Kimberly Brooks's painting "Portrait of Liz"

I just found this wonderful portrait by Kimberly Brooks at the artist's website. Several or possible all of the images are based upon photography: as the artist explains, "During my last show, "Mom's Friends," about my mother and her friends in the 70s, I foraged through old family albums and found page after delicious page of distorted photos that to me signified nothing less than the new born freedom of a generation redefining itself."
I feel some connection to this topic myself, which Brooks addresses in an interview with photographer Stefanie Schneider. Like these artists, I've also based several of my paintings on old photographs, turning them into reveries of a different sort. The photos I used go back a little farther than Brooks. Some are from the 1940s and one noteable photograph goes back to 1957.


Meanwhile, Brooks's Portrait of Liz has a wonderful angularity about it that is intriguing both formally and psychologically. The tilt of the sitter's head seems to engage us with energy and pique.

Being an artist

I've been thinking about some of the cliches associated with art, and contrasting them with lesser known realities. I was just reading Kimberly Brooks blog about the creative process. (Ms. Brooks writes occasional pieces for the Huffington Post.) In this particular blog she talks about having a large canvas sit blank in her studio for several weeks while she tried to summon the bravery to work on it. Finally, to overcome her fears, she randomly applies some bright colors to it. And this much, her "painter's block" and her emotional resolution of it are what many people today would identify as the essential character of creative endeavor. It is one of the cliches.
Cliches such as this one gain force by their repetition and by a generally lax approach to art education -- lax, I mean, on the part of artists. A little research independently done into the process behind truly great works of art reveals a very different sort of process.
To cite one example, the great British landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner drew incessantly from childhood onwards. Once he seriously chose to become an artist, he as quickly began angling for ways to sell his works, inspired by his humble circumstances which made earning his keep an urgent necessity. And his marketing efforts found early success, not the least because even his early works showed a remarkable fluency with visual forms. In short, he practiced his art assiduously and became exceedingly skillful at it.
He also apparently felt a reluctance to tackle a large canvas, but for reasons quite different from those typical of today's artists, as Ms. Brook's piece relates. Canvas was expensive and Turner was loath to waste money on material resources. So his early works tend, for the most part, to be small drawings and watercolors. And it was only after Turner had become an accomplished creator of images that he even turned his attention to large painting, and did so for the money, the prestige, and probably also to demonstrate that his skills were as large as those of various famous masters (such as Aelbert Cuyp). When Turner began his first large painting (and it was really large), he did not indulge a case of blocked creativity. Quite the contrary, he worked out the essential elements of the composition in drawings and other small images and then transferred the idea to the larger tableau. The creativity of the project did not reside in staring at a void and trying to imagine something, anything, with which to fill it. The creativity arose from having a motif, a subject, a particular landscape he wished to depict, and then blocking in the large forms of that image onto this new larger format.
His creativity certainly did not end there, as anyone familiar with the painter's works knows. Turner would eventually become renowned for his experimental uses of paint, imagery, and scale. Certainly in his first large scale works he would repeat ideas that had been first developed on a smaller scale. But the artist's sensitivity to the potentialities of scale would readily become a feature of monumental works. In short, he just painted.
The artists that we now call the old masters suffered fewer qualms about making images than do today's artists. They were not unwilling to just paint something. They were aware that, through making images, they were gaining not only sharpened skill, but were gaining experience, sensibility, and new ideas, ideas which they might store away for future things. They did not need to just fill the blank void with anything in the hopes of getting an idea. They had specific aims in mind that they pursued. It's a good lesson for anyone trying to make art today, a lesson in humility as well as daring.

Rethinking what art is

Well, this is all very nice for Rachel Mason. I don't wish to sound mean-spirited, but Mason is another instance of the pompier art that one sees everywhere. That she is light-hearted about it is to her credit. Given the better angels of her nature (the fact that she counts Velasquez, Rodin, Picasso, Daumier among her heros), perhaps she will make real art someday when the Yale School thing has worked its way out of her system.
Tout ca change, tout c'est la meme chose. The chic art lauded by the official "art world" rarely has much in common with real art or real life. So, for instance, Mason ought not be surprised at the offer to show her sketches. However, she should have turned the offer down. The sketches are neither exceptionally bad, nor particularly good. The only reason they were included, one supposes, is -- well, why not include them? How are they substantively different from the photos/videos of her miming a candiate posture?
What I personally would look for "as art" within them is definitely not there. I cannot really see anything in them that speaks to life, that would stand as uniquely Ms. Mason's idea. I see lots of conventional ideas about image making as well as about sociology. Mind, this has nothing to do with their being "representational." It's just that the graphic means of describing things is all secured in advance of her actually looking at her subject. I see them as potential demonstrations for a "how to draw cartoon figures" book. Similarly, the figurine of Hussain is not something I would have recognized as such without its caption. Whatever idea it holds relies completely on its presumed subject. And ANY "light" depiction of Saddam would have been equal to the task.
Ooh, la, la -- contrast to this the dynamic power a little Degas bather. We don't ask the identity of the figure. It isn't even relevant that the figure is a "bather" -- so much is just pretext. All that really matters is the figure is of a woman, and a Degas figure is filled with FORM. Today people doing "sculpture" are hard-pressed to understand what form IS. They might suppose that simply making something that is three dimensional means that perforce it has "form." And what a mistake!
People need to relearn the very notion of art -- the people who most need to learn this are "artists." Well, perhaps. Actually a real artist isn't taught. Once you realize that a particular artist needs to be taught ideas which ought to be obvious, then you are not dealing with a true artist. Real art is not the thing that can be taught. It just happens because it's a natural product of the self.
It may sound elitist to talk about in terms that can evoke "great art." But people need great art. Even Ms. Mason acknowledges that her heros include Velasquez, Rodin, Picasso, Daumier. My advice (though it would be bad advice as regards her "career") would be study your heros. This is not the "conservative" advice that it might seem. Oh, but that's another topic.
[Picture: by moderationsmuse]