I’m sending you my dirty laundry writes Courbet to his parents in 1839. Courbet is only twenty years old, a student at Besançon, and looks like the self-assured young man in this self-portrait (not the larger-than-life painter who once bragged that he drank two bottles of Burgundy, three bottles of Bordeaux, one bottle of local wine, coffee laced with Cognac, followed by dessert, and then threw it all up Roman-style while staying at a friend’s estate in Saintonge). After giving his parents the heads up about the laundry Courbet says that one, he would like his parents to send him more cotton stockings (he doesn’t wear the woolen ones) and that two, he has blood in his stool, but contrary to the hemorrhoid diagnosis of his doctor, he believes he is simply suffering from a case of échauffement, or constipation. One of the reasons I like to read letters of the famous is for details just like these. Wow. Courbet had trouble pinching off a loaf now and then. Just like me.

It isn’t only to find out that the famous are just like us (US magazine’s attempt to assure us that stars’ lives are not that different from ours) that I read letters. Reading the daily bric-a-brac of people’s lives, where Manet bought his shoes before his duel with Duranty, who met Courbet for dinner at the Café Andler; these small curios of information plunge me into their world in a way that a biography cannot do: I feel as if I know them when I finish reading their letters. When Manet complains in a letter to Zachary Astruc that he hasn’t heard from Baudelaire lately, Baudelaire sounds less like the unattainable poet-god on the pedestal where I keep him and more like a guy I might run into in a diner. (I recently found Charles Baudelaire on Facebook and asked him to be my friend; he hasn’t confirmed yet.) And what about the delicious innocence of Manet’s question to his friend Théodore Duret: “Who is this Monet whose name sounds like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety?”

Another reason to read letters? You become your own historian. Letters, along with church records, public records, maps, and treatises (to name just a few) constitute the flotsam of primary sources that historians pick up from puddles, lakes, and oceans of conserved, sometimes intentionally (sometimes not) debris. With them a version of a story is patched together to enlighten (or, when used as propaganda, to persuade) an audience. Delving into letters means that you can create your story.

A good example of the slippery nature of building a story occurred when I recently read Manet’s letters. I’ve read several books about Manet and the one I like for sheer readability is Beth Archer Brombert’s Rebel in a Frock Coat. Brombert constructs a tight, solid narrative of Manet’s life and work: saucy stories of the Belle Epoque, penetrating, but not overly academic, analysis of his paintings, investigative ferreting into Manet’s family life, and, like a good tour leader with a bright orange stick waving in the air, Brombert deftly guides us through the labyrinth of 19th century politics; the Empires, Republics, Monarchies, and insurrections.

According to Brombert, Manet endured a loveless marriage with a Dutch woman named Suzanne Leenhoff. Manet, only twenty, got her pregnant while she was working as his music instructor and later married her out of honor (claiming, to save face, that his illegitimate son Léon was in fact Suzanne’s brother). Suzanne was beneath the Manets socially, rather homely, and fairly simple by all accounts. Berthe Morisot nicknamed her “la grosse Suzanne” – “fat Susan”. Brombert points out that Manet stayed married and led the kind of life the haute bougeoisie demanded of him; in the book there is no reference to love or tenderness between the two.

Enter primary sources! While reading Manet’s letters during the Franco-Prussian war (Manet stayed in the capital as a volunteer and sent his family south for safety) one can’t help but notice that Manet wrote to Suzanne practically everyday and not just to say “Wassup, fat Susan”? Here are a few samples that were delivered by hot air balloons and pigeons from the besieged capital:

October 23, 1870: I spent a long time, my dear Suzanne, looking for your photograph – I eventually found the album in the table in the drawing room, so I can look at your comforting face from time to time. I woke up last night thinking I heard you calling me…

November 23, 1870: Goodbye my dear Suzanne, I embrace you lovingly and would give Alsace and Lorraine to be with you.

December 23, 1870: Goodbye my dear Suzanne, your portraits are hanging in every corner of the bedroom, so I see you first and last thing…

And so on and so on.

Brombert does mention the letters. She says that earlier biographies (citing one from 1947 by Adolphe Tabarant) used the letters to intimate “a vague picture of domestic bliss” and that “no attention has been paid to the probable dissatisfactions of both spouses.” Brombert read all the letters, but combined with other documentation and research, put together a new version of the Manet/Suzanne relationship, one based on her own reading of primary sources (a reading which is in all probability closer to reality than Tabarant’s “vague picture of domestic bliss”).

Reading other people’s letters is not for everyone. I’m still reading Courbet’s (632 pages and causing me a bit of tendonitis in my right arm from holding it upright in bed). My husband winces when he sees me reading them; he is appalled by my lack of discretion. He’s right in a way: pinching a letter from a postman’s cart is a criminal offense and reading someone else’s mail (such as when a friend of mine and I steamed upon an envelope addressed to her mother from her estranged father and then resealed it) is dishonest, disrespectful, and downright wrong. Yet, when someone famous dies letters become a free-for-all: the desk drawers are opened, spilled out, and we get to rummage through.

Luc Sante, writing about the recent publication of Susan Sontag’s journals (Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963) says that “the complicated, somewhat voyeuristic thrill the reader might derive from seemingly prying open the author’s desk drawer is [...] to a certain extent, a fiction in which both parties are complicit”. Ah, another post-modern dilemma, and it may be true for modern writers: French philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault famously burned and destroyed every shred of personal writing before he died. Sante’s statement implies that in the end we only read what the foresighted author wanted us to read. Will all published letters begin then to fall into the self-aware, post-modern complicity that Sante writes about?

As for me, give me the age of innocence and the “voyeuristic thrill” I have when I read about bloody stool, passion (or lack of it), and dirty laundry. In a letter dated August 23, 1865, Manet writes to his friend Zacharie Astruc: “I should be going with Champfleury and Stevens, but they keep putting it off. Anyway, they are bloody bores. Excuse the unseeming language, but since my letter is not for publication, I can say what I please.” Touché.

Resources:
Manet by himself, edited by Juliette Bareau-Wilson
Letters of Gustave Courbet, edited by Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu
The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau : “The discourse designed to make the other speak remains the speaker’s discourse and the mirror of his undertaking.” – “Le discours destiné à dire l’autre reste son discours et le miroir de son opération.”

A few years ago I was browsing in my favorite used book shop when I came upon an English edition of Charles Blanc’s Grammaire Des Arts Du Dessin by Kate Doggett. She published this translation in Chicago in 1879 as Grammar of Painting and Engraving. I immediately bought the book because I already knew a little of Charles Blanc, the French art critic and one-time Director of the Ecole Des Beaux-arts. His Grammar had influenced George Seurat, particularly in its treatment and diagrams of color theory and the optical effects of simultaneous contrast which led Seurat to his method of neoimpressionism. Not until I read the book, however, did I learn how thoroughly Blanc presented the idealized principles of the Beaux-arts Style and how great his influence was in those crucial years when the Beaux-arts tradition was being displaced by modernism.

While Blanc’s Grammar is a guide to basic principles, a kind of handbook of method for the artist, it is also a polemic of aesthetics based on Platonic ideal forms and types. The heart of this view is the idea of an eternal, perfect prototype for each class of things in nature; that is, typical, general forms to be imagined as the flawless molds of things that in nature are flawed, lesser, imperfect, individualized. The goal of the painter, for Blanc, is to imitate the ideal prototype, not nature itself. Blanc wants the painter to recognize that only through generalizing nature, seeking a type and not an individual, can one achieve what he termed Style, the imitation of the ideal prototype. Blanc refers to masters to illustrate his teaching: DaVinci, Raphael, Rembrandt. He turns to their preparatory sketches as examples of individualized life studies that are then redrawn to eliminate details and flaws of nature to instead reveal the general, the balanced, the universal: Style.

Underlying or fused with this quest for the ideal or Style is Blanc’s insistence on the moral. For him, and thus for the Beaux-arts painter, the means of imitation leads to the ends of expression of a spiritual ideal or template of that which supersedes nature and must be invented by the painter and is therefore an expression of the moral, or the true good.

It is interesting that Blanc does not limit the moral in art to subject or narrative but to formal method. He does not say that some depictions are necessarily more moral than others simply because of their subject matter or any didactic function a painting may serve. He embeds the moral in the formal properties of art, in line, balance, light-dark, color, and most of all in unity, because these are the means by which an expression of ideal form can be achieved. However, Blanc does allow for genre painting aimed at realistic imitation of nature instead of Style. For instance a genre painting of a domestic scene may emphasize — and carefully imitate the natural peculiarities of individuals and their environment for the sake of charm alone and thus eschew the higher aim of Style as a formal idealization. For such genre painting Blanc seems to imply that the moral is irrelevant because imitation of nature as it is does not involve Style.

The fusion of the moral with the formal principles of the Beaux-arts Style is all but forgotten today. Now we think of the Beaux-arts tradition as encompassing a set of conventions that fell into decay and redundancy during the rise of modernism. We don’t associate the moral with modernism. If the Beaux-arts sensibility of the moral was the expression of a universal ideal or type that lay beyond the reality of nature and is attained by formal idealization, the modernist sensibility replaced the idea of the moral with the idea of utopia which is best imagined as a social condition imitated in art and not as a spiritual aspiration. Yet the distinction is fuzzy. Even Blanc argued that the attainment of Style, or the ideal, could “…by its dignity, elevate the souls of men and nations…and reform the manners of men by its visible lessons.” Later, Mondrian had the same ambition for neo-plasticism. What of Rothko and Newman in this respect? And others?

Although Blanc presumed that the human figure is the essential subject in art, his Grammar really transforms the figure into a set of abstract formal principles. He might just as well have been writing about rectangles and circles and in fact he did place geometry as the fundamental means by which the general can be induced from the particular. The point is that he saw those principles as moral in their capacity to elevate the human soul.

Today, in the context of advanced abstract painting, it’s considered largely foolish to speak of utopian art. In the face of a disintegrating globalism, utopian ideas are pinched and quaint. Moreover, it is certainly taboo, I believe, to speak of a moral abstract painting Paradoxically, however, the modernist tradition of formalist abstract painting continues unabated into its postmodern phase, reshuffling earlier iterations, adding and subtracting whatever is deemed peculiar to painting and its processes, no longer aiming for something that used to be called the moral or the utopian or even the spiritual — and now dares not try — veering instead to the ironic, the sardonic, the literal, and the individualized. It employs the means of Blanc’s Beaux-arts Style but strays to other ends because the implication of expressing the moral is anathema in today’s secular art-world. After all, the revolutionary nature of modernism required amoral, secular boundlessness.

It is ludicrous to entertain the idea that there is indeed something that is off-limits in contemporary abstract painting. After a century and more of breaking down rules, presumptions and traditions of art, any informed painter is alert to the notion that nothing falls beyond the pale, nothing is taboo in painting — except, as I now believe, the moral, the very essence of Blanc’s formalist Style. The moral is excluded essence of contemporary abstract painting.

By about 1910, the notion of the moral had already disappeared from modernist art theory yet the formal principles remained and were given a new role as not only the structure of painting but also its subject. In 1911 Wassily Kandinsky’s essay, Concerning the Spiritual in Art proclaimed inner necessity as the fundamental source for artistic creation. Although inner necessity is separate from any formal principles it is an a-priori spiritual condition enabling the artist to employ formal elements somehow infused with that spirituality. We can’t know what Kandinsky’s spiritual inner necessity is except by feeling it in beholding the formal elements in art, expressed intuitively and independently of referenced subject matter. Inner necessity is a surrogate term for Blanc’s notion of the moral except that for Kandinsky it is purely subjective, and for Blanc the moral is objective; that is, something inscribed by the rules and principles of formal Style. Much closer to Blanc’s notion of the moral is Clive Bell’s essay on Significant Form, published in 1914. Bell claims that what makes something art is not subject matter or even content (its theme) but simply the right arrangement of form. In this he agrees with Blanc but unlike Blanc he gives no rules or formal principles and no method for achieving significant form. For Bell, significant form exists objectively as a unity of formal elements but must, like Kandinsky’s inner necessity, be apprehended subjectively and unlike Blanc, it follows no rule.

Both Kandinsky’s inner necessity and Bell?s significant form, in various mixes, are the basic conceptual contexts for modernist and postmodernist abstract painting. Both allude to Blanc’s insistence that the formal principles of art, however they are described, embody a moral dimension, but in a wavering way, indecisively, and ultimately inverting it to amoral indifference. Inner necessity and significant form don’t deliver what they inherently promise, the moral. Without the moral content formalism becomes arbitrary. Any impulse can be claimed for any expression of any so-called inner necessity. What expression does not begin as inner? Further, any configuration of form can be claimed as significant. After all, without Blanc’s rather specific prescriptions for achieving the general and ideal, there is no way to discover insignificant form, let alone significant form. Here, then is the ultimate paradox, contradiction, and crisis in contemporary abstract painting. How can it persist in using the formal principles of art as the necessary and sufficient means by which aesthetic expression is possible while at the same time denying the intrinsic moral nature of those principles?

Is it time to reexamine what is moral in abstract painting and in all serious art? To do so would mean to abandon the redundancy of irony and to overcome the one substantial taboo in contemporary art: The taboo against the moral. It would not require a return to Blanc’s Beaux-arts Style but it might lead to a radical new use of Blanc’s ideas.

Bibliographic References:

Bell, C. 1969. The Aesthetic Hypothesis. In Tillman, F., Mc Cahn, S., (Eds.), philosophy of Art from Plato to Wittgenstein, Harper & Row, New York, NY. pp 415-428, 1910.

Doggett, Kate N., The Grammar of Painting and Engraving: Translated From The French of Blanc?s Grammaire DesArts DU Dessin, S.C. Griggs and Company, Chicago, 1879.

Kandinsky, W., 1957, Concerning The Spiritual in Art, G. Wittenborn, Inc., New York, NY, 1912.

Exclusively for Neoteric Art. ©William Conger, 2011
www.williamconger.com

Foreword

In the summer of 2011 I began a lengthy email conversation with my main professor from graduate school, Barry Gealt. Barry is someone who’s continued to have authority to challenge me and I have always valued what I’ve learned from him; he’s been at least as influential to me since grad school as he was during it. Getting an email from him is always an invitation to think about things – life, art, or meaning – from a perspective I hadn’t been considering.

In the course of our summer email repartee, Barry suggested that I evaluate – or reevaluate, as the case might be – what the weight on my artistic shoulders is. What are the things that motivate me? What pushes me out of my comfort zones? What challenges me to do something more, or something different, in my work? What moves me beyond my assumptions?

These are all important questions. They’re certainly necessary to those of us who’ve made a life of art, but they’re also part and parcel of what it means to be a reflective human being. So I decided to sit down and try to enumerate for Barry what my “weights” are right now and how I’m thinking about them. By way of calibration: know that Barry and I had been talking about illustration as a particular avenue of image making, as well as the place of belief or spiritual motivation in the life of the artist. This is why these issues feature prominently in my “weights.”

My Weights, for Barry

As an artist I am not interested in argumentation about belief or proving anything about religion or spirituality. My work is really more about paying attention to evocative, relational experiences and making images that relate to those experiences.

To me, all artworks are simply artifacts of an individual having a focused, aware experience of being – what Gaston Bachelard called “the astonishment of being”. Think of it this way: An individual has an intense experience in the context of living that creates a sense of fullness, meaning, and direction. The artist is constrained by this experience and becomes pressurized to respond to it. There is an ebb and flow to this call and response, but it is a constant state for those of us who think like artists. An artwork is the overflow of the artist’s evocative experiences. It is an expression of the artist’s experience of being as filtered through his or her proclivities, influences, and frame of reference. Artworks are not merely pretty pictures or didactic declarations of information; works that fall into these categories fall short of the promise and purpose of art. The purpose of art is to translate an evocative experience of being and initiate/stimulate contemplative engagement in others who are willing to have it.

Artworks are reflexive, subjective expressions that proceed from our engagement with reality, whatever that engagement might be. The works become transmundane, evocative things that – when we actually submit to their influences – may function as relational conduits for us as an audience to sense and become more aware of being.

So I wouldn’t say that I’m a religious artist or that I’m trying to make declaratively spiritual pictures. It’s just that I think that everything is enchanted and that even the most banal subject matter can be made worthy of contemplation through contemplation and deep engagement.

Looking at artists like Titian or Guido Reni or Bellini or Tiepolo you can see that yes, the subject matter might be religious but the image is about being. Many of the images these artists made show true, deep, human engagement that goes far beyond merely expressing biblical doctrine or a mythological morality play. These works transcend the local meaning of the religious moment for which the image was made because the artist sensed deep currents of evocative life and worked from them.

Pontormo’s Deposition is perhaps the greatest example of this mode of artistic creation. It’s a consummately religious work with much to say theologically. But it transcends the situational “holiness” of its use and takes on a deeply evocative human meaning because of how it was made and how it has functioned over time. The spiritual context of his society certainly influenced Pontormo and was part of the reason why he made the work, yes. But his ability to take the image beyond doctrine – beyond information-transfer, beyond illustration, beyond proselytizing or argumentation – is related to how humane and sensitive his eye and mind were, both to the human condition and the formal concerns of crafting images.

It’s easy to spot artists who merely executed religious images from those, like Donatello, who lived and made images from life. His Magdalene isn’t the product of religiosity; it’s the product of humanity. The works I’m describing are not about converting people, but showing the witness of transformation that’s already in our world.

That’s what I want to do. If that’s religious, so be it, but I don’t see it as such. There isn’t a circumscribed area of “religious” and other areas that aren’t for me. All of life is sacred and enchanted for me. Everything is subjective and contingent.

All of the above determines the weights that I feel:

1) The weight of how objects resonate with our experience.
a. Meaning comes to inhabit objects through our use and experience of them over time. Because of this they become important and worth contemplating in artworks.
2) The weight of how the body resonates with our experience.
a. The inherent value and wonder of our embodiment is key to our experience of reality, key to our understanding of aesthetics and formal concerns, and key to our notions of meaning.
3) The weight of form as image.
a. Form as image is really just constructive visual logic in the context of compositional visual dynamics, formal relationships, and chromatic environments. It is a key to how we understand reality.
4) The weight of the difference between poetic (intersubjective, evocative) understanding and rational (empirical, “objective”) understanding.
a. The perennial dualities that seem to divide our experience of the world are heavy; each side tries to be definitive, but neither can exist without the other:
i. Faith / Logic
ii. Belief / Reason
iii. Intuition / Analysis
iv. Metaphysical / Physical
v. Supernatural / Natural
vi. Mystical / Rational
b. The rational / technical is more specific, directed, and closed. It lends itself to illustration and argument.
c. The emotional / allegorical is specific, directed, and transitional, which is why it can bridge the gap between illustration, iconography, and poetic images.
d. The poetic / archetypal is more general and open, trying to evoke a kind of multifaceted approach to meaning and understanding.
5) Weight of the differences between illustrative, iconographic, and poetic images.
a. Illustration: a directed one-to-one relationship between the picture and meaning.
b. Iconography: a more resonant and generalized one-to-one relationship between picture and meaning.
c. Poetic: an open and relational evocation of meaning via the picture.

But how does all of that play out in specific images? What it means is that I try to create images that work like relational conduits (something that simulates relationship, contemplation, and generosity of spirit). I want viewers to experience an invitation to contemplate their experiences in a dynamic, evocative way. This means that I can’t close down the read too much. It means that I can’t have too much of an agenda, though all of my history and influences and forebears (like you) are going to be shining through and inflecting what I do. It means that I have to try to maintain an open voice while advocating for the things I believe and am motivated by. I may fail at this from time to time, because I am so interested in the tension between illustrative, iconographic, and poetic images. I want to try to push illustration out of telling and facts and into evocative contemplation. It’s a hard task.

Most of the time illustration merely tells, merely declares something known. But good artworks remind us of something just beyond the edge of our knowing. They evoke a sense of what we intuitively feel about life: that there is something inherently meaningful and worthy about who we are and what we are doing, contemplating, living with, and aiming toward. Our dignity and the wonder of our consciousness can’t be reduced to certainty and facts; we know that we’re more than the sum of our parts. We know that what we are can’t be reduced down to the chemistry of our brains. We sense that we are more indefinable than definable.

The distinction between telling/declaring and evoking/reminding is very important to me. Telling and declaring only work in the context of certain kinds of truth. However, as Lucian Freud said, “There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.” Truth does more than strike one as merely being true. Truth is more than the transmission of facts. It lifts you and causes you to resonate with awareness of your own contingency and limitation, your own beingness and consciousness. That’s why religious works meant to convey religious dogma are boring to me: they’re not true enough, not about life enough.

That’s why the Pontormo and Donatello I mentioned above work so well; they connect with life in a way that rings true. That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s what the weight on my shoulders is. What burdens are you carrying?

Top: Matthew Ballou, Condition, multiple layer monotype in oil on paper, 2005

The ways that the human mind manifests itself in creative activity are vast and various. People have theorized about and argued over modes of creative impetus for millennia. Artists and lovers of art are constantly attempting to plumb these depths, always looking for some elucidation of the mechanisms and maneuvers our minds utilize when we are in that universally recognized but seemingly undefined state that is creation. There have been a great many different opinions and certainly a large proliferation of words used to describe this state, this modality of thought. What follows here is a brief attempt to perceive a strategy for understanding the broadest creative modes of the mind.

These creative modes could be distilled to two mental states: intuition and analysis. I believe that creative activity really amounts to the dynamic interaction between these two forms of understanding.

Consider intuition first. When people talk about their artistic processes with statements such as, “I just surrender to the work,” “I empty myself and let it flow,” or “I turn off my mind,” they are speaking of acting from intuition. They are moved by an instinctive, largely unexamined series of unspoken conditions, assumptions, and motivations. To describe all of this as intuitive is not to suggest that it is illogical, irrational, or arbitrary. Rather, the intuitive is built from a whole range of varied interactions with reality, all of which are grounded in real experience and practical knowledge. The substance of our intuition is, as I will discuss below, partly made up of what we know about the world through overt cognitive engagement: education, reading, studying, and thinking. Yet it is also built from physically being in the world: experiences we have with our bodies, technical skills we have built over time through multiple attempts, and the ability our minds have to identify with the physical, emotional, and intellectual realities of other human beings. The content of our intuition is basically the sum total of our mental, emotional, and physical experience of the world that forms an instinctive frame of reference for us. What we know and how we experience that knowingness coalesce into an inner sense of rightness and direction.

I can witness this time and time again while creating my own paintings, drawings, or prints. As I take creative action in the world, my background frame of reference – my intuition – flows out of its own accord. Even with extremely precise and specific efforts, the weight of what I know constantly informs my conscious mind in multifaceted ways that are not the overt recitation of techniques or formulae but instead are a meta-filtered pre-cognitive sense of how I should move or not move in any given situation. I cannot escape my intuition, but I can seek to use it or to constrain it. I can work to be aware of it or find ways to ignore its presence.

The results of this synergy between more or less conscious action and embedded, unconscious or instinctive stimuli are not necessarily objective, nor are they always entirely appropriate at first blush. However, they can be honed over time into greater and greater accuracy, or at least into more applicable and necessary avenues of implementation. How I use that vast data enclosed in my intuitive frame of reference, how I add to it, how I shape it is, in large part an effect of just being in the world.

Because it is intuitive, it directly follows that I am not overtly deciphering what I am doing while I am doing it but rather am going with the flow, responding in a kinesthetic way to my environment, to the task at hand, to the formal physical or visual dynamics at play. There is a real sense in which the practical value of the intuitive is located outside of the mind (i.e. in the realm of actions) but is directly related to what the mind has previously processed through thoughts or experiences. The more I use it, the more it can shape my actions, and thus, circling back into itself, the more it is refined and referential to my own particular encounters with reality. In stepping back and considering what intuition has wrought I can gain a greater grasp on what I am doing, what I want, and how to get there. This mental state of stepping back from active making in order to take stock of what that making has done is, obviously, analysis.

The analytical property is the cognitive process of considering what has been created, known, or formulated and investigating it in the light of other available information. Though it is a different function of the creative mind, analysis is no less valid or valuable than the intuitive function. It is, perhaps, Kant’s notion of disinterested judgment at work. It amounts to a studied, learned grasp of a field. It is a rational, thoughtful application of relevant information to the question at hand. It is a knowing trajectory of thought meant to bring context and history into perspective and apply them to a specific situation. Analysis is the conscious, rigorous assessment of what the intuitive has conjured up. It brings in the weight of external meanings and conceptualizations, allowing outside history, methods, and meanings to become a foil to the internal, personal movements of intuition.

Like intuition, analysis is also accumulated and honed. Like intuition, analysis must be utilized in order to grow and become more useful and far-reaching. Like intuition, we carry analysis with us; it is in our frame of reference, and the information it calls us to consider is later absorbed into the unconscious bedrock of our intuition. This is a special point – that the analytical may be subsumed into the body of the intuitive. Any instruction in art (or any other subject) that I have received, every page of theory read, all of the critiques I have had (or have given), every passionate argument made or heard were, in their moments of happening, analytical by nature. Yet afterward the experience of dense intellectual assessment passed from my outward regard and became a part of the matrix of my deeper understanding. Each book read, every museum explored, all lectures intensely considered, every struggle to mix the perfect color… all of these things eventually add their value to the ocean of meaning and pre-cognitive understanding that is intuition. There is an infinite return at play here, as these elements become part of the underlying depths that constitute the intuitive. What was once outside of me, part of the external context, has now become part of the inflection of my innermost creative movements, and it may – in ways I can never entirely know or fully understand – be re-manifested into the world through my intuition. This is a glorious, necessary thing.

Analysis is absolutely essential to whole process of art, because it brings a multifaceted framework to bear on the singular viewpoint of an individual creative action. Analysis is the re-contextualization of information, action, and instinct that had been de-contextualized in the unconscious databank of the individual mind. It once had context, but, after being learned and practiced, it passed into the intuition where it was sublimated into dense interwoven strands of subjectivity, ready to be called forth in various ways. This calling forth in a creative action is usually automatic and un-parsed; we normally do not examine every single brushstroke or every line of a composition in the moment of its initial appearance. Therefore, in the moment of its presentation, any element may seem to be context-less (“I just did it. It’s not based on anything,” etc). We know this not to be the case, since all things were presented to us within a context, all learning occurs in some format, and all actions take place within a broader referential tableau. It is impossible to make a pure or random or context-less expression. Analysis heightens our sense of the surrounding context within which our expressions move.

Analysis could then be understood as a conscious awareness of the broader perspective within which our unconscious, instinctive actions have taken place. Intuition is built from the absorption of analytical information, and analysis of intuitive action forms the basis for understanding deeper pre-cognitive, instinctive motivation and direction. Using what we learn from this process feeds back into the process, progressively shaping the contours of our intuitive abilities and enhancing the precision of our apprehension of what we mean in our instinctive creative action. There is balance here. It is a wonderful symmetry, a tightrope dance between the poetic and the rational, between faith and logic, between the sensate and the intellectual.

Unfortunately, analysis is something that creative people often fear, denigrate, or ignore. There are many reasons for this. One of them is fear of the feeling inadequate in the face of intellectual or philosophical rigor. Some artists fear that disenchantment – and a resulting inability to create – might come from too much definition or explanation. Another fear is related to the emotional vulnerability that analysis creates. Ultimately, people fear being attacked for their expressions. This is, of course, because analysis is a deeply challenging event, in the sense that critique or scholarship forces creators to step away from their emotional association with the work in order to gain a different, broader, nuanced understanding of it. Because of their close connection to the work they make, artists necessarily feel the uncomfortable, prying, revealing force of analysis when it is brought to bear on their work.

Along these lines, there is a huge amount of distrust of analysis by creative people who are in school, particularly graduate school. Often those who reach this level have gotten there purely on intuitive making. They fake the analytical element or compartmentalize it, seeing it as irrelevant to the way they work. This is something I have encountered many times at the university level. When students are pressured to bring the analytical aspect into their work they revolt, feeling that it would demystify their process, destroy the enigma of their ideas and normalize the effect of their work, causing its scope to vastly diminish. Without fail, these fears are baseless, because the feelings of embarrassment and vulnerability brought by true analysis pay off with an infinite range of possibility being added to the work. Suddenly it has access to a real basis, an actual pedigree, a huge arena of resonance, and a claim to an artistic legacy – more than they could have possibly imagined and far more than their own closed-minded perspective could have given them.

There is a strange duality working in the tensions artists feel about deeply examining their own artworks. In many ways we are conditioned to keep our inner beliefs to ourselves, to proscribe our expression of our most fundamental convictions. Yet simultaneously there is a premium placed on self-expression in art, as if it requires no justification whatsoever. Into this realm come intuition and analysis. The intuitive – obviously informed by personal feeling and inner dialogue about what is important and valuable – is revealed by analysis. That is, the analytical approach exists as an explicatory function of critical thought, and it forces inner beliefs and convictions into the light of open discussion. This is often a confrontational, stress-filled situation for all involved, and artists sometimes learn to associate analysis with distress, confusion, misunderstanding, and emotional trauma. Instead of a growing grasp of the potentiality of the work, a more whole understanding of how it operates and how it may be received, they experience a collapse of what limited power the work initially did contain. This need not be the case. What many artists learn through the difficult process of having analysis brought into their world is that, while the intuitive is a door of access to all of human consciousness, analysis is the key that opens that door. Each needs the other; they are conjoined.

In conclusion, and in the interest of further clarity, let me express some thoughts on the symmetrical characteristics of intuition and analysis:
• Intuition moves us deeply but provides no overt justification of these moves.
• Analysis helps us see what our moves share with the history of other moves.
• Intuition tells us what to make.
• Analysis tells us how to understand what we make.
• Intuition forces us to make expressions without qualification.
• Analysis helps us discern the qualification of our expression.
• Intuition is the friend of the individual, the poetic, and the particular.
• Analysis is the friend of the viewer, the rational, the universal, and the contextual.
• Intuition is a monarchy.
• Analysis is a democracy.
• Intuition is passion and reaction.
• Analysis is thoughtfulness and reflection.
• Intuition cares about preserving individual subjectivity.
• Analysis cares about establishing contextual appropriateness.

I hope from this brief listing of contrasts and exploration of intuition and analysis that it is apparent how desperately artists need both of these modes to be active parts of the creative process. Intuition, almost involuntarily, guides the direction and flow of our working (the facture of our paint handling, the style of our prose, the legibility of our handwriting, etc). Analysis helps us shape those intuitive elements into a broader scope and a more nuanced application than our automatic action might make. Analysis helps me inform my intuition, causing my art to better serve its own ends. It helps bring balance to the process. It helps bring a light of understanding to the cloudy depths of inference and implication. In striving to keep intuition and analysis in dynamic tension, by valuing what each brings to the overall artistic situation, and by growing in our appreciation of each, we are able to maintain a perspective that gives us greater sense of what is actually going on in the mysterious process of creation.

“White” was originally published January 16, 2009 on vschneider.wordpress.com

Two days ago at a press conference in Millennium Park, Mayor Daley warned residents about this week’s dangerously cold temperatures while at the same time announcing a new campaign to attract tourists from around the world to Chicago in the winter. In his cavalier way, Mayor Daley mocked the media for sounding the alarm every time it snowed: “We’ve had snow, I mean, we’ve always had ice.” (Imagine with the inimitable Chicago accent.) Yes, we’ve always had it, I tolerate it (badly), but if he thinks a gaggle of Australians are going to leave their summer behind to experience mounds of snow, sheets of ice falling from buildings, temperatures below zero, and, when it all starts to melt, slush and muck so deep you could lose a baby in it, well, I think he is in for a bit of a disappointment.

I’m already sick of winter and it has only just begun. I’m tired of the cold, fed up with the snow, and sick of well-meaning people telling me “how pretty it is”. Aesthetically speaking, I’m sick of the color white. On sunless days white has a hegemonic dominance over the landscape. Looking at the cottony blur in the morning makes me feel as if I’m in a continual process of coming out of anaesthesia, clarity always a bit beyond my reach. Besides, isn’t it unsettling, almost unnatural, when the bottom of the landscape matches the top? Just ask any sailor.

White might symbolize innocence and purity for some but in India women wear white saris when their husbands die. White doesn’t fare much better in Moby Dick. In the chapter The Whiteness of the Whale Melville writes, “…it is, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that ere is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” For Melville, white is absence (“dumb blankness”) and it is precisely this which makes it so full of meaning: it is the ultimate fear, the fear of nothingness; it is the great, white leviathan that drags the crew into the vortex of non-being.

In his short essay Black or White, American abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell doesn’t go into the symbolic powers of white (though he does mention Melville), but he’s pretty blunt about the chemical properties of the respective pigments black and white. Black, he writes, being made of soot, is “light and fluffy” whereas whites are either “cold” and “slimy” (zinc oxide) or “extremely poisonous on contact of the body” (lead). ‘Nuf said.

White is also a real stickler for the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: at least half his comments in Remarks on Colour focus on white as a problematic concept. The crux of the conundrum is that white is the only color that doesn’t have an opaque and transparent version. Think about it: grass is opaque green, old Coke bottles are transparent green. An apple is opaque red, a red piece of stained glass is transparent. One can even imagine transparent black, though when a sheet of white paper is put behind it, it appears dark grey (which poses yet another problem according to Wittgenstein, for white dilutes other colors but cannot itself be diluted). All this brings Wittgenstein to postulate: if milk is opaque white then doesn’t it follow that water is transparent white?

Chicagoans know all too well what happens when our white, opaque stuff begins to turn into (white) transparent stuff: first it gets speckled with exhaust, then the large, grey mounds melt, which produces a flow (not very transparent) of water, dirt, spit, and grease, all of which ends up in a water treatment facility somewhere. Which brings me, oddly, to the beautiful painting by Gerhard Richter called Ice 1, one of three in a series at the Art Institute of Chicago. Richter takes on the colors of our cold, drab winter and turns them into three amazing paintings of ice; ice out of which seeps infinite and at times almost imperceptible variations of color and texture. Imagine one of our whitish-grey mounds of plowed snow lit up from the inside and embedded within it tiny particles of color: at first glance it looks like ice, upon closer inspection the whole thing is pulsating with color. Now that might (just might) bring the tourists here in January.

Remarks on Colour, Ludwig Wittgenstein, University of California Press
The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, University of California Press
The Daily Practice of Painting, Gerhard Richter, The MIT Press
Gerhard Richter’s notes are so honest, deep, and poetic that I have an inkling to do a “best of” post with some of his quotes and paintings. Read this book!

Recently I returned to the Musée d’Orsay. The first thing I did was to take the five floors up to the Post-Impressionist collection to Douanier Rousseau’s painting War. Last year I regretted not having taken a picture of it to use in the classes I teach at the Lab School because there is no reproduction available (don’t get me started about the glut of Mona Lisa postcards, posters, puzzles, coasters, clocks and the comparative dearth of other works of art: this is a whole other issue that deserves to be treated at length).

Anywho. I was framing the picture in the viewer of my discrete digital camera and a little, tiny corner of an old leather jacket was in the picture. I waited a minute or so and then politely asked the man wearing the leather jacket if he could move over for a second while I snapped a photo. Well. He looked at me (down at me – I’m a mere five foot tall), his face of an equine sort, his bad teeth showing as his mouth dropped open, and didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I thought maybe he hadn’t understood my request, so I repeated myself, this time in English. That’s when I got the snub of a lifetime (in a British accent, no less): “I come to museums to look at paintings, not to take pictures. What do you come here for?” Well, the Goddess of Repartee was with me that day (normally good comebacks materialize a few days later while I’m knitting or sitting on the pot): “I come to museums to take pictures, but I like to buy stuff too.” He snorted at me, spun on his heels, and trotted off.

This brings me to a subject that I’ve been pondering all year while visiting museums: to shoot or not to shoot. Susan Sontag in her book On Photography discusses the role it plays in tourism and vacations: people in today’s mundus imaginum (I did that just to sound impressive – it simply means world of images) have come to depend on photos to validate experience. A young woman I interviewed from Berck-sur-Mer told me a joke the other day that I’m sure Sontag would have enjoyed: a friend asks a friend how his trip was, to which he replies: “I don’t know, I haven’t developed the pictures yet.”

Those who take pictures in museums often do it for just this reason: to prove that they saw the painting (this is especially true when the person poses with the painting as they would with a friend or family member). Taking a photo of the painting, “shooting” it (Sontag discusses the semantic reverberations of “to take” and “to shoot” in her book) means to capture it, to consume it; the photo serves as a talisman representing the visitor’s taste and his journey through the museum.

Taking pictures of paintings can also reduce one’s own experience with painting. The camera is the thing looking at the painting, not the person. The person focuses on mechanical issues: framing, turning off the flash (if he follows the rules), and holding his hand still, so that the camera makes a good reproduction of what is right in front of him. It is as if I were to take a friend to a restaurant, watch him eat a good meal, and then ask, How was it?

For to experience a painting is different from looking at its reproduction. Walter Benjamin speaks of the real deal as having an aura: just as radium emits radiation, a painting emanates the effort and presence of the painter which comes out of the painting to greet us as we stand before it. Taking a picture of an image is a one-sided experience. Looking at a painting without the mediation of the camera is a two-sided one; we enter into a dialogue with it. In his book The Open Image French art critic and historian George Didi-Huberman speaks of images as if they were organic objects: “Images embrace us: they open up to us and close themselves to us in so far as they conjure up in us something that we could call an interior experience.” If we open up to the image, without protection or the desire to possess it, the image will reciprocally open itself up to us.

I sound as if I agree with Mr. Horse Snob (Equi-Snobus), don’t I? Well, that’s just it. I did agree with him at the start of the year, but after spending time talking to people in museums about why they take pictures of paintings I have come to realize that there are some excellent reasons. It’s easy to go to museums with preconceived notions about how people really don’t take the time to look at paintings (such notions flatter one’s own sense of cultural superiority); it’s much more interesting to talk to people and learn that museums are in fact filled with people for whom art resonates quietly (or loudly) in their lives and that taking a picture of a painting doesn’t necessarily mean that a museum experience is qualitatively any less for them than it is for someone who shuns the camera.

Here are some interesting examples I’ve encountered this year about how the camera aids people’s experience at museums: Kamilah from California keeps a portfolio of paintings on her computer that have moved her and writes about her experiences, a man I spoke to takes a picture of a painting only when he finds one that particularly speaks to him and doesn’t know the painter well; he takes a picture of the painting along with the identification plate so he can further research the artist and the painting later. At the Louvre a few days ago a young Russian pianist living in Paris and I talked at length about Watteau’s painting Pierrot, dit autrefois Gilles. She was so thrilled to have discussed the painting with someone that she wanted me to take her picture with the painting as a visual memory of our encounter (besides, her red hair matched the wall behind the painting to a tee). Finally, I’ve come up with my own use of photographed paintings in museums: as desktop pictures. I take just part of the painting (for instance, an up-close Courbet’s signature from L’Hallili du cerf or part of the allegorical painting The Funeral of Love by Antoine Caron where one of the cupids looks at the observer – he alone does this – as if to say can you believe this painting?!). My favorite (and the one currently on my computer) is an up-close of Gilles, slightly off-center: his face, quiet and almost blank, reveals a different emotion, whispers a different story, every time I turn on my machine.

…”arguably the least love-struck woman in all Western painting.” – Michael Fried

In his book Pictures and Tears, James Elkins explores the act of crying in front of painting—an act that if one is to believe him (and I do) strikes most academics to be as shameful as farting during an inopportune moment at the opera. Before writing, Elkins wrote to colleagues, friends who love art, and also posted inquiries in newspapers and journals. Everyone was asked the same, basic question: have you ever cried in front of a painting and if so, please share your story. His book is divided into “crying categories”: one chapter is about the weepy reactions in 18th century France to the paintings of Greuze, one chapter is based on the experience of an art historian in front of a series of Rothko paintings, and one marvelously zany chapter is about “the Stendhal syndrome,” named after the writer Stendhal who lost his marbles for a short time during his first visit to Italy, so moved was he by the art and architecture he saw.

Elkins comes to the conclusion that historical knowledge and emotion make for very strange bedfellows: “In most cases, history kills. Luckily it kills slowly, over many years. During the long interval between the first poison pill and the death of all feeling, history can give a great deal of pleasure. [...] Art history continues to deepen my experience of images, and I keep buying, reading, and writing books of art history, even though I know I am slowly corroding my ability to address paintings with full emotions and an open heart.” In short, knowing kills our ability to feel; there is no emotion where there is knowledge. Darn. I learned a lot over the course of reading this book. James, what are you doing trafficking the pills of detached wisdom? Thanks a lot!

Despite the trenchant thesis, Elkins knows that measuring tears is not a clear-cut science and says as much: “Learning did kill emotion for me, but I also have letters from people who know a great deal about paintings and still cry.” Second, one would be hard put to argue that an un-wet yet jarring experience in front of a painting is somehow qualitatively less “emotional” than a similiar experience with tears. Finally, one’s own affective experience with art can differ from day to day: looking at something after personal tragedy is different from looking at something after a day at the office is different from looking at something after you’ve been dropped by your boyfriend, etc. and this instability constitutes one of the miracles of art: each act of beholding is a unique creation in time, a singular creation between the viewer and object.

It turns out that I am a happy exception to Elkin’s conclusion: I’ve read loads of serious art history, the kind that revels in words like “ontological, teleological, metonymy” and have come out unscathed. I do occasionally cry in front of paintings (I also tear up while reading, the last time was in the bathtub while reading Rimbaud’s correspondence). In fact, my crying episodes in front of paintings have always been thanks to what I know, not the contrary. The last time I cried was in the Musée d’Orsay in front of Edouard Manet’s Carnations and Clematis in a Crystal Vase. At first I was simply entranced by the painting, by the brush strokes and colors. I looked at the painting for a few minutes, kind of “sinking into it” so that I was no longer looking at flowers or a vase per se but rather seeing how the shapes and colors echoed back and forth, as if calling each other into existence. Next, I pulled myself out and looked at the painting again as a compositional whole. Then my learning took hold: I remembered that many of Manet’s still lives (like this one) were painted at the end of his life when he was seriously ill and unable to work on large canvases. Méry Laurent, a good friend and former model (perhaps former lover too) would buy outrageous bouquets and take them to Manet when she visited him. I thought about how Manet had married his plain, portly wife Susanne out of a sense of duty, had agreed to pretend his son was his brother out of his mother’s bourgeois priggishness (so that no one would know Manet had had a child out of wedlock), and all of a sudden the painting, bearing no trace of self-pity or pain, serenely beautiful, seemed itself like an outrageous gift from the painter to me. My eyes welled up with tears.

Last week I met another weepy scholar, a former art student named Casey. Casey told me about her experience in the Musée d’Orsay in front of Manet’s Olympia. She had spent years studying 19th century French painting and Manet was a personal favorite. Yet, when she finally had a chance to see the painting in Paris it wasn’t just an academic pleasure: “I felt tears in my eyes, had chills, and somehow felt the painting all over my body.” The connection was at the same time so intellectual and physical that she had a hard time leaving the room.

I was happy to have found another educated crier and I asked her if she had ever seen Fantin-Latour’s painting of Manet in the Art Institute (for, I have to admit that in addition to knowing a fair amount about Manet and loving his painting, I also happen to think that he was quite a stud and this painting does my opinion justice). We got up from the bench, in my excitement I may have taken her by the arm (I don’t remember), led her to the painting, and then left her alone there, so that she could have a quiet moment with Ed.

It was a bold statement when the Chicago art scene needed one. After a downturn in the economy and The Fire, Chicago’s art scene seemed to have lost the luster it had in the 1980s. It was said during the high point of that decade that the number of galleries in SuHu was only second to that in Manhattan.

However, by the early ’90s the Chicago art scene was a shadow of its former self. Some notable temporary art shows, put on by artists like the Cold House group, proved there was still an artistic spirit in Chicago that was still hungry, even if the art world couldn’t sustain it. World Tattoo was the embodiment of that spirit. Since the nomad galleries were fleeting, the work may not have been shown in the best light. World Tattoo was different. It was a strong, solid permanent exhibition space that took a stand on the corner of 13th and Wabash. Arms folded and with the sneer of a bouncer at a biker bar, it said “Fuck you!” to those that would write off the Chicago art scene. “There is good work being made here and you need to take a look!”

It eventually closed down and the space was taken over briefly by another exhibition space, Izzo’s Artery, before it was inevitably swallowed up by the condo revolution, as the South Loop became a place to eat and sleep. Fitzpatrick moved on to focus on his work, yet continued his leadership in the Chicago art scene. This time, though in a more mentor-like role, with his Firecat Press and by example.

Fast forward 17 years and the Chicago art scene again finds itself in need of a kick in the ass and Fitzpatrick is once again happy to oblige. Last night I saw the opening at Firecat Projects, a new space dedicated to showing new work in a more dignified manner than we’ve seen in recent months. Run by Tony and his business partner, Stan Klein, it occupies his former studio, as the artist now works at home. The inaugural show is the first solo show of his work here in two years. To some this may seem kind of self-serving, but he can do this because it’s his, damn it (and he’s the Fuckin’ Mayor)! And what better way to stir shit up? The show kicks ass.

Firecat Projects steps in at just the right time. The Chicago art scene has been sort of languishing since the heady blogosphere days of the mid-oughts. It is a time when stupid little contests (Loop Open, I’m looking your way) and filling abandoned store fronts with art are supposed to get us excited about the Chicago art scene again—however, these efforts fail to stir the hearts of anyone. Firecat Projects proves that there is still a bold spirit in Chicago that will not rest.

Over the last few years, while teaching at the University of Missouri, I’ve often played a few select minutes from the middle of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind for my students. I find that the film, though unrelated to art making directly, has a number of specific benefits to offer young art students. When I want them to think about the tension between intuition and skill, the psychology of the creative mind, or the value of actively negotiating materials (as opposed to the preciousness and creative constipation they so often exhibit), I break out Close Encounters.

The protagonist of the story, Roy (played by Richard Dreyfuss), is moved by something beyond the edge of his conscious perception. He can’t clearly grasp it intellectually or express it physically. He is irrational and chaotic. He traumatizes his family with his attempts to understand what “it” is (“Tell me what it is!” he shouts to the sky). He feels obsessed and frustrated and isn’t able to bring his very powerful yet unclear vision into the world. Sounds a lot like being an artist, doesn’t it?

Spurred into blind action, Roy starts manipulating a variety of materials (mashed potatoes, modeling clay, shrubbery), trying to translate some sense of the foggy vision in his head into material reality. Through a series of permutations (via both happy accidents and his willingness to use any skills and materials he has to intuitively experiment), he finally comes to recognize the form that has been so insistently present in his mind yet so inconceivable at the same time. This definitely describes something of the trajectory of an artist in the midst of creating a work of art. It also provides an avenue to talk to students about how artists work through the challenges of creativity.

The application points, as I see them, are as follows:

First, skill and intuition are inseparable. Skill is not the tool of repressive patriarchal power structures, not an instance of intellectual gate-keeping designed to concentrate power or opportunity in one class or demographic. Certain skills may once have been used that way, and some may still find themselves bastardized to some degree, but this is not a state inherent to skills as such. Skills are, instead, democratic and cumulative; we inherit them from others and build on them ourselves. We all have them. We all develop and use them. By working on fundamental skills and basic strategies, we equip our intuition to function through what we have learned so well that we no longer have to actively think about it. This is the beginning of real artistic freedom.

We had to learn the skills necessary to ride a bike, but now we don’t think about them – we just ride (gaining more and more nuanced kinesthetic knowledge about the skill of riding). Similarly, we learn the skills to measure proportion, sight an angle, render a volume, or build a type of surface quality, but eventually we don’t spend our time wondering if we’re executing this or that skill; we simply intuitively apply what we’ve learned through dedication and accumulated experience.

Second, it takes dynamic engagement with materials to translate ephemeral ideas into real forms. The medium and support we use to create a work are not merely passive participants, not merely background to the work. Our negotiation of their reality IS the work. We do not execute works; we participate in the potentialities of the materials. To a large extent, the quality of the work is contingent upon our willingness to work with the range of possibilities afforded us by its constituent elements. By forgoing preciousness, we allow ourselves to be influenced by the materials rather than attempting to dominate them. By learning their properties, we decrease the extent to which they will defy us, because we learn to ask them to do the things they inherently do. By challenging our preconceptions, we enable our creativity to manifest in strange and fresh maneuvers rather than simply regurgitating the same strategies. In this way technique and experimentation come together, and neither one is overvalued.

Third, once created, the work is primary and has to be considered over the idea. Ultimately the form takes on different qualities, resonances, and meanings than the original idea seemed to. That is, when we embody an idea – bring it from an intangible inner conception to a tangible outer reality – we fundamentally change its potentiality. The only way to understand the form is to make it, inspect it, and live with it, not constantly refer back to the idea or the inspiration. We have to learn to deal with what has been made, not what we wish it was, thought it would be, or imagine it to be. Bringing the work into the world necessitates letting go of the idea in service of the actual reality of the work.

This point is a variation on one of the greatest pieces of advice I ever received. During graduate school at Indiana University I was struggling. Barry Gealt, one of my professors, challenged me one day by asking, “When are you going to serve the picture instead of trying to illustrate your ideas?” This shift from idea to artwork was a big leap for me.

The reason that question was so valuable – and why it’s something I try to extend to my own students – is because, ultimately, the work never directly corresponds to the idea in a one-to-one relationship. Therefore the form has to be understood on its own grounds, not on the grounds of the idea behind it. The idea may inspire any number of works, but this work is actually present in the world and we have to deal with it.

These are some of the things I’m aiming at by showing my students this section of the movie. You can see for yourself by looking at chapters “Noticing Something Strange” and “Roy’s Sculpture” (tracks 12 and 13 on my version of the DVD). I’d encourage any creative person to check this out and, if you teach, see what your students make of the sequence. Beyond the direct application to artistic practice, I find it’s also a fun way to initiate discussion about stereotypes of artists, the challenges of artistic creation, and the play between creativity and irrationality. In an era in which students want instant gratification, direct relationships between their ideas and their “products”, and exhibit a lack of ability to project out (and trust) the variety of strategies that might help them make progress, Roy’s experience of creating his sculpture is a powerful witness.

Making art is not accounting. It’s not a production line. It is not a process that’s entirely laid out and easy to move through. Creativity requires different areas of our brains, different categories of knowledge, than what students have typically been exposed to before college (and all too often, in college as well). Watching those few minutes of Roy at work challenges students and inspires them to break open their conception of what it means to make an artwork. I know seeing it makes a difference for students; I end up referring to it over and over as the semester progresses.

In many ways teaching art is about teaching close encounters – dynamic, enigmatic, sometimes counter-intuitive engagement – with ideas, processes and materials. Close Encounters of the Third Kind helps me do that. And in the end it’s also nice to expose my students to a fantastic film that most of them have never heard of because it came out a decade or more before they were born.

I’d love to know how it works for others.

This is me in the room where we read, where the kids do their homework, and where we put up the Christmas tree. This is the room where I phoned my dad a year or so before he died: we were both catheterized, me following an operation for postpartum incontinence and him because the cancer that eventually killed him had taken over his lower body. We had a laugh about the improbability of us both having tubes coming out of our bladder at the same time, me at forty-two, him at seventy-three. This is the room where we entertain guests, where we watch birds in the tree right outside the window, and where we listen to the radio. It’s the most lived-in room in the house; facing south, it is the only room that floods with light during the day. This is the room where only last week a man climbed through an unlocked window while we were sleeping and helped himself to my computer, an Xbox, games, and two ipods, which makes me wonder if there are any creative thieves out there, ones who might have preferred my husband’s old cameras, my cookbooks, or our truncated, travel-weary garden gnome. No. Technology. Always technology. How predictably boring.

This is me: pint-sized, a pointy chin, thin lips, blue eyes, and a hair-mop made up of three different colors. I’m wearing a sweater I knitted, my sloppy slippers lined with sheep’s wool, and black toenail polish (which makes me look a bit more hard ass than I am). The artist (more about her later) painted two portraits of me. In one I am featured more prominently, the room figures less. I prefer the composition of this one: I am in the center, I anchor the painting, but at the same time I’m a bit dwarfed by it all, the room isn’t mine as much as I am a part of it, which is the way a home, a real home, fits around its dwellers; it not only encases them but slowly penetrates them, imposing itself in between their fingers and toes, fusing the space between them and their things (I’m recalling how my daughter cried when she saw a decrepit, old bathroom cabinet we had replaced out in the alley; it was as if we had pulled out some of her teeth to give away to the shamanic junk collectors who make their rounds in the alleys of our neighborhood). I also love the scale of the painting: the leaves of the plant are bigger than my head, the dictionary takes up a big space on the rug – just the kind of metaphorical space it embodies in our house where we play Scrabble, Boggle, and are challenged by new words. What is pralltriller? Look it up! Finally, the wall is a tricolor reverie in the hands of the painter: reflections of the chair, my sweater, and my eyes cast vibrant shadows onto the wall that is, in reality, a monotonous grey.

I picked this painting up today from Emily Rapport’s house. Emily Rapport is a Chicago-based artist with hot pink hair and a shy, friendly smile. Emily has a distinctive style, rooted in the gritty working class Chicago of Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren. Her colors and composition style remind me of Edward Hopper, though the series she did in the Chicago Northside bar Delilah’s harkens back to the sordid tenderness Lautrec painted with in the bars and cabarats of Montmartre. I called Emily in February to commission this portrait. I wanted to enter the painting process from the back screen door (certainly not through an unlocked window!), experience what others had felt under the gaze of an artist, and engage in a dialogue with a painter about their side of the experience; the working side of painting.

So, what was it like? First of all, there is the strangeness, the awkwardness, of looking at the painter. Unlike normal social exchanges where looking at someone means recognition and communication (of a sort), the painter looks at you but does not return your gaze. The gaze is the detached gaze of the scientist, analyzing the face like a staph culture, deciding which details to focus on and which to pass over. For the painter, the mouth is no more sacred than a slipper or the leg of a chair. Indeed, spending too much time on a face out of a desire for photographic precision can lead the artist to over-paint, a problematic temptation Emily Rapport describes on her blog: “Faces can always be difficult. We tend to pay too much attention to the details in an effort to get the recognizable person ‘right’ and lose the impression of the whole face.”

Secondly, there is the unexpected physicality of painting. I had envisioned the sitting as a hushed ceremony with the sable brushes gliding silently on the canvas. Wrong. Tools scrape, instruments rasp, and tubes squelch. To paint is to work; the technical side is as much about a gardener raking soil and gravel as it is about the fine artist (an image inherited from the Romantics) dabbing the canvas with color in a transe-like state of genuis. One wonders if Courbet, while painting The Stonebreakers (destroyed during the bombing of Dresden), didn’t see himself in the men breaking stones into so many different sizes, combing the ground with dusty fingernails, and dropping their work into an iron pail, marked by countless mishaps and travails.

Indeed, the tactility of paint, the imprint of the artist, and the gesture of work involved in the process are all key elements that distinguish the photo of a person from the painted portrait. Unlike a mechanical reproduction where the image is captured by light hitting a chemically treated surface or by a sensor that digitalizes light waves, the painted image is set down on the surface through the painting act of a person, an act that includes her movements, concentration, hope, frustration, and will. That each brushstroke is a deliberate choice of the painter as opposed to a reflection of light or the arrangement of pixels; that these brushstrokes coalesce to give an image, is nothing short of a miracle; the everyday miracle of creation.*

Now, there is the problem of where to hang my portrait. Certainly not in the reading room where it was painted: settling into the very chair where I was painted with the portrait looming above would be a bit like the nightmarish funhouse scene in The Lady from Shanghai. I suggested putting it in the room where we watch t.v., but my son was creeped out by the image of my unblinking stare forever looking out onto the spectacle (as if I don’t already give him enough shit for watching t.v.). It might just end up in the narrow, dark red corridor leading into my bedroom, in between the framed posters of other women: Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat and Young Girl with a Flute, as well as the painting Gabrielle d’Estrées and one of her sisters (which aforementioned son, then only four, made me buy in the Louvre, so delighted was he by a painting in a museum where one woman tweeks another one’s nipple). It might not end up in a veritable room for the time being, but at least I’ll be in good company.

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*The word “miracle” has the caché of a Hallmark card today. Writers concerned with aesthetics (among them Elaine Scarry in her book On Beauty and Being Just) have pointed to our post-modern discomfort with talking about or even using the word “beauty”; the word “miracle” has, in my mind, succumbed to the same problematic. A writer can’t use the word “miracle” without conjuring up images of puppies (“the miracle of birth”).

And yet. If one hasn’t stood in front of a painting long enough to be baffled (and entranced) by a brush stroke that can yield a likeness and at the same time something fuller than a likeness (because not mechanical), then one hasn’t spent enough time in front of a single painting. The last time this happened to me was in front of Fantin Latour’s painting Still Life: Corner of a Table while looking at the sugar bowl.

So, I do mean “miracle” when I say it; that is how I regard the fuller-than-a-likeness phenomenon that painting yields for those with the time and intention to look.