The slow art of Frank Auerbach

Once, not so very long ago, people only occasionally looked at their own image or those of their friends and family. Even mirrors were uncommon. With the invention of photography that changed. I suspect, although I don’t know it for a fact, that mirrors multiplied so that we could arrange ourselves for all that picture-taking.

It hasn’t been much longer than a century ago that many of our ancestors sat in parlors passing a stereopticon from person to person, marveling at 3-D images of foreign wonders. Not long after that postcards became all the rage. At last, we could all see what the world beyond our own town looked like.

So it was that portraits and landscapes, especially exotic landscapes, were the camera’s first subjects, and the two were frequently combined.

Today, I know people, I guess we all do, who take pictures at a furious rate—watching the children grow, marking every rite of passage with dozens of snapshots, and especially recording every holiday and the family’s presence in front of distinguished buildings and magnificent mountains. One of my favorite memories of an early trip to China was the woman who on every occasion handed me her camera so that her picture could be taken in front of something or some place important.

We consume more images today than any culture before us and, in a digital age, we throw them away almost as fast as we make them.

I spent part of the last day reading about Frank Auerbach. Like the rest of us, he’s mostly interested in pictures of people and landscapes. I looked at pictures of his paintings, of course, but while most copies of most paintings are of little worth, those of Auerbach’s work are especially so. His paintings are many-layered, thick with brush strokes, scraped, gouged, cross-hatched. His early paintings especially were so thick they were almost sculptural. No one-dimensional copy could reproduce that, or even come close, and so this post will be my first not to include a picture. From a 2001 gallery guide description of a painting of Primrose Hill, and quoted by Wikipedia: “Reading an Auerbach painting is an energetic experience… Furiously worked pink vibrates in a different way to swift interlinked zigzags of red and green, while a marbled sky offers an area of tranquility.”

That gives you some idea of the problem.

Auerbach, who is 78 years old, still paints long solitary hours. For his landscapes, he sketches hundreds of preparatory drawings. Like the digital picture-taker, he frequently throws away canvases he doesn’t like, but in his case he may have committed weeks and even months to the painting’s construction. He’s been known to buy back paintings that don’t meet his expectations in order to destroy them. What’s important to Auerbach is finding the truth of the art he’s making.

Auerbach is the very epitome of slow art. He has only a few subjects, subjects he’s painted for over fifty years—primarily the three women he’s loved in his life and the neighborhood of his art studio London’s Camden Town. He’s never had much interest in travel or seeing the world. There’s still too much to see in his several subjects. The exploration never ends. His paintings are more than images. They’re a response to the very fact of physical existence.

We can only see Auerbach’s paintings if we look slowly. Every stroke of the brush, every blunt attack with the palette knife is a fresh approach to something that is familiar and ordinary. If we let the paintings work on us, our tired ways of seeing can be shaken loose. We can learn to see and to celebrate what is no longer ordinary.

Surely this is what art is all about: “What I’m not hoping to do is paint another picture — there are enough in the world,” Auerbach says. “I’m hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing.”

Looking at a picture slowly

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar. Flickr. Creative Commons license.

On New Year’s Eve this year, I found myself at a party. The older folks (like me) mostly left around 10 or 11, while the younger people danced, drank and talked the night away. Of course, the two overlapped, and during that overlap, trying to make myself heard while indie rock pounded against the walls, I realized that I didn’t know how to act anymore. In fact, I felt like someone invisible. I found myself wondering if the 30s-40s people saw me and what they saw, if they did. Did they see 71 years old? Did they see a woman as old or older than their mother?

It’s hard sometimes to be elderly because many of us truly don’t know we are. I’ve known very few older women whose self image isn’t a decade, two, three or more younger than they are. I remember my friend Ada who fell in love with boys half her age when she was in her 50s: I understand her now when I didn’t then. I don’t feel that much different from the way I did at 30, 40 or 50. But I am. When I was 35, I could have taken to the dance floor and caused little comment. At 70 plus, will I seem inappropriate? Not to mention—breathless.

The music that night was very, very loud and rhythmic. About 50 years ago, music became louder and faster, and ever since people have gone hard of hearing at a young age. I know there are still slow songs and gentle music, but it seems to me much rarer than it was for people growing up in the 1940s and 50s. Were people just slower and sweeter then?

I’ve always moved more quickly than most of the people around me—walked faster, ate faster. I still do, though I suppose I’ll eventually slow down. But I wonder if there are some things I should start slowing for now. A few weeks ago I went to a slow dinner to hear about slow food and the recent global gathering of slow food producers in Turin, Italy. Eating slowly, especially when the food is local, fresh and wonderful, is an excellent idea.

Then today, I discovered James Elkins, an art critic and historian from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who blogs on Huffington Post. The subject of his post was “How Long Does it Take To Look at a Painting?” I discovered that I wanted to spend more time looking at pictures. Each picture. Elkins tells the story of an elderly woman who for decades had been coming came to the Institute three or four times a week during her lunch hour to look at one Rembrandt painting, “Young Woman at an Open Half-Door.” Elkins figures that’s 3,000 hours of looking.

But most of us look at paintings for only a few seconds at a time. Even at the Louvre, people look at the Mona Lisa. on average, for only about 15 seconds. On-line, and in this post, Elkins engages a 14th-century Sorrowing Madonna, a portrait that calls out for a long, searching view. “I have written about this image at more length elsewhere,” he writes. “Here I have just said enough, I hope, to suggest how a person might spend hours, and in the end years, in private communion with the figure in this painting. How long does it take to see this painting? A lifetime, more or less.”

Maybe, just maybe, this is a good time to slow down to taste, smell, eat, view. Maybe, that’s what I should be doing at 71. Although, for the present, I intend to continue walking quickly—I want to get there fast. I want to spend more time looking at whatever it is I’m walking towards.

People quitting art

I knew a very fine classical guitar player once – not well – who told me he was quitting because he’d learned that he’d never be the world’s best guitarist. So sad, I thought. What about the music? What about his sheer love for the music?

There are many people who do art, then quit — and for a wide variety of reasons. I always favor the odd stories, like the one about my friend, Joan (who reads this blog by the way, so I hope I don’t misstate any of the specifics.) She was a child prodigy on the violin with a mother who, seeing a bright future for both of them, pushed hard. But at the age of seven, Joan fell in love with a much older, rather famous violinist and decided that she would one day marry him. She labored hard, at her mother’s behest and to further her own dream, and at a still tender age became a student at Julliard and a student of — well, you know who. She married the man, quit playing the violin, and had four children with him before he died at the age of 79.

My violin: Carlo Antonio, Testore, MIlan, 1938. Photo by pellacea. Creative Commons.

Joan still loves music and both her later husbands were musicians. But she’d achieved her goal and her own fiddling was no longer relevant. I guess.

Then there’s June, who was one of the people discovered by Don Sunseri and GRACE. I talked about GRACE in two of my earliest posts (February 24 and 25 of this year). Don’s program encouraged people to do art in nursing homes, schools and community centers. He provided the tools and a lot of support and attention to people with no formal training but with vision. Their work was always unique, always intriguing.

June had never committed marker or brush to paper before, but in short order turned out a dozen-plus paintings, all of them interesting and some of them quite impressive. Just last night I remembered what June said when someone asked her how she knew when a painting was finished. Her heart, she said, beat faster. Or at least that’s how I remember what she said. Anyway, June painted and then she quit. That was what she wanted to do, that and apparently no more. She is now 90 years old and in the hospital with one thing and another and your prayers, if you’re a prayer, would be most welcome.

One of the most famous quitters in history was Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet, who, in his late teens, wrote poetry that profoundly influenced the world of literature. Victor Hugo called him “an infant Shakespeare.” He stopped writing poetry at the age of 20. As far as I know, he made no memorable pronouncements about it. Given that his work was accompanied by a feverish life full of drugs and passionate sex, his surrender to a more ordered life may also have meant the end of his writing.

More commonly, artists stop working because they grow weary of trying to make a career happen. They may decide they’re not good enough, which isn’t always true. Frequently, they don’t have the stomach for the marketing of their gifts. I first met Rhea when she was a student at the Manhattan School of Music. She was charming, very attractive, and sang beautifully. For years after, she continued to study and to sing at every opportunity. She worked at one job and another (rehabilitating pipe organs in Boston!), married twice, and had nearly finished raising two children before she decided to give up her ambitions for a singing career. She could sing continually, she could get better and better, but she couldn’t sell herself, and that was almost as important.

I’ve quit doing art too, and not always for the most comprehensible reasons. I never quit writing although I often didn’t get around to it. Another problem altogether, I think. But I did stop doing photography. I returned to an earlier state where I’d been utterly unable to take a decent picture.

For a number of  years, I actually took quite good photographs. I also started reading about photography and marveling at what its invention had meant to humanity, and admiring work by some of its best practitioners. And then I stopped, not the reading but the act of  photographing. Something about turning people and places that were lively and exciting into still-lifes. Something about the distance the camera created between me and my subject. Maybe one or both of those. I don’t really know. Suddenly, I was lousy at it all over again.

Creativity is a complicated business. Writers who decide to be literary agents. Composers who grow old and weary. Poets who run out of words. Painters who make the statement they want to make, and quit. Dancers who can no longer dance.

As well as the many, many people who just keep doing art because it’s what they need to do.

Leftover entertainments and brief reports

This will be a short post devoted to a few leftover entertainments and brief reports. After that I’ll be taking off for New Mexico for a week where I’m sure I’ll suffer horribly from the heat and waves and waves of dust,  and have all sorts of archaeological adventures.

Once again, I don’t quite know how to leave my blog untended. I don’t know what I think would happen if I left it hanging here by itself for a while. I know I’m afraid it would be difficult to find my readers again. At any rate, I’m going to fill the space with some fiction. A short story every other day (or as close to that schedule as I can manage). I hope you’ll read them; none of them are terribly long; all of them are lively and, I think, possibly, both entertaining and edifying.

Now, for the reports. A few days ago I happened to be listening to the car radio when Dr. Dean Edell talked about a survey that asked the question: At what age were you happiest? The answer was a wonderful surprise to me: it was 74 years of age. I’m not even there yet!!!

The other thing I wanted to call everyone’s attention to is a story in the July/August issue of AARP magazine. If you’re too young and never see “the world’s largest circulation magazine,” look at the online edition. The story is about Margaret Cosgrove, an eccentric New Yorker, who at age 81 has been painting for 30 years, and was just given her first gallery show. Until 2008, no one, literally no one, had ever seen her work. The neighbor who “discovered” the work and helped bring her to our attention has written a charming article about her. Unfortunately, we only see bits and pieces of what she’s painted—but what a beginning!

On to the entertainments: first, three more flower paintings with botanical descriptions from Sally Levy. These are from the “Every town has a Pearl Street” series.

And finally, from Voices and Faces, the Brownington kids book in our last post, a cartoon from the chapter on “finding our inner voice.”

Women’s work and Grandma Moses

In my last post I talked about women’s work as art which has since reminded  me of one of the most famous American women artists: Grandma Moses.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses. Wickipedia. Creative Commons.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, her work began as embroidery, or “yarn paintings.” She was already in her 70s when she started. If arthritis hadn’t started crippling her hands so that embroidery was painful, she would never have begun painting. “She would sit on an old, battered swivel chair, perching on two large pillows. The Masonite on which she painted would lie flat on an old kitchen table before her. There was no easel. Crowding her in her ‘studio’ were an electric washer and dryer that had overflowed from the kitchen.” (From the New York Times obituary)

In the beginning, no one really took notice. She sold her paintings alongside her jams at the county fair, but while the jam won prizes, the paintings were pretty much ignored. However, she placed a few in the drugstore where she was charging $3 or $5, depending on the size, when a New York art collector passed by and happened to see them.  He bought all of them and everything else she had. From then on it was only a matter of time before Grandma Moses, one of several “naive” painters of the day, was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Some critics and gallery owners balked at showing her work when they found out her age. They figured she’d be dead soon and there’d be no more paintings to sell. How could they know she’d live to 101 and paint up until a few months before her death? And how could they know that she’d develop as an artist?

A fine gobbler. 1948. Photo by Kamakazecactus. Creative Commons.

Grandma Moses’ paintings may have begun as decorative women’s work and, in fact, her earliest pictures were copies made from Currier and Ives prints and postcards, but her art soon took on new dimensions. Her subjects were more and more events from the past as she remembered them, the changing seasons, local lore and fun and festivity. She painted, as other naive or untrained painters have done, without the linear perspective common to realistic painters. The paintings became more and more patterned as she grew in her art: sometimes they were reminiscent of quilts with dozens of smaller scenes or narratives on a larger field-a farm, a fair, a winterscape, a crossroads in the spring, a summer’s day.

July. 1956. Photo by Kamakazecactus. Creative Commons.

When she was asked once how she could paint several paintings of the same thing, for example, a legendary checkered house, she explained that she imagined herself looking at the same scene through the same window but from another place so that everything was changed.

Grandma Moses became a force to be reckoned with commercially when Hallmark cards bought the rights to reproduce some of her paintings for Christmas greeting cards. For many of us, this is where we first discovered her and between her and Currier and Ives, we’re left with an indelible picture of the early rural United States – the Yankee part – that’s sentimental and bucolic. After years of living in California and New York City, I moved to northern Vermont in the 1990s and will soon be returning for a holiday and some sugar-on-snow. There’s no boiling cauldron of syrup for sugaring-off, buckets are being replaced everywhere with plastic piping, but there’s still a sugar house, the scent of burning wood, the sweet taste of amber syrup, the sugar-on-snow-events after dinner when we all stood around the kitchen table and spooned up the carmelized stuff from the snow someone had gathered up and stuck in the freezer. It wasn’t like it was in Grandma Moses’ sugaring paintings, but those scenes colored every spring’s sugaring and made it more special. Was that nostalgia? Well, yes. But Moses was much more than that.

Grandma Moses charged certain iconic scenes with such joy that she made art.  But she remained a hard-working Yankee grandmother. As she once said, “If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens.”

Goya’s late work: art and mortality

So there I was, trying to decide what to write about in this post, since I couldn’t figure out how to make the bombardment of sub-atomic particles at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) an issue about aging artists, nor the Einstein statement: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science” an issue with specific reference to growing older. (I haven’t given up making a case for the Einstein quote in a later post.) Anyway, I was thinking about stars, nebulae and black holes when I ran into a wonderful critical essay about Goya, the artist who perhaps more than any other looked into the black hole at the heart of much of what we call civilization. (The metaphor isn’t that much of a stretch.)

Le sabbat ou le Grand bouc 1797-1798. Fondation Galidano Madrid. Photo by remaudjoel. Creative Commons license.

The author was John Sevigny, and the essay, “On Francisco Goya,” in the current Guernica magazine, is an exquisite look at Goya’s art, and especially that of his late years.

Ironically, it was not until Goya was old, deaf, bitter, and driven half-mad by encephalitis, that he turned painting upside down, driving a stake into the old vampire of the Baroque and giving birth to Modern Art. Goya was 72 when he painted the walls of his home with 14 works, never meant for public view. Taken as a group, they are as dark as anything created in the history of art, and yet, they are so modern that later Spanish painters such as Joan Miro, Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso took more than a Century to catch up with him. And none of them ever really matched Goya for combining thought, observation, passion and technical expertise.

Verborgen hond/Hidden dog. A late painting on Goya's wall. The dog is swimming into the waves, and we know that the dog is doomed: the waves will keep coming, and coming. Photo by mooste. Creative Commons license.

The essay has as its main point that Goya, a painter with royal patronage and simultaneously, profoundly, an outsider rejected by the establishment of his day, was centuries before his time, and may still be ahead of ours. Further, that the best art since his time is deeply indebted to him. The man’s age is only a minor theme. But isn’t it fascinating that the wall paintings were not painted to influence or to be remembered, but were made simply because Goya had to do it? It’s a motif that’s repeated again and again when we look at aging artists.

At another place in this engrossing essay (please check it out for yourself!), Sevigny writes:

Saturne (1820-1832) rez de chaussée. La romeria de San Isidro. Musee de Prado. Photo by remaudjoel. Creative Commons license.

From Kronos, also known as Saturn Devouring his Son, to Duel with Cudgels, Goya pulls no punches in these private but now legendary works which have since been transferred to canvas. They are marked by his own fear of impending mortality (he had been mortally ill twice before), his lack of faith in humanity, and his condemnation of the irrationality of violence and superstition.

The themes of his work are the same as they were throughout his life; only “his own fear of impending mortality” is contemporaneous with the wall paintings. I think it goes without saying that “fear of impending mortality” must be present in the work of any older artist. And that, though it may be discomfiting, is one of the themes of this blog.