Saturday, July 27, 2019

DISAPPEARING INTO FOG

The esteemed illustrator Robert Andrew Parker is 92 years old, and his vision has become so poor he can no longer read or draw from a model.  Still, he goes to his studio every day and paints from imagination and memory.  This is his recent painting, "Plane Disappearing Into Fog."




Parker had a long, prolific career before macular degeneration began stripping him of his precious eyesight.  I especially like his etchings-- rich, imaginative works with strong compositions.  They take full advantage of the grainy textures and special "look" of the etching medium, something very unusual for the field of illustration.




Parker also made some striking images expressing his political views:




Most people regard eyesight as the crucial requirement for a visual artist, but there are other compensating qualities that can help to offset diminishing sight.  One is imagination.  Here is Parker's recent painting of a dogfight between a plane and a bug:


Another is the strength of character to continue working at age 92.

I've previously quoted Tennyson's famous poem, Ulysses, which describes the hero's resolve, at the end of a long life of adventure, to set out once again. He rousts his aging comrades to accompany him to see if "some work of noble note may yet be done."
Ulysses admits that old age has robbed his crew of much, yet he glories in what still "abides":  
 Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.







27 comments:

kev ferrara said...

It is no small solace knowing that no matter how little one can garden, something will grow; something worth tending to.

sally said...

I love your blog. Is there a way to subscribe to it or be added to your email list?

MORAN said...

I didn't know Parker but these etchings are awesome.

chris bennett said...

A tough post David. But it has prompted a beautiful insight from Kev.
Thank you both.

Tom said...

Thoughtful post David and a insightful tribute to the nature of art. I concur with Chris's comment.

"Most people regard eyesight as the crucial requirement for a visual artist, but there are other compensating qualities that can help to offset diminishing sight."

It's one thing to see, it quite another thing to conceive what has been seen. What I like about the post is it brought to my mind Michelangelo's quote, "A man paints with his brains and not with his hands"

David Apatoff said...

Kev Ferrara-- Your comment reminds me that, on a couple of occasions, I've visited elderly people who were once rich and powerful, who once traveled the world making important decisions but who ended up in nursing homes, their memories failing and their eloquence gone. As therapy each was given a small patch of land (about 4'x4') to garden. Their choices about what to plant and how to nurture it became the biggest decisions of their week. They applied all their taste-- their best, highest aesthetic judgment-- to choose between planting daisies or bachelor buttons.

It made me wonder, when viewed against a backdrop of geologic time, whether the artistic choices regarding these little therapy gardens were all that different in kind from the artistic choices made by great painters working on canvas.

Sally-- Thank you so much, I appreciate your comment. I'm sure there's some intelligent way to create a notification process but I never got around to figuring that part out. Your nice comment has inspired me to look again.

MORAN-- for me, Parker's etchings are his best work. He does smart and interesting drawings and watercolors too, but there's something about the etching process that forces him to be a little more concrete and measured about his designs, and I like that.

David Apatoff said...

chris bennett-- tough perhaps, but it's sitting there waiting for all of us, calmly licking its chops so there's no point in averting our eyes. What did you think about Parker's earlier and later work?

Tom wrote: "It's one thing to see, it quite another thing to conceive what has been seen." I agree, and I like your Michelangelo quote too. (Perhaps he was a conceptual artist at heart?) I note you used the past tense, "what has been seen" instead of "conceive what one [currently] sees." Is your point that the conceiving can go on and on, after the seeing is through? As the saying goes, that's what enables us to have roses in winter.

kev ferrara said...

"It made me wonder, when viewed against a backdrop of geologic time, whether the artistic choices regarding these little therapy gardens were all that different in kind from the artistic choices made by great painters working on canvas."

The similarity is the choice to act in the face of {David's perverse cosmic-sized comparison of the day.}

But selecting from binary options doesn't get you near this. Comparing multiple choice questions to artistry on this level is a qualitative rift as oceanic as any nebula you care to fathom.

chris bennett said...

What did you think about Parker's earlier and later work?

The late works of Titian, Constable, Turner, Rembrandt, Monet and Degas among others are often cited as expressions of Old Age Style - As the breath grows shallower and the faculties blunt so comes the cut-to-the-chase, the aesthetic shorthand. With nowhere far to go, the sandbags are released and the balloon soars...

The examples of Parker's late work, in its own small way, seems to show some evidence of this but it is hard to properly tell due to the particular impediment to his vision, which, unlike Degas, seems to occlude and skew the realiation of the forms rather than blur them.

Parker's earlier work shows a canny sense of design in the best stuff that serves his expression well. This is a quality that is still there in the late painting of the biplane entering the fog regardless of its unfortunate drawing faults. So he remains an artist even though, like the aging Frank Sinatra, his singing chops ain't what they used to be.

chris bennett said...

Kev,

Ah, that wonderful, wonderful Everett, in full view without any cropping!

David Apatoff said...

Kev Ferrara-- Well, I certainly do maintain there are times when it can be useful to fashion binary choices within controlled parameters. For example, placing the current debate within the framework of "20th century Western art," I might agree that your Everett painting is at the opposite end of a spectrum from the old man selecting flowers that will look nice for his tiny patch of earth. However, I think opening up those parameters and trying to shed our cultural limitations is the opposite of "selecting from binary options."

If we take into consideration anthropological time, and ask what motivated Neanderthals to pick flowers and bury them with their dead, is that instinct substantially different from the instinct of the old man in the nursing home who uses his best artistic judgment to decide which colors and shapes "look best"? And what separates the taste and judgment of the old man in the nursing home from Everett's taste and judgment in designing your painting? You may claim that nature has allocated Everett a larger dose of taste, but is it a qualitatively different human phenomenon? And can you say that Everett's painting has a more significant impact on the lives of the people who skimmed past it in a magazine than the impact of the old man's garden on his life and the lives of the others in his nursing home?

chris bennett-- Yes, Dégas was exactly who I had in mind when I posed the question. He, too, had dwindling eyesight and yes, as you say, the balloon still soared. Could he ever have reached those heights if he was still able to paint crisp, sharply detailed works?

David Levine also lost his sight and continued working, but without the great success of Dégas. There are no guarantees either way.

I agree with you about the Everett, although this work and others from this period always seem anachronistic to me. Without knowing its time period, I might guess it was from the 1960s when Bob Peak and others were making wonderful compositions with flat, bright colors.

chris bennett said...

Could he ever have reached those heights if he was still able to paint crisp, sharply detailed works?

I think it is the sense of time running short rather than the blunting of the faculties that is responsible for the final ascent. A good portion of one's time as an artist is spent keeping open to and watchful for ways of extending range or discovering means by which one can more efficiently or fluently realise their inner vision. And so we keep in sight of the ground, ready to stop and pick up anything that may be useful to us before flying on. With the sense that the last leg of the journey is in hand there is less point in stopping, we let go and allow what we have in the bag to carry us as high as it will.

chris bennett said...

That said, there is something in the idea that the inability to discern minutiae or even the small details means that the artist is by necessity concentrating less on the niceties of mimetic rendering and thereby more on the bigger elements of the composition and the overall structural expression.

kev ferrara said...

However, I think opening up those parameters and trying to shed our cultural limitations is the opposite of "selecting from binary options."

We walked that mostly barren land of 'anything goes' for many thousands of years until we finally built a mill by the one running stream we found, dug a mine into the one mountain full of ore, and erected rods to catch the lightning under that one wild cloud. In the context of infinite possibility, beauty, quality, and meaning all derive from rigorous limitation placed upon the endlessly possible; it was found, in other words, that only small tracts of land are tillable. Most elsewhere there is weeds, rubble and dung. Or to be more precise: The amount of nonsensical quasi-linguistic structures available is infinite compared to the highly constrained set of sensical (actually) linguistic structures. Nobody is looking for the luminiferous ether or the humors anymore.

Which is why, without limits, there is almost nothing but limits. Ask anybody who lives without limits; it is a short-lived idyll. Mostly what happens to people who wander off into the woods to live wild is that get full of briars, get lost (because a home must be built) and hungry (because almost nothing is food), and then are dined upon by predators (drug pushers, say.)

And what separates the taste and judgment of the old man in the nursing home from Everett's taste and judgment in designing your painting?

I keep trying to hammer this into you in different words and contexts and it never seems to take. Taste and judgment are responses to stimuli. Which anybody can do. Such are not creative, substantiating, physicalizing actions that produce and organize aesthetic forces that produce orchestrated meaning-inducing stimuli.

A curator (or DJ) is not an artist. Nor is the meaning of lazy and uninspired consumer the same as brilliant and industrious producer.

Subjectively, what a thing means to you is not the same as what it actually means objectively to the normal distribution of sensibilities.

kev ferrara said...

Ah, that wonderful, wonderful Everett, in full view without any cropping!

Testify!

kev ferrara said...

And can you say that Everett's painting has a more significant impact on the lives of the people who skimmed past it in a magazine than the impact of the old man's garden on his life and the lives of the others in his nursing home?

David,

The life of this Everett painting has just begun. Art persists. Many thousand have already seen it across the net. And as one commentator put it "You've really turned on a light!"

I agree with you about the Everett, although this work and others from this period always seem anachronistic to me.

Check your Russell Conjugation. I think you meant "innovative," "ahead of its time" or it "holds primacy in terms of this type of work which later found popularity in a shallower form in the 1960s."

chris bennett said...

Testify!

I can see the frame...

Tom said...

David wrote
"I note you used the past tense, "what has been seen" instead of "conceive what one [currently] sees." Is your point that the conceiving can go on and on, after the seeing is through? As the saying goes, that's what enables us to have roses in winter."

What I am saying is the artist has to conceive how he will portray what he has seen. He has to maintain a simple idea that will allow him to convey and express the emotion or feeling that the "seen" has awakened in him. It could be a color idea, which has to be reducible to a color scheme. A light and dark arrangement that has to be organized into a value pattern. But the hardest thing to conceive is a form idea which everything else rests upon. The form idea is what I was really thinking of when I wrote my comment. How will one draw and arrange the subject. Because there is a idea the artist wants to express, the idea has to take precedence over the "seen" or all of the other multitudinous ideas the "seen," presents to us. This idea, which is the driving force of the picture, can not be forgotten as the artist considers his subject and that is why I used the past tense in my sentence.

Monet also expressed the same idea as Michelangelo, " No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition"

PS, I posted this on you pervious post. It seemed relevant and I thought you would get a kick out of it!

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/cfco0o/newest_edition_of_der_spiegel_on_boris_johnson/

David Apatoff said...

Kev Ferrara-- A+ for the poetry, Kev. In fact, it's so darn good it seems almost ungrateful to mention its inaccuracies.

Obviously, lightning rods don't "catch" lightning, they merely deflect it from the spot where the wild pagan gods aimed it, in order to protect the little constructions of civilization, and disperse it harmlessly into the ground. Sans disruptive violence, sans blinding light, sans sacred fire and yes, sans random chance and unpredictability.

And obviously, we did not "build a mill by the one running stream we found, dig a mine into the one mountain full of ore." We are not artistic nomads who finally discovered the one right spot and settled down. There is no one truth; art's questions may be permanent but its answers have always been temporary.

And as a matter of process, it makes no sense to say, "Subjectively, what a thing means to you is not the same as what it actually means objectively to the normal distribution of sensibilities." The normal distribution of sensibilities doesn't equate to "actual" objectivity. If we ever adopt that standard, you and I are both in trouble because in today's culture we both appear to be in the distinct minority (i.e. "abnormal").

Does all this mean we must sacrifice the poetry of your lovely metaphor? Must we surrender all that beautiful absolutism and confidence just for the unsatisfying rewards of truth? I've previously tried to offer you compensating poetry on behalf of my view-- from Nietzsche ("One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star" ) and Tagore ("The freedom of the storm and the bondage of the roots join hands in the dance of swaying branches") yet you seem unimpressed. In the words of someone I respect, "I keep trying to hammer this into you in different words and contexts and it never seems to take."

So let me woo you with another poem, this one by Sherman Alexie:

So lightning says to mud,
What would happen if I struck your blood?
And mud says, "Brother,
It would hurt,
And make me the mother
Of every living thing.
But, fire boy, you ain't lifting my grass skirt
Until you burn me a ring.

I agree with you about the importance of the ring, the "rigorous limitation placed upon the endlessly possible." But in my view, that hardly justifies your assertion that anything on the other side of the hill from your running stream and iron mine must be "that mostly barren land of 'anything goes'." The ratio of hits to misses shouldn't make us unreceptive to new possibilities.

Streams run dry. Mines tap out. And despite lasting "many thousands of years" even the dogma of high and low from the divine pymander of Hermes Trismegistus (thrice great) is eventually disproven by The Via Negativa.

There is plenty of foolishness generated by "people who wander off into the world," but in the long term art is renewed by people who keep an open mind to its possibilities.

kev ferrara said...

Obviously, lightning rods don't "catch" lightning

There's always a standpoint to criticize any position, any one, or any thing; one merely finds the stance or develops it. But, dear sir, you get no points for a literal critique of figurative language.

There is no one truth; art's questions may be permanent but its answers have always been temporary.

I'm speaking of meaningful linguistic structures built of suggestive graphic terms. Such has spanned the entire history and geography of the arts. If this aesthetic structure can "run out", then grammar itself can "run out."

Do you believe that grammar can run out?

I don't think so.

Or are you suggesting that there are meaningful structures to thought other than those already supposed?

No, I think you aren't interested in that tack either.

I think what you really want to assert is that meaninglessness is of equal value to the meaningful. And your method of doing so is to point out that you quite enjoy looking at (so called) meaningless creations, and since you enjoy them it enriches your life in a way that can be seen as "meaningful." Therefore the meaningless can be meaningful. Which means anything goes. Which, of course, just conflates structural meaning and the personally "meaningful" in order to sidestep a key technical point at the core of aesthetic phenomena.

Richard said...

Artistic meaning and its discovery only appears random with a very short timescale.

Linguistic meaning in art recurs like any other natural patterns, a sort of “evolutionary recurrence” [technical term]. Call it memetic recurrence, perhaps, in this case.

Sure, the process of biological discovery may be random, but you’ll usually land on slithering, legs, wings, or fins for locomotion.

The tribal hunters will all in due time discover bows and arrows, despite that there’s no Platonic solids.

When math is done, having negative numbers works wonders. Ask the 5+ civilizations that independently invented them.

The world evolves towards these same patterns over and over, separated by continents or species.

The functional patterns in the world emerge on their own, quite in spite of randomness.

A bow and arrow to hunt, or using legs to walk, may not be exactly objective per se but they’re as close as you can get for laws of this universe.

Art works just the same. A thorough analysis of art history would show an “aesthetic recurrence” happening too. Even the artworks of the Neanderthals show this aesthetic recurrence in action.

kev ferrara said...

Richard,

Generally I agree with all that.

However, this: While insightfulness is an emergent ability that seems to stem from our uniquely evolved nature -- and abstraction and symbolization also seem to be something humans do naturally -- to actually symbolize an argument requires the successful back-engineering of an insight through all its component and necessary lines of proof. Leading to the reification of all the involved abstract thought in communicable concrete form. (Thus allowing other human beings to share in one person's insight, which spreads brilliance, knowledge, understanding, beauty, and truth. Thus, in a sense, love.)

This crafting of thought, in my opinion, is a willful, dedicated pursuit rather than something that just happens. Thus it is an achievement of mankind more than something that naturally emerges from our existence.

In my view, the back-engineering of insight and crafting it into a symbolized thought process is the greatest, most foundational achievement of mankind, the very thing that has raised us out of the muck.

And the people who want to equate that with splashing pigment, speaking in tongues, found objects, random constructions, mere politics or rhetoric, or gibberish juxtapositions aren't as "on the side of the angels" as they suppose.

Richard said...

If meaning itself can’t be evolved ( memetically, in an extended Dawkinsian sense) from meaningless sounds towards meaningful ones (by way of inter generational selection for increasingly accurate predictions of the utterers next actions), how do you go from a speechless species to a communicative one?


It would appear that the hard dichotomy requires the creation of a communicative substance ex nihio to get to symbols if you don’t allow them to evolve from random grunts by way of memetic selection.

Richard said...

I wonder if maybe this dichotomy is because you’ve taken the Piercian 3 forms of signification literally.

Let me explain. I would argue that materially there is only one form of signification in the universe, Index.

When a lightening bug lights up, you could view its light as a proto abstract symbol for mating, but a lighted up bug is also just index for a horny bug.

A crying baby is index for an upset baby.

A stranger with an empty outreached hand is index for a friendly stranger.

And a human uttering a sentence is index for a human who says/feels/is what that sound implies.

The use and comprehension of Communicative index evolves — we get better at predicting what an utterance correlates to based on what we saw in relation to past utterances. The universe doesn’t require such a thing as abstraction.

A child doesn’t learn language then, they learn to ape complex strings of sounds that help a listener predict what that child’s internal life is like. The person communicating makes themselves and the things they touch into index for their meaning.

Symbol itself then is just a very high density Index, and we should expect Index to evolve towards meaning even if it comes in the form of “speaking in tongues” so long as those tongues become predictive for the utterera state of mind.

Richard said...

Put perhaps more simply: what appears as abstract language starts as a mere speaking in tongues, which if it goes on long enough can become perceptibly correlative with the utterers state of mind, so that the listener will find interpretations of those sounds predictive (and thus meaningful).

kev ferrara said...

Richard,

Predictive/stochastic/machine learning/memetic language development and acquisition is mostly a separate matter from insight and the complex and rigorous thought that achieves it, and the dedicated craft required of its symbolization. Particularly in the visual arts, where iconicity is the dominant quality of signification.

In fact, iconicity (and onomatopoeia) rebuts your speculation about signs resembling thoughts and external referents only by rote assignation/stochastic apprehension. Which is why it was hasty of you to dispense with Peirce’s triad of sign types in your rush to assert the idea that all signification is indexical.

Kant already told us that all experienced phenomena is, at best, indexical. (We get the light bouncing off a thing, not the thing in itself, so we presume the thing itself exists.) The semiotic domain that Peirce (who was one of the great scholars as well as great critics of Kant) is teasing out is post-perception. So the fact that all of experience consists of, at best, indexes, pace Kant, is a separate issue.

Peirce also realized that all the sign types could be mixed. That is, any particular sign could be simultaneously a symbol, an icon, and an index. But that doesn’t preclude that each type may exist in a pure state.

For instance a ‘pure symbol’ would not have iconicity; the number sign # is a good example. Most words are like this; pure symbols that only attach to its referent and thought by declaration/assignation/code. (Even if this code is learned through indexical testing, the code itself would still have been set in meaning, in general, by prior cultural forces.) To say all such symbols are “indexes of the thought referenced by the symbols” shows you never actually looked up Peirce’s definitions of index and symbol, which distinguishes them. Or you just read in a superficial way, and two minutes into the reading your ADD kicked in and told you to think, “Ah, I understand all this. This guy ain’t all that smart!” And off you went somewhere else, cocksure in your erudition.

An index can be pure in a particular semiotic relation too; neither iconic nor symbolic. For instance, the smell of smoke is not something human beings codified as a code. And obviously the smell of smoke does not look like the look of fire. Yet the smell of smoke can directly bring to mind the look of fire.

Anyway, Peirce was working away at a much larger and deeper formulation of signs for much of the latter half of his life. Hopefully once his papers have been fully organized and published, we will all have a much better sense of his deeper understanding.

kev ferrara said...

2/2

Back to my point; That symbolization of complex back-engineered epiphany/insight is an achievement, and not something that might be intuited or obvious or arrived at through random tinkering…

Ancient runic characters and cave drawings, I think, show the natural extent of our abilities to symbolize thought. Very rudimentary.

And I presume prehistoric humans had epiphanies all the time, great and small, which no doubt got them through their day. But we know more than enough about extant ancient just-so stories to presume that many epiphanies were nothing of the kind, and very few actual epiphanies were sensibly back-engineered and symbolized. It was and is the rare person or group that is worth listening to. Very few deserve the title; Author/ity.

Regarding linguistic teleology: English has, at its core, a beautifully reasoned structure and lexicon. It once seemed to me it had, from some peak moment that I could not pinpoint, been brutally degraded and kluged and overwhelmed with barnacles over time; by pop-sloppy colloquial usage, random neologisms, pastiched bits of other languages, and other afflictions. Standards certainly have degraded from a high point. But it also nags at me that perhaps a better way to think about it is that it is, like the world, always being built and always being torn down. Which tells against any teleological interpretation of language development.

Re: the meaning of gestures like an outstretched hand… applying Peirce’s pragmatic maxim gets you to quite a gaggle of meanings. One must consider, before being too glib, the many reflexive and intentional manipulations that we perform on each other through veils of niceties. What is in the hand that is not outstretched might better tell the truth of the meeting.