Discussions with Mark Norseth

Artist Frank Serrano posted this on Facebook, and I can’t resist putting it up here on my blog.

Walt Disney speaks on Robert Henri’s ” The Art Spirit”.

I vividly recall seeing this short film somewhere in grade school, which for myself was over forty years back. Of course I hadn’t read Robert Henri’s  book “The Art Spirit” at that point, but certainly have since.  I didn’t realize that I’d adopted the notion of painting “ideas, not pictures” from that source, either, but I surely have.

Walt Disney was a giant, and a very good one at that.

My favorite week of each year is the last week of December.  Between the two towers of Christmas and the New Year the fabric of life seems to hang more casually…schedules are a bit more open and folks are enjoying some margin in their otherwise crowded, overbooked lives.

For myself, it is always a week of reflection.  One of the beliefs that I haven’t yet outgrown or abandoned is the notion that, with the right set of principles and some discipline, one can change the course of life for the better. Despite failures, I also have some proof of this; when I finally managed to overcome my addiction to the smoking of cigarettes some 19 years ago, it was a New Year’s resolution that kept me on track. So, I think I have reason for optimism when at each year’s end I attempt to look both backward and ahead and ask myself the questions that I think I need asking.

-Why am I here? And where am I pointed…on what trajectory? To what end?

-What worked? What should I retain?

-What didn’t work? What can I discard?

-What might be the wisest single change I could make, all things considered?

-What would my family and friends like to see me change? (I’ll ask).

As a person of faith, I can’t exclude God’s influence, and ask myself what He has been showing me or trying to tell me through circumstances and all the ways He speaks. In that regard, I can say that the journal work I try to do throughout the year has been a good investment. It’s revealed  larger movements (or stagnations) in life that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Another lesson this year?  I don’t hold outcomes entirely in my hands, and if I did, we’d all be in trouble. Better to stay patient and steady on my end and allow room for all the possibilities I can’t foresee.

So, I’ll be engaging in some healthy soul-searching in the next 24.  May I wish you clarity in your search and all the best.

Happy New Year!

More work on my indoor painting…with much adjusting of values and shapes, trying to build a beautiful surface all the while.  It’s an oil -primed linen mounted on panel that I primed myself, and the linen has a fairly coarse, handmade thing to it.  I think it suits what I’m attempting perfectly.  If I can do more priming like this I will, definitely.

For the duration of the work on this painting it’s:  simplification of masses, values, adjustments of color, maybe a glaze to warm things here and cool things there.

untitled 18 x 24″

It’s also great to be making use of so many of the loose reference sketches scattered about my studio.  They are so much more useful to me  than I could ever imagine photographs being.

I began to lay-in something new in the studio over the weekend, a painting constructed from painted studies and my own imagination/recollections. Very liberating and fun after my last outdoor piece, which required a lot of physical effort and direct response to natures’ quirky comings and goings, what I call “chasing the light”  for lack of a better description.

Most every plein-air sketch painted after the sun begins to wane will suffer from an under-exposed look. The darks, when later viewed in normal light, will appear weaker than you painted them and there can be a bit of a washed out, timid look to the color, which is simple to understand because in those circumstances the artist is making decisions while painting in what amounts to a darkening studio.

If you want to understand this better, go into a dining room with one of those dimmer switches on the overhead light.  Look at a white object, say a dinner plate, in full light on the table and then gradually begin to turn the light down 30%.  The white object is still a white object, but it’s not white anymore, it’s a gray of some sort, and 30% darker from where you started. So are all the other tones.  This is going in the direction of low-key painting, where the lightest lights and subsequent supporting tones are all subdued, the edges soften, and the darks cluster into shapes and  silhouettes.

For that reason, it’s important for me to study the effects of early evening light with the idea that I’ll be replicating them mostly from memory later.

untitled, 18 x 24″, hand-primed linen mounted on panel

I have a number of small early-evening sketches that are adequate to remind me of the effect I want in this painting, but I know I can’t rely on them completely.  So, for this piece I get to dream and recall those precious times alone after I finish working outdoors on a late afternoon piece, when my light effect is gone and energy spent, and I’m just in that envelope of late-dayness, where you finally put everything aside and you are simply glad to be there.

The composition itself is a collection various experiences cobbled together, a tree or two from one place, a cliff from another.  Let’s just keep that between ourselves, though.

I foresee thin and thick paint built up in quiet shape-touches of broken color for this. A rich surface.  I hope I can do it, and I hope it will be beautiful.

These are some old gouache studies I made years back to study composition.  My task was to replicate a painting I admired into five values; white, black, and three middle grays, one being the gray of the paper itself.

Not an easy task for several reasons…it starts with translating color into a value, but the most difficult part was having to designate every tone into only five categories.

Some of these studies also received an overlay where I tried to find some rationale to how the space was divided.

Trying to distinguish a dominant line was another interest, as well as recurring shapes.

Fantin Latour is a favorite of mine.  His arrangements always struck me as having a simple elegance that I hoped might be “learnable”.   Not so in my case, but  I’m left to appreciate more deeply his wonderful taste and individual gift for arrangement and pattern.

Yoshida Hiroshi was great woodcut artist of the 20th century who is too little known. He would be of Edgar Payne’s generation, and  his color and compositions are beautiful and effective.