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About the Author
Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.
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Painting 2.0
I’ve left Painting’s Edge, the Idyllwild, Calif., summer painting workshop, where all that counts is painting, and returned to the real world (New York), where all that seems to count is money. Rich “New York-based” painters have gone off to the Hamptons or Tuscany for the summer. Poorer ones are dragging themselves to their hot and sticky studios at the end of their day jobs, with the occasional day off at Jones Beach.
From a distance, I can now reflect on what I experienced at Painting’s Edge. There I encountered, firsthand, the intense pressure that’s now on painters to justify why they are painters. When I was in art school in the late ’70s, I saw it begin, but the young painters today, unlike my generation of painters, find it almost impossible to locate truly inspiring contemporary artists for whom painting’s meaning can be derived from what a painting looks like. Instead, the few remaining artists who are sticking to painting who are making any name for themselves are making paintings that derive their meaning from the “ideas” behind their paintings. The result is that young artists feel compelled to offer long, complicated explanations about their intentions (many of which I dutifully listened to during the critiques I conducted with the painters who signed up for me).
It takes an extremely talented and mature artist to hold together a big theme, yet many of the young artists I encountered were desperately trying to make their paintings “reflect their interest” in some enormous idea or other. Some of them wanted to address themes so big that they really should first earn a Ph.D. in anthropology or Chinese before putting brush to canvas. Yet to my way of thinking, it’s hard enough to paint a still life, let alone paint something that carries multiple cultural references.
Actually, hot art schools such as Cal Arts put the screws to young painters to give up painting entirely. Why make that fuddy-duddy stuff when you can make video, sound, or installation art about all sorts of profound philosophical ideas, interesting intersections of images and sounds, or just plain goofy materials? And if the young painter still refuses to give up painting, even after being exposed to this truth, the pressure is relentless for him or her to come up with never-before-imagined surrealist images (the more random and violent the better), or paintings based on ideas and art from outside of Western culture, or paintings whose subject is the meaning of painting, or paintings that can be hung in some fancy way so that they are no longer paintings but rather a whole “piece.”
Ever since the invention of painting on canvas, paint itself has been part of the meaning of a painting. At Idyllwild, however, I learned the big truth. Although today’s painters are quick to assert that they love the “process” of their “practice,” they could easily switch to installation art in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.
And although it’s not uncommon for young painters to believe deeply in their images, rarely do they seem to believe that their images absolutely have to be done in paint. In living in an image-driven world, we’re strangely akin to people who lived in the Middle Ages. The big difference is that theirs was a deeply religious age, whereas ours is profoundly secular.
Painting’s Edge clarified for me that we live in a time when painting’s true sister is, once again, poetry — not because of any similarity in the mediums (there’s virtually none), but because both have been marginalized and are now loved by a relative few. (I’m talking about living, breathing, current painting and poetry. Francis Bacon pictures selling for zillions at auction, and T.S. Eliot still being prime dissertation fodder, doesn’t change this.) But as I said in my lecture to the Painting’s Edge residents, this is the thrust of history and to resist it is to be like Don Quixote jousting at windmills. Perhaps our real inspiration should come from the Irish monks of the 9th century. In working quietly and lovingly at preserving the heritage of a classical culture they didn’t necessarily fully understand, they helped save civilization. Every brushstroke, dear painters, can be an illumination.
Posted at 02:43:40 PM on July 8, 2008 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
The question is, how do we slow down that lamb’s tail?
— Zoe · Jul 8, 03:50 PM · #
“There I encountered, firsthand, the intense pressure that’s now on painters to justify why they are painters.”
I mean no offense, nor looking for unnecessary conflict, but I’ve found that questions that contain the word ‘justify’ are in fact an answer thinly disguised as a question. Further work on the matter is unfruitful. I would invite a consideration of unasking a question framed this way and see what shakes out.
“but the young painters today, unlike my generation of painters, find it almost impossible to locate truly inspiring contemporary artists for whom painting’s meaning can be derived from what a painting looks like.”
I find many painters and works inspiring. Perhaps my idea of contemporary is a bit more relaxed than most. I view the post-cave painting era as the epoch I belong. There seems an abundance of inspiration. Regardless, one can always lean on one’s self for these matters, or look to other human endeavors. The essence of inspiration can come from any source, and sources seem to be nearly boundless in multitude and variation, not scarce at all. Scarcity of mindset, will yield scarcity of inspiration.
To slow down the lambs tail, one must consider the ‘why’ as to it’s frequency. The tail may, or may not, be moving in full accord with its surroundings, within some sensible degree of where lambs usually find themselves maturing. Hence, slowing down the tail, and therefore, slowing down the lamb, may be fatal, if not liberating.
Perhaps, the best way to put forth what I’m getting at is through the very ancient koan regarding golf: play the course, not the opponent. Anyway, this is my approach and ‘justification’ to these types of matters.
Painting is double happiness…
— Pete · Jul 9, 03:47 PM · #
Aristotle said a long time ago that “there is no thinking without images.” That is a remarkable statement for a philosopher to make. It became nearly a slogan in the middle ages (Christian, Muslim, and Jewish) because it had become part of medical tradition as well. The last 400 years has witnessed a progressive alienation from this truth.
Behind it lies a very carefully calibrated understanding of the relationship (not just the difference) between reason and imagination. We don’t have such an understanding, not least because the last century and more of psychologists and philosophers have had serious doubts about whether there is any inner life to talk about. They are waiting for an fMRI scan to reveal to them the natures of reason and imagination. We have lost our sensibility for the very concepts—and that means that we understand neither reason nor imagination.
The hidden side of that quotation (not hidden to Aristotle, but to almost everyone who ever quoted it) is that there are no images without a medium. An idea that can be as easily embodied in one medium as in another is almost by definition an immature idea. Ideas have to work their way into and back out of a medium in order to become fully at home their.
Baudelaire had an exquisitely refined notion of this, perhaps even more as art critic than as poet. His essay “The Salon of 1859” has a lot to say about it. As Hans-Jost Frey writes (in Studies in Poetic Discourse), Baudelaire explains how there can be likenesses without originals. To put it another way, the work of art is its own idea. The upshot is that an idea that is copied into a medium without being nativized in it is not very much of an idea, and the resulting work not much in the way of art.
— dionysos · Jul 10, 07:06 AM · #
I feel a bit trepidatious commenting about this, seeing as how I am one absolutely awful painter and an even worse excuse for a poet, but it seems to me that Ms. Fendrich is definitely onto something with the comparison of painting and poetry. The explainers of their own portentous paintings need to read Archibald MacLeish, who got it right in Ars Poetica:
A poem should not mean But be.To some extent, the same could be said for painting. Certainly, both painting and poetry can benefit from (competent, clear, coherent) criticism, which it further seems to me isn’t for the most part the kind that gets turned out, but that’s another matter. But what isn’t on the page or on the canvas (or the screen or the panel, whatever ground) isn’t there, and all the bloviated blather by the artist doesn’t improve the image(s).
Don Marquis once said that publishing a book of verse was like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” Ars pro gratia artis” isn’t just the MGM slogan; it’s a hard truth.
— dan · Jul 10, 07:50 AM · #
Ms. Fendrich, my apologies for killing the thread.
— dan · Jul 10, 11:33 AM · #
Speaking as an inveterate troll, I’d say dionysos’s comment is just about the the smartest thing I’ve read in the “Brainstorm” forums. There, dan, I’ve given the thread CPR. It lives!
— Just Passing Through · Jul 10, 11:39 AM · #
I posted this on another blog:
The New Yorker, July 7 & 14, p. 81
cartoon, couple in bed, one says to the other, “What should we have sex about?”
— db · Jul 11, 07:33 AM · #
Without discounting Dionysos’ comment re Aristotle (which can also be interpreted “there is nothing in memory that is not first in imagination” ) it is useful to mention Antonio Damasio’s argument that reason and feeling, (The Feeling of What Happens) are necessarily linked and also his argument that mind and body are also linked (Descartes Error).
Fendrich’s defense of painting in her talk to the people at Painting’s Edge is memorable and I think every painter can thank her for its eloquent, candid and nuanced authority.
— William Conger · Jul 11, 04:14 PM · #
And Pascal said “la pensee vient en parlant” – thought comes while speaking. He might also have considered that “art(work) comes while painting”.
Thus it would appear to have been essential to have some of the images of the paintings as we read the preceding thread’s posting by the blog host. Indeed, then all of the commentators’ quotes would be “interactive”!
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 13, 09:11 PM · #
As a painter, I always return to poetry for some of my greatest lessons. It has been difficult for me to explain why, exactly, but you really hit the nail on the head here. As a relatively young painter I feel the enormous pressure to figure out a huge conceptual meaning for the work. I’ve found the best way to ignore the pressure is to just keep putting oil on canvas, day after day.
— Lindsay · Jul 28, 02:29 PM · #