Workmanship: Two Sides of the Same Coin (Part 2)

Workmanship n. 2. Evidence of such skill.

In the previous post we see Vermeer’s porcelain-like rendering of a beautiful young woman, whose face is painted in such a way as to leave no visible trace of brushwork. She is a vision of idealized, youthful beauty that transcends brush, paint and canvas.

Rembrandt                                                           Self Portrait  @ 1660

Rembrandt's self portrait stares back at us from the other end of the artistic spectrum. Looking at the careworn face we can almost hear the bristle brushes being dragged across the canvas.

Here Rembrandt makes no effort to hide his workmanship, allowing the individual strokes to stand out from one another, rich in variation and texture. He is as honest about the years that show on his face as he is about his brushwork; we see here a man whose youth and optimism have left him, a man worn and resigned and altogether changed from the young, playful artist of years before. 

Rembrandt                     Self Portrait with Saskia 1635

 What has happened to this man in the 25 years between the execution of these two paintings? If Rembrandt is so worn and resigned, why does he still paint? Why would someone paint such a picture of himself? Unlike Vermeer, much is known of Rembrandt’s life and a brief account of his family and career sheds a great deal of light on the mood of the later self portrait. 

A Few Words About What I Do (Part 4)

To conclude this little series I would like to make a distinction between the art of narrative painting and what is the most popular dramatic art of out time: the movies. 

Thomas Grimball 1780  (detail)                 Collection Mr and Mrs Paul Grimball Marshall Jr.

on permanent loan to the Old Exchanges Building, Charleston, South Carolina

A film maker has thousands of frames to tell a story, hours of screen time and with the aid of sound, dialog and music, his cameras and crew. A painter must put the whole thing across on a single canvas, with his tubes of muddy colors, a few brushes and what wits he has been given. 

Four colors for mixing skin tones

But by the same token, painting offers the artist and viewer time to pause and reflect at leisure on that single, beautiful moment, soak in its drama and consider its meaning. In a painting one can stop and gaze upon each character to love, pity or despise him. To consider what each element that’s been included adds to the picture. Attitude and gesture, light and dark, color and form, content and style. All these things can be taken in as a whole or considered individually. 

David and Goliath  (detail)  2007                                                  collection of the artist

The degree to which these things are possible, both in the making and in looking, are unique to painting; in no other artistic discipline can a single moment be taken hold of, ordered and held up for all to see. Nowhere is there so much freedom for artistic interpretation without doing injury to the meaning the story.

 This is what I do, or at least what I attempt to do, and this is why the practice of painting holds my attention and my affection and why I think it should hold yours as well.

A Few Words About What I Do (part 1)

If I must choose a title for myself it would be painter. But what drives me as an artist is the urge to tell a story. Not in words, of course, but in pictures.

More specifically, my desire is to either suggest some kind of narrative in the frame of a still life or a portrait or to find the single most pivotal moment in a story, compose it in my mind and arrange it on a canvas in such a way that it captures the attention and imagination of those who look at it.