Autumnal Fantasy, 1916-1944, by Charles E. Burchfield

Charles E. Burchfield’s landscape paintings swarm with spirits.  His wild and hairy visions of the alive world are currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in an exhibit titled Heat Waves in a Swamp.  I knew a little of Burchfield before, mostly through reproductions, but seeing this show, brilliantly curated by sculptor Robert Gober, was like discovering a cache of glittering gems hidden in an old tree stump.

Burchfield grew up in Salem, Ohio and lived most of his life in Gardenville, a rural suburb of Buffalo, New York.  His talent was recognized at a fairly early age, but he had no interest in living in a big city or being part of a movement or scene.  He painted to please himself, and sold paintings to support his wife and five kids.  His life story and his words reveal him as an unassuming and unpretentious man, but so thoroughly an artist that he couldn’t stop thinking as an artist for a moment.  One room of the Whitney show is filled with hundreds of abstract biomorphic doodles that he made while talking on the phone or playing card games with his wife.  Besides doodling he also kept journals throughout his life.  A particular pleasure of the exhibit is that nearly every painting is accompanied by Burchfield’s own eloquent description or reminiscence of its creation.

Charles E. Burchfield painting in his studio in Gardenville, N.Y., 1966, photo by William Doran, Burchfield Penney Art Center

While he did oil paintings and some mixed media, the bulk of Burchfield’s work is done in the medium of “dry brush” watercolor and gouache.  Traditional watercolor technique involves using thin washes of color on absorbent wet paper, and often tries for luminous, saturated colors and a loose, spontaneous style.  Burchfield’s technique is quite different, heavily worked by watercolorist standards, and his colors are often subtle and earthy.  His work achieves a feeling of light not by a light touch, but by a fiery intensity of movement.

His work divides neatly into three periods: the first begins in his breakthrough year of 1917, when he was in his mid-20′s.  He devised a system of visual motifs that embodied different moods and energies, called “conventions for abstract thoughts“.  These forms remind me of the “thought forms” described by Theosophists Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater in a 1901 book as shapes of thoughts visualized through clairvoyant synesthesia, though I do not know whether Burchfield was influenced by Theosophical ideas.  In painting from nature Burchfield saw manifestations of these abstractions, and his paintings of this period seem to depict organic forms through drawn lines whose movement expresses their underlying forces.  Those forces sometimes seem dark, ominous, prickly, overwhelming, or explosive, but always beautiful.  The chaos that is there is fertile and creative.

The Insect Chorus, 1917, by Charles E. Burchfield

Burchfield’s description of the image above reads, “It is late Sunday afternoon in August.  A child stands alone in the garden listening to the metallic sounds of insects.  They are all his world, so, to his mind, all things become saturated with their presence – Crickets lurk in the depths of the grass, the shadows of the trees conceal fantastic creatures, and the boy looks with fear at the black interior of the arbor, not knowing what terrible thing might be there.”

In his middle period Burchfield turned to a kind of American regionalism or social realism, often depicting industrial scenes or working-class settings.  The paintings of this period have a great sense of light and space.  The example below has a deep perspective reminiscent of Breughel, with a whole town visible in the far distance.

End of the Day, 1938, by Charles E. Burchfield

Burchfield’s description:  “At the end of a day of hard labor the workmen plod wearily uphill in the eerie twilight of winter, and it seems to the superficial eye that they have little to come home to in those stark, unpainted houses, but, like the houses, they persist and will not give in; and so they attain a rugged dignity that compels our admiration.”

Sun and Rocks, 1918-1950, by Charles E. Burchfield

Burchfield’s late period begins in 1943, when he was fifty.  He had spent decades developing his craft, but felt that his work was “rather prosaic” compared with his youthful, magical approach.  He went back to early works that were not quite successful, but that had the seeds of great ideas he now had the maturity to accomplish.  He attached extra paper around these early paintings, extending them into bold compositions in monumental scale.  The late period expansions were as much as five or six times larger than the early paintings that form their cores.

While many of the middle-period works in the show are oil paintings on loan from major museums, all the late work is watercolor on paper, which can’t be kept on permanent display due to watercolor’s vulnerability to fading, and most of them are from the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, where the artist’s personal archives reside.  I assume this means most of this late work was not sold in Burchfield’s lifetime.  Perhaps in his later years he had achieved enough recognition, his children were grown, and he felt the freedom to paint for himself, for the sheer joy he clearly felt in it.

The Four Seasons, 1949-1960, by Charles E. Burchfield

Though Burchfield was a protestant, his late work expresses a pure pagan spirituality, in which clouds and rain, trees and insects, are living beings in a web of sacred life.  In one painting, the space between trees, through which the bright distant landscape is seen, becomes a golden dancing figure.  Another seems to show, as curator Robert Gober says, “the point of view of a man lying in a field of dandelions on a sleepless night”.  The late works are overwhelming in their size, their magical light and space, and their thorny, buzzing detail.  The reproductions here don’t even begin to do them justice.

Heat Waves in a Swamp:  The Paintings of Charles Burchfield is curated by Robert Gober.  It was first exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, before moving to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, where it will remain on view until October 17, 2010.

All illustrations for this post were found on the web.  Clicking on the pictures links to their source pages, which are great places to find more images and information on Burchfield and Heat Waves in a Swamp.

Kazuo Ohno, photo by Guido Harari, date unknown

Kazuo Ohno, a seminal figure in the butoh dance movement and one of the great creative spirits of our time, passed away June 1, 2010, at the age of 103.

I saw Ohno perform in 1996 at the Japan Society in New York.  In an essay posted on my first website, I wrote, ” I will never forget seeing Kazuo Ohno dance at the age of 90, light as a feather, radiating love, a whole audience embraced in his heart.  Love was a palpable force in his performance.”  I have never seen another live artist who created such an aura.  I felt that the hearts of those sitting around me in the auditorium were opening up, and that a kind of love filled with both sadness and joy was circulating through the theater.

The soulful singer Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, whose album The Crying Light is dedicated to Ohno, said, “In performance I watched him cast a circle of light upon the stage, and step into that circle, and reveal the dreams and reveries of his heart. He seemed to dance in the eye of something mysterious and creative; with every gesture he embodied the child and the feminine divine.”

The arc of Ohno’s career was far from the norm.  Coming from a fisherman’s family in Japan’s far north, he attended an athletic college.  As a student he saw an electrifying performance by the dancer Antonia Mercé, known as “La Argentina“.  Deeply moved, Ohno knew he had found his muse, but he had at the time no dance training, and it would take him many years to be able to pay tribute to her with his own performance.  He was drafted into the army and spent nine years at the front.  He presented his first public dance performance at the age of 43.

In the 1950′s and 1960′s, Ohno was a major collaborator of avant-garde performance artist and choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata.  Hijikata’s work evolved from raw, radical provocation to a sophisticated choreographic vocabulary based not on external forms but on internal images and sensations.

In 1977, fifty years after the encounter with his muse, Ohno created the solo performance “Admiring La Argentina“, directed by Hijikata.  This dance moved audiences around the world, and suddenly in his seventies Ohno had a new career as a solo performer and a new status as a master of soul expression.

Japanese Poster for "Admiring La Argentina", 1977, photographer unknown

As a dancer, Ohno’s approach was to embody the essence of human feelings, not to act out a story or explore a concept.  When he was interviewed at the Japan Society in 1996, in connection with the performance I saw, he was asked what kind of response he hopes to get from the audience.  He said the thing he doesn’t like to hear from an audience member is that they “got it”.  “How could they ‘get it’?” he asked, “I don’t get it.”

There’s a description of a class taught by Ohno at his studio in the 1988 book Butoh:  Shades of Darkness, by Jean Viala and Nourit Masson-Sekine:  “[Ohno] doesn’t ‘teach’.  He nourishes; he guides; he provokes; he inspires. . . He assigns a subject for improvisation.  The ‘dead body’ is a theme he often suggests.  ‘What could be the life of that which is dead?  It is this impossibility which we must create.’  He explains that for his dance, we must not try to control the body, but to let the soul breathe life into the flesh.  He adds:  ‘Be free!  Let go!’  Being free is not doing what we want or what we think.  On the contrary, it means being liberated from thought and will.  It means allowing life to blossom within.” (p. 55)

Kazuo Ohno, photo by Ethan Hoffman, p. 46 from "Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul"

The 1987 photography book (in which the image above appears) Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul includes these extracts from Ohno’s writing, “The Dead Begin to Run”:  “Superimposed on the story of the cosmos, man’s story unfolds.  Within this cosmological superimposition emerges the path that leads from birth through maturity to death.  The Butoh costume is like throwing the cosmos onto one’s shoulders.  And for Butoh, while the costume covers the body, it is the body that is the costume of the soul.

“A fetus walked along a snow-covered path.  It cleared a path by spreading its clothes upon the snow after removing them one by one as in a secret cosmic ceremony.  Then it peeled off its skin and laid that upon the path.  A whirlwind of snow surrounded it, but the fetus continued, wrapped in this whirlwind.  The white bones danced, enveloped by an immaculate cloak.  This dance of the fetus, which moved along as if carried by the whirlwind of snow, seemed to be transparent.

“In life there is, without a doubt, something beyond the brashness of youth which bursts like summer light.  There is something between life and death.  This part of ourselves is like the wreck of an abandoned car; if we fix it, it could start up again.” (p. 36)

Kazuo Ohno in "The Dead Sea", photo by Nourit Masson-Sekine, 1985. “The dead start running…” p. 51 from "Butoh: Shades of Darkness"

Perhaps Ohno had to wait for the ravages of age before his body could express this transcendence.  I see many performances by young dancers with powerful, trained bodies.  But to see Ohno’s small, frail and aged body move was to see divine grace manifesting in the only way it can, through mortal, vulnerable, transient living matter.

From a young age, Ohno had been devoted to the Christian faith.  While his beliefs and their part in his art are barely discussed in any writing I have read by or about Ohno, I see in his work an expression of the Christian theme of divine cosmic spirit entering into bodily form to experience passion, love, sacrifice, suffering and death.  This is not just the story of Jesus, as Ohno shows us, but the story of all embodied creatures.  And this embodiment is not, as some would have it, the debasement of the spirit, but its exaltation.

The video above, showing Ohno improvising in his studio, is dated 2000, but I don’t know the source.  If anyone can identify what this is from, please let me know so I can credit it properly.  The images used in this post were all found on the web, and clicking on the pictures links back to their sources.  Where the scans I found on the web match illustrations in books I own, I have also noted where they appear in those printed sources in the captions.

Poster for “We See Differently” exhibit at CUNY Lehman

If you’ve attended an open life drawing session, not a class where an instructor is steering everyone down a similar path but a practice session for artists of all levels, you’ve probably had the experience of walking around the room on the breaks and noticing how very differently different artists are responding to the same subject.  Everyone is seeing basically the same thing, but one will have bold hard slashing lines and another gentle clouds of color, in one the model will appear serene while in another he looks angry, one will look like a study of classical sculpture and another like an acid hallucination.  It’s a dramatic demonstration of the power of representational art to reveal not just the subject, but the subjectivity of the artist.

Artist Daniel Galas, currently in a graduate program at CUNY’s Lehman College in the Bronx, has curated an exhibit based on that idea.  He organized a free life drawing session, two days with the same model in the same pose, and invited a variety of artists to come to the session and submit their results for a show.  The participants include Lehman art students and artists Daniel met at Spring Studio in Manhattan – the latter category includes me.

The model, Tedra, took a classic angular seated pose, with lighting from both sides and an Indian batik cloth as a backdrop.  Here’s my first of four sketches from the session:

"We See Differently" #1, 2010, drawing by Fred Hatt

In the following example, Lenward Snead captured Tedra’s strong face in profile:

"We See Differently", 2010, drawing by Lenward Snead

Ray Rosario focused on the angular structure of the arms and shoulders and let the face merge into a cloud of light that defines an inky shadow around the body:

"We See Differently", 2010, by Ray Rosario

I got to know Kimchi Kim back in the 1990′s, when she was a regular at my movement drawing sessions.  She’s a specialist in loose and lively gestural figures.  Kim made multiple studies of the model’s feet, curving in opposite directions like the fishlike forms in the Taegeuk or yin-yang diagram.  Kimchi Kim has a solo show opening this month at Spring Studio.

"We See Differently", 2010, by Kimchi Kim

James Horner is an artist and writes about art for the examiner website and his own blog.  I believe the linear shapes in his abstract painting are derived from the model’s pose, but he certainly didn’t feel constrained to restrict himself to a physical depiction!  Nonetheless, the colors and forms here make me feel happy.

"We See Differently", 2010, by James Horner

Daniel Galas, the organizer of the session and its exhibit, was an abstract painter doing cathartic expressions of inner states until he began to feel the need for an external focus in his work, which led him to take up the classic themes of landscape and portrait.  His portraits all feature a certain controlled distortion, but powerfully capture the individuality of his sitters.  They also show a fascination with the textural specifics of pores and blemishes.  Daniel cites El Greco as an inspiration.  To me, his work also evokes the cockeyed psychological realism of Alice Neel.  Here is Daniel’s very large-scale charcoal portrait of Tedra:

"We See Differently", 2010, by Daniel Galas

I did a big face drawing too.  It’s interesting to compare these two larger-than-life heads.  To my eye, Daniel’s head of Tedra has the stony grandeur of an Easter Island moai, whereas mine has a much softer, maybe sad quality.  Notice the difference in the size of the eyes relative to the head.

"We See Differently" #2, 2010, by Fred Hatt

These and many other visions from the same life drawing session will be on view in “We See Differently” in the basement gallery of the Fine Arts Building at CUNY Lehman, 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West in the Bronx.  The opening reception is on Thursday, May 13, 2010, at 5 pm, and the show will remain on view through the Summer.

Randolph Rogers, Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii, 1859, photo #2 by Fred Hatt

Sculpture practice involves working in the round.  A traditional figurative sculpture studio has rotating platforms for the work and for the model, so both can be observed from all angles.  A sculptor must also consider the work from an engineering standpoint, analyzing weight distribution, compression, tension, torque and shear, especially when the work is large.  Looking at a figurative sculpture from different angles helps us understand the expressive qualities of a pose in three dimensions.  The human body is a dynamic structure, achieving stability through adaptive movement.  A sculptor gives the illusion of life by suggesting movement in a stable structure.

In this post I’ll look at two neoclassical works, both made in the middle of the 19th century, when the art of sculpture was still defined by the combination of technical excellence and emotional connection, before modernist innovation took the art in a thousand different directions.  Both of these pieces are based on literary sources.  Randolph Rogers’ Nydia illustrates a scene from Edward Bulwer-Lytton‘s best-selling 1834 historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii.  Carpeaux’ Ugolino is based on an episode from Dante’s Inferno.  Like Bulwer-Lytton’s turgid Victorian prose, this kind of artwork is completely out of fashion today, and from a modern perspective, both of these works are pure kitsch, but taken in their own context they’re beautiful and complex.  Both are on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I took these photographs.

Randolph Rogers, Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii, 1859, photo #3 by Fred Hatt

Randolph Rogers was an american sculptor based in Rome.  This particular work was extremely popular in its time, and Rogers’ atelier made many commissioned copies of it.  It depicts a scene in which the blind girl Nydia has been separated from her friends during the eruption of the volcano that buried the ancient city of Pompeii.  The face shows a great deal of emotion while remaining youthful and innocent.  The side view above shows the forward lean of the pose.  The center of gravity of the body is above the right foot, so this is a pose that a model could hold at least briefly without external support (unlike the leaping poses in some later sculptures also seen in the sculpture court of the American Wing of the Met such as MacMonnies’ Bacchante and Infant Faun or Frishmuth’s The Vine).  But it has a strong forward lunge, with the upper body curving forward even more, giving a sense of urgency.

Randolph Rogers, Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii, 1859, photo #4 by Fred Hatt

Much of the impression of movement is imparted by the swirling folds of Nydia’s dress.  Real fabric would not hold this form in a state of repose, so this makes the body appear to be in motion even though it is in a stable position.  The drapery creates a helical swirl around the body that makes Nydia appear to be turning towards the sound she hears in the distance.  The crossing of the arm to the ear and the drapery whipping around the walking stick reinforce this overall sense of twisting.

Randolph Rogers, Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii, 1859, photo #5 by Fred Hatt

Randolph Rogers, Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii, 1859, photo #1 by Fred Hatt

You might know Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux‘ famous group La Danse, which adorns the Paris Opera, a work whose exuberant orgiastic nudes caused scandal in their time.  His other famous work is Ugolino and His Sons, which imagines a story told in Dante’s Inferno.  Count Ugolino is imprisoned in a tower with his children and starving to death.  The sons beg the father to devour their bodies.  Even more than Nydia, this work exemplifies the 19th century style of marrying classical technique to emotionally extreme subject matter.  This can be partly attributed to the influence of the ancient Greek sculpture Laocoön and His Sons, with which Carpeaux’ piece bears many similarities.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Ugolino and His Sons, 1860, photo #1 by Fred Hatt

The pose of Ugolino is similar to Rodin’s iconic Thinker, a piece that embodies stillness and concentration.  Here, though, the pose is full of anguish and tension.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Ugolino and His Sons, 1860, photo #2 by Fred Hatt

The central figure of Ugolino is surrounded by four children.  Oddly, these figures all look to me like young adult male figures, varying in size but not proportion or development.  Even the youngest figure, lying at the left side of Ugolino’s feet, appears to be a boy’s head grafted onto a man’s torso.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Ugolino and His Sons, 1860, photo #3 by Fred Hatt

In the view above, note how the hands of the son wrapped around the father’s knee echo the form of Ugolino’s own large hands as he chews his fingers.  The hands and feet of the five figures, limp or tense, carry much of the emotional stress of the composition.  The toes gripping the toes, shown below, is particularly masterful, a gesture that creates an instinctive gripping within the viewer.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Ugolino and His Sons, 1860, photo #4 by Fred Hatt

Many sculptors have discovered the possibilities of enlarged, gnarled hands and feet to convey anguish.  Here it’s combined with a tormented facial expression.  Because the figure of Ugolino is larger than life size and elevated on a pedestal, his face is seen from a lower angle when approaching closer to the sculpture.  The expression is greatly intensified by viewing from below.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Ugolino and His Sons, 1860, photo #5 by Fred Hatt

Many compositions of this type, that have such a clear front and back, are displayed near a wall so it’s hard to see the back side.  At the Met, Ugolino is not against a wall, so one can get the very different view of the piece shown below.  From this side, spared the overbearing emotionalism, we can appreciate Carpeaux’ obsessive attention to anatomical detail and the way the differently sized figures are clustered.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Ugolino and His Sons, 1860, photo #6 by Fred Hatt

"10 Years of Figureworks" postcard, illustration: Arlene Morris, "Untitled", oil on wooden box, 16" x 16" x 4"

Friday, April 9, 2010 is the opening reception for an exhibit celebrating ten years of Figureworks, Brooklyn’s premiere gallery specializing in figurative art.  Figureworks hosts an open life drawing session on Saturday mornings, and I’ve been a regular at those sessions for years.  Gallery director Randall Harris has selected work by ten artists from his diverse stable for an exhibit to celebrate the anniversary.  I’ll have two color drawings in the show, and I’ll be there at the opening between 6 and 9 Friday evening.  Full info at this link.

“10 Years of Figureworks” is curated by Randall Harris.  It will be on view through June 6, 2010 at Figureworks, 168 North 6th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY.  The gallery is open Friday through Sunday from 1:00 to 6:00 pm.  Open life drawing session is Saturday morning 10:00 am to 1:00 pm.