (1788-1860) from The World as Will and Representation:
Whilst science, following the restless and unstable stream of the fourfold forms of reasons or grounds and consequents, is with every end it attains again and again directed farther, and can never find an ultimate goal or complete satisfaction, any more than by running we can reach the place where the clouds touch the horizon; art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world’s course, and holds it isolated before it. This particular thing, which in that stream was an infinitesimal part, becomes for art a representative of the whole, and equivalent of the infinitely many in space and time. It therefore pauses at this particular thing; it stops the wheel of time; for it the relations vanish; its object is only the essential, the Idea. We can therefore define it accurately as the way of considering things independently of the principle of sufficient reason….
I'm currently purusing the second volume (1815-1900) of Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. This, found on pp. 17-18 is a snippet of Originality and Genius by Arthur Shopenhauer (1788-1860) from The World as Will and Representation:
Whilst science, following the restless and unstable stream of the fourfold forms of reasons or grounds and consequents, is with every end it attains again and again directed farther, and can never find an ultimate goal or complete satisfaction, any more than by running we can reach the place where the clouds touch the horizon; art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world’s course, and holds it isolated before it. This particular thing, which in that stream was an infinitesimal part, becomes for art a representative of the whole, and equivalent of the infinitely many in space and time. It therefore pauses at this particular thing; it stops the wheel of time; for it the relations vanish; its object is only the essential, the Idea. We can therefore define it accurately as the way of considering things independently of the principle of sufficient reason….
October 5, 2007
I’m just back from the city, where all artists talk about is how much they hate the art they see. I’m just as guilty as anyone else, and explaining the situation over Indian lunch to a friend who’s a food writer, I asked her to imagine how she’d feel if all of a sudden no one cared about what food tasted like or how it was presented, but only wanted to know about celebrity chefs, who’s eating at what restaurants, and the outrageous prices they’re paying for their meals.
So I went to bed with this art malaise swirling around in my head and by the time I woke up at 4:00 a.m. I’d decided to throw it all over and become a Buddhist nun. I already have short hair, and the idea of wearing sensible shoes and hanging out with Pema Chodron was very appealing. Then I remembered, from my hippie days, a place called Findhorn in Scotland, which is said to have such great spiritual energy that plants there grow to enormous size. The Scots have great accents, a good sense of humor, nationalized medicine and probably less severe weather than I’d find at Pema’s abbey in Nova Scotia, so I thought, perfect, I’ll move there. After deciding to buy a small cottage and spend the rest of my days raising cucumbers the size of kayaks, I roused myself out of bed, went to look up Findhorn on the Web and found—quel surprise!—that Findhorn has been commodified like everything else. “Experience Week—Seven days that can change your life” is required for entry, and costs, on a sliding scale, L365 to L505 (that’s at least $730 to $1010 to you and me) for a program that includes a work component. You can also take guest workshops with the likes of Caroline Myss and James Finley, who are on a New Age circuit where the same ten or fifteen names pop up no matter where on the planet you are—just as you can go to any art fair or museum in the world and see the work of the same ten or fifteen artists. The regimented daily schedule at Findhorn reminded me of when I was ten and at Camp Toowendawee, where the only thing I liked was being away from my parents.
Since I have no parents to bug me here I've decided to stay put for the time being, even if it means I have to finish my painting. If I want McSpirituality I can always drive up the road to Kripalu, where the vegetarian cafeteria meal has recently gone from $10 to $18, and to grow bigger vegetables in this hot, dry October, I’ll buy a sprinkler.
So I went to bed with this art malaise swirling around in my head and by the time I woke up at 4:00 a.m. I’d decided to throw it all over and become a Buddhist nun. I already have short hair, and the idea of wearing sensible shoes and hanging out with Pema Chodron was very appealing. Then I remembered, from my hippie days, a place called Findhorn in Scotland, which is said to have such great spiritual energy that plants there grow to enormous size. The Scots have great accents, a good sense of humor, nationalized medicine and probably less severe weather than I’d find at Pema’s abbey in Nova Scotia, so I thought, perfect, I’ll move there. After deciding to buy a small cottage and spend the rest of my days raising cucumbers the size of kayaks, I roused myself out of bed, went to look up Findhorn on the Web and found—quel surprise!—that Findhorn has been commodified like everything else. “Experience Week—Seven days that can change your life” is required for entry, and costs, on a sliding scale, L365 to L505 (that’s at least $730 to $1010 to you and me) for a program that includes a work component. You can also take guest workshops with the likes of Caroline Myss and James Finley, who are on a New Age circuit where the same ten or fifteen names pop up no matter where on the planet you are—just as you can go to any art fair or museum in the world and see the work of the same ten or fifteen artists. The regimented daily schedule at Findhorn reminded me of when I was ten and at Camp Toowendawee, where the only thing I liked was being away from my parents.
Since I have no parents to bug me here I've decided to stay put for the time being, even if it means I have to finish my painting. If I want McSpirituality I can always drive up the road to Kripalu, where the vegetarian cafeteria meal has recently gone from $10 to $18, and to grow bigger vegetables in this hot, dry October, I’ll buy a sprinkler.
October 1, 2007
New Yorker music critic Edward Winkleman poses the question: “Is there too much art?” (If you asked that about music, the answer would have to be “Yes, so much good music I can’t get to it all.”) The problem, however, isn’t a surfeit of art per se, but of inconsequential art marketed as great art. Is there too much art in Venice?
September 30, 2007
I couldn’t stand the green, so I stained everything alizarin yellow . Now there’s a color you really can’t get rid of. I must be out of my mind. And what am I doing with a giant tube of alizarin yellow anyway? Did I buy this thing? It’s like having a bomb in the bottom of my paint drawer.
September 28, 2007
The painting is slowly, painfully, improving, but it’s still GREEN—even though I’ve spent all day adding lots of other colors to it. That’s because green swallows every color that touches it. Painters, take a look at your once-white bristle brushes. Have you ever noticed that they’re all GREEN? If they aren’t, it’s only because you were smart enough never to use green in the first place.