Blog

As noted in the description for Mid-Century Archaic, what follows are some of my thoughts on the phenomenon of Mid-Century Modernism. I live near Palm Springs, California, which takes great pride in being a mecca for devotees of "Mid-century Modern" architecture and design. In the mid-1900s, Palm Springs was known as the desert getaway place for Hollywood celebrities. Because they had money, and desired privacy away from the glitter of Movietown, many created substantial estates in the the city. Most were designed by the top southern California architects of the day who, having gotten these commissions in the desert, sought more. The result was a large number of houses and commercial buildings designed by pretty big-name architects. Most of these still stand, many protected by historic-preservation status; civic leaders love them!
Yet, at the head of a cove in the hills south of town sits this near-replica of a Hopi Indian village; about as far from modern as one can get, even though it was actually constructed beginning in the mid-1950s. As I painted this, Palm Springs was ramping up the hype for its annual Modernism Week binge of Mid-century modern art appreciation. I lived through the mid-century period, and I'm not impressed. TV's Happy Days sit-com series is a heavily fantasized look at the times. A lot of mid-century autos are prized by modern classic car collectors: 1956-57 Chevvies, 1954 Mustangs, Avantis, A and B Corvettes, Raymond Leowy-designed Studebakers, etc. A lot of these have been beautifully restored, but mechanically they are still pigs...pretty unreliable. And the furniture! Mid-century furniture was often strikingly designed, but with no concept of ergonomics, so it was generally best looked-at...and not sat-upon.
Keep in mind through all of this that mid-century America had just emerged from World War II and was heading into the Korean War, or Korean Police-action, as it was termed. The Hollywood crowd aside, most Americans, especially returning vets, didn't have a lot of money so most of the houses built here in the 1950s and 60s were tossed together quickly to meet market demand. As a result, time and gravity have taken their inevitable toll and most houses of that era need extensive re-modelling to be livable by contemporary standards. Having lived through those times, and largely enjoyed them, I nonetheless have difficulty waxing nostalgic about them because continually looming before us was the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation. We seem to be heading in that direction again. Some eras are not worth re-living...

Have you ever wondered whether artists and writers speak the same language? I have...especially when reading “Juror’s Statements” by art show judges, or art criticism. I think this first hit me when, taking an art minor in graduate school, I signed up for a course on “Composition and Visual Theory.” All of the two dozen or so students in the class were M.F.A. candidates...except me, a candidate in a totally different field. I sat through the first three or four sessions of the class in a large circle of chairs, listening carefully as the prof and the other students held forth on their ideas about visual theory. By the end of the second week, I had no idea what the heck they were going on about. What was said was either so obvious and banal that I couldn’t bring myself to write it down, or so abstruse that to re-write it in semi-comprehensible form would have totally derailed me from what was being said. So reviewing my notes at the end of each week did little to improve my understanding. After three weeks, I bailed; dropped the class.

Some time later I figured out that describing the conceptual processes of art in well ordered words is nearly impossible. Artistic vision has to be expressed in imagery, and there are no dictionaries to translate imagery into mutually agreed upon words or phrases. It’s easier to describe wine than art, maybe because there are fewer variables.

Now, the studio courses in drawing and etching were great and I was doing well on that front. But words were the medium of discourse in all my other course work. So when words failed to convey anything meaningful to me, as in the visual theory discussions, I had little patience for sticking it out. I probably should have known....

The previous term, I was in a drawing studio, confronted by a leotard-clad model leaning on a broom, like a field worker resting on his hoe after weeding 20 acres of lettuce. I was having trouble getting the essence of the pose, so after a couple of uncuccessful starts I ripped the sheet off my large pad of newsprint and with my charcoal stick angrily pulled a long, sinuous diagonal across the page...trying to capture the line of her back from head to floor. A voice behind me said, “Wow, that’s a really strong statement, man!” It was the T.A. I shot him a withering glance and replied, “That’s a line, man”--this was the 60s, as you might have surmised. He continued, “No, man, that’s a statement.”

The exchange continued, showing signs of being a “line!”, “statement!” impasse so I scrawled one of Carlin’s Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV, Holden Caulfield-like, across the paper and told him, “That’s a statement! This—indicating my sinuous diagonal—is a line!” The argument didn’t end there, but did end in a draw...more-or-less. To me, at that time, a statement could only be made with words and anything in art could only be line, pattern, shape, color...that sort of thing. Words and the stuff of art were twain that could only be allowed to meet under carefully chaperoned circumstances. Some years later in one of those uncomfortable epiphanies, I realized that he was right. What makes some artists great is their ability to create an evocative image with very few strokes of the pen, pencil, or brush. Picasso was one of the greatest in this respect. Each line, each blob of color is indeed a statement, more eloquent than words, that conveys meaning.

Not intended to be any kind of journal, these are thoughts and observations on various aspects of the artist's endeavor. Chronology is for historians. Life flashes from the present to the past and back again rather seamlessly for most of us, and I find that's a comfortable way to think about this thing we call art. So be it....

Oh yeah...that picture is a "self-portrait (the subject of which wishes to remain incognito)." Kind of difficult to do when your name is plastered all over the web site and blog. Oh well. But the point of it was that I painted it for a contest that had three prizes: Best Likeness, Most Original, and Most Humorous. I was going for the trifecta. Only got Most Humorous. That was fine with me...although I thought the likeness was pretty good. That really looks like my hand....