Blackpaint 171

Michelangelo

His St. Matthew statue, emerging from the marble, brandishing a bible in left hand and with a curious square structure in chest region, looks like some sculpture from the 1910’s or 20’s – Gill maybe, but rougher of course; Epstein? Not really, but that era.  Later, I’ll be looking at something Michaael Craig-Martin said about drawing, how it can bridge the ages whereas sculpture and painting can’t; I think this is an exception.  It was  made as part  of the grandiose Julius Tomb project, which led to furious rows between Julius II and Michelangelo, and a flight from Rome to Florence by M.

Drawing

My moaning in Bp.170 about the Adrian Searle article was caused by the fact that articles exalting the process of drawing often go on to use it as an opportunity to attack Abstract Expressionism (carefully excluding de Kooning and a few others) on the grounds that they have to do abstracts because they can’t draw.  William Boyd, I think, was the last one I read putting this view forward.  Robert Hughes, in his diatribes against Basquiat and Schnabel, dismissed a later generation of artists on these lines, but would not include the earlier Ab Exes, whose integrity and importance are manifest.

The tone of this precious stuff about the supremacy of drawing can at times reach amusing levels – try the correspondence between John Berger and Leon Kossoff in the Penguin Book of Art Writing;   no doubt, they are both most sincere in their mutual praise, but even so, it’s a bit much…

Michael Craig-Martin

What he said was that drawings of great artists from  all ages can “speak directly to each other” in a way that paintings and sculpture cannot.  “The drawings of Rembrandt can speak directly to the work of Beckmann or Guston, …Leonardo to Newman or Andre, Michelangelo to Duchamp…”; paintings are more rooted in historical values, have a “cultural as well as  a physical density” that it is hard to transcend.

I suppose this boils down to “Some drawings look as if they could have been done yesterday or a thousand years ago, because techniques of shading etc. haven’t changed that much”.  That sounds fair enough, but the rest of the assertions need clarification, at least;  HOW exactly do Leonardo’s drawings speak directly to Newman or Andre?  We’ll never know, because this is art writing.

Barnett Newman

Since I’ve mentioned him, I have to refer to his appearance on “Painters Painting” DVD I blogged about in 170.  Drink and smoke in  hand (like all the rest), a bit tearful, looking like  anything but an  American Ab Ex in his tight suit and thick  moustache.  In the Penguin art book, he makes the wonderful, wild assertion that the creative, artistic  urge came before anything else for primitive man.  The whole article is a statement of pride really in his “calling”, although I’m not sure he would have called it  that.  Anyway, after reading that, I saw  his green zip painting in the DVD – anything you say is right, Mr. Newman.

Tom McCarthy

While we are on assertions, lovely one in the Guardian Review today from the above; in Blake’s Tyger, Tyger the beast represents the Industrial Revolution.  Blackpaint says: No, it doesn’t.  I thought the stuff on Finnegans Wake was interesting, though, containing as  it did assertions with which I agree.

Work in progress, by Blackpaint

22.07.10

Blackpaint 47

Schnabel

Mentioned him yesterday in relation to drawing ability and Robert Hughes, and behold, he’s on the TV last night, on Sky Arts, I think; putting up massive pictures in a gallery in Italy (or at least, a number of Italians were putting them up, under his orders).  Several commentators and I think Schnabel himself, spoke about his huge self-confidence as his great asset.

Van Doesburg

The preview by Simon Mawer in the Guardian today, of the above artist’s coming exhibition at the Tate Modern, points out his apparently contradictory allegiance to both De Stijl and Dada.  Mawer describes a Dada event in Holland in 1923: “On stage, wearing a monocle and with his face whited up, Van Doesburg would recite from his recent pamphlet Wat is Dada???, while Schwitters, incognito at the back of the auditorium, would interrupt the lecture by barking like a dog.”

Apparently, this sort of thing sometimes led to riots and violence.  I remember at my school in 1960, prefects performing a similar routine with piano and assorted farmyard noises; they were imitating the Goon Show.  No riot ensued.

Abstract Expressionism

Last night, painting, I found I had produced  a tame looking, pseudo-surrealist painting, utterly lifeless, with a sort of dusky reddy, yellowy brown background – I was overcome with nausea. 

A darkness descended on me and I can only surmise that I worked through out the night in an unconscious frenzy to destroy the monstrosity I had created.  As the sky lightened and the birds began to sing, I calmed down and surveyed the result – a genuine abstract expressionist painting, representing accurately my intense emotions at the time.

Blackpaint

23.01.10

Blackpaint 46

Life Drawing

My class today, and as usual quick poses – 1 minute, 2 minute and so on up to 6.  Then small sketches of pose and a long drawing – 90 mins.  As usual, I reached a point where I started to mess up, so stopped and started a new one.  Ended up with two reasonable, but not spectacular drawings that stayed at the school for future critiquing, and I brought the quick poses home (see below).

I started life drawing because, if I’m honest, I think it’s “proper”, in some way.  It’s craft.  If you can do life drawing, you’re somehow entitled to do abstract stuff.  Total bollocks of course, but it echoes Robert Hughes’ assertions about Basquiat and Schnabel in particular, and US art schools in the 80s in general, that they had turned out a generation at least who couldn’t draw properly – and that, somehow, that meant they couldn’t do “proper” abstract art.  This notion has recently popped up in William Boyd’s article on Rothko in the Guardian (see Blackpaint 13); he extends it to Rothko, Pollock and Kline. 

Anyway, having started it, it has become a pleasure in itself, sort of separate from the stuff I paint and exhibit – but it has probably rubbed off, maybe in the use of charcoal or the sort of forms which emerge (that word again) in my canvases – although, to be sure, not the latest ones.

Listening to Mahler’s 5th, the “Death in Venice” bit, where Aschenbach has found an excuse not to leave Venice and is heading joyfully back to his hotel in a gondola.

Blackpaint

22.01.10