last night I read the remarks of three painters. starting with Jef Gunn’s latest blog entry about the sensation of painting outdoors in front of the ever changing scenery, then my friend June’s accounts of painting a huge seven panel polyptych in Nevada, and lastly an interview on portlandart.net with Tom Cramer.
how great it is to be a painter, I thought. what a kinship we all have. it’s like a religion. in fact everyone spoke of their experiences with religious zeal. consciousness, emotion, passion, a sense of wonder and mystery, connecting with other people, with our higher self, with nature (with God?). these are the themes that are discussed!
Gauguin talked about painting as “lifting ourselves toward God”, and of becoming a “true creator like our divine master”.
how great it is to be a painter, I thought. what a kinship we all have. it’s like a religion. in fact everyone spoke of their experiences with religious zeal. consciousness, emotion, passion, a sense of wonder and mystery, connecting with other people, with our higher self, with nature (with God?). these are the themes that are discussed!
Gauguin talked about painting as “lifting ourselves toward God”, and of becoming a “true creator like our divine master”.
when I see something like this painting by Frank Auerbach (from the pages of a recent Modern Painters magazine) it occurs to me that I might be wrestling with the same ideas in my own painting. me … scratching my chin in front of a canvas and thinking something similar to what Frank Auerbach may have been thinking while scratching his own chin in front of this very canvas! I’m not claiming to be half the painter that Auerbach is (or any fraction for that matter), but just to think that I have been privileged to see, and ponder, and struggle with a similar scene and idea as any of the great painters, past or present, is overwhelming. we are all connected. some of us tell stories, and some play music.
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It's a great sing-along. In fact, I channel lots of folks while I'm working alone in the desert. Pink -- David likes pink; Don't crowd the canvas (Jef). Work the whole painting at once. Papa Cezanne. But I can't find Emily Carr here -- I suspect she's busy elsewhere. Prussian Blue -- definitely Jane -- I can feel it on my skin just looking at the tube. And so, I carry on the conversations, sometimes singing, "I can't do this, I couldn't do this, I shouldn't do this, but I'll do it anyway." You can make up your own melody.
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing a portrait in New York by Hans Holbein. It was a period portrait and hundreds of years old. There was a brush stroke on the cuff of the jacket, a beautiful, loose, white mark that perfectly described the lace of the cuff. It was like I could feel the way this painter, hundreds of yeas ago had moved his brush and why. The centuries between us vanished and I felt a part of a lineage of painters. Maybe the religion is in this connection in thoughts and movement across time.
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