Franklin Einspruch

• Art
• Writing
• Comics
• Projects
• Artblog.net
• About

Journal Archive About the Journal

Patience With Everything Unresolved

Journal entry for 12 Jul 2010 | Link

New Work, or, Rilke's Dictum to Live the Question Makes You Feel Idiotic

The lease was coming up for renewal on the largest and most beautiful studio I have ever rented. I looked over my work and decided to to let it lapse. Yes, the windows are higher than my studio at home is long, but I could do the 12 x 16 inch paintings in the corner, just behind the file cabinet that holds the printer, next to the window. That would be nice, right? Working on little paintings next to the window in solitude like Albert York. The monk in my psyche made tea.

Besides, I had just squeezed a model into the home studio. I was so close to her that a reclining pose put her feet out of view, but I got some decent if compositionally cramped watercolors off of her.

Then I painted something larger.

I hung it next to Blue House. Paintings will say things if you're listening to them instead of yourself. It said, "I'm better because I'm bigger. And you have a lot of room in here." I called the artist from whom I sublet my space, and whom a week ago I had told that I wouldn't be staying. I asked if it wasn't too late to change my mind, and said that I was prepared to grovel and debase myself. It was not too late, and groveling would not be necessary. I'm keeping my studio. The monk in my psyche enjoyed his tea as if nothing had happened.

Orwell reminds us that seeing what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. He meant it about more serious matters than art, but I'm struck by how often my main artistic problem is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I should have discarded the majority of doubt about what I was doing when no less than Darby Bannard wrote to me at the end of May to say:

You should paint more landscapes. There is an odd but compelling compatibility between the representation of sunlight and the excess paint application, as if light itself is dissolving substance, turning it into something luminescent and soft. It's the exact opposite of Impressionism, and it's striking.

I spent June feeling melancholy about my work anyway. Self-criticism is necessary to the creative enterprise, of course, but maudlin worry is not. And I've concluded that I might as well try to spawn consistent-looking children as consistent work—either case presumes a misunderstanding about my effect on the results. I should instead try to make each thing turn out as well as I can manage. The job of divining a consistent thread in the work, if anyone cares to undertake it one day, should fall to someone else. Here's Rilke in the indispensable Letters to a Young Poet:

...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Sketchy Galore

Bannard's wasn't the only bit of helpful advice I've gotten from a reader lately.

I used to draw with a scruffy, searching line, until I had an instructor make the memorable suggestion of a more "fuck you" kind of line, as he put it: look at the model, look at the paper, and put down that line, from armpit to ankle like you mean it. It lead, at first, to a lot of drawings with dark, black, and wrong lines in it, but if the first one wasn't right, I'd just smack another down beside it where I realized it was supposed to go. After a while, I'd just put them down in the right place to start with, more and more often. As an experiment, might try using your brush like a pencil, and use your pencil like a brush, and see what happens.

Indeed, this has been my practice at Dr. Sketchy's, namely to work in pen without the benefit of drawing in pencil beforehand. No other method so brutally clarifies the degree to which you understand or fail to understand what's going on in front of you. Yesterday I had the opportunity to put it back into action. Our model was the adorable and copiously, even surprisingly endowed Dalya DuSunshine. By the time I showed up, a roomful of drawing nerds were studiously ignoring the final match of the World Cup so they could draw Dalya in lingerie and a cooking apron.

She then switched to a mermaid getup with seashell pasties.

Dr. Sketchy's Boston (and the gleaming dome of one of its regular attendees) was featured in the Boston Globe last week, in what must be one of the stranger episodes of Cate McQuaid's career.

Blazes pulled on a black bustier. “I forgot my nipple glitter,’’ she lamented.

I guess there would be no harm in mentioning that the aforementioned reader mail comes from a reader who now owns a suite of works by yours truly.

Woodblock Faith

Annie Bissett, who taught me the basics of moku hanga at a workshop at Zea Mays last year, is working with the NPR program Speaking of Faith on a project that will incorporate readers' thoughts and stories about land, farming, family, and neighbors. The site is coy about what form it will take, but Annie is a lovely artist and bound to make something evocative and exquisitely crafted out of it.

Reader Mail

Germane to last week's thoughts about work worth doing:

When we were in engineering school at Stevens Institute of Technology there was a professor named Dr. Chang who was legendary for being difficult, demanding, and very funny. Equally legendary was his brother Dr. Chang who taught at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, an inferior school, at least according to us. When someone offered an incorrect answer in class, our Dr. Chang would say, "Here's a quarter. Go call Mommy and tell her you no longer go to Stevens. Tell her you go to NJIT to study with the easy Chang." (I heard through a friend, years later, that the NJIT Chang used to say the same thing about his Stevens brother.)

Dr. Chang never gave partial credit. If you asked for partial credit on a test, he would find more things wrong he'd neglected to mark the first time. "Partial credit? You want partial credit? I see. So if you build a bridge, and only half of it falls down, you want to get paid for the other half?"

It occurs to me that the art world has been giving out partial credit for far too long.

Peter Barrett wrote in to accept our offering of anchovy paste and direct us to his own article about homemade ravioli from a couple of years ago.

Readings

Terry Teachout:

To spend time in Maine is to be taught a priceless lesson in how to look at representational art. That's why I drove up to the Portland Museum of Art last week to see "Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place," 20 canvases and works on paper that are on display through Sept. 6. Homer's paintings hang in museums around the world—but when you have the good fortune to see one in Maine, it becomes an inseparable part of the world he knew.

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in an under-edited but interesting article for Newsweek:

With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. "It's very clear, and the decrease is very significant," Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is "most serious."

There is good news, though.

Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains' creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

David Brooks:

...there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.

Peter Plagens:

Then came Saturday's final sessions, and Mr. Chen—specifically, Chen Zhe, a high-ranking Party official from the cultural wing of its operations. He appeared in the morning, seated at the head-table side of our open square, and delivered a relatively brief disquisition from his chair. To an American, attempting to comprehend through a simultaneous translation furnished by two overworked people in a booth, he seemed to talk around things, and to—as a painter friend of mine likes to say—"choose both" when discussing which takes precedence, artistic freedom or toeing the Party line (sometimes expressed as "mainstream Chinese values"). Now some of Mr. Chen's double-tracking—he wouldn't commit to a blunt priority—might be due to China's still-monopoly political system. But at least some of it might be due to an underlying non-Western way of thinking that goes back at least a couple of millennia. Where we in the West tend to build inductively from point to point toward a reasoned conclusion (I myself am especially stiffly logocentric), most of the Chinese at the conference tended to speak in successive grand conclusions. Everything—and I do mean everything—is so equally "very important" it's hard to tell what comes first.