JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

After a battle with WordPress and obstinate plugins — which resulted in Jolly Days loading as a blank page; and a battle with a cell phone company about its online payment implementation, and not being able to run today —  I’m feeling pecked to death by ducks. Until you realize the context — the greater tribulations of the world — the Arab world in turmoil with uncertain outcome; the devastation in Japan; our president who seems one step behind too often and the Republicans in disarray, the ominous future for the economy if something is not done — it doesn’t make you feel perky.

I’ve been working hard to publish more books at the iBookstore; not satisfying creative work, but rather meticulous, mind numbing work. I’m very proud of the result though:

iPad Sketchbook 3
Ira Altschiller: Works on Paper
Ira Altschiller: A Retrospective

and two more to come: picturebooks is what Apple calls them, which are fixed layout books for a better presentation of books which have an emphasis on images.

I did want to mention a funny link provided at Jason Kottke’s site

Someone at Yahoo Answers uploaded a page of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as his own and asked for comments.

Rated as the best answer / criticism:

You know your story needs more work, so you don’t need anyone to tell you what you already know.

Comment sections are always pretty funny. Some people don’t like the snarkiness, and I’m not a big fan of that aspect, but often there are interesting ideas and commentary as well. It is the mosh pit after all. A financial journalist at bloggingheads said that she always felt that people weren’t asking questions or engaging ideas  in comments sections of weblogs, they were trying to appear smart.

The idea of sending great literature as if written by sender to an established publisher has been done over the years. Rejection letters for masterpieces like War and Peace leaves one agape — like the audience watching The Frankie singing Puttin’ on the Ritz in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Saul Bellow stopped sending his stories to the New Yorker after a full of himself young editor told him how he should correct his piece. Bellow had recently won the Nobel Prize.

Joyce’s novella The Dead was made into a movie in 1987 by John Huston, then in his 80s. This was a project of love, with his daughter Anjelica in the lead role. We just saw it in a Netflix rental. The movie begins with a depiction of the long associations of human society and quirks of personality as manifested at a party. You feel the weight of time on these people living in Ireland in 1904. Their characters are all delimited and defined in a way that is a marvel. Like My Dinner With Andre, Huston has taken a minimalist setting and made it something so much more complex. Anjelica Huston is a great actress. Her silent presence in so many scenes gave the movie a tremendous emotional richness.

Underlying it all is the genius of Joyce. His language en-flowers as the story evolves into a meditation on living and dying. At first this human society is mundane, slightly boring, quietly funny. Then on the carriage ride home The Dead opens up into a dark space that makes you shudder, like traveling into a boundless forest. You feel the emotional separation of husband and wife.

When Anjelica Huston tells her husband — a “sensible man” she sneers — of the long lost love of her youth; of her guilt at this young boy’s death, she overflows with grief and finally loses herself hugging, clutching at her husband. But she immediately pushes her husband away — she will not accept even his consolation. Her husband muses over the evening party and falls into a reverie about his life, his beloved wife, and the lives of his friends and family, and then into a reverie about all our lives. It is like a melting into something larger and larger, as Frost defined poetry.

Clearly no one could re-write Joyce in the concluding scene. It has to be repeated and heard in Joyce’s words and so the filmmaker resorts to the slightly awkward technique of voice-over to give full throat to Joyce. Joyce mingles prose and poetry in a great yielding resonance of language and feeling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Captain Beefheart died on Friday. He did not want to be known as Captain Beefheart, but as an artist using his real name, Don Van Vliet. He wanted to distance himself from his musical beginnings. Why I do not know. Tom Waits, and many others, owed a debt which they acknowledged. Part performance art, part Dada goof, part interesting music —he was an original. He and Zappa mapped a unique region in the popular culture.

His obit says,

By shunning commercial success and a more accessible sound, Van Vliet became a role model for subsequent generations of musicians. His music is cited as an influence on the rise of punk, post-punk and new wave. Beefheart is also claimed as a kindred spirit by free jazz musicians and avant-garde classical composers.

Maybe he was concerned his paintings would not be taken seriously if his other life as Beefheart were attached. He must not have realized that what is taken seriously in the pop world and art bureaucracy as well is making lots of money.

He considered himself a painter. He got his break when Julian Schnabel had a show at the SFMoMA and was asked by the director if Schnabel knew of any interesting artists in the area. This is an odd question for the director of a San Francisco museum to ask of a NY artist, but such is the art world. Schnabel was hot at the time; the museum had raised something like a million bucks for one of his paintings. Schnabel’s art dealer put together the art collection of Hollywood Guy Michael Ovitz. Now Schnabel makes movies, as does his art dealer. Such is Hollywood.

So Schnabel by recommendation anointed Don Van Vliet and subsequently Don Van Vliet had a survey show at the museum. He was so shy that he stayed in the hall leading to the main exhibition area for much of the event. He stood there in the hall with his wife. He was married for 40 years.

He was a good and true artist, an authentic creative spirit, was Don Van Vliet.

A new eBook at the iBookstore: iPad Sketchbook 2

This new sketchbook has over 100 images and animations depicting the evolution of several drawings. A permanent link is in the iBookstore links area on the navigation column to the right.

Galway Kinnell about Rilke:

Rilke writes only what is for him a matter of life and death. There’s nothing trivial, no bright chatter, no clever commentary. He writes at the limit of his powers. There are moments when he seems to write beyond the limit. His poetry gropes out into the inexpressible, like the late music of Beethoven.

That striving for more is a mark of all art. Rilke’s approach, as described by Kinnell, might sound a ponderous load to contemporary tastes, where distanced irony and referential cleverness hold sway. Earnestness doesn’t earn points but rather scorn. But who cares? Contemporary tastes change. Kinnell is speaking with the long horizons of art before him.

The nuance in Kinnell’s brief description, the subtle, complex mapping of a sensibility which he suggests, says much good about Kinnell as well.

Creative work often strays so far from its source material that it sometimes is interesting to revisit the original inspiration.

This site notes the White Horse Tavern was the source of “Those Were the Days,” a beautiful, wistful song. The tavern was a meeting place for Allen Ginsberg, Jim Morrison, James Baldwin, both great “Dylans,” Bob and Dylan Thomas; Dylan Thomas’ given name was taken as honorific by Bob Zimmerman .

Creative work mixes “reality,” whatever that is, with the temperament (“Art is life filtered through a temperament.” —Zola) with the evanescent grasp of memory.

Wikipedia quotes Dylan Thomas,

I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance. [...] I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever.

It’s funny how profound those early encounters with the medium are for artists. I remember how I loved cartoons in the newspaper when I was young. I also remember, like Dylan Thomas, my reaction was purely aesthetic. I would study the lines and forms in cartoons with an infatuation that had nothing to do with content. I knew something was different in my reaction from that of my friends, for whom it was just a good laugh — although I had no idea why I felt that way. The pure sensual beauty of the lines and the magic of the suggestive images enthralled.

Wiki also notes that a monument to Dylan Thomas has an inscription from his work:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

“Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” Fantastic.

On The Naked Scientists a panelist noted that a recent study indicated that we are happiest when we are focused on what is at hand. Zen Buddhism is right. However, in a contemporary culture, which is built to distract, this is not so happy a finding.

The scientist noted that our wandering minds yield tremendous benefits as well — our very human instantiation, our culture, our inventions, our imagination; but it comes at a cost — that of our happiness.

[via drawn]

Art is a support system for life, not the other way around.
—Stephen King

Updated site galleries:

Selected Work Gallery
This gallery has numerous additions and updates.

In the Recent Paintings Galleries:
Updated Fables series images and added the new series Ancient World.

There are parallel galleries, with the same images, which were put in this weblog itself — Jolly Days — for ease of access, but the site galleries — in PaintedMatter.com — are better formatted. The Jolly Days galleries as well will soon be updated.

On the Charlie Rose show the curators involved in a recent show of Matisse’s work focused on little known work. Curators work from the outside in — with rare exceptions, such as the late Kirk Varnedoe, who seemed to ingest the work he discussed. But most often you get lots of detailed information about the physical work and historical context, but don’t quite understand how the mainstream art bureaucracy values the work, or why. Contemporary art, like contemporary science, often needs a well-wrought bridge to the public.

Art is one area where “this means that” just doesn’t work — even though that simple symbolism is what is taught in universities by indirection; or the artist’s relations to the power structure. Curatorial discussion can often sound as shallowly partisan and mechanically tendentious as docent lectures. But these curators, Stephanie D’Alessandro and John Elderfield, had some nuance; their discussion shed light on the context of the work both historically and on Matisse’s thinking, and thus expressed by indirection their love for the Matisse’s work.

From an artist’s perspective the work under review reveals its true nature without technocratic or historical intrusion: it is clearly transitional work, aware of itself as such, but choosing to present itself in the main tent. Rather than an artist working out the many issues involved in creating an image in his/her studio, away from the public, Matisse chose to let it all hang out. The subject of his work was the ambivalence of the expressive act, particularly evident in these very complex works shown on Rose’s show.

Matisse’s work, deceptively brilliant in its daring, not only in its historically significant transition to the graphical — a crude surface indicator — but in the way he used the graphical (a building of planes rather than of forms); graphical work had before been seen as purely decorative but Matisse used the flat areas of his paintings to express ambiguity. He incorporated decorative defaults as a subtle disjunction. Faces were sometimes depicted flat, without features, or with generic features, and this might seem not much, but they are a daring and dramatic assertion for an audience expecting realism.

A courageous decision and a trusting approach to the audience rather than smug winking at shared assumptions between artist and viewer, often seen in contemporary work. In contemporary art there is much that seems clubby, obscure for its own sake, derivative of idea, referential if it is to have any meaning, or ingratiating in its pop cultural references (not trusting the viewer’s serious side). Matisse was principally an aesthetic artist, even though his gnomic written pronouncements often were impressively insightful. Matisse was a bright man. The paradigmatic quality of Matisse’s work is his intelligence; in Picasso’s work it is the very force of the creative — a seeming force of nature inhabiting Picasso’s work.

Here are some updated iBookstore links:

iPad Sketchbook

Legends of Ghost Island, Book One

Drawing on Walls

Creative Quotations, Stillness in the Midst of Chaos

25 Secrets of the Muse: A Book of Creative Strategies

A Curmudgeon’s Bestiary

Ancient World

These links will have a permanent home in the sidebar.