[On Painting] On Finding the Right Mark
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Duane
Oct 9, 2006, 12:11:03 PM10/9/06
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My Grandfather wrote me letters from time to time when I was younger. As he got older, his writing changed. It got more faint and delicate. Toward the end of his life it got shaky and was as fragile as a spider web. When I opened his letters I could discern how he was doing health-wise even before reading the words. The lines, apart from the words and sentences they served, revealed everything. Those lines were very powerful and meaningful to me. He could have simply drawn a straight line across a page and sent it to me and I would have been able to sense how he was doing.
For a representational painter, a paint mark lives a dual life: it both describes and expresses. On the one hand a mark directs a viewer to a thing, and on the other hand it directs a viewer to itself. When we make a mark representing part of an apple, for instance, the mark is serving to describe the color, shape, form etc of the apple,but it is also describing the painter’s response to the apple my recording the movement of his brush: it’s viscosity, it’s speed, it’s boldness or tentativeness etc. all get recorded in paint. The brush acts like a Richter scale of sorts, with visual and emotional vibrations being registered rather than the movement of the earth. James Elkins describes paint as being “liquid thought.”
Cezanne’s apples are wonderfully dense and tangible… if you dropped one it would crack a concrete floor. Even the air around them seems dense. They are solid and full not because of the usual visual tricks of polished chiaroscuro but rather because of the very nature of the marks themselves: each one looks as though it had been considered for a year before it was executed. None are flippant or simply clever. It is the very weight of the marks that gives the apples such a tangible weight:
Vermeer treated paint like liquid jewels (his ultramarine blue was literally made from lapis lazuli.) In every square inch of his paintings there is a reverence for the paint that manifests itself in the cathedral-like silence felt when standing in front of any of his work:
The process of finding the “right” mark-- a mark placed in the right place, in the right way, at the right time, is still a mystery to me. Sometimes it seems to happen by accident and other times it seems preordained. When I aim for it, I always miss it. If I’m too flippant, I miss it. If I try to repeat a past success, I miss it. When my Dad taught me to shoot a pistol I was told to breath out and gradually squeeze the trigger. If you’re doing it right, the sound of the gun should be a surprise. Anticipating that sound causes the hand and thus the gun to move slightly the moment before the round leaves the chamber. And you miss.
Annie Dillard wrote in her book The Writing Life:
“A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”
“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know…do you like sentences?”
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of paint.”
The above could be advice to an aspiring painter, “Do you like marks?” If your sole purpose for making marks is to cover the canvas and make a nice picture, then perhaps a house painter would be a better career. If, however, you like how the paint feels under your brush, how it sounds when it slides across the canvas, how it smells etc, then you are already a “joyful painter.”
We all have those moments when we find ourselves avoiding sections of a painting. We chose to paint something because of THIS, but in so doing we need to paint THAT too.A teacher of mine once said that if a painting looks overworked it needs more work. I think a painting looks overworked when a painter does not connect what the paint is doing to what the paint is representing. When this happens the painting is merely a copy of something, a bad facsimile of life. In any painting you can often see where the painter was enjoying the paint and also where he was merely covering canvas. Part of our job as painters is to find a way to savor (not pretend to savor) even those passages of our painting that we dread.
Predicting or even defining a “right” mark is probably impossible, at least in a way that could be very helpful to us at the easel. Every great painter I’ve had the privilege of watching paint, had a sense of play when at the easel. They are incredibly knowledgeable about the behavior of paint and color, but none of that knowledge seems to be written in stone. Every subject requires a slightly different way of handling the paint, and these terrific painters were not only open to those new possibilities, but seemed to welcome and enjoy them. They seemed to be looking for questions rather than answers.
A mark is a decision—a decision so complex that we can’t possibly be aware of all of the elements that go into making it. We can maybe predict its general shape; its general thickness, how it will catch the light etc, but we cannot predict its success or failure. We don’t really know anything until the mark is made. Making a mark, in the end, is not an intellectual exercise. All we can do is to try to have a “beginner’s mind” when we paint: “the mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the experts, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all possibilities.”—Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.
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Posted by Duane to On Painting at 10/09/2006 08:50:00 AM
For a representational painter, a paint mark lives a dual life: it both describes and expresses. On the one hand a mark directs a viewer to a thing, and on the other hand it directs a viewer to itself. When we make a mark representing part of an apple, for instance, the mark is serving to describe the color, shape, form etc of the apple,but it is also describing the painter’s response to the apple my recording the movement of his brush: it’s viscosity, it’s speed, it’s boldness or tentativeness etc. all get recorded in paint. The brush acts like a Richter scale of sorts, with visual and emotional vibrations being registered rather than the movement of the earth. James Elkins describes paint as being “liquid thought.”
Cezanne’s apples are wonderfully dense and tangible… if you dropped one it would crack a concrete floor. Even the air around them seems dense. They are solid and full not because of the usual visual tricks of polished chiaroscuro but rather because of the very nature of the marks themselves: each one looks as though it had been considered for a year before it was executed. None are flippant or simply clever. It is the very weight of the marks that gives the apples such a tangible weight:
Vermeer treated paint like liquid jewels (his ultramarine blue was literally made from lapis lazuli.) In every square inch of his paintings there is a reverence for the paint that manifests itself in the cathedral-like silence felt when standing in front of any of his work:
The process of finding the “right” mark-- a mark placed in the right place, in the right way, at the right time, is still a mystery to me. Sometimes it seems to happen by accident and other times it seems preordained. When I aim for it, I always miss it. If I’m too flippant, I miss it. If I try to repeat a past success, I miss it. When my Dad taught me to shoot a pistol I was told to breath out and gradually squeeze the trigger. If you’re doing it right, the sound of the gun should be a surprise. Anticipating that sound causes the hand and thus the gun to move slightly the moment before the round leaves the chamber. And you miss.
Annie Dillard wrote in her book The Writing Life:
“A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”
“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know…do you like sentences?”
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of paint.”
The above could be advice to an aspiring painter, “Do you like marks?” If your sole purpose for making marks is to cover the canvas and make a nice picture, then perhaps a house painter would be a better career. If, however, you like how the paint feels under your brush, how it sounds when it slides across the canvas, how it smells etc, then you are already a “joyful painter.”
We all have those moments when we find ourselves avoiding sections of a painting. We chose to paint something because of THIS, but in so doing we need to paint THAT too.A teacher of mine once said that if a painting looks overworked it needs more work. I think a painting looks overworked when a painter does not connect what the paint is doing to what the paint is representing. When this happens the painting is merely a copy of something, a bad facsimile of life. In any painting you can often see where the painter was enjoying the paint and also where he was merely covering canvas. Part of our job as painters is to find a way to savor (not pretend to savor) even those passages of our painting that we dread.
Predicting or even defining a “right” mark is probably impossible, at least in a way that could be very helpful to us at the easel. Every great painter I’ve had the privilege of watching paint, had a sense of play when at the easel. They are incredibly knowledgeable about the behavior of paint and color, but none of that knowledge seems to be written in stone. Every subject requires a slightly different way of handling the paint, and these terrific painters were not only open to those new possibilities, but seemed to welcome and enjoy them. They seemed to be looking for questions rather than answers.
A mark is a decision—a decision so complex that we can’t possibly be aware of all of the elements that go into making it. We can maybe predict its general shape; its general thickness, how it will catch the light etc, but we cannot predict its success or failure. We don’t really know anything until the mark is made. Making a mark, in the end, is not an intellectual exercise. All we can do is to try to have a “beginner’s mind” when we paint: “the mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the experts, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all possibilities.”—Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.
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Posted by Duane to On Painting at 10/09/2006 08:50:00 AM
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