Thursday, January 23, 2014

Thick or Thin





John Singer Sargent, Violet Sargent, his youngest sister, 1881, Oil on Canvas
 27.5 x 22 in., Private Collection

John Singer Sargent, Rose-Marie Ormond, the artist's niece, 1912, Oil on Canvas, 31 ½ x 23 in., Private Collection

John Singer Sargent, Corner of the Church of San Stae, Venice, 1913, Oil on Canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
John Singer Sargent, Trout Stream in the Tyrol, 1914, Oil on Canvas, 22 x 28 in., Museum of Fine Art, San Francisco

I’ve always thought there was something second rate about many realist oil painters who paint thinly.  You might as well paint with watercolors if you don’t care about the exciting physicality of the oil medium.  I think the reason why John Singer Sargent stands atop the list of bravura portrait painters is because he wasn’t afraid to paint with a “fully loaded brush.”  Of course, you have to draw as well as Sargent to really pull it off.  But we can dream, can’t we?   Sargent was such a wizard with the brush that even his watercolors have the full-bodied look of oils. 

Whenever I’m painting, some of Sargent’s words to a student pop into my head.  One time he said, “The thicker you paint, the more color flows.”  And he always tells me when I’m painting glassware that, “If you see a thing transparent, paint it transparent; don't get the effect by a thin stain showing the canvas through. That's a mere trick.”  
 
Hendrick Ter Brugghen (1588-1629), A Jovial Violinist Holding a Glass of Wine (circa 1627), Oil on Canvas, 41 ¾ by 33 7/8 in., Private Collection
And while I’m painting, that admonition sets me to thinking of all those paintings of glassware we’ve seen where the vessel is merely indicated over a dark background by strokes of lighter paint to indicate the rim and base, and a crisp window highlight.  You know it’s a drinking glass, but you don’t get the weight of the glass in space by doing it that way.  You have to observe and interpret the three-dimensional form of the glass and the volume of whatever liquid it contains, if any, by accurately representing the variety of tones that distinguish the object from the background color.

There are probably dozens of other considerations that go through my head as I push the paint back and forth between a drinking glass and the background to get the glass to seem as real as it actually is in the atmospheric space in front of me.  I dislike discussing lost and found edges.  They are such an obvious cliché for most realist painters.  So is the observation that there are no lines in nature.  Both are very important considerations, however, when attempting to achieve the illusion of reality on canvas.  But if they are exaggerated, or manufactured by the artist, it looks like a gimmick and the illusion of reality is lost.

Richard Schmid’s people do a lot of that lost and found kind of painting today.  They get some punchy, high-keyed, decorative paintings with that technique.  Collectors and many painters seem to love their work.  You don’t see any real truth to nature in that approach.   But I guess many artists and art lovers today think creating an alternate universe is more important than being true to nature.  I’d say, “to each his own,” but I don’t really believe that when it comes to contemporary realism.  There’s still enough beauty of form and color to be found in nature with your own eyes, without resorting to stylistic gimmicks that are eagerly passed around from painter to painter.   Impressionists and expressionists can do whatever they want, as far as I’m concerned, to make an exciting painting.  And I love a lot of different styles of representational art, just not obvious brush-handling gimmicks exploited by their creators for whatever their reasons might be.  I personally can’t fathom why one painter would want another painter to handle the paint just like he does -- in his own peculiar but effective way, that is.   But I guess you can’t write instruction books, create videos and lead workshops without selling a bit of your soul in the process.

When I started painting and saw Sargent's work for the first time,  I was bowled over by the way he handled his edges.  The background tones might have been almost identical to the foreground object, but the subtle separation was often obtained by a solid stroke of a slightly different tone, whether it was a sitter’s cheek or a Venetian column.  The effect from a distance was a palpable realism.

Today’s “lost and found” edge painters owe a great debt to Anders Zorn, a much earthier human being than Sargent, who creates the same palpable realism on canvas over a wider range of figurative subjects with a comparable bravura technique in both oils and watercolors, without using a lot of paint to get the job done.   Some of his incredibly well-modeled female nudes seem to be merely stained with gorgeous flesh color, but the modeling of the form is still perfection itself.

Zorn’s female nudes are unmatched in the history of painting for their naturalistic, physical presence.  He seems to have done hundreds in his lifetime, the envy of all figurative painters, to be sure.  Some earlier painters, like Rubens, Boucher and Fragonard, for example, give him a good run for his money.  But we know that the charming nudes created by those earlier painters were a few steps removed from reality.  Not so with Zorn’s nudes -- front, back, sideways, horizontal, bending over, reclining or whatever.   Just between you and me, nobody ever painted more naturalistic, volumetric female derrieres than the great Swede.

Anders Zorn, One of his Swedish Sauna Paintings
While Zorn quite obviously delighted in painting the female form divine, I’m saddled with painting drinking glasses.  My mind races around with thoughts on painting as I continue slogging away, trying to get my drinking glass to seem every bit as real as a Zorn painting of a derriere.  “What a revoltin’ Development!”  When it’s all over, I forget everything until I paint another picture with a drinking glass in the setup.  And all I’ve painted is one damn drinking glass.  Now I’ve got all the other stuff in the still life setup to paint in order to bring them up to some degree of finish in harmony with that one glass.  In addition, I’m obliged to continue my incidental musings about all the encounters I’ve had with all the fascinating thoughts and daunting images from all the other great painters I admire.

A painter’s life isn’t easy, especially if you are hearing voices and following Sargent’s commandments!


William Orpen, The Studio, 1910, Oil on Canvas, 38 x 31.5 in.
Leeds Museums and Galleries, UK
But I have to let the great Irish master Sir William Orpen have the last word on thick or thin painting.  Like Sargent and other terrific painters in those days, Orpen didn’t seem to have much interest in talking about technique.  Those painters all learned a way to paint and that was that.   According to his devoted student Sean Keating, a wonderful Irish painter in his own right, “Orpen taught that sufficient paint to create the illusion of light and shade, of tone and color was enough.”  Keating said Orpen laughed at talk about “touch,” “impasto,” and other paint-handling techniques, calling it, “all that sort of tosh.”

When I came across that quote a couple of years ago, I was set free from the oppression of Sargent’s words.  Unfortunately, this freedom only lasts until I stand once more in front of a Sargent painting.  Then I start to dream again.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Rambling Around the Red Rose Girls



William A. Bouguereau and his Women's Class, late 1890s
Women's Life Class at the Chase School of Art, New York, 1896

What happened to all those women who studied art at the academies in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries? It seems that many just faded out of sight for one reason or another; their art legacies sealed in a trunk and stashed away in a relative’s attic for many years before finally being excavated.


Edith Lake Wilkinson

Edith Lake Wilkinson
Such was the case with Edith Lake Wilkinson, a gifted artist who was born in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1868 and died in a mental hospital in 1957 at the age of 89, having spent the last 32 years of her life incarcerated for “depression.”  Seven years before she died, she was evaluated by one W.B. Rogers, M.D., in the following manner:  “Patient is quiet on the ward. Makes her own bed. Talks to herself and has numerous unusual ideas. In fact, everything she says is unusual. She is very talkative and imagines everything. Her physical condition is good but there is no improvement in her mental condition.”   That sounds an awful lot like me on one of my better days.  Back then, a little depression exhibited by women was cause for great alarm among family members, and often meant hospitalization and shock treatments that caused far more harm than good, as they did in my own sensitive mother’s case.

Edith Lake Wilkinson
Edith Lake Wilkinson
Edith Wilkinson studied with Kenyon Cox, J. Carroll Beckwith and William Merritt Chase at The Art Students League in the 1890s and returned later in the early 20th Century to study with Kenneth Hayes Miller at the League and Charles Webster Hawthorne in Provincetown, where she adopted elements of her mentor’s fresh, high-key style before she evidently stopped painting after landing in a mental institution for the rest of her life.  She clearly learned quite a bit about painting from all those great instructors.  Belying her presumed mental condition, her highly accomplished, modernist works are filled with light and life.  They are bright and cheerful across a wide range of genres -- figures, landscapes, townscapes and still lifes.

Edith’s story is chronicled in fascinating detail by Jane Anderson, an Emmy award-winning writer and filmmaker, who created a website to honor her great-aunt:  http://www.edithlakewilkinson.com.  It was Anderson’s mother who had opened a couple of trunks in her brother-in-law’s attic in the 1960s to unearth their talented relative, whose last years seem to have been such a pathetic waste of a joyful, creative spirit. Anderson grew up with her great-aunt’s work on the walls and was inspired to make art herself.  Following Edith’s example, she took classes at the Art Students League and always carries a sketchbook with her on her travels.   Her sketches seem to have the spirit of her great-aunt’s sketches.

Like a lot of single women artists in those days, Edith Lake Wilkinson had a long relationship with another woman.  It’s often not clear whether all those relationships that women artists forged with other women were sexual in nature or just a result of the natural human desire for companionship to weather life’s ups and downs.  No doubt for some serious women artists, it was a way to stay on course without having men around to muck things up.

Elizabeth Shippen Green
Jessie Willcox Smith

Violet Oakley, Penn's Vision is part of the series of thirteen murals Oakley painted for the Governor's Reception Room in the Pennsylvania State Capitol.
Elizabeth Shippen Green, Violet Oakley, Jessie Willcox Smith and Henrietta Cozens in their Chestnut Street studio, ca. 1901
Anderson speculates that Edith might have been acquainted with the most famous of the lot, the extraordinary Red Rose Girls, illustrators Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935) and Elizabeth Shippen Green (1871-1954), and muralist Violet Oakley (1874-1961).  In 1899, those three artists took over the Red Rose Inn, a picturesque old estate on Philadelphia's Main Line, and vowed to live together forever and never marry.  They created art on their own terms in an environment of mutual inspiration, until Elizabeth Shippen surprised her comrades by getting married in 1911.  But Smith and Oakley remained true to their original objective and all three women continued to create marvelous art throughout their careers. 

Historical data and the way things were back then tell us it was pretty tough for women to juggle both a painting career and the demands placed on them by society to be housewives and mothers.  In those days, you couldn’t just copy a photograph while sitting at a kitchen table, sell it on the Internet and call yourself an artist.  You had to undergo rigorous academic training first to be taken seriously as a professional artist.  It was hard sledding for those women who kept at it. 

Every state in the union probably had a handful of strong-willed women artists who returned home after their academic studies to persevere against all odds and take a vital role in shaping the cultural life of their communities.

Elsa Jemne, The Chinese Screen, ca. 1924
Daniel Garber (1880-1958), Portrait of Elsa Laubach, ca.1912, Charcoal on Paper, 21 1/2 x 15 ¼ in.
Elsa Laubach Jemne, for example, was one of eight newly celebrated women artists who blazed a trail for art and culture in their home state of Minnesota in the early 20th Century.  Only four of the artists married and only Jemne and the portrait artist Frances Cranmer Greenman (1890-1981) had children.  
 

Frances Cranmer Greenman and Mary Pickford in front of Greenman’s Portrait of the Actress, 1935, eBay, Hyee Auctions
All eight artists supported themselves, often with art-related jobs they hated, but which they stuck with out of necessity. While in art school, Elsa did commercial art, which she described in her diary as "stupid, uncongenial, & maddening in its monotony."  

Elsa Laubach Jemne at her Easel, 1922
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1888, Elsa studied out East with two of my favorite painters, the still life painter Soren Emil Carlson at The Art Students League and Daniel Garber at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she was enrolled from 1912 to 1915.  Said to be one of Garber’s favorite students, she was a recipient of the Academy’s Emlin T. Cresson Award, which enabled her to travel to Italy in 1914, where she chose to focus her studies on fresco painting. World War I erupted and she had to return to America.  She went on to a successful career as a portraitist, landscape painter, muralist and illustrator in her home state under her married name, Elsa Jemne.  She achieved her greatest recognition for her many New Deal murals, which were executed in places such as the Hutchinson Post Office, the Stearns County Courthouse, and the Minneapolis Armory.

Elsa Jemne, Iron-Ore Mines Mural, Tempera, Ely, MN Post Office




Elsa Jemne, Wilderness Mural, Tempera, Ely, MN Post Office
Rejecting commercial art work, Elsa toted her painting supplies on Greyhound buses all over the Iron Range of Northern Minnesota during the Great Depression to create murals depicting local or regional themes. Sometimes she had to wait for the plaster to dry on the wall before she could begin her murals in tempera. She occupied her down time painting watercolors of the wilderness surrounding the communities.   She loved creating those murals and took great pride in them.  And her work must have been a lifesaver for her family, as well, because her husband’s architecture practice had dried up during the 1930s.

As an important Minnesota artist, Elsa Jemne was an inspiration to other women, and helped found the St. Paul Women's City Club to promote women's rights. She died in St. Paul in 1974 at the age of 86.

There is a wonderful account of Jemne’s work on a mural for the Post Office in Ely, Minnesota in 1940 written by Irene Grahek for The Ely Echo weekly newspaper: http://bit.ly/190YiWJ.  Grahek’s niece is married to Jemne’s grandson, and they provided details for her story.  When the Post Office mural was finished and the scaffolding came down, Elsa finally saw what she had accomplished and said, “I think it is good.” 

Of all those unrecognized women art students in days gone by, the two who abducted this little ramble of mine, Elsa Laubach Jemne and Edith Lake Wilkinson, had nothing in common, it seems, other than very similar academic art backgrounds.  Elsa was determined to make a living as an artist, and she succeeded.  We’re not sure about Edith's motivation.  Some artists are just more interested in making art than selling it.  I think Edith was like that.  But if you don’t sell your art, what’s the point of making it? Thinking like that can be pretty depressing for any serious artist, let me tell you.