Fans of Krazy Kat will be familiar with the "Enchanted Mesa," the mystical cliff in the remote desert. No human ever sees the top, but it is a place where magic occurs. For example, it is where babies come from.
Fans of the illustrator Harold Von Schmidt will be familiar with his own treatment of the Enchanted Mesa, an actual place in New Mexico:
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| from Von Schmidt's masterful illustrations for the book, Death Comes For The Archbishop (1927) |
It's my bias that when dealing with mystical subjects, line is a superior medium because it keeps a respectful distance from the magic. It is less literal than realistic painting, and less presumptuous in its response to awe. Drawing, by its nature, acknowledges its limitations, yet those limits leave more room for human supposition.
And as the Von Schmidt drawing demonstrates, all of this can be done without losing the power of the original subject.
60 comments:
https://www.nga.gov/artworks/166471-simplon-pass
I love those Von Schmidt ink westerns.
Line, or black ink work generally, creates a need for the viewer to make an imaginative push in the space it leaves. Even when the good stuff is directing straight to the representation intended (ie, images that aren't minimally suggested in a flimsy way, needing strength from imaginative wells from outside the image), maybe more so. This is heightened with certain subjects of a mysterious or sublime subject.
But as the Sargent shows, that's not the only way to get there.
Bill
(There aren't really any online versions to do it justice, but the Blue Rigi by Turner would be apropos too / B.)
Kev Ferrara-- Thanks for a perfect example of my point. That Sargent painting is a tribute to empiricism, perfectly capturing the mountain pass using light, shadow, and his stunning virtuosity of color and brushwork. However, there is not one square inch left for the ancient ghosts, mythological gods and other elements that can't be seen (and that are the subject of this post).
Sargent's legendary self assurance makes him the perfect cataphatic artist and the worst possible apophatic artist. I'd love to listen in on a conversation in which Herriman explained to Sargent the value of the unseen and unknowable that resides on the top of the enchanted mesa. Do you think Sargent would get it?
Bill-- while the cliff-like subject matter of the Blue Rigi is similar, I think a better analogy would be Turner's looser water colors where he isn't so literal but rather implies the grandeur and scale and meaning in shipwrecks and thunderstorms and fires.
One of my favorite Turner oil paintings, death on a pale horse, works because he knew where to stop and what to smear. Woe unto the artist who tries to paint an accurate picture of death. Even Sargent had the good sense not to go there, but to paint death covered with a sheet (in Death and Victory).
David, pictorially you seem to equate mystery with absence. But for example Millais' 'Chill October' painted as minutely as can be imagined is saturated with unseen, ineffable presence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chill_October#/media/File:John_Everett_Millais_-_Chill_October.JPG
I suggest that you have limited understanding of how 'the hidden' is embodied in picture making.
"the ancient ghosts, mythological gods and other elements that can't be seen (and that are the subject of this post)."
They're in the colours and the heights. And the forms of the rocks and so on, just as these phenomena were replete and pregnant with their immanence for the ancient minds who felt or conceived of their presence.
"As to the number of words which are indirectly descended from prehistorical religious feeling, it is not possible to count them. We can only say that the farther back language as a whole is traced, the more poetical and animated do its sources appear, until it seems at last to dissolve into a kind of mist of myth.
.... As far back as we can trace them, the Sanskrit word ‘dyaus’, the Greek ‘zeus’ (accusative ‘dia’), and the Teutonic ‘tiu’ were all used in contexts where we should use the word sky; but the same words were also used to mean God, the Supreme Being, the Father of all the other gods—Sanskrit ‘Dyaus pitar’, Greek ‘Zeus pater’, Illyrian ‘Deipaturos’, Latin ‘Juppiter’ (old form ‘Diespiter’). We can best understand what this means if we consider how the English word heaven and the French ‘ciel’ are still used for a similar double purpose, and how it was once not a double purpose at all. Indeed, there must still be English and French people for whom the spiritual ‘heaven’ is identical with the visible sky. But if we are to judge from language, we must assume that when our earliest ancestors looked up to the blue vault they felt that they saw not merely a place, whether heavenly or earthly, but the bodily vesture, as it were, of a living Being."
Like shinto, etc. Sargent may not have been an animist but he was certainly sensitive to the same concrete echoes.
Bill
Hmmm. Yes. It raises questions about how far the 'unseen' can be represented, like the Japanese ideas around the treatment of ghosts, and how those results appear (to us). The 'symbolic' kinds - grim reapers, even bedsheet ghosts, do seem to 'get across' when done well.
Bill
chris bennett-- when we talk about "absence" we're not merely talking about an object (such as the top of the mesa) being off camera. Working with line generally means an absence of color and half tone and even value; it means a distillation to binary form at the expense of the illusion of realism and literalism. In other words, it abandons some of the rules for what we see with our own eyes and replaces them with the rules for what we think with our own brains. For example, it opens up the parameters of a picture for mythological stork to fly down with new babies in a bundle and talk with word balloons coming out of his mouth.
I'm not sure I understand your point about the Millais painting. What are you suggesting is "hidden" in that painting? If you are saying that a realistic painting of a chilly October day, just like a photograph of a chilly October day, can inspire autumnal associations in us, I don't question that.
Bill wrote, "Yes. It raises questions about how far the unseen can be represented."
Agreed, and it is a slippery topic to write about as well. ( As the old saying goes, "if you can't say it, you can't whistle it either.") To get a sense of the "mystical" aspect of Herriman's mesa that i was trying to describe, I'd refer you to Herriman's famous admonition to the "shadows" on the other side of the veil. Can you see Sargent painting a subject like the following?
You have written truth, you friends of the "shadows", yet be not harsh with "Krazy."
He is but a shadow himself, caught in the web of this mortal skein.
We call him "Cat,"
We call him "Crazy"
Yet is he neither.
At some time he will ride away to you, people of the twilight, his password will be the echoes of a vesper bell, his coach, a zephyr from the west.
Forgive him, for you will understand him no better than we who linger on this side of the pale.
It's not that the bent, dying grasses, and the colours and so on 'inspire' the autumnal associations (the inner ineffable experience), nor even that the autumnal associations sprung from an ancestral or personal experience of such a scene, but that the 'ineffable' and the material elements such as are in the picture are single, united phenomena.
Bill
We're focusing on Herriman's drawing, but Von Schmidt's enchanted mesa also has a higher significance which you miss if you haven't read Cather's book. Cather reports that an old Indian guide claimed that in ancient times the Acoma Indian tribe once lived on top of the Mesa, but the stairway which had been the only access to it was broken off by a great storm many centuries ago, and its people had perished up there from hunger.
Let's see if I can reproduce enough here to give you a taste for
Cather's legend of the Enchanted Mesa:
"But how, the Bishop asked him, did men first think of living on top of naked rocks like these, hundreds of feet in the air, without soil or water?
Jacinto shrugged. "A man can do a whole lot when they hunt him day and night like an animal. Navajos on the north, Apaches on the south; the Acoma run up a rock to be safe."
All this plain, the Bishop gathered, had once been the scene of a periodic man-hunt; these Indians, born in fear and dying by violence for generations, had at last taken this leap away from the earth, and on that rock had found the hope of all suffering and tormented creatures-- safety. They came down to the plain to hunt and grow their crops, but there was always a place to go back to. If a band of Navajos was on the Acoma's trail, there was still one hope; if he could reach his rock-- Sanctuary!....The rock, when one came to think of it, was the utmost expression of human need... it was the highest comparison of love and friendship....the Hebrews of the Old Testament, always being carried captive into foreign lands-- their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their conquerors could not take from them."
Cather then goes on at length to explain the significance of the clouds overhanging the mesa. This is not an illustration assignment that calls for mere accuracy.
Bill wrote: "the 'ineffable' and the material elements such as are in the picture are single, united phenomena."
The argument about the pictures being a "single, united phenomena," seamlessly melding form, content, etc. together in a symbiotic way is a recurring theme in comments and I am romantic enough to want to believe in it, but the arguments against it are very stubborn, especially when we're dealing with illustrations or comics which are tied to words and symbols, or with animation or sequential art which by their nature must be processed in a linear way, one step at a time.
Narrative art that tells a story must be tracked by the brain as well as the eyes. Art that implies rather than shows must draw upon the intellect. Once that process begins, so does fragmentation. And I'd say a "chilly October" means something different to a viewer who is in the chilly October of his life than to a 10 year old boy who admires the tiny brush strokes of the grass.
There's mystery, too, though in accuracy. It's only 'mere' when the character and quality aren't deeply attended to & felt. The two approaches are complimentary.
Bill
when we talk about "absence" we're not merely talking about an object (such as the top of the mesa) being off camera
Neither was I. I was using the term in its broadest possible sense. Which is why I suggested that you have "a limited understanding of how 'the hidden' is embodied in picture making". Unfortunately you assumed I was talking about 'objects'. I guess this is the reason you did not understand my point about the Millais painting.
What are you suggesting is "hidden" in that painting? If you are saying that a realistic painting of a chilly October day, just like a photograph of a chilly October day, can inspire autumnal associations in us, I don't question that.
What is hidden in 'Chill October' is the unnamable essence that characterises the Autumn season implied by the the unfolding relations between the forms in that painting at all scales. The 'meaning between the lines' is the same as 'the meaning between the forms' - the relations between the notes maketh the song and not the notes themselves. Which has nothing to do with lack of notes or abundance of notes in the same way that mystery (that which is hidden) in a picture has nothing to do with the amount of recourse used (be it pen lines or oil paints).
The brain and eyes aren't separate when seeing. And they're not separate to the feeling that happens in concert with them in experience, either. We don't attach them piecemeal, sewing them together. We can go further and ask what is there of the experienced phenomena outside of it being experienced, too.
But yes, we can then take apart - 'fragmentation', reassemble with other elements, or project after the fact and so on.
I think the same applies to narrative art, but there are two or more strands of experience of this primary sort happening in tandem, interlacing and merging at points. E.g., a word will be a recapituation of the thing it tefers to in experience, 'memory'....a natrative is compoed of beads of these melding in processes (= stories, which are quality-wholes, as well as consider-able in their parts.)
The old man will have a 'real' story - the trajectory of life up to his state of eld. And he can see it parallelled in the autumn landscape, because they are the same process playing out along different lines (cousin to each other biologically and in spirit). Metaphors work because of kinship.
The boy has this achieved-understanding ahead of him.
But he will have a chord played on his soul by the qualities of the same landscape that communicates some of these elements, without the narrative maybe but with something of the piquancy he feels when he hears a minor chord.
Bill
"That Sargent painting is a tribute to empiricism"
No, David. It isn't. Or every painting of a mountain would share its aesthetic radiance; its immediate sensual effect. And none do. It is a unique masterpiece.
Millais' 'Chill October' linked above by Chris, is another wonderful wonderful example of the aesthetic arrest phenomena. If you don't get an immediate emotional-sensual effect from it, a melancholy sweeping feeling momentarily in your body of mysterious origin (Rumi called it a “freshness in the chest”) then all heaven can't help you understand what we are talking about.
I see from your later commentary above that you did not feel it. You just picked up some kind of literal associational content no different from a photo.
We keep hitting into the same issue, and we’re all flagging it up to you. As fascinating as it is frustrating. Time and again you reveal that you can't feel (thus even begin to parse) poetic paintings of any finesse or fineness in crafting.
Any painting that looks "naturalistic" you seem to think of as in some sense "photo-realistic." Because - it seems - you don't feel the hidden emotional signals suffusing it nor the subtle strange poetic distinctions between it and real or photographed life. And it doesn’t matter how poetic the painting actually is. You just don’t feel it. Your senses don’t pick it up.
Thus of course, you won’t have any idea of what we are talking about, or what to look for on your own to test what we say. There is no way you can find the cause of an effect you don’t feel in the first place.
When you huff about this fact and say “prove it” regarding our aesthetic claims - you ask the impossible. You clearly - and sadly - don’t have the capacity. And you seem to have a very difficult time believing this is the case. You are obviously very much more ready to believe that we are seeing ghosts (or pretentiously lying to puff ourselves up) than to accept that you have an inherent limitation with respect to art experience.
This all must directly relate to why you also don’t feel the deadness in photo-tracing. Why Booth and Wrightson, Bougereau and Waterhouse do nothing for you. The uncoded language of these works just isn’t something you grok. (Are you, by chance, also face blind?)
We know you feel cartoons and expressionist graphics, however. You read and appreciate lines and descriptors; the surface stuff you pick up fine. About everything else, you presumably rely on authoritative word, because you seem to need texts to tell you what to feel in art. As with your need to quote Cather in reference to the Von Schmidt drawing as necessary to an aesthetic appreciation of the image. (As if the words magically transform the drawing.)
When Bill says, “But he will have a chord played on his soul by the qualities of the same landscape that communicates some of these elements, without the narrative maybe but with something of the piquancy he feels when he hears a minor chord,” you should understand that he isn’t speaking metaphorically or in purple poetic tones. He is talking about an actual experience that we all - or at least many of us - actually have.
Bill-- I can see that my phrase, "mere accuracy" had a more derogatory tone than I intended. I meant "solely" accurate, in the sense that however beautifully a picture captured nature, it didn't also contain a narrative about the malevolence of the gods or the human confrontation with mortality or the tragedy that once took place on this spot or the nature of consciousness or the frailty of love.
Art certainly does not have to deal with such issues; plenty of masterpieces don't. And I've never suggested that one category is necessarily better than another. But plenty of important art does deal with such issues; it is akin to the symbolism in medieval religious art, or the content of political cartoons, or any of a dozen other art forms where philosophical or religious content isn't hermetically sealed into a visual image.
I've said in this post that it is "my bias" that art that wishes to take on such narratives is likely to be more successful using the freedom of line than with realistic painting, which carries so many other obligations.
Of course there are some realist artists who successfully wrestle with metaphysics in accurate painting, although I'd suggest Andrew Wyeth is a more persuasive example than Millais (and Wyeth's meanings are usually only unleashed by contrasting his titles with his images).
David, considering that the spareness of a drawing requires the brain to imaginatively 'fill in the blanks' as it were, when compared to a densely rendered 'realistic' oil painting, I can see the logic behind your argument. Unfortunately it's also too on the nose. If the sublime or mysterious 'thing' that the artist wants you to consider is only being suggested / gestured toward, but never shown (in a visual image) then it would make no difference by what means (in this case; degree of rendered realism) the artist gets you into that place.
Or to put it another way; whatever works, works.
, "mere accuracy" had a more derogatory tone than I intended. I meant "solely" accurate,'
Oh, yeah, and I saw and kept in mind your sentence:
'It's my bias that when dealing with mystical subjects, line is a superior medium because it keeps a respectful distance from the magic,'
There's an oscillation between the approaches, both have their pitfalls, detail work can fall into the filligree trap, and the suggestive can be very unsatisfying in places where more is called for. And his is all true not just in 'mystical subjects'.
'[the naturalistic picture] didn't also contain a narrative about the malevolence of the gods or the human confrontation with mortality or the tragedy that once took place on this spot or the nature of consciousness or the frailty of love.'
- I put the etymology-mythology quote in because of the suggestion that
"the value of the unseen and unknowable that resides on the top of the enchanted mesa" might not be comprehensible to Sargent.
The qualities in nature and the qualities of the 'gods' were to the ancients the same thing coming from the same source. And this remains true even if you don't believe in spectres on the Brocken. The numinosity of the sky was that of the sky god, the colour blue in its position and in its space still provokes this feeling unprompted, without the need for a gloss or mythology primer.
How Sargent portrayed it, the shapes of the rocks not 'representing' but *enacting* ascent provokes feelings similar to those prophets who climbed to meet the gods....or even 'just' the feelings of exhilaration & fear of a climber in the revelation of those heights.
Wyeth's titles maybe are like words to music, directing them into more particular or suggested instances of what they convey ?
Bill
Laurence John-- "whatever works, works" may be the truest thing anyone ever said about art, although like most tautologies it has limited utility: what happens when people can't agree on what works?
One of the most "spare" artists of the 20th century was Saul Steinberg, who was also one of the most intellectually ambitious. His drawings of people were little more than stick figures because he was essentially diagraming ideas.https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2006/04/one-lovely-drawing-part-three.html . The elements that obsessed Sargent would only get in the way.
'Of course there are some realist artists who successfully wrestle with metaphysics in accurate painting, although I'd suggest Andrew Wyeth is a more persuasive example than Millais (and Wyeth's meanings are usually only unleashed by contrasting his titles with his images).'
This still seems to be missing the point that the 'metaphysic' (it doesn't need to that lofty) doesn't 'inhere in' (in the sense of beyond, behind, or in a box), isn't symbolised by, but *is* the thing itself.**
Any added narrative, or 'key' such as captions or Andrew Wyeths titles, work like a kind of counterpoint to the visual - constellating with it in Bachian cat's-cradles, as do our own memory-experiences (- and even our physicality, awe at the heights or mystery of the mesa will involve and influence our breathing, like we might match our breathing to a singer or hold a breath at a high note) ; but they all are made of the same stuff, which you can call 'spirit', 'quality' or even just 'character'.
A kid hears a nocturne - "that sounds kinda sad", sees the Millais maybe feels a wistfulness he can't put into words.
Bill
(** - but maybe this can be said to be the case in wider, platonic senses/notions)
Bill wrote: "This still seems to be missing the point that the 'metaphysic' (it doesn't need to that lofty) doesn't 'inhere in' (in the sense of beyond, behind, or in a box), isn't symbolised by, but *is* the thing itself."
I think I understand that point, and agree that there are pictures where the "metaphysics" are the thing itself. I'd just respond that this isn't true of all art, and the cases where it is true aren't necessarily the greatest art.
I didn't intend the term "metaphysics" to elevate this discussion to a "lofty" plane. Aristotle invented the term (literally "after" physics or "beyond" physics) to refer to the sequence in which he was writing his books, and when he finished his book on the physical world, "after physics" was the book that came next, like an ancient Greek Dewey decimal system. So when we talk about the metaphysics of a picture, I only mean the part beyond the physical part, the meaning or emotion elicited or conjured or inspired by the rocks painted by Sargent.
But here's a question for you: the reactions to art that you're describing as being the thing itself-- the wistfulness, the sadness, the spirit-- aren't they also present in a photograph of the physical object, or even in the object itself? Can a gnarled ancient tree or a majestic cliff by itself contain these spirits (recognizing of course, that the natural sight doesn't reflect the skill and talent used by Sargent or Millais to recreate it, but that's not what we're talking about here.)
Yes ! - Everything. Lichen, weathering marks, even non-figurative patterns in ink or mud have it - dips, rises, repetition, rhythm... all contribute to 'character', sometimes chiming with something else in nature or human emotion, sometimes not.
I suppose physicalist neurology might ascribe it along 'vibration'-lines or similar, and try to break the effect of the gnarled tree down as a complex of these. But that's an outside-in approach that has to step outside the experience, and the experience is the thing. Which is why colours - the prime experience of a character and quality that can't be understood except in terms of experiencing it - are the handiest thing to begin with to describe it.
Shape, pattern and so on follow.
(I should say that 'spirits' as in some sort of entities isn't what I was getting at, just the 'component' of the fusion between the felt inner experience with a thing in the outer world, like a mysterious rock formation in the southwest or whatever. )
Bill
( 'I'd just respond that this isn't true of all art' - but all art will have it even if it is inadvertent, irrelevant to the intent and the artist is not purposefully using it. It's presence (in the man-made) isn't an indicator of the presence of 'art' of course. / B.)
"If the sublime or mysterious 'thing' that the artist wants you to consider is only being suggested / gestured toward, but never shown (in a visual image) then it would make no difference by what means"
Correct. Each and every quality one may bring to bear in a work of art may be used to express innumerable suggestions, aesthetic or poetic. The idea that "line is superior for mystical subjects" is a non-starter. (How the dark masses of the mesas in the exhibited works is equated with line, I don't quite understand.)
"Mystical subjects" is another issue that needs unpacking. Leaving aside the assumed shared meaning of "mystical"...a mesa is just a mesa. The subject, if it be mystical, is actually the treatment of the subject... a mystical treatment. And that treatment does not include signpost words that point and say, "See that mesa! It's a mystical mesa!"
"Yes ! - Everything."
Sorry, Bill. But you aren't understanding a crucial point. Nature is both disorganized as to its effects and the opposite of strange, which is to say, natural.
First its disorganization...
Art is exceedingly purified as to an intended found effect. This is something the landscapists talked about long ago. That nature was completely disorganized and it was the job of the landscapist to winnow away all but what produced the desired effect. This requires, obviously, far more than rendering skills. You don't get there from empiricism. To feel the mood of the landscape is itself a kind of imagination, or imaginative communion. Normal people cannot and do not drill down on the grand effect a landscape has on them. One must furthermore understand how to achieve and orchestrate the effect complex. It is all creation and imagination.
Second... its naturalness...
When you experience a great work of art, there is a tell-tale feeling of strangeness and beauty. There is an uncanny quality. And that uncanny quality, which has a magical weird effect on the mind, come from expressive distortion. It is not what you find in a photograph, at any scale.
'The subject, if it be mystical, is actually the treatment of the subject'.
Yes, but I'd add that a mesa and many other elevations in nature (amongst innumerable other phenomena) naturally evoke awe, which you could put in the same loose/general vein as being 'mystical', thus even non-mystical and bad portrayals of such features at least somewhat evoke those kind of feelings (on the basis of whatever degree of congruence with the natural object).
Bill
(I'd ''holy shit - a mesa!'' if I saw one, so can't get ''just a mesa'')
"Nature is both disorganized as to its effects and the opposite of strange, which is to say, natural."
I have to disagree, because of its symphonic effects, its comprehensibility, its correspondences with things in us.
Nearby, every year the field is a rich green and most of the flowers are - predominently or significantly - either purple or yellow. This pairing is not the only pattern seen but is certainly a very common one in different species across different ecological niches across northern europe.
These colours we're told are spectrum oppposites and maybe naturalists will guess to have settled into this as a means of differentiation for pollinators (I don't know what bees can see in this regard so that's just a by-the-by guess). But in any case, there's a visual tension there between the two to our eyes - and feeling. That is softened or mediated by the grass, in which the colours swim like a harmonising drone. It feels like a chord.
Van Gogh believed he could see these kinds of relationships.
'That nature was completely disorganized and it was the job of the landscapist to winnow away all but what produced the desired effect. This requires, obviously, far more than rendering skills. You don't get there from empiricism.'
- I don't disagree, but I'd put that down to the overwhelming of us by the pleroma. Like why the angels are said to need to hide their fullness from us. I think we filter, de-emphasise and emphasise, but don't invent. (We make in a modification of how nature makes, with deliberation and with an unconscious activity in part, too - as we're made of nature and our workings correspond to hers. It becomes conscious at that inner bell we feel when we know we've hit something right.)
Empiricism - 'nature-studies' - involves a submission to a manageable part. It's certainly beneficial, but, yes - looking at the really great ones it can be seen there needs to be more: a mastering agency to be able to compose - standing above & outside of this while still remaining 'within' - in order to create well.
As for photos, I was talking about 'quality' - the inner experience of an outer thing that suggests a communion of essence - as the prime unit of experience. Pattern and every kind of shape are kinds of these, colours too, and so on. So photos have them. So does the pile of crap on my shelves. But I'm not anti-photo, they're a light-footprint, with little overlap with the picture-making process (framing ? ... arrangement ?....). It's a different thing.
Strange and Natural, I think, are just two responding faces to those two faces of nature.
(Bill )
I agree there is a quasi-religious connotation to awe that could have an affinity with the quasi-religious connotation that "mystical" sometimes has.
To get this effect in a work of art is an act of expressive creativity and compositional knowledge. It doesn't automatically, especially in "bad" portrayals.
So yes, I agree that a Mesa in real life is awesome, in the strict sense of that word. But any given photo of it you can find among the family pix or on the net; or any given work of art with a mesa chucked into the distance; not so much.
"I have to disagree, because of its symphonic effects, its comprehensibility, its correspondences with things in us."
You aren't distinguishing between our direct experience of nature, and the artistic representation and expression of it.
Nature has ways and ways of making us beg for mercy, knocking us sideways, making us think we're hallucinating or drunk or in the presence of the ultimate. Nature is direct force; how we interpret it is up to us. Art, meanwhile, has only suggestive effects, aesthetic and poetic; a far more limited palette and one that speaks indirectly and with far less power.
Thus in art, every effort must be made to maximize effects, in size, clarity, and power - which includes intense purification of the material involved, layering, repetition, sensually expressed meaning, and so on. Art must be fairly bubbling and roiling with whatever ideas it tries to put across. Radioactive with them, one might say. In order to be effective and worth a viewer's attention.
"As for photos, I was talking about 'quality' - the inner experience of an outer thing that suggests a communion of essence - as the prime unit of experience. Pattern and every kind of shape are kinds of these, colours too, and so on. So photos have them."
The essentials of existence include the experience of time and volume and smell and taste and touch and sound. None of which are captured in photos. An instant of captured light rays from one single pinched direction only into a pinhole aperture is the very opposite of experience. One of the teachings of the Brandywine artists was that all five senses, plus the sixth sense of thought, needed to be brought into picture making. Or else the work would be experientially dead.
I was referring to the 'base' elements, the building blocks as it were, in response to the query does a gnarled tree have the 'spirit' that was in the Millais. So, how 'base' can you go, in your imagination, a dot, a line, a quiver, a ripple, a tone...then a 'colour' - once you can feel that the primary experience of these is a qualitative one, the question David was asking can be answered, and the gnarled tree be reached.
'You aren't distinguishing between our direct experience of nature, and the artistic representation and expression of it.'
- that's right, I wasn't because I see the latter as a it as a fractal of it.
Like an inverse prism (the artist) that receives the spectrum (not just colours but all the other qualities) and then casts out a limited but composed recreation of it. The difference between this and between an image from a camera obscura lies not just in the things you mention like 'time and volume and smell and taste and touch and sound', and not solely in the activity of deliberation and composing (which future machines *might* be able to simulate, [while always remaining a parody]) , but that the 'experiential' crux you highlight is ☆qualitative☆ . A soul experience of unison of inner and outer phenomena. We're more than a lens.
Which should explain my understanding of the 'ontology' of photographs in all this - if the pattern of shadow of the tree on the white wall outside my window just now is added, and that this shadow is a network of qualities too.
Bill
Herriman wasn't trying to be John frigging Singer Sargent. See those big graphic symbols on either side of the mesa? Why don't you pull your heads out of your butts.
JSL
Aren't you the frustrated donaldtrump-guy ?
Bill
I agree that line is not the sole, or even best, way to produce with a mystical mood.
But giving Sargent’s Simplon Pass as the counterpoint seems a considerable stretch. It’s a masterful painting, but mystical mood?
I think a better counter-example would have been Arthur Wesley Dow’s treatment of the Enchanted Mesa.
Not misty-mystical, maybe, but I thought it inadvertently matched the clear, shimmering mystery in greek myth, spirit-peopled nature, the bright 'divine' of mountain heights, and so on.
I like that one by Dow, thanks.
Bill
I was referring to the 'base' elements, the building blocks as it were, in response to the query does a gnarled tree have the 'spirit' that was in the Millais. So, how 'base' can you go, in your imagination, a dot, a line, a quiver, a ripple, a tone...then a 'colour' - once you can feel that the primary experience of these is a qualitative one, the question David was asking can be answered, and the gnarled tree be reached.
The light coming off a gnarled tree is not a representation of that tree. It is just the light coming off that tree toward the tiny aperture. Less of an angle than would meet the eyes.
That is a whole other thing from a suggestive, or even symbolic, representation of the same tree. The camera doesn't feel the texture of things, nor the spirit, nor does it feel around a thing haptically, it doesn't create poetic breakdowns of experience into the terms of art. Which are notes, inherently musical and scaled.
There may be kinship at the simple level of form and identity, but isolated. When looking at a tree in a work of art it is a mistake to think the tree itself is causing the effect and affect. Every artistic effect worth its salt goes beyond the object. Which is just why the treatment of the subject is the actual subject.
And also why we all have seen a thousand photographs of gnarled trees that are dead from the neck up. Taken by people who delusionally think the camera can capture their experience, or, for that matter, the "spirit" of anything. Spirit goes beyond the thing. Cameras capture facts without our sense of the beautiful attached.
It’s a masterful painting, but mystical mood?
What is a mystical mood exactly? I only have a vague sense.
I chose the Sargent because it has poetic magic to it that feels quasi-religious or mythical. And it shows a mesa-like protruding crag in the distance done from life. More a proof of concept that full color paintings have more than enough suggestive ammunition to accomplish whatever pictorial effect is imagined, mystical, magical, or majestic than a specifically "mystical" painting.
Your choice of Dow's Enchanted Mesa is also a good counter example.
"See those big graphic symbols on either side of the mesa?
The clouds? Or the rays of morning light?
Black blobs are fertile ground for the production of meaning.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Arnold_B%C3%B6cklin_-_Die_Toteninsel_I_%28Basel%2C_Kunstmuseum%29.jpg
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse.
The 'tree' discussion was about a real tree and not a photo, so we might be at cross purposes.
'When looking at a tree in a work of art it is a mistake to think the tree itself is causing the effect and affect. Every artistic effect worth its salt goes beyond the object. Which is just why the treatment of the subject is the actual subject.'
I'd put 'the treatment of the subject' as an extension of the effect of the original (= experience) on the artist.
Bill
"The 'tree' discussion was about a real tree and not a photo, so we might be at cross purposes."
Mr. Apatoff wrote: "the reactions to art that you're describing as being the thing itself-- the wistfulness, the sadness, the spirit-- aren't they also present in a photograph of the physical object, or even in the object itself?"
And you responded: "Yes ! - Everything."
So I assumed you were speaking of both the photo and the photographed in tandem.
Anyway, the photo of the tree is an extreme mechanical reduction of the direct experience of the tree. So there is enough similarity there to conjoin them for comparison to art.
"I'd put 'the treatment of the subject' as an extension of the effect of the original (= experience) on the artist."
Again, the treatment of the subject always goes beyond the object. A tree isn't a composition. To get the felt experience of the real gnarled tree in a picture of a gnarled tree, one cannot be literal. You can't render a tree as it is and get the feeling you've gotten from it. Suggestion simply doesn't work that way. That's why photo tracing is inert.
If there is an attempt to render into art some such experience of a real gnarled tree it must be a translation - edited, clarified, exaggerated, broadened, stylized, reimagined, etc - of the real effect into the suggestive terms of art and, as mentioned earlier, composed accordingly.
Often the artistic attempt is to get something like the experienced effect into a created environment that includes a gnarled tree. That is even more loosely a translation. In fact, it is all really about abstraction first and foremost. How to engineer the feeling in the abstract and then install it through expressive distortions and compositional strategies and structures.
The terms of art - its methods and modes - are not similar to real experience. Because reality is not composed in the abstract. The likeness of art to reality is an illusion of an illusion. Art is a parallel world to our own, an aesthetic fiction.
The 'everything' was to the 2nd sentence '...gnarled ancient tree.' Think there was a cliff in there too.
'You can't render a tree as it is and get the feeling you've gotten from it'
Of course you can. In part, of course. The 'is' is coeval with the experience, as that's all you (can ) know of it.
The notion of a 'literal' beyond this is a fantasy, and artistic attempts to be 'literal' usually don't end up looking like any kind of experience. Because the experiential bit is broken into something mechanical. You can copy a photo 'literally' - it's very easy, 2d transcription, like copying wallpaper, but all you get is a simulation of an emaciated echo.
I don't object to anything you say in the 2 paragraphs following, but it's all in your own particular idiom or translation into words of the process and where you see emphases.
I disagree about 'modes' in the last paragraph, for the reasons given.
Bill
"Of course you can. In part, of course. The 'is' is coeval with the experience, as that's all you (can ) know of it."
Again, you aren't differentiating the direct force of experience from the indirect suggestive force of art and its unique suggestive form terms, which create aesthetic and poetic effects when properly structured.
The experiential feeling you get from a gnarled tree has no ready, easy, or direct translation into color, value, line, form, rhythm, pattern, and composition. It is an entire other vocabulary, an alternate-yet-parallel world of felt experience.
This problem of translation is why there's art. That's why art is artful and requires imaginative talent and immeasurable sensitivity; the only solution to the photographic or literalist problem of blithely rendering multi-dimensional experience by freezing it in a mono-sensory form, as a million bad artist have tried to do; in ignorance of the utter dominance of suggestion as the defining property of their task.
Note: If you are in fact appreciating these points I'm making, and refuting them in some way, I am unable to tell from your prose explanations.
I disagree about 'modes' in the last paragraph, for the reasons given.
I seemed to have missed your argument for why and how reality's and art's modes are equivalent, Bill.
frustrated donaldtrump guy? no way! I'm disgusted by that corrupt pig and anyone who supports him. I'm just saying people here are obsessed with Pyle and Sargent and can't stop comparing everyone else to them. Krazy Kat is doing something completely different but you cretins can't see it.
JSL.
Yes, the trump-obsessive. 'Frustrated donaldtrump-guy'. Like a perpetual dirty-protest.
Bill
Well there are modes within modes, so we might be talking about something different. The 'photo' stuff came into it as David had mentioned both so responses dealt with both parallel - dashed off, I wasn't laying out anything grand - rather than in tandem.
x - the experience; y - the point you bring elements painting to which 'pings' like a tuning fork in the qualitative experience you receive from these elements when/if they are closely matched by those of x or your memory of it; z - the presumptive recurrence of this in a later viewer.*
Personally, I see the qualitative to be the 'ur-grund' of things, so I do actually equate these as being a single phenomenon.
If you're talking about modes as in 'how' this qualitative is achieved either through painting and through matter alternately, then yes, different modes in something close to how you describe the process, differences et c.
*Several of these certainly do
https://digital.nga.gov.au/archive/exhibition/constable/default.cfm%3Fmnuid=2.html
Bill
(< 'the pont you bring elements in the painting to which 'ping'...', etc)
"I'm just saying people here are obsessed with Pyle and Sargent and can't stop comparing everyone else to them. Krazy Kat is doing something completely different but you cretins can't see it."
If you were unaware, almost this entire thread is in reference to a provocative statement made in the OP.
"Personally, I see the qualitative to be the 'ur-ground' of things, so I do actually equate these as being a single phenomenon."
One needs to be careful here, Bill. Because ideas are suggested to the mind in art as illusions of movement contextually situated (as well as illusions of illusions of objects or beings). The "psychogenic closure" that causes us to apprehend whatever the suggestions on offer might be, have no actual substance in the picture itself; abstraction to the essence, or any purer state, has already slipped its bonds of physical substance. And all that remains to prompt us toward it is glimpses and hints; visual metonyms.
If what makes art art is suggestion - then the less actual quality we direct perceive on canvas in proportion to the sensual-meaning-illusions we feel in the mind, the more the art is being artful.
With respect to the "pinging" of a picture or pictorial elements with resonant experience, I think if you investigate this you will find that it is some abstraction of experience that is pinging. Memory is poetry. And the more a work of art pings experience through suggestive abstraction, the more it feels like poetic memory. Even if it is not, we can feel the truth of a poetically depicted environment or day, even if we have never experienced it.
And I agree there is tremendous - often very affecting - resonance there. And real mysteries.
'some abstraction of experience' v 'urgrund'.
Can we really say what is going on here ? The very *opposite* of abstraction, at least.
Here's Contable, (several decades before photography & making a laugh of its capacities) getting across realities both before him, in his memory in his studio, and two hundred years later, chiming with those later viewers' experience of wind in the upper boughs, the immense travail of the skies....the delicate and strong distinctness of the region...
It's no more 'in' the painting than in our neurons. But their are physical correspondences between the three very different things - the operations of the material world, the material painted representation, and the brain-sensual apparatus - that cause what we experience into being.
I rooted out some better res. versions of some of the sketches
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/landscape-study-figures-by-a-clump-of-trees
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/rainstorm-over-the-sea
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/cloud-study-horizon-of-trees
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/distant-view-of-the-grove-hampstead
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/flatford-mill-from-a-lock-on-the-stour
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O125166/study-of-clouds-above-a-watercolour-constable-john-ra/
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O125146/the-valley-farm-sketch-oil-constable-john-ra/
Bill
(< 'there'')
Sorry, missed the importance of this -
'If what makes art art is suggestion - then the less actual quality we direct perceive on canvas in proportion to the sensual-meaning-illusions we feel in the mind, the more the art is being',
which is very good.
And is a vital clause, or of equal importance, to the congruences referred to in my last paragraph.
And brings us full-circle back to David's assertion/legitimate bias, and the countering offerings.
Bill.
> “ the clear, shimmering mystery in greek myth, spirit-peopled nature, the bright 'divine'”
I was wondering if I was missing some thing when Kev shared it, and I definitely didn’t get that from it, so I’ll have to try again.
Don't stop til you do. It can't be me so you must be faulty.
Bill
"But their are physical correspondences between the three very different things - the operations of the material world, the material painted representation, and the brain-sensual apparatus - that cause what we experience into being."
The only thing that has any physical correspondence is a general abstract recognition of broad shapes, colors and textures composed to superficially resemble a given type of day and its components in their recognized places and depths. But even that seeming correspondence bears examination.
You think you've seen that type of tree, and maybe you have, but not that specific tree. And you aren't even seeing the tree, but a metonym of it. And what is the "It" I am referring to if the tree no longer exists, or never existed? There's no actual there there.
Same with the day. You are responding to abstractions of typologies, which are themselves abstract categories. Which you may not have even experienced.
When forms in life turn away from our eye, light ricochets off those forms in some differential way according to the angle of the turn toward our eyes. When the same object - the roundness of a tree trunk, say - is represented in art, there is no angle, there is no richochet of light any different than the plane that is represented as perpendicular to our eyes.
Which goes to the point that there are no "operations" in art in the sense of how real life or real physics operates. The skies don't have depth, the clouds are still, the trees are still, the birds aren't flying, the wind isn't blowing, the sun doesn't shine, the shade isn't colored by the sky. Nothing is alive, moving, physical, or real.
Again, art is a parallel fictional world. Where illusions caused by suggestions stand in for physics, feelings, experience, and thought. Art's meaningful suggestions correspond to real experience no more than a poem about a flower has a physical correspondence to a flower.
Though I realize in art, the seeming visual similitude is far more deceptive. Which is why the camera people, in total ignorance of suggestion, can think they are making art when they capture a similitude. They think the visual correspondence is the art because they're insensitive and uneducated. Meanwhile the similitude which they think is the art, is actually just the top-most layer of that which hides the art.
'...general abstract recognition of broad shapes, colors and textures...'
Yes, but those 'metonyms' can go a very, very long way in particularising the experiences at either end.
But part of the correspondences I meant are in how the eye sees, say, a swell of cloud, with the mind and feeling, the body feels a bouyant 'weightless weight, the lungs gently take in air, the spherical quality is felt inwardly in a way that corresponds to that stimulated by a blind, tactile caress; and a very, very subtle stroke is made with the brush, involving many bodily mechanics; and the result is utterly crude in comparison with the original, but all of those qualities will, or can, recur in the viewer. Yes, there are wells of prior experience that are stimulated, perhaps archetypes beyond experience are stirred, in the viewer, too. But it involves layers of relatedness at all levels for the 'illusion' to work. Like a conch held to an ear. Whorl to whorl.
Like that quote, whoever said it, we anthropomorphise mountains because we are part-petromorphic.
And the result of the illusion is a very distinct thing, inexplicable except in terms of itself, a felt quality.
All of which suggests these inner events, of myriad character, are part of the reality of the phenomenon.
Bill
”But it involves layers of relatedness at all levels for the 'illusion' to work.”
I don’t dispute the role of feeling in the fullness of all experience. But the basic illusions you are speaking about are aesthetic effects, which compound with each other to form the illusions of entities. When Dunn said, “Don’t paint a picture of a man, paint a man,” he could easily have been speaking for Corot’s sensibility with the landscape too. When you see a cloud in a painting that convinces you suggestively, it simply is. It exists in that parallel fictional world we call art. It is only a reference to our reality if you insist on that being the case post facto, not during the “aesthetic arrest” phase of the art experience, where you are spellbound and in a state of poetic belief.
Furthermore aesthetic emotions do not come from static representation. All artistic illusions are movement illusions or suggestions of change that are inbuilt with sensual meaning. The experience of a cloud in real life may come over you in waves of apprehension as you take in the standing object and its qualities, but the experience of a cloud in a work of art comes over you in illusory orchestrated waves that pass through the object on the way from and to the rest of the composition, having “said something” along the way.
Which is to say, in real life the phenomena causes your perception. While in art, your perception is directed to cause the phenomena... sequentially and in a sequence of other events as composed to provide you with a full aesthetic thought of some complexity. Which is why the way we feel a cloud in life is not the same as the way we feel one in a work of visual poetry.
I'm not going to have time to continue this discussion. So, hey, have a good one!
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