As a visiting artist, I’ve given hundreds of critiques in art schools around the world and have seen the problems young painters face when they place ideas before aesthetics. One young man in a prestigious MFA program made six-foot-square photorealistic paintings of his anus in a range of colors (the chartreuse one was kind of pretty). After reading his dense, conceptual statement, I asked him if he had big openings. Bottom line, his paintings were poorly executed and conceptually weak, shock and yawn.
Robert Rauschenberg said it best: “You begin with the possibilities of the material.” A painting should grow like a living, breathing thing in which the ideas come out of the process. Starting with an idea and building a picture around it automatically inserts a gap between the artist and viewer because the artist knows something that the viewer doesn’t. Even if they figure it out, the gap remains. I want my paintings to begin and end with physical certainties like surface and material; anyone can relate to a buttery brushstroke because it doesn’t need to be anything else. Starting with the possibilities of the material allows the viewer and artist to form a social contract on common ground, free to make discoveries together because the painting begins in the artist’s imagination and finishes in the viewer’s.
Painters like Robert Ryman or Suzan Frecon extract ideas from the limitations of paint itself, developing a way of seeing that is the result of decades of reduction and repetition. A blank white canvas is not a wide-open road but a declaration of limitations, just as every modern piano has eighty-eight keys, yet no two pianists sound alike. The Beatles, Bonnie Raitt, and Judas Priest all began with the same structure: intro/ verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus. What makes them great artists is how they flood those restrictions with soul and introspection. Art is the magnification of limitations.
When teachers would say that painting was “whatever I wanted it to be,” I felt offended. That’s how you speak to a child. Art is not doing anything you want but doing everything you can within walls. Andy Warhol is credited with popularizing Marshall McLuhan’s dictum, “Art is anything you can get away with.” Don’t speak for me, Andy. When I experience a work of art, I want to feel that the artist was committed to more than just getting away with something. Would you want doctors or pilots to get away with stuff? Why would you want artists to? It has taken fifty years, but it finally seems as if the art world is moving beyond the bitter cynicism of Andy Warhol. I am aware of his contribution to twentieth-century culture, but when a real artist like the poet Mary Oliver asks what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life, my answer is more than get away with it.
In graduate school, I worked harder than anyone in the class, and my boyish enthusiasm pissed off an older artist in the program. One night, he emerged from his hate-filled cubby and stormed into my studio drunk, ready to hit me, demanding to know what I cared about and why I smiled all the time. Why wasn’t my work cynical? That confrontation was a defining moment in my life because I didn’t have an answer, which, in retrospect, was the perfect answer. I was a twenty-two-year-old man-child who only knew how to be himself. Nothing has changed, except that now I’m a fifty-year-old man-child.
Here is a letter to my twenty-two-year-old self:
Dear Brian,
Talent is important, but other factors such as geography, education, health, family, and being in the right place at the right time also contribute to making a career. You work hard, but you had help. Paint from gratitude. Great art can arise from discontent and cynicism, but it can also be born of wonder and serenity. Speak from your heart.
Now dropkick that clown out of your studio.
Yours,
You
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Originality Is a Myth
One of the things Will Barnet and I talked about was the notion of originality. The art world is obsessed with novelty; so many reviews begin with the caveat “Although the artist isn’t doing anything new . . .” Painters make paintings, not flat-screen televisions. Our job is not to dazzle critics with the newest model but to act as splicers, fusing personal experience with durable fundamentals from the past. Art students are frightened into thinking that they must be original right out of the gate or risk mediocrity. They face constant pressure to grow and evolve. Those are art school bullshit words. There is great breadth and poetry in repetition, in doing the same thing for a long time. That’s how you get really good at stuff. No one talks about that.
I had three museum retrospectives before I was forty-fi ve, which enabled me to see broad snapshots of my work in clean, well-lit spaces. What I learned was that I only have a couple of moves, but I do them very well. Fortunately, my compositional range, palette, even the way I see the world have remained relatively singular for forty years. Duke Ellington said, “The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.”
Painting should nail your foot to the floor so that you spend your entire life going around in a tiny circle. At the center of that circle is one question: Are you making art, or are you manufacturing a state of lucidity and trying to keep it around for as long as possible? If you’re focused on making art, it will end up looking like someone else’s. Your true job is to construct a clear seeing place. Be narrow-minded. You can’t manufacture originality, but you can limit your perspectives. Myopia is bad for politics and education, but it’s good for art. Galleries are full of paintings that are too damn smart, too global and aware. I don’t want the entire globe in a painting; I can get that from the New York Times. I want one person’s creepy world compressed down to the size of a diamond and shot at my face violently. That will give me lucidity.
An artist should never be the smartest person in the room. I never am. I’m not advocating making dumb, uninformed paintings; I am promoting flying your freak flag on high and letting us stare at you. Give up trying to be new, because as soon as you finish a painting, it’s a thing of the past. Forget originality because everything has been done. Give up trying to become rich and famous, because it won’t happen. Art doesn’t only show us what we can do but what we can’t. I continually take inventory of things that will never happen: I will never be a travel agent or a Pakistani. I will never win the Turner Prize or have a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art. I give up on stuff that won’t happen to make room for what is certain: I will show up every day, lock the door, bend the world through the prism of my experience, and put it back out. Originality is for amateurs; consistency is for artists. Don’t ask, “Is it good?” but rather, “Does it continue?” Nail your foot to the floor. Then tell us about it.
There is nothing new under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes 1:9
How Do You Know When It’s Finished?
This question is offensive. Who cares? A baker is finished when there’s a cupcake. I’m a professional, and I know my job. While some people were busy studying law, medicine, or investment banking, I was learning how to draw and mix color. The reason a lot of modern and contemporary painting appears unfinished is because it is—it requires the consciousness of the viewer to be complete. Painting is like driving a car: your mind wanders, but you still have to operate the steering wheel and pedals. Having painted for forty years, I no longer think while working, yet I’m always in full control. That’s why flight hours really count; you can’t know when to stop until you recognize what it looks like to go too far. Always go too far and then subtract. There is a fine line separating vital from vapid, and artists must labor through hundreds of paintings to recognize that line. Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live, said, “We don’t go on air because we’re ready. We go on because it’s 11:30.” You can’t tinker forever; you have to stop sometime. Experience will tell you when it’s 11:29.
One of my best friends is a famous actor. One morning, he and I drove through sheets of October rain from the Upper West Side to Milburn, NJ, to see CanCan, the musical, at the Paper Mill Playhouse while our spo
uses worked in Manhattan. The show knocked my eyes out. The previous night, I’d seen the comedian Gilbert Gottfried onstage, and his performance summoned the same feeling. There is something about consummate, polished professionalism that brings a work of art to life regardless of the audience.
When I see a lousy painting, a poorly performed play, or a mediocre singer, I feel the unconscious duty to help the artist, tapping my foot to keep rhythm, rearranging colors in my mind, or anticipating a punch line before the comic delivers it. When a work of art is carefully crafted, rehearsed, and repeated to the point of near perfection, it breathes like a living thing. Can-Can was a glittery, fire-breathing dragon thumping around onstage, and I was helpless. The same for Gilbert. Great art is always in control.
Samuel and the Urn
I discovered the odes of John Keats in a little bookstore in Florence, Italy, when I was twenty-t wo and have rarely traveled since without a copy. I’ve read them on the banks of the Arno, in Irish chapels, at East End Pubs, at NASCAR races, in Las Vegas casinos, and on the New York subway.
My favorite, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” changed the way I think about art and its role in the world. The poem begins with a solitary observer experiencing a work of representational art; the urn is incomplete without the presence of the viewer, just as a painting is lifeless until the spectator projects their vitality into it. The urn is an object that exists separately from ourselves, which produces a fascinating paradox for the figures dancing across its shape, figures simultaneously liberated from time yet stuck in it. They won’t age or die, but neither will they inhale the brief fragrance of having lived.
Keats taught me that life isn’t a support system for art, but the other way around. Art shows us how to be human. We move through life divided in half, focused on either thoughts or bodily sensations. Rarely are we fully present in both. Art teaches us to be whole because it is whole. A painting is two things at the same time: a flat surface with little piles of color and a fictive world into which we expand our consciousness. In a Rembrandt self-portrait, creamy oil paint suddenly becomes translucent flesh with warm blood coursing beneath. Scumbled brushstrokes instantly transform into the folds in a cap. First, there is paint. Then there isn’t. Then there is. Every great painter makes paint vanish.
Keats goes on, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” In painting, what gets left out is as important as what stays. Each new brushstroke squeezes out an old one so that a finished painting is half-visible; the other half is the hushed vibration of absence. In his essay Painting and Time, John Berger writes, “A visual image, so long as it is not being used as a mask or disguise, is always a comment on an absence . . . . Visual images, based on appearances, always speak of disappearance.”
I’ve been obsessed with the notion of vanishing for as far back as I can remember. I’m not referring to “getting lost in a painting” or “disappearing into the colors,” but to the fact that there is a finite inventory of brushstrokes, and, as soon as one is used, it can never be replaced. Does the act of seeing it delete it from existence? Each brushstroke is the last of its kind. Mayflies have a lifespan of thirty minutes; I think of them when I look at the paintings of Albert York. I don’t mean that his forms disappear from view but that their brief lifespan in my mind’s eye is precisely what brings them to life, so that the next York painting I see is an accumulation of comparisons to the previous one. The best paintings are those you can’t describe moments after seeing them. Paul Valéry said it best: “To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”
One of the great honors of my life was befriending the American poet Samuel Menashe, whose work I discovered in 2005 at the suggestion of the poet William Corbett. I read everything I could get my hands on and then called him on the phone. We spoke cordially and agreed to meet in person. Days later, I was sitting beside Samuel on a bench in Central Park feeding pigeons and talking about life as artists in our great city. He was very interested in my paintings and, over the next six years, came to every show I had in New York. He began to send me handwritten letters that included old poems as well as works in progress and even did a private reading for my painting class at the 92nd Street Y Art Center on the Upper East Side. My students sat transfixed beside their easels in the dark as Samuel stood under a spotlight reciting his best-known works in a mellifluous baritone. For my 2005 solo show at Forum Gallery in New York, we featured one of his poems in the catalog that accompanied the exhibition. Samuel stood at my side during the opening reception and recited Shakespeare from memory for my guests during the lavish after-party at Brasserie 8 1/2 on Fifty-Seventh Street. Here is the poem included in the catalog:
Reeds Rise from Water
rippling under my eyes
bulrushes tuft the shore
at every instant I expect
what is hidden everywhere
Like “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Reeds Rise from Water” embodies a marriage between nature and art, one hinting at the other. In just a palmful of words, we are catapulted from extreme foreground (“under my eyes”) to distant background (“bulrushes tuft the shore”) just as a painter uses foreground and background to establish pictorial depth. This technique is an artist’s way of declaring love for the viewer, as if to say, “It’s safe to go over there. I know because I’ve already been there for you.” A painter should always have the viewer’s back, giving him or her the impression that hidden eyes have seen the painting from every possible angle, so that it’s warmed up and worn in before the viewer ever arrives.
What astounded me most about Samuel’s poetry is how he got such spaciousness into so few words. His work taught me about economy of design, not “Less is more,” which I disagree with (Less is less), but clarity of intention. If it doesn’t help, take it out. What’s the least amount of information your painting can have and be a painting? Samuel is gone now, but I still sit beside him on that park bench in my dreams. We don’t speak. The pigeons are enough.
You have to simplify the spectacle in order to make some sense of it. You have, in a way, to draw its plan.
—Émile Bernard
WORKING
Drawing
Walter Sickert said, “Drawing is about captivity. Painting is about freedom.” The process of rendering the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface is the first step in grafting an image directly onto the nervous system. I have been drawing for as long as I can remember; the thrill of rubbing a No. 5B pencil on cream paper satisfies like nothing else. My favorite thing to draw is a solitary tree, and I’ve sat under thousands of them, from the jack pines of Algonquin National Forest in Ontario to the sycamores of Central Park and the banyans of Florida, but nothing comes close to the Southern live oak. I am obsessed with drawing their trunks, torqued and full of sad knowledge. Everything I am after in the conceptual framework of my paintings is embodied in that immovable marking of location.
My tree drawings are realistic because my work has to be tethered to the observable landscape; depiction allows for a broader range of expression (political, poetic, formal) because it expands things to which we can all relate. Claiming to represent the act of seeing is provocative, but what does that mean? The reason I draw a tree in great detail is not to make it appear but vanish. Each carefully rendered leaf and strand of bark nudges me further from visible reality into a crafted one, leaving me both depleted and supplied. A good drawing is the visible vibration of its subject. I believe that there is a parallel world running concurrently with this one, and, now and then, we crack into it. Drawing and painting are an attempt to keep that world around a little longer. The coast of South Carolina taught me about the density of place. I am where I go. I love the outdoors but didn’t become a landscape painter until I came inside.
Shade, 2002–03, 10×8 inches, pencil on paper.
Beginning. Middle. End.
Beginning a painting is one of the most exhilarating experiences in the world, a chance to risk everything withou
t being injured or deposed. I start a painting by standing six inches in front of the white canvas, so close that I can see the individual threads and inhale the sweet tang of gesso. Then, with both palms, I make circular patterns, barely skimming the surface with my hands, working from the center outward, feeling every inch of the blank picture plane. The sound of skin against skin and the heat generated from the friction form a binding contract between me and the painting, both physical objects occupying space in the room. This tactile ritual informs every brushstroke that follows. As Sickert advised, “Start like a bricklayer, finish like a jeweler.”
Next, I tone the entire surface with an underpainting made of a lean color thinned only with a solvent such as Gamsol—no linseed oil. I observe the fatover-lean rule: fat means more oil, lean means less oil. Applying a lean color over fat can cause cracking and shrinking because the top layer dries faster than the bottom. Lean colors such as cadmiums, cerulean blue, and burnt umber are opaque, while fat colors such as alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, phthalo blue and green, and sap green are transparent. Add more fat as each successive layer dries. Don’t analyze when you begin. Turn off the ticker tape. Do first, think second. If it sucks, wipe it off and do it again. Make big shapes, squint, block in masses, and don’t edit. Self-awareness is the enemy. Let everything pour out, and then make corrections later.
Painting is delayed gratification; plant seeds now to harvest later. The reason that I begin with a middle tone is to have the option of going lighter or darker. Starting on a white ground means you can only go darker. If I anticipate a warmer final painting, then I’ll underpaint in cooler tones like magenta, pale green, or cerulean blue, while a cooler picture gets a warm underpainting of burnt sienna, orange, or cadmium red deep. Gilbert Stuart started with what he called “fog color,” a medium-valued gray upon which virtually any color would pop. Sickert used Indian red and pale blue to block in his lights and darks, respectively. Thomas Gainsborough, my favorite painter, used salad tongs to dip sponges into bowls of dark brown to block in generous masses. I love salad and have my own tongs for this purpose.
Clear Seeing Place Page 7