art « L. Joshua Goodman’s Art Blog

November 25, 2009

Resisting the Urge

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Aquatint, art, artists, etching, Intaglio, landscape, landscapes, Occum's Razor, pictorial, Sataf, Sataf Spring, spray paint, telling the story — Joshua @ 8:42 pm

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author and aviator (1900-1945)

The Urge to Do Something can be powerful.

But good practitioners of any discipline are skilled at stripping away frivolity. The famous dictum, Occum’s Razor says something like, “Whatever doesn’t support, detracts” (that is not an exact translation, but it is an accurate translation). In Hebrew they say, “kol mosif gorea” which means “additions diminish”.

At the risk of violating the above principles I’ll tell you what brought this to mind. I just pulled a print. It’s the second state of a small plate that I took with me to a hillside not far from where I live. It’s located above the Sataf Spring just outside of Jerusalem. I drew out the landscape, the hills cascading one behind the other and the hungry sky above. I etched and printed it last week, but I felt it needed some atmosphere, some depth, so I did a few things (involving spray paint aquatint) and today I pulled the second state.

I don’t know exactly what to do right now. The decision is to Do Something or to consider it Done. It might actually be finished, but, and this is crucial, maybe it needs more. There is more that CAN be done, but I’m uncertain if there is more that SHOULD be done.

Meanwhile, I’m resisting the Urge.

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October 7, 2009

The Story of a New Project/The Vision and the Process

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: art, chess and art, color etching, creative process, Intaglio, process, process of art — Joshua @ 9:34 pm

This Hand and Piano project has a bit more background that I can share.

My daughter married recently and we gave her a large colorful etching that had been hanging in our living room. That left a hole in our living room. A colorful hole. To see the gifted piece you can turn to the Portfolio tab on the website and find “Aleph in Head Diptych”. (www.ljoshuagoodman.com)

Previously printed Hand on 17x17 cm tiles.

So to fill that hole with a bit of color I thought that I could make this hand in various colors and then swap individual tiles to have several whole hand (and piano) prints made from different pullings in different colors.

A Mosiac of Color

For example say that I plan to pull a Green print of the hand, a Violet impression and a Peach color print. The piano will always be black of course. Or perhaps silver. Then I will take, say for example, tiles two, five, nine, and twelve of the Peach pulling and put them aside. Then I might take tiles four, five, seven, and nine of the Violet and set them aside. The Five and Nine of the Peach can go in positions Five and Nine of the Violet. The Two and Twelve of the Peach can go into the appropriate position of the Green and the remaining tiles go into the empty holes on the Peach and Violet.

I think it’s something you have to see.

Piano-sketch-and-Tile-sm

In any event I’ll show you images as I go along.

The point is that I get a multi-colored work. Or actually three multi-colored works. More if I have strength.

Four-Tiles-to-make-One-Pian

Be sure to write if you have questions or comments. I know this sounds complicated, and it is. The good thing is that YOU don’t have to do it, and I enjoy doing it. I enjoy thinking about things. Often it feels like a chess game. Pre-visualizing and checking the realization against the pre-visualized. Making adjustments for what in fact eventuates.

Energetic Art School Cheater

Actually in Art School (don’t tell my teachers), I would go in in the morning, squeeze my paints out onto my palette and paint for about 20-30 minutes or so. Then I would go to the cafeteria and play chess for about two hours. Then I would return to the painting studio and paint/clean up for a half hour. Somehow I got excellent grades. The comment from one teacher was, “I like the energy in your work”.

It taught me that what matters to art consumers is the result. The process belongs to the artist.

Be well.

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October 4, 2009

The Story of a New Project/Background

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: Arik Kilemnick, art, art students, artists, assigned value, etching, Fractal, Fractals, hammers, hands, Intaglio, Iron, Jerusalem Print Workshop, kitchy art, landscape, landscapes, Matisse, old masters, pictorial, sans serif, Sculpture, telling the story — Joshua @ 11:53 am

Where does an Idea begin.

I’ve tried to make it easy on myself. I have a running series that I am continually working with. It’s called “The Hammer and the Hand Series”. It gives me a framework to relate to.

As you can see from my website, there are several works that feature a hand (always my left hand) and a hammer. A hammer is the quintessential low tech tool. From the first time that man picked up a rock to pound a stick (perhaps a tent peg) into the ground, rather than using his bare hand, man has been using hammers.

This is, of course, an extension of the “Hand” series. This started because of two bits of information that came my way over the years. The first was when Miss Bennett (see previous post) mentioned that the best draughtsman in school has a thousand drawings of her left hand. So, since High School I have known that the way to draw well is to draw what’s close at hand. Literally.

Sketchbooks of the Old Masters

The other piece of intelligence that came my way was when I learned that the Old Masters had sketchbooks where they had drawn thousands of versions of hands in various positions. Then when they had a composition that required a right hand extended and foreshortened to the left, they just reached for their archive and pulled out the closest variant and they were good to go.

So my left hand, being close, serves as a model. And when I wanted to extend the idea, I turned to that First Tool and started the “Hand and Hammer” series.

Now it turns out that I have a plate from the old “Hand” days. Three years ago I started a new working of the old idea. Rather than print one large (it’s about 50×70 cm / 19.5×27.5 inches) print, I decided to cut the paper into tiles, each of which are about 17 cm square (6.75 inches). Then (and this is another unrealized idea from the past…like about from 1972, November) I decided to print these tiles as Ottoman or Armenian tiles where the single tile is not visually complete or even readable, but the whole coherent image comes from the joining together of multiples (and multiples is almost essentially warp and woof of printmaking).

The Hammer and the Piano

grand-piano-2021a Extending the idea of a hammer I decided that a piano had hammers and might be more visually interesting than a simple hammer. And a piano references another deep interest of mine, music.

Bartok said that the piano was a percussion instrument and the music he wrote with a piano part shows this clearly. The piano is banging and crashing. I believe he even specified that the piano should be placed in the back by the tympani. The reason the piano is so percussive of course is the hammers. Eighty-eight hammers at the tips of the fingers.

Amazing!

Like I said, this was started three years ago; I printed one printing of the “Hand” on twelve tiles each about 17 cm (6.75 inch) square. I drew, etched and printed a separate plate with a piano in the corners, but wasn’t satisfied. I put it aside to rest.

Until this week.

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September 27, 2009

Too much art

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: art, art appreciation, art for sale, art students, artists, galleries, kitchy art, serious art, unknown artists, Van Gogh, visual artists — Joshua @ 6:21 pm

Kitch Sells

I think there’s too much art. There are lots of artists creating lots of art. I heard today of a student who made bookmarks which she sold on the street in Florence (Italy) to earn her way through art school. Ostensibly she made kitchy art to sell to tourists and serious art to sell to who knows who.

I don’t know who buys serious art. I sold a piece once to a priest from LA. I never met the kind friar, but I know he was a serious person. I was proud of him for buying work by a little-known artist. It takes someone special to do that.

There is a lot of really great art out there. I would even say a glut of great art. I think artists who aren’t selling should stop trying. Many artists I know have day jobs driving taxis or working in old folks homes. This is wholly legitimate and it indicates not the artists’ worthiness as an artist, but rather peoples’ worthiness as art appreciators. Rejection is hard for a sensitive soul. Art appreciators on the other hand think nothing of dismissing good work with a flip of the wrist. It’s easy. No trouble at all.

Buskers

Did you see the article (I think it was in the NYTimes) about the violin virtuoso (Joshua somebody, if memory [partly] serves) who played for an hour at a subway stop in Washington DC? He regularly commands tens of thousands of dollars per concert appearance. But he made less than $100 in an hour or so or of busking. THAT is a comment not on an artist, but on art appreciation in our society. In the same way visual artists who have menial jobs to support serious work should not be valued (self-valued I suppose I mean) by their income or job-grandeur. Someday perhaps (and this is a big perhaps) somebody will dig some “hobby” out of an attic and find a treasure. I’ve seen several galleries lately that have been showing the work of naive or insane or native American artists who only recently have been “discovered” to great acclaim. Now that they’re dead.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe there is a lot of valid, worthy and serious work being shown. But I’m pretty sure there is a lot of serious work not being shown as well.

Even the Art Industry Needs Content Writers

I have a friend from art school who told me she stopped doing art in favor of writing content for magazines of the art industry. She simply didn’t know how to store the ever accumulating piles of paintings and drawings. And it’s true. What do you do with stacks of stuff that nobody is interested in or that you don’t have time to find somebody interested? Can you imagine what would have happened if Van Gogh would have stopped painting and gone back to preaching or gotten a job as a street sweeper?

It happens all the time.

Attic Art

As for me, I make art for my children. For some of them it validates their own proclivities. For some of them it’s something to find in the attic fifty years from now.

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Visual Art vs Audial Art (Music)

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: art, Bach, Einstein, experience, Intaglio, Music vs. Plastic Arts, Paul Rand, Robert Motherwell, Sculpture — Joshua @ 5:19 am

I am a musician. I play in a band and we have a new disk. When I play at home with my wife, at times it’s almost conjugal! Music is refreshing and brings me into other non-verbal dimensions. There are things you can say, or places you can reach that are literally beyond words.

Drawbacks of Music

But music has one drawback. It’s ephemeral. Once the performance is over it can not be saved for posterity nor enjoyed in its fullness again. The fun, the enjoyment, the experience of music is over when the execution is over. Even if music is written down and played again, each performance is a unique experience. A performance by Bach himself can never be had again. His improvisations must have been unique and informative. But we’ll never get to hear Bach perform again. It must have been nice while it lasted. Now all we have is the written transcription. While still magnificent, it’s bound to be somewhat pale in contrast.

Plastic Arts Live On

But not so with plastic arts. Painting, or printmaking or sculpture is around for years and sometimes centuries after the experience of the creation of the work has passed.

So, the question then is “Should an artist put his efforts into what will last (the visual) or into the transient, but equally rewarding expression of music?” I don’t have an answer for this. But I know that I will continue to play music. Yes it’s temporary, but it is just sooooo much fun!

The Value of Music (and by extension all Art)

Einstein played music. He played chamber music on the violin. Of course he is known for other achievements. Perhaps it was the diversion that enabled him to think better in other realms. I suspect that this is what Art is all about. The ability to peer into worlds where words can’t reach, to see things that belong in other dimensions are what enables us to be able to “think out of the box” in our chosen fields of endeavor.

Robert Motherwell is reported to have said (reported by Paul Rand of all people!),

Most people ignorantly suppose that artists are the decorators of our human existence, the esthetes to whom the cultivated may turn when the real business of the day is done. But actually what an artist is, is a person skilled in expressing human feeling. . . . Far from being merely decorative, the artist’s awareness . . . is one . . . of the few guardians of the inherent sanity and equilibrium of the human spirit that we have.

Now … Back to the Music!

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June 5, 2009

No Pretty Pictures

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: Andy Warhol, art, etching, Franz Kline, pictorial, Rembrandt, Reubens, Surrealist Manifesto, telling the story, Van Gogh, Vermeer — Joshua @ 1:24 pm

I am philosophically opposed to pretty pictures. I’m not sure I could do a pretty picture even if I wanted to. Maybe I could and maybe I couldn’t. But the thing is that there are enough pretty pictures.

Now don’t get me wrong. Making Ugly Pictures is not the only alternative. There is enough of that too. Sometimes it’s even the same work that is pretty and ugly at the same time. That’s called “kitsch”.

But I’m not talking about that. I mean, that for me for an etching or a painting to be satisfying, fulfilling, and maybe even appealing, has to be intellectually satisfying as well. I want it to talk back to me and tell me things that I’ve been thinking. Or that I would think, if I would have thought of them. I want to ask, “What’s going on here?” and I want the piece of art to tell me what is going on; and I want it to make a certain amount of emotional and/or reasonable sense.

I don’t mind if there is a verbal explanation of the work. Everybody from Rembrandt and Vermeer to Franz Kline and Andy Warhol had their explanations of what they were doing and that, interestingly, enhanced the pictorial value of each piece. The Surrealists and others had their manifestos. Telling the story is a big part of what pictorial art is about.

To look at a Reubens and to see the hand(s) of his students is a big thrill for me. But until somebody explained that most of Reubens’ paintings were painted by his studio, I just saw a painting, or perhaps an illustration of a Bible story. I didn’t see the genius of the hand of Reubens in the sections that he actually painted until someone pointed out that the backgrounds were not actually painted by Reubens.

Stories is what makes Art.

Everyone knows that Van Gogh was ignored in his lifetime. What people don’t generally know is that he only became known because of his tragic life. His paintings were a by-product of his compelling human interest story. Now, I’m not going to cut off my ear. But I am going to tell the stories that are the reasons for what I do.

Blogging as a gentle alternative to ear-cutting.

Be well.

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May 30, 2009

Ya’akov Dorchin and the Ultimate Insult

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: Andy Warhol, art, assigned value, Iron, Sculpture, theives, Ya'akov Dorchin — Joshua @ 3:52 pm

Ya’akov Dorchin has a reputation. He’s been around long enough and done enough cool stuff that he is a feature on television (which was my first sighting) and is written up in the paper every once in a while. I read one of those articles recently.

Ya’akov Dorchin is primarily known as a sculptor in iron. I have to admit that I’m a fool for iron and no matter what I think of him and his work (I kind of like his work, but his ego puts me off a bit), the process of big iron seizes me. One of the milestones in Dorchin’s career was when he was robbed of several works by metal thieves. It’s easy to see how this could affect an artist. Anybody who has been burglarized knows what a sense of personal violation it is that somebody just walks in and carries off things dear. And an artist (I don’t care what anybody says about this) has a personal relationship with each piece. An intimate relationship. I think it’s safe to say that the love that an artist has for his work is a big part of what makes it valuable. It’s what separates good art from mere technical proficiency.

But the thieves were not interested in the value of the piece of art. Each piece was worth thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars just in Art value alone. But they weren’t stealing art. They were stealing iron. Scrap iron.

This raises a question. It’s kind of a Warholian question. If there is no assigned value, then there is no value. When Andy Warhol picked a selection of screen prints and left some as unsigned and therefore Not Art, he was confirming his thesis that Art is whatever an artist says is Art.

In the case of Ya’akov Dorchin the Art is whatever the thieves say is Art. If his stolen sculptures end up on the Art Black Market (or is that the Black Art Market), then they are art. More likely they were melted down and used to build kassam rockets or some other kind of hardware.

See yall soon.

Be well.

Joshua

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May 2, 2009

Texas size landscapes

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: art, etching, experience, Fractal, landscape, painting, Texas — Joshua @ 10:34 am

We were in Texas last year. Had a great time. One thing we did was to visit a gallery in Dallas (or maybe Ft. Worth, I never knew exactly where I was). Two brothers shared studio and gallery space in the same building. Among a lot of great painting were several very loooong landscapes. What is so very interesting is that the question immediately arises, “Why so very long??” and the answer equally immediately arises, “that’s the way landscapes are in Texas!!” You stand there looking out on a ton of space and look from side to side 180 degrees and see nothing but landscape. Painting just a standard rectangular landscape might be fine, and pretty, but a painting that is so long that you can’t look at the whole thing at once is giving the same experience as looking at the landscape that you experience in nature.

So I came home and decided I was going to try the same thing. I went out and found a wonderful spot up on a hillside not far from where I live. I set up two easels (one easel is for the normal-size painting) and put up a two meter (about six foot) gessoed board. I haven’t actually finished the painting. I went out twice. Nevertheless, I decided that I was going to make this into an etching.

So recently I have started a series of three plates. I can’t print a six foot plate on my little three foot long press. So I’ve broken up the landscape into three sections. Each section, not surprisingly, can stand on it’s own. Each section is a complete landscape in itself. This is in line with my theory of the fractalic nature of the universe (more on that in another blog). And of course they work together as a very long landscape.

Just the way landscapes are in nature. Long. And Lovely.

Be well.

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