While Art Green’s abstract paintings did not seem to get as much attention as Clark V. Fox’s  Obama portraits in the back gallery space, the saturated colours got me thinking about animation cells again.

After some crude and irreverent posting that seemed to come out of nowhere last month,  I am back to my all too serious and sincere ways as a reactionary wet blanket who hates everything fun except sitting in a cave in my hair shirt with my cat-o-nine-tails.

Anyway, I’m still slogging through the book on colour each day as I am transported to my cubicle in order to stare at 22 massive inches of LEDs for 8 vacuous hours, because God forbid I should read some fiction or the “devil’s literature” graphic novels, or AM New York, or the Metro like a normal person. This morning I was reading a piece by Maurice Denis on Cezanne from which I draw today’s quote:

‘There is no such thing as line,’ he said, ‘no such thing as modelling, there are only contrasts. When colour attains its richness form attains its plentitude.’

Thus, in his essentially concrete perception of objects, form is not separated from colour; they condition one another, they are indissolubly united. And in consequence in his execution he wishes to realize them as he sees them, by a single brush-stroke.

I don’t have the answers or magic wand of understanding, but this strikes me as something interesting to think about as I approach my own paintings, especially this idea of form is not separated from colour. It’s almost straight out of the Heart Sutra and seems like a very zen approach to these painting issues, if I can say that.

I went to the New Museum on Saturday to see the Mary Heilmann, To be Someone and Elizabeth Peyton,  Live Forever shows, which I hadn’t had a chance to get to before. I started up on the 4th floor in the Peyton exhibit and walked my way down.  I’ve always been attracted to the colours and sensitivity of Elizabeth Peyton’s work, especially the drawings. However, probably because I don’t really care about Kurt Cobain or Jarvis, I found myself on Saturday really looking at the grounds of her paintings and how she prepares the surface. In fact, I found the thick, sometimes smooth sometimes uneven white grounds with rough edges to be the most interesting aspect of the paintings. They provided both an interesting textural contrast to the really loose and thin paint that she uses and added a brightness/luminosity to her colours. My wife, Sauman, who’s not a huge fan or Peyton’s work, pointed out to me that none of her subjects smile, ever, which gave a strong sense of sadness or loneliness or isolation, despite the seeming intimacy of the people and everyday scenes depicted in her work.

It was such a contrast then to walk into the galleries of the Mary Heilmann exhibition which struck me as fun, playful, light and airy. I had never heard of Mary Heilmann before this exhibition and I am not familiar  at all with her work beyond the little bit that I read, but it really struck me as lacking any of the pretension of a lot of contemporary abstraction of the last 30 years. The zen phrase “nothing special,” that is used to refer to the ordinariness or everyday mind, kept popping into my head as I walked through the exhibition. I don’t know why that kept coming up, maybe because I could just relax and really enjoy the paintings visually rather than having to think about them too hard, or that they had a playful everday presence about them. Sauman, on the other hand, wanted to know what was special about her paintings because it reminded her a lot of the work of some of our peers at the ASL or other work she has seen in Chelsea, whereas the ceramic work she found exciting.

There is an excerpt from an interview conducted by Richard Flood on the New Museum website that I found intersting:

RF: I’m sitting here looking at these amazing glazes on your ceramics. Do they have great importance to your use of paint?

MH: Right. In fact, when I went into painting, I really came in with a sculptor’s attitude and used the paint in a way that you use the clay. I thought of it as a physical thing. And so I really didn’t think of doing painting the way you think of drawing and painting, but more like the way you do sculpture. Pouring, casting, pressing, moulding. And then a color, red or orange or black, would be a physical material rather than a color you paint on. It’s a different way of configuring it.

The Elizabeth Peyton show closed yesterday, but the Mary Heilmann is up of another couple of weeks and is a fun treat.

Mary Heilmann, To Be Someone @ New Museum, 235 Bowery, thru 1/28

Yesterday morning, because the figs and the air biscuits awoke your editor before the dawn, and because he had to stop stealing from THAT BOOK on colour, your editor was scanning the bookshelves looking for something good on colour. Anyway I came across a that Arthur Danto guy, who wants to kill art and go to its funeral because he writes books like The Wake of Art. So, I picked up his book, Philosophizing Art, which I figured must be some kind of fancy instruction manual for euthanizing art, and I was totally shocked. ARTHUR DANTO IS TOTALLY GAY FOR ROBERT MOTHERWELL also, which must make Andy’s whig flip around in the grave. I  mean just look at the title for the opening essay of the book, “The Original Creative Principle,” come on why not just call it YHWH’s penis and be done with it. Also, we find out that  Motherwell is such a cock tease, just listen to Danto wax about how he wished Motherwell would just whip out his philosophy and play a little, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, but that Motherwell would hold out and string poor Arthur along.

The circumstance of having had advanced training in philosophy before going on to become a painter, and indeed a great painter, is almost certainly unique to Robert Motherwell. But he carried his philosophical knowledge so casually that other than in the autobiographical mode that came easily to him in later years….In our numerous conversations, from 1985, when we met [he was totally cheating on Andy for 2 years], until the year of his death, philosophy rarely came up in a way that made me feel that he brought with him from his graduate years any special grasp o the world that an exposure to philosophical disipline might explain.

Now that’s just gross. Here I am looking for some colour and all I find is gay porn erotica, I could have accomplished that just as easily on this internet. And I would have gotten pictures, video, and live webcam too!

But I digress, you are not here [that's right you idiot no one is here reading this garbage] to listen to me name drop and tell you about how big my philosophy is because I’m like super insecure about being one of those reactionary painter types who clings to a dead art form that uses oil instead of just walking into the Whitney Museum, taking a dump in the corner and wanking on the walls and ceiling to electronica in front of a digital video cam every couple of years, like all the real artists from Yale and Columbia. You are here because I talk with dead people, which is what psychic automatism, i.e. automatic drawing, seance, ouiga, masturbation, whatever you want to call it, is all about, as told to us by Mr. Danto tells us in this essay.

I bring all this up because on Sunday, I was talking with a couple of painter friends of mine, one of whom is really stuggling because life sucks and her partner just up and died like that and shit this past year and she is really struggling draw and to paint, as we were walking through the Miro at MoMA.  Anyway, I am a big proponent of scribble drawing, especially when stuck, and do it all the time, for example, when I wake up, or before I go to sleep, or when I am bored and nothing is on the teevee. I find it to be a really good practice and tool. I would tell you why but this post is already way to long and I haven’t even given you any pictures, which means you haven’t even read this far, and besides I have to go see my therapist and then go to work for the man. Anyway, if you don’t believe me, and especially if you do, you should read this Danto essay because there is some really good stuff in it, and I’m not talking about the gay porn erotica, though that is good too!

Because your editor doesn’t have a life and has nothing better to do on a Saturday night than to go see Keanu Reeves play the alien robot saviour of the world….

…..again……………………..for like the bazillionth time, because he obviously thinks he’s jesus and why doesn’t he just remake The Last Temptation of Christ already, because we all know that he would be much more convincing macking with the deciples in the garden (because jesus was gay of course) than he was macking Trinity in the Matrix II because that was soooo convincing. And what was my point…..

Oh yeah, because your editor has no life I came home from this stupid movie and was wondering what those french theorists who hate everything fun, including Disneyland, I mean why can’t Baudrillard just go to Disneyland, go on the rides and get felt up by Mickey Goofy and Donald like everyone else and go home with a smile on his face like a good little boy?

Instead he’s got to go and say mean things about how he hates America and Americans

Like,

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation….

And,

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hperreal and of simulation.

And,

The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary…particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness…made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms.

I mean come on who hasn’t faked a phantasm before? Well, probably not that guy in the background whose about to have a phantasm in his pants, but…Why does Baudrillard hate sex and America so much?

And where was I again… oh yeah, french theorists who hate everything fun… well except for that Foucault guy, who liked to ride a pendulum and wrote about sex and pleasure and discipline and punishment…because he was like a big queen and totally into s&m

And what does this have to do with colour?¿?

Oh, yeah, so anyway I came back from the Day the Earth Stood Still and like a normal person I was like “Ok, what could Baudrillard possibly have to say about colour?” So here it is (and buy that Colours book already),

The world of colours is opposed to the world of values, and the ‘chic’ invariably implies the elimination of appearences in favour of being: black, white, grey – whatever registers zero on the colour scale – is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression and moral standing.

See I knew he hated colour, he’s like a pilgrim or something…which didn’t they get thrown out of England because they hated sex and didn’t want the king to have lots of wives and lots of sex.

…freedom and the absence of responsibilities are thus inscribed both in colours and in the transitory and insignificant character of materials and forms…

Duh, which is why the gays own the rainbow, and the wizard of oz, and why all those evil pilgrims (and the mormons too, who actually like to have sex, just unfortunately without protection, so they always have like a bazillion kids), want to punish the gays in California with their nasty Proposition 8, because they hate freedom, which makes them the same as Al Qaeda, because as George Bush tells us “Al Qaeda hates freedom.”

AND NON OF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH PAINTING! but it was fun for me anyway, because I have no life, and my partner’s on the other side of the world for five week, so i’m in front of my computer instead of in front of the teevee watching 48 Hours or Without a Trace, or whatever it is they have on CBS on Sunday nights as filler between the commercials for viagra.

Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867-1947) / White Interior / Oil on canvas / 109.5 x 155.8 cm 

So your editor awoke this morning and was going through that google reader thing, because really what else is there to do on a Saturday morning, and there was this fancy picture by french that degenerate artist with a trembling eyeball and wet dog shaker Pierre Bonnard, and well he’s got those pretty colourses so I stared blankly at the screen for a few minutes and was like, ok what the hell he did put that cadmium yellow on the wall and in the woman’s hair so he must be crazy and that chair on the left really keeps the white wall from flying out of the canvas which means he probably knew what he was doing unlike some painters I know. Plus his composition is like a how to on how to divide up the space to create a firm foundation on which to smear all those pretty colourses. Anyway, that ultra-reactionary institution for rich old people, tourists, and your editor (shhhh….i’m that creepy guy in the corner with sloppy cloths and a sketch book watching everybody while I steal from the picturses), the Metropolitan Museum is putting on a show of these pretty pictures in january because they think it’s better for you to come and pay them to stare at the light of these pretty colourses in your track suit amidst the smell of old people than to sit at home popping the xanax in front of your sun-lamp trying to get over your mid-winter depression because Madoff stole all your precious monies because you didn’t give it to the Met to name a wing after you. Anyway, here’s some stuff from the fancy press release written by a curator in a brooch or bowtie since that’s always what they wear over there otherwise you can’t get in the door, unless of course your in a nylon track suit and speak some fancy language that isn’t ENGLISH…wait how come the let me in???

More modern than is commonly recognized, the late work of Pierre Bonnard is remarkable for the artist’s individualistic approach to color, light, perspective, and composition—particularly as seen in his interiors and still lifes [ie, he didn't know what he was doing, if only he followed the book then we wouldn't have to put on this show for you people who like to smoke the ganga and look at colour, and we could go back to looking a fat naked pasty white people].

Bonnard’s late interiors and still lifes explore a multitude of nuanced color relationships among glowing yellows, violets, reds, oranges, greens, and whites

Although Bonnard’s subjects were close at hand, he rarely painted directly from life, relying instead on pencil drawings sketched rapidly in little diaries. Four of the artist’s diaries from his years at Le Cannet will be loaned by the Bibliothèque national de France, Paris. The diary notations lay out idiosyncratic marks as reminders of color, tone, intensity, and contrast. These shorthand sketches were critical to the genesis of large-scale paintings, which Bonnard developed slowly, through a process of continual editing and revision. He often worked on several paintings at once, tacking the unstretched canvases to his studio wall in order to allow for alteration of the periphery of the painting and its overall proportions. In creating his paintings, the artist deferred to the memory of perception. His interest lay in exploring how diverse objects interrelate within a pictorial field, rather than dwelling on the literalness of any object or figure.

Crazy old coots make the train ride to the cubicle that much more enjoyable, especially if they are French, because they take themselves so seriously, of course…Wait, I do that…does that make me French???¿ So, I’m reading this book Colours by David Batchelor…Oh, and if you haven’t bought the book already go out and by it because I’m not going to key in the whole goddamn thing for you because that just wouldn’t be right, even though this IS the internets and nobody reads this thing anyway, I’m just plain lazy, who wants to do all that typing. So just buy the book, I mean I know we’re in THE RECESSION, and you lost all your monies to those fancy Wall Streeters and their ponzi schemes, but David Batchelor is an artist, even though he puts together these fancy books, and could use your money just like those guys at Merrill. And if you have some extra monies in your pocket buys a few copies for all your starving artist friends. But they have to be painters, because otherwise if it doesn’t have fancy words like Baudrillard or Roland Barthes or Julia Kristeva or Derrida or Adorno or Deluze or Yoko Ono or post-modern, then they won’t be interested. Oh, but they’re in here? Who knew that they had anything interesting to say about colour? Is everything always already colourful? How pomo!

Anyway, I digress….where was I…oh yes, crazy old french coots named Max Nordau who HATE colour and have giant stiff things rammed up their cooters.

…The curious style of certain recent painters – ‘impressionists,’ ‘stipplers,’ or ‘mosaists,’ ‘papilloteurs’ or ‘quiverers,’ [this guy is so gay isn't he?] ‘roaring’ coulourists, dyers in grey and faded tints – becomes at once intelligible to us if we keep in view the researches of the Charcot school into the visual derangements in degeneration and hysteria. The painters who assure us that they are sincere, and reproduce nature as they see it, speak the truth. The degenerate artist who suffers from nystagmus, or trembling of the eyeball, will in fact, perceive the phenomena of nature trembling, restless, devoid of firm outline, and if he is a conscientious painter, will give us pictures reminding us of the mode practised by the draughtsmen of the Fliegende Batter when they represent a wet dog shaking himself vigorously. If his pictures fail to produce a comic effect, it is only because the attentive beholder reads in them the desperate effort to reproduce fully an impression incapable of reproduction by the expedients of the painter’s art as devised by men of normal vision.

…Thus originate the violet pictures of Manet and his school, which spring from no actually observable aspect of nature, but from a subjective view due to the condition of the nerves. When the entire surface of walls in salons and art exhibitions of the day appears veiled in uniform half-mourning, this predilection for violet is simply an expression of the nervous debility of the painter… {Read More…}

So I was doing some sketching this morning and I put down some colour – a really electric pink and a rich firey terra cotta – and suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking about Ezra Jack Keats The Snowy Day which I haven’t seen in years but immediatly had to do the google. I have such vivid memories of the colours in his books. The light the emanates from those pages on a cold gray day is fabulous. No wonder the colour is seared in my memory. These two examples are great.

Ezra Jack Keats / The Snowy Day / Ezra Jack Keats Foundation

Ezra Jack Keats / Keats’s Neighborhood / Ezra Jack Keats Foundation

We can’t really talk about colour without talking about and looking at Hans Hofmann. Here is a piece called Towering Spaciousness from the Brooklyn Museum. In this piece Hofmann uses both colour intervals and overlapping planes to create a sense of expansion and contraction in the painting. Each colour relates to every other colour in the painting, thereby determining its relative location in space within the painting. The result is that none of the planes sit in exactly same place in space. The rhythm and movement of your eye as it jumps from plane of colour to plane of colour, or we could say the expansion and contraction of the planes of colour, work to create the sense of an open towering spaciousness within the canvas. Hofmann called this idea, his “push-and-pull” theory, which he wrote about in the book Search for the Real. So, it is the movement of colour/the movement of the eye that creates the illusion of space in this painting, not scientific perspective, which is what Hofmann spent years teaching his students. For me, what’s really interesting, is that when I stand if front of a painting like this, not only do I see the towering spaciousness of the canvas but I can feel it in my body, it’s a viceral physical feeling, something I don’t feel in front of the best realist paintings with precise perspective.

Hans Hofmann (American, 1880–1966) / Towering Spaciousness / 1966. Oil on canvas / 84 1/4 x 50 in. (214 x 127 cm) / Brooklyn Museum, Gift of William Sachs, 68.51

I recently picked up Colours by David Batchelor and this morning I was reading a piece by Charles Blanc written in 1867. He comes from a 19th century background that favours drawing/draughtsman/form over colour/colourists. What’s funny is that while the overall implication of his writting is that pure chiaroscuro drawing is the pinnacle of art, he says some things that are right on about colour, and, in my opinion undermine his assumptions . Here are a few excerpts:

…colour is mobile, vague, intangible element, while form, on the contrary, is precise, limited, palpable and constant…

Thus colourists can charm us by means that science has discovered. But the taste for colour, when it predominates absolutely, costs many sacrifices; often it turns the mind from its course, changes the sentiment, swallows up the thought. The impassioned colourist invents his [her] form for his colour, everything is subordinated to the brilliancy of his [her] tints. Not onlythe drawing bends to it, but the composition is dominated, restrained, forced by the colour.

 The predominance of colour at the expense of drawing is a usurpation of the relative over the absolute, of fleeting appearance over permanent form…