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| John Singer Sargent, The Wyndham Sisters, 1899, Oil on Canvas, 115 x 84 1/8 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art |
There’s nothing wrong with painting twigs, weeds, leaves and
other debris to fill in some areas of a painting that you have not properly
accounted for in your original composition.
It’s a fine way to spice up that painting of an apple or a human being you
have put smack dab in the center of your canvas with no thought other than to
paint the dickens out of it, him or her.
You haven’t painted anything in two days and you have to get going on
something ASAP, right? You’ll worry
about the composition tomorrow.
I enjoy painting twigs, weeds, leaves and other debris on
occasion. But you can’t get such useful props
in my fashionable Upper West Side neighborhood anymore. Twenty-five years ago, before the
neighborhood became fashionable, you could get twigs, weeds, leaves and all
kinds of debris for your paintings. My
neighbors were singers, dancers, musicians, composers, poets, liberal
Democrats, progressive Democrats, moderate Democrats, radical Democrats,
left-wing anarchists, Jules Feiffer, Stiller and Meara, Stefan Zucker (the
world’s highest tenor), assorted poor people like me, and the bearded, genial,
save-the-world preachy guy with the funny cap and farmer’s overalls festooned
with every possible liberal-cause button he could pin on them. It was his duty to spread the word to total
strangers on the street and on the city buses.
We were all used to debris. Now
my neighbors are stock traders, investment bankers, real estate moguls and
lawyers, who won’t allow twigs, weeds and other debris to sully their
gentrified environment. But the same
lanky lady still walks briskly past you without stopping, asking out of the
side of her mouth if you can spare any change, as she has done for the last 25
years or so. She never gets any but she
keeps on walking and asking. All this may be beside the point,
but then again, what isn’t?
I’ve gone to great lengths to acquire debris for my
paintings. I once found a 40-pound slab
of asphalt (okay, maybe 30 pounds) in a dumpster that I thought would make a
wonderful base for a still life painting.
It didn’t. I was going to just
toss it in the garbage, but the maintenance staff in my apartment building told
me the sanitation workers wouldn’t pick it up as is. So I had to break it apart with a hammer and
fill about 10 plastic bags with the resulting debris before I could dispose of
it at regular intervals over the course of a few days. That stuff was tough to break up, which
shouldn’t have surprised me because it’s designed to bear the weight of cars and
trucks for a few years, at least.
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| Onions from Verdi Square, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20 in. |
Just two blocks south of my apartment building there used to
be a farmer’s market on Saturdays at Verdi Square,
a little triangular park adjacent to the subway stop at 72nd
Street and Broadway. The vendors brought in all kinds of
unexpurgated produce that was so much fun to paint. It took only a couple of minutes early
Saturday morning to get to the market and I could start painting alla prima
half an hour later. The market lost that space when construction began
on a second subway station house about 15 years ago, and I lost a great source
for natural looking produce with all the stems and leaves still attached. I was crushed. I needed the farmer’s market a lot more than
I needed a second subway station house built to make the morning commute easier
for all the Wall Street types flooding into my neighborhood. Things were starting to go downhill before
then, however, when vendors started asking customers if they wanted the tops
cut off their veggies. You bet, everybody
replied. Onions with their glorious
stems and leaves were guillotined by the farmers before being put on sale at
the market. Customers started shucking
their own corn right then and there and throwing the husks in a big wastebasket
near the farmer’s stand, never mind that they used to tell you to keep the
husks on until you are almost ready to boil the corn. But that would mean more debris in your own
apartment. Nobody wants that.
The other, more-distant farmer’s markets I frequent nowadays
sell expurgated produce, which is not nearly as exciting to paint. And by the time I drag the produce or flowers
home I’m too tired to paint them right away, so everything wilts and decays
until I get around to painting them the next morning, when the available light
is most constant in my west-facing home studio.
I occasionally put the flowers in my refrigerator overnight. I’d do it more often, but my kitchen is not
well arranged. With my nice new
landlord-supplied replacement refrigerator, one of those small upright ones, I
have to keep the kitchen door open so I can open the
refrigerator door wide enough to pull out all the shelves in order to lower them
so I can fit a vase of flowers inside. I
can’t figure out how to put the flowers in the refrigerator horizontally
without crushing some of the petals, which happened when I tried it once. Fantin-Latour never had such problems. He was painting flowers fresh from his garden
the same morning he cut them at his summer home in a little French village
called Bure in Normandy.
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Pasquale
Civiletti, Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) monument, 1906, Kenneth Ritvo for The Wall Street Journal
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Verdi Square,
by the way, is home for my favorite public monument in the city, the sculpture
of the great Verdi himself, with four figures from his famous operas
encircled below his majestic standing figure.
Much of the year, the sculpture is obscured by twigs, weeds, leaves and pigeon
droppings, and goes unnoticed by passersby.
Before its cleaning a couple of years ago, it received even less notice. And in the 1960s and early 1970s, heroin users made
Verdi Square and a small companion triangle named Sherman Square just south of
it such a popular destination that together they were referred to as “Needle
Park.”
Filling in the blank spaces around your center of interest
has been a problem for even the best of painters. Wasn’t it Rubens who had a snappy retort for
the man who introduced him to the young Van Dyck with the words, “And he
already knows how to paint backgrounds.”
“Then he knows more than I do,” Rubens replied, or words to that effect.
Rubens had a lot of help on backgrounds
from a host of able studio assistants, as well as from Jan Brueghel the Elder,
who painted flowers and other decorative trappings on some collaborative works.
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Maurice
Grosser, Onions, 1940, 15 x 20 in.,
Private Collection
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The modernist painter Maurice Grosser (1903-1986), who wrote
four books on painting, was an art critic for The Nation and devised the scenarios for two operas by Gertrude
Stein and Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in
Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of
Us All (1947), was so vexed by backgrounds that at one point in his career
he decided to just eliminate them and paint his still life subjects right up to
the edges of his canvases.
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Johannes
Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665, 18 x 15 in.,
Mauritshuis Gallery in The Hague
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Grosser, by the way, in his book The Painter’s Eye (1951), suggested the most intriguing theory I’ve
ever come across on how Vermeer might have created his perplexedly smooth
surfaces with their completely fused edges, which Grosser likened to “eggshell
lacquer.” Even the little sparkling highlight dots
have soft edges. Grosser speculated that
Vermeer might have employed the technique of baking his paintings in a slow
oven, as the notorious forger Han Van Meegeren did in the 1930s and early 1940s
before being arrested. Grosser wondered:
“Could it have been that Vermeer himself painted in some soft varnish medium,
and subjected the finished picture to a cooking process such as this, which softened
his paint, caused it to run slightly…and in this unorthodox way produced the
even surface and fusion of edges which made his pictures so different from all
others? Strange as this conjecture may
seem, and improbable as I believe it to be, it is not entirely impossible.” He
justified his speculation by noting that very little is known about some of the
16th and 17th century painting methods. I’m always dumbstruck at how I can’t see one brushstroke
in Vermeer’s paintings, even with my nose right up against the surface. His paintings are simply immune to any sensible
talk about paint handling.
Grosser, given his avant-garde sympathies, didn’t appreciate
the more brutal edges created by the brushwork of bravura painters like
Boldini, Sargent and Zorn, many of whom threw in a lot of “debris” to fill in
the blanks of their exuberant paintings.
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John
Singer Sargent, Jacques-Emile Blanche,
1886, Oil on Canvas, Musee des Beaux Arts, Rouen (Normandy), 32 ¼ x 19 ¼ in.,
inscribed u.l. “a mon ami Blanche”
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| Jacques-Emile Blanche, Jean Cocteau |
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| Jacques-Emile Blanche, Henry James, 1908, Oil on Canvas, 39.25 x 31.73 in., National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. |
Sargent’s treatment of substantial areas of nothing happening
in his large portraits came in for some scathing commentary by Jacques-Emile
Blanche (1861-1942), a wonderful painter who employed a direct painting
technique for portraiture not unlike that of Boldini, and Sargent, himself, on
occasion. Blanche knew the art scene of France
and England
very well and wrote two memoirs, which include many trenchant comments about the
artists of his day. In his highly
entertaining and acerbic Portraits of a
Lifetime (1938), Blanche wrote a couple of interesting pages about Sargent,
which included this caustic observation: “Covering a surface with forms and
lines in a definite pattern was beyond Sargent’s powers; he invoked the aid of
the dressmaker and the florist and filled in holes with the help of pieces of
furniture; satin and velvet flowed in cascades, cushions bulged like Zeppelins
on sofas, azaleas moved from vases to urns, and arum lilies added a white note
to a park-like background that Marcus Stone would not have rejected.” Sargent and Blanche had been good friends. Blanche tells of one visit to Sargent's studio when Sargent asked his advice about a portrait he was having trouble with. Sargent was already dead 13 years when this memoir was published, so the
mourning period had obviously passed for Blanche. The Marcus Stone (1840-1921) Blanche
cattily referred to was a popular English painter of sentimental pictures of
young lovers in park settings.
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| Marcus Stone, In Love, Oil on Canvas, Nottingham Art Gallery (U.K.) |
Getting a good design for a painting from the get-go is not
an easy task for alla prima painters. So
go ahead and load up your canvases with lots of twigs, weeds, leaves and other
debris, just like the best of them did, and enjoy painting again.
