John Singer Sargent is one of the truly great American painters. He, along with Grant Wood, have been huge influences on me … Sargent for his beautiful portraits, and Wood for his Voice.
Quickly … I have two favorite Sargent stories. Here’s the first — Sargent was a few years behind Whistler in his portrait career, and for a time, when they were both working in London, Whistler was by far the more prominent. (Plus, Whistler was a crazy public character, and Sargent was shy and private.) Anyway, Whistler was commanding big fees for his work … and no doubt about it … his work was magnificent. But so was Sargent’s! In fact, I think his portraiture was better than his older contemporary’s because Whistler’s work was about Whistler — and Sargent’s was about his subject. So what would happen frequently, as the story goes, is that a potential Whistler client, when unable to afford his so-spendy work, would be referred to Sargent because “his fees are half mine, and the work is decent.” Believe me, Whistler’s cast-offs came out better in the end.
Another Sargent tale is about something else I aspire to understand — Beauty. He saw beauty everywhere. Period. Case in point: during WW1 Harpers Magazine hired Sargent as a wartime painter. He was sent to the front lines to render scenes of horror and devastation, in watercolor, and he did. But ultimately Harpers had to let him go … his paintings were too beautiful. Even confronted with the ultimate ugliness of dead soldiers in the snow, he surrendered to the spell of beauty.
I know more about that process — feeling only the beauty of a thing — than I did a few weeks ago. As of my last post, on 17 March, I was unable to carry on with studio-business-as-usual given our monster at the gate. I went into my beloved Charlotte to sketch empty streets. But here’s the rub: it’s spring. The world is blooming, and delicious color is everywhere. I could feel the underlying menace, but I couldn’t see it.
In the sketches I found myself rendering the scenes with a warped perspective … linear perspective I mean. It’s the way you make objects appear to recede into the distance. We typically use linear perspective (object size) and atmospheric perspective (the lightness of the hues) to create the illusion of receding shapes. So anyway … with this first painting … the colors were beautiful, but the perspective was all wrong. I moved the vanishing points for the skyscrapers way, way down … to create structurally impossible angles … at first just to turn the sky area into a triangle (I always construct things in triangles) … but somehow the result was an ominous “sky-is-falling” feeling, without the accompanying “she just doesn’t know how to draw” concern (hopefully).
This is the first of several … 1 of 19 … maybe 19. Angel versus Coronavirus. Or some variation on that idea. My mother has warned me that, “Not everybody wants an angel in their painting … and NOBODY wants a coronavirus in their painting!” She may be right … guess we will see.
