pictorial « 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 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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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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