A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realizes that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life. Were it not for this, the perfect painting might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great insufficiency that drives him on. Thus the process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than it is in the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming.
- Lucian Freud
What rings particularly true in Lucian Freud’s statement is not so much that a piece of art might spring to life like Pygmalion’s sculpture of Galatea, but the hope that it might be perfect. What might a perfect picture look like? Monet succeeded in painting one with Soleil Levant (Sunrise). It's painted deftly with love and respect for subject and material, it transmits the joy Monet felt in painting it, and it transports the viewer to that hazy morning in 1872. (It may not have been perfect to Monet, otherwise, as Freud says, he may never have felt the need to paint another.) It also contains that magic one degree of imperfection which is necessary in order that a piece of art not be stagnant and dead in its perfection.
I have yet to execute my perfect picture, but occasionally I have a perfect day in the studio. On those days my brain, body, and the material all pull together to produce something worthy of making the ghosts of art’s history proud (after all, those artists of the past are always there, some more prominent than others, standing behind me, egging me on). I live for those rare days in the studio, but most are comparable to the movie title Live, Die, Repeat (a modernized retelling of the fates of Prometheus and Sisyphus), which is to say that each day begins with hope and a plan, but usually ends with only incremental growth, and sometimes in utter defeat. Then it is repeated. Likewise, each new painting or drawing carries with it the potential to accomplish what the last one didn’t. My husband, Dion Kliner, says he wakes up every morning an optimist and goes to bed every night a pessimist. I enter my studio an optimist and leave a pessimist, but hoping tomorrow will be perfect. The process is, as Freud says, habit-forming, perhaps more necessary than its results.
Landscape is a natural and perfect subject for this cyclic, psychological process of hope, loss and regeneration, and its corresponding process of creation. The German author Goethe wrote, “Men must retire from the world from time to time, for the world with its lewd and superficial activity interferes with the awakening of the best.” The site of that retreat and awakening is the wilderness; desert, ocean, and very often forest. Forests are heavily laden with content. They provide their own narrative. Sublime, they are revered. When pillaged for profit, their loss is mourned. A tree reaching skyward is enlightenment of mind and spirit. As a stump, or shattered by nature, it is death and the fragility of life. Forests are the romantic backdrop to our culture. They hide the innocent and protect the guilty. Looking into a forest from the outside is to peer into the unknown and unforeseen. It can trigger the age old response so ingrained in our psyches - don’t go into the forest alone. Having settled on landscape as my default subject, it frees me to concentrate on the processes of painting and drawing. Landscape is my pretext for pushing paint around on canvas or smudging charcoal on paper.
On Houseflies
The object is almost irrelevant, though not completely. Although flies come saturated with descriptive and cultural references, there's nothing spiritual, or emotional, or intellectual about my fly-as-subject. It was there when I found it. Yes, they are flies, there's no mistake. But in an odd way it only comes into focus secondarily, after it's understood as a series of marks. When it defies this route and the object of the work is seen first, it nevertheless very soon crumbles into intricacy and the sensitivity of just marks. The expectation of narrative that recognizable objects bring, is frustrated.
In Towards a Newer Laocoon, Clement Greenberg wrote that 'Literature's' corrupting influence is only felt when the senses are neglected. With the flies, the senses are not neglected and the literature that would fill these images otherwise is held out. Yet the drawings gain by this, the more so for their silence in the face of literature. Further on in Laocoon Greenberg has a passage that becomes applicable when "poem" is replaced by "drawing," "poet writes" with "artist draws," "reader's" with "viewer's," and "poetry" with "art." Adjusted, the passage reads:
The drawing still offers possibilities of meaning - but only possibilities. Should any of them be too precisely realized, the drawing would lose the greatest part of its efficacy, which is to agitate the consciousness with infinite possibilities by approaching the brink of meaning and yet never falling over it. The artist draws, not so much to express, as to create a thing which will operate upon the viewer's consciousness to produce the emotion of art.
Darcy Mann
- Lucian Freud
What rings particularly true in Lucian Freud’s statement is not so much that a piece of art might spring to life like Pygmalion’s sculpture of Galatea, but the hope that it might be perfect. What might a perfect picture look like? Monet succeeded in painting one with Soleil Levant (Sunrise). It's painted deftly with love and respect for subject and material, it transmits the joy Monet felt in painting it, and it transports the viewer to that hazy morning in 1872. (It may not have been perfect to Monet, otherwise, as Freud says, he may never have felt the need to paint another.) It also contains that magic one degree of imperfection which is necessary in order that a piece of art not be stagnant and dead in its perfection.
I have yet to execute my perfect picture, but occasionally I have a perfect day in the studio. On those days my brain, body, and the material all pull together to produce something worthy of making the ghosts of art’s history proud (after all, those artists of the past are always there, some more prominent than others, standing behind me, egging me on). I live for those rare days in the studio, but most are comparable to the movie title Live, Die, Repeat (a modernized retelling of the fates of Prometheus and Sisyphus), which is to say that each day begins with hope and a plan, but usually ends with only incremental growth, and sometimes in utter defeat. Then it is repeated. Likewise, each new painting or drawing carries with it the potential to accomplish what the last one didn’t. My husband, Dion Kliner, says he wakes up every morning an optimist and goes to bed every night a pessimist. I enter my studio an optimist and leave a pessimist, but hoping tomorrow will be perfect. The process is, as Freud says, habit-forming, perhaps more necessary than its results.
Landscape is a natural and perfect subject for this cyclic, psychological process of hope, loss and regeneration, and its corresponding process of creation. The German author Goethe wrote, “Men must retire from the world from time to time, for the world with its lewd and superficial activity interferes with the awakening of the best.” The site of that retreat and awakening is the wilderness; desert, ocean, and very often forest. Forests are heavily laden with content. They provide their own narrative. Sublime, they are revered. When pillaged for profit, their loss is mourned. A tree reaching skyward is enlightenment of mind and spirit. As a stump, or shattered by nature, it is death and the fragility of life. Forests are the romantic backdrop to our culture. They hide the innocent and protect the guilty. Looking into a forest from the outside is to peer into the unknown and unforeseen. It can trigger the age old response so ingrained in our psyches - don’t go into the forest alone. Having settled on landscape as my default subject, it frees me to concentrate on the processes of painting and drawing. Landscape is my pretext for pushing paint around on canvas or smudging charcoal on paper.
On Houseflies
The object is almost irrelevant, though not completely. Although flies come saturated with descriptive and cultural references, there's nothing spiritual, or emotional, or intellectual about my fly-as-subject. It was there when I found it. Yes, they are flies, there's no mistake. But in an odd way it only comes into focus secondarily, after it's understood as a series of marks. When it defies this route and the object of the work is seen first, it nevertheless very soon crumbles into intricacy and the sensitivity of just marks. The expectation of narrative that recognizable objects bring, is frustrated.
In Towards a Newer Laocoon, Clement Greenberg wrote that 'Literature's' corrupting influence is only felt when the senses are neglected. With the flies, the senses are not neglected and the literature that would fill these images otherwise is held out. Yet the drawings gain by this, the more so for their silence in the face of literature. Further on in Laocoon Greenberg has a passage that becomes applicable when "poem" is replaced by "drawing," "poet writes" with "artist draws," "reader's" with "viewer's," and "poetry" with "art." Adjusted, the passage reads:
The drawing still offers possibilities of meaning - but only possibilities. Should any of them be too precisely realized, the drawing would lose the greatest part of its efficacy, which is to agitate the consciousness with infinite possibilities by approaching the brink of meaning and yet never falling over it. The artist draws, not so much to express, as to create a thing which will operate upon the viewer's consciousness to produce the emotion of art.
Darcy Mann
