Friday, February 26, 2021
ONE HOUR/ONE PAINTING
If you've never had the chance to experience one of my "One Hour/One Painting" sessions, here's a chance to do so online. I have been offering these sessions at museums and galleries--even private homes--for over twenty years now, and people generally love the experience. It's a blend of two ancient skills, meditation and contemplation, originally spiritual exercises, in which I introduce participants to the rudiments of those skills and then apply them as a way to spend a full hour looking at a single painting. (I even wrote a book about the process, "Slow Looking", which you can find online). I created it originally for myself, as a way to counter the dreadful and all-too familiar habit of spending more time with the wall label in a gallery than with the painting itself; as a way to look beyond my prejudices ("liking" this, "not liking" that) and see what's on the wall in front of me instead of what I think I see; and as a pleasant way to slow down from my usual hectic pace.
I offered this current session at Laguna Art Museum. The painting is one in a new series of clown paintings by (now 100-year-old!) Wayne Thiebaud. I'm not keen on the impression of myself that I create (no one likes looking at pictures of themselves!) but once you get past me and my blurb to the painting I think you'll find the experience worthwhile.
Friday, February 19, 2021
THEY KEEP COMING...
... the lessons, that is. They keep coming...
I woke this morning early with a feeling of release. I thought to have finished the book I have been working on with a completed second draft, and had decided to put aside at least for a few days the work on taxes that will need to be done soon. From that perspective, early on, waking up in bed, the day promised to be one in which I could enjoy doing absolutely nothing except those things I felt like doing. It was a good feeling.
Then...
In my morning sit, I had a sudden insight about the book. I have suspected at some restless place in the back of my mind that there remains a basic, unaddressed problem that could be boiled down to one simple, rather devastating question: what's the point? And the answer popped up unexpectedly, annoyingly, provocatively this morning, as I sat in meditation. It's a good answer, but it means a lot more work. It means going back to the beginning again and making changes throughout. It might mean a radical change at the end. I don't know yet. But I do know that this new idea would improve the book immensely--and that it will take a whole lot more time.
Damn!
Worse. I checked my email, as I usually do first thing (by this time there may be fifty, sixty, seventy new arrivals, most of them of no earthly interest), and found a blizzard of alerts from the site I use to stand guard over my passwords, all notifying me of a possibly serious compromise to my dozens of password-protected accounts. Which means--unless I find some other way to deal with this--revisiting all those websites to make changes to my profile and security, at the cost of a huge amount of time and aggravation.
Damn again!
This one is a lesson I've had to relearn too many times already. Nothing is stable, fixed, immutable. There is absolutely nothing that can be absolutely counted on. Everything is subject to the whims of change. The only constant is inconstancy. And the only reasonable strategy is to flow with the change with as much equanimity as I can muster. I fall back on more than 20 years of practice--only to find that the supposed wisdom gleaned from its undoubted benefits can suddenly and ignominiously be snatched away. And I'm back, as they annoyingly say, to square one: beginner's mind.
Friday, February 12, 2021
Dedication
This morning I woke early with words in my head. I could not get back to sleep without finding what they wanted to say and committing them to memory, so that they'd not be lost by morning. I have been working toward completion of a new book, and these words came to me as the...
Dedication
To those who love
& those who have been loved
To those who touch
& those who have been touched
To those who hold
& those who have been held
To those who posses
& those possessed
To those who need
& those whom others need
To those who use
& those whom others use
To those abused
& those who are abused
May we all find
forgiveness, redemption
and restoration of lost innocence
in our hearts
Monday, January 18, 2021
LATE BLOOMER
Here's the text of an essay I wrote for Ellie's birthday last week, to honor her work as a late-blooming artist. I intend to include images of her paintings, with our daughter's help, and publish the essay as a mini-monograph.
We have seen them before—art world professionals who have turned to making their own art in their later years. I think of the dealer Nicholas Wilder, who represented the most prominent of contemporary artists at his Los Angeles gallery in the 1960s; and of Henry Hopkins, who, along with the museum curator Walter “Chico” Hopps, helped cultivate the first great wave of contemporary art collectors in Southern California, to the eventual benefit of our museums.
The constant struggle in Blankfort’s paintings is to find the right balance between freedom and control, between whimsy and serious intent. In part this results from the tension between the well-honed, discerning sophistication of her eye and the largely self-taught nature of her technical skills. At their most successful, her paintings take advantage of this very peculiar—by which I mean, individual, unusual, indeed rather special—ground from which she works. Her paintings continue to inspire confidence that she will continue to test herself against her own rigorous expectations. I look forward, always, to seeing more.
There are others, among them the subject of this essay, Ellie Blankfort, a multi-talented professional who started her career in the art world as director of the Art Rental Gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum, where she associated with many of the aspiring young artists of the early 1970s. She went on from there to open her own gallery, representing young contemporaries—several of whom used it as a springboard for their own distinguished careers.
To better serve their interests, she worked to qualify herself in the field of interior design and began to offer her services as an art consultant to both private and corporate clients; among other projects, she directed an art program at the Frank Gehry-designed Loyola Law School and oversaw public installations at CalTech and other institutions. And tiring eventually of the commercial aspects of consultantship, she turned her natural talents and insights to an artists’ advisory service, working one-on-one to guide artists in their studio and professional lives.
It was to better understand the challenges of the working artists she advised that she first tried her hand a making art herself. She brought no formal training to the effort, but a formidable eye and a grounded knowledge of art history—particularly contemporary art history—that stood her in good stead. From her earliest years she had been surrounded by art in her home; her parents were among those early collectors groomed by Hopps and Hopkins. At their dining table they frequently played host to prominent artists—Claes Oldenberg, R.B. Kitaj among others; her first car was purchased by her father from Ed Kienholz, making ends meet as a used car dealer before his subsequent fame; the clunker bore an uncomfortable resemblance to that artist’s notorious “Back Seat Dodge.” Later, throughout her professional life, she honed her eye to discern for her clients the best of the best.
Her first foray into the creative world was in the studio of a long-time friend, the artist Marsha Barron, who gave her the space, both physical and creative, to experiment in form and color with different media, mostly on paper—pencil and paper, watercolor and pastel—striving to give expression to an emerging personal vision that was at once free-form and lyrical, visually astute yet unhampered by formal convention. Well aware that her representational skills were inhibited by the absence of art school training, she allowed herself to play between abstraction and evocative suggestions of imagery. The results were a validation of her natural, innate sense of color and painterly composition, and gave her the confidence she needed to take her efforts further.
That “further” was enabled by the opportunity to construct a studio for herself in the course of a remodel at her Laguna Beach cottage. Over the years, it has proved both a beloved invitation and an intimidation as she moves—as do the great majority of artists—between confidence and self-doubt, creative assurance and self-critical disapproval of her work. No one who has stepped inside her studio, however, and looked around at the dozens of pictures that crowd each other out against the walls could doubt the fecundity of her vision and her dedication to the pursuit of an ever more accomplished realization of her creative talent.
Blankfort’s process has remained the same since her earliest efforts. She tends to start out each painting with a graphite rendering, meticulously drawn, or sometimes traced, and then transferred to the surface of a board prepared with a smooth coat of gesso. For a number of years she preferred to limit herself to a relatively small scale, usually a square foot in format; only fairly recently has she decided to accept the challenge of a larger scale and to expand the horizon of her possibilities. Once satisfied that the drawing meets with her intention, she adds color—gouache, oil, ink, or acrylic paint—filling in spaces, defining areas and lines, usually in smooth, thin layers, to complete the painting.
Where does this work belong? It combines a number of aspects of the work she grew up loving as a young person and admiring later in her professional capacity. There is, primarily, the thrill of color, which she embraces with the verve of a Kandinsky; the interplay of disparate, intricate elements of a Paul Klee. There is an element, too of hard-edge, sometimes geometric abstraction—a demanding, often reductive mode of expression that makes it possible for her to maintain the element of control she likes and indeed perhaps needs to compensate for a hesitation about still-developing technical skills. But ambition for growth and ever-increasing success in the implementation of her vision has pushed her far beyond the strictures of geometric straight edges, blending them with softer, more organic, more playful shapes and suggestive images---the Jungian anima, perhaps, arising to complementing the animus—that allows her to communicate a greater range of emotional complexity, something deeper and richer than form for form’s sake alone, or color exploited merely in the service of design.
Predominantly, Ellie Blankfort’s paintings project a sense of joy, an exuberance, a delight in the challenges of painting itself, the composition of line, space and texture, a complex dance of richly saturated color and a rhythmic interplay of forms. She has an unerring eye for the way a painting can be made to work, endowing her images with a natural and pleasing sense of balance—or carefully calculated imbalance—that engages and gratifies the viewer’s eye. Her abstract paintings end up looking as they should, and, for our pleasure, “just exactly right.”
Still, something—perhaps the dire nature of our times along with the threat of global social and ecological disharmony and the rages of a deadly pandemic—drew her back to a need for relevance, the need to “say something” with her art. She began to introduce unmistakable, if abstracted images of ocean, sky, interiors and exteriors of buildings, plants and artifacts, toying once again with the possibilities of representation in the context of overall abstraction. She brought in suggestions of a third dimension, doorways opening into ambiguous and disorienting spaces, calling to mind the lyrical spaces of a Helen Lundeberg or the confusing paradoxes of an M.C.Escher, thus finding a way to invite the viewer more intimately into the surface of the painting. The coronavirus also found a way into her images, black, organic, ominous—and yet somehow also humorous—sneaking through hidden cracks or windows and creeping, vine-like, across somehow innocent and unsuspecting surfaces, a quirky commentary on the odd, threatening nature of our times.
In recent work, she has been experimenting with the incorporation of metallic-hued medium, combining the eye-catching appeal of gleaming surfaces reflecting ambient light—they look particularly gorgeous, I have noticed, when mirroring the setting sun—with the geometric structure of painted areas and the natural simplicity of plywood surfaces, left exposed for effective contrast. These works speak quietly of the ever-shifting balance between artifice and nature, the work of the artist and the light that informs it with the immediacy of life. There is too, I believe, in these works, a more than casual reminder of the great Southern California school of artistic innovators who thrived in the source of her early years in the art world—those working in the realm of visual perception, employing the non-traditional properties of Light and Space.
The constant struggle in Blankfort’s paintings is to find the right balance between freedom and control, between whimsy and serious intent. In part this results from the tension between the well-honed, discerning sophistication of her eye and the largely self-taught nature of her technical skills. At their most successful, her paintings take advantage of this very peculiar—by which I mean, individual, unusual, indeed rather special—ground from which she works. Her paintings continue to inspire confidence that she will continue to test herself against her own rigorous expectations. I look forward, always, to seeing more.
Sunday, January 3, 2021
READING THE TEA LEAVES
For as long as I can remember, likely most of the 50 years of our life together, I have been up early to brew a wake-up cup of good, strong English tea for Ellie and myself. Well, the brand has changed. Nowadays it's Yorkshire Gold; for a long while, it was PG Tips. But the ritual has been the same. Rain or shine, as they say. And this morning as I popped the tea bag into the pot it came to me that tea bags had not yet been invented when I was young. You'd heap a good measure of tea leaves in the pot, add boiling water and let it stand to brew, then you poured your tea from the pot directly into your cup. When you drank the last drops of tea from your cup, presto! Tea leaves, left clinging in strange, unpredictable patterns to the curved porcelain depths, just waiting to be read.
You needed, of course, a trained eye to read the tea leaves. It was not something anyone could do. It was a way to foretell the future, like a crystal ball, or a tarot pack, or the palm of your hand. The phrase remains, an oddity in the language, to remind us of a different, perhaps more innocent, perhaps more trusting time. A time when the future might have seemed steadier, more stable, easier to rely on, even when it showed up in the form of random tea leaves at the bottom of your cup.
Today's world is much different. It merits a more Buddhist mistrust in any kind of certainty. It has always been the reality, of course, that no one can predict what might happen from moment to moment in our lives, that the only thing that's certain is change itself. Still, I believe that we have lost even the illusion of security at an accelerating pace in the past century. Two massive and ruinous world wars have done their part. Life itself seems less secure. But in the past few years particularly, with our country and the world at large perpetually in a state of cliff's edge torturous suspense, unpredictability has become the norm we have to learn to live with.
So I have no leaves in my morning cup of tea this New Year. I made our tea in the convenient modern way: with a tea bag. The bag, once used, goes down the garbage disposal, chewed up and lost forever. Even if I had the skill, I have no tea leaves to read; and that leaves me feeling more than a little sad for a past that's also lost forever.
Please be well, everyone. Be sane and hale. And be as safe as possible.
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