One is a hot summer picture, and the other is a brisk and windy picture, but Edward Hopper’s Summertime and New York Pavements are kindred paintings. In New York Pavements a nun/nanny pushes a baby carriage on the sidewalk. A headwind blows her veil back. But for the baby, she is alone. The brush strokes are prompt and efficient. In all but the lightest areas, (the columns, the bottom parts of the building, and the baby’s blanket) the paint is thin. A dark underpainting shows through the top layers to outline and delineate architectural detail. For a Hopper picture, the color is muddy. It seems he mixed most of the color on the canvas as he was painting. Summertime is a hot picture. This girl here is not a nun. We see through her dress, and get a dose of nipple and upper thigh. She is paused on the front steps of a building. A slight breeze touches her dress, and moves some curtains in a nearby window. She is taking in the sun. She is alone. The paint in summertime is thicker than in New York Pavements. The shapes are cut shapes. The architecture is not defined by draftsman-like underpainting. Instead it is defined by the shapes of color that fit together like puzzle pieces. The paint in this picture feels like heavy slabs heating in the sun. I waiver in my conclusions about these two paintings. At first, both compositions seem a little awkward, and maybe even a little lacking. They fall a little flat. It seems there are oversights, missed opportunities to show depth, activate space, and create dynamic compositions. But then, the pictures resolve, and feel quite intentional. Maybe there aren’t missteps. Maybe the pictures are purposefully uncomfortable. Maybe, in fact, what makes these pictures work is their cumbersomeness. The heavy shapes in Summertime push forward, and make the composition feel dense and stuffy. It's stepping outside into a wall of bright sunlight. It’s the suffocation you feel when you can’t get away from the city heat. The slow still of summer in the east. On cold days in NY the buildings are hulking blocks of concrete, and people are tiny figures, rushing around between them. The brush quality in New York Pavements is hurried. The figure at the bottom barely makes it into this picture. In winter and late fall in NY, you don't stop to linger. You move quickly. You can't get away from the cold. The grubby gray pavements are pervasive. The cold facades offer no relief from the sidewalk's chill. Now, am I playing with words to countenance my own opinions about Hopper's pictures? A lot in both paintings may just be coincidence, or simply be by dint of Hopper's natural hand. Maybe his concentration was all together on different things. Hopper kept meticulous sketches and notes about many of his paintings, so with some studying perhaps we could come to hypotheses about his intentions. But Theories about painterly intention require more time and thought than I want to dig into here. Still, I’m struck by one thing for sure, these two paintings, like many of Hopper's paintings, are both unashamedly sincere. This type of honesty runs throughout his oeuvre. His subjects are subjects of common ground, and simple human truth. You don't have to be an expert to relate to a Hopper picture. Summer heat. Winter winds. They're pictures of relatable basics. They're easy to look at. Hopper paintings don’t make declarations. They don’t put conditions on the viewer. They don’t tell you how or what to see. And, well, they’re pictures that are very popular. Hopper often worked with variations on themes. It's great fun to see how he handled similar subjects in different ways. His are perfect entrypoint paintings. They're pretty easy to think through. They exist plainly, and also have considerable artistry. You can choose to enjoy the paintings however you’d like. With both Summertime and New York Pavements, it seems, Hopper earnestly allowed the paintings to take him where they would. We, in turn, can simply go along with him. This is the great zen of his work. Hopper tended toward depression and was likely a prickly guy. But, his work brings you in gently. This type of care, artist for viewer, takes confidence in feeling, and real know-how. Hopper’s work never hides behind the frivolous. Whether he knew it or not, Hopper gave us truth in simple things. A girl steps out in the summer. A woman faces the wind, and cares for a child. Great masters don’t necessarily need to flaunt their mastery. Let the painting be in earnest, and maybe the rest will fall into place. So, if my thoughts about these two paintings waiver, that may just be my problem. Hopper pictures worked for plenty of folks before I was born, and they will likely continue to do so for a long time. Don’t delay or stay too long, meet us at the break of dawn. Sunrise by George Inness could be an off putting painting. It’s a hazy picture, made of orange, green, yellow, brown, and gray blears. But, while it’s somewhat ugly, it’s intriguing. It draws you in. You can feel the place in this landscape. With this painting, you wake to early sun burning through morning mist. There is a kind of magic when you step outside to feel golden heat and cool vapor touch your skin at the same time. This painting sounds like Grieg’s Morning Mood, and the Adagio from Brahm’s Piano Conerto No. 1 playing simultaneously (Try giving it a listen, it’s more beautiful than you might expect). How do you paint the ethereal? And then, how do you describe the painting of the ethereal? George Inness' imagery is evanescent. You feel like you can’t quite see his pictures. They are dreamy, but they’re not frivolous. His compositions often feel as if they will fail at any moment. But, they don't. He painted tightly within the envelope of the given images, but also with freedom and expression. His pictures are often quite abstracted, but, to the gut, they never feel like anything but true to life. He disregarded painterly posturing, and instead favored his sense of honesty. They’re paintings about his expression, but they’re not paintings about him. His creations represent his awareness of collective sensations of people and their landscapes. With Sunrise Inness painted the practical, soily chlorophyll landscape. He also painted the screen of midsummer’s fairyland fog through which you see this landscape. This dawn has summer ghosts. A figure, in silhouette, makes his way through the landscape. Is it a plowman yawning as he begins a long day’s work? Or is it a puckish hobgoblin, yawning as he slips home after a long night of mischievous wandering? This dawn is a beginning scene, and an ending scene. In parallel, the craft of this painting has productive divergence between its component parts. What you might at first see as disunion, resolves into well crafted harmony. This painting feels as if it were spilled rather than painted onto the canvas. But, it doesn’t feel thin or watery. Most of the picture is sufficiently built up. But it’s not built of dutifully alternated glazes and scumbles. When necessary to his vision, Inness freely toyed with painterly convention. His paintings have a vibe more than they have a beauty. In this painting, the careful gradient of light in the sky - orange to yellow to red - is reminiscent of the smooth color rich skys of the Hudson River School. But, in order to create morning mist, Inness painted a drab, gray wash over the bulk of the sky. He let only the brightest light of the sun burn through to become the focal point at the center of the picture. Blurry patches of greens roughly imply bushes, tree leaves, and banks of grass. Over these patches Inness laid gentle flutters of color to make more specific bits of foliage. For these, he simply touched the side of his brush to the surface, and let the bristles do the work. Inness’s creative mark making is compelling. In places he turned his brush around, and scribbled into the wet paint with the brush handle. For texture in the tree branches, he chicken scratched a dry scumble. But, for this scumble, instead of a local color in reference to the tree itself (i.e. the color of leaves or bark), Inness used the same warm tonal black that he used as a glaze throughout the rest of the picture. He simply varied his handling of the same paint for different effects. It’s the kind of efficient and painterly pluck you love to see in the work of a great painter. In Sunrise, Inness adeptly handled the diverse components of his painting until they coalesced into a morning’s majesty. It's a visual epilogue that comes at the end of a midsummer’s night of dreams. So, “don’t delay or stay too long, meet us at the break of dawn.” Three dogs at a party on a boat at night. I’ve been reading Go Dog Go to my son lately. It's his favorite book of the moment. I’ve been thinking about this picture. Related to the Latin mensis and the Greek men, and the Latin mentiri meaning measure, our word “moon” is created of quantification and frequency. While it is one of our greatest measuring devices, it also pervades our elan vital. And, perhaps these two purposes are more similar than at first they appear. It measures. It also oversees. It seems to me, for this reason, moons are everywhere in our art. So where do we start? Here are a few moons in art. In John McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne, Blue and Gold, the orange/gold moon is a bit of design. It tangents the hazy horizon and offsets the understated monochrome composition. Andrew Wyeth also uses the moon compositionally. The small moon in the upper left of Spring balances a bit of white snow in the upper right. It also adds depth to the picture, as the other elements in the landscape are relatively close to the viewer in this scene. In other paintings Wyeth uses the moon as a light source. In his excellent Night Sleeper the moonlight illuminates a white barn in the landscape, and slivers of moonlight define window frames and a dog sleeping on a sack. As a younger artist, I didn’t like this painting. I preferred Wyeth’s bleaker scenes, and his gritty, splashy water colors. But, this painting has grown on me. It’s a bit whimsical, and oddly composed. It feels like three paintings. Each window is its own picture. There’s a classic 18th century Pennsylvania barn out one window. Out the other is a silver stream in a perfectly minimal landscape. It’s a picture that feels like a dream. The juxtaposed moments puzzle together and feel completely natural. Henri Rousseau also uses the moon as a light source. The Sleeping Gypsy has similarities to Wyeths Night Sleeper. The moon lights the scene brightly, and the gypsie‘s sack clothes remind me of the bag where Wyeth’s dog rests his head. The oddly placed elements in this composition make it feel like another dream you can't quite describe. Rousseau’s Carnival Evening is an excellent moonlit scene. The moonlight filters through the trees to light a couple in carnival garb. There’s an odd structure tucked into the right side of the picture on the edge of the woods. The figures are lit more brilliantly than the rest of the landscape, and the architecture of the building seems beyond logic. Here is an epitome vision of the dreamily surreal. In Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, Casper David Friedrich’s moon is part of the narrative. Here the scene is romantic rather than surreal. Once again moonlight filters through the trees toward a couple in the woods. They are silhouetted against the sky. You can step into the moment. There is magic in contemplating the cosmos with your hand on a loved one's shoulder. Francisco Goya makes the magic of the moon sinister in the Witch's Sabbath. This picture is painterly and brusque. Here the moon tells us it’s night more than it lights the scene. The witches gather around a cartoonishly disquieting goat as clumsy bats flap around his head. This is one of Goya’s many paintings of witches, the wicked, and the fiendish. There’s plenty here to make you double take. The melting faced figures offer babies and skeletal children to this nefarious coven. The roiling landscape appears to be either dead gray hills or an agitated gray sea. The moon is a dirty dash of white that hovers lazily above. J.M.W. Turner is a painter who is known for making landscapes roil, but Moonlight, a Study at Millbank is one of his calmer pictures. This composition is similar to Whistler’s Nocturne Blue and Gold. Turner’s glowing moon is the focal point in this monotone picture. Its light glints off the water, and silhouettes the boats and horizon. The foreshortened reflection of moonlight on the water’s surface provides an avenue you can walk along into the picture. It's a line of perspective. When I was in art school, I had the opportunity to watch Vincent Desiderio paint, and listen to his eloquent musings on painting, painters, art, and life. He related moonilght’s reflection on water, as in Turner's painting, to the lines of convergence in one point perspective. With this kind of perspective, the vanishing point is determined by connecting the artist's eye line to a point of convergence on the horizon. Desiderio described this line of sight as a direct path from the eye of the artist to the eye of god, or “the ineffable one.” This line is unique to the point at which each artist stands. Similarly, the direction of moonlight's reflection on water is unique for each one of us. It travels directly to each individual wherever they are standing. There are as many different reflections as there are people standing and looking. A well built artwork allows you to step into the artist’s point of view; the artist’s connection with infinity. Alan Watts, the interpreter of zen culture, said, “when the moon rises, all bodies of water instantly reflect the moon.” Odilon Redon says it well with his lithograph, À Edgar Poe (À l’horizon l’Ange des Certitudes, et dans le ciel sombre, un regard intérrogateur) The moonlight provides practical visual structure in the picture, and it also provides the narrative of infinity. The moon measures, and oversees. In his song Shore Leave, Tom Waits tells a similar sentiment. His language, while poetic, is couched in a down and out, homely attitude: And I had a cold one at the dragon With some filipino floor show And talked baseball with a lieutenant Over a singapore sling And I wondered how the same moon outside Over this chinatown fair Could look down on illinois And find you there And, well, who can forget Cookie Monster’s moon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3U3Sby4zko Soon enough it all comes back together. There is a scene in It's a Wonderful Life when George Bailey is courting his love interest, Mary. He takes a walk, and finds himself at her house. On seeing his arrival she places a drawing she made onto her easel. It is a cartoon of George, and he’s lassoing the moon with a rope. George is a young man with big dreams. When he sees the drawing, George sees his life lay itself out before him. He’s terrified and in love. He realizes his love is reciprocated, and he realizes this love will overpower everything he's ever considered doing. They kiss passionately. Circumstances have brought me to settle back in my hometown. It wasn’t necessarily a goal I had as a young man.Still, I'm happy. I’m married to the love of my life, and it seems like we keep having babies. When I was a kid I didn't like the scene of George, Mary, and her drawing. I don't think I fully knew what it meant. There was too much kissy stuff, and frankly his fear of future regret made me scared and worried. Now I love this scene, and I can't watch it without tearing up. On one poster for the Broadway show, Crazy for You, two lovebirds sit with arms around each other by the arch of a crescent moon. It's a great show with Gershwin music, and plenty of comedy. There's a dreamy song near the end called Nice Work If You Can Get It. When I'm feeling down, especially if I can't sleep at night, I listen to Nice Work If You Can Get It. It reminds me how much I love my family, and then I’m walking on the moon.
I love looking at paintings. It’s high on the list of my favorite things to do. I love making paintings. It’s another of my favorite things. I also love writing about paintings. Of these three, I’ve professionally engaged with writing the least. There are probably a number of reasons for this. Some are good, and some are likely not so good. Maybe it's a lack of confidence. Sometimes I tell myself, I’ve been busy working on other parts of my creative process, and maybe this is true. Maybe it’s just been absent mindedness on my part. But recently I’ve had some requests to start a blog, and put my ideas about painting, art, etc. out there. Well here goes.
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