Leaving Paris

My answer to the question “What do you teach?” shifted over my four decades in college classrooms. Back in the 70s it was “radio-tv-film.” The 80s brought “mass communication.” And then in my last couple of decades it became “communication media and technology.” You know, everything digital, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and all their progeny.

I’m not sure what moniker the discipline shelters under these days, but, as in days gone by, it will rub up against its kissing cousin - journalism. And while journalism has undergone some painful metamorphosis of its own in the digital age one of its underlying principles remains unchanged: If it bleeds, it leads. (IIBIL).

I currently have at least four major “news” sites on my iPad: The New York Times, something called 1440, which bills itself as an “unbiased news source”, The Guardian, a British site, and New Scientist, for all things science. With the exception of New Scientist, they all cling to the IIBIL mantra, which, in our digital age allows them to dredge up mankind’s inhumanity to humanity from anywhere on the globe. 

Sliding smoothly into second place is reportage dealing with political attacks threatening either violence at the polls, leaving democracy as we know it lying in the battered halls of Congress, or implying further worldwide boycotts, embargoes, ecological disasters or bloodletting. 1440 does have a section called “Humankindness” but you have to scroll down past all the IIBIL mayhem to get to it. Still better than nothing, I guess.

I started writing this on Mother’s Day, and as mine used to say, “The world is too much with us.” Amen, to that. I have grown weary with the existential coarsening of this globe we all must share. Which brings me to Cezanne.

Paul Cezanne was a French artist who worked from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s. He started hanging out, and hanging his art up, with the Impressionists, Monet, Renoir and that crowd in Paris. But he never did get in with the in-crowd. The big city critics were particularly vicious and derisive. Which caused Cezanne to take himself off to the less judgmental bucolic countryside of his youth in Aix-en-Provence saying:  “The world doesn’t understand me, and I don’t understand it, which is why I have retreated from it.” And it was there, far from the madding crowd, that he did his best work.

So, I say to myself, “Self, can you follow Cezanne’s example, and retreat from the world?”  “Hmmm,” I replied. “Let me think about that.”

OK. The following suggests itself:

Cezanne left Paris to escape the negative environment created by the critics and various naysayers. The negative environment I find most worrisome is the one created by the IIBIL bias in the major news sources clamoring for space on my screen. So it seems best for my psyche to shun their digital version of Paris.  Banish The New York Times, The Guardian, 1440, etc. from my morning screen, keeping only The Art Newspaper, The New Scientist and The National Geographic. That won’t totally eliminate IIBIL, which is almost impossible to avoid, but it will greatly reduce the vitriol and gore.

No, I hear you. Doesn’t that make me a cultural slacker? Voluntarily uninformed? At fault for the ills of the world by not seeking to understand and correct them? Well, yes and no. Should Cezanne have stayed in Paris? Trying to convince those who had repeatedly refused him entry to the best shows and galleries? Or was it wiser to escape to the countryside and do the work that later inspired Picasso, Braque, Mondrian and others? If I have to choose, I’m coming down for country.

Leaving the IIBILs folk behind might well elevate my own moods and emotions, leaving me free to better pursue my L’Image Aumentare work which feels like my most mature and satisfying work to date. However, that does lead to a bit of a conundrum - the idea of sharing your best work.

My most convenient avenue for sharing my work is the one before you on the screen - The Wall.  A couple of problems there. First, unless you are a confirmed techie with a huge hi-rez monitor, you see a terribly compromised version of my art. I took a few images into my doctor at my last physical. He is a bit unique. Named among the ten best doctors in the greater Chicago area for the last several years, he also writes and publishes children’s books and messes around with stained glass. He was nonplussed with the difference between L’Image Aumentare in real life and the images on the screen. Real is far better than digital.

So that brings me to the second “sharing” issue. As Cezanne discovered, the best way to fully share your work is to have it on display either in a public show or through a gallery. I did have a show a couple decades ago back in Raleigh. Good feedback, but nothing was for sale. I have sold some pieces privately, but that was uncomfortable - and this points clearly to my second issue. Let’s say I find a gallery up here in Chicagoland willing to represent L’Image Aumentare. Cool. But if you show in a gallery you are supposed to sell your work. And give a more than generous slice of the price to the gallery. That is what a gallery is for, to make money. But, there is - in my mind - a more pressing concern: if you sell your work, you have to give the piece to the buyer. I don’t want to do that. I want to keep them all. A lot of hours, tired hands and eye strain go into each piece. Like I said, I want to keep them. Obviously a paradox with which I will have to deal.

The other major issue I need to consider as I pack my existential bags in preparation to depart Paris is leaving the cafe society, the street scene. Cezanne never became part of cafe society in Paris. I equate that with my profound ennui regarding the IIBIL mentality of contemporary media. Hence, leaving Paris and heading down the digital road to country. However, I do enjoy discussing the issues related to Distilled Harmony [Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm.] that I often explore here on The Wall.

But fortunately, it is The Wall that is my cafe society. Let me side track for a brief history of The Wall. You need a break right? OK, The Wall began back in 1990 when I finished my book, Taming The Wild Tube with the University of North Carolina Press.  When the writing stopped the thinking went on. I would print out the little thought pieces and tape them on the wall behind my computer - hence - drum roll - The Wall, or sometimes Schrag Wall.

Then in April of 1993 the internet went pubic, and I took the paper version of The Wall onto the internet by posting those little thought pieces on a blog - the one you are reading now. [To clarify, you get The Wall as a blind copy so no one on The Wall knows who else is on the Wall unless you share that information with each other.] The Wall obviously started going out to folks I saw as possibly interested, and with whom I emailed; so friends, family, former students, etc. The list has ballooned to maybe 85 names - some of whom have shuffled off this mortal coil and I need to remove them. Others have turned their attention elsewhere and either block or quickly delete The Wall.  However, the blogger app tells me, some 30 or 40 of you do open the posts, and I assume that some subset of y’all actually work your way with me as I natter on about this or that. I know some of you do since you respond - and that is the only way I know who you are, since the app only tells me how many folks open the post, not who you are.

But that is fine. You see, embedded in the list of 80, and - I choose to believe - represented in those 30 or 40 who open the posts, is everyone that I really care about. There is no need to table hop, trying to touch base with the people who are important in my life because you are all here. Oh, you may drift off a bit if the main course is too salty or spicy or bland for your taste. You may sneak out before dessert. No problem. You’ll still get gladly served the next time The Wall pops out of the oven!

And I’m taking you all with me as I put Paris in the rearview window.

Introducing L’Image Aumentare

Whenever I share my art with folks two issues are bound to arise. First is the comment - “Wow, you really like color, don’t you?” Yes. Color makes me happy, and you can never have too much happiness. The second comment often takes a little longer to arrive, but eventually shows up - “What do you call these . . . pictures?”

That one is a little harder to answer. I have always doodled. I remember, probably around preschool age, using the little pencils on the back of the church pews to draw lines between the letters in the Sunday morning programs - trying to get a line from the top of the pages to the bottom, keeping the line as straight as I could while dodging the letters. Then, starting in junior high when you had your own notebook, all the way through graduate school my notes from lectures were always interspersed with doodles.

Have you seen images of DaVinci’s notebooks? Well, mine looked nothing like those. You see, I cannot draw. I mean representational, “looks like that,” kind of drawing. Faces, hands, bodies, dogs, flowers, cicadas, all that stuff. Just could never do it. My parents did get a tutor to give me drawing lessons when we lived in Europe. She was sweet, I remained incompetent. I have had friends who are quite skilled in this area - I mean professional artists whose work is sold in real galleries in big cities. I have sold my art, but not representational stuff. More like doodles on steroids. Again, fun, colorful, happy, stuff. 

The question then occasionally expands to “Well, who influenced your work?”  Nobody. I really love the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and that crowd. Of course, Andrew Wyeth, and the old masters. But since I can’t draw, they don’t “influence” me in the sense of trying to emulate their style - worlds beyond my skill set.

However, I have also always loved, and taught, visual composition in both still photography and video. Hence, it is not surprising that I have finally arrived at an artistic style that I have decided to call L’Image Aumentare. (OK, in ordinary English - augmented images. Yech. Smacks of plastic surgery.) It sounds sooo much more artsy in Italian. (You can Google “How do you say augment in Italian?” for the “proper” pronunciation.) Go ahead. Give it a try in your best faux Italian accent. French works too. Cool, eh? So what are pictures done in the L’Image Aumentare style? Let me explain.

I’m going to use illustrations from a piece I am working on now. It is not completed, so it is too soon to say whether I like it or not, but I have all the steps in easy reach so I’ll go with it.

As the name implies each work in L’Image Aumentare begins with an image. In this case the picture is of an Indian Shot, a member of the calla lily family. I took the photo in the garden of a restaurant in White Pigeon, Michigan, close to Klinger Lake. I sometimes take a photo with an eye towards turning it into an image aumentare, other times I just scroll through my photos files and pull out one that catches my eye. I have a lot of flower pix and this one caught my eye - I think it was the “redness” of it.

Anyhow, step one is to load the image into photoshop, add a layer, and outline the pertinent portions in black. Then you delete the layer that has the actual photo, leaving you with this black and white “cartoon” of the original image, like this:

Next, I take a copy of the cartoon over to Staples and have them print out a copy in the size I want for the final image. In this case 16x20 inches. So I have a big version of the cartoon pictured above.

The next step is to draw designs in black in the “empty” spaces in the cartoon. These just sort of suggest themselves. It is important to make the lines of the designs as clear as possible, and to let them dry - at least a few hours, preferably overnight. This lets the black ink soak into the paper and, in essence, create little dams around each part of the design that will prevent the colors - which is drawn in next - from bleeding into neighboring portions of the design.

And that, of course, is the final step in an l’image aumentare, adding the colors which makes the image pop. I’m going to include a couple shots of the current “in progress” image here, and then close this post with a few finished images to give you a better idea of the result of the process.

This is a detail of the image that shows part of the image with the design/dams and the colors which have been added within the dams. The smaller design elements are about a quarter of an inch across. I don’t know why I do that to myself. 5X reading glasses help. I know when to stop for the day, when I start to cross the lines!

This a quick shot of the current state of the image. I try not to think about how much more there is to do. Just take it an inch at a time. Listen to my music. Some 50s stuff. Maybe a touch of Big Band, the Andrew’s Sisters,  a little Nora Jones . . .

 

And to close some finished pieces:

The top image started as a photo of my grandfather’s car which had found its final resting place in a field somewhere between Marion and Freeman, South Dakota where he spent most of his life. 

The middle image is a sign above a restaurant in Venice, Italy where Christine and I liked to grab a local beverage and rest up mid-afternoon.

The bottom image swings back to South Dakota where cousin Dean has preserved some of the classic farm implements our fathers used when they were growing up on “the home place.”

I’m going to attempt to close with one of my favorite l’image aumentare examples from the Grand Canal in Venice. Hope I can find it. Soooo many images: