THE LOW NOTE IN THE HARMONY

In my youth, I was easily impressed by fine, detailed linework.



Fine lines are a great way for artists to show off. They also feel cool to draw. Artists such as Norman Lindsay (above) and Frank Frazetta (below) sometimes got so carried away drawing fine lines that they could no longer hear the muse urging, "turn back!"



As I matured, I noticed that the better artists exercised greater restraint and often employed heavier, bolder lines for emphasis. These stronger lines are like adding a lower note to the harmony.

Below, the great Alex Raymond draws an entire figure using a fine line, but comes back with a separate tool to make one bold stripe for that pants leg:



Here he does the same thing to accentuate a shoulder fold:



And here he uses that bold line to chisel the most wonderfully sculpted pair of overalls I've ever seen:



Once in a while there are very special artists who go even further. Working exclusively with a thick line they somehow manage to create sensitive drawings as descriptive as anything done by the fine line crowd. Here is the brilliant work of Noel Sickles:





When you draw with lots of fine lines, no single line is crucial; if you make a mistake, you can cover it up with cross hatching, or reinforce it with the lines on either side of it. But there is no place for Sickles to hide an imperfect line in these drawings.

Here is another superb example from Alex Toth:



Toth has captured a complex subject-- a group of people in ornate robes walking down a palace corridor under a trellis with palm trees outside-- and he has done so using a simple, bold line. Unlike the Lindsay or Frazetta drawings, this is a work of unimpeachable integrity and admirable restraint.

Finally, here is another powerful example of what can be accomplished at the thick end of the spectrum. The great Robert Fawcett was far too substantial to get distracted drawing button holes and strands of hair in this picture of tear gas at a civil rights riot:



Sometimes the less subtlety and precision in the drawing tool, the greater the subtlety and precision required from the mind and wrist of the artist.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 14

This beautiful drawing was done in 1915 by Rudolph Schindler, an architect in Taos, New Mexico. It was part of a proposal for an adobe home for a local doctor, Paul Martin.



This is a museum quality drawing, but it was far too useful to hang in a museum.

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EDWARD HOPPER'S VERSION OF THE INTERNET

Edward Hopper loved to ride the elevated train through the city at night. As the apartment buildings raced by in the dark, he would catch flashes of unearned intimacy: lonely people staring at the walls... desperate couples... people whose privacy was protected only by their anonymity.

Sometimes I think that artists, like philosophers, are keyhole peepers at heart. They are observers, once-removed from the primacy of experience by the burden of consciousness.

If Hopper lived today, he might get the same glimpses of humanity from Google. He could access an endless supply of private moments, intimate photographs, agonizing diary entries and personal confessions, efficiently organized and served up with the speed of an electrical pulse. He could download and catalogue them without ever leaving his chair.

But art calls for a little less information and a little more rumination. Or, as Carl Sandburg said, poetry is "the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during that moment." Hopper's fleeting views from the train left him plenty of time afterward for slow meditation.

Perhaps that is how he was able to transform a glimpse of a naked human into a painting of naked humankind.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF A FRAME

There's only one thing that all art has in common: a frame.

The frame may be made of metal or wood or it may be purely conceptual, but it is a perimeter that defines where the art ends and the rest of the world begins. No matter how outlandish or varied the art is, no matter whether it is an antique painting or the latest performance art, it is always framed by a boundary that separates the art from the rest of the natural world.

It's pretty easy to locate the borders of a work of art if it's on a piece of paper or canvas. However, some artists provoke their audience to think by playing tricks with the location of that border. The great Saul Steinberg jumped off the paper and created illusions, drawing on a bathtub:

or a box:

The clever artist Peter Callesen escapes the bonds of the page another way:

Even the art of Andy Goldsworthy, who makes temporary sculptures in nature using all natural materials, depends on his framing a space where he makes aesthetic choices and alters the natural order of things for the consideration of the viewer:

A few inches to the right or left of this sculpture there are rocks balanced on each other that are not art, but this one has became art because of the conceptual frame around it offered by Goldsworthy.

The iconoclast Jean Dubuffet dreams of a day when there is no longer a thing named "art" because the frame is gone:

What is true of art is true of many other things whose virtues fly away as soon as their names are spoken.... [I]t is quite probable that soon the painting, a rectangle hung with a nail on a wall, will become an outdated and ridiculous object-- a fruit fallen from the tree of culture and henceforth considered an antique....[T}he notion of art... will have ceased to be conceived of and perceived when the mind will have ceased to project art as a notion to be gazed upon, and art will be integrated in such a manner that thought, instead of facing it, will be inside it....

Until we live in Dubuffet's utopia, the role of art will continue to depend in part on where we draw the frame .

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part thirteen

The illustrator Bernie Fuchs erased this lovely drawing in 1964

1964 was the beginning of an era of bold experimentation in the United States. The Beatles and Bob Dylan were revolutionizing popular music; Martin Luther King won the Nobel prize as the civil rights movement gained momentum; humans were orbiting the earth and headed for the moon; Cassius Clay became the heavyweight champ and changed his name to Muhammad Ali; clothing and hair styles became adventurous; and all across America, students began protesting the war in Vietnam and experimenting with meditation or mind expanding psychedelic drugs.

In this climate, Look magazine commissioned Fuchs to create portraits of the leading civil rights leaders of the day. Fuchs began with the sensitive pencil portrait above. Then he paused, erased the drawing and turned the illustration board upside down. Starting fresh, he selected a large crayon and used slashing purple lines to come up with this much larger and bolder version:



You can still see the traces of the original discarded drawing below his signature.

The final version published in Look magazine was bolder still, a strikingly innovative work .

Welcome to the 1960s!

NOT ALL THE GOLD IN THE VAULT CAN SMILE LIKE THE NIGHT-WATCHMAN'S DAUGHTER

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Sounds like an improvement to me.

(Quote in title is a paraphrase from Walt Whitman's poem, A Song for Occupations)

ARTISTS IN LOVE, part twelve

Pierre Bonnard was a part time law student and a part time painter.  A man of diverse interests and little focus, he also considered a career as an interior decorator, or possibly a set designer. But mostly he enjoyed an active social life, spending much of his time at the theatre or chatting at the cafés with friends. 

Then one day Pierre saw a striking young woman getting off a trolley. He followed her to a small shop where she worked stringing beads on wreaths. Friends later described Marthe de Moligny as a "washed out Ophelia type...unstable and eccentric and morose." But Bonnard saw something special in her and persuaded her to leave the shop to become his model, his mistress, and later his wife.

Pierre and Marthe were very different. They quarreled bitterly at first. Pierre was unfaithful to Marthe. Marthe was melancholy, a reclusive hypochondriac and often a scold. When Pierre invited friends over, Marthe would slam the door in their faces. And yet, Pierre and Marthe held on, gradually working out their differences. Each surrendered the things that were less important to them. Bonnard gave up his mistress and his social life for the reclusive Marthe. They made a home together in a small apartment with almost no furniture. There, they retreated to their inner sanctum, the tiny bathroom where Marthe loved to take long baths every day while Pierre watched and painted her again and again.

In the cramped space, sometimes Pierre's own hand or leg ended up in the picture:

But it didn't matter. Pierre had found his focus, and was on his way to becoming a great painter. 

The couple shed friends, entertainment and other outside distractions as they went deeper and deeper. Pierre worked on one painting of Marthe in the bath for two years.  As Norman MacLean observed,  Everything gets smaller on its way to becoming eternal.  Altogether Pierre is reported to have made 384 pictures of his wife. The couple stayed together for 50 years, and when Marthe died Pierre was disconsolate.

Marthe never cared much about material possessions, but she did covet a grand bathroom, one with windows and running hot water so she wouldn't have to heat water in a pan on the kitchen stove. For most of her life, her bathroom had a simple iron bathtub, cracked plaster and raw wooden floors. So I find it revealing that Pierre painted her bathroom as very large, with shimmering rainbows of color and beautiful tiles, mirrors, luxuriant towels and sunlight streaming through big windows.

   

I suspect that's what he saw, and that's what he gave her.

RECOVERING THE SENSATION OF PERCEPTION

Victor Shklovsky, who was a pretty smart guy, wrote:

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife... and art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things.... The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult.

It's easy to understand what he means when you look at these brilliant pictures by illustrator and watercolorist Winslow Homer.

If you saw a boy in the woods with dogs, your eyes would recognize the subject and move on. But aaahhh, not so fast. Look at the wonderful service Homer has performed for you:



He has made commonplace objects unfamiliar, merging the patches of color on the dogs with the patches of color on the leaves. By showing us the abstract design in the world, Homer "increased the difficulty and length of our perception."



These stray branches would not be nearly so astonishing if Homer had not studied them with new eyes:



Another example is Homer's lovely watercolor of two girls standing in an orchard:



Homer seems to say. "Have you noticed the effect of the bonnets illuminated white from above and pink from behind? Or the shapes created by the dappled sunlight on their blouses?"



Your mind habitually allocates just enough attention to low hanging branches to keep you from walking into them. Homer shows you a display of leafy illumination that puts the grandest stain glass window to shame:



These pictures make you realize the extent to which we stumble like sleepwalkers through a world of familiar sights.

SEEING THE FOREST THROUGH THE TREES

You can tell a lot about an artist by whether they see forests or trees.

Some view a forest as a lot of individual trees. Others think that increasing the quantity of trees changes the quality of their appearance as well.

It's kind of like boiling water. You increase the temperature of water one degree at a time, until suddenly it changes from a liquid to a gas. Quantitative change turns into a qualitative change.

When artists draw a crowd, some choose to draw a lot of individuals:

Others don't draw every individual--but they like to imply every individual. Here, Frazetta puts a few representative figures out front, then uses stray arms and legs to suggest the balance of the crowd:



Here, Noel Sickles uses highlighting to carve individuals from the dark masses of crowd on either side of this painting. He is such a brilliant draftsman, he did not compromise on the individual characters the way Frazetta did, nor did he overwork the picture the way that maniac in the Renault ad (above) did.



Then all the way over on the "forest" side of the spectrum we have this lovely painting by Bernie Fuchs. He didn't even try to capture the individual personalities within the crowd.

He viewed the aesthetics of a crowd as totally different from a collection of individuals.

There's a point at which a bouquet of flowers is so large, it becomes a garden. Some artists persist in seeing the individual flower petals. Some create the illusion of painting every petal, using time saving techniques. Others step back and say, "my subject has now changed, from flowers to a garden."

TIME AND CHANCE HAPPENETH TO THEM ALL

Rasputin

Morton Roberts (1927-1964) was a serious painter, a child prodigy who graduated from the fine arts program at Yale University and launched a career as an illustrator for magazines such as Collier's, Redbook and McCall's in the 1950s and early 60s.


A frenzied peasant dance becomes an abstract design

He was one of a small group of gifted illustrators selected to illustrate historical series for Life magazine. While still a young man, he won respect for this series on Russian history:


Lenin greets the troops

Arpi Ermoyan wrote about this painting,

Roberts' composition is so well conceived that although the main character of the story, Lenin, is off to the left side of the picture, the eye is immediately drawn to him by the strategically placed red flag. The horizontal line formed by the tops of the soldiers heads also leads the eye directly to him.

This is clearly an artist who knew what he was doing.

Roberts also painted a series for Life on jazz and a series on opera.

Scene from a Chicago jazz club

New Orleans jazz

Detail from series on Rigoletto

Then, as quickly as his career began, it was over. In his mid 30s, Roberts died unexpectedly of a heart attack. He had spent his short time well, and left behind a small but beautiful legacy of work. But who knows what he might have accomplished with another thirty or forty years to paint?

None of us has a guarantee that we will live long enough to realize our artistic ambitions. We should remember the lesson of Morton Roberts as we evaluate each day's work.

A LITTLE ROOM

When Norman Rockwell launched his illustrious career, his first studio was a small attic room in a brothel. All afternoon a piano played in the parlour downstairs.

Rockwell later recalled, "a rough wooden stairway without railings led up to a trap door in the third floor ceiling." There Rockwell painted in a room so small that whenever one of the prostitutes who lived downstairs wanted to come up to smoke a cigarette and chat, Rockwell had to move his easel so the trap door could open.



The famous painter Rene Magritte lived with his wife for 24 years in a cramped three room apartment in the industrial suburbs of Brussels. The only space for his easel was in their small dining room. There he painted most of his pictures that are now hanging in major museums around the world.



Even the great Michelangelo worked in a small space. For a while, he lived in a tiny room under San Lorenzo, where his charcoal sketches on the walls can be seen to this day. At one point in his career, Michaelangelo constructed a hat with wax candles on the brim so he could work in the dark. Guided only by those flickering candles, he made some of the most beautiful art in the history of the world. Irving Stone quoted Michelangelo as saying that a small room is better for working than a large one, because a small room focuses the mind.



Sometimes I think my own work would be better if I had big skylights with good northern exposure, or large surfaces to spread out on, or a more current version of photoshop. Then I think again.