Poem|Every day before 6 am: OCD/FB

[This GIF was forwarded to me without an attribution.]

GIFs may be the best visual images we have of OCD.| Facebook, for me, may be the best social media representation of OCD.|

From a few weeks before terrorists shot and killed people in Paris,| until now,|| I wanted to post something on Facebook that was happy,| that friends could just ponder. No need for a snappy| comeback, in fact, no need for anything that might| furrow their brow.||

I lapsed. A few days I forgot. I felt bad. I really liked doing| this one small thing every day. I found it renewing.| So anyhow,|| to not miss a day, I jumped – well, leaped – into a routine| of posting a painting, mostly landscapes, or a scene| with some wow|| to it. Something hidden or different, or evocative -| to tuck away, or when ugliness got too big, to relive.|

The Tao|| suggests a repetition of meditation at regular hours.| I chose 6 a.m. because on EST that is when the powers,| with sallow|| eyes, begin to throw their juju, sharpen their talons, hooks| and quarrels. So also time for peaceful pastorals and brooks,| to plow|| a straighter furrow, and perhaps – just perhaps – secure| a better crop than they, and a bulwark from their allure| by my vow.||

My father was a quiet man, apparently living an unexamined life,| but I now think not, he rather understood the true timbre of the fife.| Only the blow|| of many mallets on many drums will shine ‘fair as the moon,| clear as the sun, and terrible| as an army with banners.’||

 

|  Use this symbol to see poetic line breaks,  |= line, || = stanza

The Art of Reading and Remembering…

Harper’s had a brief article this week, a memoir-type piece about the Encyclopedia Britannica. When I was very young we didn’t have the Britannica, we finally got the World Book Encyclopedia, I think largely because a neighbor on the next street from ours was selling them. I have many good memories of those volumes, particularly the page-by-page clear acetate pages revealing how a woman really is.

 

But the set of encyclopedias I really remember dearly was a set of the Book of Knowledge. It wasn’t alphabetically set up, the articles had a random order and you never knew what you might discover when you took out a volume in its old-blood red color: you might get an Aesop’s Fable with wonderfully inked line drawings or an article about elephants or how steam engines worked.

 

Arthur Waley, Portrait by Roger Fry

I think this had an effect on how my mind organized itself. I don’t have a photographic memory but I remember things in books by their place on an open spread of two pages, about where it was in that volume. I remember where the volume is mostly by where it is on my library shelves if it is one I own, and then by the outline shape and organization of the type on the spine – not so much the color but to a lesser degree.

 

I understand that hoarders, who appear to just have an impossible mess more accurately have an inscrutable mess. Many, or perhaps most – I don’t remember which – can find what they are after pretty quickly. Their method of organization is a large part of why they are so pained or find it nearly impossible to throw things away. Getting rid of things fiddles with their spatial perceptions of reality. Take a foot or two off one of their stacks, or an inch or two of a dusty pile and you obliterate a needed compass point in what to you might just be clutter.

My organizational preference as an editor/publisher for my work desk is the the pile. It had the needed benefit of preventing others from finding things there that might be sensitive, private, or journalistically “top secret” within two hours – more or less a normal lunch hour. Piles of documents act like settling ponds. The good stuff tends to be either at the top or bottom, depending on the nature of good. The middle is “neither cold nor hot” and may be spued out entirely, eventually, or spat upon another pile for further settling. I found three to be the absolute minimum number of piles to make this work.

I am familiar with Matteo Ricci’s memory palace but did not discover it until too late to pour a proper foundation, and fear that advancing age, and a diminishing staff of memory servants, would diminish the number of usable rooms for something that may have resembled more of a country chateau than a palace anyway. So, piles and my shelved library ’til death do us part or I toddle off to the dreaded waking forgetfulness.

Picasso and “The Old Guitarist”

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”  PABLO PICASSO, Quote, Sept. 21, 1958

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso is his full name .  And his internal workings are thought to have been as complex as the variety of reactions people have to many of his paintings.

This one, from his blue period is a case in point (painted in late 1903-early 1904). At first glance it seems simple enough – an old, white-haired man, possibly blind, possibly even crippled but although Picasso often distorted his figures when he was developing ‘Analytic Cubism,’ this paint was done prior to that period of his painting. The players’ clothes suggest poverty, and in fact when Picasso painted this he was just barely emerging from some years of penury.

Picasso was so influential an artist that is is easy to get bogged down discussing his work. Here I just wanted to through out some of the things circling his work from a further orbit. You might listen to the Cowboy Junkies sing Blue Guitar while looking at the painting. There is also a famous Wallace Steven’s poem written in 1937 called the Man with the Blue Guitar. When asked about it by an interviewer, Stevens denied it was about the painting but reading it would give a very different impression. It’s a long poem, 33 cantos, so I’ll put a link here to more commentary about how it relates to Picasso’s The Old Guitarist.

The final orbit in this discussion will be what’ under the painting. This is from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s website:

Recent x-rays and examinations by curators found three figures peering behind the old guitarist’s body. The three figures are an old woman with her head bent forward, a young mother with a small child kneeling by her side, and an animal on the right side of the canvas. Despite unclear imagery in crucial areas of the canvas, experts determined that at least two different paintings are found beneath The Old Guitarist.^[4]

In 1998, researchers used an infrared camera to penetrate the uppermost layer of paint (the composition of The Old Guitarist) and clearly saw the second-most composition. By using this camera, researchers were able to discover a young mother seated in the center of the composition, reaching out with her left arm to her kneeling child at her right, and a calf or sheep on the mother’s left side. Clearly defined, the young woman has long, flowing dark hair and a thoughtful expression.^[5]

The Art Institute of Chicago shared its infrared images with the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where curator William Robinson identified a sketch by Picasso sent to his friend Max Jacob in a letter. It revealed the same composition of mother and child, but it had a cow licking the head of a small calf. In a letter to Jacob, Picasso reveals he was painting this composition a few months before he began The Old Guitarist. Despite these discoveries, the reason Picasso did not complete the composition with a mother and child, and how the older woman fitted into the history of the canvas, remain unknown.

So, Kristy Puchco, from Mental Floss*, wraps it up this way: don’t be deceived by this seemingly simple painting of a man and his instrument. Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist has secrets in its past and in its paint. 

1. Picasso related to his penniless guitar player.

At 22, Picasso was overcome with a sadness that he projected on this piece, and many others from his Blue Period. He showed this through the monochromatic, flat representation. Picasso knew what it was like to be broke, spending most of 1902 in poverty.

2. It’s bigger than you’d expect.

Contorted and cramped within the frame, you might think this Old Guitarist is presented on a small canvas, but it actually measures in at 48 3/8 x 32 1/2 inches, roughly four by 2 2/3 feet.

3. It appears that the man pictured is blind.

Observe his closed eyes, averted from the world and the instrument he plays. It’s suggested that a key influence of The Old Guitarist was Symbolist literature, which often employed blind characters to suggest a vision beyond this world.

4. The disenfranchised was a theme of the Blue Period.

Marginalized and deprived people were often the subject pieces in the Blue Period. Picasso was especially intrigued by blindness and seemingly blind figures can be found in several of his works. The etching The Frugal Repast (1904) offers a blind man and a sighted woman sharing a sparse meal. A similar subject was tackled—minus the mate—with The Blind Man’s Meal in 1903. Lastly, the 1903 portrait Celestina displayed a woman with one milky unseeing eye. 

5. It could also be viewed as a self-portrait of sorts.

The only element of The Old Guitarist that is not devotedly blue is the man’s guitar. Through his art, this isolated misfit finds solace. The brightness of the guitar could be seen to speak to how Picasso viewed his own art as a bright spot even in his darkest times. 

6. The Old Guitarist’s composition is a nod to El Greco.

As with all of the pieces from the Blue Period, this piece is directly related to the artist El Greco. Picasso was fond of the artist because he was overlooked by scholars in favor of other Renaissance and Mannerist painters of the time. The guitarist’s head crooked at a jarring angle and legs curled in make him appear cramped within the frame. Art historians suggest Picasso chose this angular pose accented by elongated limbs as a nod to the celebrated 16th-century artist.

7. This piece may have inspired poetry.

Three years after The Old Guitarist was exhibited in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, American Modernist Wallace Stevens published the lengthy poem “The Man With The Blue Guitar.” Despite a seemingly obvious link between the painting and the poem, Stevens denied any connection to Picasso’s work, claiming, “I had no particular painting of Picasso’s in mind and even though it might help to sell the book to have one of his paintings on the cover, I don’t think we ought to reproduce anything of Picasso’s.”

8. There’s a woman hiding on the canvas.

If you look closely at the space above the guitar player’s ear, through the blue-gray paint you might make out a forehead and eyes. This ghostly woman invited further study, so the museum that owns the painting, The Art Institute of Chicago, studied it in a conservation lab using infrared scans and X-rays to see what Picasso had painted over. What was discovered was an abandoned portrait of a nude young woman, seated and nursing a child from her right breast, as well as a calf and cow.

9. The Old Guitarist is the most iconic work of Picasso’s Blue Period.

This chapter in the seminal painter’s career began with Casagemas in His Coffin, which depicted his dearly departed friend in his final repose. From there came many more, solemn portraits of despair, desperation and desolation that have scattered to museum walls all over the world. But none has come close to surpassing the popularity of The Old Guitarist.

10. The Art Institute of Chicago made history with the painting.

The Art Institute of Chicago acquired the piece in 1926 in what turned out to be a pivotal moment for Picasso. The Old Guitarist became Picasso’s first painting to be acquired by an American museum, and according to the Art Institute of Chicago, by all accounts it was also the first Picasso painting that any museum in the world acquired for its permanent collection.

 

*from http://mentalfloss.com/article/66934/10-things-you-might-not-know-about-picassos-old-guitarist.

Mooning, sheep and Granville Redmond

“The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”

Ellen Glasgow, The Sheltered Life (1932)

The artistic endeavor, like so many pursuits in life, is one of putting one’s inclinations, imaginings and impulses into the corral of discipline for the purpose of exacting a result of excellence.

No one that I know of said that. It just occurs to me a good representation of the effort. I always liked the phrase usually attributed to Hemingway, who is quoting either Nathaniel

Hawthorne or Alexander Pope, or perhaps he is quoting Gertrude Stein quoting either Hawthorne or Pope : “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

Thus by extension, “Beautiful paintings are damned hard painting,” the s being a significant addition.

Since this little essay so far seems composed only of homilies so far, another chestnut shouldn’t be too painful: Practice makes perfect. That practice is made up, usually, of deconstructing the sum into its parts, symphony into phrase or measure, novel into sentences and words, paintings into colors and strokes. Elements into atoms.

With the last example we are reminded that the end result of such deconstruction is not

A Shepherd and His Flock in the Early Morning Mist

simplicity but yet another sum of complexity, or as one wise man either said or quoted, “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself…,” or as the Kabbalah would express it, qav ha-middah, the line of measure that maps out the path and stages of emanation, the spectrum of divine colors concealed within the concealed, hidden within the mystery of Ein Sof.

Nothing short of repetition seeking perfection. And that, nothing short of elusive to painters, poets and artists of all ilks. But tingling in its proximity.