I had a difficult week requiring both reflection and standing firm, both of which I did, successfully.

And for something gained, something else is lost, but isn’t that just part of how Nature works?

Anyway, I did an IPhone painting I am pretty happy with, it’s about Reflecting about a difficult situation and standing firm, which is the right thing to do.

The funny thing here, the iPhone paintings are becoming part of my physical 3D paintings, maybe they feed off each other.

Off, to paint some more now.

I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell (introduced by Josh Liberson) Outliers: The Story of Success (which I can’t embed here because there’s no embed code) where Malcolm Gladwell compares Cezanne to Picasso and said Cezanne’s genius took a lot longer to mature – but the problems he was trying to solve were also much more complex than Picasso’s type of genius, which tends towards a flash, something that happens in a sitting or two.

In the PDF Transcript of the talk – it goes like this -

an economist named David Galenson and he has this really interesting theory. What he says is, if you can divide creative types into — broadly speaking, into two groups, and the first group is people that he calls conceptual innovators, and those are people who have a big, bold idea, which they express very — kind of quickly and precisely and immediately and he thinks of — he uses Picasso as the classic example of the conceptual innovator; a man, who over the course of his career, is possessed by a series of truly revolutionary ideas, which he expresses in his art immediately.

I mean, Picasso is alegend by the age of 21. I mean, there is no kind of — but Galenson says that’s only one kind and, in fact, there’s a far more important and far more common and far more interesting kind of innovator and that’s the innovator that he calls the experimental innovator.

And this is the kind of person who never has a big, bold revolutionary idea, but who rather
painstakingly and carefully and slowly discovers what they are good at through a process of
experimentation and trial-and-error. And the classic example of this kind of innovator is
Cezanne. Cezanne is someone who is not a great painter until he is in his 50s.

You know, if you go the Musee d’Orsay and you look at the Cezanne’s there, you know, the greatest collections of Cezanne’s in the world, they are all painted at the end of his life.

There’s nothing in there from his 20s and in his 30s, because when he’s in his 20s and his 30s, he is not any good yet. Right?

He is still trying to figure out what it is that he wants to paint.

He spends the decade of his 30s in the fields with Pissarro. Pissarro teaching him, you know, brushstrokes and he, you know, he’s renowned of the course of his career for this relentless kind of iterative trial-and-error. He would, you know, he would have in his famous painting that portrait of Geoffroy, or Geoffroy, my French is terrible…. But, you know he makes Geoffroy sit for — come and sit for four hours a day for 180 consecutive days and then he says, “Oh, it’s garbage,” and throws it out, right. It’s the kind of guy he is, right.

That’s his approach to creativity. He’s someone who doesn’t — he doesn’t know what he’s going to do before he starts, rather, he discovers it in the doing and Galenson’s argument is that that is a very, very important and common kind of creative approach.

…….. So what does this kind of protracted experimentation give us? Well, one answer is that if you talk to art critics, they will say that the amount of time and effort and experimentation that Cezanne put into his work is the reason his art is so compelling. It gives his art a kind of emotional depth and power that simply would not be the case if he was dashing these things
off in his 20s, okay?

But more importantly, I think that there is something about that kind of experimental approach that is necessary when the problems that we’re trying to solve are very, very complex and that’s very much –I mean, when I think of the separation, the distinction between Picasso and Cezanne, I actually think of Cezanne as being the truly modern painter and Picasso is being the profoundly 19th-century painter.

For that very reason: that Picasso is capable of solving things with one simple revolutionary insight because he’s solving something that can be summed up that simply.

Cezanne is after something much more complex and nuanced and difficult and those are the kinds of problems that we deal with now in the 21st century.

My sense is that Paul Cezanne, my favorite painter, was indeed, working on something that took him many years to figure out – but I would not go so far as to say the paintings he did before he was 50 years old were not any good, as Gladwell pointed out – but I would say, he’d never become famous for them – had he not painted his late work.

Not sure where I sit in this specturm of the two types of Genius – I’d be happy just to have one of them – but my feeling is that it may take many years to mature enough to the point (say, the 10,000 hours that Gladwell says you need to spent to obtain Genius) where an artist could do something quickly that also worked.

But the latest findings suggest 10,000 hours to Genius is not an absolute – and it really all depends on what area, discipline, threshold your talking about.

I was reading In the Gloom, Seeing Rembrandt With New Eyes in the New York Times the other day and felt that I needed to go over to the Metropolitan and see the Rembrandts in person on Friday night – which I did, with a friend.

I was thinking that Rembrandt would have been a “hedge fund manager” had he lived today … or maybe not, but he was highly leveraged and when the Dutch market collapsed, so did his fortunes, according to the article in the New York Times:

In the 17th century the Netherlands was the most prosperous country in Europe. Then at midpoint of the century, partly because of a draining war, the bubble burst. The Dutch art market, at its zenith, collapsed. People thought, “Oh, it’s just a phase.” It wasn’t. The golden age of Dutch art was over.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rembrandt’s “Woman With a Pink,” from the early 1660s, at the Metropolitan Museum, takes on a new cast in new times.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Smug and seductive: “The Toilet of Bathsheba” (1643) is Rembrandt’s take on a story of betrayal.

Rembrandt was hit especially hard. A decade earlier he had been a star, with a client waiting list a mile long. Amsterdam, like New York today, was a town of culture-craving burghers who had to have — had to have — a Rembrandt in their homes. So he turned himself into an art machine, piled on assistants to finish off work, and became very rich.

He also grew careless. He mortgaged himself to the hilt. In addition to making art, he sold it, not only dealing his own work but that of other artists. He bought a Rubens and flipped it at a markup. He flogged paintings by his apprentices that looked very much like his own.

The point of the article about Rembrandt by HOLLAND COTTER was that as we face our own deep Recession, perhaps even a Depression, upcoming, the Rembrandts, in particular, look different, somehow.

What I noticed on Friday night – was that sometimes, the hands that Rembrandt paints seem to almost merge or grab the background within the painting (and Cezanne would later come to understand that approach, but in his own way).

I also noticed, and the article points this out, that it takes a lot of courage, and perhaps, hard knocks – in the case of Rembrandt – to paint only for yourself.   Rembrandts earlier paintings were masterful, and he’d still be known today had he not lived longer and suffered as he did – but his later paintings have a freedom of approach the earlier paintings lacked – because at the end of his life his only goal was to satisfy himself.

Lastly, I noticed just how much Rembrandts paintings have changed with age – and I often wish I could see what the paintings first looked like when they were just painted – but the areas where there was a lot of white used (usually lead white) did well over time, while those that were glazed in the background, tended to fade a bit.   Also, when green  was used, it often turned to brown or deep gray, over time – so i know that many of the aspects of his greatest paintings looked quite different when they first saw the world.

Nevertheless, I was able to enjoy Rembrandt’s paintings, Friday night, on their own terms.

I spent part of Monday evening at a life drawing class I hadn’t planned on attending, but glad I did.

Here’s my drawings of Lauren, an English lady who poses and acts.

After the class, we hung out at a new bar, down the block from BAG, it was a lot of fun.

All the sketches were done on my iPhone, btw.