Fences

Back in May, I was at the beach without my notebook, and I hadn't bought the camera yet (so my imagination and motor skills were still intact). I drew this little drawing on some lined paper with a pencil scrounged from the floor of the car, but I always liked it.

In some ways it's the reason why I wanted to look more closely at Kline, since I wanted to learn how to simplify my work, which had become needlessly fussy.

So did a tissue paper "level" overlay in software and produced this:



Now I want to paint it, and simplify it perhaps even more, now that I've learned a few things. For example, in my original from May I plopped the thing in the middle of the paper with a nice even half inch of white space all around. No more! I am looking at edges and interior spaces more, and thickness and thinness of marks.

I like the gray of this new drawing, which was originally unintentional, since it was the color in the digital eyedropper at the moment, but it suits -- memory, misty foggy beach, barriers that are falling down but of woody substance.

Will post and get hopping, since it's supposed to rain heavily this afternoon, so I may loose power.

Oil Discovered!

Since Kline was working before the invention of acrylics, he of course used oil paint, as do I usually. All my previous posts have been acrylic, however, since I wanted to get stuff done fast. The problem with acrylics, unless you use a whole chemical factory of retardents, flow equalizers, and texturizers, is that they dry very fast with a consistent plasticky surface. Or if watered down, very very matte in appearance. Worse, you can't rework it except by going over it again and repainting, which makes for headaches of a different kind. And let's not talk about wasting $15.47 worth of paint to mix just the right color before you get a phone call and come back and find it's all dried and you have to start again.

Oil on unprotected paper is that great modern art class no-no, because it's not archival and will rot the paper eventually, perhaps 200 years from now. This is school of thought Number 1. School Number 2 says, screw it. If your work is deemed important to preserve, it will be preserved. No one is going to let Picassos rot away, or even Klines.

So here's oil on collage, though I covered the collage with a cheating coat of gloss medium to make a nice slippery surface. I wanted to be able to move the paint around with brush and fingers yet have it sit above the surface, letting the phone book show through.



I tried to work some white in, but it still seems too white to me, but it's time to move on. I might knock it back a bit later, adding a little ochre or umber. And all my moving of stuff around did matte and dirty the surface a bit, but I can live with it. I felt a bit tentative doing all this, for some reason, maybe because I really liked the collage underneath. Next one I promise will be bold.

Date Night

Back to jazz again, but of a different kind. If you've never heard Ken Nordine's Word Jazz, you must. I used to listen to it all the time when it was on public radio (I think) or at least on an FM station back when FM meant "alternative".

I used to lie on the floor of my apartment in the dark with speakers all around me hypnotized by Nordine's voice caressing words words words through the air, telling of strange and wonderful things against a backdrop of the coolest jazz this side of Mars. If you hit "play this page" from the link above, you can experience a good selection -- best to have a fast connection, but it's worth the wait to download one or two just to experience it -- as I say, in the dark -- or in the tub for the first one.

Thinking of all the words on the pages of the phone book made me think of Nordine. That's the connection.



I pulled this Klinish drawing out of the pile since it's the first in which I consciously tried to deal with the edges of the the page better, rather than just blithely slopping around in the middle. I like it enough I may try an actual painting from it. It feels like a landscape to me, so I may use it as a departure point for a larger painting that may take several weeks.

Spent some time today in blissful ignorance tearing the yellow pages into pieces and assembling them, not really looking at the subject matter on the pages, until THIS hit me in the face, so to speak:



I was up to the pages labeled "Escorts - Excavations".

I may get very political in my ordinary blogging, but in my art I've never dealt with "issues". This seemed like an opportunity too good to pass up. So I may end up doing something with it, starting with the title of this entry, "Date Night."

Fast Car

Put on the Kline jazz playlist I've been listening to, and somehow a few lonely songs had got attached to it. Like Nina Simone's heartbreaking "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair" that I picked up from the Womenfolk site.

Awhile ago, blogger friend ThatColoredFella put out a poll of sorts asking for the songs that made everyone immediately cry as soon as they heard the first notes. I responded with anything by Janis Ian (Society's Child, At Seventeen), but I believe the prize really goes to Tracy Chapman and Fast Car, TCF's choice.

So the song came on and whatever I had thought to be painting started changing. I started looking at narrow passages, possibilities for escape that then blocked. At colors, like love, that beckon with pretty and vivid brightness, but that dull, and then trap. I wanted to paint something about routes you might take, and the ones that don't work.

All on a 9 x 12 inch surface. Yeah, right.

Working Methods

Being such a representational painter, my working methods thus far have been the following:

1) Set up easel in front of subject
2) Paint subject

Until this last challenge (Art By the Inch), I'd never done collages or little goofy things before. Now, with studying Kline, I'm interested in seeing how his working methods might help me.

Right after I got my digital camera in May, I wandered around the beach looking for interesting shapes and trees, and liked the way the clump of trees on the right pushed away from the water toward the land:



However, I realized what I really liked was more the idea of this scene, rather than the specifc photo of it. I liked it best as a little thumbnail. So I did some manipulation, shrinking and expanding it, etc., and then did some studies from it, and then a little painting. Here's a shot of the studio with the mess:



And the kinda finished painting -- I actually sawed the piece of luan to exact size to match dimensions of my little photo study.



I wanted to give the big negative shape of sky the same kind of weight that Kline does with his big black shapes, hence "learn" from him. Being of his time and gender, he didn't do much with the girly pastels of sky and landscape. I hope to change all that.

Not Franz Kline, Exactly, But...

The idea of having Pac Man race around in a Mondrian painting is too wonderful for words (thanks, Boing Boing).

Pac-Mondrian Video Game
When Piet Mondrian arrived in New York in 1940, he heard the Boogie Woogie piano of Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson, and from then on refused to dance to any other jazz, leaving the floor in a huff if the music didn't boogie.

After years of completely abstract work he abandoned the black grid to use yellow lines and red, blue, and grey colour blocks to build a representation of New York infused with all the vibrant kinetic energy of raucous road-house piano blues in 'Broadway Boogie Woogie'.

Pac-Mondrian transcodes 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' into a Pac-Man video game: the painting becomes the board, the music becomes the sound effects, and Piet Mondrian becomes Pac-Man.

And jazz, too! Will continue to check out this developing story and get back to you.

Slow day for Kline news, unfortunately.

My Ordinary Style

I suddenly realized that most of you out there have no idea of what my ordinary painting style looks like. Here's a recent portrait, a studio model named Steve. Now you can see why what Kline ended up doing is so very different from my stuff. Everyone is told in class that "all painting is abstract," but some paintings are more abstract than others.



Kline went through stylistic changes too. He had originally wanted to be a cartoonist or illustrator (in the 1930s and early 1940s), did some mural work, and, yes, portraits too. Even in his most representational work, however, he pushed speed of stroke and image in complex layered compositions.

This 1941 landscape, "Palmerton", from the Smithsonian, shows the dull colors and themes of his early style. He was from the Pennsylvania coal country, and the imagery of trains, trestles, tracks, and hills were motifs he abstracted and explored in his monumental black and white works, many of which took names of trains or towns.

Here's my first attempt at doing something "monumental". I'll probably revise this, since it needs to cut in a bit from the very dark edges.



And want to work on some landscape images of my own, both in his black and white, and color on color modes.

The Bad One

As promised, here's the one that doesn't quite work, so it's now officially abandoned (until I find it in a pile of stuff someday and decide it isn't that bad after all!)



It's bad because 1) it floats in the middle of the plane and 2) the edges of the collaged piece of newspaper are meaningless and mush into nothing. It is not a Kline at all. It isn't even a fake Kline.

Have another up to bat on the easel right now that looks a bit more promising.

Until then, keep enjoying the weekend. Listening to Calexico on the mp3 player right now, a switch from jazz. Need to find a new hot-night jazz tune, you dig?

Things I Learned Today

Have been working on 3 different paintings all day, moving back and forth among them, but none of them jelled or looked particularly Klinish, unlike some of the collages and sketches posted earlier. Went back to the book and tried to figure it out, and here's the answer:

One reason why even Kline's small paintings take on a grave and monumental look is that he extends the main forms off the canvas into "your" space, thus sucking you in whether you like it or not -- unless every photo of his work in the book was cropped (god, I hope not).

So in this one I fixed some of the shapes and marks, and it's better. Not good, but better. I'm still working on the idea of including the color of the yellow pages and ordinary phone book paper, and even the color of some of the ads, along with the curving angled marks that intrigue me. These are not Kline colors. Even in his later paintings, he generally started with a white ground, though often layered black on top of a colored underpainting.

Since it still wasn't right, I tried putting different shapes from my pile of collage materials (from when I spilled my bottle of ink the other day), so that's what the shape in the middle is.

UPDATE: Shape looked too goofy for words. Removed it....



It may stay there or not. Today was not a particularly good Klinish day. May post another one that's almost done later, and one that is really really ugly and bad, too.

Later.

Collages, Partly

Here's black over red in a kind of squarish shape that Kline liked, especially in his earlier abstracts.



In this one, I worked back and forth with acrylic paint and adjusted by "correcting" with strips of phone book, both yellow pages and regular listings. There's 3 or 4 layers in a few places, and it still looks messy, but the central circle I find interesting, somewhat sexual and female amidst all this Kline maleness.



Finally, here's a simple "neat" one, black over red with collage. Seems a little tied-down to me, but the simplicity also appeals.



I'm finding doing these extremely addictive and freeing, once the arm gets going. Here's a simple one with a little yellow to supplement the yellow of the yellow pages. For some reason this shape keeps recurring in what I've been doing. My gesture always (because I'm right-handed, perhaps) starts from upper right to lower left corner, then moves elsewhere. If this seems important to me, perhaps it should be important to me, but I don't know why.



I need to get another big piece of luan so I can work on a really big painting. Everything I have right now is small. Great for the quick studies I've been doing, but I want to start something meatier too, and worked in oil, which takes longer to dry.

One step at a time, however. I'm learning a lot. People have always assumed (as did I) that he was heavily influenced by Chinese calligraphy -- not true, however. He was more interested in shapes like railroad trestles, bridges, tracks, and urban scenes.

Plus jazz...

Was listening to Leonard Cohen this afternoon while trying to work on these, but ended up listening to his sad and depressing tales and only got going again when I turned it off. Ah, music.

New Links

Added a few links to the side.

The ArtCyclopedia site will lead you to links to museums with Kline collections, so I won't duplicate here. The Beat Museum is kinda interesting in itself. Artnet has an assortment of works on paper. The Weatherspoon Museum has 2 pastel drawings. No black at all! The fan letter from Hedy Lamarr is just charming, that's all.

Did a lot more drawings today, trying to layer color as he did. Will scan and post one or two in a bit once I get them sorted out. Still recovering from what seems like the endless party that is the Independence Day holiday around here.

More later.

Phone Book Studies

Starting about 1950, Kline used old phone books as a cheap source of paper.

From time to time Kline looked throught these telephone-book drawings, which were stacked by the hundreds in a corner. Selecting one that he felt wold work as a painting, he pasted it to a piece of cardboard. Then, either tacking the drawing beside a canvas or holding it, he followed it closely, painting directly.

Here's one of his:



Here's my first perfect Kline:



And another one -- an example of a drawing that Kline might have rotated around looking for the best view:



In these two I started adding color. Many people think Kline only worked in black and white, but nearly all of his paintings have some color in them. In the late 40s, and again before his death in 62, he used a lot of color (we'll get there later):



Now I'm getting a little more comfortable with the process, and getting messier, too. This is a good thing:



Finally, in this one I didn't even notice the "sun" up in the corner streaming goodness down on the rest of the phone book, because I drew this the other way around. I don't think Kline cared what he was drawing on, but maybe it subtly influenced what he was thinking anyway:



I did a bunch more, but let's not go nuts here. I want to do some collaging of them next. A lot of his are Frankensteins (like the one above). He preferred to work at night, which I used to prefer as well, however... His roommate used to get up to go to work at 7:00 am and find him painting away, having been up all night. He used strong ceiling lights aimed at his painting wall -- he painted on unstretched canvas, only getting it stretched for a show. He also painted on board, cardboard, paper -- just about anything. He used cheap inks and paints until he started showing regularly and his dealer put a firm halt to it.

That's it for now. Still haven't prowled the net looking for Kline stuff. Will post my bibliography on the side in a bit.

Testing Testing

There. That's better. I'm warning you all, if you don't want to spend tons of time loading pages filled with artwork you probably don't care about, leave now. Go on! Scoot!

I am not in love with this man because I have no life of my own, as some have suggested, though maybe so. Here he is:



Here's one of my versions of him:



And here's how he did a portrait from a photo of Nijinsky:



That said, will probably post more studies a bit later. Have to finish setting this up and get some links over there on the side.

A note for your enjoyment: Looking at this stuff and listening to jazz from the 50s and 60s, and some big band items works well. May put up some music links too. Have discovered the joys of sampling .mp3s and am downloading them like a fevered teen.

Later. I'm going back over to Fresh Paint now...