Painterly and Abstract Images: What Might They Be?

[Charles L Webster]

Editor's Note: This thread was originally posted as Abstract Reflection and as you'll read on, you will see that it tok off in a lively and very deep discussion on the way terms come to be used in art critique and the learning of art forms in the history of art.

So I extracted the posts commenting on the actual picture, which I happen to like, and restarted the thread in the Landscape Forum (http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=20664#post20664)to deal with the image itself.

Here we'll continue in learning about what has been called "Abstract" and "Painterly" in the spheres of formal art communication and appreciation.

I myself have reread some of the posts here and each time I have gleaned more. So I'm renaming the thread, Painterly and Abstract Images: What Might They Be? Asher Kelman, Editor, March 1 2007.




When I took this picture, I saw the "painterly" effect and was struck by the abstraction. Several of my other photos explore this "reflection" theme and I think this is one of the more successful.

Shot with my trusty 300D with the Sigma 70-300 f/4-5.6 @ 240mm f/5.6 1/800 ISO 200. This is almost full frame, some small amount was lost when I rotated the image to straighten the horizon.

http://gallery.photo.net/photo/5547030-lg.jpg

I leave the question of "is it art" to those who care, such as Ray.

[Asher Kelman]

Congrats Charles,

I'm a sucker for gold, sienna and sunsets! Your picture is very impressionistic and attractive. As it is it seems to lack some clarity but probably the real file prints well.

I tried sharpening and it really does look great that way too. I like the more defined irregular gold reflections broken up by the ripples on the water.

Do you also have shots with the sky?

We know this is a sunset or dawn, but that would be other pictures with different meanings. The lack of sky does create a tension, since we know enough of sunsets to expect the sky and low sun. It is part of the platter we expect mother nature to serve as things are packed away for the day!

So this image is only part of the sunset, a restricted sunset, if you wish. The top of the picture is not fading to anyrhing, rather abruptly disappears, which tells us more is there but we can't see it! So that sets up a question of what was there to see.

Asking that question and the initial attraction is what can take this image on its way to be "art". For me it works as art but I might want to choose such a pciture from a real print of a particular size on the right paper. Then it will make it or not.

All I can say is that I like it, I wouldn'y have framed it that way, so that's another thing I like!

Thanks for sharing!

Asher

[Ken Tanaka]

Although I'm not a conventional sunset/sunrise/landscape enthusiast I am a bit of a mug for a good reflection image. This certainly falls into that category for me. As Asher noted, very nice color contrasts. The colors and compositions of the best reflected images not only keep the eye satisfied, but they also provoke the analytical brain to wonder what is being reflected. That's the case here, too, although identification is just beyond my imagination.

Nice image, Charles. Thanks for posting it.

[Ben Lifson]

Dear Mr Webster

"Painerly" is the wrong adjective. In all of art, which includes paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, music, etc., "painterly" doesn't mean "like a painting". It is a term used to distinguish one kind of ,method of making pictures, called the painterly, from, usually, one other specific method, which is called "linear", although the important 20thC historian and critic of drawing, Charles de Tolnay (see his important book, "The History and Technique of Old Master Drawings") adds a third category for drawing: "plastic."

Since photography is and has always been understood as a branch of drawing, de Tolnay's discussion of the three methods, linear, plastic and painterly, is not only useful but, I would say, indeespensible for any contemporary photographer who wants his photography to get better.

Your picture of reflected sunset light on water strikes me as falling into de Tolnay's categor, "plastic".

As for "abstract," it definitely is not that. In Abstract pictures the visual elements that go into making a picture -- the picture's light, shadow, values, hues, lines, masses, details, textures, shapes, etc. -- refer only to themselves.

They do not refer to anything in the real world i.e. the world we see every day. The computer I'm looking at right now. The oriental rug on the floor behind it. The windows I see in the wall opposite my computer desk. The roll of paper towel and the bottle of glass cleaner still on my desk after I cleaned my CTR monitor. The spindle of DVDs waiting for my next task, archiving the last 5,000 pictures I've taken since Feb. 1 for my current project.

In your picture, the golds, blues, small waves, texture, etc. defenitely refer to water and as Asher so accurately points out, to water at a specific time of day, when the sun is at a specific angle to the earth.

Therefore the picture isn't abstract

Last week one of my art appreciation students at Three River Community College, Norwich, CT, asked if Picasso weren't an abstract painter.

I said, "No. And he always rejected the term, said he never made an asbtract picture in his life, that abstraction in art is impossible because "every picture starts from something real."

But he meant more than that.

I happened to have a large number of Picasso scans in the 23,000-file image bank on the external hard drive I take to class.

So, on the screen of my "smart" classroom we looked at scores of reproductions of Picassos from 1907 to the late 1960s, then at files of reproductions of truly abstract paintings by artists like Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian.

"It's true," my student said. "Picasso didn't make abstract pictures. So what kind of an artist would you call him?"

"Oh," I said, "he had so many ways of making a picture I supposed you'd have to call him an artist so greatly gifted and talented, so powerful and fast that no style of painting could hold him for very long, even things like Cubism, which he invented out of some internal necessity.

"Remember," I continued to my student, "When Picasso was 13 years old he passed the 4-day entrance examination at the Barcelona Academy of Art in 1 day. And not every student applicant of 18 or 22 who finished it in 4 days passed it. And he did the same thing 3 years later, at the Royal Academy of Art, Madrid, passed the 4 day exam in under one day. He was to most 20th Century artists what Mount Everest is to most other mountains."

The only other great Cubist painter of the 20th century, Fernand Leger, said, in the 1930s, "Every artist dreams of making abstract art. But when he succeeds, finally, he realizes that he's reached an untenable position."

He meant "every artist". Look at the feathers in the wings of angels painted by the great early 15th century Russian painter Andrei Rublev, or at various passages of a Fra Angelico panel painting and you'll see what Leger means by "every artist".

The first published argument in favor of abstract pictures was in 1784 -- a small short book, more of a pamphlet than a book, by the British watercolor landscape painter Cozzens.

"All we're doing," Cozzens wrote, "when we make a watercolor landscape is using a brush and paint to put marks on a flat surface. When we finish we pretend--we tell, that is, lie to the public--that these marks represeent nature. And lo! and behold!, the public gets a feeling from our picture, a feeling that they're standing in nature itself looking at a beautiful stretch of land. So why can't we just put marks, any kind of marks, onto the paper without having them refer to a leaf, a branch, a cloud, etc. but have them in the same kind of purely visual, purely formal relationships, and have them still move the viewer as if he were looking at a beautiful landscape? Even though the picture wouldn't give the slightest indication that there was any subject there to begin with?"

He illustrated the book it with pen drawings which got as far from nature as a man of his training and decades of habit painting "landscapes" could get. They're pretty abstract.

By 1800, writers, many of them German, were claiming that there could be abstract novels, that is, books without stories, plots, characters, dialogues, descriptions, essay-like passages, etc. etc., just wors, BUT THEY'D STILL BE NOVELS. If you can imagine such a thing... Which many writers have tried ever since 1800... You'll know what an abstract work of art is.

Even James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" is not abstract.

Nor are Gertrude Stein's cubist word portraits (1920s) of people like Picasso, Braque, abstract, despite all their difficulty. I guess of all the writers I've read, Stein came closest to writing abstract works. But only in short pieces. Her long novles, e.g. "The Making of Americans" and her long poetic prose works, -- e.g. "The Geographical History of America" (in which latter Chapter 4 comes after Chapter 11 and there are over 20 Chapter 4s and I don't know how many Chapter 1s, and no chapter is longer than a page and a half and many chapters are only five lines long -- are not abstract.

For a lucid, down to earth, comprehensive, accurate and, to the layman, entirely accessible explanation of what abstract art is, please see Meyer Schapiro'[s two essays on abstract art in volume 4, Modern Art, of his 4-volume "collected essays."

For lucid, down to earth, comprehensive, accurate, copiously illustrated and, to the layman, entirely accessible explanation of the differences between "painterly" and "linear" art, please see Charles de Tolnay, "The History and Technique of Old Master Drawing" and Heinrich Wollfflin, "The Principles of Art History"

If you want to understand what your pictures are, where they're headed, where they're strong, how they're constructed, etc. it's important to know the precise terminology of pictures themselves.

Remember, there were art schools, art academies, etc. in ancient Egypt as far back as around 3,000 BC.

We know this thanks to the late 19th century excavations of an important German archaeologists who found the remains of these schools from almost every era the Egyptian civilization before the birth of Christ.

He found not only ruins but so many student works at so many different stages of completion as to enable us to study the way art was taught and learned in ancient Egypt c. 3,000 BC to, say, 500 or 300 BC

In those schools students learned the very same things art apprentices learned in the workshops of Renaissance artists like Rubens and Michaelangelo and in places like 19th century Paris's School of Fine Arts and are learning now at the California Institute of Art, where I founded the photography department in 1970 (the year the school opened), designed and instituted its curriculum, hired its other faculty, designed and instituted its first graduate program and accepted its first graduate students and designed and taught its first History of Photography curriculum-- years before any other photography department in the US, much less Art History department, even thought of teaching the history of photography. I led the deklpartment as its chairman, until 1974, when I left teacjomg in order to concentrate on my own photography then, 2 years later, left California for the east in order to accept the post of Acting Chairman of the Department of Photography, The Carpenter School for Visual and Environmental Art, Harvard University (where I established Harvard's first History of Photography curriculum, which the Art History department took over later -- as did Yale's Art History Department after I had instituted a History of Photography curriculum within Yale's Graduate Program of Photography: Art history departments don't like it when photographers teach the history of photography from within the photography studio art curriculum so they have, by and large, stolen art history from photography departments all over the US by now.)

I moved east and took the Harvard job (and stayed east with the support, 3 different times, of the Yale Graduate Faculty in Photography***) also in order to be near the great museums of the East Coast.

In them I learned about pictures from their permanent and temporary exhibitions of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs, just the way ancient Egyptian artists of 3000 BC learned by copying prior works of art and that 19th century painters in Europe and the US learned by sitting in such museums as The Louvre, The Albertina, the Bode, the Uffizi, and copy masterpieces.

In the 1870s, when the then young French painter Edgar Degas and his art school friend the painter Gustave Moreau had graduated from the School of Fine Arts, Paris, had gone to Italy together and separated in Rome, where Moreau stayed to copy certain paintings in the Vatican and other museums while Degas went on to Florence to draw from the master works at the Uffizi gallery, Degas wrote to Moreau saying "Stop messing around with all that copying of painting and join me in Florence where you'll learn more by going to the Uffizi with me every day and draw from these great masteripices."

Throughout his 30s, 40s, 50s, and, I'm told, until he was actually bed-ridden, Henri Matisse left his suburban villa and studio at the same time every afternoon to take a commuter train into Paris and join a life drawing class at the School of Fine Arts where, side by side with students, he would draw from the "unclothed person". 'If I don't practice every day like a student," I'm told he said, 'I'll never paint like a grown up painter."

But remember, there are no secrets in art. There is no arcane knowledge that only specialists can know. There are only pictures and anyone can learn everything there is to know about any picture if he/she just looks at the picture long enough and carefully enough.

Any picture.

Even pictures from distand and ancient cultures like, say, those of Tibet, or the cave paintings of 30,000 years ago. We don't have to know anything about the painter, his/her era, its philosophy, its religious beliefs, its politics, the status of its women, its communication or the lack thereof with other cultures, whether the people of that time and place had writing and, if they had it, how many of them could read it.

Every picture will disclose everything there is to know about it if you will look at it long, hard and carefully enough.

Happy Trails to You.


yrs

ben

***Each time I accepted an appointment at Yale I had no idea the position was open until the university called me (before announcing the position) and asked me if I were available ad if so would I accept it.

www.benlifson.com

[Asher Kelman]

Hi Charles,

First let me affirm that I like you picture. Next we need to separate wonderful, informative articles that educate us on the semantics of describing art from the work of an individual who is just looking for reactions on how they feel emotional and think in terms of the actual image as it is, ways of photographing such a subject and choices for getting that idea to a brilliant print that people will enjoy and even pay money for.

Now how do we then deal with both and still have the openness that distinguishes OPF?

My solution is carve out this essay as an article which can be illustrated perhaps by my own pictures.

In any case the I may transfer my respected friend's informed article to a new place temporarilly while I think!

Asher

[Ken Tanaka]

Ben, Ben, Ben...

How, from any point of view, could you possibly imagine that such a long-winded, self-focued, pompous (and mostly pseudo-intellectual malarkey) rant was an appropriate response to Charles' photograph?

[Charles L Webster]

-snip- The colors and compositions of the best reflected images not only keep the eye satisfied, but they also provoke the analytical brain to wonder what is being reflected. That's the case here, too, although identification is just beyond my imagination.

Nice image, Charles. Thanks for posting it.

Ken, That was precisely my intention when I shot this. I wanted to remove the image from the reality of the object being photographed.

The object being photographed, and its surroundings, are anything but beautiful, but by removing the subject from its objective reality, I was able to create a thing of some small beauty.

Thanks for your compliment.

[Ben Lifson]

I repied only to Mr Webster'words "painterly" & "abstract" in order to point out to him that his picture is neither.

To define art terms for an artist's benefit is pompous? Giving Mr Webster powerful tools for the development of his art is being self-important?

Pompous to talk about great past artists for the benefit of pressent ones?

Pompous to cite one's credentials, which give one's contribution authority?

You ask if I had no papers to grade.

I don't grade my students' papers. I only read and comment on them. I teach art appreciation. There's no way to weigh one student's appreciation against another's.

If my students attend class, turn in their assignments--to trace 2 reproductions in the textbook per week--and turn in the term paper, they get an A.

Their work doesn't have to be good or on time. It just has to be done.

So I never have papers to GRADE.

By week 10 of the semester my students don't need me any more. They can appreciate art by themselves. If they've finished the work they can stop coming to class.

A teacher's job is like the psychiatrist's: bring the student ASAP to the point that he doesn't need you any more.

This semester my students are teaching me more than I'm teaching them. So I've stopped preparing. I look at their tracings before I leave for campus and start class with the works that most interest the students.

Today it was Ingres' Grande Odalisque, c. 1820s

90 min later we ended at once in 1848, with Delacroix saying he hated subject matter, which is "only an excuse for putting paint on canvas" and in the 1780s with the beginning of Goya's paintings about the madness of social life.

In between we covered

Stiubbs' dissections of horses & the 18thC trade of the horse knacker

Sylvia Plath in "The Bell Jar," on how a flaccid penis looks like "the neck of a plucked chicken"

Goya's painting of a plucked Turkey

The visual viruosity of the film BREACH

The literary brilliance of the contemporary Moroccan writer Mohammed M'Mrabet, who can neither read nor write

The scene in John Barthe's The Floating Opera in which the hero, about to make love for the first time, sees his and his girlfriend's naked bodies in the bedroom mirror, laughs at how funny sex is, & so loses erection, opportunity and girlfriend.

Iago telling Brabatio his daughter and Othello are "making the two-backed beast"

The difference between Linear and Painterly art.

The nature of the aristocrats who sat for Ingres' portraits

The grotesque anatomical disproportions Ingres gave them but which can be seen only by looking very closely at the paintings.

The way the hands of Ingres' sitters resemble horrible spineless sea creatures creeping out of their shells.

Tolstoi telling Gorky to "write about everything," even a child trying to pull his drunken mother up from the mud & filth of an unpaved Moscow street because "If you don't, he will come to you later & say your art is false because you didn't write about everything. He's passionate for the truth, that little boy."

That Ingres had the courage to tell the truth about his aristocratic sitters' ugly vicious world through their bodies' grotesque disproportions and about the beauty of their material world., gowns, jewels, suits, flowers, rooms, art objects, wall paper. How he had the courage to show at once the beauty of their corrupt world & the corruption in their beautiful world.

Akira Kurosawa's great early movie THE BAD SLEEP WELL.

Not bad for 90 minutes in which a lot of students learned a great deal about painting & stayed after class to talk about it.

One student & I talked about how Photo Shop might better express what she sees in art than do her tracings.

This made me suddenly wonder if Photo Shop mightn't be a powerful tool for the teaching of art appreciation.

Have students download a scan of a painting. manipulate it in Photo Shop...I think people would learn a lot about pictures this way

By making a large dark area in the middle of Ingres' Grande Odalisque a little darker...would totally change the painting and show us the difference between dark & black, solid & void, space & flatness, design & composition...We'd learn more about pictures in 10 min tham from a whole art history course.

Imagine making some of Henri Cartier'Bresson's painterly pictures a little bit more linear!

E.g. the two gypsy boys blowing smoke, or that strange picture of the Mexican woman with the baby hanging down from her shoulder in a black shawl so thin & transluscent that it's as tho' we're looking into the wman's uterus at her sleeping unborn child

Our Photo Shop linear versions of these powerful painterly photographs would be failures precisely BECAUSE we made them linear. for H C-B conceived & executed them as painterly.

But our failures would show us why the original painterly pictures are great.

So you see, Mr Tanaka, my method, which may seem self important, pompous etc. to you really isn't. It's just free-association rambling toward some simple idea

"Mary-Ann," said a friend about a fiend of ours, "is amazing. She starts with simplicity & goes to complexity. Bit I have to start in complexity just to GET to simplicity." Mr Tanaka, it's the same with me.

If I don't ramble, no holds barred, I don't learn anything. For example, Asher's experiment w/ the picture from the car was, I'm sure, behind my conversation with the student today, although I wasn't aware of it. Now the conversation w/ the student, recounted here, has brought me back to Asher's experiment but w/ a difference.

As for long, what's wrong with it?

"Some questions," says the hero of William Cooper's novel Scenes from Later Life, "can only be answered with more words than will fit on the back of a penny postcard."

The same is true for some responses to art.

Is it any more self-important, Mr Tanaka, for me to TELL of my achievements which can't be SHOWN here? Others can SHOW their achievements here, & do so often/

What's the difference between Mr Webster showing a picture he's proud of & me telling of a class or a curriculum I'm proud of? Am I self important and he's not?

If you yourself make a picture you're proud of, will you NOT share it with us here because you think Sharing Your Work With Us is Self Important Pomposity?

I was sharing past INTELLECTUAL work with Mr Webster. Work as important to me as Mr Webster's is to him. Is it because my work was intellectual that you call my sharing it pompous and self important?

Are you saying that intellectual work is of a lower order than visual work, which is why sharing the former but not the latter is pompous and self important?

Does it follow, therefore, that my being proud of having founded a Cal Arts curriculum and led a Harvard department is being pompous and self important because that was only INTELLECTUAL work but that for Mr Webster to be pleased with his picture is ok because it's VISUAL WORK?

Was it self important of me to speak of teaching 3 times at Yale but not self important of Nikolai to share those extraordinary group portraits with us?

Is it self important of me to be sharing my experience with you & my feelings about it?

All my stories about artists, books, paintings, etc. are part of my DEEPEST EXPERIENCE & have given me some of my STRONGEST, DEEPEST & MOST MEMORABLE FEELINGS. Mr Tanaka, my strongest, deepest & most memorable experiences & feelings.

Both live inside me as the experience & feelings of seeing one's first born come into the world live inside a father. Is it pompous and self important of a father to tell you of watching his first child being born, and of what he felt then?

The first time I read what Tolstoy said to Gorky, saw Brueghel'"Netherlandish Proverbs", got a class to see the difference between painterly and linear etc. are events in my experience as great. thrilling, moving and determining as was the moment on May 16, 1971, when I saw my first child be born, heard his mother say "Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby" and reach for him.

As we entered Berlin's Boda Museum one day the German artist Lothar Baumgarten said, "Be careful. You're going to faint."

An hour or so later I saw Roger van der Weyden's "Descent from the Cross" & had to hold on to Lothar to keep from fainting.

When I first saw Piero's unfinished Nativity in London, I had to stay conscious long enough to find the men's room. lock myself into a stall & almost faint, & sob for 30 minutes.

The first time I read an ornate line from Hamlet I almost fainted at the discovery that anyone could use language that way. I was fifteen.

At this moment a thumbnail portrait of Kafa stares down at me from the back cover of a paperback The Trial. I tore it from the book so that I'd always have Kafka's picture with me. I was thirteen & had never read a book so powerful.

When my nephew, then 26 and a world-class silversmith, first saw the Metrolitan's great Courbet Nu_e (unclothed person) with a Parrot he studied it, speechless and motionless, for 30 minutes then said to me "Now that I know people have dreamed dreams like this and have expressed them in forms like these I also know that I never again have to be afraid of being lonely."

It's experiences and feelings like these that, living in me for decades as though I were experiencing and reeling them for the first time, that have led to my knowledge, which is also not, to me, knowledge as a scholar or a pedant defines it. It is knowledge like my knowledge of my desire for the woman I love, when I feel it.

And you accuse me of pomposity and self importance.

What are we if not our experiences and our feelings?

Then why do you tell me that by sharing the fruit of my deepest life experiences and feelings I'm being pompous and self important?

When I wrote to Mr Webster about linear and painterly and abstraction I was sharing the fruit of my deepest experiences of and feelings and knowledge about art with him.

When my Parisian friend Genevieve was friends with a French Formula 1 driver she visited him at his track a few days before a Gramd Prix & he let her drive the car by herself once around the track. It was, she said, one of the deepest most thrilling most transporting most other-worldly experiences of her life.

Was she pompous and self important to share this experience with me because it wasn't even work, either visual or emotional? Because she didn't make a picture of it?

I'm sure the Piero Nativity is as awesome in its way as a Formula 1 car is in its way

But you seem to think that if I share experience of my own as deep as was Genevieve's drive around the track I'm being pompus & self important.

You also seem to think sharing knowledge is self importance.

But "Knowledge," as my friend Nana ...The Fourth (in Ghana means "Chief" but I can't disclose his royal name here), who is king of an area about a third of the size of Rhode Island in the interior region of the Ashanti tribe, always reminds me "Knowlege is sweet"

So I'll keep sharing it here even though you think that sharing sweetness with others is pompous.

Well, that's the end of the ramble.

ASHER, THIS IS NOT AN ESSAY. THIS IS A LETTER AND ACCORDING TO THE 2ND CENTURY BC RHETORICIAN DIONYSIUS, A LETTER IS "A GIFT FROM ONE FRIEND TO ANOTHER," IN THIS CASE, FROM ME TO MY FRIEND MR KEN TANAKA.

It is also medium tempo jazz in a meditative mood

Happy Trails to You

yrs

ben

www.benlifson.com

[Ben Lifson]

Mr Tanaka, I don't like to blow my own horn. I really don't. None of what I wrote to Mr Webster was for that. It was really to give some credentials to back up what I was saying about art with some career experience that kind of demonstrates that I do kind of know what I was talking about.

But since you brought my teaching into the discussion and, in a way, treated it ... Well, let's just say not as respectfully as you might have...

I think it's time for me to blow my own horn a little and tell you what my teaching can do.

I'm speaking now of my teaching of photography, to private students who find me at my website


www.benlfison.com

and enter into the mentoring situation described therein.

Recently, I had reason to be very proud of a student and of my work with him.

The student is Carl Socolow, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Just under a year ago Mr Socolow received word from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation that he was one of 2006's recipients of the Guggenheim Fellowship in photography.

Only three other photographers received this, the most prestigious award in American arts and letters and, I might add, the most lucrative. I don't know how much Mr Socolow received but I do know that most 2006 Guggenheim Fellows in every category from Art to Zoology received about $45,000 each.

That's more than each Chicago Bears team member who played in the 2007 Super Bowl received for his participation in that game.

The interesting thing about Mr Socolow's receiving the grant is that he never had any formal study at high school or university level in the art of photography (i.e. studio art), in the history or criticism of photography, in studio art of any other kind (painting, drawing, etc.) or in art history, criticism, theory and appreciation. He was an English lit major in college and a self-taught photojournalist, then commercial photographer in Harrisburg.

I was his only teacher in the art, history, criticism and theory of photographer and his only guide to painting, drawing, print making, etc., their making, their history, their theory...

When he began studying with me he was in his late forties, a generalist commercial photographer.

Four years later of intense but intermittent study with me and only with me he was one of the four photographers in the world that the Guggenheim Foundation deemed a good enough artist to be awarded this prestigious and highly coveted grant.

There are other success stories. After a little over a year's study with me, my former student Gilbert Plantinga, of New Paltz, New York, receoved the very first grant he had ever applied for, which also carried with it the purchase of a number of prints, now in that foundation's collection.

After a year's study with me, after which she (rightly) felt she should go on without me (as my philosophy of teaching hopes every student will feel ASAP), the photographer Brita Lomba, of Cape Town, South Africa, is talking to important South African galleries about an exhibition and selling her pictures privately, doing quite well.

Asher did say one of our goals here is to discover ways of selling our work, yes?

After only a few months' study with me, after which he too went off on his own, my former student Dimitris Kris, of Athens, Greece, started exhibiting in Athens, to good success. Before he started with me he wasn't technically or esthetically as good as Mr Webster etc etc. But after only a few months with me he captured the attention and the support of strong Athens galleries.

As for my university teaching, at Yale, Harvard, etc...

One of my former Harvard students and two of my former Yale students have also received Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. One of my former Yale students is now Chairman of the Photography Department at a prestigious East Coast art school Another is currently teaching photography at Smith College and has suddenly gotten important critics interested in her work, which she, the critic, will soon be showing to important New York dealers.

One of my first graduate students at the Califronai Institute of the Art has had a one person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

I could go on.
'
So please, in the future,

Do not say things about my teaching like those you just did

And when you read my longish comments about a picture or a word by another member here, my longish rambling comments that often talk about myself, Please, Please, Mr Tanaka, think twice before you write to say that I'm pompous or self-important when it is sharing ideas in the way and of the kind that you read in my letter to Mr Webster, and knowledge, let's not forget knowledge...

When you see me sharing ideas feelings experience and knowledge of the kind(s) and in the way(s) that you read in my letter to Mr Webster,

and which led in the past to my students distinguishing themsleves so prominently in the world of photography of photography grants and (Asher again) photography sales

(Look up the sale history of my former student Joseph Bartscherer, the prices his pictures get, which are now, I belive -- because i don't follow -- in the 10s of Thousands of dollars...

Joseph Bartscherer who was just honored by an important one person exhibition in Paris

was my undergraduate student at Harvard

and because of both my teaching and my influence was able to get accepted as a graduate student, at the important and highly influential Nova Scotia College of Art and Desing, Halifax

accepted there even tho he applied about 4 days before graduating from Harvard, that is, 5 months after Nova Scotia College of Art and Design's application had passed

because I picked up the telephone and talked to the photography department chairman there

urging him to consider Josphe's application

Which he did because the phone call came from me

)))

The next time you read things like what I said to Mr Webster and the way I said them

As yourself

Please

Think twice and ask yourself


"Is this guy just being pompous and self important, sounding off like this. Or does he know what he's talking about and has it done other photographers any good at all?"

I think you now know that it's done a lot of photographers a great deal of good including getting them good sales at terrifically high prices

Tens of thousands of dollars for one picture isn't bad, you know, even these days.

Tens of thousands of dollars.

One of my former graduate students just got tens of thousands of dollars from a big corporation just for letting them USE seven of her l;ittle point and shoot digital pictures in some website series, I think, or advertising campaing, they['re running on photography

Point and shoot digital pictures. Little ones. Not good resolution. Seven of them. Tens of thousands of dollars just for the use of them, not even for the purchase.

Do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how to teach?

NOT ONE OF MY STUDENTS MAKES PICTURES THAT LOOK ANYTHING LIKE MINE.

I teach them about THEIR ART not my opinions of what photography is or shold be.

I look for their strengths as visual artists. I teach them how to develop those strengths.

They learn.

We say good bye.

And they go on to get fabulous fellowships, big print sales, one person exhibitions in Europe, tens of thousands of dollars a picture, university posts, get taken on by some of the most internationally powerful art galleries in the West

In other words, I have no definition of the right and the wrong kind of photograpny.

There is only the good and powerful photography within each student I take on.

I see it where they don't.

I bring it to their attention.

They look and wonder.

Then we go to museums and look at paintings

Suddenly they see

All pictures are strong for the same reason

"What I'm doing" they say to themselves, "is just another individual application of those principles. Just another new style. But it's mine. It's all mine. No one else's."

Then they turn to me.

"Is it good?"

"It's better than good."

"But it's so rough, so undeveloped."

"That's because you're just starting at it."

"But I've been taking pictures for 20 years."

"Yes and you've been making these really tough individual original verry good and possibly great pictures for 20 years but you've been calling them mistakes because they don't look like Ansel Adams' pictures or calendar pictures or National Geographic pictures but you're already better than anyone photographing for National Geographic and as for Ansel Adams, forget him, he coldn't make a picture as good as this one," and I point to a frame on the contact sheet "if he had tried 100 years."

"But i didn't know I was making them. Does that count?"

"Did you make thjem?"

"Yes"

"Then it counts."

Then we work. Then they get Guggenheims and sell their pictures for thousands to tens of thousands of dollars each.

Was bedenken sie, herr Ken Tanaka?

That I'm a fake or a phoney or talking through my hat when I talk about art and photography?

yrs

[Sue Butler]

Hi All,

Most interesting reading and comments.

As a current student of Ben's I must tell you that I am very fortunate to have his wisdom and knowledge to draw on to help my own appreciation of art and my own photography.
When I first emailed Ben to ask to be a student of his I knew nothing of Ben or of art or of appreciating art. I'd just seen an email on another list that had spoken highly of him.

Ben has opened up a whole new world to me. Suddenly taking pictures with my camera, seeing photographs taken by others, paintings on walls, in museums, in books has been eye-opening and fascinating.
Ben has only ever encouraged me to become the photographer I wish to be and to extend myself in the directions I want. I only wish I lived in the US where I could take one of his art appreciation courses and actually meet him.

I appreciate his achievements and knowledge and am thankful to have the chance to be exposed to them.

So, to weigh in on the discussion regarding him 'blowing his own horn' ..... I couldn't disagree more with that comment.

best wishes,
Sue

PS. I love this forum, particularly the Photography as Art one, I'm usually fairly quiet but do read all the messages and enjoy (for the most part).

[Ray West]

Hi Charles,

I know what you mean. Your use of 'painterly' is I guess in line with ones found in the oed definition, at least as in a 1991 edition - 'an adjective 1 a - using paint well, b - characteristic of a painter or painting, 2.(of a painting) lacking clearly defined outlines.'

My jury of one is still out as to where I would place it in my personal view of what constitutes art. I wonder if I would have considered it more artful, if you rotated it 90 degrees, and altered the colours, or carried out some other sort of manipulation, or whatever? As it is, it reminds me of 'basket weave' - a lot of withies around here. Thanks for posting, and 'the dig' ;-)

Best wishes,

Ray

[Ben Lifson]

Dear Mr Tanaka,

Please forgive my hasty reading of your letter.

You said "self focused" not "self important"

If there is a standard by which one's focus on the subject -- here, two terms in art, art terminology, art teaching, etc. -- is indeed focus on the subject and not focus on oneself, please set this standard forth in clear plain words, with examples, together with a good plain clear definition of what is self-focus, with examples (but not from my work, from well known self-focused work, for clearly, if you can say such things as self-focused, one assumes you know what you're talking about. I do, at any rate, and so wish to learn from your experience of self-focused writing that poses as writing focused on a subject.

As for "pseudo-intellectual malarkey", which you claim most of my letter is, let's get down to business now. If I'm writing pseudo-intellectual malarkey I'm most eager to see where and what it is and to learn how to eliminate it from my work. So please, begin by quoting me, analyzing what you quote, show where the "pseudo" comes in, what is not intellectual about what I wrote. Please also show me where, intellectual or not, what I said about art is malarkey. Give me not only your own arguments against what I said but those of established respected art and photography critics and theorists.

As in a duel, you can name your own experts from the long list of acknowledged ones. These, as anyone who calls another writer's work "pseudo-intellectual malarkey" obviously knows, include (but the list is not limited to)

Lessing (especially of The Lacoon)

Diderot (of the Salons)

Coleridge

Wordsworth, of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Walter Pater on both Style and the difference between Romantic and Classical

Arthur C. Danto

Benjamin Buchlo

Hal Foster

Rosalind Kraus

John Coplans' essays

Sergei Eisenstein's lectures on film.

Suzanne K. Langer, especially Feeling and Form

John Berger, especially that early book on Looking (I forget the real title) and those short essays on modern masters in Towards Reality

Vassily Kandinsky, "On the Spiritual in Art"

Leo Steinberg, 'Other Criteria"

Meyer Schapiro, Volume 4 of the collected papers, "Modern Art," plus his two books for Abrams, one on Cezanne the other on Van Gogh

The Goncourt Brothers' essays on 18th Century French Painting and on Japanese Prints

Wolfflin's Principles of Art History

Wollflin's "Classical Art"

E H Gombrich's several volumes on Renaissance art, especially "The Heritage of Apelles" and his beautiful little general book "The Story of Art"

Vasari's The Lives of the Artists

Leon Battista Alberti's "On Painting"

The essays on visual art in Marguerite Yourcenar's "The Dark Brain of Piranesi"

Van Gogh's letters

Gauguin's Tahiti writings

Eugene Fromentin's "The Old Masters"

Varvara Stepanovna

Anything by Malevich

Hazlitt on "One Painting by Poussin"

Marcel Proust on the still lifes of Chardin

Bruce Boice's Artforum essay on "Quality in Painting"

Willem de Kooning's essays, "The Renaissance and Order" and "What Abstract Art Means to Me"

Douglas Crimp

Craig Owens

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Goethe

V S Pritchett

George Meredith's essay on Comedy

Henry James' prefaces to the New York edition of his collected novels and tales

Henry James' late 19th century reviews of his then contemporary English, American and Continental European writers.

(art is art)

Charles Baudelaire's essays on the paintings of the mid-19th-century Paris salons, especially his essays on Delacroix and his diatribe against photography.

Eugene Delacroix's journals.

Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art

John Constables London Letters on Landscape Painting

John Ruskin's Modern Painters and his smaller works on art and architecture

Marcel Proust's two essays on two of John Ruskin's essays on French Gothic Cathedral Architecture

Nikolaus Pevsner's "Pioneers of Modern Design" and anything else this important critic of architecture wrote on his subject

Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading

Ezra Pound's literary essays

Ezra Pound's The Spirit of Romance

Marianne Moore's "Predilections"

William Carlos Williams "In the American Grain"

T S Eliot's The Sacred Wood and all other critical essays he wrote

Ford Maddox Ford's "The March of Literature" and all of Ford's occasional critical passages on visual and literary art in "No Enemy", "It Was the Nightengale" and "Provence."

I assume that someone who takes himself as seriously as, and feels he has the authority, to call a working critic's work "pseudo-intellectual malarkey" is familiar, as I am, with the above named 15-20th centuries' major and minor landmarks and monuments of the criticism of art. Also Montale and other Italians. Also Stendhal's occasional critical works. I'm also sure that someone who has so set himself up as an intellectual worker who can call another intellectual worker's work "pseudo-intellectual malarkey" can certainly extend the list above by tens if not scores or even hundreds of names and or works. So let's get down to business, OK? And have a really good time at the kind of knock down drag out damned be he that first cries Hold, enough argument about art, intellectual work, argument itself, the meaning of words, the precision or lack therof with which either you or I a) use words b) use art terms c) practice dialectice... The kind of good old intellectual warfare that we used to delight in both here and abroad.

I got my first taste of this when I was 17 and, in a Paris bar near the Cite Universite, listened to a black Americaan expatriate medical student of about 35 go head to head and horn to horn with a younger American (but not expatriate) student, of French literature, over certain matters of race. The older man mad wiped the floor with the younger one who was left with his tongue hanging out and nothing, but nothing to say. Upon which the older man, kindly, in a brotherly way, as the old should behave toward the young, especially when they've given them a lesson in dialectic, said,

You see, brother

It was great, you know, for me, a 17 yr old white kid from a lily white high school in a lily white neighborhood of Minneapolis hear a 35 year old black man call a younger white man "brother"... It taught me a lot

You see, brother,

and he sounded like a white Harvard professor giving a white rich student a mild and oh, so civilized and oh, so respectful and even -- because Harvard students have much, much more money than Harvard professors -- deferential reprimeand for some minor infraction of Harvad's social rules

You see brother, in a man's world, when you begin an intellectual argument such as we just had you are, in effect, stepping up to the line of fire. So think about it. If you're going to step up to the line of fire you must have ammunition. You must have lots of ammunition and in addition your ammunition has to be of the right kind. Because

and suddenly his voice changed to that of a Harlem ghetto black hipster street hustler

Because, Jack, if you step up to that line of fire, Jack, and you ain't got no ammunition or aint got the right kind, Jack, I tell you, Jack, I'se Gwine Ta Blast Yo Outta Yo Socks.

as he just had.

So let's go Mr Tanaka let's step up to that line of fire, you on your side with your ammunition and I on my side with mine and let's see if we can't use dialectic and the authority of our respective sources (ammunition) to come to some kind of understanding of where and in what my pseudo intellectual malarkey lies and how to correct it, or, if we can't do that, let's see whose dialectic and ammunition is going to blast whom out of whose socks.

Either way it should be fun.

Happy Trails to You

ben

www.benlifson.com

[Ben Lifson]

Yes, Ray, the OED is right on all counts. But in discussions of art, when we want to be precise, when we say "painterly" we only mean the OED's definition "2.(of a painting) lacking clearly defined outlines.' "

Professionals develop professional terms in order to speak precisely to each other. In art, in discussions between artists, between critics, between curators, between collectors, or any combination of these, "painterly" means only "2.(of a painting) lacking clearly defined outlines.'"

As for the OED's definition

"b - characteristic of a painter or painting"
In professional discussions of art the term for "characteristic of a...painting" is "picturesque" -- well characteristic of a certain kind of painting. As for "characteristic of a painter", in professional discussions of art, among artists, etc. we often use the artist's name and the suffix "-esque"

Thus beginning at the end of World War One, when Picasso turned definitely from Cubism and started in on a somewhat naturalistic style with lines that resembled those of the 19th C French painter Ingres, one spoke of (we still speak of) Picasso's "Ingresque" lines or style.

In many cases it's a clumsy suffix.

Pollock-esque?

Johnsesque (for Jasper Johns)?

Legeresque?

So we tend to say "like Leger"

it's clearer and simpler.

Then there's "-ic"

As in Surrealistic
Realistic
Naturalistic

But these are mostly for styles

One says Rembrandesque
Rubensesque

Maybe Poussinesque

But Henri Cartier-Bresson-esque?

Frankesque? (for Robert Frank)

Hardly.

So.

Painterly, used precisiely in discussions about art, means

"2.(of a painting) lacking clearly defined outlines.' "

Mozart is a linear composer, Beethoven a painterly one.

You see? the term does work in all arts.

Henry James is a painterly writer. Ernest Hemingway is a linear one.

yrs



(PS to Mr Tanaka. The above is not pesudo-intellectual malarkey. First of all, there's nothing intellectual about it, it's just descriptive. It's no more intellectual than saying that in carpentry we call a hammer a hammer and a plane a plane. and that they do different things. Second of all, it's true, as I'm sure someone with your vast knowledge of intellectual discourse and especially of art will agree when you remember what Wollflin and de Tolnay say about the painterly and linear methods and the writing of Henry James in, say, The Golden Bowl and the early short stories of Hemingway and when you remember the differences, in the transitions, between Mozart's King of Prussia Quartets and in Beethoven's Rasumovsky Quartets. Oh, by the way, in my list of critics, as I'm sure you noticed, I forgot to include Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Rosenblum and Charles Olson's important 1950 essay "Projective Verse" -- these and the others in my earlier list are among the critics and thinkers I cut my intellectual and art critical teeth on, so to speak. Which writers and essays did you cut yours on? I'm eager to find out.)

[Edward Bussa]

Perhaps an extended, informative post like Ben's would be out-of-place in most of the other forums, but it seems fairly appropriate in this, "Photography as Art" forum, no?

I know I don't check the front page very often. I use links to the forum and so I don't see the articles list very often... RSS would be very useful for that situation BTW.

I am ignorant with regards to art history and I do appreciate Ben sharing his knowledge.

[Edward Bussa]

The ripplies in the water remind me of hammered or carved metal...

[Ray West]

Hi Ben,

My reply was addressed to Charles. I was saying that 'I know' what he meant by 'painterly'. Instead of calling on a list of dead people to support my view, I merely quoted the oed. I have no interest in either accepting or rejecting your 'professional art' interpretation of the word, at least not for the moment, it being 4am here....

I am not a professional artist, I'm not sure if Charles is. I personally have difficulties with photography and art in general. I do not have a particular interest in classifying my knowledge any further in that direction, being more interested in getting some sleep - maybe later?

Best wishes,

Ray

[Charles L Webster]

-snip-

My jury of one is still out as to where I would place it in my personal view of what constitutes art. I wonder if I would have considered it more artful, if you rotated it 90 degrees, and altered the colours, or carried out some other sort of manipulation, or whatever?

But that would be your picture Ray, not mine. I had a similar discussion with a friend who is a professional artist (whatever that means). I showed him a picture I had taken of a local museum that contrasted the hard lines of the building with the soft curve of a street lamp (http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=4332832). He suggested manipulating the colors and shapes to make a different picture, and I replied that "then it wouldn't be the picture I wanted to make, it would be yours."

I'm glad you liked my picture, thanks for the comment.

[Ben Lifson]

Absolutely right! Now we're talking! Mr Bussa has put his finger right on one of the main things art can do: show us the resemblances among forms in nature, that properties and qaulities residing in one kind of thing reside in another klind of thing but in different ways, different forms. Show unity and integration where we often think we see only disunity and disintegration. "...only connect!" wrote E M Forster in the epigraph of Howard's End. Only connect. only sdhow us that we are not alone in the universe that we are connected to all things

When such as I cast off remorse, wrote W B Yeats

but maybe "cast off" is wrong I can't rmember

When such as I cast of remorse
Such a sweetness fills the breast
That we must laugh and we must sing
We are blest by everyting
Everything we look upon is blessed!

When a photograph of water shows us water's likeness to metal's and metal's to water's and the integrative power or faculty of the eye and imagination to see such things and feel them

that simple photograph is in the realm of art

My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky!
So was it when I was a boy
So is it now I am a man
So be it when I grow old
Or let me die!

The Child is Father to the Man
And I would wish my days to be
Bound each to each in natural piety

Wordsworth

It's that "bound each to each" that the water picture achieves

Wordsworth would have understood and loved the picture, I think...

Yes.

Simple, direct, modest, humble even, yet concentrated and in its own quiet way full of gusto
a gusto for life
a gusto for appearances
a gusto for light
a gusto for surfaces
gusto in the sense of zestful enjoyment of
gusto in the sense of "taste in"

What a picture!

You're on your way.

Don't stop.

Forget the intellectual reasons you thought made you make the picture like that
follow your heart and eye

And you too, Mr Bussa, follow YOUR heart and eye to good pictures like this, trust to your heart and eye and pretty soon you'll start making pictures like this

they won't look anything like the water gold etcv

thery'll look like your pictures

that you've never seen before except in your dreams

but you wake up without remembering them
so they're locked, still, in wish
they need to come out into will
but they will
if you keep following your heart

p.s. to both

it ain't quite that easy
I forgot to tell you that you've got to take about 200 a day if you want to have any hope of being good

Since February I've made 20,000 expsoures for one project alone out of which so far I see only about 100 pictures

which is a very, very good yield for the kind of project it is

Robert Frank shot The Americans in ONLY 750 some rolls of tri-X 36 exposures.

ONLY 750 some rolls yielded those 84 or so pictures.

When most serious ambitious photographers hear that

they say

No! Impossible! ONLY 750 rolls? It can't be done. Someone must have lost count. 750 rolls? Are you kidding. Maybe the angel Raphael came down from heaven and aimed his camera for him.

Remember, when Diane Arbus was on a panel discussion about portraiture,. with Irving Penn on her left and Richard Avedon on her right, they talked and talked and for the first 45 minutes she said nothing.

"Diane," said Bob Adleman, the moderator, from whom I heard this story when I was his darkroom assistant batting out 300 reproduction prints in 6 hours every day and 2000 contact sheets in six hours every night

Diane, Bob said, You've been awfully silent. Do you have anything to add?

All I can say, Arbus answered, is that I wish I had Mr Penn's and Mr Avedon's technique. Barring that, I wish I could point their cameras for them.

And she was right about the second

But not having either Penn's or Avedon's smooth flawless technique was part of what made her art so great and not having the visual intelligence that enabled her to point her cameras as she did is part of what makes Penn's and Avedon's rather good but essentially weak decorative art essentially ephemeral.

Keep up the good work you guys. You're aiming and feeling the way one has to if art is to get made.

Happy Trails to You

ben

www.benlifson.com

[Asher Kelman]

Well, Charles,

Other Americans go out with stick and skillfully pick up signals from the earth and point to water. When workers toil aceess to water, we are amazed.

Now your one picture brings a torrent of art history and nuances that few have witnessed?

More astounding is that it was a picture of an illusion! There was of course no sunset in the water!

Still, your wizardry has brought out a lot about what we have.

1. A diverse community

2. Feelings

3. Manners in spite of feeling provoked

4. Ability to self-balance with censorship.

I'm sort of jealous!

I posted a picture of the daughter of a street preacher and received not a single response! Here we have enough to start someone with ambiton and dedication on a path to a guggenheim Scholarship.

Am I joking? No.

Ben is one of our special assets. However, he comes in the package he comes in not made to measure for one's sensitivites. Now there are orthers who know a lot too but refuse to share. Here we are surpised to get such a lot.

I'd always go for more.


Bird On The Wire by Leonard Cohen the Canadian poet, songwriter, singer and cultural icon.

http://www.openphotographyforums.com/2007_OPF_AK/OPF20072/Leonard_Cohen©.jpg

Like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
Like a worm on a hook,
like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee.
If I, if I have been unkind,
I hope that you can just let it go by
If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you.

Like a baby, stillborn,
like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.
But I swear by this song
and by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee.
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
he said to me, "You must not ask for so much."
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
she cried to me, "Hey, why not ask for more?"

Oh like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

Here, we all have to be prepared for things coming out more strange than we expect because we are dealing with so many characters with different expectations, backgrounds and motivations.

We just need to accomodate the post in one's mind. Ben's too! I'll read every sentence and each reference is important to me. Others may skim through it and get what they want.

I can assure you that Ben's ramblings are like those hills, there's gold there!

Now for you, Charles, who wont remember your picture now? Thousands of people around the world already know your picture of the illusion of a partial sunset, is related to a discussion on "What is painterly and what is abstact art"

Now I go back to your timidly placed original description:


I saw the "painterly" effect and was struck by the abstraction. Several of my other photos explore this "reflection" theme and I think this is one of the more successful.

Well, is it painterly? Using the Clintonism, "that depends what you mean by" "painterly"?

Did Charles mean painterly as used by in the skilled-use sense of the art-critique term painterly. I don't think so. Sure there are terms one expects to have standardized meanings to allow discussions to be based on a common language. Charles, however, makes no pretense of such knowledge. He is just using the language colloquially.

He even was cautious, so he wrote "painterly", which to me indicated that it seemed, because of its indistinct forms, painterly, even though it may not in fact be painterly!

Still the term painterly and the term abstraction seemed to demand correction for Ben. This is no reflection on Charles, even though it seems like a rebuke, it really isn't!

Now in this case, how can one expect an academic to hold back?

I can only finish by relating an incident at our table when I asked someone to pass the horseradish to complement my roast beef.

The response was an informed discourse on the cultivation of the herb, the discovery of its enzymatic effect on oxidation reactions and why it should be served on Passover with fish. At the point I got up and yelled at him, "Pass the bloody horseraddish, that's all I want; the bloody horseraddish!"

Now after a most sumptuous meal the guest was so aplogetic. I reassured him that actually I was very interested in the plant and all it phytochemicals, but I was salivating for the extra sensation from the first line of enjoyment and pleasure, the taste buds iin my mouth!

Here Charles just wanted the horseradish!

Charles shouldn't feel bushwacked. Rather there's someone who know more about art than most of us sharing in his own way!

I'd like to see "the letters" as articles with my own "abstractions" and "painterly" images put in Ben's line of fire instead!

Charles, do not let all this long-winded discourse detract from your contributions.

Asher

[Charles L Webster]

Yeah, seems that my pictures have a way of provoking deeper discussions than I intend. Though, frankly I'd be happy with a few comments that are directly germane to my picture.

Don't worry, the academics can keep discoursing to their hearts content while I'm making pictures. I don't need words to make pictures.

BTW, when I used "painterly," I used it knowing the correct meaning -- that of "2.(of a painting) lacking clearly defined outlines." And when I used "abstract" I used the common definition of "disassociated from any specific instance." I have been a professional writer for 25 years, I do not use words imprecisely.

I don't need to cite famous names to support my work. My pictures stand, or fall on their own merit.

[Ray West]

Hi Charles,

But that would be your picture Ray, not mine. I had a similar discussion with a friend who is a professional artist (whatever that means). I showed him a picture I had taken of a local museum that contrasted the hard lines of the building with the soft curve of a street lamp (http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=4332832) (http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=4332832%29). He suggested manipulating the colors and shapes to make a different picture, and I replied that "then it wouldn't be the picture I wanted to make, it would be yours."

I'm glad you liked my picture, thanks for the comment.

I wasn't trying to ask you to alter the image to suit me, I was asking a question of myself, as to how I would have thought of it if you had extracted more abstraction, so to speak.

It is odd, to the way I think, that it needed the horizon straightening. On the one hand I want randomness, but it has to be confined to our limits. But, if you tilt the horizon, it becomes a gimmick. btw, there is a problem at the moment with the link you quoted.

Best wishes,

Ray

[Asher Kelman]

Now this thread is purely for discussion of the nature of abstract and painterly in art and expressed in photography. We'd like to see actual examples if at all possible!

Especially I'd like to see work of great photographers!

Place the url of the picture beetween and so we can see it in the post if you have a great example.

I'm still learning!

Thanks all,

Asher

[Charles L Webster]

Thanks for your reply Ray. I see the problem with the link, the closing parenthesis is included, which breaks it. Try this
http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=4332832

[Ray West]

Hi Charles,

Link works fine, now. A really interesting photo, to my mind. If you want to risk? posting it on opf, I'm sure we can find things to say about it.

Since my comment re basket weave seems to have been ignored in general, do you folk want an image, or even an image of a withe or three? Here, or elsewhere? Is it too obvious, or obscure?

Best wishes,

Ray

[Asher Kelman]

Please post any comments in Charles Webster's picture here (http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2315).

Only discuss the use of Painterly and Abstract in art and photography! Please, please, help me now!

I'm trying to separate two discussions which became mixed up.

Asher

Ray, when you get to the other thread, kindly explain again the basket reference, since I got lost on that one!

[Sue Butler]

I would love some examples of 'painterly' and 'abstract' pictures.
As a learner I'd find it most helpful.
Or maybe a link where I could go and view some pictures.

regards,
Sue

[Ken Tanaka]

In the spirit of the discussion I'll offer four of my own images selected from a nearly completed (but not yet shown) project titled "Season 4". The concept of this work is to capture a series of visual vignettes that convey a sense of a mostly urban winter. Some of the work's current 40+ images are aerial, others are very terrestrial. But all were recorded and selected to convey the winter experience in a rather abstracted manner.

Let's start from the air:
http://www.pbase.com/tanakak/image/75067770.jpg

This image offers a very modest nod and homage to the wonderful photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto whose work I greatly admire. (I refer here to Ishimoto's series of b&w images of snow-dusted cars parked on Chicago streets from 1949-1950.)
http://www.pbase.com/tanakak/image/75069570.jpg

This image is titled "Winter Thrushes".
http://www.pbase.com/tanakak/image/70006748.jpg

Finally, this image of decomposing ice on the Chicago River.
http://www.pbase.com/tanakak/image/75067130.jpg

Today, with such a plethora of digital image manipulation technology, creating interpretive abstractions of subjects is nearly push-button simple. And, certainly, such exercises can be fun. But at least to me it's far more challenging, more frustrating, but ultimately more rewarding to attempt to collect essential visual abstractions of a theme simply in the frame. I have been pursuing several such projects for several years and they can really challenge one's skills and imagination.

[Charles L Webster]

This image is certainly not painterly, nor is it abstract by Ben's definition. But most people accept it as an abstraction.


Shot with the Sigma 70-300 @ 263mm f16 1/125 ISO 200 Canon Digital Rebel

http://gallery.photo.net/photo/4202132-lg.jpg

I was asked by my client to make a picture of the building in which they have offices, but with trolley wires, a freeway overpass, street trees, etc. I could not get anything that expressed the unique character of their building until I was leaving the location, and saw the windows of my building reflected in the windows of the building across the parking lot. This was the result. The green color of the window frame is not particularly accurate, I was more interested in making the white of my building look correct when reflected in the blueish glass of the other.

[Ken Tanaka]

I think this is a terrific image, Charles. It's open to a great deal of interpretations and offers both the eye and the imagination something of interest. A very creative solution to the problem.

[Ben Lifson]

Asher

I don't have any URLs so I can' send pictures as you wish

Until recently there have been only a handful of photographs that have even come close to approximiating the conditions of an abstract picture. Only a few come immediately to my mind right now. William Henry Fox Talbot's picture of pine needles (c. 1840); August Salzmann's photograph of an ancient Jerusalem wall; a few from Egypt by J.B. Greene (1850s), one Baldus, and Brett Weston's (1940s?) photograph of a broken window in what looks to be an abandoned house.

"Close" becaus when you look at them carefully you can see the subject -- the needles in Talbot's picture, the dust, glass, wood etc. in Weston's.

Recently, the Hartfor, CT photographer Ellen Carey became the first photographer, I think, to have made truly abstract photographs that are at once truly abstract (the colors, lines, tones, etc refer only to themselves) and are truly photography (depictions of a concrete 3-dimensional object in front of her camera at the time of exposure.) I wrote about them in my last article for my Making Pictures column on Michael Tapes rawworkflow.com website. There you can see many examples. Or you can look up Ellen's website. Ellen Carey. I don't know the address.

The picture of the water is not abstract and it lies somewhere along the boundary of painterly and linear.

Asher, I'm not an acadaemic.

Most academics, seeing my resume and watching me teach, would agree with this statement.

yrs`


(direct limk to article in Michael Tapes site is http://www.rawworkflow.com/making_pictures/11/index.html )

[Ben Lifson]

Dear Mr Webster

You have not been reading my definition of abstraction. I myself have no definition of abstraction and certainly no opinion as to what is or is not abstract.

What you have been reading when I wrote that when the means of making a picture (line, light, shape, color, etc>0 refer only to themselves and neither denote nor connote anything in the world we all share is abstract I am merely conveying to you the standard commonplace precise meaning of the word within the discourse of artists and of theorists, critics, historians, collectors and curators of art.

Please read Meyer Schapiro's two essays on abstract art in Volume 4, "Modern Art", of his 4 or 5 volume edition of his collected writings, published by George Braziller.

Schapiro is universally recognized as one of the greatest art historians and writers on art of the 20th Century. Some would say The Greatest.

Don't worry about his being too academic. He was highly intelligent. Therefore, his writing conveys his intelligence. It is intelligent writing. But it is also clear, plain and accessible. Not academic writing at all.

Thrilling writing, actually. His essay on Cezanne's still lifes, with its 5-page interlude on the nature of still life pictures temselves, always thrills and inspires me so much that I leave it unread, grab my camera and go out to see if I can't make a still life worthy of the name.

yrr

[Angela Weil]

Ken, I especially like the aerial image of the lakefront. You really captured the quiet atmosphere of a winter day here. The absence of any noticeable color reinforces that impression.
The thrushes ring a note, because I have an image that is almost identical, taken from my window (in Heidelberg, not in Chicago) and made for the same reason: The seasonally recurring view signifies a particular mood of winter.
Stretch Limo and Ice both do not speak to me as strongly.
As an aside: I don't want to go into the discussion of the nature of abstractions, because I don't 'tick' that way. I react emotionally to images regardless of how they might be classified.

Angela

[John_Nevill]

Can this be considered Abstract?

http://www.eos-images.com/images/Vegetation.jpg

EOS 20D & EF100mm, f4.5 - 1/400sec - ISO200

[Charles L Webster]

Dear Mr Webster

You have not been reading my definition of abstraction. I myself have no definition of abstraction and certainly no opinion as to what is or is not abstract.

-snip-

When I referred to "Ben's definition" I clearly meant "the definition advocated by Ben in his previous posts." I would not attribute such a definition to you intentionally.

As for pursuing the subject through further reading, I'd rather spend my time shooting, because I believe as you do that one becomes a better photographer by shooting every day.

[Ken Tanaka]

The Wikipedia definition of "Abstract" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_art).

An accompanying example by Kazmir Malevich. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Black_Square.jpg) Although this is a painting I actually have several photos very similar to this, taken accidentally with my lens cap attached.

I actually don't mean to seem like an urchin with a complete lack of aesthetic erudition; the truth is actually quite the contrary. But categorical debates (modernist, post-modernist, pictorial, abstract, constructivist, et.al.) are somewhat pointless outside of the academic world. The true primary joy of all art forms exists, as Charles suggested, in their creation. That's what distinguishes photography from nearly all other media; nearly anyone can give it a go.

I'll leave categorization to Ben, as he seems to have a good grasp on such matters. Personally, I'm enjoying the stream of images that folks are beginning to submit under this thread's banner. Let's keep it flowing!

p.s. Thanks very much, Angela. If it's not being too forward <g> I'd love to see your "thrushes" if they're handy.

[Asher Kelman]

The true primary joy of all art forms exists, as Charles suggested, in their creation. That's what distinguishes photography from nearly all other media; nearly anyone can give it a go.


Yes, Ken, everyone can "have a go" but like poetry and song there's so much more than the democratic access to having a voice.

The true primary joy of all art forms exists, as Charles suggested, in their creation. My definition of this would be a sense of struggle, labor leading to a climax and I'd express it thus:

The true primary joy of art is an itterative creative experience which culminates in feeling emotions, thoughts and consequences and being satisfied that one has embedded in the physical form all that you intend and more to be discovered in the future.

Asher

[Charles L Webster]

Can this be considered Abstract?

-image snipped-

EOS 20D & EF100mm, f4.5 - 1/400sec - ISO200

According to the definitions cited by Ben, no because there are identifiable elements. According to common non-art world usage of the word, I would say "Yes, definitely" because it removes the image from it's relationship with the original object.

Nice picture by the way, I really like the quality of the color in the background, blurred but still intense.

[Ben Lifson]

No, the picture is not abstract. The forms are representative of leaves, etc.

As for

"common non-art world usage of the word, " abstractiion or of any word, why bother? We're talking about pictures here and there are precise words for their various elements.

Which would you rather your auto-mechanic say to the parts store when ordering something for your car?

"You know, that thingma-bubby that does something for getting the fuel to the whatsis where it gets burned?"

(which could be a fuel pump, you know, or a fuel filter)

Or "A Fuel Injector AX-09B13"

Or (if it's an older car) "A Cabeurabor, V8-1260." No, not V-6. V8. Right. Rebuilt? No, don't you have a new one in stock? A new one then for sure."

Knowing the terms is only one step. Knowing them and making a lot of pictures is only another step. A third and very important step is looking at a lot of abstract pictures (paintings, drawings, prints: there are almost no abstract photograps) and figuring out how they work.

Aaron Siskind did this with his friend Franz Kline's abstract paintings and even though Siskind made almost no abstract photographs he certainly did see that the success of Kine's pictured depended considerably on surface -- on a sense of raised surface here, of depressed surface there -- and he, Siskind, certainly did learn how to give the illusion of the same kinds of surfaces in his photographs.

But to do this he had to respect the physical nature of the bits of paper, the scored concrete, the grain in the wood, the peeling paint, that gave this roughj marvelous surface to the stretches of walls he photographed.

Because peeling paint and torm paper etc. remained themselves in Siskind's pictures the pictures themselves can't ever be called abstract.

Better person to study is Minor White.

Asher, teach me how to import pictures into these windows.


I'll show you some of the very few abstract photographs that existed before Ellen Carey made the great break through.

yyrs

ben

www.belifson.com

(Andre Keresz' distorted "unclothed people" aren't abstract. Pablo Picasso's Cubist portraits aren't abstract. Not in art temrs.

Why even bother to make pictures if one wants to remain ignorant of the terms by which pictures are discussed and taught? Light grey to text added to indicate this can be interpreted as derogatory and is not in line with OPF policy. Asher

[Sue Butler]

In reply to Ben's comment on Minor White.......

Yes, he was amazing ...... how he saw things.
I mean, if you didn't know from the caption where and what this was, would you actually know??
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/W/white/white_capitol_reef.html

I really, really like his and Aaron Siskund's work.

cheers,
Sue

[Charles L Webster]

-major snippage-

Why even bother to make pictures if one wants to remain ignorant of the terms by which pictures are discussed and taught?

Because I don't care to talk about pictures, I care to make them and look at them.

Ben, I do not dispute the necessity for having precise terminology to discuss/describe things. I am a technical writer by trade and without precision of meaning and terminology my work would be worthless. But, I do not teach art, nor do I claim to be an art critic, so I have little need of such precision of words to describe my, or others, art. I do not dispute your need for such terms, I only dispute my need for them.

Let's agree that I am, and shall remain, ignorant of the correct vocabulary to precisely describe art. I am similarly ignorant of the correct vocabulary to describe geology, architecture, and many other fields of endeavor.

I do not feel any need to describe my pictures in words, that would be like "dancing about architecture." If my pictures evoke an emotion in my viewer, I am satisfied, and Asher's "arc of intent" has been completed. All else is after the fact. Words do not figure into my seeing of a picture, my capture of that image, or my satisfaction with that image.

[Text added after some consideration] I doubt that Ansel Adams, Minor White, Andre Kertez, or most other "great" photographers could have spoken about their work using any precise terminology either.

I apologize if I offended you in some manner by using the incorrect terminology when describing my picture. I ask only that you look at my picture and experience whatever emotion it stimulates.

Thus, I end my participation in this discussion

[Ken Tanaka]

Why even bother to make pictures if one wants to remain ignorant of the terms by which pictures are discussed and taught?

Ben: I actually am not "ignorant of the terms". I have had the great fortune to get a wonderful education in art as a young man. Today as a not-so-young man who loves photography's practice and history I have the good fortune to have access to a few of the largest and deepest photography collections in the world and, more importantly, to a few of the finest art and photographic scholars and curators in the world. Not one of these folks, not one, would ever utter such a condescending jet of vitriol as that. I think you've let your slip show.

I, too, am finished here.

[Asher Kelman]

I'm going to do something I don't do, and that is close this thread, as least for now to allow us to learn some lessons.

I had moved the essence (http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2315) of the thread dealing with the actual painting and what was left was to be just the discussion of terminology and styles. I'll revisit this 5th of March, all being well!

Asher

[Ben Lifson]

for my recent bellicose postings. A few hours after the last one of Thursday I called my upstairs neighbor who came down and rushed me to the hospital, emergency room: high fever etc etc. Pneumonia, 2 days' stay. Home now, awake some of the time, I think back to those postings and if it weren't for the antibiotics lined up at my sink and the extreme drowsiness I'd be asking "What got into me?" Whatever it was in addition to the pneumonia made my neighbor think I was going mad when he first walked in the door and all the time he was with me in the emergency room, while I was answering intake questions, he kept saying "Calm down. Play their game. Tell it to them the way they want to know. Stop this fighting with them." So I guess those contentious postings were like warm up exercises to something which, at 102.9 degrees farenheit, pushed me past the boundary of politness and into the land of belligerence. I am truly sorry for my harshness here and for any hurt feelings it might have caused.

yrs

ben

[Nicolas Claris]

Bonjour Ben

even if i did not participate to the debate at OPF you're talking about I felt a little concerned about the tone used…

Even, obviously, still in bad health situation, you found the courage and the strenth to go to your computer and post here your apologies.

This is the talent of the great men (another "Grand Homme" Asher ;-).

This is largely fair enough for me as far as I'm concerned and I sincerely hope the best to you and that you'll recover soon a very and durable good health.

I do hope that all other members, specially the ones involved in that debate will feel the same as me and won't blame you.

BTW, you may thank your neighbor too !

Take care

[Asher Kelman]

Hi Ben,

Welcome back from Hades! sometimes we miss Dante's sign on the gates as we descend the steps into the levels of the damned!

I myself still enjoyed every word you wrote apart from the several nasty phrases that caused grief. We learn such a lot from you even when you're temperature is high! Now I will cancel my prescription for sedatives for myself, Charles and Ken!

We value your participation in this very unique personal forum.

This is a nurturing place where we self-balance. Each of us is on a high-wire way above the crowd and we have to make sure that the guy up there does not fall!

Asher

[Charles L Webster]

Thanks for the apology Ben, I was a bit concerned. I have had similar episodes in which high fever made me go "right round the bend" for no apparent reason. It isn't pleasant to look back on the resulting chaos.

I too look forward to reading your posts and learning from you.

I hope you are feeling better soon.

Best wishes,

[Ray West]

With Asher's permission, this thread is being reopened.

Hi Ben,

I knew you had been ill, you mentioned it a few days ago, sorry you got worse, glad you're getting better ;-)

To post images, you have to link to them from another hosting site. You can use the little icon at the top of the reply form, that looks like an envelope with a couple of mountains (I guess its an icon for an image) then paste your url into the pop-up text box. I would be interested in a picture of an "A Fuel Injector AX-09B13".... or even what you think it may look like. ;-)

Best wishes,

Ray

[Asher Kelman]

Here's my question,

When someone uses a painterly style with indistinct borders or abstract with little claimed or no apparent reference to real objects where do think the creativity is occuring? Is it in the head then expressed or is the work on the canvas, the film enlarger of the computer screen, then discovered, appreciated and owned bt the artist? Where does it occur?

Does a person think in terms of painterly or abstract, or rather experiment with forms that appear when they spatter inks or throw sand on to glue and see if they like what sticks?

IOW where is the work done? Internally and expressed or externally and then selected as good or not?

Asher

[Ray West]

I would imagine different folk would do it differently. if working with paint, then generally you start from a blank canvas and work towards the final image. There is no need to paint a detailed tree, then convert it to blue and red splodges - just go straight to the splodges.

If you are using photography, then I guess you start with a photo of a tree, and remove detail, to get to the splodges. What puzzles me is how you tell an abstract rose is not an abstract lettuce, or is it given, say a numeric title, so that no clue of its origins are suggested? How far can you go with this, before it gets silly? Is this where the million monkeys could excel?

Best wishes,

Ray

[Ken Tanaka]

That sounds like quite a brush with eternity that you've experienced, Ben. I am glad to read that you were able to get treatment promptly. Thank goodness for kind neighbors.

No really hard feelings here. Just please take care of yourself. Recovery from pneumonia can take longer than you might think.

[Sue Butler]

This subject intrigues me.

The definition 'abstract art' from my Concise Dictionary of Art and Artists is as follows:
"Art that does not depict recognizable scenes or objects but instead is made up of forms and colours that exist for their own expressive sake."

I couldn't find anything under 'painterly'. So I'm not sure how that is expressed.
Also what Ben means by 'plastic'?
Perhaps Ben could help us out here.

Here is an essay by Ben on Abstraction.
http://www.rawworkflow.com/making_pictures/index.html
He explains how something can be abstract and yet can also represent something of reality. He shows pictures which explain what he means.

I'm still learning all these things and having pictures that help to explain, I find extremely good.

Just my thoughts.

regards,
Sue

[Asher Kelman]

Sue, thanks for the reference.

What I'm wondering is whether we conceive of the image in our mind and then make it or work with the tools we have (camera, photoshop or paints and then build it with no reference to a preconceived mental image, rather we are just exploring and enjoying each blob of paint, each indistinct golden reflection in the water that comes from the RAW developement and use of blur filters.

I hope I have framed my question. I want to understand are we creating the object first in the mind ?or just simply claiming after the fact, that what we do in our playing and experimenting is art?

Asher

[Charles L Webster]

Sue, thanks for the reference.

-snip-

I hope I have framed my question. I want to understand are we creating the object first in the mind ?or just simply claiming after the fact, that what we do in our playing and experimenting is art?

Asher

I can say that I saw the final image in my mind as soon as I saw the reflection on the water. I then spent considerable time trying to find the correct place, focal length, etc. to capture what I had previously envisioned.

But that's because I look specifically for those type of images. Many of my pictures deal with reflections, especially off water, and I am attuned to looking for and recognizing those "picture opportunities"

Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of vision wrt other subjects.

[Asher Kelman]

Thanks Charles what you are telling me of your experience is very helpful. So do you think you train yourself in selecting such scenes, IOW, you become skilled in finding scenes that show that pattern. So we are sort of hunting? Do you think that maybe, you first saw such a reflection and enjoyed it so you are going after the same thrill you had before and this feeds on itself?

I'm learning a lot by this simple questionioning and I trust you telling me what you really think is happening. Any other input will be valued!

Asher

[Sue Butler]

Well Asher,

I guess I'm just starting out with this thinking. I want to be able to create a picture not have it come randomly. I know what I want when I compose a picture but using shadows, parts of forms or creating forms to be an abstract picture, well that's what I'm learning.
I guess it's experiment and experiment (really practising and practising) until you know what you can make the camera do (ie. which lens, which iso, which angle to shoot from and so on) and then you would be creating the picture from the start.
That's my aim anyway. To know right from the start what I want and more or less how to get there.
Of course, many, many times mistakes have made good pictures and it's all a learning process.

regards,
Sue

PS. Randomly taking pictures can work too. Sometimes I get mesmerized by light and shade and get carried away taking pictures. I have an idea of what they will look like but don't know for sure.
I spent an hour photographing shapes on rocks on the weekend. I composed the picture and I knew what I wanted but it's not until you see them bigger that you actually know if they look okay. On an LCD screen is not big enough to know for sure.

It's good to talk here but I feel such a novice!!
Learning all the time and for the rest of my life!!

[Marian Howell]

i'm like <chas> in many ways, in that, perhaps because i live at the water's edge, i explore reflections alot. i see the reflection, a specific image/shot/vision comes to mind, and i then work to achieve it. of course, i also can plan the image in advance knowing the time of year/day/weather/light and be there waiting for the opportunity. sometimes i am just reacting to the light, maybe because i didn't know it would be there, and have only a brief time to explore it. usually when that happens though, my explorations with the camera are akin to a preliminary study, and result in a more planned attempt later.
i might agree with asher though on another level, in that there must be some essential emotional connection between me and the reflections so i do hunt specificly for these and become more skilled in the process.

[Asher Kelman]

Hi Marian,

I think Charles has a way that is on the right track. Nicolas Claris is working on that track to with his personal work that I have had the privilege to see.

Decide on one idea, one subject or set of subjects or theme. Look then at how you can find its essence and concentrate on that. It might be anything you choose. Even things with shapes those are clear like a teapot can become transformed although one must do many creative alterations with light, shading and hiding.

I wouldn't aim for "painterly" or "abstract”, which IMHO is a trap! Rather there is a conversation between your inner sense of wonder and purpose and then the extent to which this vision of yours can be implemented. That is where you have to work; art genre and taxonomy be dammed. It would be great to have you post your work as you experiment. There's always some degree of struggle, at least for most of us, to match what one wants to achieve and what one has the knowledge experience and technique, let alone opportunity to deliver.

So make your subject simple, economical, near your home, easy access. This will allow the hundreds or thousands of images you might need of one subject to understand what you can and can't do and how to get some match between internal vision and external opportunity to fulfill it. All the time, your internal vision will change as you get new technical ability and you will be surprised more and more by what you can create.

Allow some peaceful time for yourself, like when the light in the morning start to wake you Linger and imagine your art. You'll find that at this time the barrier between you and where these things get discussed in the brain, get opened and your will have revelations of how it might be.

The Progression: Now if you had a wirtten goal at he onset of this project, I swear you will be amazed at the changes. You will find parental connections to your starting idea, but as you go on, there's a recruitment of ideas, possibilities, nuances by your internal directives to make the art. At the same time the external facility, has acquired new skills and tools as well as a pile of physical prints or images on the monitor to use as measuring instruments, like rulers. So one has the internal indefinite and the external definite to play off each other. Both change as you proceed! This, I think, is how we hunt, seduce, capture, masquerade, deceive and build and make art.

Asher

[Charles L Webster]

Hi Marian,

I think Charles has a way that is on the right track. Nicolas Claris is working on that track to with his personal work that I have had the privilege to see.

Decide on one idea, one subject or set of subjects or theme. Look then at how you can find its essence and concentrate on that. It might be anything you choose. Even things with shapes those are clear like a teapot can become transformed although one must do many creative alterations with light, shading and hiding.

I wouldn't aim for "painterly" or "abstract”, which IMHO is a trap! Rather there is a conversation between your inner sense of wonder and purpose and then the extent to which this vision of yours can be implemented. That is where you have to work; art genre and taxonomy be dammed. It would be great to have you post your work as you experiment. There's always some degree of struggle, at least for most of us, to match what one wants to achieve and what one has the knowledge experience and technique, let alone opportunity to deliver.

So make your subject simple, economical, near your home, easy access. This will allow the hundreds or thousands of images you might need of one subject to understand what you can and can't do and how to get some match between internal vision and external opportunity to fulfill it. All the time, your internal vision will change as you get new technical ability and you will be surprised more and more by what you can create.

Allow some peaceful time for yourself, like when the light in the morning start to wake you Linger and imagine your art. You'll find that at this time the barrier between you and where these things get discussed in the brain, get opened and your will have revelations of how it might be.

The Progression: Now if you had a wirtten goal at he onset of this project, I swear you will be amazed at the changes. You will find parental connections to your starting idea, but as you go on, there's a recruitment of ideas, possibilities, nuances by your internal directives to make the art. At the same time the external facility, has acquired new skills and tools as well as a pile of physical prints or images on the monitor to use as measuring instruments, like rulers. So one has the internal indefinite and the external definite to play off each other. Both change as you proceed! This, I think, is how we hunt, seduce, capture, masquerade, deceive and build and make art.

Asher

My process is not so formal as Asher suggests in "The Progression" but I recognized a year or two ago that reflections in general have a power to mold and alter common items into something else. A "magic" if you will. Since then, I have trained myself to be constantly on the lookout for opportunities for such images. I look at every body of water that crosses my path, every shiny highrise building, every automobile bumper. When I find something that's reflective in the right way, I look to see what's around to be reflected. I visualize the picture and then try to execute that picture.

Sometimes it just isn't going to happen, sometimes I can see right away that the light isn't right, or the reflected thing isn't really going to make a good picture.

And sometimes a picture literally falls in my lap. In this case, I was looking for a classic reflected landscape when a moth fell into the lake. The fluttering of the dying moth created concentric ripples that reflected the clouds in a good way. I took the shot, thankful for a "freebie."

http://gallery.photo.net/photo/4714458-md.jpg

[Ben Lifson]

In the following, I don't mean to be flip.
Driving home the other day, I thought that some examples from familiar verse can pinpoint the difference between that which is abstract, i.e. communicates and refers to only itself, and that which is concrete, i.e. refers to or represents something solid, familiar, recognizable in the world.

Here's a good example from a familiar Christmas carol.

Deck the halls with boughs of holly [concrete]
Fa la la la la, la la, la la [abstract]
"Tis the season to be jolly [concrete]
Fa la la la la, la la, la la [abstract]
Don we now our gay apparellel [concrete]
Fa la la, la la la, la la la [abstract]
Join the ancient Yule-tide carol [concrete]
Fal la la la la, la la, la la. [abstract]

Almost abstract is the children's counting-out rhyme

One potato, two potato, three potato, four,
Five potato, six potato, seven potato, MORE!

Almost abstract because it does'nt really describe or explain or communicate anything.
Almost abstract because "potato" does indeed denote something.

Then there's the cowboy song, with the abstract parts in italics

Yippee ki yi yo get along little dogies
It's your misfortune and none of my own
Yippee ki yi yo get along little dogies
You know that Wyoming will soon be your home.

All scat singing is abstract except when the singer interpolates lines or phrases from well known songs, as did Betty Roche in a classic 1940s or 50s scat improvisation to Take the A Train with Duke Ellington's orchestra. Again, abstract in italics

Sha baba doop booba dood do ah,
I ain't mad at you pretty baby
Don't be mad at me
Ba dooya dooya dooya dooya doobee do dee
I've got a train waiting for me
I'm waiting for the A Train.

When I was a teenager a popular singing group, The Four Freshmen, had a hit song called Sh'Boom: which goes back and forth between the abstract and the concrete

Sh'boom sh'boom
Ya da da da da da Ya da da da da
Sh'boom sh'boom,
Ya da da da da da da,
Life would be a dream,
Boom Sh'boom
If you would take me to Paradise up above
Boom Sh'boom
If you would tell me I'm the only one that you love
Life would be a dream Sweet Heart
Hey lolly ding dong
A ding-a Ling-a Lay
Boom sh'boom Dai-Yo,
A boob a boob a day...

Picasso denied the possibility of an abstract painting. "Every picture starts from something," he said.

Fernand Leger said, "Every artist dreams of making purely abstract pictures but when he gets there he finds that it's an untenable position.'

Happy Trails to You

ben

www.benlifson.com

[Ray West]

Hi Ben,

I guess the abstract parts of the songs you mention, are 'in tune'. Is not then all orchestral music, for example, abstract?

In the painting situation, is it abstract if the form is not identifiable, how about the colours?

I explained earlier on how to post images, when you asked, can you show something? I guess there are various levels of abstraction, or is it not that finely defined?

Best wishes,

Ray

[Ben Lifson]

from the art historian Charles de Tolnay, from his History and Technique of Old Master Drawing, whose comments and explanations of the power of drawing are of great use to photographers, since photography was originally (and rightly) perceived to be a branch of drawing.

The text below is two dense paragraphs from his book. I've broken them up into units of thought, for easier reading.

de Tolnay actually calls the method Pictorialist but when I give examples of Heinrich Wolfllin's definitions of painterly (as soon as I can find them in my folders) you'll see that de Tolnay's Pictorialism and Wolfflin's Painterly are the same thing.

de Tolnay:

The pictorialist method...takes the surface [of the work: the paper] as a symbol of concrete space saturated with light and atmosphere.....objects are no longer isolated but seem to be enveloped by this atmosphere and to share its life. Sometimes they are so completely absorbed that they no longer seem solid but simple condensations of the atmosphere itself.

The entire drawing is a homogeneous unity differentiated only by subtle values. Contours have their significance as limits. They are dissolved into little flecks or points. The modeling often passes through the forms with no regard for their limits, thus transforming them into degrees of light and darkness. Instead of lines one sees masses.

Touch always devours line, says Baudelaire.

The untouched paper gives the impression of light and, together with the dark touches, creates a pictorial effect.

In this method the artist no longer concentrates upon the isolated forms but upon the total effect. He abandons the anthropocentric for the cosmocentric point of view. He contemplates the spectacle of nature as it actually appears to him.

As Baudelaire said,

Colorists draw like nature, their figures are naturally compromised by the harmonious battle of colored masses.

Artists who work in this method must renounce precision in their characterization of individual objects, but they gain a greater exactitude in the characterization of the whole. They renounce the truth of detail in order to seek the truth of the Infinite.


The many excellent examples of painterly (or pictorial) drawing in de Tolnay's book at once clarify and support this definition.

[Asher Kelman]

Excellelent!

Asher

[Ken Tanaka]

OK, how about this for an image that represents an abstraction through utter simplification.

The image used on the cover of the late Harry Callahan's "Elemental Landscapes" (http://www.amazon.com/Elemental-Landscapes-Photographs-Harry-Callahan/dp/0876331509). (Sorry, I do not have a direct link to the image.) I have seen the original prints of this image many times and, although it represents something real, Harry's method of photographing and printing the image has abstracted the subject to its most elemental form. Curiously, nobody seems to know exactly what it is, even folks who knew and studied under Harry at the time. It's generally accepted that it's a dried weed in the snow. He created quite a few other similar images during this same period which are equally simplified. His images of phone or electrical wires slicing through a white sky may be familiar to some here.

Rather like Picasso's "Every picture starts from something" remark, I believe that the images by Harry Callahan represent abstractions. They are not distortions of the subject, merely simplifications.

[Ray West]

Hi Charles,

you were merely involved in producing that image, the moth was committed. It throws up, in a small mothlike way, another boundary to think of - suffering for one's art is yet another...

Best wishes,
Ray

[Charles L Webster]

Hi Charles,

you were merely involved in producing that image, the moth was committed. It throws up, in a small mothlike way, another boundary to think of - suffering for one's art is yet another...

Best wishes,
Ray

Yep! I was just in the right spot at the right time. The moth would have fallen in and drowned whether or not I was there. I claim no credit for the image, only for capturing it.

[Asher Kelman]

Yep! I was just in the right spot at the right time. The moth would have fallen in and drowned whether or not I was there. I claim no credit for the image, only for capturing it.

There, Charles, I think you are mistakenly modest! For sure the moth had its fate, blown by the wind or out of strength. You, by contrast, had your vision.

All your experience, and capability were prepared and waiting for such moments. You compare what your see against your own unique library of images. You measure the worth against your asthetic values. You're thrilled! You are developing visions but things are happening too fast, you must act now before the moment is lost!

Now you take the picture!

The quality and nature of your vision really improves as you go on with other things, not even thinking about how to to make the picture! That intent fashions itself like a growing caterpillar long before the butterfly is formed. That is the complex nature of your picture-taking, making and delivery in what I have termed your "Arc of Intent". The fuel for this is your passion! If you can take no credit for taking the picture, then doctors should not be paid for diagnosing illnesses at a glance! After all the patient walks in the room and the doctor just has to look, often only for 5 seconds. They look for longer to make it seem non-trivial when they get the bill for $180!

So taking that picture is your achievement alone. This is a long way of saying thanks for posting! But how will/have you finish(ed) the picture? Do you have any more shots like this. I'd love to see more, much more!

Asher