The Zen of Watercolor
The brush is a better artist than you are. The water is a better artist than you are. Just introduce the colors to each other then go get a coke. They’ll form their own friendships and you can sit in the corner and eavesdrop.
Minimalism versus simplicity
“But I notice that the minimalist mood — wherever it appears — eventually kills all joy.”
I made this statement here and then spent some time defending it in an internal debate, because I like some aesthetics that are often called “minimalistic”. They seem, well, artistic. Traditional Japanese aesthetic is often called minimalist, for example, and I love the look of a tea room, with its natural materials and its discipline of excluding unnecessary implements.
Seems to me there is a nuance of a difference between the modern mood that wants to strip the physical world down to its skeleton, and the traditional love of simplicity. The first is a joyless cynicism: this mind has been betrayed by objects and people and wants as few of them as possible. The second contains a pleasure in the individual object, so much so that it wants to contemplate and savor a few, free from the distraction of clutter. The first — the “contemporary” mind — has no joy in any particular thing. The second – the “traditional” mind — finds great joy in the rough wooden bowl for the tea, and wants to really see the grain of the wood, and this vision is so deep and full it requires an empty room to contain.
“Minimalist” and “simple” seem to be perfectly appropriate terms for these two distinct and opposite moods. Though they seem similar at a superficial glance, the “minimalist” is the diseased cousin of the “simple”.
Form Follows Function?
One day I noticed that the ugliest buildings in town are at the art gallery, so I began pondering modern design. How could the people most aware of the Beautiful veer so forcefully into making things ugly? Since modernism is all about shifting blame to root causes, I wanted to be fair to the artist community by blaming a root cause. So I’ve decided that the poverty of modern plastic design is rooted in a failure of poetic vocabulary.
“Form follows function” seems to be a guiding epigram of the modern aesthetic. And this produces minimalism. It produces what we now call “contemporary style”. But no art can survive long in minimalism, since the most fundamental function is simple survival. Art is always an extraneous object from the point of view of mere survival; it is the very opposite of minimalism. So the post-modern artist, in order to overcome the inevitable ennui that comes attached to modernism in all disciplines, resorts to what some call “whimsy” — although, as I say the word, I want to restate it, since “whimsy” is a positive word, with an element of joy, and it is useful. But I notice that the minimalist mood — wherever it appears — eventually kills all joy. (more on Minimalism versus Simplicity)
So, what does the artist and critic mean by “whimsy”, really? They mean “random”. What the post-modern artist actually cultivates is randomnity of form. Yet, the true random event has, by definition, no designer, so this path logically ends either in abandoning art entirely or in suicide. Or spend your life designing forms that go against other forms — avoidance of pattern, anti-form. (I know, I know, the lack of insight is breathtaking, but I’m just reporting here.)
But this stance is not new; we’ve seen it somewhere before…let’s see…let’s see…ah, it is old as adolescence. The definition of oneself by adopting anything random that is new and is not what your elders did — to define yourself in contrast to others — is the adolescent pose. What a sad spectacle is this: high intelligence, such as God gave an artist, harnessed to the end of intentionally avoiding order or value. Unspeakable tragedy.
So that doesn’t work. It produces the ultimate absurdity: the ugly art gallery. What makes more sense? Well, in the real world, form and function are intertwined inseparably, of course, but we do need to express their relationship in a verb, or we have no guide whatsoever for formal (design) decisions. The problem is in the verb “follows”, which connotes passivity. It relegates “form” to a passive role, which is eventually always a death. The minute we choose the verb “follows” in the epigram, and let that relationship be the way we think about form and function, we start down a road to random form. Bad poetic vocabulary locks us in bad thought, and bad work.
Better: “Form REJOICES in function”. This gives both nouns something to do. Within the building this architect is drawing, real people work. Let the form rejoice in that work, not just accomodate it. If Form rejoices in the function it facilitates, then it will be something worthy of beholding in its own right. Art. And the artist — the architect’s job is to rejoice.
A poet would know that if the wrong word sneaks into the communal mind, it can kill for generations an entire discipline.
lines and colors
And this. Bookmark it, visit it every day.
Making a Mark
Another site that produces wonderful instructional content for those of us who try to eke out a few minutes a day to make art.
Roz Wound Up
There are lots of sketching blogs out there, but not many that regularly write helpful instruction. Here is one:
These people are the saints of the internet– they give of their own time and talent to put out helpful material. Thanks, Roz.
She is featured in Danny Gregory’s book: “An Illustrated Life…” , if I remember right.
See also James Gurney’s site, Gurney’s Journey — my blurb here.
We Know the Garden In the Act Of Drawing It
One proper object of our knowledge is the Creator; the other is The Garden. The World is the garden, seen from exile.
We can observe the world via Reason but we cannot know it. This detached observation — science — is the spectatorship of exile. It yields useful information, through which we master and improve the world.
All knowledge is participatory love. Our knowledge of God is through the agency of love, but is often called “mysticism” when it impinges the cognition. Our knowledge of The Garden is in the artistic act, which is simply an exercise of loving the warm light as it kisses the molecules. Knowledge is useful, but the knower, the lover, is indifferent to its usefulness.
So knowledge is interpenetration; it is cognition of the inner essences of created things. Michelangelo saw the inner essence of the stone when he released the angel from the prison of extraneous marble.
So, art is a mode of friendship.
Watercolor: Belle and her babies
Watercolor: Belle and her babies
Originally uploaded by Timothyone
The black lab pup at the lower left is our new addition. Her name is Daisy and she is 7 weeks old.
Flannery O’Connor: “…stifled with all deliberate speed…”
“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. …Now in every writing class you find people who care nothing for writing, because they think they are already writers by virtue of some experience they’ve had….I believe myself that these people should be stifled with all deliberate speed. “
Flannery O’Connor: The Nature and Aim of Fiction
