Chocolate Box Paintings

I was watching a British TV show the other night and a character referred to a painting as being a "chocolate box", a term referring  to the type of overly sentimental, sweet paintings that decades ago were used as illustrations on the covers of boxes of chocolates. This is one of those terms that maybe means something only on the other side of the pond, since to me, "chocolate box" means a yellow Whitman's box, or possibly See's or Fanny Farmer's.

It's hard to imagine another style of painting on a box of chocolates. It's not as if you're going to sell candy in a box with a painting featuring a dead goose, for example.

The British don't use this term as a compliment - it's a disparaging term, meaning that the painting is too cute or "twee" (another British word)  to be taken seriously. I don't think it's a good thing to have one's art referred to as chocolate box. One of the sources I consulted in my web search mentioned this 19th. c. painting as an example of a typical chocolate box painting.

"The Daughters of Eve", by George Dunlop Leslie. Image courtesy of The Art Renewal Center

What do you think of this painting? Seriously. Not what you should think of this painting, but in your private heart, what's your gut reaction?

For all I know, your eyes are rolling back into your skull and you're spitting your Pimm's Cup down your weskit.  Or maybe you're an ironic hipster who snickers at this painting and finds it so deliciously mawkish that you must have it for your collection. But then again, maybe you're searching Sotheby's and Christie's right now for available works by G. D. Leslie.

Do you honestly care what I think about this painting? Well, would you care about the opinions of magazines like Art News or Art Forum? What if I were Sir Kenneth Clark or Robert Hughes, pretending for a minute that they were still around to opine on such matters? Who validates your gut response for you?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. For one thing, I don't like labeling art with disparaging terms, and since I'm a representational artist, I especially don't like it when those terms are used around that style of art, though I have been known to rant about a few things and let's be perfect frank here, there is a lot of representational art I don't much like. A person's taste is what it is, everybody is different and hooray for that, too.

The American word for overly sentimental artwork is not exactly similar, but close... schlock.

I'm always wondering what, exactly, is schlock. It is probably different for everyone. It seems to me that there's some suspected element of dishonest art-making in schlocky art, some whiff of market-pandering trickery that's going on. Yet I have never met an artist who isn't trying to create something honest and meaningful and lasting in his or her work. Such fraudsters may be out there, and yes I've heard rumors, but I have to tell you, I have never personally met an artist who is not doing the best that he or she can to transmit themselves and their passions to the viewer in their artwork, even if they're working in a narrow, commercial situation like illustration. The artist's soul is trying to dance around in there somehow. What you might think of as schlock is to them, generally speaking, completely sincere. Many artists don't operate in the snide or edgy range, they are earnest, straight-arrow types and even if they're painting something really off the wall, they are quite serious about it. Nobody is trying to pull  your leg, an artist is trying to show you what he or she thinks is meaningful.

Maybe "corny" is a better word that schlock. It's a lot less gutteral, for one thing. It's a gentler word, bringing to mind simple pleasures like apple picking, making cookies and other long-ago pastimes involving actual human interaction, if you had any of that type of interaction.

What I'm trying to say is this: If a painting - if this chocolate box painting -  reaches you in a meaningful way, you shouldn't worry in the least what other people have to say about it. I'm encouraging you to follow your heart in these matters and not to worry if you appear to others as unsophisticated, naive or corny.

I found the corniest song I could think of to end this post, seasonally appropriate to boot. There's another version on YouTube where the group is much younger, but I prefer this version, it's more heartfelt, I think. This group was before my time but we will all get to this age, if we're lucky. I've been singing this along with them all morning.

The Laib Wax Room

There is a little room lined with beeswax at the Phillips collection in Washington, D.C.  Designed and installed by the German artist Wolfgang Laib, you can read about it here.

To experience this art form, you remove all your loose gear, like handbags or big cameras so as not to scratch the walls and then you leave them right outside the opening where they are guarded by a serious lady with a mysterious accent. Then you stand inside the quiet room and inhale the smell of beeswax, which is actually nice. The color of beeswax is lovely, too, similar to amber.

I think you are supposed to notice the feelings you have and whether they concern your union with nature. In a roundabout way, this did happen to me. I started to worry about all the stuff I had to remove and put outside the door:  my handbag, with my wallet and my mobile phone, not to mention everything else I need. Could I trust the guard to keep an eye on it? What if I got an important text while I was standing there and couldn't get to my phone?

Thoughts like these made me realize how attached I am to my belongings. Was that the goal of this exhibit, our neurotic attachment to technology and our increasing alienation from the natural world? I don't know, but being in the room made me consider the fact that I am really attached to my wallet and my mobile phone, at the expense of having a quiet moment thinking about claustrophobia, the inside of a candle, how it would feel to be one of those fossilized insects that is suspended in amber, whether the amber jewelry that professes to be amber is actually yellowish plastic from China, the mean behavior of Queen bees, the worrying decrease of the world's honeybee population, whether Germany is plagued by Africanized Killer Bees of the sort that are terrorizing parts of Arizona, and if people who are deathly allergic to bees would also react badly to being near several pounds of beeswax.

I like some contemporary, interactive art. It frequently stimulates the mind and draws people into museums who might otherwise not go in. It keeps the mind fresh and curious and we are challenged to discover new paradigms and re-think some cherished beliefs. Many of the visuals/sounds/smells/experiences are interesting and sometimes very beautiful and memorable.

I think artists should be encouraged to express themselves any way they like - well, I guess there are some limits to this, but generally speaking - it's just that I also have a lot of concerns about how art is marketed and valued. Art in general seems extraordinarily susceptible to corrupt marketing practices and unregulated Ponzi-type scenarios. I have no idea how much this wax room is worth or who paid for it and I have no idea as to how much it should be worth. How is something like this valued? Does supply, demand and resale factors guide valuation? How does the art market guide valuation, exactly? Does talent and skill matter at all or is novelty the deciding factor?

And what about hype and marketing? Is it really all dependent upon... buzz? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Meanwhile, I had a dream that night involving wax and cellular phones, which may make its way into a painting. If  I paint my painting and it turns out well (keep your fingers crossed for me) then the visit to this little room was to me, at least, worth the price of the museum admission. You just never know where inspiration will land on you.

On the Depiction of Animals

"Gift at my Doorstep", Oil on Linen

The cat who lives next door to me likes to put dead animals on my doorstep from time to time and brought me this one. Dear Reader, I painted him. I'm happier to see a  rodent there than the remains of hummingbirds, but she catches those also. Cats are tireless, relentless predators, rather like furry Terminators. They're not just cuddlesome; they contain a history of the snarling fanged Thing that brought terror to our ancestors and made them huddle together around fires at night, nervously playing Sudoku.

I initially thought that this was a mouse, but it's more likely that it's a baby pack rat, which are all over Arizona like chopped onions in salsa. I don't always bring dead things into my house, by the way; I'll often spend a couple of hours painting or drawing it outside.

Many representational artists like to paint the natural world and will eagerly accept any fresh roadkill to examine an animal in the privacy of their studios. This is one reason why you should think twice about visiting an artist's studio. (May I just remark, en passant, that fish are the worst thing to have in your studio? I have had a fish liquefy in two days. Liquefy, as in, turn into a dripping jello with bones inside the skin. I have new respect for those Dutch still life artists.)

Goldfish are not bad, though:

"Simple Fish", Charcoal and Pastel on Paper

"Black Moor", Charcoal and Pastel on Paper


But there are a number of artists who seem to restrict themselves to painting animals solely from photos. Everything, from bugling elks to charging cape buffalo to fluffy puppies, is rendered with photographic accuracy, or artfully blurred and arranged, all done from fabulous photos, apparently. The resulting paintings are often filled with vitality, power, great design, grace, intelligence and everything else that makes a wonderful painting, depending upon the skill and intent of the artist.

I have no problem with working from photos but I'm always surprised by the artists who paint animals who are also repelled by dead animals, or think that an artist is somehow treating an animal with disrespect when you look at their bodies for a very long time as you draw or paint them. Hmmm. What is less respectful, 1. looking at a beautiful being for hours and hours, marveling at its extraordinary structure and moved to sadness, possibly to tears, by being in its presence; or 2. taking a few photos of an animal in action and running home to make a nice happy painting, after a bit of Photoshop blurring and lassoing?

(And artists, how do you explain having that human skull in your studio, if you find death so disrespectful, hmmm? Not your own human skull, silly, the other one, grinning jauntily on your still life shelf.)

Since animals are so active, personally I think it's best to work both ways: from "life" (meaning, from death, as the case may be) and from photos. The very best animal artists really understand how an animal moves, rests, how the legs are constructed, etc.

You can also paint or draw animals that are visiting your back yard, hanging around the park or in cages, or otherwise holding still, but this is obviously a little trickier, since wild animals seldom hold still for you. They do stand or lie around on occasion and you can sketch them. It's helpful to have an enclosed area so they don't run away from you. An animal in a zoo might go to one location for a while, then to another, so you can have two sketches going at the same time, depending on where he is at the time. (I call this "common ground non-narrative sequential art" - I'll write about this later and then come back and link to it here. Maybe by then I can discover a better term for what I'm trying to say.)

I've done this often; for example, this baby citrus rat got stuck in a convenient location and I drew him, poor little guy. I am not authorized to disclose the location. The same rat, in five different poses.

"Baby Rat", Graphite on Paper

I think the real issue is that nobody wants to see, and maybe not to buy, a painting that reminds them of death. This, I can maybe understand. If nobody wants to buy a painting about death, then, why would you bother to paint or draw anything with dead things in it? To which I respond:

How do you know what life looks like if you don't know what death looks like? What does it mean to breathe and then not have breath, is there a visual difference?

How do you know what movement looks like if you don't know what stillness looks like? Is photographic stillness real stillness? Is photographic movement real movement?

How do you know how the surface of an animal feels if you haven't touched the animal? How close do you need to be? What does presence mean to you, anyway, does it mean.... being present with something right near you? What does it mean to be near something, anyway?

Your art can be all about life, design, movement, color 'n light and bringing happy feelings to others. That is wonderful. But there is also room in art for another, maybe deeper truth that can only be found in the total-immersion system of looking it all in the face, including the end-of-all-movement condition which is death - which quite shockingly is in fact, NOT the end of all movement, matter just goes from one form to the next, a process which - and we are getting morbid and icky again here - includes movement, actually an alarming amount of movement and which probably would involve the linkage of another scary video if I had the time to go and find one.

I won't do that to you, don't worry! I found a cute 'n happy video to end this up for you. The puppy is listening to what is on the owner's computer:

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"

This is one of the paintings I grew up looking at, in one of the Time/Life Art Series books I kept checking out from the library.  There were not a lot of paintings to see in my town but there was a wonderful library with art books. The first famous painting I remember seeing in person was at a school field trip to the Detroit Museum of Arts. Please, people, do not sell off the paintings at the Detroit Museum of Arts.

This painting was long attributed to Pieter Brueghel, but since it's an oil and Brueghel worked in tempura, it's now thought to be a copy by a student. It shows the moment that Icarus, son of Daedalus, plunges into the ocean as a result of the candle wax melting off the self-made feathered wings (while escaping from a tower with Daedalus, the boy had defied his father and flew too close to the sun, thus melting the wax that held his wings to his arms).

I liked this painting as a child because I knew about the Icarus story and I was fascinated by the fact that at first glance, this painting doesn't seem to be about the fall of Icarus at all. It seems to be a painting about a farmer plowing his field, though how you can plow fields that steeply inclined is a mystery to me. Far away in the background, a boy with wings is falling from the sky into the ocean, and nobody notices, they just go on about their business.

As a child, you identify with the boy falling into the ocean and of course being an alarmist even then, I figured, well, yes, awful things happen all the time, even to children and anyway, you could see that the bird wing experiment was a pretty dumb concept to begin with.

But as I got older I got the point that is made by the poets that wrote about this painting -bad things happen, and yet the world moves on, largely oblivious. People keep planting the fields, people go about their business, boats sail by and a miraculous being who tried to achieve something incredible dies instead and it all goes without notice.

Of course, this is not the point of the Icarus myth itself. The point of the myth is to obey authority and avoid hubris, as if that is ever a fun couple of objectives. But the point of the painting is, I think, much more interesting. The artist has made a very interesting comment on human nature and how  we are the center of our own world, often to the exclusion of others and some very interesting events. If you don't doubt that we think we are the center of the world, go look at Facebook and watch the artists talk about themselves. "Well, enough about me, tell me, what do you think of my work?" (And yes I am just as bad, I guess.)

The real point of this post is that you can interpret a painting a million different ways. It's not just the knowledge and intent of the artist that matters, it's the knowledge and intent of the observer, too. A painting is a dialog. We need good, educated viewers, just like we need good, educated artists. If you don't know the legend of Icarus, how will you understand this painting? Well, you'll get something out of it, and it could be interesting, and you might be really impressed by the whole steep hill plowing reference, but you won't get as much out of it. If you didn't know the myth, part of the language between you and the artist would be lost. Ars longa, vita breva, etc. but ars gets a lot more breva if we lose a part of our cultural heritage. You could listen to the story on your headphones, but wouldn't it be better if you knew a little something about it in advance of your museum trip?

Now you'll have to go and Wiki the legend of Icarus if you don't know it.

There are a few excellent poems written about this painting. I'm going to write out the poem by W.H. Auden, "Musee des Beaux Arts", otherwise you'll be too busy to go and find it:

Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Varnishes

Despite what you're thinking, I don't just go swanning around at art parties and museums, I work like a dog at my studio and I have lots of opinions on art materials.

I use two brands of varnish for my paintings, in addition to the occasional use of retouch. The first is GamVar, a very fine product made by Gamblin. The package that I have comes with two glass jars. The first has varnish crystals and the second jar has liquid that dissolves and suspends the varnish crystals into a usable liquid varnish. The two jar method keeps the product fresher, in theory. I just went on the Gamblin site and it seems that GamVar is now being sold in bottles, so it looks like you might as well just get the single bottle after all and forget the mixing and shaking.

GamVar is glossy, but you can reduce the gloss by mixing it with Gamblin's Cold Wax medium. You can also make the varnish completely matte by applying the Cold Wax Medium and buffing your painting. I've done this and it works well also, especially on panels.

The company is well known for providing lots of good product information to artists and this is the link to its discussion of varnishes.

The varnish I've been using most recently is 'UVS Matte Varnish'  made by Conservator's Products, available at this link. I like the matte quality of this varnish on my paintings. It comes with a little plastic bottle of UVA product and you add a drop or two according to directions as you mix up your varnish. The nice people at the company answer the phone if you have questions about anything, too, or if you have managed to lose the top of your squeeze bottle or tipped it over. The reason there's a rubber band around the can is because I attach the varnish directions to the can that way (it's a separate piece of paper).

The best way to apply your varnish is to pour it into some kind of china or porcelain saucer ( that's what I use) and use a little triangular soft white makeup sponge, available at your local pharmacy or megastore. These are perfect for putting on the right amount of varnish and you can also use them for applying powered charcoal or graphite or other dry media when you draw. They create a satisfying blockiness and mass when you draw this way and you can use the side or the edge of the sponge. Dual thank yous for this tip, the awesome artists, Sadie Valeri and  Kate Stone.

Guest Blogpost: Ilaria Rosselli del Turco on the BP Award vs. The Boochiver Award

A quick note: I now have a link on the right side of the Blog to subscribe via email to these blog posts. I'm trying to keep this up on a regular, if not daily, basis, so thanks for reading.

A lot of us from the WPW (R)evolution show at Principle Gallery last weekend naturally ended up in the museums in Washington, D.C., a short hop on the commuter train from Alexandria where the gallery is located.

Can I just say something here? Is it possible that the same minds that brought you the U.S. tax code wrote the instructions on this ticketing machine for the Washington D.C. Metro? Furthermore, the kiosk containing an actual person who might answer your questions is located in the area after you insert your ticket into the turnstyles. I guess you could yell across the room, but somehow it seems like a design flaw - you have to select payment and pay before you can get to the spot where you can ask somebody how much you have to pay. Why, it's downright Sisyphussian in its potential frustration.

But press on in your journey, because the National Portrait Gallery is a wonderful place. I saw so many memorable pieces there.

My brilliant friend Ilaria Rosselli del Turco has written this insightful blog post about the difference between the prestigious BP Portrait Award based at the National Portrait Gallery UK (she was in the contest a few years ago) and the Outwin Boochever Portrait Award now being exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery of the United States. (Go over and read Ilaria's blog for a while. She is funny, incredibly talented, passionate and very, very smart. She had Washington D.C. all figured out while I was still looking for coffee. But she did look to the right once when stepping off the curb. How many Brits do we lose every year this way!?)

Ilaria is in front of some trash cans, pointing to the National Portrait Gallery sign. I think we were considering making some kind of performance art piece out of this but it was never fully realized.

In her blog post linked above, Ilaria includes a lot of good photos, links and much insight to the current Outwin Boochever show.

I agree with Ilaria about many things but I disagree with her on one thing - okay, maybe two things, including the number of times a person should drink cappuccino during the course of the day - but, personally, I don't like that this competition clumps paintings, photographs, videos and sculptures into one contest. This would be fine as an exhibit based on a portrait theme but I feel it is not a service to any of the artists working in the various art forms to compete directly against each other in a mass competition. The BP contest, meanwhile, is purely a painting contest and encourages the art of painting as a separate art form. In my opinion there is a lot about the technique of painting that can be examined, discussed and judged which sets it on a different platform that the technique of, say, photography, which has it's own techniques and possibilities. It's a little like having discus throwers and javelin throwers in the same Olympic event. If there's going to be prizes, let's spread out the prizes and include more artists in more categories.

I would have liked to see a portrait sculpture made out of American snack food. What could be more American than that? I've been thinking about this all evening. Fritos, crushed potato chips, Oreos, M & Ms, those pull-apart Twizzler strings for hair... . You are what you eat. By the way, did you know that the typical American's DNA is slowly being readjusted and our cells now indicate that we are genetically very similar to a Dorito?

"We're like corn chips walking because we really have a very, very large fraction of corn in our diets, and we actually can't help it because it's an additive in so many of the foods we find on the market shelves."  - see the quote and full story here.

For all I know, this sort of sculpture has been done before, but I'm putting it out there in the blogosphere because I would love to see somebody do this. Maybe I'll get to this myself in my spare time.

Anyway, as Ilaria says, it's a great show - do go see it.

"Women Painting Women" (R)evolution Show opening night, Principle Gallery

So this is a little late, I had a few internet problems...but here's what the group of artists looked like on Friday - we had a wonderful crowd. So much fun, thank you all so much for coming! Photo from Clint Mansell of Principle Gallery.