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...
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.
