The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568 – please click on all images for larger viewing
Update: since posting, I was sent this video interpretation of Bruegel’s painting created by Nir Nadler and Chaja Hertog, a triptych compilation of figures set in the misty, haunting landscape of Holland in a focus which ranges from sharp to foggy. A beautiful adaptation.

The Misanthrope, 1568 – A ragged figure in a glass globe is cutting the purse strings of an old man wearing a dark habit. Under the picture are the words: “Since the world is so unfaithful, I am in mourning.”

When I was a child, I used to love looking at Bruegel’s painting of the Hunters in the Snow. That snow looked just as real and cold as snow, and I longed to get out there with the other skaters in what seemed a perfect winter wonderland of paint. The hunters, however, gave me a shudder of something with a different, inexplicable quality of cold. Still today, I feel the same in looking at this painting, preferring the skaters over the hunters, having learned a bit more about that second kind of chill.

The Hunters in the Snow, 1565

As for the painting Dulle Griet, also known as Mad Meg, I am relieved I learned about it as an adult, for the nightmare probability is quite high from viewing such a magnificent painting like this. Mad Meg is the Anglicized version of Dulle Griet, a peasant woman figure of Flemish folklore who leads an army of women to pillage Hell, wearing an apron and armed with rough language and tools of male aggression. She is also the subject of a 1640s painting by Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger, and she appears as a character in Caryl Churchill’s Play “Top Girls” (1982), where she recounts her invasion of Hell: “I’d had enough, I was mad, I hate the bastards. I come out my front door that morning and shout till my neighbors come out and I said, “Come on, we’re going where the evil come from and pay the bastards out.’” (Churchill, 28).

Dulle Griet, 1562

But mostly, Bruegel created paintings that richly suggest that we stop to reflect, no matter if we are contemplating ice skaters, hunters, crucifixions, demonic peasant women or Icarus falling from the sky. As W.H. Auden explains in his poem, great masters such as Bruegel show how most people are too oblivious to care.

“Musée des Beaux Arts”

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.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1558

Aldous Huxley wrote a very interesting essay on Brueghel which was circulating around on facebook recently, in which he prefaces his thoughts on Brueghel with an interesting opinion on the modern art values of his day. I have written before about my disappointment in the fact that current artmaking seems to eschew emotional content, any narrative and any focus on any real subject matter, other than the artist’s “formal concerns.” Thus, I found I could not agree more when Huxley writes about the value of feelings in painting,

One feeling is excited by another. Our faculties work best in a congenial emotional atmosphere.

I also enjoyed his discussion about the value of “the sentiment of the buttocks”:

The contemporary fashion is to admire beyond all others the painter who can concentrate on the formal side of his art and produce pictures which are entirely devoid of literature. Old Renoir’s apophthegm, “Un peintre, voyez-vous, qui a le sentiment du téton et des fesses, est un homme sauvé,” is considered by the purists suspiciously latitudinarian. A painter who has the sentiment of the pap and the buttocks is a painter who portrays real models with gusto. Your pure aesthete should only have a feeling for hemispheres, curved lines and surfaces. But this “sentiment of the buttocks” is common to all good painters. It is the lowest common measure of the whole profession. It is possible, like Mantegna, to have a passionate feeling for all that is solid, and at the same time to be a stoic philosopher and a hero-worshiper; possible, with Michelangelo, to have a complete realization of breasts and also an interest in the soul or, like Rubens, to have a sentiment for human greatness as well as for human rumps. The greater includes the less; great dramatic or reflective painters know everything that the aestheticians who paint geometrical pictures, apples or buttocks know, and a great deal more besides. What they have to say about formal relations, though important, is only a part of what they have to express. The contemporary insistence on form to the exclusion of everything else is an absurdity. So was the older insistence on exact imitation and sentiment to the exclusion of form. There need be no exclusions. In spite of the single name, there are many different kinds of painters and all of them, with the exception of those who cannot paint, and those whose minds are trivial, vulgar and tedious, have a right to exist.

And just a bit later he writes,

Every good painter invents a new way of painting. Is this man a competent painter? Has he something to say, is he genuine? These are the questions a critic must ask himself. Not, Does he conform with my theory of imitation, or distortion, or moral purity, or significant form?

Like Auden, Huxley also recognized the tremendous impact Bruegel creates by presenting a scene of “regular” people in which the mourners of an “important” tragedy go unnoticed, discussing it particularly in The Procession to Calvary (1564):

“Breughel… represents the scene as it would have appeared to any casual spectator on the road to Golgotha on a certain spring morning in the year 33 A.D. Other artists have pretended to be angels, painting the scene with a knowledge of its significance. But Brueghel resolutely remains a human onlooker. What he shows is a crowd of people walking briskly in holiday joyfulness up the slopes of a hill. On the top of the hill, which is seen in the middle distance on the right, are two crosses with thieves fastened to them, and between them a little hole in the ground in which another cross is soon to be planted. Round the crosses, on the bare hill top stands a ring of people, who have come out with their picnic baskets to look on at the free entertainment offered by the ministers of justice. Those who have already taken their stand round the crosses are the prudent ones; in these days we should see them with camp stools and thermos flasks, six hours ahead of time, in the vanguard of the queue for a Melba night at Covent Garden…

That eager, tremulous, lascivious interest in blood and beastliness which in these more civilized days we can only satisfy at one remove from reality in the pages of our newspapers, was franklier indulged in Brueghel’s day; the naïve ingenuous brute in man was less sophisticated, was given longer rope, and joyously barks and wags its tail round the appointed victim. Seen thus, impassively, from the outside, the tragedy does not purge or uplift; it appalls and makes desperate; or it may even inspire a kind of gruesome mirth. The same situation may often be either tragic or comic, according as it is seen through the eyes of those who suffer or those who look on. (Shift the point of vision a little and Macbeth could be paraphrased as a roaring farce.) Breughel makes a concession to the high tragic convention by placing in the foreground of his picture a little group made up of the holy women weeping and wringing their hands. They stand quite apart from the other figures in the picture and are fundamentally out of harmony with them, being painted in the style of Roger van der Weyden. A little oasis of passionate spirituality, an island of consciousness and comprehension in the midst of the pervading stupidity and brutishness. Why Breughel put them into his picture is difficult to guess; perhaps for the benefit of the conventionally religious, perhaps out of respect for tradition; or perhaps he found his own creation too depressing and added this noble irrelevance to reassure himself.”

You can read the rest of Huxley’s essay here. No need to rush off, though, as each image below is an “island of consciousness” well worth visiting.

Way off the subject of painting here, but really felt that this was worth sharing. (The embedding on the video is disabled, so you will have to click over to youtube and come back.)  Today it has been cool and windy in Naples and as I was knitting away my domenica, I decided to look up videos of songs I used to belt out with my many sisters when I was a wee little one. I never spend time on youtube because of all the crap that’s on there and the annoying lags in the replays, but today I was craving different music and I was lucky enough to find recordings of songs that brought tears of laughter to my eyes and ears: Perhaps Love (1980) by John Denver & Placido Domingo (hahaha!!), the Beatles White Album, Cat Stevens, Don McLean (1979 performance in Caesarea, Israel), the Carpenters (We’ve Only Just Begun), Simon & Garfunkel, Van Morrison and many other surprises. We would dress up in clothes from my mom’s fabulous wardrobe and mime out the music, utilizing utensils and pots from the kitchen cabinets for musical instrument props.

While browsing Van Morrison’s songs, a title with Santana caught my eye. And this recording, though a little distorted and cropped at the beginning, is just fantabulous. I had not known this recording nor had I seen it live on the Midnight Special on April 22, 1977 because I was four years old and I went to bed at 9. Hosted by George Bensen, this Midnight Special episode featured Moondance performed by Van Morrison, Carlos Santana, Etta James, Dr. John and Tom Scott. It threw me off my feet – and my knitting – as I found it impossible to sit still while listening to this.

I then looked up information about the performance, and came across some interesting tidbits on an archived page that looks like it may expire. There’s a funny story about how the managers of the program got high (and deaf) on a “doob” offered by Jerry Garcia just before going over to Van Morrison’s house to ask him to make the guest appearance. If the link doesn’t work, here is a PDF copy I made: Van Morrison Story

Whatever one might say about the great sun and light in Israel, I can now personally vouch that it is way over-rated. Just too much of it all the time, never changing, and just too hot.  So hot that it bleaches rather than burns, in my opinion, so that if I had stayed any longer I may have disappeared.  And who wants to feel sticky all the time, from breakfast to dinner? I was once talking to a taxi driver in Israel as we were going from Rehovot to Jerusalem, and he said to me that he loves the heat and sun of Israel, “The hotter the better.” And this he says as we are sitting in sub-zero temperatures of the air-conditioning he has cranked up in his car, for that is how much he “enjoys” the hot weather.

The weather in Naples is changing now from summer sun to autumn rain, and as I make my way around the city to see the different Caravaggio paintings and erotic frescos, it made me think about the work of Walter Sickert (31 May 1860 – 22 January 1942). A German-born English painter and a member of the Camden Town Group, Sickert often favoured somber colors and ordinary people and urban scenes as his subjects, and his works were considered very controversial, even connecting him to murder. He is considered a prominent figure in the transition from Impressionism to modernism, and I can see how he might have been an important influence on certain British painters, particularly Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and even the young Jenny Saville.

I personally think that his nude paintings are his best works, but I have included here below as many as I could find.  Following Degas’ advice, Sickert painted in the studio, working from drawings and memory as an escape from “the tyranny of nature.” His oeuvre also included portraits of well known personalities and friends, as well as images derived from press photographs. Continued biographical information on Sickert is available here on WetCanvas, and here on Wikipedia.

As much as I do like looking at “dark” paintings from time to time, I don’t particularly revel in them; a good dip down now and then though provides some variety, something I do vastly appreciate, like an enormous platter of antipasti. And of course, Napoli itself. Today I took advantage of a questionable sky and brisk air to explore the neighborhood of Chiaia, with occasional jaunts into alluring doorways and enticing stairs going up up up, ending with an inhalation of sun, salt and surf along Naples’ Riviera.

Self portrait with Milk and Mug, 30 x 30 cm, oil on panel, 2011

I also recently delivered 16 paintings to Bernard Gallery in Tel Aviv, a bright ground-floor gallery space on Ben Yehuda Street, run by an elegant and savvy couple from France with enthusiasm for figurative art. Introduced by an enthusiastic art curator I met in Israel, Bernard selected several of my “messy bedroom” paintings and self-portraits from Israel, and I will post details of upcoming exhibition details as soon as I have them. If you are interested in the purchase of any of the following pieces, feel free to contact Bernard Gallery directly.

Twilight violet and lime, 35 x 40 cm, 2010

Stage 2-4, Oil on paper, 2010, 50 x 70 cm

Self-portrait Study, 2010, oil on linen

Self-Portrait in Studio, Oil on paper on wood, 2009, 50 x 65 cm

Self portrait in floral blouse, 2010, oil on panel, 25 x 30 cm

Self portrait as Housewife with Cat, 2009, oil on linen, 70 x 50 cm

Salmon Lover, 2010. Oil on panel, 35 x 40 cm

Red Pareo, 2011. Oil on panel, 30 x 30 cm

Pink Sheets, 2010. Oil on panel, 35 x 40 cm

Pink Sheets Study, 2010. Oil on paper, 50 x 70 cm

Pink Pillow Study, 2010. Oil on paper, 50 x 70 cm

Memory Window, 2011. Oil on panel, 25 x 25 cm

Memory Painting with Cat, 2011. Oil on panel, 25 x 25 cm

Implosion, 2011. Oil on linen, 70 x 70 cm

Gabriele's Trumpet, 2009. Oil on linen, 40 x 60 cm

Bathroom Laundry, 2010, oil on paper, 50 x 70 cm

The sink study above was a quick one, maybe about an hour at most. I plan on doing another one, but much more “finished,” because I like both quick/sketchy paintings and more defined ones for so many reasons. They have different things to see about the experience of perceiving the space and subject.

The square bedroom ones below instead already involve many days and hours overlapping. I don’t share these because I am happy with them now as they are as a whole, but rather to share the process of what I am thinking about as I paint them and look at them. They have parts or aspects that perhaps I am pleased with or make me think of new directions to take. In the square painting below, for example, I am happy with the back left corner of the room, particularly with the cat cage and Christmas tree sticking out of it. But in order for the painting to be more representative of reality, in my opinion, the painting needs numerous other “days” inside of it, and in particular I need to work on the colors. I may prefer to make this painting more black and white.

This second bedroom start has a bit more room in the approach to the bed, and I like that. I also like the cooler and softer colors, and I am wondering if I don’t want to make the painting a bit more blurry-eyed in general. Below this top surface are, I think, at least 6 or 7 other paintings I had started, though I am not sure I can remember what they were.

This last square painting had originally been an interior one, depicting my kitchen, at least until the washing machine/sidewalk scene outside my front door distracted me so much to the point that I needed to grab the closest, least precious, most suitably sized surface available. Hence, no more kitchen painting. The photo below shows the first half hour of frenzied changes, and it has been an absolute joy to be outdoors painting again. I do this a lot, painting over older paintings, and not because I am convinced that the new painting will be better, but because the new motif interests me more. Painting is a passionate enterprise, involving impulsive actions which can ultimately lead to a failure. But you must take a breath and jump all the same.

“Thanks, but I’ve got my own soap.”

Though relatively unknown today in the art school and painters circles, Fausto Pirandello (1899-1975) is one of my most favorite modern artists, and one I dutifully try to find every time I am in Italy. Pirandello’s approach into different layers of reality, while also focusing on the mundane behind closed doors, strikes deep chords in me. I also appreciate immensely his very original motifs and compositions, as well as his ongoing explorations of the figure and bathers. Son of the dramatist Luigi Pirandello, he trained with the sculptor Sigismondo Lipinsky between 1919 and 1920, before turning to painting. His early work was influenced by Armando Spadini and Felice Carena, colleagues of his, as well as by Gauguin, Kokoschka and van Gogh.

After a four year experience in Paris, where he mingled with some of the more important Italian-Parigian artists of the 1920s and 30s, Pirandello returned to Rome in 1931 and was welcomed into the Roman School, distinguishing himself by his originality and solitary research. Pirandello’s painting was oriented towards a realism of daily life, including the grimy and gritty, and expressing himself through dense painting. His intellectual vision translated the naturalistic facts, even those most brutal, in a sort of magical or poetic realism with archaic and metaphysical tones, adding spatial concerns stemming from cubism, tonalism and expressionistic painting, such as in La Scala, depicting a woman ascending and descending a staircase in a brothel, or in Pioggia D’Oro, with a foreshortened female figure falling out of a domestic scene.
During the 1950s, Pirandello develops his style further, reabsorbing cubist suggestions from Braque and Picasso, and living through the difficult phase afflicting Italian painting at that time, the split between realism and neocubism.  Through expressionistic deformations, he comes up with new solutions that sit between abstraction and figuration, with paintings that refer strongly towards a cubist synthesis in the tiling of colors and in compositions which slowly lose their narrative.

(La Scala – no better resolution found)

Pirandello exhibited widely during his career, including the Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadriennali, along with solo exhibitions at the Galleria della Cometa, Galleria del Secolo, and Galleria di Roma.  After the war, he held a solo exhibition at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York in 1955, and the solo show “Nuova Pesa” (New Weight) in Rome in 1968.

From The Fallen (revisited) series, 2006

Jodoin has explored numerous difficult themes over the years, particularly the violences in war, children, relationships, growing up and aging, as well as the feelings of numbness, nostalgia, fear, rejection, and aspirations that accompany these very facts of human existence. Around 2003, and certainly by her Fallen (revisited) series in 2006, Jodoin chose to remove color altogether from her work, to strip “away the sensuality of color often associated with painting,” as she put it. The 2004 series “A Little Red Suite: the World is a Heartbreaker” – oval portraits of grief in red – were thus followed by the black and white documentary type explorations of Drawing Shadows (of her mother) and Diary of K., and since then Jodoin has consistently stuck to the raw, graphic power of black and white.

From A Little Red Suite – the World is a Heartbreaker series

Is she perhaps better skilled in black and white than color? I might say so, but then again it has been hard to find more than a few earlier works in color to compare. Reality has its base in black and white, existing before the cones and rods of the eyeball, and color does impassion our moods unwillingly – just imagine if food were only in black and white. Certainly, the lack of color in her work over the last several years lends more severity, coldness and objectiveness to the analysis, and thus is more suggestive of a documentary approach on the human condition. It also serves to curb any of those who dare classify Jodoin as a political artist; the removal of optical color also takes out any of the cloying color of politics. At any rate, I like pretty much anything she does, in any hue or tone.

Study for Homicide, date unknown

She always knocks the wind out of me, because the images have a violence in contemplation rather than in surface – a jolt of exposure that is needed, in my opinion. It is too easy to go about our day ignoring, neglecting or simply being unaware of other currents and people around us. We are so “busy.” It is only when unfortunate things happen in our own back yard that we stop for a moment and begin to fully question the horrors of being human. Sophie Jodoin paintings function like universal backyards for the viewer. Though artists tend to notice things others may not, in many of her series, Jodoin chooses to make the likeness of a person unrecognizable while focusing instead on the realism of recognizable props, which can sift out an undercurrent of emotions that perhaps we had never considered before. We do not recognize a random soldier, but we recognize the bandages of war. We may not relate to a toddler’s face, but we can relate to a faceless young girl clinging to a bunny.

From the Ward Series 2008-09

Jodoin allows us views of people who – by a rare slip of circumstance – are not us, but could be us in a split second. We should not be fooled that we are better or more fortunate than anyone else simply because we are standing on the other side of the glass. Instead, we can absorb these works as exposures of the fragile, haunting truthfulness of life, and we can walk away more equipped to proceed with life, with more knowledge and compassion.

Born in 1965, Jodoin lives and works in Montreal, having earned her BFA from Concordia University in Montreal in 1988. Represented by Battat Contemporary and Newzones Gallery of Contemporary Art, she exhibits regularly throughout Canada, the US and Europe. Her website provides a thorough investigation of her work and bibliography since 2004. There is a also a beautiful filmed interview (in French) of Sophie and her work.

If you have not yet been able to make it to Madrid this summer for the major retrospective of Antonio Lopez Garcia at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Museum makes it a little easier to cope with through an excellent online virtual tour through the exhibition. The virtual exhibition walks you through the ten rooms of Lopez’ development, thematically displayed in categories of Memory, Surroundings, Madrid, Gran Via, Trees, Nude, Characters, Interiors, Food, and Projects. The new six curvilinear perspective paintings of Gran Via, talked about in the El Pais 2010 interview below, are displayed in progress, as well as a recent landscape view of Madrid, his newest flower paintings and sculptures of his grandchildren. The phenomenol show opened on June 25 and will be up until September 25, 2011.

Closed on Mondays, the Museum recommends early booking to the limited entry exhibition.

You can buy the soft-cover Spanish exhibition catalogue here online, with 176 color illustrations and 45 black & white ones for about 30 euros, but only if you have a Tax/VAT #.

• Major El PAIS news spread on Antonio Lopez, including photo galleries, videos and articles.
• 2010 Interview of Antonio Lopez by El Pais in Spanish. Click here for a transcript in English.
• 2009 Interview by Luis Maraleda and Carmina Montana for TV Tomelloso. Click here for a basic English transcript after viewing the video.

Some of the works on exhibition, and others I love looking at:

Nowadays, it is considered taboo in figurative painting to betray any sense of feeling if you want to be taken seriously. Objective analysis of form and color is heralded as a higher goal for a painter, and yet I am not sure I agree. The art can then very easily become just as boring as photorealism. There is a lot of excellent painting happening today, but when I feel that it is being conducted in a mechanical method or pixelized way, rather than perhaps being something pounced upon and pushed through an emotional instinct, it does not seem to go beyond craft and decoration for me. I think this becomes even more interesting to examine the closer you edge to the extremes of more abstract versus highly rendered paintings. When I look at Andrew Wyeth’s paintings, the last thing that comes to mind is painstaking, empty illustration. There is a love driving his work, both found and lost. I always feel privileged to look at his paintings, swept away by the chance to stand in his shoes and look deeply at his recordings of the people, places and weather around him. It is a rare gift that someone looked so stubbornly, poignantly and faithfully – not afraid to expose himself so, despite the trends of the commercial art world.

Andrew Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was primarily classified as a realist painter and is one of the artists I have consistently looked at in astonishment during the past 20 years. In a “Life Magazine” article in 1965, Wyeth said that although he was thought of as a realist, he thought of himself as an abstractionist:

My people, my objects breathe in a different way: there’s another core — an excitement that’s definitely abstract. My God, when you really begin to peer into something, a simple object, and realize the profound meaning of that thing — if you have an emotion about it, there’s no end.

Wyeth’s favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine. With his father’s guidance, painter and illustrator N.C. Wyeth, he mastered figure study and watercolor, and later learned egg tempera from his brother-in-law Peter Hurd. He studied art history on his own, admiring many masters of Renaissance and American painting, especially Winslow Homer.

N.C. fostered an inner self-confidence to follow one’s own talents without thought of how the work is received. In a letter to Andrew in 1944, N.C. wrote:

The great men [Thoreau, Goethe, Emerson, Tolstoy] forever radiate a sharp sense of that profound requirement of an artist, to fully understand that consequences of what he creates are unimportant. Let the motive for action be in the action itself and not in the event. I know from my own experience that when I create with any degree of strength and beauty I have no thought of consequences. Anyone who creates for effect — to score a hit — does not know what he is missing!

In October 1945, Wyeth’s father and three-year-old nephew were killed when their car stalled on railroad tracks near their home and was struck by a train. The strong emotions arising from this tragedy engulfed Wyeth personally and artistically, finding an outlet in what would become his enduring style. For further biographical reading on Wyeth in Wikipedia, click here. There is a great video of “Andrew Wyeth Draws a Portrait” on the Painting Perceptions forum. Sharing below images I have collected over time for others to enjoy.