Art School (Part 1)

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“You may think that you’ve come here to learn to draw, paint and sculpt but that’s not why you’re here. You are here to learn how to see.”

This was my introduction to art school and the nature of my art education. Learning to see…the negative shapes as part of the whole, that I’m not sketching an interior, I’m trying to capture its shadows, and there’s a lot of blue in that red (fire trucks). I was and am amazed at the richness and dimension there is in life, and that light was turned on when the professor said, “You are here to learn how to see.”

[Stairway to the Antiquities: Musée du Louvre]

If you’ve not been in the Louvre yet, you have quite the experience waiting for you. For one thing, this joint is freakin’ huge! It has to be huge because this place houses centuries, nay millennia, of human feeling, aspiration, conquest, defeat, ruin, liberation, et al and all captured in a story form we call art.

This place is stinking with people learning to see…and what they’re studying are these examples, a lot of examples, by masters who have recorded their progress as they learned to see. Can you imagine studying art history when instead of a slide you get to see the actual piece? Here are some of those luckier bastar…uh…students (below) studying just a portion of the $bazillion dollars worth of Neo-Classical art housed in just this section of the Denon wing:

[Large Format French Paintings, Denon wing, Musée du Louvre.]

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When the very early Greeks were beginning to, for some reason, manipulate matter to fashion it into something else, they had something in mind but not necessarily something epochal. They were just getting the hang of their media and they found that they could express…well, that they could express anything was the wonderment. They were playing with forms, shapes, textures, and they were finding out that they could paint patterns onto their clay with different thinned-out clay and it will stay after firing. How cool is that?


But in this particular period, in this particular region of the ancient world, we started drawing patterns that were not relative to the natural world. These designs were purely geometric, purely of the intellect. I wonder where that road would take us if we were silly enough to follow it.

After a few hundred years of practice we got pretty good at manipulating matter. We found that certain materials were a joy to work with and others not so much. We also went from this person in her geometric muumuu (to left)…



…to this person half out of her muumuu (below):

[“Venus de Milo” (Aphrodite). Musée du Louvre]

I always thought of her as dancing…maybe to Jimien Hendrixis.

"Venus de Milo can have my arms, look out I’ve got your nose, give my heart to the junk man and give my love to Rose.” -John Prine.


What…you were expecting some serious discussion of the sculpture during the Hellenistic Period of Ancient Greece? Oh…okay…mmm… Ancient Greek sculpture from the Hellenistic Period can be characterized by mankind achieving near realism in detail of the human form, the draping of material, etc, as well as capturing an accurate sense of movement. This is evident in the “Venus” in that her spine has a twist because her left leg is forward and up slightly, and with her weight on her right leg, I… yes…definitely, I have to conclude that she is doing “the pony”. Yes, that’s right, “Venus” is purposefully loosing altitude…she is getting down with her bad self.


Anyway…




[Musée Du Louvre: http://www.louvre.fr/llv/commun/home.jsp?bmLocale=en .]



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Over at the Musée D’Orsay they have Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” on loan from the MOMA, NY, NY, I read somewhere. I would love to hop on a plane right now and go verify that for you, but that aint’ going to happen…in the episode, anyway… Anyway, that joint looks like this from the middle of the Seine:

It used to be a train station. The French know how to build a train station, don’t they? I did not get to visit the Musée D’Orsay because I’m an idiot. So, I must go back.

[Musée D’Orsay: http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/home.html ]



The Louvre takes us to about 1848. The Musée D’Orsay covers 1848 to 1914, which includes Impressionism among many other schools of art. This is a period that seemed to concern itself with our inner reality. Artists became aware of the fact that we are not naturally in “lockstep” with each other. They began to openly admit that the world they were seeing was not of the world that could be captured by that new picture making device (camera). If ten artists painted the same thing at the same time, not one of them would duplicate another. Even if you tried to copy another exactly, there will be a signature your individuality somewhere in that painting. Instead of trying to conform to visual accuracy, or some other culturally accepted standard for proper art, they attempted to express a view more respective of their responses to stimuli. They were not trying to capture life; they were trying to capture the effect that life was having on them.


As I can’t get “Starry Night” out of my head, I guess I may as well use it:

[“Starry Night”, Vincent Van Gogh, Museum Of Modern Art, NY, NY]

In learning to see, I realized that data was coming into me from “out there”, into me and heavily processed, and then I’d fashion it to become an expression of my experience…an art object.

In Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” one realizes the definition of “seeing” has to include the processing. The data has been processed, indeed, but what Vincent was seeing with his mind’s eye is breathtaking. In this period of our art education mankind was particularly keen on the idea that all we know is an impression of the world. This is based on the realization that the act of seeing is the processing of data. We wouldn’t be able to paint a stroke, play a note, or utter a word if data hasn’t been processed.

Reality is a matter of language in that we’re using the same words while looking at the same things to describe them. Whether what you’re seeing and what I’m seeing are actually the same experience is unknowable. With the amount of variables involved, however, I have to think that there’s no way that we’re living in the same world. Still there remains the fact that this piece (“Starry Night”) from another mind affects me as it does, and in talking with others who admit to being affected by it as well, we may still be connected but how we might be connected is getting more interesting the more I look.

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After a while we decided to find out what would happen if one’s feelings were allowed to select the imagery as well. As you can imagine, this opened up a big can of “crazy”. The impressions were transforming into expressions as many of these paintings were not relative to any specific place on earth, but of mind. Images now could be expressed from deep within us, which gave us the ability to face ourselves, see what motivates us, what stops us, and what’s left for us to do.


We start to see the likes of cubism, surrealism, and later, after the wars, abstract expressionism, show themselves in all their glory. This was an atmosphere where art was expressed unabated, well except for the limits of our fear, which is often the “cutting edge” of our art anyway. One finds oneself facing some interesting things when creating art. That’s why an artist can seem so preoccupied when he/she is in “create” mode. The artist might be becoming aware of a well hidden fear, memory or something but he can’t quite get it into view. Then someone like me comes along and starts asking stupid questions like, “When’s the last time you ate?”, “Wanna go bother some women artists?”, “What’s that?” [I’m an ass, what can I tell ya], or whatever, and all he wants to do is get a handle on something that has been eating at him all his life. [Now you know why I have time to write this stuff up.]


Art allows us to see what’s inside our nebulous world of thoughts, notions and feelings that usually exists out of focus. We keep it out of focus sometimes because we have so much to tend to now, or sometimes to avoid complexities that we feel would make now not a good, proper or constructive time to bring la libra esthétique to the fore, or we really don’t know how to express ourselves yet, or we’re straight-up chicken shit, but whatever the reason, our stuff can get stuffed in there, and stuffed in there good. The matter is further complicated as art is a non-linguistic expression of a state of mind. Art cannot be explained away, even by the artist to the artist, as the art is the best explanation he/she can achieve [ref: Picasso]. There is no linguistic equivalence, even to prose or poetry. In other words you have to make your art. Talking about it just doesn’t work.

[“Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man” (1943), Salvador Dali:]

Our passion, our compassion, our fears, whatever, call it in the air, all gets boxed up and, per the occasion that could be fine, necessary perhaps at times, but if (and only if) you have a place, or studio, or whatever works for you where you can state your case. With canvas, with stone, with guitar, with words, with whatever makes the point the best, hone your skills so they are second nature to you, then speak as though your sanity depended on it.



Now, I’m not saying that you’re going to be the next Picasso or Gauguin, because if you’re one of those guys, who’s going to be you? No, what I’m saying is that you should be the next person to say, “Damn, I didn’t know that was in me!”

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