“Some forms of success are indistinguishable from panic.” — Edgar Degas
Here are the two small landscapes after the second day of work. With the tangled limb architecture established, the compositions are taking shape. Walking through the allee, you feel like you are in a vaulted interior space … the canopy creates a living cathedral of sorts. So that’s the feeling I’m working to create. It’s a bit of a stretch on these small canvases (16x12), but hopefully the idea will play out better on a larger board.
This is the first session work on a pair of small landscape sketches. Different perspectives on the same location — a dreamy azalea and live oak lined allee in Charleston. I love this early stage of the work … at the beginning you paint what you see in order to render the scene somewhat realistically. Gradually, toward the end of the session you begin to paint what you feel … squinting at the subject to flatten and simplify the forms, and then rendering them in patches of color. So! Much! Fun!
I’m very fond of these colors. Now to move on to the large landscape commission. Perfect warm-up project …
Ok … almost done with this and then on to the large landscape. Good warm-up for that project I guess. Looking forward to finishing this over coffee tomorrow morning.
Sometimes you have to let something burn itself out. I made the mistake of looking at the calendar yesterday, leading to the realization that I have to finish three paintings in the next four weeks … a lot of work, but doable. So … what do you think … perfect time to ignore all that and go off on a flower-fest? At least I should finish this tomorrow or the next day … and then back to the calendar.
Off to a good start. Hope it will be dry enough in the wee hours to advance, but probably not. The nocturn feeling was definitely the right way to go …
What a glorious way to start the week — buttery orange and white roses and poppies. It’s not as if other project deadlines aren’t bearing down on me … but how can we not paint flowers in spring! This composition might actually be more dramatic at night. Easy enough to sketch it today, and finish over the next few evenings. I’m moving into one of those phases I call “losing time” anyway … it’s actually very peaceful to start the day at 2:00 in the morning. Gandharva Veda music, Gyokuro Konacha tea, sunrise over the race in my little Brigadoon. I’m a bit sad to know this splendid isolation is slipping away — developers at the gate. I seem to have a knack for escaping to places on the verge of discovery, gentrification, and true to our time — zoom village potential. But for now, the real world is way out there on the other side of the fog … whispering to me, “I’m on my way back to you”.
Been working for days on “Window” after weeks out of the studio. It was hard to get back to it. This is the last of the pandemic paintings. Lots of hidden numbers and meanings … and hopefully, if I do my job properly, you will react to the image and not its codified secrets. This painting is about the totality of the time. Patriotism … in all its incarnations, our central-beautiful symbol, red white and blue, innocent and believing. Stuck inside with the sky and the earth (blue and green) as interiors … and outside …. is this yellow strangeness. I have not added yet the prayer flags, dragons in flight… a personally loving symbol that my South Carolina mill village neighbors call China Flags. Still working … the idea is fixed, but the execution is likely to evolve.
I don’t want to brag, but I’m an excellent sleeper. Nobody ever had to tell me to go to bed as a kid. I love to sleep. My ex says that if sleeping were an olympic sport, I’d be a gold medalist. And on top of that, these threshold pandemic times have brought along with them all sorts of sleepy dream adventures.
Last night, heavily blanketed against the early spring cold with my sweet little tribe, I woke around 3:00 from a dream, set in Southpark mall, of toddlers surfing on escalators and golden retrievers riding horses. So we rested on … arranged in our nest: I’m on right my side holding Alia Atredes in my arms like a kid with a teddy bear. Purring and breathing a whisper-song. Duncan Idaho, with forever troublesome sinuses, curled against me, snoring softly. Poppy, quite content with the cold, rolls over on his back, paws up, and sighs. Feeling so cozy, so safe. And all I can think is — I never want this moment to end.
So I rest in the Vitruvian beauty of it … feeling such peace, bathing in an oceanic visitor of perception as it gradually expands to all those I love, and have ever loved. The top of my head seems to open up with the radiance of epiphany: this is it!
This. Is. It. The promise of Easter, of life everlasting.
This is the actual Truth of it. This moment. This feeling. This energy. Energy that cannot be created or destroyed, only borrowed and shared. This is the resurrection — the part of us that never dies. This enormous shared peace is the moment that never ends, and all I have to do to summon it is to know it. This is the gift of eternal life, completely outside of time — the moment that never ends.
The light today was nourishing. Advancing shadows on Window … it will take several sessions to underlay dozens of colors … only to mostly obscure them later. The studio gets west light, so late afternoon is not workable. But Duncan Idaho loves the light.
Usually when I close my eyes I see the river. These days it’s my little stretch of the Broad River … not the ferocious swelled beast, churned up brown water with whitecaps. Not that one. I see lazy green puddles among huge black boulders — the one I can wade across if I’m wearing the right boots. Lately I walk out into the middle of a shallow patch and stand there. Just stand there. Something about it — standing in the mud, with the water flowing around me, just like I’m one of the rocks. The River — take me to Church.
But there are times I don’t see the river: when starting a new painting … while it’s just beginning to take shape in my mind. For significant pieces, I work in studio-imagination for quite a while, and finally take it to the canvas only when the destination is fixed. I’ve been visiting the unformed “Window” for a couple of years now … with the lovely figure seated on the floor in front of an open window … bright light beaming in and casting darkly informed shadows around her lanky frame.
The sun came out yesterday, and I had to do it. I just HAD TO DO IT. Here’s the first day’s work. I already love her.
I had planned to work on research this week, to advance what I consider my last research project. But about a third of the country is frozen today, so I decided to get back to the studio for the day. Not really painting … just working on a few of the paintings in the pipeline …. one in particular: a figurative piece of one of my favorite models. Josie. The working title is Window … but as the composition evolves … I’m starting to think of it in terms of activating (and elevating) the shadows. So … working on the composition … photoshop and paper sketches. The idea I was trying to articulate was: don’t forget to look in the shadows!
And then I looked up from my drawing desk and saw this.
2021 is all in, and I’m still dragging some traps from 2020. But not the burdensome sort Thoreau cautioned about … those that would nip us in a vital part. Instead, these pieces and parts of the year are going into a curry … one with lots of flavors and heat. I’m trying to survey the work I did last year, tie it all together, and expand it into a meaningful whole.
I hesitate to say so in these painful times, but I am at peace … which is weird, right? The world is awash in fear, and anger, and danger. I know it’s there, and I feel tremendous loss … believe me, the sun doesn’t set on a day without at least one good cry. But those tears are for the pain of others, not for me.
For me, these are threshold times. We entered the worm hole with one set of realities. And we will emerge from it with another. I know that idea is at the heart of what the 20-21 body of work will express … not the world before, or the world after …. it will be the world of the threshold itself … the experience of what we lost from the past, and what we are finding for the future.
Working on pieces for a show later this year. This will not be my first solo show, but it will be the first of this type — a body of work unified around a relevant theme.
And a name! A name! I know more or less what this curry will taste like, but what will we call it…. Hmmmm….
The year 2020 gave us so many shifts in reality, not the least of which was Christmas. Like many families, mine did not gather together. The loss of our rituals was unsettling, but we created some new ones to fill the void. Oddly enough, I made a new friend for the season. And he kept me company in the studio as I painted gifts for his children.
Here’s the story. The commission came in during the second week of December. It was a fairly unusual request, but I’ve had weirder. The client brought a portfolio of photos of her late husband, and wanted two portraits (using the same source photo) — one painting for each of their daughters. I’ve painted deceased subjects before, working from photos without ever meeting the person. Generally, working from photos is fine … but not meeting the subject is a real challenge. As I explained to the client, every brush stroke is a decision …. moving the painting toward or away from the “feeling” of the subject. If the artist has no real sense the person to orient the work, it’s like wandering toward a destination deep in the woods without a compass. Lacking a well of experience to draw from, it all comes down to instinct …. and faith. I have no shortage of either, but even so, it’s VERY hard to do this kind of work well.
Having finished my other Christmas commissions, I accepted the assignment, and hastily prepped two 16 x 16 boards with portrait-grade linen over panel. While the canvases dried, I tried to discover more about this larger than life character everyone lovingly called Boss. His wife told me stories; so did the man who had served as his driver for many years. The source photo was one Boss had liked, in a dark, conservative suit. We decided to paint different ties for each painting, using ones with meaning for each of the girls, and corresponding background colors … one red with a school tie, and one blue with a whimsical, tropical tie.
Then the work began … two easels side-by-side in the upstairs studio where it’s so warm and cozy in the winter (I’m not sure I’ve ever loved a studio space more). My source photo of Boss was on a music stand in the middle …. always looking right at me, with tender gray-blue eyes …. and something else … something ineffable … growing in strength as the work progressed. I’ll come back to that.
When painting a portrait using the classical method …. building the picture up with thin layers of paint … the image emerges gradually. The underpainting, which is essentially a monochromatic drawing in paint, generally resembles the sitter, but rarely conveys the feeling of the person. In a way, that feeling comes together gradually, layer by layer. But for every single portrait I’ve ever done, there is a precise moment when the subject feels real. It’s not sort-of-real, then a-little-bit-more real, then more-real-still. Nope. The process of construction is gradual. But that moment of life happens in an instant. I always feel it, tingling on the back of my neck. Not a conscious thought … it’s a feeling. From that point on, there’s a negotiation of sorts … the person seems to respond to every mark … “yep, keep going” or “no, not so much”. The subject essentially tells me how I’m doing. Of course they do … at this stage they are alive, metaphorically.
That part … the moment of life … is normal for me. Moving along the process alone, then suddenly the person is there with me, and we carry on together. To be clear, I feel the vitality of the person, but I don’t feel their literal presence in the room. We are co-creating, but my studio-reality is not the same space as the subject’s painting-reality. They feel real, but they don’t feel present. That was always true, until Boss.
From the moment I placed his photo on the stand, he felt alive to me. Neck tingles from looking at the photo! Granted, portrait painters get a lot of information from looking at a person (or an image) … a lot more data than someone without an artist’s eye. (As a kid everyone thought I was psychic because I could always tell when people were lying … turns out, it wasn’t anything supernatural at all … I was just a portrait painter in the making.) But deriving gobs of information about a person from their image doesn’t make them feel present.
OK, you know the feeling of a presence in the room, right? Unlike solitude, there is the energy of shared space … even if you’re not interacting … you can feel another person in the space with you. Normally that’s because they actually ARE there with you. As I worked on these two portraits … softly at first, but growing in intensity … Boss was there in the studio. Bear in mind, doing two classical portraits in a week is no small task for me, so I was working every waking minute. The fatigue and pressure were enormous. Without the necessary drying time between sessions, I was painting wet into wet, which is an unforgiving technique. “A siege in the room.” The self-doubt is always there to battle; this time I was feeling it in my body … clenched jaw and aching shoulders. But my friend Boss always settled me down. His presence, and yes, it did feel like a presence, urged me on … “you can do this — you can — you can do this for my family.”
The client and I communicated about the work every day. Unlike many artists, I love collaboration, so her input was welcome and helpful. And as the feeling of Boss grew in me … as his presence felt more and more real, I finally broke down and mentioned it to her. I didn’t want to sound TOO crazy-from-the-world-of-weird (which is actually where I live, but try not to talk about it, since appearing sane strikes me as a useful professional characteristic). I toned down the experience: “ya know, I’m getting a feeling for him … I can almost feel his presence,” apologizing for sounding a wee bit psycho. Amazingly, it didn’t sound crazy to her at all. She told me stories of the many times since his death that people close to him had had the same experience…. “there was a recent wedding where everyone kept saying to me, ‘I can feel Boss here with us.’” At that point I was all in. If Boss was determined to help me, I was going to listen. And we worked on together.
I basically collapsed into bed late Christmas Eve thinking the two Bosses were finished, but someone woke me before dawn — “do a bit more”. So we did.
I delivered the Bosses to the client at 4:00 on Christmas day, and she gave them to the girls that evening. They were completely surprised, and thrilled with the work. Normally, presenting a portrait is a nervous business … never quite sure how the client will react. But this time was different. I wasn’t wondering how they would feel. I already knew — we had gotten it right, my dear friend Boss and me.
This is a commission for my dear friend Joni — a Christmas surprise for her husband. Happily they love it! And, hate to admit it, but I do too. Funny thing …. I thought about the design for months. Knew I wanted it to tower over the landscape, with a larger than life feeling. At first I played around with all sorts of clutter, telling the Coburg story in little pieces and parts that would mean a lot to the family. But hard as I tried, that never worked. So I consulted some masters of monumental painting … Bo Bartlett, Ben Long, Diego Rivera, Grant Wood … a few of my personal favorites. Simplicity was the guiding approach. The whole point of a symbol is to say a whole lot … but without a whole lot of fanfare.
For all of 2019 I had planned to return to the Santa Knows tradition, this time with a She-Santa instead of a He-Santa. There were quite a few subjects in consideration as the year passed, but the sad loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the choice easy. And what a fine subject … like most people of greatness, her story is written on her face. The decision to use all that delicate lace was an easy one too …. such a rich symbol for her life and her work. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol siege, it seems that lace has turned out to be an even more fitting symbol than ever imagined. As recent history shows us, democracy, like fine lace, is fragile. It takes a long, long time — with a steady hand — to design and construct. And it takes relatively no time at all — with a dark and sinister heart — to rip apart.
As a fairly isolated person … living in a tiny village far from family and friends, and working alone … this past year has had some dark nights. That’s certainly true for countless people all over the planet.
The existential darkness is a particular burden for artists. Why am I doing this? Do these careful lines and swirls of paint really matter? Sometimes even beauty feels pointless. Rationalizations like “art benefits its culture,” and “you produce a product which benefits the economy,” and “people like your work,” and “you should be using your God-given talent” …. none of these abstractions soothe the soul on those dark nights.
Sometimes you just have to get through it organically, to wait it out. One of my mentors, Michael Kampen-O’Riley used to observe that when I go into a dark hole for a couple of days, I come out of it and do my best work. And as I think back across this year, I realize he may be on to something. Somewhere in the darkness we find purpose, and climb out of it with fresh eyes. The only truly useful beliefs are the ones that are tested … the ones that require you to hold on to them even in the darkness.
Paintings usually mean something to the people who commission them. I remember a story about my dear friends Ann and Peter, for whom I’ve done several portraits. Ann told me something once that changed my life. Funny, because I think it was just a passing comment for her. She is amazing that way — always hiding magical ideas in the most ordinary words. Anyway, she told me that when they evacuated their beautiful Folly Beach home for hurricanes, the only things they would take from the house were my paintings. When I asked her why, she said, “Because they are us … they are part of the family … the part that lives on.”
A commission is a responsibility. Instead of pointless swirls of paint, the portrait holds the potential to be the part that lives on. If I do my job well, it will be. And in that responsibility lies purpose. The kind of purpose that pulls us out of the dark night, back into the studio, back into that place of beauty and hope.
Working on Hannah and Phoebe. Just want to do my job well.
Peter Korb
I live in rural America. Almost all the people in my life live in cities.
There really is a difference. It’s easy to frame that difference in terms of politics. That’s easy and convenient. It is also wrong. Very wrong.
I stopped along the road between Rock Hill and York South Carolina. You should know this about living in the country: if a car is stopped on the side of the road, the driver needs assistance. Period. They can be male, female, old, young, black, purple, green, yellow or white. If a car pulls over, the driver needs assistance. Period. And everybody stops. Even me …and I know NOTHING about cars. But I stop and say what everyone says: Are You OK?
As an artist, I often pull over to take a photograph .. a landscape, some horses, a guy with a cross …. if I see something beautiful, I want to capture it .. remember it …. save it forever. Maybe I will paint it, and maybe I won’t. But I want to save that image for later … I want to drink it …. taste it … feel it … AGAIN. So I pulled over to take a picture of this guy … walking down the street with a wooden cross. I’ve seen him before, many times actually. And so on this morning, I pulled over to take a photo of him.
And of course. Someone immediately stoped and asksed “are you ok?” I used my customary dismissal: “I am from the city.” That usually sends them on their way.
But not today. If I had said, “mama is very sick and I was crying so much I couldn’t see” I know I would have ended up in someone’s kitchen eating tomato sandwiches and drinking home brew. So I said, “I’m okay.”
He smiled at me and said, “next time, why don’t you stop and talk with him. He is smart and interesting. You should hear what he has to say.”
And I will do that. Stay tuned.
Lots of work these days, complete with deadlines and even (Oh Yeah!) compensation. More than ever, I’m cultivating the flow state — the zone — that state of consciousness which allows us to leave the bulky harness of the here-and-now, and move into unity with the work itself. In this space, for me at least, solutions flow into the process seemingly without any effort on my part. In fact, from this magical place, I am my most rational … my most productive … my most creative. Time vanishes. The dots connect themselves. The output is peak performance. And the input is … what?
The only word that seems to fit is love. When I pour creative attention into a project, I feel love for the inputs — the process — the outputs — and the outcomes. This is not that clingy, anxious sort of love … like a relationship gone wrong. It is the exact opposite. I’m sure you’ve been there … in sports or work or play … everything in the world makes perfect sense … it is so easy — like knowing without learning.
With so much work to do, seems best not to leave this “in-the-zone” business to chance. One researcher determined that there are three conditions required to enter and maintain the flow state:
clear goals
immediate feedback
optimum skill-to-challenge ratio (He postulates that 4% is best — meaning that the challenge level is just slightly beyond our perceived competence, thus the pull of the just-out-of-reach goal keeps us in the zone.)
This is the perfect storm of portrait painting: a known objective, a process that always tells you where you are, and the drive of an ever-haunting fear … “all those other times were just a fluke … you’ll never be able to do that again … what were you thinking … is it too late to get a real job!”
One time in Asheville I was hanging around with some artist friends, and James, who was forever on the hunt, was trying to attach himself to a lovely woman clustered with her tribe at the other end of the bar. His usual pickup line, “I am an artist,” didn’t seem to be moving this clearly very bright woman. She came back with, “ok … but are you a serious artist?” His response was pretty good: “If you go out with me, I promise I will never paint your dog.” Most artists I know, the good ones at least, have an internal line in the sand. For me, until now, that contemporary-potrait-painter-line has been on the SERIOUS side of this: little girl on a porch swing with kittens and flowers … under no circumstances would I go there … to the Hallmark movie of portraits. So naturally, that’s exactly what I’m painting right now. And here’s the scary part — it was my idea, not the client’s.
The background flowers for “Hanna and Phoebe” are pink azaleas. From memory of course, I’ve been rendering highly stylized mounds of Italian yellow ochre-bohemian green earth-sap green-permanent green leaves, neutral gray n2-brown pink bark, and permanent rose-brilliant yellow extra pale flowers. Cerulean blue specks of sky peeking through. To me, the work feels like that sweet azalea sigh southerners know so well … wandering around every spring enjoying the fresh, home-grown reds, and lilacs, and yellows. and mandarins, and pinks, and whites. And there’s the little thrill of spotting a favorite variety … like Golden Retriever owners giddy from stumbling across other people’s Goldens.
As I’ve written so many times in this blog, I love the work … every bit of it …. even the hunger. Only now something is different — I’m feeling less conflicted about it. My inner Don Quixote’s sanity is defined by the love codified within the quest itself.
Given the outcomes and the alternatives, to love is the ONLY rational act.
It takes time to build a masterpiece. Or does it?
There is the time to conceive of, design, and paint it. There are the thousands and thousands of hours of learning to draw and paint … dreadfully at first … then slowly feeling the hand and the eye and the spirit working together … then light dawning on the truth of it all as mastery approaches … and finally …. finally knowing that you can paint anything … the monetary bliss of that, followed by the dark burden of “now what?”
When completely lost in painting, there is no time. In fact, there is no anything. There is a dreamlike sea of color and shape and story and emotion — when the soul expresses itself. I think this is called unity consciousness, at least that’s what I call it. If you’ve ever been in this zone, you know that if there is any time at all, it is experienced in a vastly different way … as plastic and observable. It is not concerned with the habituated reality of a clock-time-march …. it is ours to ride wherever we want … like children on bicycles.
Aside from the commissions I’m just starting, there are only two unfinished paintings in my life — Garden and the Dendera Study. The latter is part of the (yikes!) Unseen Architecture work. It is based on the Dendera Zodiac ceiling bas-relief from the chapel dedicated to Osiris in the Hathor temple at Dendera, an ancient timepiece.
All that’s left to do on Dendera Study is detail the hands of the large figure, and sign it. Have absolutely no idea why I have never bothered to finish it over these dozen or so years …. but today is the day. Like the celestial calendar from who-knows-how-long ago, maybe the little painting and I have cycled back to the proper place to make these last few marks. We have finally crossed an ocean to a place where there is nothing to explain. It sure took us a long time to get here … or did it?
