Popular Colors

Below is my newest work in the Running Stitch series - Carry On, 24"H x 60"W, painted and printed paper, cardboard, book parts, rubber, metal, tacks with encaustic on 3 joined panels

Carry On, 2010 (Click image for a larger view)

The title has several meanings/references: (1)the basket-shapes in the rectangles of the central panel, (2)continue or move forward, in regard to life in general or more specifically in regard to the texts of the dismembered books, (3)do something, i.e. make the next art work.


The Color RED
I made this piece in red because I like the vibrancy of red and red attracts attention. Besides, everyone knows   that people like red. (Or do they? Hmmmm. See below.)

Meanshile, from Wikipedia (the compendium of all the world's knowledge), this description of red says it all:

Red is the color that is on the outside edge of the rainbow. It is one of the three primary colors, along with blue and yellow. Red light has a wavelength between 630-750 nanometers.

Red is the color of some apples.

Red is the color of some blood and the occasional tomato.

It is sometimes used to mark things that are wrong, important, or dangerous.

Popular Colors
Based on a recent personal survey of an unusual type, red is not the most popular color. My survey consisted of submitting images of 79 works to an art consultant recently. (Yes, I have a lot of work around - and this was mostly old work.) While by no means an exact breakdown, I'm speaking here about dominant color, the works broke down about like this:

Red  -  17
Yellow/Orange - 32
Blue  -  23
Green  -  7

Of these, the client is "thinking" about taking 11 pieces, that break down as follows:

Green  -  4
Yellow  -  2
Blue  -  5

Not a red in the bunch. (You can congratulate me later if it really happens.) I think this survey provides valuable knowledge and debunks the prevalent view that green is not a good color for a painting. In my Questionnaire of 14 artists, green was by far the favorite color of the artists interviewed. Was it only Rothko who was a red devotee?

Matisse - Red Studio

Rothko - Four Darks in Red (at the Whitney)

Clyfford Still - 1949 No. 1

Philip Guston Zone 1954

Philip Guston Painting, Smoking, Eating, 1973

Most Popular Colors in Decorating
By chance, I happened to receive an email today from HGTV. I'm on their list because every day for 30 days in a row I entered their contest for a fully-furnished, newly-constructed home out west. (Note: I did not win.) So one of their headlines grabbed me: The Five Most Popular Colors. I had to see what they were. Here they are in order of least to most popularity:

5. Yellow
4. Pink
3. Grey
2. Green
1. Brown

Well, that's a big YUCK.  I don't see aqua, orange or magenta anywhere on there, colors that I prefer in my rooms. However, perhaps this is useful information for artists looking to sell work for over the sofa. Certainly Brown is good news for that because pretty much everything goes with it. OK, I do not like brown and I only like beige in dogs.

December Arting Expedition
I am off tomorrow for another trip to NYC with the Binster to visit some galleries and see the Ab-Ex and drawing shows at MoMA. I'll have a full report on my return.

Abstract Expressionism at MoMA

Three of the works featured in the Museum of Modern Art's Abstract Expressionist New York, October 2, 2010--April 23, 2011.

Hedda Sterne, New York VIII, 1954, 72 1/8" x 42"

Philip Guston, The Clock, 1956-57, oil on canvas, 76"x64 1/8"

Philip Guston, Painting, 1954, 63 1/4"x60 1/8"

Philip Guston painting and talking

Wow, a great video of Philip Guson painting and talking about his work!

This video is from the National Gallery via YouTube posted by Jeffrey Collins. (It says footage of Guston from Michael Blackwood.) I took it off Facebook courtesy of Tracey Physioc Brackett.

It's fascinating to see him working so loosely. His paint handling is just fabulous. But even more important is his struggle to be true to himself and his ideas.

If you are interested in Guston, you might want to read my earlier posts about his life and work:

Inspiration for Painting - Philip Guston and The Presence of Absence.

The Presence of Absence

While stumbling around on the internet, I came across this description of Philip Guston's studio after his death, as described by his daughter, Musa Mayer. It was so poignant that I wanted to share it. It's from the end of her book, "Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston." I had read her book a few years ago and found it absorbing and very well written. I recommend it both to those who like Guston's work and those who just like memoirs and/or biographies - especially of artists.

Philip Guston: Talking, 78"x68", 1979

"Beside the glass double doors to my father's studio is a green curtain for privacy, so that no one would walk in on Philip when he was working. Though no one is here but me, I find myself instinctively pulling the curtain across the entryway, hearing the brass rings scrape along the metal rod. Still protecting him. I open the curtain again, reach for the lights, and pause for a second look. The studio walls are bare, with only ladders and light fixtures leaning up against them to disturb their white expanse. Big wooden packing crates for a European exhibition now past, built sturdy as furniture and lined with green felt, are stacked like giant blocks. Stretched, primed canvases stand side by side, waiting. For a year or two, we cleaned in here, but now everything carries a fine coat of pale blond dust. We call this room 'the studio,' but it is no one's studio now. No longer steeped in sadness, it is too anonymous for that. It is no longer his. It's just a room, an empty room. It could be anyone's space, with its flat lights, its silences, its dust. I listen to the high whine of the fluorescent lights, the beating of the silence behind. So this is what death is really, I think, what it becomes. Beyond the pain of loss, there is finally only this sense of absence. The night quiet. And the way that memories blur, running into one another in the dilution of time."

Selected Painting of the Day + Love Words

Just a Little More, oil and cold wax on canvas, 2008, 36"x36"x1.5"

There's something about this painting that reminds me of Guston's work. It looks a little cartoonish but at the same time has a certain dignity. I gave it that title because at first it was much more an all-over field and then I started putting in boxes. I kept adding more and more of them until they almost filled up the whole work. Then I started over-painting and taking back the field. And then more boxes came back and I kept painting...just a little more. Like eating peanuts - whoops! not these days.

I made this painting as a companion to an earlier piece:



This one is titled Ooooo because of the ooooo in it and also because I was so enjoying working with this medium.

I like to use cold wax medium when I paint with oil. Dorland's is the most well-known brand, but I prefer Gamblin's because it has less solvent, is more creamy and dries to a more flexible skin. When you mix it with oil paint as a medium, it will let you spread the paint with pallette knives like butter. It dries to a matte finish.

Note for those painting in encaustic, this cold wax medium has nothing to do with encaustic and should not be used with it. If you heat it, it will release toxic fumes because it contains turpentine (solvent).

Aromaphilia (Not a real word, but I made it up to mean "love of aroma.")
Back when I attended MassArt, every time I walked into the building where we had student studios, the smell of oil paint let me know that I was home. I just love that smell - I think even more than the aromatic smell of beeswax and damar resin. Oil paint just wafts me away on a pink cloud more than the most expensive perfume.

Yesterday, after finally recovering from that nasty virus, I decided to clean the house. I felt so sick of winter and so badly in need of uplift from something. When I spotted two wrapped paintings standing against the wall in my bedroom, I decided that they were the change of vision I needed and that hanging them would be my mission before mundane tasks like vaccuuming.

As soon as I peeled apart the bubblewrap, I could smell the oil paint and it was luscious. The painting I hung in the bedroom was Just a Little More, and I hung it opposite the bed so I could look at it morning and night. This is not something I would have done years ago, but I'm fairly happy with this painting and don't mind looking at it for extended periods. That is, I'm not constantly thinking about how I could repaint sections. Progress?

Chromophilia (love of color)
One thing about the bedroom is that the walls are magenta, as in Pipilotti-Rist-at-MoMA-magenta. The surprising thing is that I didn't paint them that color, the prior owner of our house did. At first I was taken aback by it, but I grew to really like it, so here's the painting as it looks on magenta:

Deciding to post this image got me thinking about other backdrops for artwork in our house. We have really strong colors on the walls - no white box for us - so here is more art hung on chromophiliac walls.




Encaustic paintings on deep turquoise.




Another wall in the same room with a work on paper (Pale Guide, 1999).




An oil painting (Mission to Mars, 2004) on dark orange.

Two little oil paintings on a blue-grey wall.

I like the way the art interacts with the wall behind it. It's always a surprise to hang something and see how the wall color changes your perception. Too much interference with art's sanctity? What do you think?

Inspiration for Painting - Philip Guston

Yesterday I was thinking about writing a piece on Philip Guston. It was a gloomy, stormy day and I felt kind of melancholy and annoyed, really too cranky to write. In the afternoon, as I went to the door to let the dogs out, I saw a red-tailed hawk in the yard standing over a kill and eating warily. When I opened the door, the hawk flew off with the corpse in one talon. I went over to look at the spot where he had been eating. In the center of the area, surrounded by a ring of feathers (a mourning dove I think), were pieces of viscera - intestines, a foot, pieces of flesh. They were the same dingy pinkish-red color that Guston used a lot.

It's funny the way artists develop a personal pallette - it's just those certain colors that have more meaning than others. Mine has orange, blue, green, white and - the favorite - black. Guston developed his pallette early in his painting career and it never changed even though his painting style went through contortions: white, black and what looks like cadmium red medium plus a weird green and a blue. That pallette identifies Guston nearly as much as the forms he painted over and over in the latter part of his career.

A friend asked why I liked Guston and I told her that the paint handling was what attracted me so much - I liked the luscious surface and the way you could see that he changed his mind in a painting and painted over an area so that it looked like an obvious change, not like it had always been the way it ended up. I admire that because that obvious over-painting gives me a little inkling into the process of construction and lets me see the painter's struggle.

I have a quotation from Guston pinned up on my wall in the studio: "Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing." I'm not sure I agree that satisfaction is nothing, but lord knows there's plenty of frustration in making art. Is it the overcoming of frustration or the frustration itself that keeps us making?

I think I have three or four books on Guston that I used to spend a lot of time studying. The main one is the hardcover Philip Guston Retrospective, organized by Michael Auping. Another very intimate look at Guston is Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by his daughter Musa Mayer, which is also about her own life as well as his. The Retrospective has lots of reproductions of works from throughout Guston's career. (There is also a paperback version, but I'm not sure if it's as extensive.)

Looking closely at the works in the Retrospective one afternoon, I began crying because I empathized so strongly with the sadness and despair Guston expressed in those late paintings that are referred to so often as "cartoons." The depth of feeling he painted is intense and the loneliness of his battle against depression, alcoholism, injustice and futility hit me. What a weight he took on! The forms he painted repetitively such as shoes and boots, spindly legs, the huge head with one eye, the bottle, the hooded figures, the bare lightbulb, the pointing finger, the cigarettes, the books, the clock - all became so weighted with meaning, both universal and autobiographical.

Guston, born Phillip (with two l's) Goldstein in Montreal in 1913, had two very traumatic events in his childhood and youth. Most shockingly, at about age 10 he found his father's body hanged in suicide. (His father had been a blacksmith in the old country of Russia and was forced to make a living as a junkman when the family moved to California.) Secondly, when Guston was about 17, his older brother Nat had his legs crushed when his own car rolled down a slope, pinning him. Within a short time he died of gangrene in the hospital.

As a boy and young teen, Guston began drawing and hid himself away in a large closet with a bare lightbulb where he practiced cartoons. He dropped out of high school and had a very limited art education, but he became a talented muralist, who worked for the WPA during the depression and later taught at the University of Iowa. Beginning in the 1950s, Guston began painting abstractly and became a member of the New York Abstract Expressionists.

"To BWT", 1952, 48" x 51", oil on canvas

In the 1950s and '60s Guston made beautiful, abstract paintings that were very successful and extolled by Clement Greenberg and the AbExers.

"Zone", 1954, 46" x 46", oil on canvas

Guston's work began changing as he explored abstraction. Dark shapes started appearing on the canvas but he painted out recognizable images because an image "excludes too much." The paintings he made in the 1960s were called the "dark paintings" and were not well received by critics because they seemed to exist outside the accepted definition of abstraction.

"Close-Up III", 1961, 70" x 72", oil on canvas

By the late 1960s when the Vietnam War was in full swing, Guston was mobilized by the atmosphere of protestors, riots and the election of Nixon in 1968. What he referred to as "the final mask" came down and he began painting recognizable forms - especially hooded figures that looked like Ku Klux Klansmen. (I should say that Guston didn't regard the KKK in an admiring way but said that he was fascinated by evil and wanted to show the KKK carrying on their normal activities - more as ironic models of political actors. These hooded figures actually had been an early theme in his painting in the 1940s.) Rebelling against the prevalent belief of the absolute purity of non-objective form, Guston said, "I got sick and tired of all that purity … I wanted to tell stories!"

In his 1970 show at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, Guston revealed the full extent of his defiance of orthodox Abstract Expressionism when he showed paintings such as "Bad Habits." He was excoriated for leaving the fold of abstraction in much the same way that Bob Dylan was criticized ad nauseum for going electric in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival.

"Bad Habits", 1970, 73"x78", oil on canvas.

Guston continued painting in his own style for the rest of his life, developing the portfolio of forms that meant so much to him.*

"Painting, Smoking, Eating," 1973, 77 1/2" x 103 1/2", oil on canvas

This work is so much about painting to me. I read it as the painter obsessively seeing his work (all those shoes) in his mind even though the actual painting is not in front of him.

"Head and Bottle," 1975, 65 1/2" x 68 1/2"

Can any image express alcoholic dependency more vividly? (This painting sold in May 2007 for $6.5 million. Drink up!)

"Talking," 1979, 78" x 68", oil on canvas

*Guston was pretty well known in Boston since he taught at Boston University for five years in the '70s and developed a following among his students. His painting "Talking" seems to me that he is gesturing and talking about painting - never out of his thoughts.

Guston died at age 67 in 1980, just three weeks after the opening of the retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.