Matters of Subject

I’ve been thinking lately about the nature of that moment when something makes me want to paint it. The origin of this moment, or the “why” of this moment, is hard to discern because it can have such a long and complex ancestry of influences and because explaining a longing to paint something is difficult to put into words. Frankly, I often don’t know why certain things make me want to paint them and not others. Cezanne called these moments “petite sensations.” “The sensations” he said, “ which are the basis of my work, cannot be penetrated.” I always have an initial notion about what attracts me to a scene or object but it often seems that the deeper reasons come after I begin to paint. It is by the very act of painting something that I begin to get a sense of what moved me to paint it in the first place. So I suppose I don’t necessarily paint something because it is beautiful, rather, it becomes beautiful to me because I paint it. When Hopper painted a lighthouse, he wasn’t just painting a lighthouse per se. He was painting light, the feeling of a certain kind of day, the wind and air, and an undercurrent of loneliness. The lighthouse served as a vehicle through which he conveyed those things, consciously or unconsciously. I doubt he started painting that lighthouse thinking he wanted to paint loneliness-- it seemed to be a by-product of his investigation of paint and light, and an honest and clear expression of the unnamable feeling he had when he viewed it. He found a universe of thought and feeling in a lighthouse and had the skill to transfer this feeling to us via paint.

It is easy to start second-guessing yourself and lose that initial “sensation”-- the paralysis of analysis. PAD has an aspect to it of jumping in that I liked very much. The practicalities of having to paint each day forces you to paint first and think later-- to respond to your instincts and think and contemplate as you paint, rather than trying to calculate a specific outcome. This is not to say that you have to shoot from the hip or that the process is devoid of intellectual considerations, but I believe those “small sensations” happen before our brain starts trying to make sense of them. Not every emotional response requires a rhyme and a reason before we allow ourselves to paint a certain subject. I think part of the way a painter finds his subject matter is my trusting his instincts and just painting.

What we want to paint can be very different than what we want to photograph, or draw, or even what we simply enjoy looking at-- just because you like flowers doesn’t mean you want to paint them. When you have spent many years painting I think the personal aesthetics of beauty are no longer separate from the aesthetics of paint. What is a painterly aesthetic? Many years ago I discovered in one of Velazquez’s early paintings his thumbprints in the paint (at least I thought it was a thumbprint-- who knows really?) The thumbprint was used to describe a piece of reflected light on the bottom half of a lime. There was something wonderful about how his thumb had lifted off some paint to reveal the warm ground underneath, and how that warmth acted as the glow of light from the surface the table on which the lemon sits, and how, in addition to it’s representational finesse it still remained a thumbprint like you’d see a five year old make while finger painting. When I put an actual lime in front of me I could see how he saw it and why he came to the conclusion that his thumb was the best tool for the job. I suddenly wanted to paint a lime but not just because of the color or shape or texture but rather I wanted to paint a lime because of how Velazquez moved the paint when he painted one. For a long while I would “see” that thumbprint in all limes... I was channeling Velazquez through a lime!

Obviously, what we paint is partially based upon or at least inspired by the work of painters we admire. In the beginning or my artistic training, even several years into it, when I looked for something to paint what I was really doing was finding something that Rembrandt or Vermeer (or any of my other favorite painters) would paint. I was looking through the eyes of other painters. I would be thinking, “Rembrandt would have liked this” or “Cezanne would have liked that” etc. I wasn’t necessarily copying or consciously painting “in the manner of” but their painterly aesthetic became mine. When you tell a beginning painting student to choose a subject to paint, the look in their eyes is akin to panic. First, they flip through their internal rolodex of famous paintings (this usually results in a montage played in their mind which blurs together like a flip-book movie into a single image of a wine bottle and grapes.) Second, they filter out the things they feel are outside the realm of their abilities (as if they knew what their abilities were in the first place.) Third, they attempt to discern what it is their audience (me) would prefer to see them paint. Lastly, they try to decide if their choice is “worthy” of being painted (ie is it too trivial or not “arty” enough etc?) So their choice is initially filtered by a kind of artistic fashion tempered by perceived practical considerations. As I painted more I began to see things through my own eyes, and my technique developed in a way to serve my own vision. But I still see Vermeer’s paint in a white wall and Hopper’s paint in the night and Rembrandt’s impasto in faces. Degas once said that art is not what you see but what you make others see.

So a painterly aesthetic develops when the way we like to move paint begins to mesh with our sense of what is beautiful. Did I choose this thing to paint because of how it strikes my eye or because of the license it might gives me to move the paint? In an essay by Louis Finkelstein, he conveys De Kooning’s thoughts on Courbet:

...it was not simply where his donkey stopped that he painted, but where the qualities of wetness and dappled light had just that propensity for translation into palette-knifed paint. So is it that the compulsion for a certain kind of paint leads one to the leaves, or do the habits imposed by the process promote a habit of mind which then transvaluates a technique?

Paint colors how we see.

My wife always knows when I am looking for something to paint because I have a very specific look on my face-- I suppose it must look like a thousand yard stare. I am looking at nothing and everything (I would love to see what parts of my brain light up in a brain scan during this process.) What am I looking for really? I get the sense that I am not so much trying to find something to paint as trying to make myself receptive to that vague and amorphous longing to paint. It is as though these objects and places are sentient and that they choose me.