While I was up in the New England area this week I was getting a flood of thoughts, some of which involved painting, but I didn’t have time to write them down.

Thinking back to Cezanne’s Composition, Cezanne composed space by pushing things back and pulling other things forward - in fact, it was a mutual operation - when you did one thing, you affected something else - which ended up sounding like a Boolean equation (Truth Tables and all):

Source: Wikipedia

And that got me thinking - thinking of Hans Hoffman’s ideas of Push and Pull using color which was an extension of Paul Cezanne’s (it’s also the subject of a paper by Maxson J. McDowell titled - Cézanne and Hans Hofmann on Pictorial Space (see, I do know what I’m talking about here - I came up with this not even knowing about the paper).

 

What if - in looking at Art work - at least, work that proposed to be about 3 dimensions on two dimensions - flat work or nearly flat work that had a sense of dimension - if it could be looked at in this way - as a series of equations - equations that could be processed by software designed for that purpose?

What if we could create a program that would scan a painting (assuming the colors and lines were well represented) and show the areas as “push and pull” along with suggestions about opening up space in the work.

Would such an idea help? It might move people beyond where they are to another level with their work - even it it’s not the end goal itself.

 

Cezanne - Still Life with Apples

I believe technology is at a level now where this could be accomplished, probably with not that much work - though it’s hard to say as I don’t think it’s been tried before.

Just a thought on this Saturday where I really do need to stop blogging and start getting ready to go out -talking about Push and Pull - we can extract that idea into our entire life (at least I can) and I’m pulled now, to get ready - which means I’m pushed away from this post.

I saw two openings tonight but only one was worth writing about - Eleanor Antin “Helen’s Odyssey” at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

 Plaisir d’Amour (after Couture) from “Helen’s Odyssey,” 2007

The photo, masterfully done - was inspired by Thomas Couture’s Age of Decadence which I’ve seen a couple of times when visiting Paris (see below):

A couple of my favorites are Constructing Helen from “Helen’s Odyssey,”and The Tourists from “Helen’s Odyssey.

Saw several people taking pictures though I don’t know why - all of the photos at the opening are online.

 ”…As a pioneering conceptual artist, Eleanor Antin has engaged in a dialogue with history for nearly forty years. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts is pleased to exhibit Antin’s latest work, in which she turns her gaze on the Trojan War. Through Helen’s Odyssey, Helen of Troy is finally allowed to speak for herself in a series of imagined scenes from the life of the two Helens. For in her pursuit of the Spartan queen, Antin has discovered two women, a charming blonde engaging the seductive pleasures of luxury and desire, and a demonic dark Helen smoldering with disgust and venting her rage on her admiring victimizers. In these nine large-scale dramatic photographs, warriors, artists, gods, and goddesses emerge in a set of luminous archaeological retrievals from Helen’s historically fragmented life.”

The only thing I’m wondering about is how easy it is to color my perception of these works!  I walked out of the gallery (after a glass or two of wine - they were small glasses of red wine) and wondered past some more galleries on Broome street - saw a storefront that had similar types of large display photos and that told me the idea of doing historical photos - parody, if you will, is actually not uncommon.

Then I decided I’d seen enough and went home.

Just reading about this story in the New York Times makes me sick to my stomach- 4 Masterworks Stolen by Armed Robbers in Zurich.

Among the paintings stolen was one of my very favorite Cezanne

The other three paintings are also great and somewhat familiar to me - but I don’t have the same connection to them that I have to Cezanne’s work.

I hope the paintings are recovered soon - one wonders where they can move them to? Who can the robbers sell them to?  The paintings are so well known no one would buy them.   What about threatening to destroy them unless a certain amount of money was paid to the thieves?

I don’t want to think about it - already upset over the theft.