Plein Air: The Exciting, Not-To-Be-Outdone, Gloriously Scenic Second Chance

What's to be done?  Two of the sub-minor league art world's most unflappable players have spawned a tired old magazine that served us best when dead.  It was - and is - called Plein Air and must, besides plutocracy-butt sniffing publications like The Robb Report, be American's most complacent. 

Where do I start?

How about the look of it?  It's not unusual for magazines to tempt readers with a slickly smiling presentation, so I'll acknowledge it and go on.  But the image it wishes to present is clear; it's new, it's irresistibly gorgeous, and it's for Republicans!

Or is it?  I mean, is politics necessary?  As I understand it, however, Republicans want to corral all the money and, if possible, keep it to themselves – which means not including anybody else.  If I had to describe the magazine in a single sentence, it would be something like that.  Plein Air is about painting, but it's also about getting.  And (this one is never far behind) spending.  Its key players get to out-of-the-way places your hooded citizen cannot reach and spend their social capital along the way.  According to its unspoken agenda - which is fairly audible if you train your ear for it - painting out-of-doors involves the sort of travel that's not within most job holders' budgets.  Come to think of it, plein air paintings don't seem to get done in the old Rust Belt.  Nope.  America just isn't beautiful enough in places where unemployment has soared to thirty percent, the crime statistics are more terrifying the farther away you go - which is always the best place to contemplate crime statistics - and the overall mood is one of carefully calibrated despair.  People'll serve you at a restaurant, but you can never tip them enough.  You can go to the potty in a public building, but you'd better bring some hand-towels with you.  And if you get hurt, maybe your economic profile will zing you into triage before you bleed to death.

Best not to do your plein air paintings in bad places.  Somebody might come up and steal your stuff.  Or jump into your minivan and give it a nice little, mininum-wage style test-drive.  And who can say what'll happen to you when, staying on some godforsaken highway, you leave the hotel?   You want to see how America really lives?  Go ahead, then.  The farmland’s still fertile, but there aren't as many farmers on it as there used to be.  Do some painting there and you might start identifying with the people.  And you don't want that.  Plein air painting is about happy times, particularly happy times that are fueled with sound investments and getaway cars that can be started remotely if things get out of hand.

But don't let me prejudice you.  Let's look more of less objectively at what the magazine has to offer.

First: the ads.  Pretty posh.  Plein Air has got dead painters supporting it right off the bat.  What better insurance is there?  Then a few live ones who can afford it, then some more dead ones.  No, I'm sorry; these people are alive too.  Just couldn't tell from the stuff they’re painting.  Or how they’re painting it.  But why quibble?  There's going to be a lot more where it came from, so we might as well get used to it.

Here, then, is the unflappable Eric Rhoads, the publisher of this mighty juggernaut, painting in his boat.  He's certainly sending the right message.  It’s not enough to talk about something; you’ve got to go and do it.  But he’s about to say something.  It had better be pithy; as the magazine’s overseer, these are his very first words.

After telling us that the secret of painting well is to do "100 paintings in one hour apiece", he admits that learning is an "ongoing process" - which I hope is a disclaimer.  Doing those 100 paintings sounds pretty rough.  I'd pull back a little.  When you work from life, you've gotta pace yourself.  And must it be a hundred?  When you’re really into your work, seems like half of that will do.

Then he goes on to tell us that he longs for the sort of connection only a convention of plein air painters might give him, so he plans to have one in Las Vegas so that he can paint something called "Red Rocks" with a bunch of other plein heirists who can clearly afford to meet with him.  Here we have our first indication of a monetary bias, which prompts the question: "Aren't there any poor plein air painters - or are these people just the help?"

Then, after another big, splashy ad, there's the editor, who's also painting. 

He starts off by telling us that artists "love to use Italian and French terms to describe their materials and techniques." 

I just skimmed after that - and found a misspelled word.  Not a hard one either.  Minding its business amidst the multi-lingual splash, it was an unostentatious word of four letters – though it needed one more letter to finish it off.  Oh, well.  When you're dealing with so many languages at once, how can you bother with an Anglo thingy that sounds so plain anyhow?

I will only say that I don't particularly care to use French and Italian words to describe anything aside from sexual positions.  And not even then.  I mean, what if one’s girlfriend or boyfriend isn't bi?  You'll have to translate, thus spoiling the mood.  Just say what you want and have done with it. 

But let's try to enter into the spirit of things. 

A “pochade box” – which painters apparently love to say they have – is an easel from which you make sketches.  (Hence the word “pochade”, which means “Just do it!”)  “Plein air” is a way of telling people you like to do it outside – though en boudoir will do in a pinch.  And why not just say it?  I repeat: artists love to use French and Italian words.  Haven’t you been listening?  The editor ends up affirming that there's a community of plein air painters out there and hopes they can all get together and have a swell time. 

And as we browse the magazine, we see that they are!

Because I enjoy contemplating murder and mayhem, I know that plein air events happen all around the country - particularly in those places where rich folk can watch people doing it.  Wait a minute!  Why did I say murder and mayhem?  Well, I've always had this secret urge to go to one of these plein air events and pick off a few painters with an illegal weapon.  I won’t do it, of course, because if I’m going to kill somebody, it’ll have to be Somebody Big.  These are small fry who are just trying to keep their heads above water.  But it doesn’t hurt to dream.

In any case, there are plein air events all over: from sea to shining sea, as a matter of fact.  A lot of them seem to be in California, where I guess they’ve got the most paintable landscapes as well as a per capita income that suits the business-minded approach of plein air folk.   To be inclusive, however, somebody staged one in rural Georgia.  And in Connecticut too – though Connecticut’s like California in more ways than Georgia is and doesn’t count.  For the Connecticut event, actress Christine Baranski gave out the awards.  (Hey, I’d take a ribbon from her.)  As if that isn’t enough, there’s an article about how to make such events successful. 

I want to say something about the nature of painting outside with a bunch of people.  For one: why would you want to do that?  Isn’t painting solitary?  I mean, isn’t the opportunity to commune with nature on a one-to-one basis the appeal of painting en plein air?  Even in art colonies of the past, the paintings were done by people who felt they could be most effective by themselves.  When they were done, they came into the dining-room with all their buddies and showed the result.  Because it is both companionable and contemplative, this arrangement is a tolerable one.  When you throw a bunch of people at nature, you’re going to get a free-for-all.  Furthermore, when you’ve got an event, you make it competitive – at the very notion of which nature, if it had a voice, would laugh.  And perhaps it is laughing as it wonders to itself about all of these nature worshippers worshipping so conspicuously.  Fracturing a solitary activity into a gab-fest or trophy-hunting expedition is quite irritating.  Hence my initial observation about murder and mayhem.  You see these people and you just wanna shoot ‘em.

I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t get so ad hominem.  I guess I get riled when I think about how easy it is to access “beautiful scenery.”  When old-timey painters wanted to reach them, these kinds of places were fairly remote and accessible – after the train or boat-trip was over – on foot.  No Hudson River painter stumbled over a colleague to get to a desirable overlook or pleasing coign of vantage.  If he went out into the wilderness, he had it all to himself.  And he’d earned it, by God!  And, after the sun’s rays declined and he started to pack up his little paint box, he knew he wasn’t out of the woods.  I consider the pursuit of a landscape honorable.  If you can drive up to one and drink out of a plastic bottle – then sleep in a comfortable bed – you’re not really getting the experience about which every plein air painter clamors so much.  Nature is uncomfortable.  If you’re comfortable in it, you’re not there.  You’re in Nature At a Second Remove; Nature with Miles Per Gallon; Nature With a Plastic Hotel Room Key.

But never mind.  These people are having a good time and not hurting anybody.  And some of their paintings are fresh and lively.

Let’s move onto more upsetting things.

I must, in fact, return to my original premise: about Republicans running the joint.  One of plein air’s most self-regarding practitioners – whose landscape paintings are full of dash and skill – staged a “sporting event” at Lazy Triple Creek Lodge in Newdale, Idaho and posed the participants outside of a log cabin which, in truth, doesn’t look big enough for them all.  If you squint your eyes, you can almost fetch yourself back to the fin de siècle (of the previous century) and substitute the people in the photograph – who are decked out quite fabulously – for the industrialists and robber barons who typically utilized such photo-ops.  But, no, these are just painters in riding costumes and tweed jackets.  In a more private photo, the organizer of the event poses, with a shotgun in one hand and a young lady in the other.  What’s he gonna do with that thing?  (I mean the shotgun.)  Or is it something I wouldn’t understand?  

If you envied people who have everything, you’d be pretty pissed off by all of this.  People are just hanging on in Wisconsin and all of these plein air assholes are frolicking – albeit genteely – in fuckin’ Newdale, Idaho.  Don’t revolutions start this way?  I mean, if these guys exemplify the stingy, I’m-keeping-it-all spirit that has divided our country so – and they do! – why shouldn’t we visit Newdale, Idaho and give them a run for their money?  Or run them off and grab the money for ourselves?  (In this context, my murder and mayhem scenario doesn’t sound so far-fetched after all.) 

But never mind.  America is a big country and should have room for everybody – which is why so many people who are offended by the stench of poverty are inspired to investigate its most pristine places.  Our mountain majesties, our mighty rivers, and our blue-green forests beckon the well-heeled as few other things can.  And if these folk can hear their ruby-throated cries, why shouldn’t they leave an already-swell looking place and go to them?  At least somebody’s enjoying the country!

The magazine does not shirk its duty to teach and features articles by artists about their techniques.  These are the most useful and least irritating of the magazine’s “contents.” 

Given their bona fides, these artists aren’t particularly interesting.  Most merely try to imitate people who did what they’re doing with greater skill and panache.  The artist profiles are useful up to a point, but same thing.  The artists aren’t that hot.  There is an analysis of a Sorolla painting that attempts to liken its resonating color to music.  A rather enervated conception, considering that Whistler tried it back in the day and sounded, then as now, like a pretentious weenie.  ("You conduct, I’ll play the violin, and we'll sing it all the way to the bank.")

But at least it's a Sorolla painting - and it’s pretty good for what it is.  Sorolla was, however, doing what these people are doing: going to the nice places and making little designs with them – albeit superbly.  I often wish Sorolla had a little more of the tragic muse to incite him.  His paintings are gorgeous, but they’re almost content-free.

So, let’s wrap up.  What is Plein Air about?  For me, it’s about the capacity for privileged people to roam to their heart’s content and feel good about it.  It’s about relinquishing social and economic problems to mirror nature – but in a way that asks no new questions.  It’s about making a life out of intellectual abnegation.  It’s about being sociable, but unengaged. 

Plein air painting has seen an astounding explosion, which is not surprising.  It does dramatize the have and have-not nature of our world.  The haves go somewhere nice while the have-nots send in applications.  Or they work some shit job that keeps them handily in debt until they can find something better.  Or they jolly well forget about finding something better and watch porn on the computer. 

In no plein air painting does one get a sense of doubt.  Plein air paintings are little performances that bid the viewer to be astonished at the painter’s capacity to reproduce “reality” in a series of tidy – or anarchic – strokes.  It's performance art that is snug, safe, and friendly.  Hence plein air “events.”  Such a social construct suits the plein air philosophy.  And with that, I will leave plein airists to their mini-vans and ten-week vacations.  I just hope I don’t go crazy someday and actually shoot some of these people. 


Go and get irritated personally at:
http://www.outdoorpainter.com/

Be a glutton for punishment and check in on: http://www.fineartconnoisseur.com/article.asp?id=44398

And at: http://www.ericrhoads.com/

I'm sorry, but you've gotta see this too: www.ranchweb.com/nv.htm

An Appreciation Of George Tooker

I was saddened to hear of George Tooker's death, which, as such things go, was a peaceful one.  Tooker can be credited with some of America's most iconic images, in which the spectres of anonymity and paranoia played against the starkly functional architecture of our offices and subways.  But he was also a compassionate interpreter of intimate relationships.  And his color - which can be drily aseptic in the works of his fellow egg tempera painters - can be joyously sensual and profoundly luminous.

I'm just familiar enough with Tooker to want to remember him for a moment.  I write, not as a scholar, but as a dedicated browser. 

Longevity is a double-edged sword, particularly for artists.  The world moves so fast that a single figure can be eclipsed many times over a long and productive life.  When Tooker began, his work dovetailed into the prevailing zeitgeist enough for it to seem palatable.  Having rejected modernism for a spell, artists were re-examining the vast and lonely spaces, the Depression-haunted journeys, and the palsied appetites of an America that had turned in on itself.  Only the well-remunerated could reflect the old orders, which turned on bromides The Crash had set aside.  Artists were not looking for America the Beautiful; they were content to show the textures of survival.  The only Depression-free art-form was in Hollywood, which employed art directors, scene painters, and sketch artists by the dozen.  Yet Tooker was not so tempted.  He preferred to look inward, as so many of his contemporaries did.

His circle was small, but nourishing.  He gathered around him a highly accomplished, but self-effacing group of artists who had similar aims.  Paul Cadmus had already ventured into the teeming squalors of weekend pastimes - and made a reputation for himself as an elegantly unvarnished interpreter of American mores - or at least such mores as were likely to turn heads.  Jared French was another contemporary who was unabashedly surrealist.  All of these men were homosexual at a time when such a love spoke at its peril.  It was good for them to be able to support one another, not only in their aesthetic proclivities, but in their lifestyle preferences as well.  The Thirties were bleak for everyone and, as a result, people found kitchen communities of their own.  As with segregation, many good things came of it: a sense of shared values, unconventional social habits, and the solidarity of the rejected.  And while Tooker's image-making capacities were his own, I'm sure they were helped along by the example and practice of his friends.
Tooker seem to have disappeared from the mainstream after WWII, to emerge forty years later with books and retrospectives devoted to work I had never seen.  He had moved beyond the Orwellian imagery for which he's best known to a sort of paganistic awe.  He was painting figures for their own sake and bathing them in the sun-warm tonalities of his mind - which seems, as I look at these astonishing pictures, newly minted.

Writing as an outsider to his career, I have no idea what inspired this new direction, but it should be a source of hope for any mid-career artist who, like Dante, has lost his way.  Tooker exemplifies the notion that life cannot be static.  It must either shrivel up or find some happy re-awakening.  Given Tooker's decades-spanning career, perhaps he realized that the bitch goddesses were well-named and could have power over him only if he let them.  Perhaps he had wandered those subterranean vaults long enough to peek behind them for a moment.  Perhaps he had found the humanity that lurked behind the buttoned-down coats that were Everyman's uniform.  Perhaps he'd had an ephiphany that could only happen to someone who didn't believe in such things - like a spinster discovering love for the first time. 

Whatever the case, Tooker turned a corner at a certain point in his career and, after having created images that represent man at his most alienated, went on to create a body of work that was serenely joyous and humanly irresistible.

I thank and bless you, old man.

A Brief Personal Essay Inspired By An Incident At the Virginia Museum

Re: Picasso: Masterpieces From the Musee National Picasso, Paris
February 15 - May 15, 2011
VMFA (Virginia Museum Of the Fine Arts)
Richmond, Virginia

I don't like Picasso.  His household word status has given him complete immunity - a bill of health that will ensure that his immortal soul continues to circulate our globe of consciousness till the end of time.
Perhaps I overstate the matter.  So be it.  In the hyperbolic universe that surrounds All Things Picasso, it's just breezy patter.

I doubt if I even see this exhibit.  I don't care to jostle for viewing space among people who are looking for an icon buzz, a frisson of celebrity, a glimpse of greatness that will get them through a day that does not include American Idol.  I don't want to get all sweaty trying to jump high enough to see bits and pieces of things whose bank-busting entirety isn't worth the strain.

No, I don't like Picasso.  He knew art was a shell-game and he played it to the hilt.  He was obscenely competitive and won more than he lost.  If art has a Last Painter Standing, Picasso's your man. 
I suppose we should credit him for surviving the numerous culture wars that have rained down upon us.  He's, after all, a great polarizing force.  You either love him or you hate him.  He hangs the moon or he languishes in the cellar.  He appeals to your sense of adventure or he breaks the bank of your native conservatism. 

Having been a celebrity since Day One, he's suited to our age.  His love affairs were as numerous as we'd want them to be.  His productivity suits the path of genius.  And his ego was suitably gargantuan.  He's everything a celebrity artist should be.  And we love him for it.  And we hate him for it.  And we keep on arguing about whether he was a fraud or a creator such as the world had never - no, has never - seen.
Shall I say it again?  I guess I don't have to.  But it's fun.  Let me, in fact, create a sort of blackboard epiphany.

I hate Picasso
I hate Picasso
I hate Picasso

You should try it; it's downright cathartic.

Saying you hate someone is, however, not really enough to induce somebody else to hate him with you.  All right.  Let me tell you why I hate him.

For one, Picasso takes up way too much space in the collective imagination.  I wouldn't mind if he just had his share.  But, no, Picasso is still synonymous, nearly a hundred and thirty years after his birth, with artistic genius.  "Hey, Picasso!" people say to me as I paint my pictures in the open air.  If they only knew.  Picasso never, as far as I can tell, painted a picture from life.  Everything he did - after a certain period - he did from his head.  Now, this would suggest that Picasso was endowed with an imagination that took mere reality and metamorphosed it into a private symbolism.  I wouldn't argue with that, but these private symbols aren't really that interesting.  After he gets out of the academy and comes to Paris, he paints some clumsy pictures of nudes and such.  And he makes them monochromatic.  They are his Blue Period.  Then he roams the countryside of his imagination and does a series of traveling players.  I like these pictures a lot - they're the exception that proves the rule.  They're the small thing you like about the Big Thing you hate.  Then. . .there was Cubism - decorative painting that has been overblown absurdly.  I think these pictures would make excellent quilts.  And, by cracky, they have.  And they look pretty good that way.  As quilts.  As paintings, they're mildly interesting exercises in pseudo-planar geometry.  Then our global genius goes off into all sorts of directions: African masks, Greek statues, and I don't know what all.  Toward the end of his life, he makes a series of fairly poignant etchings about growing older.  For these, he appoints a minotaur as a stand-in.  Is it a minotaur?  No matter.  It looks suitably mythological.  This minotaur is losing the battle every warrior fights in vain.  He can't find his game anymore and it's killing his soul as well as a visibly deteriorating body.  He's consumed with lust, but can't gratify it like he used to.  He's a man's minotaur who's gonna have to find his pasture whether he likes it or not.  In these, Picasso made a personal statement and it sticks.  But great artists do this sort of thing all the time.  Picasso waited till the end of his life.  In betweentimes, he left us with a boatload of clever stunts, for which he was magnificently remunerated and universally admired.  And inconceivably famous.

Do I still hate Picasso?  You better bloody well believe it.  He screwed around most of his life - both on the picture plane and on Eros' day-bed - he made tons of money, and he's the most famous artist of all time. 

How could I not hate him?  He has everything I don't and I don't think he earned it. I also hate him because I don't ordinarily like to get personal.  And he's made me cross that line.  (Yes, mom; Picasso made me do it.)  Ordinarily, I hate artists who are are infatuated with themselves when, in fact, they're unspeakbly bad.  I hate Picasso because he lived the sort of life no man, no artist, no-body really should have a right to live.  Certainly not nobody who was more ambitious than talented.   

Repeat after me, everyone:

I hate Picasso
I hate Picasso
I hate Picasso
   

A Recent Purchase, Or: Two Other Painters and. . .Me

Dominion Resources recently purchased three of my paintings.

They are river subjects, about which few Richmonders complain.  Mine don't necessarily draw comparison with the local talent - unless that local talent is Daniel Robbins, the expatriated Frank Hobbs, or the long-missing John Cort. 

I'd like to take the opportunity to talk about these people.

If John Cort isn't well-remembered, it's entirely his fault.  But his reputation is secure.  Last I heard of him, he lived on an island.  When you can do that, you don't think about the home-folk anymore.  And why should you?  You are not only far away in terms of distance, you've gone about as fer as you can go as regards the elusive, but highly coveted spoils our culture can lavish on its winning teams - whether the team is a team of many or a team of one.

I don't know the man personally, but I've seen a number of his pictures. You can too - if you care to: 1) be in Downtown Richmond, Virginia and; 2) show up at the James Center there.

The first (and least) of these celebrates pride and pelf.  It is in the magisterial vein of much oversized portraiture and, while it is technically superior, it has no artistic value.  Few portraits do - or have to.   But the other two paintings are worth your time.  Facing the portrait is a panoramic view Cort knocked together from a downtown eyrie - or photograph of same.  It captures the after-hours glamor of a place that will most definitely wake up in the morning.  Its treatment is relentlessly energetic; the picture is alive - an attribute that's peculiarly underrated.  Cort's limited palette and "rubbing out" technique are eminently suitable to his aims.  There are few better paintings of the subject.  It is quite enormous and, unlike most panoramas, it is vertical in format. 

The third is of a shoreline washed by slate-colored waves.  It's a good piece of work and also very large.  The smart money, however, should go to the cityscape, which takes some risks and sticks in the head.
Whatever Cort may do, I hope he tempers his portraiture with truck like this.

Frank Hobbs doesn't live in Richmond anymore, but professes to like it and may well return.  Choice of residence aside, Hobbs' contribution to the landscape is worth revisiting. 

His most visible work revolves around the poetry, if you will, of transportation.  It's formally exciting and has a terrific punch.  But his river paintings are, in my view, more compelling.  They are striking enough to attract art accumulators whose comfortable yearnings go only so far.  To see a Hobbs' painting among its peers can be unsettling; if you don't watch yourself, it'll you wake up.

In his river paintings he gets at two very essential things: the vitality of fluid motion against the monumental forms of piers and bridges.  His delineation of things is strong and subtle.  His bridges span the river, keep the traffic moving, and are not likely to cave in.  He understands that less is more, but is willing to show the effects of age - which can mean a lot on a bridge.  Because of his superior grasp of form, he never loses the big shapes that constitute an abstract design. 

Whether intentionally or not, Hobbs has made paintings that represent, not only a familiar subject, but something that does not cater to sentimental prejudices.   He's made good paintings and good paintings last. 

Daniel Robbins' paintings are, like Hobbs', constructed along organic lines.  They not only give you the subject, but how aerial perspective can affect how it's perceived.  He understands that one thing must be seen in relation to something else and doesn't, as a result, pander to a viewer's preconceptions about what to paint and what not to.  In a painter's view, no subject is more important than the next.  The really important thing is to make an image that will live and breathe.  Robbins' best work does this and I hope collectors of "Richmond subjects" learn to see with their eyes and not their habits.

And, finally, there's me. 

Dominion's three paintings are: Tredegar, Bridges Raised and Fallen, and Three-Mile Bridge At the Kanawha Canal.  All of them show "historic" subjects.  And insofar as I can be a historian, I'm glad I can do it.  But I was more interested in showing - as Robbins and Hobbs do - "history" in relation to the things around it.  Tredegar as a Civil War shrine needs no introduction.  But the sun shines on what's left of it; consequently, it's new every day.  I excerpted its smoke-stack as a compositional device, bearing in mind that the history-conscious wouldn't care about that.  But history-conscious people need aesthetics whether they know it or not.  In any case, I chose to paint this emblematic view as winter's russets and yellows yielded to acid green.  The sky pushed flat-bottomed clouds as the river ran toward the sea. 

I painted "Tredegar" during for a two-week period, which spanned two seasons.  I'd never done that before.

Bridges Raised and Fallen is about swift-moving water.  It's about a transportation culture that's been laid low.  It's about chunks of concrete that have, thus far, defied the river's rage.  It was composed on a square, but it is, I think, panoramic in feeling.  When I did the picture, I was thinking of a view I'd seen twenty years before.  It showed man and nature in a kind of split decision - which is evident here as well.  The wind was up all the time I painted.  In such conditions, time is always spent anchoring picture to easel.  I did it grumpily, then gladly, then grumpily again.

The Kanawha Canal is all that remains of a great transportation system that conveyed goods and passengers to the world beyond.  In order to link canal to river, locks were built.  As I understand them, locks created the necessary water-flow to lower barges and bateux from into the river, where they found a wider channel.  Shiplock Park is a fascinating time-capsule; it celebrates, in three-dimensional form, the relatively breathless period of our nation's canals - which started with the Erie and moved south and westward.  It was here that a seaward journey began.  Without locks, the river wasn't reachable.

I wanted to show a man-made Richmond alongside of a more pastoral one.  So I divided the painting into two sections, which were created individually and fused when they were done.  The result is the largest painting I have ever attempted in a natural (or any) setting.  Such flaws as it has can be attributed to me struggling, not only with my own limitations, but with the challenges implicit in a two-panel design.

Regionalism in art can be suffocating.  It's predicated on political meanings first and artistic ones second.  It is best consigned to that proverbial dust-heap where impractical notions wither away.  On the other hand, I see no reason not to celebrate a locality's genius, which the James River mightily exemplifies.

A didactic moment you are free to ignore:

Postmodernist types eschew emotional connections for fear of being "uncool."  Their concerns are well-taken.  There's nothing "cool" about liking something.  Coolness is about systematic rejection - or, rather, conscious apathy.  The act of making something is never cool - or shouldn't be.  To do, to make, to be: these are passionate decisions that are never beyond criticism; on the other hand, what else is there?     

Delayed Proclivities: The Loves Of Thomas Van Auken (Part One)

Wait and good things will come.  Or so many of us - who have no choice but to mill outside of offices and sit by rotary telephones - must believe in order to get up in the morning.

For those of us who must wait for the aforementioned reasons, it's best to wait unconsciously.  You can be in the midst of a "waiting period" and think about other things entirely.  Yet you are still waiting even if the psychological stress of the activity isn't affecting how you live and breathe.

By that definition, I've been waiting for a painter-colleague of mine to relinquish his studio and plunge into the three-dimensional world that beckons him from an open window.  I've long bemoaned the fact that all he was getting were views and not experiences - and to deaf ears that have, in one fell swoop, listened in.
He was - and is - brilliant at constructing figurative conundrums in which a defenseless model waits for the artist to "capture" her in ways a larger audience will find irresistible.  Over the years, he's developed an approach that is indelibly his own - for which he has acquired a justifiably glittering reputation.  But he's still dangerous.  People my who wish to see themselves preening from mantelpiece commission him at their peril.  He will be honest about time's ravages, as well as dietary lapses that appear as lumps and bulges.  A while back, everybody was up in arms about Lucian Freud's portrait of his Queen.  Compared to this fellow, Freud was blowing smoke.  My studio friend would have made the old lady an old lady who has been trapped in a royal persona she possibly dislikes now and then.  Freud's picture was honest, but he didn't really get at anything.

This fellow lives in the pleasantly sluggish backwater of Richmond, Virginia where he towers over most of his competitors. (When I rack my brains for high-achieving locals, he's always at the head of the list.)  And he's gotten where he is, not only by the conventionally cumbersome route of hard work, but by means of an original point of view which has, thus far, found perfect expression in the studio.

Well, he has finally taken it upon himself to walk out the studio door.  He hasn't found roses to smell, but mercury-vapor lights and boxy-looking facades.  From these simple objects, he's made the devil's own clubhouse.  His personal aesthetic rejects the notion of a cool, clear day and goes right for the murk.  He has found his outdoors on a string of electric lights.

I want to make it clear that I haven't seen any of the paintings yet, merely online reproductions of them.  But I've looked at such things for a while and have a pretty good idea whether the original sings or not - as these appear to.

When I'm in Richmond again, I'm going to see the exhibit and hope that the three-dimensional canvases captivate me as much as they have in 2-D.  I'm very likely to thank myself for waiting - even if I didn't know I was doing it.

For images of this series as well a happy miscellany, go to: http://www.google.com/images?q=Thomas+Van+Auken&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&oe=utf8&rlz=1I7ADFA_en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&sa=X&ei=QQSZTdlugbPRAdmrse0L&ved=0CDkQsAQ