Mumbo Jumbo

I visited a museum the other day and read something that was enough to finally get me off my ass and write another blog post. The museum is dedicated to one of southern Sweden's local heroes, Axel Ebbe, primarily a sculptor of the female nude. What caught my eye, and started me thinking, was an explanatory plaque about one of Ebbe's pieces which read: 

LIKE A MELODY

"A work of art should captivate immediately. It should speak to the emotions through the eyes like a melody does through the ears." _ Axel Ebbe

Axel Ebbe wants his art to be experienced directly, with the heart. Using mythological motifs and creatures from folklore, he tries to reach into the subconscious to awaken feelings, memories and associations. The works come to him as a sudden vision he wants to share. Based on the initial idea, he creates his work through symbols and metaphors: longing for the fleeting sun is symbolized by a woman with a sad expression who stretches her body backwards, upwards. He creates his own interpretations of well-known myths from the Bible and Norse mythology. He recasts the Greek poet Orpheus as Orphea: a damsel playing a harp made from the body of a hunchbacked troll.

Do you like art when is impacts you immediately and emotionally? Or do you prefer work that satisfies intellectually, even if it sometimes requires reading or other contextualization in order to come fully into focus?

For me the choice is clear; I'm with Ebbe on this one. Ebbe, Jassans, Bacon, Hirst, McQueen, Helnwein... all my favorites hit you hard with the image first. In some cases a little follow-up intellectualization can deepen the experience, but it's not a requirement for the enjoyment of the work.

If you read this blog and you think this all sounds familiar, you're right; I've written about it before. If I have anything new to add, it's this: I wonder if that sort of art... art that tries to speak about universal truths through recognizable forms like the human body, is a bit out of fashion these days? In the "old days" (by which I mean, you know... 100 years ago...) it seemed like it was enough to sculpt a nude figure, give it a wistful facial expression or a or restless turn of the body, and call it something like "The Wind" or "Discontent". Or maybe put the nude on a wild animal and call it "Europe," or "Night." I think this is called Symbolism. It certainly seemed to work for Ebbe. It worked for Jassans too, but Jassans was a superior sculptor and his work would stand apart... get noticed and appreciated... no matter what it was called. Ebbe was not so great a sculptor, in my opinion, but the formula worked for him. He got famous and many Swedish towns have an Ebbe in the town square. 

Maybe the world is tired of that kind of thing. It seems to me that these days... in order to get into a museum or whatever, sculpture needs to have an axe to grind, or at least a backstory. Oftentimes the work is "identity-based," which is to say that the meaning of the work centers on a revelation of some core truth about the artist's racial, ethnic, geographic, or socioeconomic identity. Interestingly, the Ebbe museum has been recently renovated to include a new wing to show temporary exhibitions, and the current one features mostly work that needs a bit of reading to really understand it, much of which has been made by members of "marginalized" populations. The museum made no mention of the stark contrast between Ebbe's approach to sculpture, and the approach taken by most of the contemporary artists showing in the new wing, but to me the difference was so clear. I do understand that after so many years of domination of the art scene by white men (and women to a much lesser degree), it's important and valid that members of marginalized groups get a chance to break in. But when the message of the work feels more like a history lesson it can sometimes feel boring to me. Maybe it's just my white privilege / guilt, but I would rather experience a work of art by a Yanomami woman (or other marginalized group-member) which addresses love or death or the struggle for self-actualization from a Yanomami perspective, rather than the experience of being oppressed by the "dominant" culture. In other words, I'd rather see universal human stuff. Of course oppression at the hands of another culture is probably a commanding experience for oppressed communities and any commanding experience is a valid subject for art, but I wonder if work like that will stand the test of time in the same way that art which attempts to address more universal human struggles will, other than perhaps as history lessons or morality warnings? Maybe it's unfair to expect anything other than art about oppression from oppressed peoples until oppression itself is a thing of the past? Maybe that overarching experience needs to be resolved before the way can be cleared for other kinds of art. (And that unfortunately doesn't feel like it's going to be happening any time soon...) 

I'm in danger of rambling here, but I'll just bring it back around and say that any artwork that hits hard in the beginning with an emotionally evocative image (or narrative) has... I would say... a better chance at affecting its audience. If that emotional sledge-hammer is enough to get the viewer to read an explanatory plaque or do a follow-up web search about the artist and learn more, then that's great; the artwork will have succeeded even more. But it needs to hit you hard first. If it's too academic or esoteric and relies too much on explanatory text, it is not... in my opinion... successful. 

"Postmodernism" isn't a term I use a lot, but I know enough to understand that postmodernism is characterized by the breakdown of widely-held, universally accepted symbols and structures of meaning, and the emergence instead of "the many truths," meaning itself having been fractured into a billion meanings. I'm no fan of modernism, but I don't see much to like in postmodernism either. I think I prefer Symbolism!

OK, enough with all the pompous art-theory mumbo-jumbo... let's make the big leap to the psychology of art!

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Making art is like learning to see. That's my thesis. 

In my post way back on June 20th I talked about a grant I'd received to build 2 new sculptures for a festival here in Sweden, and I've now begun to work on those. I'll be building the one I mentioned in June, "Emotions Are Like the Weather," as well as a second one featuring two figures, a man and a woman, reaching for each other across a circle. 

Here, once again, is the proposal image for Emotions Are Like the Weather...

...and here is an image of the first face, almost done. 

As I write this I am preparing to make the silicone and plaster mold for this first face, which I will then cast in Jesmonite (which is a water-based casting resin... a bit like fiberglass but non-toxic). Once the mold is made, I will then re-sculpt this face into an angry one, make a mold, and then finally re-sculpt it again into yet a third emotion, and then mold and cast that one. (This third emotion is yet-to-be-determined; I want it to be somehow neither at the "happy" end of the spectrum nor the "sad," and so it's hard to figure out what it should be. I think it needs to be a subtly mixed emotion which is somehow also not boring or too arcane to read.) Then of course I will build the steel structure to carry them.

Here is the proposal picture for the second sculpture, which does not yet have a name (my working title might be too pretentious, too Symbolist!)

The ring in which the figures rest (or are trapped?) will be able to rotate within its frame. These two sculptures are the first time I am combining traditional figurative sculpture with metal fabrication and mechanics... and I am pretty excited about that. It feels like it could be the beginning of a new direction for me. 

The process of sculpting the first face has been fascinating to me from a psychological, or perhaps neuropsychological perspective. This face is fundamentally symmetrical, which makes it easier to explain what I mean. As I sculpt the face I am going through a non-stop process of the correcting of errors. I must see the errors, and then correct them. In a symmetrical sculpture like this one, the seeing of the errors often takes the form of the observation of unwanted asymmetry - things like "the left eye is too big," or "the right cheekbone is too high." In an asymmetrical sculpture the process is the same... always error correction... but often even harder because there is no mirror-side for comparison. But even the simple act of seeing and identifying the errors is not always easy! Sometimes it happens like "I can see that there is something wrong with the mouth, but I can't figure out what it is." Then you must look at the sculpture from every angle, look at it in a mirror, sometimes wait a day or two and come back to it... before you can correctly identify the problem. This in itself is fascinating! Why can't we see the errors right away? What is going on in the brain of the sculptor - my brain - that allows me to notice that something is wrong but not be able to pinpoint it? Or to fail completely to notice a problem? As one does this kind of thing more and more... painting, sculpting, drawing... one gets better. One learns to see! To make art is to learn to see. 

And then, when the sculpture or painting or drawing is finished... what is it other than a reflection of the artist's abilities and shortcomings? The work of art is a portrait of the artist's brain, their capacity to see and manually reproduce that thing that they want to make into art. If the artist has a neurological inability to perceive proportion, that failure will be in the artwork. On the other hand, if the artist has the imaginitive ability to see 'beyond' reality, to see rhythms and patterns that aren't literally there, or to distort reality in intentional and gratifying ways, this will also be in the art. The face I sculpted above was sculpted without reference images; I sculpted it just from my head... my idea of what a happy face should look like. And it has a certain 'look,' a certain unreality. Where does that come from? Why did I sculpt it that way? I don't know the answers, but surely if those answers were ever uncovered, they would say something interesting about my brain.

I guess this is one of the reasons I think art made by generative AI is so boring. Yes the artworks themselves can sometimes be amazing, but they don't reveal anything about anyone. And so AI art completely misses the exact thing that I find most interesting about art, its capacity to reveal something personal about the artist. 

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Sometimes I feel like a retired film star. You know how when movie stars reach a certain level of fame they just sort of disappear from the public eye? Like they don't really have anything to prove anymore. Sometimes I feel that way. I feel more and more these days that I am just making art for myself. Like I don't really care what other people think. Sometimes it seems as if I don't even care if other people see it. I certainly consider myself to be my most important critic; for me the most vital criteria for whether I consider one of my pieces to be good... is whether I like it. Of course none of this is absolute; I will still post on Instagram (although as I write this, I haven't done that in months), I will still try to show my work... especially to people I care about, and I will still try to get grants. But this feeling of not giving a shit, of doing it for myself, is definitely creeping in. And I like it. There's a lot of freedom there. 

I often think of the example of sculptor Lee Bontecou (and I think I've even written about her before.) After achieving some fame in the 1960's and 70's she then retreated from public view for about 30 years. But even though she made almost no attempt to have her work seen during those three decades, she never stopped working. When she was 're-discovered' in the early 2000's, she had a huge body of highly personal work. I think that is so cool! I think having the courage and self-confidence to just say "fuck off" to the world and disappear into art-making is so strong. Anyway, that's how I think of Lee Bontecou!

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This next point I want to make is definitely not mine alone, although the kernel of this idea did occur to me all by myself while driving one day..  and it pisses me off! Remember how in the 80's and 90's (and earlier) everyone owned their own copy of whatever entertainment media they liked? If you wanted a particular album, you bought an LP or a CD... and it was yours. If you loved a particular movie, you would buy it on VHS or DVD... and it was yours! Nowadays the big digital corporations just want you to stream everything... and so now instead of being an owner... you are just a renter. Not only that, you're a renter without consistent access to your rented property; what happens when you want to listen to your favorite album or watch your favorite movie, but you have no wifi or network connection? You're shit out of luck! I've heard it called "digital feudalism," and just like ye feudal lords of olde, these new digital corporations prioritize profit above all else, profit earned off your back. And when you think about the fact that they are simultaneously collecting all your data... your likes and dislikes and shopping patterns... just to be able to effectively sell you more shit, it's pretty fucking Matrix. I say: buy DVDs and CDs (or torrent and download if that's your thing) and resist being a cell in the giant battery! (Gotta admit, though... streaming is pretty convenient...)

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I'll be in the States soon. I'm running the Hand of Man at a private event (which I'm not supposed to say much about) in early December. So I'll be in Taos for 10 days in late November, and then in San Francisco from December 5-8, more or less. It will be fun to see old friends, but I'm also sort of scared to go to the US! It seems like a scary place!

It's been so long since I've posted that of course lots of other stuff has happened. We continued our workshop renovations over the summer, built 2 decks affording beautiful views over the neighboring fields...

Deck

...and we are making good progress on Christina's studio. 

I've also been a few fun trips, like Athens with Kodiak, Oslo with Cedar, and Barcelona with Christina. 

Cedar and me, having ridden our rental scooters all over the roof of the Oslo Opera House... Jesus that was fun!

Damian Hirst's Anatomy of an Angel. Such an epic sculpture.

Barcelona, visiting with our old friend Carla

I should probably do another post focusing on those trips; they were fun.

My verdict on living in Europe: no complaints. 

Cheers

SKULLS

MY SKULL COLLECTION, TAOS, 2007

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We got back from San Francisco and Taos about a week ago, and, WOW, I saw a lot of skulls on that trip. Maybe it was just because I was "tuned in" to seeing them... you know how when you are attuned to something, you see it everywhere? Like, if you are interested in birds or flowers or sports cars, you will notice more of them? Well maybe it was that. Or maybe, as my photos below will demonstrate, there were just a LOT of skulls on that trip. 

I have had a long relationship with skulls. 

I can't quite remember when it began... but it was a long time ago. I remember being 16 years old, living in the heart of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury and one day mounting a small skull on the front of my Honda XL250, which I kept parked on the sidewalk. 16-year-old me thought that looked really cool! It had been stolen by the next morning. I guess that's my earliest memory of actually owning a skull.

A few years later, in college in New York City, I started collecting for real. Possibly my best skull-collecting story... certainly my craziest... dates from my third year in university. In search of animal skulls, I located the largest animal crematorium in the area; they handled all the roadkill and otherwise unclaimed animals in the whole New York area. When I first contacted the guy in charge, I gave him a bullshit story about being an anatomy student needing skulls for a school project, but when I showed up on my Honda XL600R, he saw right through it. "You're not really studying this stuff... you're just into skulls, right?", he asked... "Uhh, yeah I guess.." I replied. "Cool, come with me" was his answer. He led me into a huge walk-in freezer filled with large wheeled carts stacked full of dead animals and said I could take whatever I wanted, except that I had to take the whole animal. He was not going to allow me to cut the heads off and leave him the bodies. That stipulation rather limited my options, having only a motorcycle. But I took what I could carry in black plastic bags on the back of my bike, and after 3 or 4 visits I had quite a few skulls. Nothing too exotic; mostly cats and dogs and at least one goat. I was living with roommates in a communal house on 113th and Broadway at the time, and they were not very excited about me preparing animals skulls in our kitchen, so I eventually broke into the abandoned building next door and used the kitchen there. The stove still worked and I was able to work in peace. Oh, the things we do when we are young! Crazy times...

Two of the best skulls in my collection also date from those days in NYC. I got my first human skull from a flea market on 26th St. and 6th Ave. sometime around 1990. There was a vendor there selling nothing but bones and when I saw this beautiful skull priced at $300, I had to have it. 

Skulls in this condition now sell for a lot more than that. A little later in this post I will discuss the trade in human skulls; it's interesting and, some would say, a bit controversial. 

The other skull which I really treasure and which also came from those years in New York is this one...

I saw it in the window of a little curio shop in the East Village - the kind of shop that sells a curated selection of just about everything - and right away I was pretty sure it was a rare find. The size of the skull - it measures about 215mm long (or about 8.5 inches) - told me it was either a juvenile lion or a leopard... but the adult teeth excluded it from being a juvenile anything... and leopard skulls are exceedingly rare (as well as being basically illegal to sell without paperwork). The woman in the store told me she had bought it from the estate sale of an old hunter (there were several other skulls and skins from Africa, from the same estate sale), and that she believed it to be the skull of a young lion. By this time I was pretty sure it was actually a leopard and so, without saying a word, I bought it. I've since confirmed it to be a leopard and it is the pride of my collection. I really love cat skulls. I also have a tiger skull, two lions, a bobcat, a caracal (also a gorgeous skull), and several domestic cats.

Speaking of domestic cats, this is Havoc. He was Christina's favorite pet, ever. 

I prepared his skull for her as a present. 

He was really a great cat and it's nice that he is still with us.

After graduating from university I was involved in a theater production in Scotland and eventually found myself in Africa, where I had some pretty crazy adventures in search of skulls. At one point I befriended a petty criminal in Uganda who was also a really funny guy. I told him I was interested in finding a skull from the cat family and the next day he tried to sell me a dog skull, swearing that it was a leopard! He also asked me to provide change for a few $100 bills which were obviously counterfeit. It turned out that HE had made the fake bills and when I told him that they were clearly fakes, he was at first offended... then surprised... and then he wanted me to tell him what was wrong so he could make them better! 

By the time I reached the Western Uganda town of Kasese, I was traveling on another Honda XL250 and nearing the end of my trip. I must have been an unusual sight in that part of the world... a 22 year old white guy on a motorcycle, and as soon as I pulled in I was approached by a very confident 12 year old local boy named Sam who basically offered to be my tour guide. He spoke perfect English and for the next week or so Sam and I rode around Kasese on all kinds of adventures, including looking for skulls. As amazing and hard-to-believe as it sounds, he took me to two different local witch doctors... old men in small huts surrounded by medicinal plants and dried animal parts and skins! I wish I had pictures. None of these visits turned up any skulls, but they were amazing adventures. Sam was a great kid, and towards the end of the week he even invited me for dinner at his family home. 

On the Equator in Uganda

I did buy some monkey skins from a tribe of real pygmies, but I made the mistake of trying to send those home to myself through the mail and the package never arrived. 

With the Pygmies

By the end of my trip I had managed to collect a chimpanzee skull and a baboon skull, both of which I basically smuggled back into New York (this was before the days of baggage x-rays!) These two primate skulls are the brown ones in the first picture above; they were painted brown because they were originally included as parts of sculptures. I also brought back a small hyrax skull that I picked up while climbing Mount Kenya. 

A better picture of the Baboon

I've also gotten a few skulls from roadkill over the years, including a kangaroo skull I grabbed while on a road trip in Australia in 2009.

When we moved to Sweden almost three years ago I was advised by the agent helping us with our shipping container NOT to include my skull collection due to Sweden's stringent rules on things like that. But I miss my collection and have been trying, in a rather slow and lazy way, to start a fresh collection here. 

A few months ago, in the course of doing some research about sculpting the human face, I read about the importance of understanding the structure of the skull, and suddenly my interest in skulls was fired up again. I started seeing them everywhere...

 So.. back to San Francisco and Taos... Here is what I mean when I say that I saw a lot of skulls...

Wayne Thiebaud painting...

4 pictures above, all from the San Francisco Hall of Sciences

Mummified cat in the workshop of my artist friend Reto Messmer, who uses skulls in his sculpture. I loved this cat so much that I tried to trade with Reto, offering some of my nicest skulls, but he wouldn't budge! (It was a gift to him, so he felt he couldn't trade it away...) But it got me searching for a mummified cat of my own....

Another cat from Reto's workshop

Drawing by Nocolai Fechin

A dog and a coyote, from the Taos Mesa

I mentioned to my friend Michael Lujan in Santa Fe that I was on the hunt for a mummified cat, and he blew me away by gifting me this little fellow for my birthday! Thanks Michael!!

I took many more photos of skulls on this trip, from my own collection, from the museum in San Francisco, from Reto's workshop, and from Taos's coolest new store Taxonomy (they sell skulls!), but for the sake of brevity I haven't included them all.

But the coolest skull of all is the one you get to bring home, right? 

During most of the 20th century, every doctor and dentist in the West was required to own their own human skull (or in some cases a whole skeleton), and this one...

...belonged to my father, until last week. He graciously gifted it to me during those few days in San Francisco, and now it is back in Sweden with me. In contrast to what my shipping agent told me during our move here, as long as the bones in question were not originally intended for burial or cremation, it's no problem to own human bones here. 

So yeah, let's talk about private ownership of human bones and skulls. Some people think it's totally normal, while others appear to think it's kind of creepy or even morally wrong. 

The situation is interesting. The vast majority of skulls for sale on the private market are medical skulls, which is to say that they were prepared as a commodity to sell to all those doctors between about 1920 and 1985 who were professionally required to own one. Most of them have "medical preparations" of some sort, such as a cut calvarium (top of the brain case) and a sprung jaw. Unmodified skulls, meaning those with no cuts or hardware, are more rare. Both of mine are clearly medical skulls. 

But what does that really mean? A little internet research quickly reveals the fact that most of these skulls were originally obtained under questionable circumstances, sometimes linked to slavery, and typically without the consent of their "owners." And yet, they exist. They are out there, available. So what to do with them? The answer, currently, is to make them available for sale on the open market. Many people collect them. But is that the right thing to do? Opinions vary widely. If you just read the comments from this one video, you can see that opinions range from "This whole thing is sick and morally wrong" to "I would be honored if someone kept and owned my skull after my death." Christina and I keep Havoc's skull as a way of honoring and remembering him, so why not human skulls? Are humans so different from animals that they demand a whole different set of rules? (I mean, maybe they are. Maybe, because of the depth of our relationships with other people, owning a skull just feels like too much for some people. Owning a skull of someone you knew would probably be too much for most people. Maybe that's one of the reasons why so many of these skulls are "medicalized," with cuts and springs and hardware; it allows us to distance ourselves from the humanity of these skulls and see them more like objects...?)

As for me personally, I'm somewhere in the ambiguous middle. My own opinion about owning skulls reminds me of my own opinion about owning guns. Yes, I think the world would be a better and safer place if all guns would magically disappear, but that's not going to happen. They exist, they are here to stay, and as long as that's the case I would like to own a few. Plus, they are fascinating and beautiful. Same with skulls.

So that brings me finally to: Why collect skulls? What's the source of the fascination? On one hand, I feel like the answer is self-evident, and it's a question that doesn't really need answering. I mean, why is art fascinating? Why are motorcycles cool? Why is sex fun? They say that the human skull is the only human body part that is just as powerful dead as alive. The experience of holding and handling a real human skull is powerful and charged. To think about the person that once lived in that skull can be complex and intense. They are the ultimate Memento Mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death, and therefor of the brilliance of being alive! Skulls are beautiful. They are structural. If they had been designed by a person, that person would deserve the "Best Designer of the Universe, Ever" award. But of course they were designed by Nature, and they are perfect. They are graceful. They are fragile and yet strong. No two are the same. 

I want more of them. 

Art and Travel and Travel and Art

I just looked back to see the last time I blogged, and... Oh my gosh it's been a long time.

Since then I've been to Switzerland, to Rome, to San Francisco (twice), to Athens, and I'm writing this now from Taos.

I did a painting that points in a very different direction for my painting practice, and then abruptly set aside painting for a return to sculpture. I've built a new mechanical sculpture and put it in my first art show in Sweden (a group show with Christina and other friends), and I've also received my first grant to build a new sculpture since moving there.

And we have begun a new building renovation project at our farmstead. 

Lots to catch up on.

I devoted almost the entirety of my last post to discussing my struggle with brush strokes. Not long after writing that, I noticed online advertisements for a week-long workshop in Lausanne, Switzerland with a painter who I like a lot, and upon realizing that I could fit it into my schedule I decided to go. I like this painter, Mustafa Özel, precisely because his strengths are my weaknesses; he paints confidently and organically, he is not afraid to use color, and he is comparatively free with his brush-strokes, all within an essentially realist and figurative framework. 

Lausanne was sweet (many steep hills and good fondue!), I had a nice connection with the model (who helped me solidify my commitment to posing one day as an art-model myself), and I made two paintings, one of which was good.

Lausanne

Me, one of the other painters, and Mustafa

My painting from the class

Wayne Thiebaud, the California painter I brought into the discussion in my last post, was still very much on my mind as I came into this worksho. And to be honest, the painting I made in Lausanne shows more influence from Thiebaud than from Mustafa. The courageous use of color, the thickly applied paint, the multi-colored energetic edges, and the white background are all from Thiebaud. To be fair, the contrasting use of warm and cool colors comes straight from Mustafa. And I think there was something liberating about just being with Mustafa, a real teacher, that allowed me to play with paint in a new way.

Anyway I was pretty happy with this painting and I returned from Switzerland intent on bringing some of these new ideas into my paintings. 

But it was not to be. 

That was over four months ago and I haven't painted since.

Not long after returning from this exciting trip it became clear that I would need to make a short-notice trip to San Francisco. My father, who still lives there in the beautiful city of my youth, is facing some health challenges and my brother and I flew there to assist him with a few things. With two 12-hour flights coming up, I tried to find a way to use that time productively. Initially I considered trying to make a painting on the flight, but Christina suggested I try to do a sculpture instead... and it turned out to be a fateful suggestion... because I've been sculpting ever since.

Sculpting a small portrait, high above Greenland

I liked the results of my portrait sculpting efforts enough that, upon returning to Sweden, I gave it a body.

Here you can see the head welded to an armature for the body, in front of some reference pictures. Several months later, as I write this, the sculpture is still unfinished. It's a long story, which I will tell in condensed form below.

Not long after that Kodiak had a school break and we decided to go to Rome, in part to keep him occupied (you parents know what I mean) but also to show him Rome.

After 3 trips in a month I wanted nothing more than to stay put for a while. Some friends had arranged a group show in Malmö in May, to which Christina and I were both invited. I decided to show some of my paintings... which I was excited about as it was to be the first time showing my paintings in public, but I also wanted to show the breadth of my work and include some sculpture. I had been working for quite some time on a small clay sculpture... 

... and I felt this was a good time to finish it and cast it in bronze. What followed was a very long story of failure, which ended up with me being unable to make a bronze casting, AND losing the original clay sculpture. The root cause of the failure was that I used the wrong kind of clay for working with silicone, which prevented me from being able to make a mold of the piece. But it was not for lack of trying...

... and I learned a lot along the way. In the end I showed the small bronze portrait that I made a year or two ago at the show. I also had an idea for a mechanical sculpture - a woman's hand endlessly and repetitively squeezing a stress ball - and so I spent the next month making that. I equipped it with a foot pedal so the audience could control it.

I ended up showing 6 paintings, the bronze head, and the mechanical hand. 

It was great to show my work, finally. 

And... I must admit that I was a little disappointed with the show. I had cautiously hoped for better attendance, and some sort of reaction... from anyone. I suppose I will need to organize a proper show for myself at some point, in a proper venue. 

Back to the sculpture I started after making the head on the flight to San Francisco...

I said it was a long story, but basically... I got quite far along sculpting the body, as you can see above, before I realized that I had been using the wrong kind of clay!! The body (luckily not the head!) is sculpted in the same clay that gave me so much trouble with the previous sculpture. (For those who want more detail, I believe I accidentally sculpted it in Roma Plastilina, which contains sulfur. Sulfur inhibits the curing of silicone, and that is a show-stopper. As you can see from this image, the "wrong" clay on the body and the "right" clay on the head look exactly alike. What a pain.) So, not long after the above photo was taken, I had to strip off the clay from the entire body, down to the armature, and start over. As I write this, the second go with the body is about 30% done.

I've noticed something interesting about the different ways I approach painting and sculpture. Being a relative novice at painting, I frequently try to educate myself through reading about it (which is where I get all that advice about brush strokes.) Another thing one finds in the educational literature is the idea that one is supposed to float freely from one part of the painting to another, organically making corrections and improvements wherever you see the need. I have a very hard time painting this way... but it's exactly how I sculpt! When I'm painting I feel the need to focus on one section at a time and bring it to completion before moving on. It's a very uptight way of painting. Part of the issue for me is that oil paint dries too quickly for my taste, which makes it hard to come back to earlier sections and re-work them after a few days. That's something I like about the clay I use (which is called Plastilene)... it never dries. I've also put a bit of effort into finding the slowest-drying oil paint brands (which, for the curious, are Blockx and M. Graham). I believe the oil painter in me has something to learn from the sculptor in me.

So we are almost caught up here. We are in Taos right now, but we came by way of San Francisco. I started yet another sculpture on the 12 hour plane ride...

It was great to spend a few days in SF with my dad, who continues to struggle with health issues. The other thing that really excited me about being there was the opportunity to see a large retrospective of Wayne Thiebaud paintings currently on show at the Legion of Honor. There have been only two times in my life that I've gotten emotional seeing a work of art in a museum... Alexander McQueen's bamboo dress at the Met, and Thiebaud's Supine Woman last week...

I saw this painting about 5 years ago in Arkansas and it was the first time I'd understood that Thiebaud is amazing. I guess I've had a sort of relationship with this painting since then and I wasn't expecting to see it again... and it was sort of overwhelming.

Just quickly, before I leave Thiebaud, I want to show these two pictures which I think really illustrate his incredible confidence in using paint...

OK, so now we are in Taos.

It's complicated for me to be here. But I'll talk about that another day.

The last thing I want to mention here, briefly, is the fact that I have received my first grant to build a sculpture in Sweden, which is pretty darned exciting. Starting over in a new place involves many steps, and I would say that the last thing to fall into place for me, and Christina, has been work. We bought ourselves some time by selling our house in Taos last year (we did not sell the workshop), so we have had the freedom to try to find the right kind of work, and this grant is a significant step in the right direction. 

I will build a sculpture featuring three faces, each displaying a different emotion, which are suspended on a mechanism allowing them to move up and down. They will be counterbalanced against each other such that, despite their weight, they will move freely... and when one moves up the others will move down, and so forth. The piece is about the fleeting nature of emotion and is called "Emotions Are Like the Weather". Here is the proposal image...

For some reason this festival is keen on displaying two sculptures by each participating artist so they've allocated a few thousand more bucks for me to build a second piece as well, which is yet to be determined. I'm pretty happy about all of that!

OK that's about all I've got. We are here in Taos for another week or so and... who knows... maybe I will write a wrap-up about the trip sometime in the next few weeks.

I hope this finds you all well. Sorry about Trump and all that. Every empire falls eventually. It's sad to see people voting for their own demise, but the Germans also did it in 1933, so it's nothing new. Like I said in the beginning, we have begun a new building renovation project in Sweden, and when we are done at the end of the summer (hopefully), we will have a sweet new guest apartment. So to all our friends in the States, just reach out if you need to get away from Trumpistan for a bit. 

Hugs,

Christian

In Which I Continue My Struggle with Brushes and Paint

A freewheeling and lavishly illustrated post mostly about art but maybe also about other things too... things like Hydra and David Lynch? But I think David Lynch is art too.

I have for a long time struggled with the whole topic of brush strokes in painting. I can see a few of you rolling your eyes with boredom already; I hope I don't lose you so early! I'll try to keep it interesting!

Many painters, especially those who paint realism, make an effort to show NO visible brush strokes at all. For example, have a look at this painting by Ingres:

This approach was pretty much the Norm for hundreds of years before the advent of photography, during which time painting was mostly preoccupied with faithfully documenting life and people. 

Then the camera came along and relieved painting of the obligation to be documentary; painting was suddenly free to be interpretive. Brush strokes went wild and things got impressionistic. There are gazillions of examples to show this, but this Van Gogh that I photographed recently in Amsterdam is as good as any:

When I began to paint a few years ago I couldn't help but notice - on Instagram and Youtube and other places - that loose painting (visible brushstrokes) was considered COOL... it was the way you were supposed to paint. But I could never find anyone to explain WHY. Why are you supposed to paint loosely? I rebelled against this dogma, in part because I don't like dogma, and the idea of doing anything because that's the way you're supposed to do it without understanding why seems weak and stupid to me. Additionally I felt that several of my favorite painters did not adhere to the "Visible Brush Strokes Are Cool" school. These are painters who I felt had something precise, important, and personal to say... painters like Mati Klarwein, Paul Cadmus, and Gottfried Helnwein. 

   

Mati Klarwein

Paul Cadmus

Gottfried Helnwein

These painters, and many others like them, apparently have no interest in loose brushwork... and my interpretation is that they want to say something specific, to convey an idea or a statement, and so loose brushwork would do nothing other than 'muddy' that message, make it imprecise and less impactful. 

BUT NOW, AFTER ALL THIS TIME AND OPPOSITION, I AM STARTING TO OPEN TO THE IDEA OF LOOSE BRUSHWORK. 

Despite the fact that I have never ever anywhere read a compelling defence of loose brushwork (a fact which I find endlessly annoying), I might be starting to see some reasons. (I suppose that after all, it's probably better to come to these ideas for myself rather than reading other people's justifications..)

For one thing, there are times when it just looks better. I find that this is usually in combination with precise brushwork elsewhere in the same image. To illustrate this point I will show - for the first time - a new painting I completed recently:

Initially all the edges in this painting were razor sharp, but at a certain point I decided to make them all intentionally imprecise, with the exception of the edges of the hand. 

This had the effect of bringing the hand 'into focus' in both a photographic sense as well as a psychological sense. And it just looks better than it did when all the lines were sharp. I suspect this might mimic something about the way the human eye focuses on things, making some things sharp and others blurry. (Or is it just the way we have been conditioned to see, based on looking at photographs, with their limited focal range?)

Although I used Helnwein above as an example of someone who tends towards precise brushwork, here is a painting by him... 

... which combines hard and soft edges to focus our attention. I think in this painting he is also using softer brushwork on the faces of the men to tell us something about their character. (This is among my very favorite paintings in the world, certainly in the top three...)

Another key to this discussion comes from something I read by the French painter Bruno Schmeltz, who writes about the importance of the "container being consistent with the contents." What he means by this is that the painting STYLE should match the painting's SUBJECT. The one painter (that I actually like) who most exemplifies this for me is Francis Bacon. 

One of Bacon's many Pope paintings. 

Bacon's eternal and unchanging message was something like "the human condition is characterized by pain, violence, dissociation, and confinement" (my interpretation), and the thing that is so brilliant about Bacon - and what makes him such a successful artist - is that he conveys this message through a perfect concordance of style and subject. The container matches its contents. His contorted grotesque people and his anguished tortured brushwork are both screaming the same thing at the same time. No wonder he is considered among the greatest painters of all time.

I was recently given access to a library of several hundred Christie's auction catalogs. These catalogs feature beautiful extreme closeup photographs of paintings, clearly showing the brushwork. This is something really special that you just simply don't see in ANY other way, not even in most art books. Look, for example, at this closeup of a Bacon painting:

And for the record... look also at this extreme closeup of Lucien Freud. 

I'm not really a huge Freud fan, but this photo, also from a Christie's catalog, is so instructive.

I think an interesting question that arises from this discussion is how much the Style and the Subject (or the Container and the Contents) can really be separated in some of these painters. In Bacon, for instance - and Freud as well - the subject is just people, and the message is arguably conveyed MORE by the style than by the content. (Although it must also be said that 'people' is a deceptively complex subject; it is not one subject but rather an infinitely regressing progression of subsets differentiated by headings like gender, age, posture, expression, assertiveness / demureness, aggression / passivity, etc etc etc. I don't think Bacon or Freud would work as well with happy smiling people. And so yes, I would say the content can actually be considered as  separate from the style, even in the work of these two.)

If I had to put a name on the message in my painting, it is something having to do with the collision between emotion and the feminine. (I actually have a much more articulate understanding of this message - it's even written down somewhere - but for all kinds of reasons it's not something that I think should be shared publicly). So the BIG FUCKING QUESTION facing me here is: Does my container match its contents? Is a precise and realistic style the best vehicle to convey messages about emotion? If I am using a precise and controlled style, am I not more like a clinician describing emotion in a detached and emotionless way than a real whole person (painter) actually conveying it? 

I'm currently working through a great book called The Art Spirit (recommended to me by the talented Jeff Cochran) in which the author makes the following challenging claim: Every brush stroke is the exact embodiment of the state of mind, the state of feeling, of the artist at the time that he or she made it. In fact the author devotes 10 or 15 pages of this book just to the discussion of brush strokes!

So if a painting is supposed to convey an emotion, and the brush strokes are the carrier of the feeling of the painter, what does it mean when the painter wants no brush strokes at all? Can a painter whose brush strokes are so controlled that they carry no emotion ever really make a painting that conveys an emotion? Or is there fertile artistic ground to be tilled by the detached and clinical depiction of emotion by someone who is not literally experiencing the emotion? After all, the flash of inspiration that forces an artwork into existence typically lasts only a moment, and everything that follows is just work in the service of that moment. Jesus, who knew painting would be so hard! Or so complex!

The final piece of the puzzle I want to bring in here revolves around the work of California painter Wayne Thiebaud. Thiebaud had a spectacular career spanning over about 7 decades, and is mostly known for painting cakes, pies, and other foods, although he also painted landscapes and people. Unsurprisingly I am mostly interested in his paintings of people, but the truth is that I am much more interested in his style than his subjects. In this photo that I took back in 2019...

of his painting Supine Woman, as well as this one from a Christie's catalog...

you can see that Thiebaud is not afraid of laying paint on in a thick and rather uninhibited way. Some people even say his handling of paint is "joyous", and at the risk of sounding like an anthropomorphizing sommelier, I have to say I sort of agree. What I see in the way he handles paint is a kind of glorious embracing of the fluid nature of paint, allowing the paint to act like paint. As someone who has consistently struggled with the paint itself... always trying to control it... I really like that about him.

Perhaps the last thing I should say about my slowly growing interest in loose brushwork is that I just can't seem to do it very well, and that is as good a reason as any to give it a shot. Maybe experimentation will lead me somewhere interesting. I've just prepared a handful of smaller canvases so I can play around a bit. 

If you read this blog regularly, and you find yourself thinking "Wow, Christian is just flitting uncontrollably from one painter to the next," you're not alone. I feel that way too! The world is just too full of great painters and paintings, and I do like different things about many of them. I'm trying to forge a way for myself, for my paintings, between all these giants. Sometimes I feel I'm better at thinking and writing about painting than I actually am at painting. But I continue to paint. So there. 

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If you think I'm doing myself a disservice by stepping away from sculpture, fear not. Sometime in the next three days, not later than the deadline on Wednesday, I will submit a proposal for a new sculpture. It is for a public art festival in Örebro, Sweden next year, and if accepted the sculpture will be built this summer and fall and displayed for about 6 months in 2026. I'll let you know.

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In November I visited the Brazilian side of my family in Amsterdam (and went to the Rijksmuseum as well as the Van Gogh Museum), and in December Christina and Kodiak and I spent two weeks around New Years in Greece for the second year in a row. Athens is always fun, and hanging with my brother Cles and his one-year-old twins was a blast...

 ... but the real highlight for us is always our time on the island of Hydra. 

We are going to retire there one day, I tell you!

Until next time,

Hejdå

PS: RIP David Lynch. I've never been a rabid fan of his movies (don't misinterpret that; I love his movies, just not rabidly!), but I have always loved his embrace of the artistic life, his interpretation of what it means to live as an artist. He was brave to be so unique. He will be missed.

PPS: As I write this the fires that have devastated parts of LA are still burning, albeit less ferociously than they were a week ago. As far as I am aware, no one that I know personally lost their home in LA, but each of those few friends that I still have there knows many people who did in fact lose their homes. I don't know what to say, really, other than that it must be devastating and I wish everyone well. I'm sure that even living there now must be tough. I'm thinking about you all.