A Few Words of Wisdom

It seems to me that today if you want to produce art seriously and make for yourself a little corner of originality, or at least keep for yourself a thoroughly guiltless personality, you must immerse yourself in solitude. There is too much tittle-tattle. It's as if pictures were being painted by stock exchange players, by agents of people avid for profits. Apparently you are supposed to need the mind and ideas of your neighbor to do anything at all, much as a businessman needs the capital of other people in order to earn a sou. All these transactions put your mind on edge and falsify your judgement.
Edgar Degas, 1856

Clearing the decks from last year...

Both are conte on Kraft paser, approximately 2'x3'.
Faye:

Bill

A friend of mine recently reawakened my interest in Mary Cassatt, definitely one of my favourite artists ever. I pulled out a book I had bought ten years ago Mary Cassatt, Modern Woman (put out by the Art Institute of Chicago), and the first thing I came across was this etching, done by Winslow Homer for Harpers.


It's a striking etching taken from a gallery in the Louvre. Note the number of students and copyists, the hanging style for the pictures and compare them to what one sees in most modern museums, where pictures tend to be hung miles apart, and one rarely sees anyone trying to draw from them.

What does that say about the state of modern art?

On Painting the Sistine Chapel

A goiter it seems I got from this backward craning
like the cats get there in Lombardy, or wherever
—bad water, they say, from lapping their fetid river.
My belly, tugged under my chin, 's all out of whack.
Beard points like a finger at heaven. Near the back
of my neck, skull scrapes where a hunchback's lump would be.
I'm pigeon-breasted, a harpy! Face dribbled—see?—
like a Byzantine floor, mosaic. From all this straining
my guts and my hambones tangle, pretty near.
Thank God I can swivel my butt about for ballast.
Feet are out of sight; they just scuffle around, erratic.
Up front my hide's tight elastic; in the rear
it's slack and droopy, except where crimps have callused.
I'm bent like a bow, half-round, type Asiatic.
Not odd that what's on my mind,
when expressed, comes out weird, jumbled. Don't berate;
no gun with its barrel screwy can shoot straight.
Giovanni, come agitate
for my pride, my poor dead art! I don't belong!
Who's a painter? Me? No way! They've got me wrong.
===================
From Three Complete Poems of Michelangelo, translated by John Frederick Nims

Another sketch of Faye, started about a month ago. About 2'x3', NuPastel on Kraft paper. There's a lot of "issues" with it, but w/o the model, it's time to stop & start working it up into a proper drawing....

Just down the street....

Just down the street (and in the same neighborhood in the blogosphere) is the studio of Joy and Brian Scott; good art, good woodworking, and right across the street, good coffee :)

Briana has taken the time to start up a reference blog for life drawing in the Halifax Dartmouth area - http://figuredrawingns.blogspot.com/ - and this is to thank her for her effort! Figure groups - except for a few that have been around for awhile - tend to come and go very quickly here, due to lack of space & financing (and of course a certain amount of internecine squabbling). So a few (Christmas) thanks to Briana for putting this together!

Someone over there gets it....

Our artistic debt to faith | Mary Kenny (At the Guardian, no less!)
My own commen (partial)

[....]
Bach's quote w/r to music applies to visual art as well:

"The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul. If heed is not paid to this, it is not true music but a diabolical bawling and twanging."

[Re commenters about the Hellenistic art].. the Greeks and direct descendants were great at working towards the Platonic Ideal (although we haven't seen what their sculpture really looked like when it was tarted up in its original form, and no paintings of Appelles exist AFAIK), and certainly their contribution is huge. The Romans pushed it a bit further (e.g. portrait busts and representational painting). But their philosophy lacked the notion of immanence (their gods were pretty much just major celebrities). Immanence, along with a (too often unobserved) moral law that gave artists the freedom to explore its nature - was brought into the West through Judaism. The search for a deeper understanding of that has been a huge motivator in Western art, and is why its canon is so much more diverse, evolving, and profound than that of other cultures.,