Saul Steinberg

 

Saul Steinberg, Breakfast Still Life, 1974

 

 

This Saul Steinberg post card fell out of a book today.  What a pleasure to see it again with  its breakfast paraphernalia laid out like a landscape.  Everything has a shadow, and most of the objects don't touch one another.   It looks like a composition achievable for my current skill level. I do see that as he drew he looked down at his piece of toast then raised his eyes as he looked at the horizon in the  far distance, past the police car and out to the cruet.   It seems suited to the diminutive size of a post card, but the actual drawing is 23 1/2 and 14 1/2 inches.  I think most of the objects are presented as life size. 

 

 

Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940)

 

All that follows is what I learned from reading John Russell's introduction to E Vuillard: Drawings,1885-19.  Vuillard did not  exhibit his drawings: for one,he was a very private man;  also he "rarely made what are called "exhibition-drawings": fully- worked-up compositions on big sheets of fine paper."  Russell quotes Jacques Salomon,  who tells us " Vuillard hardly ever painted from nature. His paintings almost always came out of a preliminary pencil sketch."  And Vuillard drew almost continually wherever he was.  When he returned home, he transferred the drawings to a sheet of cardboard, a piece of canvas or  another sheet of paper. They were pieces quickly done.  Russell says they were a specific kind of  kind of  Parisian drawing, then goes on to tell of how Delacroix told a young painter that it was not enough to be able to draw slowly and concentratedly as if all eternity were before him.  "What you must be able to do is to see a man jump from a fourth-floor window and get a good likeness of him before he hits the ground.  (I love reading John Russell.)

 

I like the searching line of these drawings.  I see the change in value of the lines. I like the way part of the page is given to a small drawing of  a detail  in the larger sketch.  I like the details that are left out, but indicated.  And the domestic scenes  and the architecture.  Did he start out with a lighter pencil and go in later to emphasize some lines or did he just change pressure?

 

 

Rackstraw Downes to Sally Heaphy

Consider this, Sally.  Nobody came to your door to recruit you to learn to draw.  This was your very own bright idea. You can stop any time, and you'll be the only one who cares. Well, maybe not the only one, but the larger world is not going to be affected.  It's not going to be "fun."  Why should it be?  It should be interesting, and it has been. Expect to be dissatisfied. If the rest of us slave away, in my case in wind and rain, why should you expect to glide through and achieve even minimal competency quickly?  In fact, I know you don't have any such expectations.  I see that you find the whole process engaging,  that once you sit down at your work space or stand at your easel something happens.  You feel alert, filled with a sense of possibility despite all the erasures you make. I know that you are pleased with many of the things that you have done so far.

The possibility of doing better will always be with you.  I feel that  I always flunk sky painting.  Well, that sense of a need to do better will be what enables you to actually do better.  It's conceivable that I will be satisfied with a sky I paint. 

The pleasure of looking closely will carry you through.  The pleasure of looking at other people's work will sustain and inspire you.

Get on with it.

Mid-term Self-Assessment

My drawings are boring.  I've chosen to try to learn a difficult task, that of expressing spatial relationships, and while I can't help but think that every effort I've made so far in that regard constitutes a major triumph, I also can't help but see that my drawings are also boring.  I need to think more about mark making and value, and some color wouldn't hurt either.  Plus I just haven't been putting enough time in.  I don't know why exactly. My husband's operation and stay in the hospital was why I didn't work last week, but it doesn't account for previous weeks.  I think maybe it's because I have to take two steps backward in order to go forward. The drawings I made when I was looking at vases and bottles set up in Morandi-like compositions are much more accomplished that what I have made so far this Fall.  They are modest accomplishments, but  better.  I look at collections of contemporary drawings and see the wide range of possibilities for mark making.  I see the drawing that I started by rubbing over a collograph plate.  They seem much more interesting to pursue than the task I have chosen for myself.  But I'm not ready to give up.  

Throughout this floundering, reading Rackstraw Downes has been a comfort.  After finishing his series of razor wire paintings he wrote, "Why do I always flunk sky painting?"  Then he went  on to name contemporaries who are skillful at the task.  Downes wrote the introduction to Art in Its Own Terms, a collection of Fairfield Porter's art criticism.  Here is Downes on Porter's early struggles:
   "Porter had to work hard for his eventual accomplishments. Rudy Burckhardt recalls seeing in his studio a painting with an awkwardly cropped composition; when he pointed this out, Porter replied that first he had to learn just to paint: composition he would worry about later.  But he was certainly not bothered by self-delusions on this issue: he once wrote to a friend, "It is interesting about your reaction to my early paintings. It was not so different from my own: I, too, thought them atrocious."    

On the other hand, I've really enjoyed the reading about and by artists and the looking at art on the internet. In A Printmaker's Document, Jim Dine tells how he made a series of self portraits not by using a mirror, but, instead, nailing copper plates  to a wall and using the reflection of his face in the shiny copper surface to guide his had as he drew.  If I were more interested in my face, if I had a beard or interesting tufts of nasal hair, I'd be interested in doing that myself.

What I'd Like to Make

I'd like to make a series of autobiographical artist books in small editions of only eight or ten.  I made one in Ursula Minivini's Artist Book class.  It was a series of maps of places I went to when I was a child living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I'd make ones titled Jobs I've Held,  Places I've Ice Skated, Places I've Lived, Favorite Forms of Procrastination, Brief Biographies of the Family Cats.  Nothing profound and revealing: the books would be for my grandchildren. 

My work in another medium

If my work were in another medium, it would be an installation like those of Red Grooms, except it wouldn't quite work:  the bridge wouldn't quite span the river and doors would remain ajar, but not functional.

Or it would be an elaborate device like a Rube Goldberg construction which would take the marbles it was supposed to convey and allow them to escape prematurely.

That's my present work.  I have high hopes for my future work.

Rackstraw Downes and Me

Here's some of what I've been reading lately: Rackstraw Downes'  "Turning the Head in Empirical Space" an essay in Rackstraw Downes, Sanford Sanchez, et al.  and  Under the Gowanus and Razor-wire Journal, the journal Downes kept while making these paintings.  Part of the pleasure of reading the journal comes from the fact that the paintings he made under the Gowanus expressway are of an intersection that I passed through on my way to and from work for fourteen years.  The major part of the pleasure is of learning of the hours and hours he put into the making of these paintings during some of the hottest days of the year in a place so packed with traffic that on some days he wore a mask to limit the amount of fumes he was inhaling.  He would often feel discouraged, uncertain whether he was persisting in a task that might end up not satisfying him at all.

Why would that please me?  Well, I feel the same way with a lot less at stake.  The simple drawings I make seem to me neither accomplished or even particularly interesting, and yet they also represent a triumph and I feel that if I persist, I will do better.  And some parts may even possibly  become easier.  Although when I think about it,  it's hard work right from the beginning of every painting for Downes. 

Other pleasures of this reading come from looking at works he mentions in passing:  Turner's Lord Egremont Greeting His Dogs, and Hobbema's  Middleharnis, among others. 
And from learning that Yvonne Jacquette said of  recognizing converging vertical lines, "I see it but I refuse to do it."

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