Talking art with Paul Herman

I have developed & maintained a theory about happiness that few I have engaged in the conversation agree with, indeed, I would say, few understand. I have suggested that the pursuit of happiness is a not only a fallacy but a self-defeating approach to life. Some of the feedback I’ve had agrees with the evanescent quality of happiness, the common experience that once achieved, its ability to give happiness disappears but that is only part of my point, the real point is that happiness only makes up a part of the satisfying whole that is the experience of life.

Many consider life more successful according to the quantity & quality of happiness that can be stuffed into the minutes that make up the affair of life, while I consider the more difficult emotional states such as melancholy or rage just as important to that successful experience. A good example is love; I think anyone who has experienced the mad state of falling in love agrees it holds a heightened awareness that is unique to that predicament. And yet, many who have tasted the god-like quality of being in love eschew the possibility of its repetition once they have tasted the fall from glory which is the pain & dejection of having one’s heart broken because of it. A good example of putting a greater importance on happiness than the possibilities offered by the range of emotion available to humans brave enough to feel it all.

I have read Jamison’s Touched with Fire whose impressively deep research into the connection between manic depression & art in such subjects as Lord Byron, Virginia Woolfe & Van Gogh point to a clear correlation. Her attitude however, is the common one & therefore illuminated some of my own thoughts without shedding new light on my ruminations. I am excited for this reason to discover the work of a Harvard professor called: Dr. Schildkraut who began his studies (in 1959) into the suicidal & famously gloomy abstract expressionists, Miro, Pollock, Rothko among others & the question of depression among artists as an ailment common to artists but ended with a sense that: “…depression was not a weakness but simply “one of the things that humans happen to be capable of experiencing.” It had its uses. “Depression turns you inward,” he explained. “In some senses the artistic calling becomes easier with a depressive illness.”

If there was a bright side to depression, Dr. Schildkraut saw it. “Depression in the artist,” he noted, “may be of adaptive value to society at large” — meaning it could inspire great paintings, symphonies and novels. That’s a controversial idea, insofar as it raises a moral dilemma: does treatment, while benefiting the patient, come at a cost to culture?

A victim of manic depressive syndrome is actually a bipolar personality meaning that as sad as the darkness through which no light can filter is, it is accompanied by it’s opposite: bouts of joy that a healthier, more stable, generally understood as ‘more realistic’ personality cannot imagine. Is one more ‘true’ than another? Is something in the middle, without the experience of either extreme, better? Or is it mere mediocrity? Dr Jamison pointed out a behavioural trait of victims of this emotional instability I found very interesting, self-medication with a drug such as cocaine is not used by a depressive as cure to depression but rather by the hippomanic (or the manic depressive in a state of hypomania) as an attempt to extend the sense of ecstasy.

My mother who is an art restorer, or as they are known nowadays: an art conservator, once had twenty or so coloured pencil drawings done by Jackson Pollock while in therapy. She was cleaning them in preparation for their sale (later stopped by court order of the Krassner foundation on the grounds of patient/doctor confidentiality) by the psychiatrist in whose office they were done. Apparently, in moments when old Jack the dripper was unable to express himself with words he drew instead. Dr Schildkraut discovered, & based all his later groundbreaking research on the fact he noticed that depressives who didn’t respond to talk therapy often came to life after taking certain drugs. A groundbreaking paper that he published in 1965 suggested that naturally occurring chemical imbalances in the brain must account for mood swings, which pharmaceuticals could correct, a hypothesis that proved to be correct.

So, should the artist who suffers with his questions “into direct and lonely confrontation with the ultimate existential question, whether to live or to die,” he wrote, “depression may have put them in touch with the inexplicable mystery at the very heart of the tragic and timeless art that they aspired to produce.” Be content with his bargain? Creative expression for personal torment? Or chemical balance & ignorance of his existential plight?

I read something which referred casually to Rembrandt’s vanity because of the large number of self-portraits he painted (estimated- 80). As vain as Rembrandt may have been, it was a vanity based on his greatness as artist not on being enamoured of his own looks. Anyway, considering his actual greatness, (as testified to by the intervening centuries since he painted) was it vanity or simple pride? The writer who claimed the number of self-portraits as evidence of self-love didn’t understand the artistic process. The first & most common reason an artist paints a self-portrait is because he is a ‘people painter’ who finds himself eager to work in a moment he has no other model.

Another inspiration for the self-portrait can be found in moments of crisis, especially emotional crises, when in the solitude & silence of the studio, the examination of self introduces a sense of introspection that adds an expressive dimension to a painting. The reason Rembrandt's great self-portraits continue to haunt art lovers through the centuries is not because of the accuracy with which he copied his own features onto a canvas but because he managed to capture something of the drama of human nature which we all share & therefore recognize. The art in a good portrait is made up more of psychology than dominion over the painter's craft.

Personally, I find it easier to capture a sitter’s character before I know him. When I paint someone sitting for me I can (at least- hope to) portray the personal history written on his face more successfully if I have no pre-conceived notions as to who he is because of my acquaintance with him. With enough practice, capturing his looks is a simple exercise; capturing some part of his character is where 'art' enters into the equation.(1) This makes a self-portrait the greatest challenge to the portrait painter, we know ourselves so well including, for most of us, misconceptions & private opinions not shared by others, that the study of our own faces & the histories written on them, becomes more than mere painting exercise.

Another complication to getting an objective likeness is the fact the artist is actually painting a reversed image of what people who look at him in real life see. Unless one has the symmetry of a supermodel a mirror image is very different to the face mirrored. To test the truth of this assertion just try holding up a photo of yourself in the mirror or flipping it horizontally with any image viewer on your computer. An old friend, a photographer, once tried the experiment with a photo of himself cut down the middle. He reversed half of the image & printed them together, in other words- a face made of two left sides & another made of the two right sides. Though I could see it was he, the result was surprisingly monstrous!

I suspect the mirror is also the source of the myth that an unusual number of artists are left-handed—that left handed people are more creative. Some artists, like the incomparable Velasquez, didn’t stand in front of his sitter looking at him but stood next to him instead, looking into a mirror reflection of the sitter looking at himself in the mirror. This eliminated the need to translate three dimensions into two since the mirror reflection is already a two-dimensional image. A measurement like, for instance, the distance between nose & ear is difficult to determine because it involves a plane that curves away into the depth of the three dimensions; the slightest turn of the head changes the measurement. In a mirror the measurement ignores the curving plane & offers an opportunity for clear lineal measurement in two dimensions (even if the measurement is made simply with the artist’s eye).

Velazquez's self-portrait in one of his most famous paintings- Las Meninas, (above) shows his placement before a mirror clearly. Which puts the royal parents reflected in the mirror beside the door- behind his canvas & under the mirror that reflects the scene from a height higher than the children are tall. The King & Queen stand on one side of the light source that illuminates canvas, people & dog on the other- a window on the right between the artist & mirror.

People are often amazed by the fact the eyes of a portrait seem to ‘follow one’ as one walks away from the painting. This tends to be true particularly of self-portraits because of a simple fact: unless the artist sets up more than one mirror he must needs look directly into his own image (his own eyes when he is painting them) & therefore the eyes of the portrait will look directly into the eyes of the person looking at the painting. Although the portrait may appear to be a three dimensional image because of the illusionist tricks in an artist’s arsenal, it is in fact a two dimensional image & consequently it doesn’t matter from which angle you look at it, the eyes will always appear to be looking at you- the viewer.

As a collector of paintings instead of the painter of them, I am always more interested in an artist’s self-portrait than one he has done of someone else. It is a more personal work, often very different from commissioned work & though his objectivity may be less than when painting a sitter, there is always a depth of scrutiny that makes it more compelling. When I look at a bunch of self-portraits I painted at different times of my life I note both the differences between them & the ‘me’ under the skin of the moment when I painted it.



(1) Regarding the aspect of getting a good likeness, I remember one artist I knew many years ago in London who said to me: Once one has a good understanding of the anatomy of a human face it is far easier to pick out the things which make any individual unique than it is not to...

Let’s start by addressing Modern art’s commonly understood misnomer. While the abstract expressionists were still the avant-garde ‘Modern art’ was indeed synonymous to ‘contemporary art’. But once abstract expressionism used up its ideas & began dying of old age, ‘Modern art’ came to describe a stage of art history while contemporary art became, for a short time at least, post-modernism. (1)

What epoch are we in right now? While there are many names there are none, we are in the age of recovery.

After the prettifying dissolution of the High Renaissance ideal that made so many painter’s work indistinguishable from each other’s by mid-nineteenth century, the revolutionary aesthetics & techniques of the Impressionists, the advent of photography & Modern art, (then installations, performance art, video art, dead animals in formaldehyde etc.) we find ourselves in a period of self-search. Who knows? Maybe with the perspective of temporal distance a pattern & a category may be found to label this period of art history. At the moment, however, like other directionless moments in art history, what the average patron of the arts is qualified to judge is technique over artistic expression & we therefore get a trend toward hyperrealism.

Though hyperrealism (especially with the aid of the overhead projector- in common use today) is a mere craft that creates comfortable if emotionally sterile pictures, any painter who learns this craft has a relatively easy time selling his canvases. Today’s average buyer mistrusts his own taste too much to gamble on something more expressive & many make the mistake of thinking a looser more impressionistic style is easier to accomplish- a shortcut, instead of the far more difficult & sophisticated skill it is. What skill am I referring to? I can answer that using the photograph as reference. We have all looked at a beautiful scene & photographed it in order to capture its beauty in a still image but then been disappointed by the results. The reason, as often as not, is that our brains make the interpretation of the visual subjective, while the camera is objective. In other words: when we notice the beauty of say, a bend in the river with trees on either side topped by a sky filled with majestic clouds, we don’t ‘see’ as the camera does, the telephone poles or overflowing garbage cans in the foreground that rob the big picture of its focal beauty.

An impressionistic technique (for example) chooses & directs the viewer’s eye to those expressive qualities in a way hyperrealism & camera cannot. The former translates through a trained eye, the latter merely copies what it sees. The proof of what I say is in the fact that a great painting like one of Rembrandt’s psychological tour de forces holds the mystery of the undefined that makes his painting more fascinating over time. One of his canvases lives & breathes on the wall & over time becomes a friend that invites greater attention. The canvas that pays attention to every detail equally, if exactly, can be more fascinating the first time you see it but dies a quick death & is soon walked past without notice by its owner because it has already been seen thoroughly that first time it fascinated- there is simply nothing left to look at.

Painters using overhead projectors are, to me, no better than frauds, not only because anyone who has taken the trouble to learn how to draw can usually distinguish between the painting that involves interpretive draughtsmanship & that which is nothing but a projected image that was later 'coloured in', i.e. the painter doesn't deserve the respect as artist because he hasn't taken the time necessary to learn the tools of his trade; but also because he skips the step which I have described as the one where the 'art' enters into the painting: the personal translation from three dimensions to two. It shows the average painting buyer today is more interested in subject than how that subject is painted.

If you pick up almost any issue of the popular magazine American Artist you will find many pleasant, nicely crafted, carefully composed & sensitively lit still lifes, landscapes & occasionally, portraits or figurative paintings, in standard, run-of-the-mill realist, hyperrealist or impressionist techniques. These clear representations of the realities they depict are harmless & decorative but in many cases if you shuffled the images from a few issues & redistributed them at random to the articles they illustrated no-one would notice. At the other end of the extreme you might pick up an issue of another popular magazine: Art News & you will find it filled with things so original you may not find a single image you recognize as art!

The post revolution time we live in has taught us that all the rules in place throughout art history from early Greek lessons in the golden section or contraposto, to the demands of the paying client, have been tying the hands of the creative genius. A true artist paints only for himself, audience be damned. What has come of this attitude? A lot of original work from- Jasper Johns’ encaustic flags to Andy Warhol’s soup cans, canvases painted black, white, torn or with things glued to them.

Personally I fail to appreciate most of this work though I recognize great qualities in some abstract paintings- mood, colour/spatial composition, application of paint etc & yet most do not have all the qualities that make great art in a single canvas, like one of Rembrandt’s or Van Gogh’s. Yet there are always exceptions, for me Jackson Pollock is one of them, great complex paintings that are valid, fascinating, expressive & above all: live.

The question arises: If there are painters painting wonderful & enduring objects of beauty using the tenets of the Renaissance, others doing great work in what is essentially impressionistic technique (Lucian Freud comes to mind) even today, what happened to the work of the abstract expressionists? Why is no one painting in Jack the Dripper’s style? Or doing paintings of supermarket shelves lined with ‘Tide’ soap boxes the way Warhol painted his soup cans? Or painting cubism? (Whose early twentieth century examples by Braque, Gris & Picasso are worth fortunes today). The answer is simple: someone dripping paint on canvas the way Pollock did (even given the same unique skills) would not be following a painterly school of thought but just copying the master. The artist who painted ‘Tide’ boxes would do even worse, he would simply be re-using an idea someone else came up with, as would the contemporary cubist.

That is the reason abstract art hasn’t changed the way painters paint permanently, it is the illustration of an idea & not (as I argued the true purpose of art is in part 1 of this essay) the creation of a beautiful object that will move the sensitive viewer emotionally. For most abstract artists once the ideas were converted to visuals the examination was over; while Monet painted twenty-seven paintings of the same haystack, from the same point of view, & made each of them beautiful in unique ways.

What about limitations on artistic expression imposed by the patron of the arts? In some cases the patrons that controlled to some extent the artist's means of expression such as the Catholic church during the Renaissance, (by requiring the subject be religious, or that the Madonna be dressed in blue or look younger than her son et. al.) were largely aristocratic connoisseurs with excellent & discriminating taste- without whose patronage the Renaissance would have been a far poorer thing. While at other times, like the seventeenth century Netherlanders, art patronage was taken over by the bourgeois (hence a greater interest in genre than the grandiose themes of religion) & yet that was the time of Vermeer, Rembrandt & Frans Halls, among others...

So now that our hands have been freed we painters should be pleased, no? No longer fettered, repressed, oppressed, no longer subjugated to rules of any kind, no limits to subject matter, composition, materials or even the constraints of beauty for that matter, we are free, FREE! Our patrons & audience should also celebrate the new depth the work created under such conditions must produce, yes? Well, if you ask me, I must say: no. The rules that tied our hands gave us Michelangelo’s Pieta (actually more than one, a rougher & stronger Pieta by his hand marks the spot he is buried) Bach’s concertos & Shakespeare’s poetry; while ridding ourselves of the rules gave us dead cows suspended in formaldehyde, pornography parading as eroticism, poetry that doesn’t rhyme (isn’t that actually the definition of prose?) & hip-hop which after more than thirty years has not produced one poet with the sense to use the beauty of iambic pentameter!

(1) The many art-sites I see that describe their own work as 'contemporary' are just plain silly- if one is alive to say so then of course he is contemporary! Contemporary is not a description of style but of one time period relative to another...

From dictionary.com:

1. existing, occurring, or living at the same time; belonging to the same time: Newton's discovery of the calculus was contemporary with that of Leibniz.
2. of about the same age or date: a Georgian table with a contemporary wig stand.
3. of the present time; modern: a lecture on the contemporary novel.
–noun 4. a person belonging to the same time or period with another or others.
5. a person of the same age as another.

As a painter I have had a thousand conversations that begin with the question: What is art? Why is that art? Or: Why isn’t that art? And a dozen other variations that all mean the same thing. Sometimes the conversation is with someone without education in the arts who is genuinely looking to me for an answer; sometimes it takes the form of debate with another artist or cognoscenti. But however naïve the person I’m speaking with is, they always have a vague if distorted view of what ‘art’ is, even if only garnered from Charlton Heston & Anthony Quinn movies on television. But it is easy to forget that the Orient has other ideas & here in Thailand no tradition of visual arts whatever. I began thinking about what I intend to write as a result of an earnest request by a Thai person to explain this strange Occidental concept of ‘art’ to her.

The elusive answer is of considerable interest to me & I have therefore studied the conclusions other artists in history have come to, listened to those of my contemporaries & been particularly curious about the reasons given by philosophers. Why would I place more weight on the opinion of philosophers than artists? Because the answer to the question lies in the realm of theory while the act of painting is in the thoroughly distinct realm of practice. 

Although I was shown early on by some art appreciation teacher how neatly Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling can be divided up into graceful compositional triangles, I believe it only came out that way because the Maestro’s instincts bade it & not because he consciously designed the figural placement according to a geometric formulisation. In this case at least, theory follows practice.

I have a good friend who is a talented & dedicated artist whose work I respect; indeed, I like his paintings so well that I have bought several over the years. (The only real compliment one can offer an artist!). He, however, has an entirely different approach to mine & paints ideas. In other words, his inspiration is the idea the painting illustrates. To me this approach is just that: illustration instead of art. But it is also a good example of where theory & practice diverge since, as an artist, I don’t agree with his approach but find his paintings are none-the-less, often beautiful.

Let’s start by defining terms- dictionary/encyclopaedia descriptions & etymology:

c.1225, "skill as a result of learning or practice," from O.Fr. art, from L. artem, (nom. ars) "art, skill, craft," from PIE *ar-ti- (cf. Skt. rtih "manner, mode;" Gk. arti "just," artios "complete;" Armenian arnam "make," Ger. art "manner, mode"), from base *ar- "fit together, join" (see arm). In M.E. usually with sense of "skill in scholarship and learning" (c.1305), especially in the seven sciences, or liberal arts (divided into the trivium -- grammar, logic, rhetoric -- and the quadrivium --arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). This sense remains in Bachelor of Arts, etc. Meaning "human workmanship" (as opposed to nature) is from 1386. Sense of "cunning and trickery" first attested c.1600. Meaning "skill in creative arts" is first recorded 1620; esp. of painting, sculpture, etc., from 1668. Broader sense of the word remains in artless (1589). As an adj. meaning "produced with conscious artistry (as opposed to popular or folk) it is attested from 1890, possibly from infl. of Ger. kunstlied "art song" (cf. art film, 1960; art rock, c.1970). Fine arts, "those which appeal to the mind and the imagination" first recorded 1767. Art brut "art done by prisoners, lunatics, etc.," is 1955, from Fr., lit. "raw art." Artsy "pretentiously artistic" is from 1902. Expression art for art's sake (1836) translates Fr. l'art pour l'art. First record of art critic is from 1865. Arts and crafts "decorative design and handcraft" first attested in the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in London, 1888.

The modern use of the word "art", which rose to prominence after 1750 is commonly understood to be skill used to produce an aesthetic result (Hatcher, 1999).

The quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.
(Dictionary.com)

"The use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others"
(Britannica Online)

A statement/criticism more than definition but interesting especially because of its author’s undisputed status as artist: "Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and/or religious truths, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned. The revolt of individualism came because the tradition had become degraded, or rather because a spurious copy had been accepted in its stead."
[William Butler Yeats]

Another statement by a universally recognized authority, Leonardo Da Vinci, said in reference to art: “God creates man translates"

Overall, the etymology & traditional definitions point in one direction with relative clarity, in the words of the philosopher Santayana- “Art is for beauty”. The confusion begins, it seems to me, with Freud, photography, the first world war & its consequent search for new beginnings, we eventually arrive at this kind of definition from Wiki-pedia:

The second, more recent, sense of the word “art” is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art or ‘fine art’ Here we mean that skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the “finer” things. Often, if the skill is being used in a lowbrow or practical way, people will consider it a craft instead of art. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it will be considered Commercial art instead of art. On the other hand, crafts and design are sometimes considered applied art. Some thinkers have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with value judgments made about the art than any clear definitional difference (Novitz, 1992). However, even fine art often has goals beyond just pure creativity and self-expression. The purpose of works of art may be to communicate ideas, such as in politically-, spiritually-, or philosophically-motivated art, to create a sense of beauty (see ‘aesthetics’), to explore the nature of perception, for pleasure, or to generate strong emotions. The purpose may also be seemingly nonexistent.

A definition so broad it hardly seems to qualify as a distinct word, since it essentially allows anything to be labelled as art & anyone to self-designate as artist. 

Any philistine can recognise the beauty of a sunset but it takes a Goya to show us the beauty in nightmares. Goya said: Ugliness can be beautiful while prettiness cannot.

I am long accustomed to the response: "Me too", from a great variety of people when they first discover I am an artist. I remember one time, however, when someone I met followed his ‘me too’ with: "I’m a Garbologist!" To the uncomprehending look on my face he explained “A garbage man, that’s my art”. I laughed at what I took to be a joke but as he produced a business card confirming what he claimed, I noted a serious-peeved look, engendered, no doubt, by what he must have taken as a distasteful elitist arrogance on my part.

The archetypical example of the confusion between theory & practice, between novelty & originality, is Duchamp’s urinal proclaimed art by the very right of the artist who recognizes it as such. A brilliant argument, an original & deep aesthetic philosophy but to me entirely separate from the undeniable fact that though it may even be argued the object has innate beauty in its graceful curves, the urinal remains to me, very simply, a urinal. Dadaism & Duchamp’s elegant language caught the imagination & the idea influenced all art of the rest of the twentieth century & yet he himself didn’t appear to take the object-as-art as seriously as the idea, when he signed it with a tongue-in-cheek pseudonym that made play (in French) on the name of a company that built sewers.

I believe that since the aforementioned influences, WWI, photography & Freud confusing everyone, art’s democratization has meant the little training most receive in its study, is neutralised by teachers afraid to state any opinion at all in their teaching. In classes on actual technique at university I even found teachers who refused to answer simple questions about processes like colour theory, for fear of sabotaging my ‘innate natural expression’. I believe that even if there were such a thing as ‘natural expression’ as opposed to a progressive refining of the eye to a sophistication in seeing the beauty in front of it, accompanied by the tools to present them in such a manner that others are surprised & moved to have this hidden beauty pointed out to them, I would still need the tools to express the natural expression!

As far as the aspect of political obligation on the artist’s part, I mean in the sense of making social statement, I think if it happens to coincide with expressive beauty like Picasso’s greatest work: Guernica or any of Kathe Kollwitz’s body of work, that is fine; what am I saying? It is wonderful, wondrous even, like any real inspiration. But making such statements through art should not be a pre-requisite or justification. This, I think, must be true if for no other reason than that we know it doesn’t take great men to make great art. Many are guilty of far worse than absence of social conscience, like the ultimate painter’s painter, Rembrandt Van Rijn who had his wife locked up in an insane-asylum, married his maid & collected his first wife’s pension till her death. Or the brilliant Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio who was protected by the Neopolitan city-state from the Roman city-state, where he was wanted for murder. What importance could one little murder have when compared to his divine canvases? He died in a Roman back-alley at 39 in a knife fight.

I once read some bits of the New Testament freshly translated from the original fragmentary papyri written in Aramaic. I think there are but few Aramaic scholars in the world but this book claimed to be the most accurate & literal translation published to date. Boy, it was a tough read, dull & dry lists of rules & events written, apparently, by a hand ill-accustomed to writing. This led me to a curiosity about the King James’ version of the bible & the discovery of Lancelot Andrewes who led the team that translated the 9th century Masoretic Hebrew into gorgeous poetry, or lyrical prose, that became arguably, the greatest piece of literature written in the English language. The fluidity of style points to the fact it belongs to Andrewes personally, rather than any of the many who made up his team. A work greater than any by Shakespeare, Lancelot’s contemporary, at least in the range & breadth of its inspirational impact. I would contend he might epitomise the role of great artist according to my definition: He found the beauty & showed it to everyone else.