THE HUMAN FIGURE

The Human Figure and Emotional Space     

Douglas Hyslop

The Human Figure:  The Starting Point. 

    The human figure was largely removed from painting during the first half of the 20th-century. It would be an interesting study to trace the pathway from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) to the Abstract Expressionist portraits of Willem de Kooning (ca. 1950). If Les Demoiselles, with its ominous mask-like figures, announced the beginning of a period that included two world wars, de Kooning’s figures proclaimed its ending. They showed what you might expect after the completion of those wars: figures torn to shreds, as though they had a run-in with Euripides’ Maenads, except that here the Maenads were in fact the victims. De Kooning was not the only artist still dealing with the human figure at mid-century, but most of his peers had abandoned it: de Kooning was criticized for continuing to paint the human figure (I’m not sure whether Pollock ever did the human figure). 

    I may be a minority of one, but I believe the second half of the 20th-century was essentially a continuous deconstruction and rehashing of the first half. And it still goes on. Sisyphus keeps charging up the hill, but always back into the pit falls he. Anyway, the human figure did not play a significant part in the art that I have seen over the last couple of generations. On the other hand, the use of human and other body fluids have. Materialism and reductionism have won the day. I know we’re in a post-modern age, but maybe it’s also post-humanist, as some people say. 

    At the Peacock Theater in Copenhagen, Denmark, two ballet pantomimes used to be performed each evening during the summer months. The subject was always a tale from the Commedia dell’ Arte (Comedy of Art). After three trips to Denmark I have seen a hundred or so. My last visit was for ten days with my eldest daughter a number of years ago: we watched fourteen during that visit. In one of the episodes Harlequin was caught in Columbine’s bedroom. After a make-shift trial the verdict was death by firing-squad. The soldiers marched onto the stage to the music of the March of the Magpies. Harlequin was ushered into a tight alcove. The guns fired and Harlequin fell to the floor. The first time I saw this I kept waiting for the dancer to bend his knees to break the fall. But his knees didn’t bend. The guilty party hit the floor and broke into several pieces (Close observation the next time I watched the episode revealed that when Harlequin went into the alcove, by a sleight-of-the-body trick, as it were, a life sized realistic lego-Harlequin was deftly substituted for the real Harlequin.). 

    Pierrot, the White Clown of the Comedy (as I usually call the Comedy of Art), attempted to put the lego-Harlequin back together. I feel I am attempting something like this: trying to put together a Harlequin that is an imitation of the real Harlequin! Certainly Plato would disapprove. Regardless, I pursue this quest, anyway. The extent of my success must be judged by the observer. 

    Whether right or wrong, I try to put the human figure back into the picture, but not following the spirit of Picasso or de Kooning. It has been argued that Picasso ultimately portrayed Nietzschean “Superman” type figures, ones “beyond” morality. This assessment is probably correct, and it seems to appeal to many today, but not to me. As for de Kooning, it is arguable he made Honoré de Balzac a prophet. De Kooning became a real-life Frenhofer, Balzac’s fictional painter who seems to have been an Abstract Expressionist before his time. It makes you think of Auerbach’s theory of Figura, ultimately based on the notion of Old Testament personages and events as prefiguring more dramatic and sometimes apocalyptic ones in the New Testament. I say, as I would about Pollock and Abstract Expressionism in general, with de Kooning what was being expressed had more to do with the emerging atomic age than anything else. If de Kooning obliterated the human figure, Pollock obliterated something more abstract — symbolism itself. This is not to denigrate anyone. I find it very arguable that the Abstract Expressionists responded heroically to their time: they were a fitting climax to the overwhelming drive to abstraction of the first half of the 20th-century. 

    But not everyone repudiated the human figure during the second half of the 20th-century. A good example of someone who has influenced me — in the sense that he has shown me how I don’t want to portray the human figure — is Philip Pearlstein. This is not to criticize Pearlstein: I admire the way he pursued figural art in the face of, not only Abstract Expressionism, but also Minimalism and Conceptualism. Today he is famous for his “naked” nudes. “He paints the nude not as a symbol of beauty & pure form but as a human fact — implicitly imperfect” (This reads like the application of reductionism to Degas: if Degas gave us truth and beauty, Pearlstein (and many others) have given us truth without beauty). Pearlstein’s naked figures are “devoid of any identity other than the attributes of sex and skin.” This isn’t quite true: the faces of his models, when not looking the other way or when not cut off by the edge of the canvas, are the faces of his models — there is a degree of individual portraiture present. This is part of what makes his figures seem so naked. When he puts clothes on his figures (everyday shirts, ties, dresses) they still seem naked, or at least empty — empty of being, and with a sense of angst. 

    I try to avoid the “nakedness” and contemporary dress of the figures of Pearlstein and others. There is something “plastic-like” in modern clothes. Of course much of our clothing is literally made from plastic polymers. But there is something else. People used to talk about “Teflon” personages, especially politicians. In any event, I try to avoid the Teflon or plastic look. This is significant in that I paint with acrylics, which have a plastic base. We really do live in a plastic world. I learned early on that I could avoid the plastic look by diluting my pigments with water (acrylics are water soluble). Indeed, I am sometimes asked if my paintings are watercolors. In addition, early on I began the practice of drawing with pencil in white pigment, which is far and away the most abundant pigment that I use. When I don’t like what I have drawn, I “white-out,” as it were, with Titanium White. I do this over and over until I like what I have. The net result is the white paint on the canvas takes on a greyish cast, as a consequence of the mixing of lead from the pencil with the white paint. This is a result that is far more appealing to me than a Teflon look, where nothing sticks. I find this forces a more “natural” appearance to the picture created: there seems to be something of a tribute being paid to the “dirt” of the real world. There is something about modern culture that reeks of plastic-ness — as though modern culture is packaged with some semi-transparent flexible, plastic membrane, and you have to somehow break through the membrane to be able to truly see and touch the “real.” Shock art, where you brutally destroy the membrane, makes sense in this context. But I try to get through it more subtly, by dissolving it in water, as it were.  

Figure Identity & Fictive Space: First Synthesis  

    If I am to avoid portraying nudes, I must put costumes on my figures. Long ago I took a fancy to the Comedy of Art. Harlequin and Harlequine, Pierrot and Pierrette, the beautiful Columbine, these are some of the main characters, and their costumes provide clothing. Why the Comedy of Art? Many reasons; but Pierre Duchartre provides a good one: “The masks of Pulcinella and Harlequin will always signify something vital and intense, for they are sculptured by both art and time to a semblance of humanity.”  

    But the Comedy does not supply all my characters. Folk Ballads may be far removed from the Comedy of Art, but they have characters and an atmosphere that suits me: the fairy world of elf-knights and fairy queens. Contrary to common opinion, evidence from the ballads suggests that in terms of size and appearance, they are quite human-like. Animals also play their part in the ballads. Two important to me are the “bonnie bird” & the “fairy steed.” 

    I also draw from the Circus, which has a very different atmosphere The Circus (especially its clowns) may not be so popular anymore, but neither are the Comedy nor the Ballads. Too bad. But we all have to decide what to follow, that which experts tell us is acceptable or that which inspires us. In any event, I portray equestrians, tight-rope walkers, acrobats, and especially clowns. The foolish red clown of the Circus makes a contrast to Pierrot and Pierrette, the melancholy white clowns of the Comedy. There is also the King’s Jester, King of the Carnival, and his false donkey-ear crown. If there are circus horses and riders, there is also the “cheval-jupon” — the “double-horse” comic routine: one person acts as head and front legs, the other tail and back legs. What is it about clowns? They can absorb pain; and sometimes they can tell the “truth.” But can they do it with beauty? 

    Beauty and comic figures; they don’t seem to go together well. So much of comedy is about “incongruence,” which tends not toward beauty. And when there is a joke, someone is often the butt of it. The Sun Also Rises is arguably a study of comedy. Mike Campbell incessantly ridicules Robert Cohn. On top of that, his self-criticism is designed to absolve him of his responsibilities. Yet the novel has been said to achieve “a delicate balance of ridicule and affection.” Part of the reason is because Campbell is brought down and exposed for his behavior. He gets his just rewards, as it were. But there is also the harmless nonsense of Bill Gorton, who directs his jibes at ideas and institutions, rather than human beings. Overall, I think The Sun Also Rises is a serious and tragic story (arguably Hemingway’s greatest novel) raising profound issues, indeed issues made even more profound because of the humor. The early Stoic thinker, Chrysippus, observed, “Comedies have in them ludicrous verses which, though bad in themselves, nevertheless lend a certain grace to the whole play.” Stated this way, it would seem comedy could function like dissonance in music. To me, this seems to be the case in The Sun Also Rises. 

    If there is humor in any of my work it is probably largely in my depictions of Humpty-Dumpty, who is only an egg, actually an imaginary creature utilized by Lewis Carroll for the enjoyment of Alice Liddell. It is natural that I have taken up ideas found in Alice in Wonderland, because I found my métier as an artist when I was put in charge of the future of two young girls. Nevertheless, some of my humor may be too dark. Humpty-Dumpty and Jump-Rope has Humpty on a scaffold with a jump-rope, presumably planning to hang himself. Below him on the ground is Alice demanding Humpty hand over her jump-rope. To find the humor, it helps to pose a question: How is someone to hang himself when he has no neck? In any event, I learned the gag, if you can call it that, from the movie Les Enfants de Paradise. In the movie there is no Humpty-Dumpty. It was Pierrot who was saved by a young girl, who then skipped away with the rope. 

    Scott Donaldson argued that in The Sun Also Rises Hemingway with his “comedy” “conveys an attitude toward existence available to all,” far superior to the “catchword pedantry of the literati: ‘Irony and Pity.’” I take Donaldson’s words seriously. Nevertheless, I am not averse to irony and pity. Long before Picasso painted his Saltimbanques, Daumier painted his own. Of them Henry James observed: “The crowd doesn’t come and the battered tumblers, with their furrowed cheeks, go through their pranks in a void. The whole thing is symbolic and full of grimness, imagination and pity.” My own Saltimbanques, if you call them that, are not battered, have rosy cheeks rather than furrowed ones. If there is anything my work shares with Daumier’s, it may be in the “void” and in the “pity.” Pity is a critical component of Aristotle’s theory of Tragedy: the pity and fear we feel for Oedipus’ learning the truth of who he is and what he has done makes us feel something of our own is threatened — our own being, I guess. But in the presence of pity and fear the discovery of the truth can lead to catharsis — a purging of what is foul, it is said. 

    My Humpty-Dumpty, as well as circus clowns, has an element of caricature and the cartoon about them. Whether they function in a “dissonant” manner the observer will have to decide. The white clown of the Comedy of Art is different: he or she is more in the “tragic mode” than the “comic” one. Bergson defined the tragic mode as depicting things as they should be as though that is how they are, and the comic mode as depicting things as they are as though that is how they should be. With these distinctions I believe the main thrust of my own work is within the tragic mode. At least my figures are handled in an “ideal” rather than “individual” manner. The canon of Polyclitus rather than the gravitas of the Roman portrait? Can I really decide between these alternatives? Is a synthesis possible? In any event the emphasis is on the whole body and with the look of the lightness of ballet. However, an important goal is to make the figures look as though they are “real” people actually present in the pictorial space of the canvas — as though the restrictions of gravity apply. I do not try to liberate my figures from the effects of gravity, as was so common in the 20th-century, when the figure, if it wasn’t being hacked to pieces, seemed either to fly away or take on the form of a decorative ornament in an ill-conceived allegory. Here Pearlstein and I may have some agreement, as his figures are certainly not independent of gravity; rather they seem overwhelmed by it, as they lie limpid on sofas and chairs and rugs. But Pearlstein and I also differ: I try to portray figures in harmony with gravity, as it were, rather than be overwhelmed by it. Consider what Akim Volynsky said about classical ballet: “For all its soulfulness, ballet operates on flesh; it loves light bearing, yet at the same time solid materiality.” 

    This may be looked upon a little differently. In Canto VIII of Dante’s Inferno, Pilgrim Dante (to be distinguished from Dante the “author”) must cross by boat the River Styx if he is to continue his journey through the Underworld. Our “pilgrim” observes, “not till I was in did the boat seem to bear a load at all. When we were set, the ancient vessel then put forth at once, cleaving the water’s grime deeper than her wont…” Although gravity applies to Dante the “pilgrim,” it does not to the “shades” he meets. The natures of the shades are explained in Canto XXV of the Purgatorio. According the Statius (a 1st-century Roman poet), the “soul, based on its virtue, irradiates the surrounding air (as a ray of light irradiates moisture to form a rainbow) to form an aerial body.” John Freccero elaborates: “The bodies of the Purgatorio are related to real bodies as the torch was related to the life of Meleager in the 8th-book of the Metamorphosis or as the image in a mirror is related to what it reflects.” As I think on this, I pose a question: Can the body of Pilgrim Dante, as found in the boat on the River Styx, be “thesis,” and the Statian “soul,” be “anti-thesis,” for the figures I create? 

    This may be too abstract. Back up to the beginning. Long ago I was taken by the “contour” drawing of Greek Archaic vase painters. The “gravity” and “nobility” of Exekias: Achilles and his horse, each as noble as the other. The Brygos painter, the master of the “pose,” and the flexible line. When you follow the development of this art, you can sense an aspiration for the later monumental sculpture of the Classic age. In many ways I found here my ideal for drawing the human figure, and have pursued it. I began my painting “career,” if you can call it that, during the spring of 1971: the puppets of Paul Klee and the animals of Franz Marc. But when I wasn’t so concerned to be “modern,” I would practice the human figure. As it turned out, I naturally drew in the manner, not of Klee or Marc, but the ancient Greeks. I also began to realize I had an affinity for Degas and Picasso, both of whom were, at least in my opinion, as good as Ingres. One October weekend in the late 1980s (I think it was 1987) I painted, as a diversion, two young seated girls (Two Victorian Girls). I was stunned by the result. Although the two girls did not look like my daughters, who at the time were about the same age as those girls I painted, and although they were not intended to be my daughters, at least at the most direct level, in another sense they were them, them in the sense of the awareness they seemed to have of themselves and the simple setting they were in. To me they seemed to suggest a sense of “being,” whatever that means. But it was a sense of who they were or should be, and it seemed more important than anything else. I came to realize I was projecting into my picture my hopes for who I wanted them to be. I turned my back the “modern” art I previously was trying to create. My modernist art failed to have life. Maybe it was just me, that I was a throw-back, and couldn’t identify with the modern world. But when I looked at the art of my contemporaries, I felt their art work lacked life too. I must be mistaken here, because other people that I talk to don’t agree with me. So I have made my way alone. 

    Sometimes I think I am Don Quixote. He was intelligent, rational, decent. But he was “mad” in one area — Chivalry. He thought he was a medieval knight, and his destiny was to address all wrongs, stand up for the weak, create an environment for the noble individual, maybe Nietzsche’s later Superman — Superman in the best sense of the term. In my case, I think people who know me would consider me intelligent, rational, and decent. But I seem to be “mad” in one area — Art. I think of myself as an artist. But when I see what is considered art today, I am dumbfounded. But as I have said, others seem dumbfounded by me. My quest to return the figure to painting with dignity and humanity seems as meaningful as Don Quixote’s quest to bring back the Age of Chivalry. 

    In any event, by the late 1980s, I found I was drawing and painting pretty much as I have ever since. What I do is quite different from Pearlstein and other “photo-realists.” I attempt to portray figures in an appropriate “emotional space” for the figures and the subject at hand. Here there is a significant difference between Pearlstein, as well as the artists of Modernism and Post-Modernism in general, when compared to myself. One of Pearlstein’s paintings portrays a naked woman sitting on a shiny, silver chrome chair adjacent to a bright, red kiddie car/plane, complete with steering wheel and nose propeller. Lautréamont’s famous dictum seems intact: art is like the chance meeting of an umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table. Maybe it is only myself. But the throwing together of these antithetical realities — naked flesh, chrome steel, red plastic (or is it metal?) — leads to no synthesis — or “love making,” as Max Ernst would put it. No. The whole is just the sum of its parts. I argue that during the 1960s, when Pearlstein came into his own, the precepts of modern Shock art gained insider status in the world of fine arts, so that shock no longer had the effect that it previously had. There is the following statement in an old Chinese treatise on painting: “When everyone knows the beautiful as beautiful, then already it is ugly.” I think the same is true if the word “shock” is substituted for “beautiful” and the word “tame” for “ugly.” In the case of Pearlstein, he was a fine craftsman. Craftsmanship and “shock” don’t go hand in hand. My idea of “emotional space” is where the figure somehow “penetrates” and “integrates” into its surroundings: the “shock of beauty” rather than that of “abrasiveness,” and ultimately advertising (This season’s “outrage” is next season’s “fashionable” and “salable” commodity is a refrain well known in advertising.). 

    But what is the “shock of beauty?” Max Luthi related the idea to Lessing’s rule. Lessing pointed out that “Homer does not describe beauty, but its’ effect.” Luthi found this relevant to Fairy Tales: Although the Prince is “frozen” in place by the beauty of the Princess, that beauty is not described, except in general terms — she is a beautiful as the sun, for example. We know the beauty because of the response of Prince. 

    Something like the “shock of beauty” can be found in old folk ballads. Although the stories are often grim, they are just as often off-set with beauty similar to that found in fairy tales: “She play’d a rune on golden harp ...,” and as a consequence, “the wild bird… his song forgot to sing.” Much of balladry is about enchantment and disenchantment, both of which are often associated with “location images”: Tam Lin sleeping under an apple tree; a blue hawk perched on a rock in a Highland loch; an Elfin-Knight blowing an elf-horn on yonder hill; a milk-white steed grazing beside a Fairy Well surrounded by roses. 

    The task of integrating figure and surroundings would seem to be part of what is sometimes called the “figure-ground” relationship. It only makes sense that for a figure to seem to belong to its surroundings, its ground, something should be shared between them, between figure and ground, for example, the manner of depiction, perhaps color, but also texture. As 20th-century art proceeded the so-called “formalist aesthetic” of “flatness” came more and more to dominate art theory. Any painted figures or objects had to be as flat as the canvas. This can in fact make figure and ground seem to belong together, that is, if there is in fact a figure, something there usually isn’t, at least in art during the second half of the 20th-century and beyond. At any rate, no foreshortening, no perspective, no nothing. The exception is for real, physical objects. They could be pasted on the canvas and extend three-dimensionally into real, external space. This of course is the legacy of Synthetic Cubism of Picasso and Braque during the run-up to the First World War. Pasting seems to have been the rage during the 1980s.  I remember reading rave reviews of Julian Schnabels’s “plate paintings.” Apparently he glued supper plates to his canvas. As for me, I do not paste objects onto my canvas, I do not avoid foreshortening or perspective. I do try to use color to unify, however. Cezanne tried to unify with white pigment. His process is called “passage.” The early Cubists made use of it. I also use it. However, as I have already said, I call it “whiting-out.”  

    “Passage” is more complicated than this. Edward Fry calls it the “running together of planes in space.” Picasso and Braque used it to “interlock” “arbitrary, grisaille planes in their Cubist paintings.” Dore Ashton observed that Cezanne altered “passage” over time. Originally it came in the form of gradation of light tone from “object” to “air.” Over time Cezanne developed “passage” into an abstract system of “white absences”: an “ideal, held in imagination as hand and eye, seek equivalences; tension between idea and act find resolution in these ‘white absences.’” Look at this in another way. Cezanne’s “white absence” would seem to have affinity with Mallarmé’s “white page” that is associated with “silence” and “musical stops” in Symbolist poetry. When I “white-out” something I have rejected on my canvas I have to make a further evaluation: leave the “white-ness” as a sort of “absence,” a “silence,” a “musical stop,” or draw in wet white pigment. There are always decisions to be made. In the wake of Mallarmé and Cezanne, however, I pose the question: How long would it be before someone called an all-white painting a work of art? Cezanne died in 1906; Malevich painted his famous White on White in 1919. 

    When I began painting the human figure many years ago, there was the issue of how to paint skin, particularly the face. For example, if the personage was to be “White” (i.e., Caucasian) I used Portrait Pink and Titanium White. If “Black” (i.e., Negro), I used Sienna or Umber, or both. In attempting to relate figure to ground, it helped if color was shared in both figure and ground, something that seemed evident to me in old Byzantine mosaics. This was probably because of “ruptured” figure and object contours, and the fact that so many reproductions (that I saw at least) were black and white. The “rupturing” effect is more pronounced in the Pointillist drawings of Seurat. In any event, these observations suggested I was approaching the human face the wrong way. 

    In a certain sense, skin is like water, which doesn’t have its own color, but takes on that of the sky or surrounding atmosphere. Pavel Florensky, a Russian theologian martyred in the 1930s, argued that “blue was not the essential color of the sky.” Rather the sky was about “light-bearing-ness.” In icon painting the “face” had no definite color: it was like a “potentiality for the face’s future color.” Florensky was arguing for a sacred “countenance” suspended in a plenitude of gold. 

    What I do. I still use Portrait Pink, as well as Sienna and Umber, but not so much in faces. I attempt to have faces reflect the relevant color of their surroundings: as Titanium White is the predominant pigment in most of my paintings, it is generally the predominant pigment in most of my faces. But I also add a little “rose,” generally by way of Naphthol Crimson (and sometimes also a little Portrait Pink), to the cheeks to provide the spark of life, as it were. 

    But the notion of “emotional space” would seem to imply a broader range of colors besides white, pink, or brown. I have read theories relating hue to emotion, but have found them lacking. Early in my “career,” if you can call it that, I paid an art marketing “expert” to evaluate my work and give me advice. “You have a wonderful way with sun-set colors,” he said,  “but your figures spoil the paintings because they make them way too personal. Abandon the figures but keep the colors.” I have kept both. I have always found it natural to work chromatically from yellow to orange to red to violet, and sometimes blue. With yellow, in particular, I often apply pure pigment thickly to the canvas. Normally I apply a little white adjacent to it. By way of the Impressionists “simultaneous contrast” and “optical mixing,” the yellow becomes more brilliant. Early in the 19th-century Michel-Eugene Chevruel observed that contiguous colors appear as dissimilar as possible, because of simultaneous contrast. More than this, two contiguous colors are each influenced by the complementary color of the other. For example, before Impressionism, Delacroix added small amounts of green to the predominant pink in his faces. The idea is that red, the complement of green, enhances the pink. I have not tried this.  

    The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists often invoked simultaneous contrast to do away with explicit “lines” in their paintings. Simultaneous contrast, by accentuating differences of adjacent colors, creates “optical lines,” as it were. “Passage,” on the other hand, disrupts or takes the place of explicit lines. “There are no lines in nature,” Cezanne (and Delacroix before him) are said to have said. Nevertheless, I am a draftsman before being a painter, and I take lines seriously. My drawing in wet white paint would seem to violate the spirit of “passage,” it may be noted. 

    The conflict between line and color is worth noting. Goya posed the question: “Where do you find lines in nature? As for me, I can distinguish only luminous and dark bodies.” Later Gauguin argued “everything must be sacrificed for pure color.” Not everyone thought this way. There is the rule of Ingres: “lines, lines, always lines.” It is hard to imagine Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, even Picasso, without Ingres. As for me, I begin with line, but I strive for color too. Like the relationship between the canon of Polyclitus and the gravitas of the Roman portrait, is synthesis possible between things that seem antithetical?  

    Although I sometimes use simultaneous contrast with “warm” colors, I seldom do so with darker colors. Especially with blue, I apply as washes over white to obtain a translucent effect (Again, there is the evaluation process: Do I want “translucence,” or do I want “white absence?”). Mallarmé’s “azure” almost becomes a goal onto itself. Anna Balakian called azure “metaphysical blue” and pointed out that it is really part of something larger, the void, the far side of which is the “black chaos of nothingness.” I remember studying the palette of Seurat, who would lay out eleven pigments, all in a row, but none of them was black. I do not exclude black. I have discovered from experience that translucent blue looks best, at least to me, when darkness, for example opaque black, is near by. 

    What about shadows? Seurat dealt with shadows by using complementary colors. For example, with sunlight being yellow and orange, he used violet and blue for shadows, always using simultaneous contrast. Apparently he came to this by way of study and observation of real shadows. My shadows are more abstract and symbolic: a ruled line is likely to separate widely different colors (possibly complements) in order to dramatize or isolate possibly different realities. I try to suggest the use of spotlights of the circus. Whereas Degas’ ballerinas and Toulouse-Lautrec’s night-club performers, dancers or singers or otherwise, were illuminated from below by way of stage floor foot-lights, my figures, dancers or acrobats or otherwise, are generally illuminated from above. I use color more as you would expect in an allegorical mode, where you expect ambivalence and duality, between good and evil, for example. Is there any sense to the old Neo-Platonic notion that just as darkness is the absence of light, Evil is the absence of Good? When the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus said “Comedies have in them ludicrous verses which, though bad in themselves, nevertheless lend a certain grace to the whole play” (quoted above), he was arguing that the evil that falls on us sometimes may be turned into blessings. There is truth in this: I know it from my own experience. However, a voice inside myself tells me that at some deep level the notion of evil as absence of good holds an unassailable power that I cannot put aside. I do not claim to show this in my work, but I cling to the idea as though it were part of the Holy Grail. 

     I sometimes portray lit candles in the face of electric lights: although candles compete poorly in terms of intensity, I find they tend to denote a sense of “integrity.” As such they imply a “reality” that electric lights do not, at least to me. Nevertheless, I paint in my basement (my Gypsy cave, as it were), and rely on electric lights to see my canvas. I try to portray this light as “real” and “beautiful” as possible. 

    My discussion of light and shadow to this point is arguably too subjective. Light and shadow can be treated more objectively, for example by using the rules of perspective when applied to shadows. Sunlight perspective requires a couple of additional vanishing points beyond those required for placing objects on a picture plane, but it is very doable. I have painted shadows this way in Humpty Dumpty and the Jump Rope, where sunlight comes from the right resulting in a shadow on the left side of Humpty Dumpty’s “scaffold.” Three black birds seem to wait in this shadow, apparently to see what is going to happen. The same principles were used for the reflected light on the surface of the water under the bridge in Twilight Harpist. In this case red birds rest on the rocks in this moment of twilight. 

    Related to color is the matter of texture. Indeed, it has been argued Picasso and Braque invented “papier-collé” and “collage” to circumvent problems associated with coloration in Cubism. There’s no need to apply paint if the “real” thing, with its “real” texture and its “real” color, is attached to the canvas. I do not use these techniques. However, I do use the Surrealist technique of “frottage,” or at least my own variation of it. Figure and ground share the same surface of a canvas. Its texture, if brought out, can facilitate a sense of unity. I often use cloth to rub paint on the canvas to reveal the canvas texture underneath. Sometimes I don’t bother with a rag and use my hands; more often I just use a finger. 

    Meyer Abrams, in his famous book, The Mirror and the Lamp, makes a crude but insightful distinction between Platonic and Romantic aesthetics: “If Plato’s dialectic is a wilderness of mirrors, Coleridge’s is a very jungle of vegetation.” Coleridge’s “organic” approach to aesthetics certainly has won the modern world. As for mirrors, Velázquez’s Las Miniñas (painted in 1656) is said to have made the final statement concerning the paradoxes of mirror images. Nevertheless, I find mirrors facilitate what I am trying to do, and I often include them in my pictures (Not the literal ones of someone like Juan Gris, but painted ones). When you see yourself in a mirror, you begin to question who you are. Foucault said first you see yourself where you are not, beyond the mirror surface — in a Utopia, he said. But with reflection you come back to where you are. You oscillate back and forth spatially, intellectually, and emotionally. Hopefully you come to know yourself better. Sometimes you desire to see through the mirror. Moshe Barasch argued John of Damascus, the great defender of icons in the face of Iconoclasm during the 8th-century, built a metaphysical foundation for painting where this desire was integral. The “see-through mirror” is called the “aenigmatic mirror.” What is significant to me is that the Damascene argument justifying painting seemed to have at its core what Philo of Alexandria argued many centuries earlier: Idolaters are not stupid; rather they have an overwhelming need and desire to see and know the Divine, which is unattainable. A real desideratum, I guess. This is called the Tragedy of the Human Condition. Although my mirrors may sometimes seem enigmatic, you cannot see through them. Windows are different. You sometimes have reflected images as you look through them. Sometimes I try to portray both what is on the other side of the window and what is reflected there. There is also the matter that you sometimes can see through, at least partially, my figures and objects. Literary critics talk of the notion of “penetration” in regards to the novels of Dostoevsky. The penetration of one character with another seems to be at the level of “being.” The goal seems to be “to affirm someone else’s ‘I.’” If this can be done visually, transparency helps: transparent overlapped figures or transparent figures and objects, for example musical instruments. An existentialist once posed the question: “How is it that the soul of the violinist passes into his violin?” Today our question would be more like this: “Mr. Philosopher, how is it that you think the violinist has a soul?” 

    Marcel Proust, in his great novel, In Search of Lost Time, took up the question of souls: “I feel there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken… And so it is with our own past.” This seems to have come to Proust when by chance he ate a “petite madeleine” soaked in his aunt’s lime-blossom tea. Proust began to “seek” his own “lost time” and the lost souls who inhabited that time and created an enormous tapestry that he wove himself into, one that has much of the appearance of an Impressionist painting, one in which Proust himself inhabited.  

    When I read Proust’s “experience” of the “petite madeleine” my own memory was stirred. I used to practice drawing faces in the hopes of capturing a particular person’s “features.” Late one night many years ago I sat down with a photograph of a woman (I can’t remember whom) and began drawing. After a few minutes I paused to see how well I was progressing. To my surprise, I had gotten a good “likeness,” not of the woman in the photograph, but of a woman I had seen in a movie a few days earlier. It was only later that in reading Don Quixote I came across a piece of wisdom expounded by Sancho Panza: “Sometimes when one thing is looked for another is found.” In my case it was my subconscious that was essentially drawing the picture. It was as in a dream. But the critical question was could I continue to recognize when my subconscious was taking over my work? And if it was, was my subconscious having me do something better than that which I planned? And if the answer to both questions were “yes,” would I have the good sense to try to unite the activities of my conscious and subconscious? In any event, I developed a rule: if something arises that is better than what you planned, try to go with the new thing that rose up. Friedrich Schelling argued the best work of art arises when “unconscious creative energy” in nature and in the universe is “fused” with the “free, conscious effort of the artist.” This is not the same as what I do. I never claim that nature or the universe is working with or through me. I only claim to try to go with my own subconscious when I feel it is merited. Nevertheless, call my rule an adaptation of Schelling’s rule. Whether any soul has ever been “freed” by following Schelling’s rule is a question that I cannot answer other than to say none that I know of. 

    Proust gave us Combray, the steeple of St. Hillare, the Méseglise way and Swann’s park and the sight and smell of hawthorns, and Guermonte’s way along the river Vivonne and the buttercups and water lilies a la Giverny. He also gave us characters like Françoise, Charles Swann, Odette de Crécy, Bergotte, Elstir, Norpois, Saint Loup, Charlus, Gilberte, Albertine, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, the Verdurins, and about two thousand others, all of who are hard to separate from the Proustian landscape. If Proust loved his landscape he had known and the characters who populated it, and ransacked his memory to make that which was lost in it come alive, to name its soul, as it were, I love history, literature, philosophy, theology, as well as art itself, especially parts that have somehow been lost, and I try to find them and make them all come to life. What are some of the particulars here? The rise and fall of the Scholastic soul, the king’s jester who failed to survive the English Civil War, The Comedy of Art that was done in by the French Revolution, the tradition of painting itself that was put asunder by Modernism. 

    How come alive? I was given the charge of raising two children about the time I began to pursue my quest. More to the point, it is more accurate to say that it was that responsibility that largely pushed me to pursue my quest with the human figure. I put aside my previous quest to pursue Modernism (I revered Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky), and began to pursue the human figure, not in the Cubist or proto-Cubist fashion, but in a more ideal fashion, more like the ancient Greeks. I decided to try to portray who I wanted my children to be. Not portraits in any conventional sense. Rather I used my adaptation of Schelling’s rule. The human figure became a vessel for something more important than its appearance. Hopefully I could create figures with a degree of natural beauty. But what was important was to relate them to those things lost in history that were so important to me. Could a figure and story from the Comedy of Art say something about who I wanted my children to be? And who did I want them to be? “Being” suggests metaphysics. Vladimir Soloviev and Feodor Dostoevsky argued Hegel got it wrong in grounding metaphysics too strongly on rational cognition. It was too easy to follow the pathway of Raskolnikov (who murdered an old woman for the benefit of human-kind) or Kirilev (who murdered himself in order to become a god), who were arguably precursors of Nietzsche’s Superman (Although I’m sure this is not what he intended). No, metaphysics should begin with “compassion.” I wanted my figures to be imbued with compassion. Proust’s landscapes are imbued with the “fragrance” of hawthorns and lilacs. Could I make my “landscapes” exude the fragrance of compassion? Then maybe I could express a sense of humanity that I hoped my children would carry with them always. I see this as no different from what untold parents have always attempted. I have just tried to portray it as an aid in the process of doing it. But even this may not be so unusual. What I do could be construed as an attempt at “sympathetic magic” that is found in so many allegories. 

    Another of my “subjects” is music. Schopenhauer said music exhibits “the inner nature of the ‘thing-in-itself.’” Although I make no such claim, I will not argue against it. Certainly music can be profound. It is hard to consider Modern art without considering music. Begin with “synthaesthesia.” Edward Lockspeiser posed the question: “Was there some hidden alliance between the realms of sound and color, an alliance which artists & musicians have hoped to establish since the 18th-century and which has not been abandoned yet?” Certainly J. M. W. Turner, the famous painter of “indistinctness,” the painter of fire, water, light, and air…” — the “counter-part of Wagner” and precursor the Impressionists, even the Abstract Expressionists — must be important here. Certainly he is. 

    However, a century before Turner Nicolas Poussin attempted a “beginning of a rapprochement between music and painting in modern times…” In 1647 he wrote a letter explaining how he was attempting to introduce the Renaissance musical mode theory into painting: “I hope by the end of the year to have painted a subject in the Phrygian mode…”Just as some thinkers attempted to attach different colors to different emotions, other thinkers attempted to attach different moods or emotions to different musical modes or keys In the latter case, the Phrygian mode was associated with “passion” and the key of E. As it turns out, much of Flamenco music is in the key of E. 

    Anthony Blunt made a study of Poussin’s efforts: “… According to earlier writers on the arts, the means of conveying a mood by an emotion had been by gesture, whereas Poussin maintains that it can be done by the actual style of painting, that is, by an almost abstract means. Delacroix was to put forward much the same idea in the 19th-century, and since that time it has become commonplace.” On Delacroix, Lee Johnson observed that color was “associated … in the first place with mood,” and has “a purely abstract or ‘musical’ quality that exists independently of the subject depicted.” Johnson argued Delacroix initiated a revolution, one that made its way through the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Fauves, and ended with Kandinsky. 

    It is not just color that has an affinity to music. Gauguin wrote that paintings “should provoke thoughts as music provokes thoughts, without the help of ideas or images, simply through the mysterious relationships which exist between our brains and these arrangements of lines and colors.” This has the sound of Apophatic theology, the “negative way” made famous by Dionysius the Areopagite. Besides refusing to make positive statements about that which is transcendent, there was a tendency to by-pass the use of metaphors and metaphysics because they cannot logically achieve the goals set by their practitioners. It is arguable that there is here also a tendency to by-pass the Platonic rejection of art because it is inferior to the “real” Idea. It is arguable the “modern” notion where painting and music “flow together,” the notion of “imitation” — the bane of Plato in regards to art and poetry — seems to have little place. 

    But there is something else here. Blunt observe that figural “gesture” no longer is needed if mood could be achieved by “abstract means.” My response: If “gesture” is no longer needed, is the figure itself needed? If you follow the course of Kandinsky’s art when he was creating “non-representational” art, you witness slowly disappearing figures as they seem to dissolve into the matrix of the abstract “ground” of the paintings. 

    But it is arguable that all this is the retelling of an old story. During the run-up to the Iconoclastic Controversy of the 8th- and 9th-centuries, if realistic figures looked ridiculous in Byzantine domes, designed after the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite, a hierarchy of celestial “spheres” of angels radiating like a mammoth spider-web over gold-mosaic surfaces, how could comparable figures look anything but ridiculous in modern abstract paintings where the emphasis is on the “key” or the “mode” of some musical scale? 

    But the issue of “gesture” needs to be elaborated on. Decades after Kandinsky’s Improvisations and Compositions, “gesture” returned in Pollock’s “drip-paintings,” where the artist’s “body rhythms,” traced out as hurled liquid paint on the canvas laid out on the floor of his barn. Rather than gesture of figures on canvas, the trace of gestures of the artist’s act of painting itself on the surface of the canvas. I may be alone in my take of this, but I argue this placed us in a kind of No-Man’s-Land: Post-Modern art has little room for a figure of vibrancy, whether man, woman, or child. 

    My response. I do think in terms of line and color and composition to try to establish emotion and mood in my work, but include the figure. But my “ground” might be said to be found in old folk ballads where “fairy music” is used to “enchant” and “disenchant” the heroes and heroines that migrate in and out of Fairy Land. Lowry Charles Wimberly, in an old study of the English and Scottish (and other, especially Scandinavian) ballads, observed, “Of those charms which lure mortals to elf-land, magic music is perhaps the most common and most effective…” It may sound ridiculous but I always listen to music when I paint. I guess I do hope that something of it will rub off onto me, and then hopefully might make its way onto my canvas. In any event, I often portray musicians playing their musical instruments: Celtic harps, Spanish guitars, violins and fiddles, up-right pianos, accordions, flutes and fairy horns. Portraying musical instruments is a challenge. Portraying the musician playing the instrument, where posture is correct, hands in the right place, fingers on the keyboard as they should be, or forming a chord on violin or guitar, this is a greater challenge. Getting the hand right can be very difficult. I may redo a hand 30 times. Maybe more. If you want to understand my art from the inside, begin with the hands depicted. There are hundreds of them, I’m sure. They are reproductions and metaphors and images of the hands that made the pictures. Rilke used to talk about “hand-work.” This was likely on account of the time he spent with Rodin, of whom he said could make a single part into a whole world — a Rodin “foot” or “hand” seemed to stand alone as something of an independent entity, a sort of thing-in-itself. True enough. Nevertheless, I don’t look upon it this way. A hand or foot belongs to the body, the body to the mind, and all to a whole. It may take some time and effort to get one whole. But that’s the price of what I do. I’m sorry. My art is not about umbrellas making love to sewing machines on operating tables. I am not an “object” artist. I do portray umbrellas, however. 

    If there are musicians in my pictures, there are also dancers. Although I try to portray figures with the “lightness” of ballet, I seldom portray ballet dancers themselves. I orient more to the salt of the earth — the dance of the Gypsies, especially Flamenco. Few things have done more to free me from the perniciousness of modern, plastic culture than the unvarnished music and dance of the Gypsies. But again, it is that which is subtle that wins me over. Can I get the hands and fingers of the female dancers right as they circle about. I listened to a Flamenco dancer once explain the secret of the “hands”: “They want to go but they cannot go.” Gia Kourlas related a conversation she had with the famous Flamenco dancer Soledad Barrio: “’Sometimes,’ she (Barrio) added, ‘ you’re twisted, like branches of old trees.’ She spiraled her back until her arms and fingertips curled above her head. ‘They start looking for different ways to keep growing. It’s about going beyond the limit of your body.’” As arms and hands and fingers circle round and round, or at least have a limited space to work in, they may or may not be trapped. The dancers may not literally go beyond the limits of their bodies, but I give them all the beauty I can. Others can shock the observer with the wondrous dance of an elephant dung Madonna, but I try to portray the Gypsy “juerga”: singers, dancers, musicians, tiny audience, anonymous or not. I don’t expect to ever get a sense of the famous duende, but I do my best. 

    Dancing is done primarily with the feet (even the modern female Flamenco dance). I spend nearly as much time with feet as with hands. Early in The Divine Comedy Pilgrim Dante, though lame in both feet, concludes he must make his great journey up Mt. Purgatory by foot: “After I rested my tired body, I again took up my way across the desert strand, so that the firm foot was always the lower.” Whether making a heroic journey, or simply dancing, feet need a “ground” to make their way upon. Of course, the “ground,” in this sense, has physical dimensions, and needs a context. Consider Classic Greek theater, which seems to have evolved out of a “participation ritual,” a ritual with strict separation between audience and stage. Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier, who analyzed this subject, observed: “Despite this separation, the citizen still participated knowingly in the order of culture, just as the philosopher & scientist contemplated the order of the cosmos from a ‘distance’…This distance… made reflective thought, authorship, and metaphysics possible… This distance made it possible for ‘space’ itself to become an object of artistic representation…” Pushing further, we have “Plato’s space of ontological continuity, the ground that makes it possible for Being and beings to relate and to share a name, in language and in human action. The distance, therefore, is what enables ‘participation’ after the inception of the ‘reflective’ individual.” 

    We now live in a Post-Modern world that has metamorphosed into a digital age of cyberspace, a space of “ubiquitous character.” This “electronic ‘space’ adds a new dimension to the old dialectic of public and private realms, suggesting possible new forms of human interaction.” But this same cyberspace can lead to a “delusion of omnipresence.” Then what happens to the“reflective distance,” so important to Classical theater? “In this new space of communication, the expressive body, origin of all communicative action, is always left out.” In this context we may pose a question posed by Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier: “Whether the collapse of this distance… (‘Depth of virtual reality’) will not signal a loss of the possibility of acting ethically and compassionately?” 

    I do not know the answer to this question. But it makes me think of Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, where the author refused to remove the “ground” upon which he stood. I do not know if Kafka was right in not removing this ground. But I know that I try to provide a solid ground for my figures, a ground that has an atmosphere above it, and figures that I try to make “whole” and “expressive” on it. 

    But what about that atmosphere, that space? In the wake of Cubism and everything that followed, you have to talk about space. Although Renaissance artists, when they developed perspective, focused attention on their objects, even though perspective opened up space. Historians and critics of perspective space tell us that the notion of open, homogeneous space became widely accepted only during the Enlightenment. This would be normal space that extends in three dimensions. As the scientific understanding of space and the ability to “portray” it (by way of one-, two-, and three-point perspective) improved, artists and critics turned away from it (James Elkins has shown that this process had already begun during the Quattrocento.). Aesthetic space has become more and more “subjective.” Jean Paulhan (as quoted by Hubert Damisch), observed that Cubist space has been said to be a space “that falls on us without warning! A space in which we have no part. Yet (whose existence) is incontestable! A space … felt by the heart, and which is not mediated by perspective. I mean by reflection, combination, arrangement, in short, by method and its reasons.” Damisch responded to this: “But the fact that perspective must be challenged, that the attempt must be made to break it down, to deconstruct it, makes it clear that we are dealing, rather, with a space ‘after’ or ‘according to reason.’ As for the other kind, nothing can be said about it without resorting to … recourses of negation.” When I talk about “emotional space,” my “fictive space,” I think in terms of the usual homogeneous space of three dimensions. I may seek   to make it into something special, even indispensible, for the figures I make. But I still approach it as normal three-dimensional space, one that I do my best to transfer to a two-dimensional surface, following the rules of modern perspective drawing. Most of the time, anyway. 

    I speak of “ground,” but I have not defined it. Is it the same ground as found in the earlier “figure-ground?” To try to make a distinction, “figure-ground” is about “relationships,” between the figure or object and its background or milieu. The term “ground” as used above is more about “distance” or “dimension.” In this context I also talk of “reflective distance,” “depth of virtual reality,” “dimensions of space,” terms that are all abstract. But they seem necessary if I want to discuss the painting I do in the digital age we live in. 

    But there is another way to discuss my work in terms of “dimensions,” a way less abstract and more easily understood. Consider an observation made by Mark Rothko, the famous Color Field painter of half a century ago: “… to paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience… to look at experience with a reducing glass. However when you paint the large picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.” Most of my paintings extend at least 3ft. on the short side, and extend up to 8 ft. on the long side. My most common dimensions are about 3 ft. x 4 ft. and 4 ft. x 5 ft. A few are about 5 ft. x 8 ft. In any event, for me these sizes are large enough for me to feel I am “in it.” Long ago, when I began painting seriously, I stumbled onto Oskar Walzel’s German Romanticism, and once there, stumbled onto Fichte’s “intellectual perception”: “I cannot take a step nor move my hand or foot without the intellectual perception of my consciousness of these actions, only by means of these perceptions do I know that I am doing it; only by means of them can I differentiate between my actions and the experience objects of my actions.” For me it is by way of a perception of this sort that I decide where to place a line or a color on canvas, and another such perception to decide whether to keep it. But it’s a “full body” decision (Kind of like trying to complete a forward pass in football under game conditions). Following Rothko’s terminology, I am “in” the picture. But I also need to evaluate what I have done. I need to step “outside” to get enough “distance” for that. This way I alternate between being “inside” and “outside” the picture. I began painting following the dictums of Paul Klee’s “cool romanticism.” It worked wonderfully for him, but not for me. Working on Klee’s scale — more the dimensions of a sheet of typing paper — I always felt “outside” the picture. I needed to get “inside.” Working on larger canvases has helped. 

Composition & Narration: Second Synthesis 

    If the human figure has largely departed from art, so has the story. There’s been little narration in painting for a long time now. Few things are more human than story telling. Reinsertion of the human figure means narration. It also brings composition to the fore. The first artist I studied in depth was Paul Klee. I soon realized the importance of what might be called a “see-saw” balance system: if a figure, object, action, was in the lower part of the picture on one side, I would sometimes find a counter-balance figure, object, action in the upper part of the picture on the other side. In my own work I gravitated to this technique and I found that when I constructed such a balance, I would also, in my mind’s eye, construct an imaginary line connecting the paired figures or objects, thus making a diagonal. My mind was activated and set in motion, but balance reigned. This might be called the notion of an induced diagonal. 

    The balancing entities need not be of the same size. This I learned from Picasso’s Les Saltimbanques. Fernande Olivier, seated in the lower right corner of the canvas, holds at bay all the others, standing on the left: Max Jacob, André Salmon, Guillaume Apollinaire, Picasso himself. Even though the separation distance between Fernande and the others is not large, I find the gap critical. The saltimbanque-type gap is something of a leitmotif in my work, not necessarily for figure or character, but for some compositions, for atmosphere, as it were. Günther Bandmann (Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning) discussed the nature of space in medieval churches: For the medieval mind it could not be “grasped,” was “even non-existent ‘between’ the walls, ‘between’ things, not the air between them but actually a ‘nothing’ that does something.” For me, at least, even in our digital age spatial gaps sometimes are important, regardless whether they’re made up of air or nothing — or more mundanely, paint or canvas. Whatever it is, it sometimes does something. In any event, I find gaps are sometimes essential in order to obtain the atmosphere I seek. 

    A separate problem concerns movement of figures themselves in a picture. If there is to be action in the picture, there must be empty space for the figure in question to move into. I vividly discovered this when painting Masquerade in a Spanish Café. There is a Flamenco dancer at the upper right of the canvas “moving” diagonally downward to the left. When I painted the picture I reached an impasse: there was something wrong with the painting but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I put the canvas aside for a year or so, if I remember correctly. When I returned to the canvas, the problem was obvious. The lower left portion, where the dancer was moving to, was cluttered with objects and figures. I painted most of this out to provide the dancer empty space to move into.  The observer will have to decide whether my ploy worked. In any event, I consider this an induced movement technique: a supposed moving figure needs an empty space to move into. 

    Long before Klee and Picasso there was the classical Greek notion of the “pregnant moment,” the moment or pause before a suggested or known action that forced the observer into a mode of anticipation concerning what would ensue. The Archaic vase painter Exekias was a master of this. For example, the depiction of the suicide of Ajax: Exekias shows him propping up his sword so he can fall on it — not the impaling but the propping. 

    I use, as best I can, all these techniques — see-saw balance, induced movement, pregnant moment — and often try to combine them with point perspective. Point perspective can open up space to provide a location or locations on canvas where the figures or objects or actions may go into. This puts me in opposition with Cubism and everything that has come after it. Clark said Cubism was about “a new feeling for space as we moderns encounter it.” Here perspective is taboo! Nevertheless, James Elkins posed the question: “Is it too extravagant to say perspective is both that which pushes the eye through the painting & that which pushes the thought when it thinks about painting?” 

    It has been many years since I took an interest in Archaic Greek vase painting, the “contour-like” figures that seem so alive, the transition from the Black-Figure (black figures on red ground) to Red-Figure (red figure on black ground), the increased confidence exhibited in drawing skills, once the Red-Figure technique was established (The more transparent red figures encouraged and facilitated the development of foreshortening of figures), and always a story being told, if you knew how to “read” it. Nikolaus Himmelmann called the story telling technique “hieroglyphic narrative,” and pointed out that vases had “self-contained compositions,” but also that the figures had “independent narrative value.” It is uncanny how the figures seem to belong to the story being told, but also seem to have their “own story within it.” I have sometimes wondered if this was not the beginning of the Two Nature’s doctrine (Jesus possessed two natures in one person) in Orthodox Christianity, even though Christianity did not yet exist. When dealing with narration, inevitably the question of “character” arises. In a mimetic novel, characters approximate “real people” (“walking ideas,” is one way it has been put). On the other hand, following Northrup Frye, in Romance the artist creates “stylized figures which expand into archetypes” where “we find Jung’s libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain, respectively.” A well-constructed Romance “radiates a glow of subjective intensity that the novel lacks, and why a suggestion of allegory is constantly creeping in around its fringes…” The danger of this type of representation is a tendency to ornament and ideology, both of which are characteristic of allegory. 

    A personal criticism I make of paintings I have seen over the last generation and more is that figures are too decorative or ornamental. For example, they are often “flattened” into landscapes that are themselves “flattened.” The figures are more “designs,” often suggesting “fossilized artifacts” rather than “walking ideas.” This does not mean I have no place for ornamentation and abstract design. I think of the ornamentation of Odette’s “attire” in In Search of Lost Time that the narrator tells us “enveloped Mme. Swann in a sort of nobility.” Proust may have intended this as parody, I don’t know. But I put geometric and other “frills” on the attire of some of my figures: bead earrings and single bead necklaces adorn most of my female figures, regardless whether these frills or ornaments bring out anything dignified or noble in these figures. 

    Too much “realism” in depicting figures can create a different problem, that of mundane photographic-type representation. Photo-realism looks frozen to me. I find it important to distinguish the artistic creation from the prototype, whatever it might be. Too much realism, photographic or not, tends to block this. I may be rare today in that I have read and taken seriously Günter Bandmann: “to say a work of art has meaning is to point to something.” The need to “point” suggests “symbols” and “metaphors.” Derrida considered a metaphor’s “lack of determination” part of its “goodness.” The notion of the “walking idea” becomes more plausible. This is consistent with the so-called Baudelaire Revolution: “He leads us to a new definition of poetry; the poem becomes an enigma.” There are “multiple meanings” contained in words and objects that are the ingredients in a poem. The same would seem to be true for figures and objects in paintings.  

    My own approach. I try to make figures be part of the story, but also have a story of their own, but all in an emotional atmosphere that makes it possible. I used to be a teacher. My notion of teaching, besides imparting knowledge, was fairly simple: I tried to create an atmosphere in which my students could show or exhibit their “dignity.” I try to do the same for my figures (I must say, however, some of my figures are not very dignified.). In creating such figures I feel I sometimes fight a battle between mimetic and allegorical modes, between character and caricature. Aristotle gives pride of place to mimesis, not allegory. The allegorical imperative is one of fate & control, not the freedom of letting go. But Fletcher argued that somewhere between complete allegory and extreme realism there is enough sense of control (even security) that reflective distance makes possible, at least, the great products of mimesis, comedy and tragedy. Perspective, especially two-point (oblique angle) perspective, tends to open up space for a story to be told, or an action to unfold. I try to lay the ground for a potential story that the observer may work out for him or herself. In this way hopefully narrative is open-ended, but not trivial. 

    Open-endedness suggests a larger story, or a story at a different level. Does the collective work of an artist tell a story in its own right? Isaiah Berlin, in his famous essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, based on the words of an old Greek poet — “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” — argued Tolstoy thought he was a hedgehog (Hedgehogs “relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel — a single, universal, organizing principle in terms or which alone all that they are and say has significance.”), but in fact was a fox (Foxes “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle…”). Berlin calls the difference between hedgehogs and foxes a “great chasm.” Which side of the chasm am I on? The observer will have to decide. 

    Hedgehogs, foxes, allegory, mimesis, pregnant moments, see-saw balance, this is all very nice. But how do composition and narration apply to my actual paintings? I need to discuss individual paintings. And this requires context. Story telling, with words or pictures, is often associated with mythology. Arguably primordial stories begin with a dream. Is there any relationship here with allegory and mimesis, caricature and character in the context of the dream? Fletcher argued that from a semantic and rational standpoint, the dream-story tends toward allegory, but from a metaphysical standpoint tends toward myth. Be that as it may, in myth we usually begin with a great battle, for example, the Battle of the Titans in Greek and Roman mythology. I have had my own battle with my own Titans. 

    One of the first art history books I read was Robert Rosenblum’s Cubism and 20th-Century Art, published about 1960. At the conclusion of the book Rosenblum wrote about his subject: “Yet, if the generative power of Cubism has waned, the authority of its major statements has not. The cardinal works of Picasso and Braque not only take their places beside the masterpieces of the Western pictorial tradition, but offer standards of 20th-century achievement by which art of today and tomorrow will be measured.” On the page facing Rosenblum’s comment was a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica. This painting is one of great seriousness: the mass-bombing of innocent civilians, the beginning of an exercise that included use of atomic weapons on civilian populations, and threatens the existence of human civilization down to the present day. 

    T. J. Clark discussed Picasso’s painting in detail. He pointed out how the figures and objects in the picture were pushed to the frontal plane — something made necessary in order to bring appropriate drama and gravity to the event depicted. But the flat, cartoon-like figures needed a ground to stand on rather than float about on the frontal plane. Clark argued the drama and gravity were provided by pseudo-collage patterns placed on the cartoon figures and a grid-like floor that the feet of the figures touched. In addition the feet were represented more three-dimensionally that the rest of the body in question. I appreciate that Picasso also seemed to represent the hands of the human figures more three-dimensionally. This helps me — both with hands and feet — begin to feel, as it were, the suffering of the innocent in the face of the brutality portrayed. 

    Arguably Picasso in this instance is worthy of Homer. Auerbach, in his great masterpiece, Mimesis, begins with Homer, and explains how the poet placed all his action in the foreground: “Procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground — that is, in a local and temporal present which is absolute.” This is because Homer allows “externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative.” Auerbach uses the example of “Odysseus’ scar” in the Odyssey to make his point. I would argue the point could be even more relevant in the battle scenes in the Iliad, where the brutality would more resemble the scene depicted in Guernica. What matters is the “present,” which fills the stage and the readers mind completely. I think this is true of both Homer and Picasso. 

    Arguably, European Modernism was over with the creation of Guernica. For me it was. 

    But Auerbach did not discuss Homer in a vacuum. He provided the counter-poise of Hebrew literature in the Bible, where there is always background. Consider the example of the Sacrifice of Isaac. When Abraham speaks to God, the two are in different planes: Abraham is prostrate before God. Abraham’s words and gestures are directed “toward the depths of the picture or upward.” The dark place from which the voice of God comes is not in the foreground. “Even humans in Biblical stories have greater depth of time, fate, and consciousness than human beings in Homer.” 

    Myself? I do not eschew Homer, Picasso, and the foreground, but I also do not eschew the Bible, its dark spaces, and the background. For better or worse, I accept the notion of depth into the canvas, regardless of how illusory it is, and do my best to use means designed to suggest depth. Given the dogma of flatness that evolved during the 20th-century, I am at odds with the conventional wisdom of our time, and have done battle with it. 

    Nevertheless, when I decided to try to become a painter in the spring of 1971, it was to Paul Klee and his “random walk” that I gravitated. I did my best in his wake for the good part of a decade and more. However, whereas Klee’s carefree fantasies seemed to expose fundamental truths, in his wake I seemed to produce rigid compositions that elicited only a yawn. I needed to do battle with Klee, certainly Picasso, whose drafting skills more closely resemble my own, as well as the dogma of Modernism itself. Harlequin Brings the Night was one of my battles. Upon seeing the picture a friend asked, “Why is the ground more abstract that the figures — the horses and the charioteer?” 

Whereas the charioteer and horses are idealized and three-dimensional (foreshortened) and reminiscent of many other similar figures in my work, the ground-figures are more two-dimensional (un-foreshortened, cartoon-like, and arguably of the same stuff as the ground) and reminiscent of many figures found in Klee and Picasso and other similar artists. The spear-wielding harlequin-thunderbird charioteer and galloping horses trampling and obliterating the fantasy ground-figures, are reminiscent of the story of long ago, of Achilles dragging the lifeless body of Hector on the Trojan plain. 

    Just as the Greeks destroyed Troy, I was trying to destroy the grip of failed attempts to be a modern painter. Why a two-dimensional ground and three-dimensional figures that trample it? This may be from the influence of Ernst Kitzinger, who in his great book, Byzantine Art in the Making, explained the “figure-carpet effect” in Byzantine mosaics. Traditional floor mosaics in the Roman world were portrayed with three-dimensional illusionism, as were the walls. During the 5th-century Byzantine artists began evenly spreading figures in a schematic way, so that the floor mosaics appeared more like carpets or rugs, suitable to walk on, you could say. This meant that Byzantine churches, for example, could be decorated in different pictorial styles, one for floor, another for walls (These ideas could be extended to the ceiling, which, like the floor was conducive to surface spreading, which itself was conducive to more two-dimensional portrayal.). 

    When I began Harlequin Brings the Night, I was thinking in terms of Achilles and Hector, but with time (I returned to the painting several times for the good part of a decade in a re-working process) I began to associate Hector and the ground with Modern art, parts of which in fact I loved dearly, but had to move beyond. So I used one style to attack another. The darkness behind the chariot that seems to be coming indicates, I think, I was not optimistic about what I would replace Modernism with. In retrospect, it was with the more “realistic” and foreshortened figures that were destroying the landscape. 

    I conceived the painting as epical for myself and used the largest size canvas I could move about comfortably: 5 ft. x 8 ft. (My arm span is approximately five feet and my basement studio has ceiling beams at approximately eight feet).  Another painting (also 5 ft. x 8 ft.) on the order of Harlequin Brings the Night is Thunderbird and the Thunderbolt. This time it is the sky that is being attacked: Has the thunderbird figure cut-up the sky with his sword? Regardless, again there are two styles: three-dimensional horses and figure, and two-dimensional sky. A third painting (again 5 ft. x 8 ft.) that could be construed as making a trilogy, is Harlequin Goes to the Sun. The heroic figure seems not up to conquering the sun, but rather, along with his horses, is in free fall, just like Phaeton in Greek mythology. There is no ground in this painting. 

    The three mythological paintings — Harlequin Brings the Night, Thunderbird and Thunderbolt, Harlequin Goes to the Sun — with their five by eight foot dimensions are all relatively large. A pair of paintings of the same size, but of a different nature, are Tight-Rope Walker I and Tight-Rope Walker II. These “tight-rope” paintings are more mundane when compared to the mythological trio, about the trials and tribulations of raising children. 

    Tight-Rope Walker I has six figures (originally there seven, but one was painted out during a re-work). On the lower left there is a ticket-taker in his booth. Left of the booth and in front of it are two clowns, a three-dimensional Pierrette (with worried look and folded arms) seated in front, and a more two-dimensional Red Clown (pointing to bandages on his head) left of the booth. To the right of the booth are two more figures dressed in blue and orange poka-dot costumes. They appear to be two halves of a “cheval-jupon” act: the figure more to the left has a tail while the one more to the right has the mask of what appears to be the head of a horse. The latter figure appears to be smoking a small firecracker that may explode at any minute. This figure also has one shoe on and one shoe off, while the shoe on has its redness in a pool in which the figure is standing — it is as though this red shoe has been drained of its life-blood. The tail-half figure is complaining to the ticket-taker. In the upper right is a Harlequine commencing her walk on the wire. She is the only figure in the upper register, and is in see-saw balance with the ticket booth and the cluster of figures surrounding it. The upper left of the canvas is empty, providing a place for the Harlequine to walk the wire. 

    When I constructed the painting I was raising two juvenile daughters, something that had much to do with searching for ways to balance many things. The painting was very much about balance, in particular, making sure the tight-rope walker looked like she actually was balanced. The idea was that the painting wouldn’t be complete unless the tight-rope walker looked right (On this point the observer will have to make his or her own judgment whether the painting is “complete.”). For me this was something of an allegorical imperative: the final result was determined before hand. I might not carry this out in real life, but if I could manage it on canvas, maybe that would improve my odds. In allegory there is what is sometimes called “magical causation,” one type of which is called “sympathetic” or “imitative” magic: the hunter, for example, plans out the hunt by miming the hunt, sometimes making a picture of it, of the prey and the kill. What I was attempting was something like this, but in an opposite manner. I was not trying to bring down the figure in question, but boost it up. 

    Another characteristic of allegory pertains to the splitting up of the important attributes of important personages into individual characters, often more caricatures than full-fledged characters. In the present case, the two clowns in the lower left might be called the maternal and paternal instinct of myself, while the ticket taker is a figure trying to unify or at least hold together the two. The parent in this case sees a rather unimpressive trinity, three figures in one person, as it were. If we assume the other figures are the daughters, we have three figures in two persons. Given the lack of confidence in the appearance of the clowns and the lack of harmony associated with the “cheval-jupon” act, this allegorical picture does not look promising. 

    T. J. Clark commented on the women and guitars in Picasso’s post-World War I paintings. The fingers of these women failed to play their guitars. It is that way here: a guitar rests silently against the ticket booth behind Pierrette. If there is music, it is supplied by the Red Clown, as he holds with one hand vertically an accordion that seems to be stretched by gravity to its limit — actually beyond its limit, since it appears broken at the bottom end. The accordion is largely transparent and you can see inside Mallarmé’s metaphysical blue transitioning downward into a thin rainbow-like spectrum, but then into blackness, arguably all symbolizing the Symbolist void. Balakian said Mallarmé twice tried to probe the dark side of the “azure” but “came away with a sense of the futility of the great, and the devastating importance of man’s metaphysical adventure.” Tight-Rope Walker I would seem to look inauspicious. Nevertheless, the key figure, the tight-rope walker, looks like she might achieve her goal to walk the wire. Besides, there is a second picture, Tight-Rope Walker II. 

    A spotlight illuminates the tight-rope walker in this follow up painting. She appears to be completing her act. Directly below is the ticket booth. Inside is a young woman who is dressed as though she is a performer herself. Next to her are two Red Clowns looking pathetic, as they seem to be following the girl on the wire. The taller clown has what appears to be a fish net, while the shorter clown has what looks like a kitchen strainer. They seem to be waiting to catch the tight-rope walker, if she were to fall? These two clowns look ridiculous, fearing so for the girl on the wire, even though she seems quite stable and balanced. But my own experience tells me parents often worry about their children, even when their fears are unwarranted. The “cheval-jupon” fiasco of the first tight-rope painting is now an equestrian act: a young female rider atop her horse, reins confidently in hand, waits her turn to perform. Another young woman is playing a mandolin and is located in the lower right side of the canvas, and looks isolated, but compositionally performs the important function of providing a see-saw balance with the tight-rope walker, the only figure in the upper register. 

     Clark said of Picasso that he was “the artist of the shrieking girl, and the silent mandolin.” The portrayal here seems more that of the silent girl and singing mandolin. In Section 1 I said my goal has been to portray who I wanted my children to become. The two tight-rope paintings were important in my becoming aware of my goal, as well as what I had in mind. 

    Master-builders of the 13th-century, in their quest to reach the heavens, built churches that were taller and taller, until St. Pierre in Beauvais fell down. But there was another trend in the wake of cathedrals like Chartres, Reims, Amiens, a trend toward smaller size, but with emphasis put on perfecting the inner essence of what a sanctuary should be. Likely the most famous building that came out of this movement was the La Chapelle, built by Louis IX. 

    In the wake of my large mythological and allegorical paintings just discussed, I began to work on canvases of smaller sizes (usually approximately 3 ft. x 4 ft., 3 ft. x 5 ft., or 4 ft. x 5 ft.). I was hoping I could perfect something I seemed to be trying to see or do. In any event, this is the range of sizes of the paintings I will now discuss. 

    I decided to become an artist in 1971. In 1997 I had an exhibit that was reviewed in a local paper. The reviewer referred to Masquerade in a Spanish Café as my ”tour de force.” During the exhibit opening one of the gallery patrons asked me how I did that painting. I said I first established the dancer as a full figure and then “choreographed” other figures around her. At this point we were interrupted and our conversation was ended, never to be picked up. About a decade later I had another opening and was asked to talk about twenty minutes about my work. This was an opportunity to pick up where I left off. My so-called “choreography” was based on the structure or organization of the bullfight, which has three acts. The first act begins with lance-bearing picadors who ride out on horses. They wound the bull with their lances. But in return the bull gores the horses and sometimes the horses fall on the picadors. “You should be horrified and disgusted at these parodies of the horses and what happens to them,” said Hemingway. In the second act the matador and bandarillos implant “barbed flags” (“little harpoons”) in the neck of the bull to further weaken him. During both these acts the matador displays his skill with his large cape (red on the bull side, yellow on the other). It is probably true to say bullfighters are judged largely on their skill with the cape. Finally, in the third act there is the “moment of truth”: the matador, with a different and smaller cape and with a sword has fifteen minutes to complete his job, to seal the deal, as it were. 

    The lower register of the picture has two figures seated at different ends of a table. The male wears what looks like a picador’s hat. Each holds a mask. Both these masks seem to be of the head of a horse: the two figures are the two members of a “cheval-jupon” act. It would seem each considers him or her self the lead part of the horse. The Flamenco dancer dominates the middle register. Behind her is a guitarist and below her, off stage, is a figure peering at her. This figure has the costume of a Minotaur. The dancer’s dress whips like a matador’s cape, one the Minotaur is no match for. A caped Harlequin is communicating with a pierrette at a bar in the upper register. Pierrette faces away from us, but in a mirror behind the bar part of her face can be made out, but her reflection seems fused with that of the reflection of the guitarist, who is onstage in the middle register. 

    The argument could be made that the three registers of the picture represent the three stages of the bullfight: picadors and horses in the first register, matador and bull in the second, the “moment of truth” in the third. But what truth? A better analysis might be made by observing the registers in reverse order: at the top, Harlequin and Pierrette meet; next Pierrette bests Harlequin in the main event; finally, mutual separation at the bottom. 

    Hemingway spoke of the bullfight in terms of tragedy and comedy: “The death of the horse (in the “old” bullfight) tends to be comic, while that of the bull is tragic.” Although I have parodied the picador-horse part of the bullfight, I don’t find it funny. And with the cowering Minotaur, the part of the bull I cannot find tragic. 

    When I finished my twenty-minute talk on my art, there was a question and answer period. A woman introduced herself as a literature teacher without significant knowledge of painting. She asked if the dancer in Masquerade in a Spanish Café could be construed as possessing the “narrative voice,” I think she put it. I told her I had not thought of it that way, but that I began the canvas with that dancer and choreographed around her — the point I had made at the earlier opening. Subsequently, I have thought about the question, and I can say I generally begin with one or two characters, situate them as full-bodied figures in key locations, and then work around them to tell the story that I want to tell. In this sense I think it is proper to consider the dancer the main character of Masquerade in a Spanish Café. The main character in the Titan-battle paintings would be the harlequin-thunderbird figure, and in the tight-rope paintings it would be the tight-rope walker. 

    At three feet by four feet The Bead Necklace is smaller that Masquerade. A small space for a woman with fan and necklace on the left is off-set by a small group at the right: violinist and guitarist playing, two young girls watching the woman with the necklace, and behind them a box and two birds, one red and one blue. 

    What is the story? When I see the necklace, I think of the old Greek legend of the Necklace of Eriphyle. The necklace actually belonged to Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite. During the lead up to the Seven Against Thebes, Eriphyle, wife of Amphorus and one of the Seven, accepted the necklace as a bribe from Polynices, and another of the Seven. The result of the bribe was the ruination of everyone involved. 

    In the painting I have attempted to create an ominous atmosphere with the blackness of the water and the sky above the right side group with the whiteness of almost everything else except the birds & beads and flowers at the feet of the bead woman. The separation of the fan and bead-necklace performer from the “audience,” the music, the black void in the sky, the whiteness of the idealized figures and their ground, in all this I attempted to create an atmosphere where there might be a sense of reflective distance or space. The reflective distance I discussed at the end of the last section. Pierre-Gomez and Louise Pellitier discuss its importance in our Post-Modern world: “However difficult it may be to bear, operating in this bittersweet space of desire, the personal imagination is perhaps our finest accomplishment as a species; it is the medium of ethics and our best assurance against self-destruction.” I tried in this painting — actually, in all my painting — to represent a space something like this, regardless whether anyone can find — or even desires to find — a place where the imagination can come alive in a positive way. 

    Who us the lead character in the Bead Necklace? The title would seem to indicate the left hand woman with fan and necklace. She is the one “telling” the story. However, I began the painting with the violin-woman on the right, with her violin and the void, but also the colorful box and birds behind her. It is her “music” that establishes the atmosphere of the story. As far as I’m concerned, this was a shared story: the woman who showed it, but also the woman created the atmosphere. 

    The painting called Donkey Girl proceeded in unusual manner for me. Everything seemed to fall into place from the beginning. And unlike so many of my other paintings, I have not felt a need to rework it. The painting came about as follows. I saw a photograph in a newspaper of an Algerian girl with a donkey. This was the origin of the girl and donkey at the left of the canvas. Once the girl and donkey were established, I added an elf-knight playing a horn-flute on the right. The girl and donkey failed to properly off-set the elf-knight. There was too much emptiness between left and right. I added a harlequin with a drum on his back to the girl-donkey pair. This significantly improved the balance, as well as suggested conflict with the already suggested relationship between the girl and the elf-figure. Nevertheless, more details and content were needed. At the right I added a birdcage and two birds, one in the cage and the other on the elf-knight’s shoulder. Behind them I painted a black sea.  At the left I painted a patch of poppies at the donkey girl’s feet, a bit of a mist behind her, and a snow-capped mountain behind the left side group. 

    Some time after completing this painting a Danish friend commented on the elf-knight. The Norse god Odin had two birds, he said, and they would perch on his shoulder and speak to him. I thought I was unaware of this. It turns out I was mistaken. Several years before I read some Norse mythology, and did in fact read about Odin and his ravens. Each day they would fly throughout his kingdom; when they returned, they would perch on his shoulder and whisper in his ear all that they saw. 

    I need to make a couple of observations. First, inclusion of two birds, one on a shoulder and one in a cage may have been a consequence of my application of the Schelling rule discussed in Section 2. My subconscious may have added the birds. Second, by putting on the same canvas girl and donkey along with Odin and his birds, I may have put the lie to my contention that I am not a disciple of Lautréamont, that I do not subscribe to the creative process of placing a sewing machine and umbrella on the same table and from there. It seems my handling of the donkey-girl and elf-knight are not so far removed from Pearlstein’s placing a naked woman and steel toy car in the same space — with very different results, of course. 

    H. R. Ellis Davidson (Gods and Myths of Northern Europe) commented on the birds of Odin: “… while the ravens, the birds of Odin, are closely connected with battle and the devouring of the slain, they have a different aspect in the poem Grimnismál. There the wolves of Odin are called Ravener and Greed, but the ravens have names of a different kind: 

          Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory, 

          Fly over the world each day. 

          I fear for Thought, lest he not come back, 

          But I fear more for Memory. 

The birds here are symbols of the mind of the seer or shaman, sent over vast distances.” 

    Consider this a little differently. There is an Old Norse term, “filgja,” defined as an attendant spirit where well-being is intimately tied to a personage in question. Often it is the animal form of the personage seen by those with second sight. If filgja dies, so does the personage who is so tied to it. A literal translation of filgja is “follower,” but it can be more a forward scout, as it were. In this sense Odin’s birds may fit within the concept. 

    Since I have off-set my donkey-girl with the raven god, is there any significance to the relation of the girl and her donkey? Are the birds and donkey portrayed to insure the survival of the god and the girl. I felt something like this, I think, when I came across the photograph of the Algerian girl and her donkey: there was a haunting, but sacred, beauty that seemed in danger of being lost. Is the girl in danger? How about Odin? Or is this a matter of a mortal in danger because of enchantment with a fairy? Certainly it is well known that there is a kinship between the Edda (Old Norse source of the story of Odin and his birds) and folk ballads. Of all the themes found in the ballads, enchantment and disenchantment might be the most prominent: of “spells and charms whereby mortals are brought within the jurisdiction of Otherworld powers” and “counter-spells by means of which mortals evade, or escape, such jurisdiction.” Wimberly observed that, “of those charms which lure mortals to elf-land, magic music is perhaps the most common and most effective, that is, at any rate, according to the folk song.” 

    One of the first ballads I learned was The Elfin-Knight. It begins as follows: 

          The elfin-knight sits on yon hill, 

          Ba, ba, ba, lilli ba. 

          He blews his horn both lowd and shrille, 

          The wind hast blown my plaid awa. 

          He blowes it east, he blowdes it west, 

          He blowes it wher he lyketh best. 

          “I wish that horn were in my kist, 

          Yea, and the knight in my arms two.” 

The ballad suggests the elfin-horn is a sort of bugle. In Donkey-Girl, my elf-knight, if you can call him such, blows more a horn-flute, and its music seems to paint the sky pink. The donkey-girl seems frozen in a patch of poppies, those flowers that grew wild in the fields of Flanders and symbolize the life-blood of so many heroes who died too young. 

    Although I painted Donkey-Girl pretty much in one take, as it were, I cannot say what my intention was other than trying to enchant the observer, and to this day do not pretend to know. It is probably best to say Donkey-Girl is a riddle. 

    If I painted Donkey-Girl straight through, not putting it aside for another day, Twilight Harpist, on the other hand, I put aside for about twenty years before bringing it to completion. In addition, this painting suggests I have probably read too many folk ballads. Composition wise, the painting is simple enough. A harpist is in the upper left on a bridge. The bridge opening in the lower right is in see-saw balance. There are birds on the bridge and around the bridge opening, where twilight sunlight leaves its reflection on the surface of the water, under which there is a small family of fishes. 

    Bridges, it is said, sometimes separate our world from the fairy world. In the Old Norse ballad Sir Bosmer in Elf Land a knight meets on a bridge a lovely maiden who turns out to be the Elf-Queen: 

          But while he was crossing the bridge of stone, 

          His horse tripped upon his golden shoon… 

          “O welcome, Sir Bosmer! Come home to me, 

          I’ve brew’d the mead and wine for thee.” 

Harping is heard in numerous ballads. It plays a critical role in another Norse ballad, Harpens’ Kraft. In a Swedish version Sir Peter’s bride, Kerstin, like her two sisters before her, falls from Ringfalla Bridge into the water below. All are held captive by a water-troll (called Neck) until Peter begins harping: 

          The first stroke on his gold harp he gave, 

          The foul ugly Neck sat and laughed on the wave. 

          The second time the gold harp he swept, 

          The foul ugly Neck on the wave sat and wept. 

          The third stroke on the gold harp rang, 

          Little Kerstin reached up her snow-white arm. 

          He played the bark off the trees, 

          He played little Kertsin back on his knees. 

          And the Neck out of the waves came there, 

          And a proud maiden on each arm he bare. 

In a different Swedish ballad a young maiden, betrothed to the Dwarf-King, is scolded by her mother for “sitting in the rosy grove playing on her gold harp,” rather than finish her bride-dress. In the ballad Twa Sisters, a maiden is murdered by her sister. A harpist, stringing the harp with locks of hair from the murdered maiden, accuses the guilty party. In some versions of the ballad, the harp itself does the accusing. 

    If you look inside balladry, you find animism and transmigration of souls. Animism refers to the belief that creatures, objects, even places, that people engage with possess spiritual qualities, in short, have souls. Transmigration, sometimes called metensomatosis, refers to the passage of the soul into plants (“a briar and a rose, or a briar and a kirk”), animals (especially birds: “out an spake the bonny bird, that flew abon her head”), body parts (for example, bones: in The Twa Sisters the harp is sometimes made from the breast bone of the murdered maiden), objects (for example, swords: “and speak up, my bonny brown sword…”), more abstractly, light (“One of the most persistent echoes of an old idea is the mention in many ballads of a more or less supernatural light that is given off by some object”: “wherever her blood ran a light kindled”), or even into names (In Ribold og Gulborg, the former says to the latter: “Now if in fight you see me fall/My name I pray you not to call”). 

    In The Cruel Mother, you have the following: 

          ”Ye sall be seven years bird on a tree, 

          Ye sall be seven years fish i the sea. 

          Ye sall be seven years eel i pule, 

          An sall seven years doon into hell.” 

This graduated hierarchy downward affected me long ago. I consciously thought of it when I painted Twilight Harpist. Although I made no attempt to portray hell, I did the birds and the fish. Whether there is an eel, the observer will have to decide. 

    Several years ago I saved from a newspaper a photograph of women and children refugees walking across a desert plain, I believe in Afghanistan. The personages in the photograph were moving right to left at a slight camera angle, so that their pathway formed a shallow diagonal from upper right to lower left. A decade later, I started a painting based on this photograph. How to do this? I thought of Jane Austen. Of her Tessa Hadley observed, “Austen imagines a new world of fluid novelistic mimesis, brings it into being and makes it in the same moment seem inevitable and natural as breathing.” My take: in this fluid mimetic world she created some characters that graced it with dignity. This is what I wanted to infuse into my figures, give the personages, whoever they were, dignity. But how to do it pictorially? First, a sense of dignity was already present in the photograph: from the left, three adult women, with heads tilted slightly downward, each carries with both hands a child, moves with directed gait. Next a younger woman, probably a teenager, carries what looks like a rolled up carpet, as with the older women, using both hands. And as with the older women, head slightly down, directed gait. Finally, there is a young girl, maybe an adolescent, the only one with head up, eyes squarely on the camera, thoughtful look. Could dignity be enhanced? All that I can say is that I tried, and entitled the painting Refugees. 

    I gave the women and girls bead earrings and necklaces possessing a single bead each. In the photograph all personages are bundled with dark, opaque clothing, presumably for protective purposes. I put distinctive ornamental designs on the clothing of all figures. I also made the clothing, and to certain extent, the bodies themselves, partially transparent, so you could see designs behind designs, hidden pearls, as it were. Transparency can suggest integrity, and all that is associated with it. This is what I did, and the observer will have to decide whether the effort was worth it. 

    When I was a teacher, if the subject was important enough, I would sometimes explain the material in question in simple enough fashion so all hopefully could understand the contours of the subject. Before going into more depth I would then tell my students that I was about to re-explain the subject, which they now understood, but this time in a manner that would insure they would no longer would understand it. I am going to do something like now. 

    In Sodom and Gomorrah, at a salon at the Prince and Princess de Guermantes, Proust describes the features of two sons of Mme. de Saint-Surgis, each with very different but distinct features of their mother. Later the narrator observes them: “The pair slipped past us toward the card room, one behind the other, like a pair of allegorical figures…” For better or worse, the photograph & the painting of the women and children refugees walking one behind the other across the desert plain, has the look of an allegory, at least in my mind’s eye. 

    Fletcher argued symbolic action in allegory comes in two forms: battle and progress. I prefer to substitute quest for progress. Harlequin Brings the Night could be argued to be an example of allegorical battle (My own personal battle with Modernism), while Refugees could be argued to be an example of allegorical quest (The quest of real refugees to find a safe-haven). To achieve victory in battle and to obtain the goal of a quest in allegory, allegorical magic or allegorical ritual is required. In battle normally imitative (homeopathic) magic is required (The magician imitates what is to be controlled: in Harlequin Brings the Night Harlequin-Thunderbird attacks the ground that is laced with fanciful creatures). In quest generally contiguous (contagious) magic is required (The magician uses an object — a magic wand, for example — to cast a spell). I don’t see that this happens in Refugees. 

    Does this mean Refugees is not allegorical? Proceed from a different standpoint. Allegories become distinctly visual with the notion of cosmos. Susanne Lingren defines allegorical cosmos: “The organizing and founding image or idea that can make sense of all parts of an allegory.” Fletcher gives a simple example: “the jewelry worn by a lady to show her social status.” In my art — in Refugees, but more often than not, in most of my paintings — you find I am less interested in social status than status of being: most of my female figures wear simple, spherical bead earrings and single bead necklaces. When white — as in Refugees — the beads have the look of pearls. Hopefully, there is also dignity. 

    When I think of allegory and cosmos, I think more in terms of decoration and ornament, which play significant roles in allegory. Allegorical causation is sometimes called magical causation. It is not about syllogism, certainly not the rigors of modern logic. Rather it is more about using methods like synecdoche, where a part is substituted for the whole (for example, substitute the word “brush” for the act of “painting”). All parts point to a whole in a well constructed allegory, it is said. This is probably a good part of the reason ornament, where you have identical, or practically identical, repeated units, plays an important role in allegory. This would seem to symbolize or imply some kind of perfection in regards to the story at hand. I find such ornaments associated with personages suggest a kind of perfection or the bearer of those ornaments. So it would be for a figure wearing a dress with well-constructed ornaments. This is the idea in Refugees: each figure has its own design; even the donkey’s bridle carries the same design as the girl who leads that donkey. 

    Refugees are people who seem to be without home or identity. The lowest of the low. “What you have done onto the least of these, you have done onto me,” someone once said. 

    The subject of ornamentation and decoration points to a problem I see in the art of the second half of the 20th-century. We need to sense the difference between the decoration and the person. If the personage, him or herself, becomes decorative — something I have seen over and over again in contemporary drawing and painting — the life-blood of the personage drains away. Although the clothes on my figures are ornamental and decorative, I have tried to prevent the figures themselves from being that way. 

    Transparency plays a large role in my artwork. This is especially so in Refugees. In Section 2 I commented on the aenigmatic mirror argument for icons and how it is based on the Tragedy of the Human Condition. You can look at the argument from a different schematic standpoint: First, we as human beings can be construed as having a two-part composition: body and soul, physical and spiritual, material and immaterial. Second, we cannot reason without images: “It is impossible for us to think without images.” (John of Damascus) Third, matter is not completely opaque: “The bodily elements can be made diaphanous, at least to a certain extent.” (Mosche Baratsch on the Damascene) Fourth, By making bodies diaphanous, we seem to move away from physical and material images toward spiritual and non-material awareness: “Visual things are corporeal models which provide a vague understanding of intelligible things.” (John of Damascus) This is the “mediated revelation” elicited by icons in the aenigmatic mirror model: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” (I Corinthians 13:12) 

    With the exception of Tight-Rope Walker I, the paintings just discussed utilize, more or less, two-point (oblique angle) perspective. The subject of perspective and narration needs more elaboration. The notion that perspective facilitates narration is disputable, if for no other reason perspective tends to draw attention to itself at the expense of everything else. Jacques Lacan argued “artificial perspective” was “anti-humanist,” that it reduced “man to an eye and this eye to a point.” This is the “Cyclops vision” argument, apparently first used by Leonardo. The idea is that the technique obliges the viewer to stay in one location to properly see a scene in perspective. A change in vantage point means a change in what is seen. In short, if the viewer is not face to face with the vanishing point of the picture, the view is distorted. 

    It seems this type of criticism became dogmatic with the inception of Cubism, because Cubist paintings had the appearance, at least, of using multiple viewpoints. Part of the argument is that this is how we interact with our environment. We formulate it by looking at it from different viewpoints, and ultimately make a composite “picture” for ourselves. It should be observed that there are numerous examples of Renaissance artists using more than one vantage point in single paintings. The first example I remember studying was Masaccio’s Trinity: The Christ figure has a different vanishing point than the figures and objects at the base of the painting. I approached Tight-Rope Walker I in a similar fashion. This painting has three single-point perspective vanishing points. The figures and objects in the lower register — ticket-taker and ticket-booth, clown pair and double-horse pair — exist in space with a vanishing-point vertically at about eye level of seated Pierrette, and horizontally slightly to the right of her (near the center). Arguably Pierrette is the “reflective” character of the painting. To maintain this vanishing point for the grandstand and tight-rope stand would require extreme foreshortening that would draw attention to itself rather than the story being related, so I used a second vanishing point for these objects. Finally, there is Harlequine, the tight-rope walker. I wanted myself, as well as the observer, to feel next to the tight-rope walker, as it were, to lend her moral support, so she would feel confident in walking the wire. Thus I drew and painted Harlequine as though the vanishing point was at her level of the tight-rope. I like Tight-Rope Walker I but feel it is less dynamic than Tight-Rope Walker II, which is constructed with two-point perspective. 

    The Lacanian view of perspective is not the only one. Leibniz argued the “congruence” of perspective “lines” “defined God as a geometric aspect of all perspectives.” This seems to come from the earlier notion of Nicholas of Cusa and others that God was like an infinite sphere such that its center was everywhere and surface nowhere. We may not believe in God anymore. Nevertheless, convergence to a vanishing point seems to imply something perfect and ideal and divine. Karstin Harries, commenting on Rogier van der Weyden’s St. Luke Sketching the Virgin, observed “I would like to suggest that it is … possible to interpret the attempts of painters such as Rogier van der Weyden to grasp something of the infinity of space as a symbolic activity analogous to our attempt to grasp God.” 

    So a problem with perspective is that as soon as we move, the infinite vanishing point moves too. The situation is like that of chasing rainbows: we cannot possess that which we strive for. Perspective seems tailor-made for pursuing the Human Condition discussed above. Consider the words of Pascal: “Thus paintings, seen from too far away or from too close; and there is only one indivisible point that is the truthful spot; the others are too close, too distant, too high, too low. Perspective designates (this point) in the art of painting. But who designates it in truth and ethics?” Damisch argues that Brunelleschi’s invention of artificial perspective at the beginning of the Quattrocento was a “call for truth.” 

    Wittgenstein said words are like points, prepositions like arrows: they give meaning to words. “Don’t look at my finger, look in the direction in which it is pointing.” Damisch argues perspective is like a sentence: it has a vanishing point, distance point, and designation of place. This opens the possibility of painting making a statement. If we allow the poet to take liberty with sentence structure by way of poetic license, we should allow the painter to take liberty with perspective. I do this with reflected images, whether in mirrors, pianos, whatever. Such reflections are dependent on the observation point. I tend to try to set the vanishing point, and consequently observation point, for each mirror image, independently, as though each figure has its own vanishing point in regards to the reflecting surface. In this way the observer of the painting will see the figure and its image as I desire: the reflected images may or may not be consistent with the overall observation point of the painted scene. 

    But if there is virtually no sentence or no perspective, do we really have a poem or a painting? I would say, “Yes we do, but should we be saturated with this kind of art?” In a chapter entitled The Fossilization of Perspective, James Elkins comments on perspective as follows: “Though geometry is still strong as a signifier in our painting, ‘perspective’ has faded almost beyond recognition — or, to use the metaphor of the chapter title, it has been compressed from a living organism into a flattened fossil.” In short, self-respecting artists still use geometry but not perspective. I see two extremes here: rigid one-point perspective that crystallizes the life out of the picture — it has as much life as a stone; or rigid avoidance of perspective that functions like an amputation — life is lost because of lack of movement because of lack of limbs. 

    Single-point perspective is a limiting case of two-point perspective, the case where the viewer is face-to-face with the figure or object or scene at hand. Technically the distinction between one-point and two-point perspective is dependent on whether the plane of the object to be portrayed is parallel to the picture plane on not parallel (at an oblique angle). When not parallel, there are two vanishing points on the horizon, one right of the object, the other left. As the object rotates so that a critical plane of it becomes parallel with the picture plane, one of the vanishing points goes to infinity, becomes infinitely far away on the horizon to the right or left. The other vanishing point lines up with the eyes of the observer, again on the horizon.  

    The history of stage design is instructive when considering two-point perspective. Prior to the 18th-century it was common for stage-set scenes to line up the perspective vanishing point with the “King’s Box.” This meant that views from all other locations would be distorted. Ferdinado Galle del Bibiena (1711) published a method for designing stage-sets that no longer gave the King’s Box a privileged point of view. The method seems to have been an early attempt at two-point perspective (Brunelleschi’s perspective had one infinite point.). Pérez-Gómez and Pellitier note that with the new method “the perspective illusion of scenery … appeared real from every seat in the auditorium.” Theatrical space was established “that was more ‘democratic’ than former created perspective, providing everyone with a better illusion of apparent depth.” Strictly speaking a scene in two-point perspective changes when the vantage point changes, but not nearly so much as occurs in one-point perspective. 

    Before I was a teacher, before I fancied myself an artist, I fancied myself an athlete. Indeed, I was the guy that my teammates and coaches had pegged as a future coach, probably because I was such a student of the game. In fact, I did do some scouting. I can’t remember where or when I first learned it, but a rule was to scout opposing teams from the corner of the end zone (for football) or gym (for basketball). The idea was that observing the game from an oblique angle made visible the break down of defenses and the opening of “holes” in it, and the ability of opposing players to take advantage of these breakdowns. I have long seen a relationship with this and making pictures where the viewer is at an oblique angle with the scene or action observed. I think I first saw the value of oblique perspective studying the pictures of Degas. Degas himself said he didn’t know anything about perspective. Maybe so. But he certainly had a feel for it. Critics refer to his “camera angle” views. As for me, I almost always make use of two-point perspective: you do not see just the front, back, or side of a figure, but front and side or back and side. To add to the complexity I also often add mirrors.  

    Mirrors can also open up space, sometimes when perspective falls short. I learned this when I painted Spanish Fan Dance. There is a dancer on stage moving right to left on the canvas. Behind her is a mirror, so that her mirror image moves left to right, in the direction of other figures who, like the dancer, are reflected in the mirror. Originally I placed a guitarist and hand-clapping woman on the right side of the picture between the stage and mirror. But the size of the reflected dancer, as well as other reflected figures in the mirror, mandated that the mirror existed just behind the stage. There simply was no room between stage and mirror for any figures.  After trying to paint guitarist and clapping woman between stage and mirror anyway, I concluded that the composition looked impossibly forced on the right side of the canvas. I finally decided to conceive these figures as reflections of personages presumably on stage with the other reflected figures. The point to be made is that the mirror opened up space in the opposite direction when compared to perspective: point perspective tends to open up the background (the space behind the frontal plane); mirrors tend to open up the foreground (where the observer is). When I first worked on Byzantine Gypsy, I made the same mistake I made with Spanish Fan Dance. There are two figures in the foreground of Byzantine Gypsy. I tried to place other figures behind them in front of a wall, but there was insufficient space. This time I put a window where they were so that they are either reflections on its surface, or existing on the other side. The observer must decide for him or herself whether my ploys actually work. I believe I was successful in placing figures between stage & mirror in Blind Cantaor. In this case the mirror is higher on the canvas and smaller in size, so that space between stage and mirror is more believable. And only one figure, the dancer, is seen in the mirror. The dancer’s reflection is moving in the same direction as the dancer herself, right to left. More to the point, the reflection is ahead of the dancer and seems to be leading her, rather than following her, across the stage. 

    My judgment that there was an impossible space in Spanish Fan Dance points to a fundamental difference between my approach to painting and that of the Cubists, who arguably gave us the most profound painting paradigm in the 20th-century. Clark argued Picasso was Nietzsche’s painter, and quotes comments of the great prophet concerning the “inner world”: “The entire inner world (is) originally thin as if inserted between two skins.” Clark asserted that Cubism picked up on this notion or the inner world: “thinness — the proximity — was non negotiable. It was Cubism’s reality principle.” This seems to be another way of saying Cubism is about constructing with planes. Even if infinitely thin, they still can be projected at different angles. If a plane is not parallel to the picture plane, there will be recession in depth and consequent intersections and possible entanglements and confusion that are often hidden with the aid of white and off-white “passage.” This is not to be critical of “passage.” One of the great paintings of Analytic Cubism was Picasso’s Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1909-10). Of it Edward Fry observed, “The whole surface of the painting is a series of small, interesting planes, anyone of which, because of ‘passage,’ may be understood both behind and in front of the other, adjoining planes.” Fry argued Cubism constituted a break with the “European illusionistic tradition.” The most notorious tool of illusionism arguably is perspective and foreshortening. Jean Metzinger was singled out for special criticism because, although he was a Cubist painter, in Blue Bird, for example his faceted, Cubist planes made up a series of vignettes where each scene was constructed by way of perspective and foreshortening. Fry called this “sub Cubist.” Rather than “represent” scenes and objects, the true Cubist “presented” them — flattened them out and remade them. Clark argued Guernica “shows the Cubist world coming to an end.” Actually, both he and Fry pointed to Picasso’s 1925 painting Three Dancers as marking the end of Cubism as a critical art form. Nevertheless, many of the rules of Cubism have carried on well past their time. This is certainly true of “object-ness” and “flatness.” I have problems with both these principles. As for the latter: foreshortening is too important to me. Without it the human figure loses its suppleness and rigidifies. I find one of the greatest challenges when drawing and painting the figure is properly foreshortening. Indeed, forbidding foreshortening is like forbidding the throwing of curveballs in baseball. 

    There is a little more to say about Byzantine Gypsy and Blind Cantaor. The first has two stage figures, a woman with Spanish poka-dot dress holding a tambourine above her head and pointing her index finger off stage and off canvas to the left. She is onstage with face in profile view facing a harlequin-dressed guitarist, also in facial profile view. Adding a window increases the riddle nature of the relation between these two figures on stage. The reflection of the tambourine woman (or of her double on the other side of the window) has a frontal face and has what looks like a Byzantine nimbus above her head (The visor of her hat is painted gold). This Byzantine tambourine woman seems not to be pointing off stage but directly at Harlequin. And her tambourine seems to now serve for a nimbus for him. Which side of the window is this double of the tambourine woman actually on? And what is the meaning of the pointing? This all seems like a mystery or a riddle. The truth is the picture has been created in an open-ended fashion. I have imagined that the tambourine-woman is teasing the harlequin-guitarist. 

    The lead character in Byzantine Gypsy is the tambourine-woman, even though both she and Harlequin are shown full-figure on stage in the foreground. Actually, you might say she and her double are the lead characters. It should be evident that the on-stage dancer with the red and yellow poka-dot dress is the lead character in Spanish Fan Dance, as was the case in Masquerade in a Spanish Café. Blind Cantaor is different. The dancer gliding across the stage following her reflection is not the lead character. She is backstage behind the blind singer wearing the costume of a harlequin. It should be clear that he is the main character. For me he is a special personage. When I look at him voices come to me of great Flamenco singers: the strangely operatic voice of the Manuel Torres, the so-called “gravel” voice of Juan Talega, two of the great masters of the famous duendé. There is also La Niña de la Puebla, who was truly blind, and who sang a campanilleros that I have listened to many times. For me it has as much gravitas as any soleares or siguiriyas that I have heard from Torres or Talega or anyone else. But there is someone else here. When I was young I saw film clips of Marian Anderson:  her large boned body and humble countenance; but more than that she closed her eyes when she sang, as though she were singing not to the audience standing before her, but to another one, a more ideal one, kind of like Jane Austen’s writings, perhaps. In some ways my blind singer is a male version of Marian Anderson. She may be gone, but at least for me, her grandeur lives on. 

    Return to Spanish Fan Dance one more time. I painted this painting as a follow up to Masquerade in a Spanish Café. Both were important to me in finding my way in terms, not only composition, but also in trying to tell a story. From the composition stand point, the role of mirrors expanded in Spanish Fan Dance.  How about narration? I began with photographs of two Flamenco dancers on the jacket of a compact disc. One was of a dancer moving right to left with an “attitude,” left arm and hand out looking like a running back attempting to “stiff-arm” some unseen opponent, the right arm behind her back holding a fan. The fan might have been a football: then the pose might pass for the famous Heisman pose in in college football. The other dancer was behind the first one and was standing still with her right arm straight up in the air holding a spread out fan. She seemed to be signaling “stop!” 

    I gave the “attitude” dancer a red dress with yellow poka-dots. Call her the Red Dancer. I placed her at the lower left of the canvas, the place where the similar red dancer in Masquerade was moving toward. I gave the other dancer a yellow dress with blue poka-dots. Call her the Yellow Dancer. I placed her at the upper right edge of the canvas and put the fan in the hand opposite that in the photograph. I wanted the upward stretching arm to be parallel with the canvas edge. 

    The two dancers were now in see-saw balance, but they also served as book ends for the space in between. The Red Dancer was moving away from the Yellow Dancer. The movement was reversed by placing a mirror behind the Red Dancer and situating the Yellow Dancer in the mirror. In short, I painted the mirror image of the Red Dancer, who is moving toward the Yellow Dancer. With two views of the Red Dancer, they could be compared. The Red Dancer was the only personage that could be seen on the stage. As such she appears isolated.  Her mirror image is moving not only in the direction of the Yellow Dancer, but several other figures bunched on the right side of the canvas. The Red Dancer looks like a running back finding her way through the opponent’s defense. From my perspective, this interpretation seems to work. But it also seems to contradict the principle I took pains to explain, that of “induced movement,” the notion of the need of a moving figure for empty space to move into. My response to this contradiction: the notion of induced movement does not always apply. Context is important. 

    The argument could be made that we learn something by this “doubling” of the Red Dancer. I have been drawn to mirror images as a challenge to see if I can make them believable. Drawing such images illustrates visually a form of doubling. Doubling has been called “the chief defining attribute of allegory.” Certainly the phenomenon could be said to be found at the core of allegorical causation. Fletcher argued the creation of double plots enforces allegorical interpretation: “We want to know which is genuine and which is the false presentation.” In Spanish Fan Dance the genuine presentation is the Red Dancer alone on stage; the false presentation must be the action in the mirror. There are problems with the mirror figures. Most obviously, the real Red Dancer wears no hat, while the mirror image one does. But in addition, the real and mirror image arms don’t seem to match up (Are we really dealing with a mirror image?), the guitarist doesn’t seem to make sense (He seems a disembodied reflection), the lower right woman is problematic (She seems like a reflection of the off-stage woman at the left of the mirror, a woman who seems at an impossible angle for a mirror reflection). It would seem the story in the mirror — the false one, as it were — is more interesting than that on the stage itself — the Red Dancer on stage is about to leave the limits of the canvas. 

    It could be argued that the total picture suggests someone with an “attitude” — the Red Dancer —is introduced on stage and fulfilled in the mirror. We could interpret this as a parody of Auerbach’s notion of “figure and fulfillment.” What began by taking Old Testament personages and events as “figures,” and finding in the New Testament their “fulfillment,” ultimately became in the hands of Dante real historical personages finding their fulfillment in their otherworld character appropriate rewards and punishments, all done within a Thomistic-Aristotelian framework, emphasizing the “book-ends” of “potential” and “actual.” 

    Several years after painting Spanish Fan Dance I returned to the theme of action represented by a mirror image in Looking-Glass Minuet. This time I wanted to make the figures in the mirror more directly related to their prototypes. Originally I called this painting Columbine’s Minuet, a response to a much earlier Harlequin’s Minuet: if he could have a dance named after himself, so could she. Indeed, I tend to interchange these two titles. 

    The source of the dancers was found in a Watteau pastoral painting. A young woman, in an 18th-century country peasant costume, complete with apron, is leading out what seems to be a country bumpkin of a man who knows nothing of dancing. He looks so awkward that a young girl seems to be imploring the lead-out woman to be careful: “This is not going to end well,” she seems to say. 

    I brought the two dancers in doors and put them on stage. The woman is Columbine with apron, and the man is Harlequin with eyes shut. Columbine, who appears quite sure of herself, leads out Harlequin, who is precariously close to the edge of the stage. The pair constitutes the only figures on the left side of the mirror, which is behind them (The observer is at an oblique angle to the complete setting). After working on the painting for a year or so, it occurred to me that with some effort I might make the dancers appear to move through the mirror to the other side, as happened to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass. For better or worse I made a slight disjunction in the mirror by making vertical lines to indicate mirror panels, one being between Columbine and Harlequin. I do think now the mirror image of Harlequin suggests he’s on the other side of the mirror, but now blindly stepping right off the stage. And there is there — in Looking-Glass World — a young Alice, dressed like Columbine, and aware of the impending disaster. Columbine herself seems also to be entering Looking-Glass World. You see her face at a new angle, in profile, not only on the other side of the looking-glass, but on the other side of Harlequin: you have to look through Harlequin to see her face and expression. 

    Figure and fulfillment? True for Harlequin: the awkward guy on the stage does seem to be marching off a cliff, as it were, on the looking-glass side of the mirror, fulfilling his fate, as it were. But this is trivial, as was the case in Spanish Fan Dance. What about Columbine? Certainly she is more problematic. What goes with her, only she knows. You may argue this is ridiculous and absurd. Columbine’s reflection isn’t real, nor is the on-stage Columbine, as both are figments of my imagination, figures drawn and painted by me. Isn’t it pointless to talk about what some one is thinking or feeling if that someone doesn’t exist? True enough. But what if you accept the notion of Coleridge: to appreciate what he called “the willing suspension of disbelief,” to accept that a story in question is untrue, but to suspend that knowledge in order to win something from that story. Maybe this is like falling asleep: you cannot dream unless you do it.  

    Although there is much to say about the Looking-Glass World on the other side of the mirror, I will comment only on the pianist, whose reflection can be seen in her piano. Since she doesn’t seem to exist (at least is not shown) on this side of the mirror, and since Plato said a picture is two times removed from reality, the pianist seated at her piano must be three-times removed from reality (as are all the looking-glass figures), but her image in the piano must be four times removed. Regardless of how many times she is removed from reality, she seems to be enjoying the dance. 

    Beginning of a Royal Dance was a follow up to Looking-Glass Minuet. The source for the content of the painting was again Watteau. He did several pictures where a noble man and a noble woman are, or are about to, engage in a noble dance. I scoured these paintings to get myself started. In the end the noble man became a jester, all dressed in red, and totally out of place. The noble woman is, as always in such paintings, Columbine, here very much the center of attention (Unless you think Jester wins that role). Two critical decisions were made at the outset when planning this canvas. First, whereas the mirror was to the right of the dancers in Looking-Glass, I decided it would be to the left in Royal Dance. Second, whereas movement was implied in Looking-Glass, static stability was to be the rule in Royal Dance: the pregnant moment before the action begins. There are numerous mirror images in this picture. Columbine at the far left, nicely symmetrical to her floor presence. Behind her to the right a woman with a lute-like instrument, only with a violin-like bough, and a harlequin pianist — both personages are reflected in the piano. Harlequin’s mirror image is believable, while the lute-woman’s is more about symmetry than accuracy. Behind the piano are three women, apparently performers. Two are reflected in the mirror on the left wall. Significantly, Jester has no mirror image, but between he and Columbine is a window to another room or hallway that has another mirror with the reflection of a Flamenco-type dancer, apparently mimicking the jester, presumably as a parody. 

    Although the lute player and the pianist are poised to begin playing (In the wall mirror to the far left, behind the mirror image of Columbine, is a blue and white harlequin with a crown and what might be a conductor’s baton preparing to signal the commencement of the dance), behind Columbine is a boy or elf-like figure, who seems to have already begun blowing his horn-flute. Apparently the dance has already begun. 

    Much ado of dancing. Each of the last several paintings I have discussed, is one way or another, about dance. Strictly speaking, none is about ballet. In fact, with the exception of Harlequin Pianist and Ballerina, I have avoided strict ballet. And that painting is a depiction of a ballerina holding her shoes as she listens to Harlequin at the piano. There is no dancing in it. However, I have not avoided ballet as much as this suggests. Jennifer Homans (Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet) tells us the story of ballet began when Henri II of France married the very young Florentine Catherine de Medici in 1533. There was a great blossoming during the long reign of the Sun King Louis XIV, who died in 1715. Watteau painted toward the end and beyond the Sun King’s reign. The dances found in the paintings of Watteau, from whom I have drawn so much, whether they suggest peasants in the country, or lords and ladies at court, come from the same milieu as ballet itself, and pay homage to both that milieu and early ballet. 

    I argued Section 2 that ballet is important to me. Consider ballet from a different perspective, in the realm of Flamenco. “Ballet is up, Flamenco is down.” So said a poet of the dance. There is the striving against gravity and the limits of vision to see angels dance, but there is also the often wild, but also poignant song and dance of the outcasts. Maybe I am wrong, but I try to take a dance like Flamenco and find in it principles that are at the core of the ballet. A fundamental notion in ballet is the “turnout.” The normal sense of the term pertains to the proper foot position. In modern ballet, proper position is the 180-degree angle between the feet of the dancer. I have seen a reproduction of a painting showing Louis XIV with what Jennifer Homans calls a “dignified 90-degree foot angle.” The blind singer in my Blind Cantaor seems also to hold a 90-degree position, and he, too, looks pretty dignified. Although I am clearly biased, I also find him “noble.” On the other hand, in Tight-Rope Walker II there are two clowns wearing boots with an approximately 180-degree foot position. Actually I should say the position of their boots has a 180-degree angle because there is little evidence of legs coming out of the boots because of baggy pants. It looks as though someone just drew and painted boots on the canvas. There may be no feet in them. Here I find neither dignity nor nobility.                            

    For Akim Volynsky, turn-out was about far more than foot position: “There is no movement on stage that can be done without turn-out. You extend your leg forward, or back, or sideways, executing what is called battement. Rotating the leg on the floor or in the air, you must show complete turn-out, directing to the spectator’s view just that animated, wide, and delicately resilient part of the leg. Gently sinking down, the dancer directs her knee as much to the side as possible, revealing the confined planes hidden in darkness. And everything turns out pure, harmonious, and ecstatically illuminated.” More than this: “Classical dance demands that all of the body’s essence be exposed.” Even more: “Turnout is not the property of choreography alone. It is reflected in almost all areas of the human spirit and activity. We encounter it in verbal and fine art.” I don’t know if this last is true, but I make an effort in this direction. I may be alone here, but I strive for my own notion of turn-out. Not in the sense of figures properly “turning out,” or having proper foot angle. No. It’s more about the composition [Symbol] for example, the use of perspective to facilitate exposing some essence of the situation at hand: what do we see concerning the meaning of the figures and the context they exist in? What do paintings like Looking-Glass Minuet and Beginning of a Royal Dance expose? 

    The old Chinese painting manuals talk of “breathing-in” and “breathing-out,” “filling” and “emptying,” “presence” and “absence.” I’m sure these old manuals don’t say “turn-in” and “turn-out,” but I do. Tight-Rope Walker II is more about turning-in than turning-out. The tight-rope walker is moving downward right to left into the plane of the picture at an oblique angle and off the picture itself in such a way that that the composition seems to be “closing-up.” But below the exiting tight-rope walker is an equestrian waiting to perform [Symbol] it is the moment before her moment, you could say. The rider and horse are poised to move left to right out of the picture plane to where the viewer is [Symbol] to turn-out, you could say. On the other hand, in Looking-Glass Minuet, because of the large mirror, the minuet pair appears to simultaneously turn-out and turn-in. 

    In this context, one last painting: Tambourine Dance. I began the painting by placing the dancer in the lower left on stage. A man in a harlequin costume was placed in the upper right of the picture for balance. In between I added a violinist, pianist, and horn-flute player for music. There are other figures behind the piano. The stage was originally made diagonally so that it extended from upper left to lower right across the complete canvas. The idea was to provide a place for the dancer to move into, but this didn’t work: the space to the right of the dancer looked wasted. It seemed to trivialize the composition. As was the case in Spanish Fan Dance, this seemed to put the lie to the notion that a moving figure needed an empty space to move into. In any event, I cut off the portion of the stage that looked wrong and added a table with two figures seated at it, a woman and a man dressed as a harlequin. Once done it was apparent that the tambourine dancer functioned on a diagonal line extending from herself back to the upper right harlequin who originally was added to balance her. The induced diagonal is her directional line; it is perpendicular to the diagonal of the stage. Since the tambourine dancer is at the end of the diagonal, there is no place for her to go, and she is too far away from the mirror for a reflection that could move her in a different direction, as was the case in Spanish Fan Dance. 

    Nevertheless, I can make an argument for this composition. Whereas the Red Dancer in Fan Dance was about aggressive movement, the tambourine dancer is more about gentleness and grace. With her right hand she holds her tambourine above her head as though it were a halo. With her left had she gently holds her dress in such a way that she seems to be pulling back a veil. Whereas the castanet dancer in Masquerade in a Spanish Café uses her dress as a cape or lure to fool the Minotaur, the tambourine dancer seems to be revealing to us, not herself, but all the other figures, who are her audience. In the lower register at the added table sits another dancer, in a front row seat, as it were, and she seems to watch in awe (jealousy?) at the stage dancer. The harlequin seated with her seems happily mesmerized by the dancer, but also seems absorbed by the horn-flutist behind him seemingly blowing her music right inside his brain. The musician, who looks like she might be some fairy princess, seems to be fusing with the harlequin, diffusing into his body, as it were. When I painted her into him, I thought of the old theological concept, enhypostasis. Strictly speaking, the term refers to the nature of the personhood of Jesus Christ, how he could have two natures in one person, one divine and one human. I first learned the term as “having one’s being in another,” apparently an old definition, which is not Orthodox. How I looked at it: Is it possible to portray how a person becomes consumed by or part of someone or something else. Today we would do that by inserting electrodes to monitor brain electrochemistry and make a map of the results. But I seek something else. What does it mean to be part of another? What was it about the Vinteuil sonata that so gripped Charles Swann that was somehow inextricably tied to his love of Odette de Crécy. Proust called it “the national anthem of their love.” Odette seemed to inhabit Swann in some way. Does the sonata have any tie to the fact that Swann was infatuated with Odette because he saw a Botticelli maiden in her? Maybe he was enchanted by a fairy princess the way countless personages were enchanted long ago and sung about in old folk ballads.  In any event, to the left of the fairy princess horn-flute player is a piano with a harlequine pianist. Her hands are reflected just above the keys on the upright piano, while her head and upper torso can be seen further up. But there is a disjunction: the reflected hands are seen from one angle, the upper torso from another. Its as though Harlequine’s reflection is looking into an empty place where her hands suggest her head should be. This is subtle return to an idea in Humpty Dumpty After the Fall. In that case a broken Humpty Dumpty picks up a shell fragment of himself that includes one of his eyes which, of course, is only painted on the shell, and holds it up as though it is looking back into the emptiness of his broken eggshell self. To the left of the pianist is a third harlequin, a violinist with eyes shut and playing up a storm, so much so that we can “see” the music. He seems totally engrossed in himself or his music or both. Maybe he’s a narcissist. In the background behind the piano is a bar with mirror behind it. There are three young women and mirror doubles, all in dance costumes. Presumably the young dancers are biding their time, potential performers waiting to become actual ones. Finally, behind the bar is the original  harlequin, there from the beginning to provide the diagonal line for the tambourine dancer to work her magic. Smoking his pipe, he contemplates the action he helped set in motion, or is he just infatuated with the dance and dancer? 

A Modern Labyrinth & Thread of Ariadne: A Search for Truth & Beauty

     Narrative doesn’t make sense during an age that values the notion of “non-representation.” The drive to abstraction during the 20th-century minimized both the human figure and the narrative story. If the 19th-century gave us the great realist novels based on mimetic storytelling, the 20th-century gave us the story as process of the mind itself. In the words of Virginia Woolf: “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected & incoherent in appearance…” And such Ms. Woolf and many others did. There were many great works of art produced early in the 20th-century. But there is the danger of getting lost in the labyrinth of the mind. Henry James argued Balzac himself got lost in a labyrinth. Concerning the “architecture” of Balzac’s Human Comedy, James wrote: “Balzac’s luxury, as I call it was in the extraordinary number and length of his radiating and ramifying corridors — the labyrinth in which he finally lost himself.” If Balzac’s fictional character Frenhofer pre-figured the Abstract Expressionists, Balzac’s own example of losing himself may have pre-figured more of the 20th-century than we are willing to admit.  

    Consider the example of non-representational art. About the time Picasso and Braque began their adventure with Cubism, Wassily Kandinsky, who came to Munich from Russia, began his adventure with non-representational painting. He began slowly and deliberately, with horse and rider and landscape. John Golding explains: “Kandinsky investigated the relationships of figures to landscape and subsequently the figures to cosmos dissolved into compositions of a coloristic richness hitherto un-envisioned… The truth is that he succeeded from time to time in divorcing himself from legible imagery…” Also consider the following insightful observation concerning the apocalyptic nature of his paintings: “Kandinsky needed an ambitious theme to carry or provoke the supreme ambitions he held for his painting” (For example the Deluge in Genesis 7, 8). Although Kandinsky sometimes achieved “non-representation,” he seemed to need a dramatic story as a starting point. When World War I broke out (August 1914), Kandinsky went home to Russia, not to return until 1921. During the interim he seems to have developed a new abstract style: if the first style was a freewheeling and intoxicating flow of colors, the second style was geometric, contained, with the look of the need for ruler and compass. The “circle” replaced the “horse” as starting point. Golding observed: “There is a sense in which he had reached a second absolute.” Maybe so. But I do not see that the second style matched up to the first. Wilhelm Worringer made a distinction between “empathy” and “abstraction” in regards to aesthetic evaluation of art: “Empathy implies a transference of feeling from the subject into the object and as such is the antithesis to abstraction, which implies the withdrawal of all elements of subjective feeling from the object of perception.” In this context I find Kandinsky’s early work “empathic” and later work “abstract.” 

    I don’t know if Kandinsky was influenced by Malevich’s geometric abstraction (referred to as Suprematism) while in Russia (Golding says the “whiteness” in Kandinsky’s later work may have been), but I prefer Malevich’s geometric work to Kandinsky’s. There is a fresh-wildness in Suprematism that I think is lacking in Kandinsky’s geometric art. As for individual works of art by Malevich, he is probably most famous for his Black Square (“The most minimal canvas yet to have been produced”) of 1915 and White on White (“The blue color of the sky has been defeated by the Suprematist system, has broken through and entered white as the real concept of infinity”) of 1919. It is evident that Malevich shared Kandinsky’s flair for the apocalyptic. In any event, in 1920 Malevich announced that “painting (was) obsolete and the painter himself a thing of the past.” 

    When he returned to painting nearly a decade later, like Kandinsky, he was a changed artist. But whereas Kandinsky painted in a new abstract style, Malevich returned to the human figure in a representational manner. I have not seen enough of Malevich’s late representational work to make an evaluation. Others have. Robert Chandler remarked, “as Malevich’s earlier career is remarkable for its energy, so these late portraits are remarkable for their humanity.” Rachel Polensky said that his late depictions of peasants looked “like saints in icons.” It is noteworthy that Malevich himself thought of his Black Square as an icon. 

    Both Kandinsky and Malevich took abstraction as far as they could, but both ultimately retreated and found their way out the their respective labyrinths, as it were, before they got lost. Golding argues Malevich’s art became the basis for Minimalism and Conceptualism, two of the signature movements of Post-Modernism. Golding also asserts he was also the “prototype for countless subsequent abstract artists who reached their goal … only to find themselves in the tragic position of wondering how to go further, how to avoid the endless repetition of the climax of their achievement, a repetition that might ultimately only drain their art of much of the original impact on meaning.” After 40 or 50 years of observing this kind of art, I find the emphasis should be put on the word “repetition.” T. J. Clark may have argued convincingly that Picasso ultimately portrayed Nietzschean Superman-type figures, but I argue the rest of us seem victims of Nietzsche’s “Eternal Recurrence,” where we repeat ourselves over and over again, making the same turns in our own labyrinths. 

    My question today is how do we “see?” How do we get out of the labyrinth? And my answer is to use the thread of Ariadne: Classic art itself. Robert Flaceliere wrote a study of Greek art and literature during the thousand-year period between Homer and Plotinus. Flaceliere argued the Greeks created a “cult of beauty,” one with a two-pronged focus. First, on the “human figure”; second, on “beauty,” both “moral and physical.” Dostoevsky is famous for saying “beauty will save the world.” I do not know if beauty will save anyone or anything. But I feel compelled to pursue it.  

    The pursuit of Beauty suggests the question of Truth. Periodically I come across critics who argue 20th-century art (and I guess 21st-century art so far) is an episode of Iconoclasm. Iconoclasm suggests the Iconoclastic Controversy of 8th- and 9th-century Byzantium that dealt with the problem of idolatry: mistaking the work of art for God. In today’s parlance we would substitute the word Truth for God. Seen in this light, Iconoclasm begins to have the appearance of Plato’s rejection of art in the Republic: a work of art is only an imitation (actually an imitation of an imitation) of the “real” — the Idea or Truth. 

    Aristotle, with his theory of Tragedy in the immediate wake of Plato, and Plotinus, with his notion of heuretic art half-a-millennium later, as well as others, provided accepted ripostes, as it were, to Plato, but by the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Reformation, the intellectual tide seemed to flow back toward the Platonic rejection. Literature I have read suggests thinkers of the Enlightenment and beyond, especially those in Germany (e.g., Kant, Hegel), have brought us to a circumstance where Truth has drowned out Art, and somehow perhaps we need to separate them. Art needs its own ground, as it were. 

    Talk of beauty in the context of abstract art might be misplaced. Wouldn’t it be better to pursue the “sublime?” The sublime has been with us for a long time. Longinus wrote on it in late antiquity. But it was during the 17th- and 18th-centuries that interest in and analysis of the sublime seems to have blossomed. On one hand, it seems to have provided a repost to beauty, which is so problematic. Although it is easy to talk of beauty when observing a symmetrical frieze on the pediment of a Greek temple, it is entirely different when observing an asymmetrical mountain peak in the Alps. In such situations we usually talk of the sublime. This seems simple enough. And certainly the sublime would seem to be more relevant to Modern art. But the sublime can be problematic, also. Angus Fletcher has argued that modern critics have put too much emphasis on the “subjective” nature of the sublime. He points out that Kant treated it as an Ideal: “Ideas are a dialectically apprehensible source of authority.” It is quite arguable that Kandinsky followed a dialectical process when he paved the way for “pure painting,” as his art is sometimes called. Maybe part of the problem with Post-Modernism is that there is too much emphasis on subjectivity, and too little on ideality. 

    My own position. I think Fletcher has a valid point, and I find the arguments of Aristotle and Plotinus and John the Damascene good enough for me. As for my approach to art, long ago I came across what is called the “kalokagathic argument,” which has been used to defend and explain icons: when Beauty and Good come together, you have a place for Truth. I don’t see this as a philosophical answer to the problem elucidated by contemporary critics of iconoclasm, but I do find in it a working method. Given my goals elucidated in this essay, I pose this question: If I can make “beautiful” (although I cannot define this) something I also think is “right” (whatever that means), what is the result? And if this doesn’t work, try again. 

Sketching & Painting: A Problem of Teleology

    The pursuit of Beauty and Truth and Good is all very nice. But there is always a critical problem in painting and the making of pictures: how to “finish.” Cezanne said the finished work attracts only “the admiration of imbeciles.” According to Picasso finishing a painting was like giving it the “coup de gras.” Anka Myhlstein relates a story about Edgar Degas and Henri Rouart, where the latter purchased a pastel from the former. “Later Degas came to dinner and left with the pastel under his arm, to spruce up a detail. Rouart never saw the painting again. Degas revised it to such an extent that it was ruined.” Ambroise Vollard, the famous picture dealer, relates a different version, or maybe its just a separate, presumably later incident: “But Rouart was not unaware of Degas’ artistic conscience. He knew the artist’s mania for adding final touches to his pictures, no matter how finished they were. And so to protect himself, he fastened the famous Danseuses to the wall with chains. Degas would say to him: ‘Now that foot, Rouart, needs just one more little touch — But Rouart had no fear of losing his picture; he had confidence in the strength of his chains.” 

    These stories call to question, not only the meaning of finishing a work of art, but also the role and meaning of a “sketch.” Long ago, Pliny the Elder wrote about the value of some unfinished works of artists because in them “we see traces of the sketch and the original conception of the artists…” François Jullien criticizes Aristotelian “telos” that puts too much emphasis on the “finished”, at the expense of “potential.” Jullien calls this “form-as-end” where the “sketch” is just a concession. To be sure, Modernism has begun to change that. It is well known that Kant removed “telos” from aesthetics. He gave us what might be called “disinterested, purposeful purposelessness.” 

    There is an old Chinese treatise on painting called the Laozi. In it is the following: the sketch is the stage of creation where the “plenitude has not broken up.” The idea is that the sketch lies between “being and determination”, on the one hand, and “potential and work of art”, on the other. A voice inside me tells me to take this seriously. But there is another voice that calls these differences thesis and antithesis, and demands a synthesis. I listen to both voices. 

    Behind the idea of the “sketch-plenitude” lies a more fundamental idea — that “presence” suggests “absence”, and vice-versa: they reciprocate each other. Heidegger argued the West fixates on “presence”, mistakes it for “essence.” The implication seems to be that we should let presence and absence “mingle together”, as in old Chinese mountain landscapes, where the base of the mountain is lost in the morning mist, and the mountain seems to rise with it (Is the painting of the morning mist an example of “passage?”). Dark clouds can do something like the reverse, and suggest a deluge. Whereas a Chinese landscape seems to rise as you see it, a Watteau landscape, with dark clouds brewing beyond the trees and hills, anticipates something ominous, for example the French Revolution, two or three generations down the road. 

    What about an empty hole? Following the Laozi, it would seem to be in need of filling. I think of this because several years ago I painted Humpty Dumpty’s Champagne Party. I seated Humpty Dumpty on his perch on his wall playing his guitar (sort of) and drinking champagne (more than sort of). Well into the painting I added a well-like hole directly below Humpty Dumpty’s perch to provide a place for the poor egg to fulfill his fate. Is this a “Laozi-plenitude”, somewhere between “being and determination?” Actually, I always considered the depiction as a joke. 

    What does this have to do with sketching or finishing a painting? The same principles that govern sketching govern the final work of art, whether it be a landscape rising or falling, the fate of an imaginary character representing an idea, or a Harlequin playing a violin. The point is for me sketching never terminates. Humpty Dumpty’s “hole” came about this way. When the painting goes bad or I see something I feel the painting needs but is not in the “plan”, I return to the sketch. For me the “plenitude” is between the “sketch” and the final “work of art.” In short, I never stop sketching, If I overdo something, I white it out and start again. 

    R. F. Christian, in a study of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, observed the writer rewrote everything — over and over again. One of the great episodes in the novel was the first meeting between Natasha and Prince André, an episode Tolstoy rewrote several times. Christian observed that Tolstoy’s final version of rewrites was not always the best version, but in this case it probably was. Tolstoy himself said he finally gave up rereading his own work: “It all needs rewriting,” he would say. I am not Tolstoy and I don’t write fiction, but I do identify. 

    Ambroise Vollard, on visiting Degas’ studio, saw a number of wax figures and suggested one be “cast.” Degas responded: “Have it cast! Bronze is all right for those who work for eternity. My pleasure consists in beginning over and over again. Like this… Look!” Vollard: “He took an almost finished Danseuse from his modeling stand and rolled it into a ball of clay.” Once again, I identify. In my own case, however, I only hope I am not a casualty of irony by being an embodiment of the Nietzschean principle of the Eternal Return and repeating myself over and over again.