In March and April of 2007 I spent two months at the Virginia Atelier in the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. The atelier is on the banks of the Seine across from Île Saint Louis in the Marais. Quite nearby is the Musée Nationale Picasso. Inspired by many Picasso drawings on exhibition there, from the period late 1890s-1905, I drew incessantly for two months. My drawings are often small, delicate figurative drawings from Picasso’s Rose Period.; in many cases I have retained Picasso’s exact titles. These drawings have formed the basis of a number of my subsequent exhibitions; the period is Paris was so productive that I have had 10 solo exhibitions since the spring of 2007. In addition I was greatly inspired by the paintings of Lucas Cranach the Elder that I also saw in Paris. Picasso has likewise worked through Cranach’s influence.
A number of my portrait drawings are free studies after Cranach. The tension in Cranach’s paintings of working in a genre something like “official court painting” is something I thought a lot about. How might that dilemma apply today, or really to any era? I question how much freedom an artist, any artist, working at any time, might really have. These kinds of questions allowed me to think in new ways about tradition and innovation. Somehow I needed to give myself special permission in order to be able to draw after an earlier master. Not that my drawings look particularly like the work of those masters. Perhaps it was just being in Europe, in Paris - where streets, buildings, museums, paintings – where everything is many centuries old, that provoked in me a different awareness of tradition. Also nearby in the Marais was the Musée Carnavalet where I spent a lot of time considering the history of Paris. Musée Carnavalet was full of engravings, lithographs and many other types of populist prints about events in the history of Paris.
This was all an interesting new perspective on questions of High and Low in art, and on perspectives in printmaking that might be called on the one hand ‘the democratic multiple’ and on the other ‘the commodity fetish’. That conceptual space is where I work and teach, and this experience added a lot of nuance and depth to my thinking.
In these drawings the cloud fulfills a variety of tropes. It is ominous, threatening, falling; it functions as Nature’s reproach to mankind. But clouds also soar, protect us and envelop us.
A number of my portrait drawings are free studies after Cranach. The tension in Cranach’s paintings of working in a genre something like “official court painting” is something I thought a lot about. How might that dilemma apply today, or really to any era? I question how much freedom an artist, any artist, working at any time, might really have. These kinds of questions allowed me to think in new ways about tradition and innovation. Somehow I needed to give myself special permission in order to be able to draw after an earlier master. Not that my drawings look particularly like the work of those masters. Perhaps it was just being in Europe, in Paris - where streets, buildings, museums, paintings – where everything is many centuries old, that provoked in me a different awareness of tradition. Also nearby in the Marais was the Musée Carnavalet where I spent a lot of time considering the history of Paris. Musée Carnavalet was full of engravings, lithographs and many other types of populist prints about events in the history of Paris.
This was all an interesting new perspective on questions of High and Low in art, and on perspectives in printmaking that might be called on the one hand ‘the democratic multiple’ and on the other ‘the commodity fetish’. That conceptual space is where I work and teach, and this experience added a lot of nuance and depth to my thinking.
In these drawings the cloud fulfills a variety of tropes. It is ominous, threatening, falling; it functions as Nature’s reproach to mankind. But clouds also soar, protect us and envelop us.
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