The Three Roles of the Artist, Part One

-


Arnold Boecklin (Swiss, 1827-1901) Isle of the Dead

Got to thinking the other day about the different hats an artist must wear. You can boil it down to three:
  • Explorer
  • Magician-builder
  • Curator
I'd like to talk about all three, but pick them up one at a time. First I'd like to say a little about the role of the Explorer. Artists have to be explorers of a very special type.

Art is a tool to help us make sense of our experiences out in the world. And it helps us to understand and come to peace in our inner lives. The above illustration is a painting that impressed me very much when I was a student at the Art Students League of New York. One of the five different versions the artist painted of it is in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Boecklin's painting is a chilly, although very beautiful, reminder that none of us has unlimited time. Our lives begin and then end. There's an imperative to make the most of the time we have. Artists, it seems to me, are charged with the mission to seek out the images and symbols they find out in the world that are the most meaningful. Boecklin uses his somber reflection on islands and stillness to produce this wonderful elegy in paint.

Artists start by putting more energy into exploring our surroundings with our eyes than most people do. In time, it pays off. We might for example discover a remarkable chord of colors looking at the shallow waters lapping above the sandy bottom of the ocean. We need to study it, look at from all possible angles, and see if this is a momentary fascination or whether there is something enduring and significant in what we've discovered. If there is, our job is to somehow pick the idea up, dust it off, and find a way to present our finding so others can see some of what we've seen and felt.

So much of an artist's training (endless hours of struggling to draw, mix just the right color, become a master of a certain kind of gradation, etc.) helps to open our mental doors wider. We train ourselves to see more than ordinary people. Trust me, it's hard work. It's also worth it.

Then there's a second side to our role as explorers. We have to turn our gaze inward as well.

I've always been struck by how emotional we humans are. I can recall sitting in a movie and being so moved by what I was seeing on the screen than my face became wet with tears. Then I looked around and realized everyone in the theater was crying softly along with me. . Who hasn't had this experience? We can't help but be responsive creatures

Artists have to sort through all the images they're so busy studying and storing in their imaginations. Always the question is "What have I seem that moved me the most? And then "How can I work with that image, or shape, or set of colors in a way that will move others?" Key to this whole undertaking is a finely honed selectivity. Probably ninety-nine percent of the things I enjoy looking at have to be rejected as not good enough. We need the sharpest of eyes, but just as much, a keen awareness of our emotions.

My own paintings draw heavily on my experiences as a young boy on the forested shore of Lake Ontario where I grew up. Those were days of exhilaration, delight, and also of some terrible sadness at times. I can't think of those times or feelings without sensing the deepness of that forest or the striking imagery of the wide expanse of the Great Lake's waters. Karl Jung said our psyche is composed of "feeling toned images." I make paintings employing those landscape images that resonate so deeply in my heart.



Popular posts from this blog

Edward Hopper- Looking Out

-
Image
Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning,   oil on canvas, 1950,  Smithsonian American Art Museum Above is a painting I've loved for some forty years. I'm fortunate to be able to see it often as it lives in the SAAM in Washington, D.C. . This painting contains a real clue to Hopper's art. I visit there often as it helps me learn how to see better. Often writers will talk about the loneliness of Hopper's paintings or how his figures feel isolated and rarely interact with one another. While there is some of that in Hopper's painting, it begs a question- why is Hopper's art so widely loved? I'd offer a couple of answers. First, he's one of the most talented painters and was able to invent visual equivalents for strong emotions we humans experience as we live our lives.  He saw color combining in unexpected ways and offered up generous servings of the most delicious color combinations. Yum. Usually, as in the SAAM's Cape Cod Morning above, when he paints...
Read more

Ever Wonder What's in the Next Room in Hopper's Rooms by the Sea?

-
Image
Edward Hopper, Rooms by the Sea , oil on canvas, 1951, Yale University Art Gallery One of Edward Hopper's best known paintings is Rooms by the Sea that was based on his studio in Truro, MA. Its mysterious doorway leading to the ocean captivates our eye.  Did you ever wonder what the room through the painting's other doorway looked like? Last week a collector asked to see some of the drawings I made during my residencies in the historic studio so I photographed this drawing. Philip Koch,  Edward Hopper's Truro Bedroom: Afternoon  Sunlight , vine charcoal, 9 x 12 inches, 2012. To make the drawing I set up my French easel in the bedroom Hopper shared with his wife Jo for the three decades they lived in the studio. One of the room's two small closets centers the drawing. At the right is the doorway leading into Hopper's big painting room with his studio easel in the distance.  What inspired me to make the drawing were the intense patterns the afternoon sunlight made ove...
Read more

Edward Hopper's Poetry of Empty Rooms

-
Image
I've just been invited by Rachael Solomon who is the Program Director of the  Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, NY to have a mini solo show in one of their galleries.. We'll be showing some of my paintings of the interior of Edward Hopper's Cape Cod studio where I've had the great pleasure of enjoying 13 residencies since 1983. The Edward Hopper House Art Center is the boyhood home of the famous American realist artist. So much of what Hopper became stemmed from his early years there. So I'm excited to do the exhibit. It will be coming up in March through May of 2012.   Hopper didn't teach. Yet I learned more about how to become a good painter by studying his work than by any other single thing. Art after all is visual. Words, even beautifully and aptly spoken can get in the way. And Hopper was legendarily tactiturn. I suspect had someone asked Hopper how to paint an empty room, his terse reply would have been "Don't!".  Above is one of h...
Read more