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.