In Memoriam: Three Archived Posts

I'm working hard in the studio and can't spare the time to blog right now although I'll be back soon. Meanwhile, here are three interesting posts I wrote about the dear departed along with the reasons why I chose these particular ones from among the many. I think they are worth reading or rereading. 

The Queen portrayed by Lucien Freud

Lucien Freud: My post of February 4, 2011 here.
When I looked at the stats for my blog last night, I saw that the number of hits on Thursday and Friday was in the thousands! Between the two days, there were more than 5000 hits, where they are normally in the hundreds. At first I thought they were all New York dealers responding to my work as publicized in Joanne Mattera's blog (irony), but actually they turned out to be people who were somehow directed to the post I had written about Lucien Freud last February. An unknown search engine listed my post and directed people to it because of Freud's recent death. Here's what I said about Freud last February after reading a book about what it was like to sit for a portrait by him.

A portrait of Roy Neuberger reading, by his grandson, Matthew London

Roy Neuberger: My post of February 19, 2011 here.
Last night I received a comment on a post I had written about Roy Neuberger from his grandson, Matthew London, a New York photographer. Neuberger was a well-known art collector and founder of the Neuberger Museum in New York. He lived to be 107 years old. Matthew thanked me for writing about his grandfather and directed me to a website he had set up for him. He also listed his own website, where he had posted portraits of his grandfather. Matthew London's photographs are strikingly beautiful and I urge you to visit his website to see them.

Rob Moore from the Boston Sunday Globe article about him

Rob Moore: My post of December 17, 2009 here.
I continue to get comments on this post from people who search Rob's name and find it. There is not much available on Rob, a wonderful painter and teacher at Massachusetts College of Art for 26 years. Rob Moore died in 1992 at the untimely age of 55, before the internet could immortalize him. Only years after graduating from MassArt and painting many paintings was I able to understand what Rob meant in his criticism of my work and assignments in color theory classes. He was a brilliant teacher and a very colorful personality. He is still very much missed by his students. How I wish I could show him how my work developed. It only took me 20-some years after studying with him.

Convincing Conclusion

The new version of the old painting is done. I'm waiting for the OK from the art consultant, but I don't know what else I could have done to paint it differently.

Ooooo - new version - 2011 - oil and cold wax on canvas, 36"x36"

It looks a little different from the original, but unless you toggled back and forth between the two versions, I don't know that you would notice much of a change. This one is not as slick as it appears in this photo and the old version is not as sketchy as it appears in its image. (You can see the old one here.) It looks good in person and the color is a bit stronger in some places. (By the way, you can click on the images to enlarge them.)

Ooooo detail of the new version

Yellow is a hard color to capture and you can see that the yellow ground looks very different between the image of the full painting and the detail. Actually, neither one is really accurate, but the detail is probably closer to the truth.

At some point during the painting yesterday, I decided that the piece had to stand or fall on its own - enough with the copying; let's make a painting. I remembered my favorite painting teacher, Rob Moore, talking about a painting having to be convincing. And before anyone else can be convinced, the artist has to reach that point. I had to be convinced that the painting had reached its conclusion and made sense to me. Well, I'm there.

Working, Working - New Work

I've been cranking it up in the studio trying to get work completed for a photo shoot date next Monday. Here are two new pieces in the Running Stitch series - one of which is done and the other that just needs a bit of color tweaking. (Note that you can click to enlarge the images.)

Tic Tac Nature, encaustic with book parts and other elements on panel, 24"x24", 2010

Tic Tac Nature side view

Tic Tac Nature closeup

This first piece is the one that's finished. After making several in this series, I have now decided that while I may compose and edit elements as I assemble, the final cogitative review where I pull together the color is one of the most important parts. It's like making any painting - you need that time in the armchair looking at what you've done and trying to sneak up on it so you can see what's really there. (Every time I think about that, I think about my painting teacher, Rob Moore, at MassArt who said that seeing what was really there instead of what you think is there was the hardest part of painting.)

Not a Day Goes By, encaustic with book parts and other elements on panel, 24"x24", 2010

Not a Day Goes By, side view 

Not a Day Goes By, closeup

This second piece has gone through an abbreviated review after assembly and paint application, but the color still needs to be brought together. I don't feel that it's all that it could be yet so I'll have to sit with it for a while, see it out of the corner of my eye from across the room, and generally study it while appearing not to be looking so that I can tell what's really happening and get it to come to life for me.

So other than tweaking Not a Day Goes By and reworking one of my earlier pieces in the series that I think could be made stronger, I'm about finished with the work I want to get done before Monday. I'm having 10 pieces photographed - a good number, I think. Ill be using the photos to apply for grants and to post on my new website.


How Strong Is The Connection?
Beginning Tuesday night and continuing throughout last night, I was having trouble with my internet cable connection. At first I thought it was because of the election and so many people being online, but when it continued on Wednesday morning, I suspected something was wrong. I could not connect with my gmail account. I went to one of my day jobs that morning and connected to gmail just fine on their computer so I knew it had to be me. Last night I tried resetting my cable connection several times. Each time I did, I could connect for five or ten minutes and then it shut me off again.

So last night I couldn't follow my usual pattern of taking a look at Facebook before going to bed. Neither could I check out blogs, look things up or write a blog post. I was disconnected and it was a very lonely feeling. Here I was, late at night, working at one of my home jobs on the computer, and I was shut off from that whole wide world out there. It was a surprising feeling of isolation. Who knew I would feel it so strongly?


Election Recap
Yes, I'm disappointed at the losses by Democrats, but here in the Northeast, the results were not as strongly negative as elsewhere in the country. Luckily we are one of the last bastions of Liberalism and a Democratic stronghold, so we re-elected Governor Deval Patrick in Massachusetts and voted in a full Democratic slate for other offices and the state legislature. New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont all elected Democratic governors and Rhode Island voted in an Independent. Maine came close to voting in an Independent governor as well.

I'm in a wait and see mode for what will happen next, but it's like going to the movies and closing your eyes when you hear the scary music. I don't want to see what's next because I'm afraid of the monster mess that I can hear slouching toward Washington.

And on a lighter note, per New York Magazine's Daily Intel, four dead people were elected to public office on Tuesday. Apparently no one noticed they were six feet under even though they were on the ballot. They'll probably do a better job than some of the live ones just voted in. (Me, cynical? Nevah!)

Unearthing Interesting Things

I'm still organizing things in the studio. Progress is actually being made. I bought 10 or 12 new storage containers (some transparent) and have been repacking the many old books I've collected for use in my work (not as reading material but as objects to deconstruct and reuse in various ways).  I've also sorted through the materials I use for texture, and the pieces of fabric, and all the papers, the tools, the various equipment and who knows what all. The good news is that I'm getting there and I can imagine a time when I'll finish and be able to rehang some work, set up the tables and be ready to roll.

Meanwhile, in one of the innumerable pre-existing storage containers, I came across a cache of notebooks that I used when I was a student at MassArt. Of particular interest to me was one for the color class that Rob Moore taught. Here is the initial direction and first homework assignment:

1) Collect found color from magazines (enough for 4-5 weeks worth of assignments)
2) It must be continuous color 
3) Collect as many greys as possible
4) Sort by color
5) Use railroad board or chip board to mount the colors for exercises.


First Assignment:
1) Create an illusion of red:
   (A) as black
   (B) as grey
   (C) as white
in 3 separate studies, using, to define the objective, 8 other hues beyond a constant red.
2) Place all 3 studies (24 colors plus red) into a single arrangement of color and shape.
Note: choose most saturated red.
This is a perceptual problem to challenge preconceived ideas of color. Intensity of a color does not increase by lightening or darkening which only affects hue. Perception depends where the color falls in the value scale, i.e. red as opposed to yellow. You will use a red that has a constant position in the value scale but change its function relative to the colors around it. This will be affected by the size of the color shapes and saturation levels.

Wow! No wonder I didn't understand what was going on.

Hedda Sterne, Machine No. 5

Rob Moore - The Art of Seeing

Rob Moore taught at Massachusetts College of Art for 26 years and made an indelible impression on those who studied with him - or even those who just passed him in the hall. He was "the kind of a teacher students love to hate - charismatic, authoritative, charming." Nearly 17 years have elapsed since Rob's death on December 31, 1992. He died at age 55 of complications from AIDS, one of many who tragically contracted the disease too soon to benefit from life-prolonging drugs in use today.

Rob Moore closeup from "The Eloquent Eye", a Boston Sunday Globe article about him by Jon Garelick with photographs by Keith Jenkins, published May 22, 1988. The quote in the paragraph above is from this article.

Full page spread from "The Eloquent Eye", subtitled "Rob Moore teaches the art of seeing," showing paint tubes and mixed paint on a palette in Rob's studio. Rob is standing in front of one of his paintings.

That such a vibrant and dynamic person, artist and teacher as Rob should have had his life cut short is truly a great loss. He had so much to contribute with his own painting as well as through the work of his students. He died much too soon.

"It's the difference between seeing and hoping to see." (Rob Moore quoted by Jon Garelick).

In 1988 I graduated from Mass. College of Art (MassArt) after having majored in painting and having studied with Rob Moore during my last year there. Studying painting with Rob was a big reach for me. Most of the time I had no idea what he was talking about. Only now, more than 20 years later, does some of what he said about painting, color, space, marks and two dimensions started to make sense to me. Recently I discovered a notebook I had kept from his color class. As I paged through it, I read verbatim statements I had taken down but not understood at the time. "Oh, that's what he meant," I thought more than once as, for example, I read a homework assignment to make red a relative black in six assemblages of colors. I understand that now but then I was in a quandary.

Cover of the catalog of Rob Moore's retrospective, September 8 - October 23, 1993, Huntington Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art, organized by Jeffrey Keough, Director of Exhibitions. The painting pictured is Untitled, Summer 1992, oil and wax on board, 80"x18".

I have been wanting to write about Rob Moore because he died before the internet made accessing an artist's work and life so simple. If you Google Rob's name, very little comes up and it makes him seem invisible. Articles about him are not easy to find and are not free when you do locate them. I am lucky to have the Jon Garelick article, the retrospective catalog and a review of the retrospective by Christine Temin, then the major art reviewer for the Boston Globe. She described Rob's late work as being "in a league with the likes of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman" although made in a smaller and more intimate scale.

Image from the retrospective catalog, Untitled 1991, oil and wax on board, 80" x 81", collection of David Murphy. This one is my personal favorite.

I feel a bit intrusive writing about him because I did not really know him that well - not on a personal level as many of his students did. But of all the teachers I had at MassArt, he is the one who has had the greatest influence on my work over time. It's only as I have begun to mature as an artist that I realize his influence.

..."there are no rules. There are only what I call truisms, facts: Hue exists, yellow is a color...." (Rob Moore quoted by Jon Garelick)

I can't begin to recap Rob's life and work, but as I read through the slim amount of documentation about him that I have, I did find a striking connection with him that I had not registered before. Rob was one of the founders of the Graphic Workshop in Boston, along with Felice Regan and Chris Mesarch. This print cooperative was formed in response to political and social events such as the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Vietnam war, the killings at Kent State and other turbulent events of the late '60s and early '70s. The idea was to make socially responsible work that was high quality but essentially expressive of a political viewpoint. During his involvement with the Workshop, Rob stopped painting because he questioned "the seemingly selfish act of painting", according to Jon Garelick.

On a trip to New York, Rob stopped in at a Jasper Johns retrospective at the Whitney where the targets, flags and maps were being shown. Rob was blown away by "the sheer involvement of the artist with his material" (Garelick) and came away with tears in his eyes. He realized that it was time for him to "make some of those private excursions" (Garelick quoting Moore) that an artist makes through painting, and this prompted him to withdraw from active participation in the Workshop so that he could begin painting again.

"All I can talk about are the limitations of the medium - the utterly unique conditions of two-dimensional space." (Rob Moore quoted by Jon Garelick)

Rob painted geometric abstractions with oil paint and cold wax medium, but I wonder if he would have adopted encaustic as it became more accessible and widely used. Many of the Johns works included in the show that Rob connected with so emotionally were painted with encaustic, and its materiality impressed him. This is the connection I felt when I read about his reaction to the Johns show: he loved wax and paint as I do.

Summer Series 1987, work on paper, 19" x 5 1/2" on 25" x 33", Estate of Rob Moore. from the catalog of the MassArt retrospective. Rob made several series of prints at Rugg Road Paper that combined thin layers of marks in arrangements with "a simple set of strategies, including reflection, repetition, and displacement, which in combination generate great complexity....near symmetry and imperfect reflection (which) are most characteristic of his subtle destabilization of the visual field." (David Joselit in the catalog of the MassArt retrospective.)

But did he love color more? Rob's juxtaposition of color fields was deeply felt and conveyed emotional weight. He thoroughly understood the interaction of colors, but his understanding was based on perception rather than conception.

Untitled 1990, oil and wax on board, 28" x 84", collection of Nancy Talbot, from the catalog of the retrospective.

"He passionately embraced color with its ability to affect the viewer and to touch something internal. When I look at Rob's work, color operates on the senses like a poet's carefully chosen words." - former student Stephen Mishol quoted in the catalog of the retrospective

"There are as many ways of seeing as there are artists. That's why painting isn't dead." (Jon Garelick quoting Rob Moore)

"He has a particular ability to combine colors and hues which seem to belong to different worlds: sweet synthetic aquas or pink are juxtaposed to dour earth tones. But it is just this logic of balancing strong colors, ranging from the delirious to the somber, which gives weight and poignancy to the geometric gymnastics beneath." - David Joselit in the catalog of the retrospective

"The works from the last couple of years of Moore's life are commanding, with a palette - purple, black gold - full of religious symbolism. A tall vertical from 1991 combines stripes of somber black and gray with an expansive midsection of purple. What rescues the painting from morbidness is that glinting through the waxen purple is a brilliant, glowing violet that reads like hope made tangible." - Christine Temin, "MassArt's Rob Moore: A Life of Form and Color", a review of the retrospective.

I had the above image in my picture file for Rob Moore with the title "Remembrance". I don't know where the image came from but I know it is Rob's work and the title is most apt.

I hope that other students of Rob's will read this and comment about their memories of him.

"What I want you to hold onto is your own faith in making an abstract painting - it's tough. It's a lonely business." - Rob Moore quoted by Jon Garelick in the catalog of the retrospective.

Rob Moore's work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts as well as in many private collections including the collections of Harold Rosenberg, Joan and Roger Sonnabend, Marian and Thomas Marill, the Bank of Boston, the Chase Manhattan Bank and Time Warner, Inc. (from the catalog of the retrospective)

Seeing Your Own Paintings

I love reading what artists have to say about making their work - especially what they say to themselves in their notebooks, sketchbooks, diaries, etc. In The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, John Elderfield includes in his essay (pp 112-113) a list that Phyllis Diebenkorn found in her husband's papers after his death. The undated list was written some time between 1966 and 1976 and headed, "Notes to myself on beginning a painting." This is what it said:

1) Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may be a valuable delusion.

2) The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued - except as a stimulus for further moves.

3) Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.

4) Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.

5) Don't "discover" a subject - of any kind.

6) Somehow don't be bored - but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.

7) Mistakes can't be erased but they can move you from your present position.

8) Keep thinking about Polyanna.

9) Tolerate chaos.

10) Be careful only in a perverse way.

Elderfield, who knew Diebenkorn for a period of years and visited him in his studio many times, also says that "his argument with himself was continuous." His greatest battle was to attain a "reconciliation" between the initial idea for a painting and finishing it while not relinquishing the inspiration. Elderfield describes the process in a very turgid way, but I think what he means is that RD (as we all do) wanted to retain the excitement and freshness that an idea for a painting arouses and not kill it as he went along. RD said, "I can never accomplish what I want, only what I would have wanted had I thought of it beforehand."

Now, here's the part that reminds me of my favorite teacher at MassArt - Rob Moore* - Elderfield says that RD would "contrive things so that he would see a painting when he was 'completely off guard', forgetful of his participation in its ongoing history in the hope of the surprise that would tell him that he had re-established contact with his spontaneity." What Rob Moore said, and what I also say in my artist's statement is that seeing what is there (in a painting) instead of what you think is there is the hardest part of painting.

What connects these two observations about painting is the difficulty that the artist has in seeing his/her work as it exists and not as a record of its history or as the sum of many parts. Some artists keep mirrors in their studios and look at their work through them. I remember George Nick at MassArt saying that he sometimes put a completed painting behind his TV so that while watching TV, his eye would sometimes stray to the painting and he would be able to get a look at what was really there. I tried this in my early days of painting and it did help. Now that we have digital images of our work and can see it on a monitor, we get another perspective, but jpegs don't have the physicality of the real thing and the screen illumination makes it a different experience.

I guess the only thing that works for me is hanging up a painting in the studio after I think it's finished and then living with it for a while. I have to move on to something else and get to the point that I'm not actively looking at the painting and then maybe I can really see it. Sometimes this leads to futzing with it and other times I let it stay as it is. It's all a question of time - but we've all got plenty of that.



*Rob Moore died in 1992, before the online age so there's nothing to link him to. I have a wonderful review by Christine Temin in the Boston Globe of the retrospective of Rob Moore's work that MassArt mounted in 1993. I'll write up some excerpts from it along with some of my own observations.