Somewhere in North Adams

A new biography of the art critic John Berger suggests why I've always been sympathetic to his writings.  The author Joshua Sperling writes "Painting, for Berger, was rooted in the experience of sight, and sight was rooted in the local and particular.  Visibility takes place somewhere."  The somewhere in this small painting is the middle of the incline of North Holden Street in North Adams, MA.  6x8 oil on panel.

Delaware River Sticker

This one I threw against the wall to see if it would stick. 8x10 pastel.

Regarding John Berger, he can write insightfully about his own experience painting and drawing, and then he can write about art history, and art as property, and the end of landscape painting etc. , in a way the contradicts his own experience. Here's what he says about landscape painting: "Certainly there are no great modern landscapes comparable to those of the past...Cubism when it broke painting broke the landscape too." Fortunately, there's no inevitability about what one can paint. I know more because of what has preceded me, but that doesn't mean I can do less.

Here's what he says about his experience of drawing: "To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree-being-looked-at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking. Within the instant of the sight of the tree is established a life-experience. This is how the act of drawing refuses the process of disappearances and proposes the simultaneity of a multitude of moments." This passage suggests the constant renewal and possibility of creativity, no matter what has already happened.

Marks of a Landscape

John Berger wrote an essay titled "Painting a Landscape." Though he wrote that "landscape painting" is dead, painting a landscape can be a "starting point" for painting. He wrote, "As I work I am faithful to what I see in front of me, because only being faithful, by constantly checking, correcting, analysing what I can see and how it changes as the day progresses, can I discover forms and structures too complex and varied to be invented out of my head or reconstructed from vague memories." Also, "The marks on the canvas must have a life of their own." Again, "The thing interpreted becomes the interpretation." Further, "However short-lived, there are moments of triumph, incomparable in my experience to moments achieved in any other activity. They are short-lived because they depend upon a correspondence existing between the totality of relations between the marks on the canvas and those deducible in the landscape..." And finally, "...it is the consequent sense of the near impossibility of the task which allows me to take pleasure in the little that I have temporarily achieved."

A Paintable Landscape

This is another view of the Hopper from Sloan Road in a 12 x 24 inch oil.

John Berger in a fascinating essay, titled "A Story for Aesop," discusses paintable and unpaintable landscapes. The Spanish landscape is "unpaintable," he writes. "A landscape is never unpaintable for purely descriptive reasons; it is always because its sense, its meaning, is not visible, or else lies elsewhere... Paintable landscapes are those in which what is visible enhances man--in which natural appearances make sense. We see such landscapes around every city in Italian Renaissance painting. In such a context there is no distinction between appearance and essence--such is the classic ideal."

He adds, "The scale of the Spanish interior is of a kind which offers no possibility of any focal centre. This means that it does not lend itself to being looked at. Or, to put it differently, there is no place to look at it from... A landscape that has no focal point is like a silence. It constitutes simply a solitude that has turned its back on you."

The only landscape like this that I have encountered is usually the site of a natural disaster in a forest area. Or the shattering descriptions of nature that Thoreau recounts in his trip to Mt. Katahdin in Maine.

Foreseeing

Happy New Year! The bottom drawing is one of my walk'ndraws from this morning. It's a view looking north on Stratton Road. I was standing in the field. The top drawing is a study of the Hopper from Sloan Road in preparation for a painting. The painting is completed, and I will post it later.

I visit the Northshire bookstore in Manchester, Vt. frequently. This last time I found a copy of a book by John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous. In an essay, titled, "drawing on paper," Berger writes about three kinds of drawing: "those which study and question the visible, those which put down and communicate ideas, and those done from memory." He goes on: "In the first kind of drawing...the lines on the paper are traces left behind by the artist's gaze, which is ceaselessly leaving, going out, interrogating the strangeness, the enigma, of what is before his eyes, however ordinary and everyday this may be. The sum total of the lines on the paper narrate a sort of optical emigration by which the artist, following his own gaze, settles on the person or tree or animal or mountain being drawn. And if the drawing succeeds, he stays there for ever..."

"In the second category of drawings the traffic, the transport, goes in the opposite direction. It is now a question of bringing to the paper what is already in the mind's eye. Delivery rather than emigration. Often such drawings were sketches or working drawings for paintings... Such meagre drawings still possess an artisanal interest..., but they do not speak directly to us. For this to happen the space created within the drawing has to seem as large as the earth's or the sky's space. Then we can feel the breath of life... To create such an immense space with ink marks on a sheet of paper one has to know oneself to be very small..."

"In a few great drawings...everything appears to exist in space, the complexity of everything vibrates--yet what one is looking at is only a project on paper. Reality and project become inseparable. One finds oneself on the threshold before the creation of the world. Such drawings, using the Future Tense, foresee, forever."