I worked on Into the Blue, the painting I started last week; I wasn’t sure it was done but the work I did, while I moved it further along (and maybe it is done – or I’m just sick of it – which is more or less, the same thing) makes me wonder if I had been better off to leave it alone.

In other words, I challenge the idea that continually working on paintings makes them better …. I don’t think it does in many cases.

Let’s see what you think of the two versions of the same thing – did you like the “before” or “after” version, or do you like/dislike both?

Before

Not bad, it seemed to have what it needed except for one thing in the middle, an extra dab of red – that’s what I started with today – and looke what I ended up with.

After

I advanced the painting much further – but is it really better?

I’m reminded of Delacroix’s saying that “one always has to spoil a painting a little to finish it“.

But, while I won’t paint on Into the Blue any more, I am not sure I got anything more by working on it more – in fact, I lost much of the freshness I had and replaced it with some push/pull/popping color stuff – but did I achieve any more, really? Probably not.

So people to tell me to keep on working on stuff – do more than one sitting – do several sittings … on one painting – consider this – if you can’t finish a painting in one sitting – you probably won’t be able to finish it in two, six or ten sittings.

More may some times be required, but in a lot of cases, I believe, the best is done quickly and in the beginning and the best execution is one that allows the beginning to remain as a permanent fixture of the work.

I also felt unready to start something new and realized it’s often easier to have work to go back to – that it’s not necessary to start something new all the time – and it might actually be too much pressure to expect myself to do that.

Again I questioned why I bother to have a studio if all I do there is come one a week for a couple of hours – even though it feels good being there – when I’m there. Fact is, often I choose not to be painting when I could be – often I’d rather party and go to art openings or museums and see art, and not so much be locked away, somewhere, producing it.

But without actually having a place to do it – do Art, can I really fully participate as both an artist and art blogger?

I don’t think I can.

On another note, I went back to the Metropolitan Museum last night to see the Nicolas Poussin exhibition again and it was great – I even took the audio tour this time plus I got to appreicate how Poussin constructed his paintings – his concept of “modes” of painting and how Paul Cezanne also contructed his paintings – but not in the same way.

Idea being that nature is a “dictionary” or resource – along with a story or stories to be told – Poussin told stories and composed his pictures to tell the story as best he could – he probably chose his palate different depending what “mode” his painting was intended to express (along with the times of day – of which there were 4, morning, noon, evening and night).

Cezanne’s approach was much different – he composed his paintings from everyday objects – but he constructed much as Poussin did – even if the vocabulary was entirely different along with the painting technique.

At the end of the day, both painters created works that blend emotion and intellect (who says you have to have one or the other) and while Poussin and Cezanne’s work can be appreciated visually, without knowing anything else about the painting or the ideas of the painter- in both cases, knowing what the painting is about – or what the painter is aiming for, brings a much greater dimension to both painters’ work.

Enough for one post – this could have been two or three posts had I wanted to make it so.

Six or seven months ago I did a drawing of a house near where I live and about a month ago I noticed the house was gone – did I have a sense of that when I chose to draw it?

In a way, is my drawing predictive of change? What do you think?

Here’s the drawing

And here’s the “missing house”, along with the missing tree at the center of my drawing but missing from the photo.    Did I somehow sense change and is that why I drew the tree, stop sign and house?

What I’m looking for here – is how an artist picks motifs – do they reflect, in a very real way, where they’re at, or where they’re moving to?

Just a thought on a rainy Saturday.

I spent Friday evening at MOMA viewing three shows which I’ll briefly cover here – Design and the Elastic Mind had a few things in it that I liked but the rest of the show looked like a free for all – a lot of work but no real emotional connection to most of it. What I did like was the “New City” installation which has it’s own Mini Theatre.

This was an image shown at the Theatre installation which people had to sit or lie down to fully view. I liked it though I’m not sure what it was actually trying to say (or was it anything worth saying ….don’t know). At any rate, most of the works in this show, while many have merit, don’t really tell much of a cohesive story – that’s probably more the fault of the curator than anything else.

Color Wheel also wasn’t a very good show except for a few pieces of work in it like the two paintings of Blinky Palermo, a German artist who died way too young, in 1977 at the age of 34. Too bad, the world lost a great artist.

Blinky Palermo, Untitled, 1969

Considering that this show was about the Color Wheel, and Color, in general, it was amazing to me how superficial the treatment of color was for most of the artists in the show. Blinky Palermo was only artist, I saw, who actually “did” something with the color – the color poped out at me and there was an intense “push-pull” that worked better, to me, than Hans Hoffman.

I also liked, but not as much, Jim Dine’s The Studio (below) but again, the treatment of color was more superfacial – but atleast there was some real feeling there – based on an emotial experience Dine had when he was younger.

Lucien Freud’s Etchings show, closing on Monday, was a disappointment – not that his work isn’t great, or worth seeing, but while I saw some interesting work, his limitations as an artist are also clear – he’s struggling with everything – and the paintings show it (maybe that’s what people like about it – but I think Lucien Freud takes the human being and makes it ugly and repulsive but somehow, manages to get you to look at it anyway.  However, didn’t Francis Bacon do the same thing, but better?

Among the show’s best piece is “Bella” painted in 1981 (below) and “Man with a Blue Scarf” painted in 2004 (also see below).

The rest of the etchings are superb – but I can’t help but feel the struggle, which in most cases, doesn’t really help me. The Man with a Blue Scarf probably had the brightest palette of any of his paintings – and yet, it too is subdued. I wonder what he’s afraid of (or maybe it’s a Freudian Slip).

At any rate, when I left MOMA (did buy a sketchbook in the Design Store) it was still raining hard and on my way home I was Tweeting (on Twitter) just how impersonal and cold a place MOMA is – where did didn’t need to be – the IAC Building designed by Frank Gehrys (see below) is a modern building and yet, much warmer to be in – a great piece of Art and an amazing building with some amazing capacities:

For one thing, the “windows” change color and transparency based on the time of day – also there age giant video screens inside and a lot of really good space and energy.

But MOMA is, for all it’s space, a building all about Process – and the feeling is, for me, of people being “herded” in and around the building – treated almost like “sheep” who are being ready to be slaughtered; that’s why I don’t enjoy going to MOMA that much, it feel dehumanizing, somehow, to be treated like a like part of a mob, that needs to be “regimented” and directed.

And while we’re at it, the Whitney Museum of American Art is also a modern building but feels a lot more plesent and human to be in. Like I said, MOMA is impresonal and cold – and the art, I feel, is colored by that – but it didn’t need to be that way.

Just because a building or a work of Art is Modern, that doesn’t mean it has to be cold, impersonal or devoid of human feeling.

When I went to Paris last December I made the mistake of staying in a 2 Star Hotel; it wasn’t a disaster and could have been much worse, but it was depressing all the more, when I first confronted where I was to stay for the next 4 or 5 days (even as I was out most of the time).

On my first evening in Paris, December 9th, I made this sketch in my hotel room, trying to be optimistic.

It was only later that I realized why the French were able to stand it, but I won’t go into that here. Below is the movie I made when I first arrived in my room after an average Trans Atlantic flight from New York. I also added some footage of me leaving the Louvre and then dropping my camera later that day or the next. Fortunately, the camera was repaired and the movie, you see, below.

Just wanted to share this.