Why I Paint

Detail from a recent painting.

My walls are full—some might say overfull—of paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs. Many of the paintings are my own. I rarely sell one, though I give one away now and then when I think it won’t be taken amiss. I certainly don’t need to paint any more paintings, and I don’t think I’m much good at painting in any case. So why do I paint?

The easy answer is that I still enjoy it—when I don’t hate it. Painting challenges me. I never seem to be able to create the image in my head on canvas, but I’m often pleasantly surprised by what does appear. And if I’m not pleased, I can paint over it. A good number of my paintings have other, less successful works lurking beneath the surface. I like pushing paint around. Attacking a canvas is a visceral aesthetic. Often I do so to the accompaniment of rock music played loudly. Painting can be a total-body workout, feet shuffling like a boxer’s, hands slashing paint, mind running this way and that, contemplating moves like a chess player.

Mid-19th century, the Académie des Beaux-Arts dominated French art and therefore art writ large. The Académie was the embalmer of traditional painting standards: historical, religious, and mythological subjects, portraits, all carefully idealized realism in somber colors and no visible brush strokes.

Then along came the Impressionists, who liked color and everyday scenes—and visible brush strokes. Perhaps they also rebelled against the Académie because at mid-19th century the advent of photography was threatening to make realistic painting obsolete. Once freed from the constraints of the Salon, painting boarded a speeding train toward Modernism, which pervaded the 20th century. That was the train I got on about a half-century ago.

I’ve never entirely settled on a style of painting. The images I create veer toward Modernity but are as likely to be sidetracked by Impressionism. Put two of my paintings side by side and one might wonder whether they were created by different artists. My only defense is that, yes, they probably were. Each time I load a brush and approach a canvas, I am someone a little bit different from the person who last painted in my shoes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” I make no judgment about whether I am foolish; I only know that I am not consistent. At least, not in painting. But I like doing it anyway. It’s good exercise.

Little Resurrections

Diana

Resurrectio in Latin is a universal concept of coming spiritually or physically back to life after death. It is the central theme of the Christian Easter, which will be tomorrow this year. I don’t believe Jesus physically arose from the dead, but I do believe in resurrection both in the larger spiritual sense and in the everyday sense. Everyday, or little, resurrections are acts of will.

Two days ago my mother-in-law, along with several family members, took the ashes of my father-in-law to sea off the coast of southern California. My father-in-law was 86 when he died a couple of weeks ago. Twenty-two years ago, their daughter Diana, my wife of 23 years, died at age 43. It struck me this week that if I lived to my father-in-law’s age of 86, my life will have been divided equally between the years before and after my beloved wife’s death.

When Diana died, so did I. So did her parents and others. And so did our children: our daughter in college at the time, our high school son, and our three-year-old son. Since that dreadful moment of loss, we have lived on, as others have done following moments of spiritual death. Our lives are acts of resurrection. Each day, we will ourselves to come back to life.

“Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground,” wrote Jessamyn West, an Indiana Quaker and author of The Friendly Persuasion. “Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.”

Life, for me and I suspect for many others, is a series of little resurrections. By writing this reflection today, Diana, and my father-in-law, live on. And in this little resurrection I also am free to live again.

Houdon and the American Collective Memory

Recently my family and I embarked on a spring vacation road trip that included spending time in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello. The trip was, partly by intention and partly by accident, a kind of civic education tour. One persistent memory for me has become the artistry of Jean-Antoine Houdon, the French neoclassical sculptor.

Houdon (born at Versailles, March 20, 1741 – died in Paris, July 15, 1828) excelled at portraying with classical realism the great figures of his day. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art I encountered his bust of Benjamin Franklin, which stands at the center of small rotunda gallery. Franklin did not sit for Houdon, who apparently drew on memories of having seen the American statesman at various times when Franklin was representing the fledgling United States in France from 1776 to 1785. A 1778 marble version of the bust can be viewed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Houdon exhibited a terra cotta version at the French Royal Academy Salon in 1779. (A 1778 terra cotta bust of Franklin can also be seen at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.)

Houdon actually met Franklin in 1783. The Philadelphia marble bust dates from 1785 and is the most detailed. It has become the iconic portrait in the round of the American statesman. At eye level one can almost imagine standing before the great man himself.

Houdon’s plaster bust of George Washington stands in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Franklin invited Houdon to visit the United States, specifically so that Washington could sit for the artist. However, in the National Gallery the more remarkable images may well be two busts of the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, whose ideas helped shape the thinking of many of America’s founders. Voltaire was a favorite model for Houdon. The two marble busts in the National Gallery show Voltaire with and without a perruque (wig) but both with a wry smile, consistent with Voltaire’s fame for his wit.

At Monticello visitors can see Houdon’s bust of Thomas Jefferson, a terra cotta-patinated plaster on a marble plinth. Jefferson met Houdon while the former was minister to France from 1785 to 1789. Before leaving France at the outbreak of the French Revolution, Jefferson acquired ten or twelve terra cotta-patinated plaster busts of figures such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Voltaire for Monticello. Jefferson also sat for Houdon himself and brought back several plaster versions of his own bust to give to friends.

Houdon worked from life, portraying the noteworthy figures of his day with extraordinary skill and accuracy, thus giving future generations the images that form the American collective memory of its founding generation. What a marvelous gift these images are for today and for the future.

No. 1 Connection to Indiana

I had to chuckle when I read the latest in Alexander McCall Smith’s popular and thoroughly delightful series of gentle mysteries featuring the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana. Not only did the novel’s various little problems, twists, and turns offer the usual good fun but there also was an Indiana connection of a surprising and unusual sort.

Like the earlier novels, this 2012 one, titled The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, featured the familiar cast of characters: founder and principal detective at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, the redoubtable Precious Ramotswe; her assistant—oops, associate—Grace Makutsi; Mma Ramotswe’s husband and proprietor of the Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors garage, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni; Mma Makutsi’s new husband and proprietor of the Double Comfort Furniture Store, Mr. Phuti Radiphuti; and others well known to readers of the series. But there was a new character—and a special one at that.

Since the beginning Mma Ramotswe and her associate have been guided in their efforts at detection by a book titled The Principles of Private Detection, which is full of pity sayings and sound advice. Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi can quote sections of the book verbatim with easy familiarity. Now, who should appear in Tlokweng Road but the author himself, a modest, unassuming man, Clovis Andersen. Needless to say, Andersen is treated like a visiting dignitary, though he is anything but; and Mma Makutsi is particularly star-struck.

Andersen, it transpires, is from Muncie, Indiana, and even went to college in Bloomington. Were I to suspend my disbelief, I might well wonder where the fictional student Andersen walked and lived. Did he frequent the same coffee shops where I am prone to read mysteries over an afternoon cup of brew? For those who have not yet read this latest offering in the popular series, I won’t say more about Clovis Andersen, as to do so might spoil the fun. And this book is fun, as is the entire series.

St. Nick Redux

It’s that time of year again—a time for newbies and hucksters to reinvent Christmas, repurpose, reuse, refresh. The rest of us, I suspect, may be content merely to revisit some version of Christmas past.

One version that is a particular favorite is the one given life in Clement C. Moore’s poem, known variously as “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” and simply “The Night Before Christmas.” Clement Clarke Moore (right, July 15, 1779 – July 10, 1863) must be given credit for shaping our modern-day Santa Claus, his basic physical appearance and character, white beard and jelly belly and all that. However, like Shakespeare, Moore’s authorship has been called into question. Some have suggested that the real author could be Henry Livingston, Jr., a distant relative of Moore’s wife. I’ll leave that debate for scholars to argue. The fact of the poem—originally published anonymously in 1823—is sufficient for the season.

St. Nicholas, “a right jolly old elf,” offered at the time a counter-character to the then-popular image of a venerated saint—Father Christmas in Britain or Sinterklaas in Holland—who traditionally turned up on St. Nicholas Day, usually December 6 (though December 19 in most Orthodox countries). Across Europe that day is still reserved for children, and St. Nicholas is a bringer of gifts. Our Santa Claus starts with this tradition. Moore reinvented the holy father as the tubby, magical fellow who cruises around the world in a flying sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer—we know their names: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen. Donder (sometimes Dunder or Donner) and Blitzen (or Blixem) are a nod to the Dutch words for “thunder” and “lightning.” (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer didn’t appear until 1939.)

Since the mid-1800s Moore’s St. Nick has shaped our modern Christmas mythology. Naturally, this version also has been a frequent subject of parody, reinvention, and reiteration. The poem was crafted as a silent movie in 1905 and inspired Tim Burton’s 1993 animated film, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Singer Perry Como recorded a spoken version in 1953, although the poem had been set to music in 1942 and has since been recorded by various artists, including Dave Seville, who included it in a 1963 album, Christmas with The Chipmunks, Volume 2.

All that aside, the poem is still fun to read in its original version, preferably to a child. Or record it and send it to all the grandchildren. Or find Basil Rathbone’s 1939 recording. Or Perry Como’s. Or Jack Palance’s in 2001. You get the picture.