Blues of the Past
March 14th, 2006Sometime in the 14th century, Cennino d’Andrea Cennini wrote Il Libro dell’ Arte. The book is a treasure because of its detailed information about a wide range of artistic techniques. 
For Cennini and his contemporaries, using natural mineral pigments was the best option available to create intense and lightfast blue colors.
Mineral azurite yields a handsome blue pigment, somewhat “warm” or inclined slightly towards green. Ultramarine was purified by a labor-intensive process from the lapis lazuli stone, and yielded the most pure blue available. Although the stone itself was semi-precious, the purified pigment was considered a treasure.
These natural blue colors are intense, but not so intense as modern synthetic colors. This meant that painters of past centuries could strive to produce the strongest blues possible, and still arrive at results that were poetic, rather than garish. In contrast, the modern painter, working with colors from a tube, must often fight with the colors, to take away some of their overpowering intensity.
The painting here is an “imaginary portrait” which I painted with oil on panel in 2002. The blues here are underpainted in azurite, and overpainted with natural purified ultramarine, using varying admixtures of white. Differences in the pigment particle size and the degree of purification have an important influence on the colors.
14 March 2006
December 24th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
First, I don’t think it’s difficult to be an artist.
Second, Art training today is no longer done the way it used to be where it was, “You will take this seriously and work hard to make it as a pro, or you’ll be gone from this studio.”
It’s easier to fill and keep classes when the hard line approach is dropped.
Result: Legions of dilettante know it alls (about 8,000 MFA’s a year) who can’t draw or paint worth snot.
Obnoxious enough for you Karl?
December 26th, 2006 at 9:43 am
Rex,
Point #2 agrees with my impression of what is happening at the Michigan State Dept. of Art.
During a Summer Arts Program in Interlochen, MI, Sarah, a young woman, painted self-portraits that struck me as highly original. Now, taking art courses at Michigan State, she has lost interest in painting. She complains that art teachers compliment students for throwing paint on a canvas.
Viewing the many paintings lent by our Art Profs for the decoration of our elegant new ‘Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building’, makes me think that she is right. The paintings are colorful and dull.
It may be good that they are so dull. No one is tempted to steal them.
December 26th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
Karl, CB’s comments ending with: “just suck it up and quit yer whining….”
are equivalent to a nike sentiment for me: “just do it.” It neither acknowledges the complexity of people’s lives nor provides any meaningful solution to the questions at hand.
However, it obviously triggered a useful reaction in you and provoked thought. Therefore, very valuable, and I appreciate your response:
“You can fairly disagree with CB in many respects. Rather than disagreeing, I am taking what I find useful.”
So in that spirit, What is useful to me is reminding myself of a larger context in which we make art. Yes, making art, deciding to be an artist and making it work is difficult. No doubt about that. But compared to lots of human suffering out there it does not, well, compare. And, in fact if you have the privilege of ANY time to make art (not to mention money for supplies), you are probably doing quite well for yourself. So CB’s comment reminded me of the privilege of making art. And I think he was referring to a bubble that many artists put themselves in, of ego, self righteousness and insularity, that makes them seem small minded and clueless about the world outside of art. There can be a lot of whining amongst artists, but I didn’t take your post that way, nor do I see that in this blog. But it is out there — I have seen it in academia in particular.
And, yes, We should make art as if our lives depended upon it (Adrienne Rich has a quote about that), as much as is possible. But we also have full lives with ups and downs and suffering to contend with. Who’s to say some of us here who make art and write in this blog are NOT suffering from a debilitating illness, or are veterans of Iraq, or soemthing equally difficult?
January 9th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
In comment #12 above I quoted Rex about his [at the time] plain website. Things sure change, don’t they Rex?
January 9th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Yes, Karl, things sure change. Except I’m still too busy doing art to work on my website…
But blogging has sure lit a fire on the writing — it seems that I’m doing a lot of in depth stuff offline and only manaage a quick quip now and then online though, at least for the past couple weeks.
Like Jordan, I’ve experienced (am experiencing) a paradigm shift.
January 10th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Rex,
I’d love to do an interview with you someday.
I’ve also experienced a paradigm shift through blogging.
Of course, this whole notion that blogging is so special is overblown. The special thing is people communicating. The blog allows us to overcome obstacles to communication thrown in our path by the structure of the modern world.
If you look at the posts that Jordan refers to, and then look at what he was posting just before then, the change is amazing. Jordan is a big inspiration to me as a creative person. If only art were as easy as writing . . .
February 5th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
[this comment is from 17 December but got posted to the old A&P site –Karl]
This is a great question. Here is my way of thinking about art. It may be completely wrong, it is simply an explanation that helps in many situations.
Any explanation of art must say something about the brain.
Art is a stretching of our brains internal low level symbolic language.
With this language we create at least two detailed models of our universe which we can tour at will. Our brain is very sensitive to art, it automatically focuses our attention process to it in order to extend our power to represent and thus to think. A barren environment is one with little or no art, leading to less developed thinking processes. Each new element that is added to our symbolic language can cause a flurry of thinking about the many ways the new element could be used, a process called inspiration. Artists are inspired regularly. Art causes art. Art causes inspiration.
Extrapolating, (stretching) we can say;
1. The human form, face breasts etc are always art.
2. To a young child everything is art.
3. TV is an art extravaganza for a children.
4. Art ages-out once it is common to the recipient.
5. To an old person art is a less common experience.
6. Thus art to one person may not be art to another.
7. Art is not so mysterious, we can think it through.
8. High art is produced by artists who well understand the symbolic landscape their target culture.
Their art is stretching the symbolic language of their own intellect and may be beyond the understanding of the majority.
9. Artists can thus produce art for selective target groups by working relative to the target groups symbolic language experience.
10. Thus an artist’s art may not be art to that artist, but the artist knows that its art to the target group.
11. Art and our exposure to it is very important to our brains development.
12. Expensive art may have much or little art in it. Price has other more dominant dimensions.
There is much more to say but time has run out.
February 5th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
[This comment is from 4 December; It got posted to the old A&P site –Karl]
Thank you for the good article. The question “Why is it so difficult to be an artist?” is indeed worthy the digging. You very well compared the artist with the pilot and pictured the uncertainty of the profession of art.
I have looked at myself and…The more we will concretize the situation that an artist faces today, the gloomier it will become. So to say it is the real “To be or not to be”.
However, that ambiguity will vanish immediately in case we choose to rewrite our question. Why is it so difficult to remain a man today?
While the pilot drives just a car, the artist deals with the symbols, with the comprehension of the light. The artists act as priests in some sense. Therefore we encounter not the difference in the wages there, but the conflict between human flesh and spirit- the eternal striving to reach the harmony.