C. S. Price ~ The Willow Tree

When you walk into the gallery where C. S. Price's The Willow Tree hangs you'll find it next to Raymond Jonson's City Perspectives (image on left below). Completed in 1932 Jonson had graduated from the art museum's school and just returned from a trip to New York. It has elements of cubism and futurism and shows a fascination with the Industrial Age. Price's painting of The Willow Tree was done after he had moved to Monterey, California. He was no longer working on the ranch lands of the Western United States and Canada where he had spent the majority of the first thirty years of his life. Unlike Jonson Price had only one year of formal art training in Saint Louis, but had resolved after that year to spend the rest of his life as an artist. Since the two paintings share a corner of the gallery, you can think about the two views of the world, the two approaches to art. One thing I always do is find the yellows, lavendars,greens and blues in both pieces, what they share in common. The brushstrokes are different also. Jonson's are invisible to the eye while Price's have a layering - you can almost feel the strokes as he put the paint on the canvas. Price painted The Willow Tree after he had seen the works of Derain and Matisse. He left the very realistic style he had used when he was sketching while working as a cowhand and then later as an illustrator for magazines. His journey in abstraction will take him further until there is no representation is some of his later paintings.

Explore the gallery where these two paintings hang and you'll find another painting to compare and contrast with Price's. Bror Nordfeldt painted his Willow Tree in 1931 (image on the right below) – a landscape like Price's but from a less intimate perspective. Look for a willow tree, as well as a number of other different varieties of trees. Not many of us would be able to identify that one on the left as a willow either but the choice of title allows a person to think about willows and trees in general. It also gives us the opportunity to think about what were these artists thinking about when they titled their paintings.

The Peach Tree

I love C.S. Price. For him it was a Willow, and for me it was a Peach Tree.

The Peach Tree

Stretched down like a knotty branch
of Wheeler's peach tree loaded to falling
with ripe harvest, is mom's arm
"You'll make yourself sick again."
The drip, drip juice on my skin dries sticky
Bits of hay fall from air stiff with gas fumes
Wheeler's tractor roars, it is caked and cracked
with dry dirt like the skin of old elbows.
Wheeler is a road without lines just gravel
Where I learned to stand. Now I use sidewalks
like grey skillets that cook my shoes
Along them people sip coffee on balconies.
My wheels are attached to a chair in an office
Where the air is conditioned
The baby chicks I used to spy on in cattails
Are city chickens I keep in a cage
On the weekend I drive away to a farm on the edge
I ask the ripe peaches to fall, if they’re ready
I ask the baby to come, if it’s ready
I’ll stay home and buy a rocking chair
Set it up by the potted tree, on the back deck
Listen to shopping carts loaded to falling
In my skin healed of grass cuts I’ll smile
with peaches make myself sick again.

C. S. Price ~ The Willow Tree

This week we're returning to the American galleries and will be spending some time with C. S. Price. Pictured above is The Willow Tree. It's an oil measuring 31 in by 38 in. Although the Portland Art Museum has an entire gallery devoted to C. S. Price's later work, this piece reflects the style he used during his formative years.

I'm always intrigued with Price's choice of title. Willow Tree, well I see that it's a tree, but I'd be hard pressed to identify the tree as a willow from the ten leaves and the gestalt of the trunk. But I can let my imagination go and am transported into a setting where the sun is intense, heating up the yard in front me – perhaps as hot as the 104 degrees Portland was last week. As I stand in the shade of the willow, I am thankful that someone years before had planted this tree. I'm much cooler because of it than I would have been without it. I also see that most of the people have arrived for the party next door. Aren't those cars grand?

Whenever I'm in the gallery where The Willow Tree hangs I'm drawn to it. I think it's because of the shade of the tree, the vibrant colors and the place I'm taken by letting my imagination go like I just did. Try it the next time you're in the gallery where The Willow Tree hangs.

Sweeping Motions

Something caught my attention today in my research about Jasper Johns. A google search of Racing Thoughts, the piece LaValle wrote about yesterday, led me to a description of a phenomenon that is a symptom of a psychotic disorder that people diagnosed with bipolar disorder sometimes get. They hear things quickly pulsing through their minds, things like words of a song or the grocery list etc. It is not voices, as in schizophrenia but is something else, termed “racing thoughts”, it can last for hours and seems painful. Johns’ use of words in title to describe his work led to a connection to Wittgenstein, a philosopher of the late 19th century who questioned the effects of language on people’s visual perceptions. One of W’s ideas is that you could prove that things are true or they are false, with no third alternative. He wanted to do this with ideas.Imagine a picture explaining an idea, no words necessary, this is what W was going for. Here is how he said to get there: if a landscape painter’s points on a canvas are not correlated with points in space the picture would not succeed to say anything, likewise no sentence constructed out of them would say anything. Therefore each would lack sense. But, if they were given the necessary correlations they would make sense and thus be true. Language is the same, if something threw a light on logic it ought to also throw a light on the structure of ordinary factual discourse. W questioned how language affected what people saw. He wanted to separate words from meaning and used art to describe this idea. The big plan, remember, was to do away with explanation. In 1961 Johns read these philosophical writings, He said
“Art should not come from the mind, but from the spark between the world and the eye that creates, according to Johns, "the final suggestion [that] has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement."
Then, in 1962, he painted Fool’s House, to reflect some of these theories Wittgenstein wrote about.

The broom hangs by a hinge. It was used to make the marks we see in the pattern, it was dipped in the paint that makes the painting that the broom made. My description is starting to sound like a children’s song lyric isn’t it? The broom is marking it’s own path, and words are used to label everything on the canvas from a cup hanging on a hook to a towel. Arrows are used, so we’re sure to associate the word with its object by use of this handy symbol. The piece is a diagram, like a bar graph or a pie chart of what is in the fools house. The fool must be Johns, to whom these items must have belonged. As one writer said of the piece, “The oversimplification and literalism of the works are rife with dead pan humor mixed with somber meditation on the meaning of things.”
The best part of all, for fools like me, is the fact that the Portland Art Museum has a print of this piece and will be displaying it in the upcoming show “Word and Image” which will be up this fall. Now you will be all brushed up when it gets here.

Jasper Johns ~ Racing Thoughts, another gray piece

Racing Thoughts is a drawing that was included in the show "Jasper Johns: Gray" that I mentioned two days ago. Like so many of his drawings it was completed after the original painting of the same name. The painting was done in 1983 and the drawing a year later. Look closely and you'll see the work is divided into a diptych. On the left are the cross-hatches that became synonymous with his work. The right side is the wall of one of his homes. Look for the nail that casts a shadow. That abstract rectangle near the nail some say is either by Robert Rauschenberg or Barnett Newman – you choose. Right next to it is a danger sign with skull and cross bones, an interesting companion piece.

If you haven't already seen the faucet to Johns' bathtub take a look in the bottom right hand corner. Visually, let your eye move diagonally to the left and you'll see an image of Leo Castelli. Castelli was Johns' art dealer for many years and was a major influence in his life. While you're looking at Castelli, take a peek over at the Mona Lisa. Those two smiles are equally enigmatic. Down below the Mona Lisa are two vases. The white one some say has two human profiles. The images on it if you look just right are Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, again the image deciphering is left to the viewer.

Racing Thoughts has many images, icons for the viewer to ponder. Imagine yourself in that bathtub, thinking about life. What is real, what is imaginary? In the end is your imagination any less real than what may have actually happened?

Jasper Johns on the Simpsons

Jasper Johns starred as himself in the Simpsons, episode 1019 in April of 1999. In the epidosde Homer becomes a conceptual artist, "Mom and Pop Art", see a clip here.
After Homer loses his temper building a BBQ he tries to throw it out when an art dealer tells him he has real art talent. He goes to school, decides he wants to create something truly groundbreaking so he floods Springfield, making it something like Venice. (sound familiar? Pearl district canal project, I swear someone mentioned that.) Everyone, including Jasper Johns, thinks his idea is a hit and all is well in Springfield.
The thought of Johns playing a part in The Simpsons is a happy one. Another happy moment of a day full of happy moments, like this morning on the radio I heard a snippet of Obama's recent speech about free education for service men and women. The bravest of our country have earned free education, he said, and it is more than just a benefit to them, it is a benefit to every one of us. Johns served two years in the army during the Korean war. He had very little education, three semesters at the University of South Carolina where his teachers told him to go to New York, perhaps the best thing his education did for him. After the war he didn't go back to college, he went to the Big Apple, fell in love, worked and became, according to Charlie Rose and Nan Rosenthal, the greatest living artist today.
I am all for free education, for everyone really. It seems like a no brainer. Otherwise we entertain the idea of Venice canals in Portland Oregon. We shouldn't be taking the Simpsons literally- it seems there is truth in every line, but you have to know it before you see it to really get it. Groening and Johns have a lot in common that way.

Jasper Johns ~ The Critic Sees, More Gray

Jasper Johns created The Critic Sees in 1964 four years before he made The Critic Smiles. Like in The Critic Smiles Johns has once again brought his wit forward for all of us to see and enjoy. The eyes behind a pair of eyeglass frames are replaced with talking mouths – talking and seeing become the same. Much like the gold teeth in The Critic Smiles this work is an art world visual pun. It's also gray like The Critic Smiles – gray being one of Jasper Johns' favorite colors. Gray over the years has become not just a color for Johns but the "essence of a long metaphysical journey, an exploration of “the condition of gray itself.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago were the venues last year for "Jasper Johns: Gray" an exhibition of Johns' work that focussed on his use of gray throughout his career. At one point when asked about gray and the exhibition itself, Johns answered in classic sphinx style:

“Yes, gray has been important to me. But I don’t tend to think of it as separate from the rest of my work. ... At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.”

There are a number of videos here on the internet that will show you the enormity of the Gray show at the Metropolitan and the Art Institute, some explaining a bit more about the work. One of the best videos is this one with Jerry Saltz from New York Magazine. Saltz will take you on a tour of the exhibit, picking the pieces he thinks will show Jasper Johns' grays in the best and most humorous light. And humor is always a good thing on an art tour, especially when the exhibit would at first appear to be monochromatic. Saltz starts after a 30 second commercial (there is no such thing as a free lunch or video in this case.)


Another video about the show is Charlie Rose interviewing Nan Rosenthal, Senior Consultant in the Metropolitan's Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. Rose's interview of Rosenthal is also insightful if less humorous than the Saltz. Click here for the link for Mr. Rose's adventure with Jasper John's Gray.