American Anguish

The events of the past several days--protests in Kenosha Wisconsin followed by killings, unrest and protests in other places, and more have been difficult to shut out. The pandemic seems to be increasing once more but there are many who choose to ignore needed safe behaviors. It is almost too painful.

American Anguish, digital

This drawing, though, "American Anguish," is an excellent representation of my feelings now, in this place. The darkness at the center of the nation is growing. The important thing is not to lose hope, not to surrender to the horrors of the past few months. The key is to continue, persevere, look forward and not back.

Cleaning and Conserving Art

Art conservation is a fascinating discipline. Years ago, while learning oil painting, disparaging comments about art restoration were common. Painters and respected teachers talked about disasters of the past--overcleaning ("skinning" the paint layer) for example. And who can forget the untrained Italian grandmother who accidentally destroyed a church painting trying to retouch it. There are many stories of inept destruction. Today, though, art restoration is meticulous, science-based, and commonly based in institutions like The Getty and others. There are many restorers working privately too, of course. For anyone with an interest, videos abound online.

Not long ago I discovered a series of videos dealing with art restoration and conservation by a free-lance restorer named Julian Baumgartner. Mr. Baumgartner is sole proprietor of Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration, a second-generation practice in Chicago. He was taught by his father, a master art restorer originally from Switzerland. His videos are wonderfully produced and narrated, providing a wealth of information. Here is a recent example, a simple cleaning of a nearly century-old painting by John Nolf, who was active in the Chicago area in the early 20th century. Mr. Nolf's work is still relatively unknown, but as you will see when his painting emerges from the murk, he deserves wider recognition.

Julian Baumgartner has a YouTube channel and also deserves wider recognition. Some of the work that he has been asked to do is simply unbelieveable, up to and including restoration of a painting on panel that had been broken into four chunks. Certainly worth the time.

John Nolf, 1871-1950

John Nolf studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1890s when in his early twenties. Before that he was a tramp printer in the Pacific Northwest. He lived in a small Illinois town named Grand Detour during much of his painting career, producing works in a realist style reminiscent of regionalist painters like Thomas Benton but with significant impressionist overtones.

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Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration
John Nolf

Back in the Outdoors

Iowa had truly dreadful weather last week--first an inland hurricane (well nearly) called a derecho blasted Iowa and Illinois, flattened crops and stripping trees, and then heat and humidity made people without power suffer for days. This week the weather is sunny, cooler, and not so humid. Taking advantage of that, I spent time painting outside this week.

Set up at Grays Lake

This time Gray's Lake beckoned. It's closer, there are wide grassy areas under huge trees, and the lake shore is always interesting. On the north shore there is a point of land like a straight finger that points to the south, covered with giant, ancient trees. The storm knocked a few big branches down but otherwise there wasn't much damage at all.

The day was pleasant and breezy and the point made an interesting subject. I painted for nearly three hours before the light changed too much.

"The Point, Grays Lake," oil on panel, 9x12

Pandemic Faces 5

For many our global emergency is the worst waking nightmare in history. Bleak times seem endless, as the past seven months have demonstrated. At the beginning of the pandemic no one could envision the end. Nor can we envision it now.

Nonetheless, life continues and so must we. Persisting, living as full a life as possible, contributing what we can, working, is what we must do. Alas the victims and alas their families and friends. We still must go on.

"Physician Assistant"

This is another group of faces of the pandemic. The first is a physician assistant who works with covid-19 patients, done from a freeze-frame of a news interview. As his eyes filled with tears he said he felt that he had failed all of them who died. Although he has yet to contract the virus, the psychologic toll is clear, in his eyes. Capturing that haunted look was the goal of this particular drawing.

The woman in this drawing is an Intensive Care Nurse who works with covid-19 patients daily. She's wearing full protective gear including a face mask and face shield. I did this particular drawing out of fascination with the transparent shield and how to depict it. The juxtaposition of rectilinear with rounded shaped--both live and mechanical was intriguing too.

The final of this group is another nurse, this time in only moderately protective equipment--face mask and face shield. This particular image echoes profile portraits like those of the Renaissance, so the background is similar to those drawings in charcoal and chalk.

The pandemic rages on. We endure.
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Pandemic Faces
More Pandemic Faces
Pandemic Faces Again
Pandemic Faces 4

Powerless in a Pandemic

Today is the first day this week that we've had power in my studio. Last Monday a big storm called a "derecho" (Spanish for straight) blasted through and knocked out the power grid to almost half a million here in Iowa, including us. Trees were uprooted and tangled power lines, landed on roofs and cars. We scraped through but it was difficult because power was lost to everyone, from businesses to private homes. That meant places without backup generators (most of us) lost refrigeration, cooking and air conditioning. And there were few places to get food since grocery stores and restaurants nearby all lost power. Most people had to dispose of spoiling food as well so it has been a difficult few days.

The studio power has been off so that blogging, emailing, and other computer-related activity has been nil. Luckily though, painting and drawing don't require electricity, so despite the humidity and discomfort I've been able to do a bit of work when outside cleanup became less of a priority. None of that work is ready to photograph, but here is a work from not long ago, "Canoes at Grays Lake."

Hoff, "Caones at Grays Lake," oil on panel, 2020

The park at Grays Lake has a summer program for kids and one of the activities is canoeing on the lake. The painting came about one morning as I was setting up to paint the lake shore--the park employee happened to park right where I was working and so his truck and trailer of canoes became part of the work. Although this qualifies as a plein air work, I finished it in the studio. It's larger than most at 12x16. 

Coming Back to Casein

Hoff, "By the Creek," casein on bristol, 11x14, 2020

This post was delayed by a lengthy power outage and is only now being uploaded.

Back in March, just before the pandemic began reaching us I posted about an art contest sponsored by Jack Richeson & Co. The contest Casein 2020 closes on the day this is posted. Richeson manufactures casein emulsion paint under the series name Shiva (the name of the original company) and this year for $50 sent a set of paint, brushes and supports to artists who agreed to enter the contest. I've enter a few things, most recently "By the Creek," finished this month.

This particular work came about because I've been interested in capturing light and water. Painting outdoors was an awakening for me when it comes to water. Water is maddening. It moves continously, sheds, reflects, and refracts light. Water has no color. Instead it is colored by everything. Water has no shape, no form your mind can grasp. In short, water is elusive.When painting water, what you actually do is paint what water does to everything else.

This painting started with a broad lay-in of dark colors, warm and cool, mostly value 3 or 4. Because casein dries so very fast, in only a few minutes it was possible to go back and begin laying in somewhat smaller patches of color. Working systematically from top to bottom and background to foreground I cautiously layered sky, then trees and foliage patches,, then foreground areas to add definition, then the creek colors and rough shapes. With each pass over previous areas (when dry) I was able to add detail and form. Because casein is opaque, it's possible to cover darks and re-state passages. In the end, "By the Creek" is a good example of my casein technique.

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Casein 2020

Ancient Painting

If you look at the vast majority of ancient art that survives, you'd think that ancient civilizations didn't do much painting. You'd be wrong about that. Ancient painters produced many works in various mediums, but the majority of those works didn't survive the millennia. Sculpture made of stone is more likely to survive than a painting made on a piece of wood. Nonetheless, there are wonderful examples of ancient painting in museums and in situ. My favorites are Fayyum funeral portraits dating from Ptolemaic Egypt.

Unknown, "Eutyches," encaustic on panel

Egyptians of the Ptolemaic period mummified their dead in a manner similar to practices dating back thousands of years. The mummies of that time were often entombed with a painted likeness of the dead covering the bust and head. The portraits were painted either using tempera, the same sort of paint used to paint tomb walls, or encaustic. The paintings now extant mostly come from an Egyptian oasis in the desert southwest of Cairo. These portraits have been known since the 17th century although the majority were discovered in the 19th.

Encaustic is still used in painting, consisting of pigment added to wax in its simplest form but often with added resins, oils or other substances. Encaustic paintings have a luster and depth that wasn't achieveable with tempera. These paintings look to my eye as if they could have been done any time in the last century or two rather than two thousand years ago. They are lively and real, depicting definite individuals. The subjects were upper class, well-off, and Greek. (When Alexander the Great died, his General Ptolemy was ceded Egypt as a kingdom.)

These portraits clearly must represent a well-known painting tradition in the ancient world. They have survived because they were left in a very dry desert environment. Other wood panel paintings in more humid and cooler climates did not survive but clearly must have existed. Very few examples are still to be seen, but one of them, the Severan Tondo, dating from about 200CE, still exists. The origins and history of that work aren't known (it was discovered in the 19th century) but it is similar to these Egyptian funeral portraits, though it is a painting of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus and his family. Beyond that, other ancient paintings are almost all wall paintings (murals) and are present in many places, notably Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy.

The skills of the painters of these works vary widely, and the preservation varies too. Given that these portraits were only intended to be viewed for a brief time, it's not surprising that some are more realistic than others. These are a small selection of the Fayyum works.

Representation and Reality

Piet Mondrian, "Irises," oil,ca.1910

The 20th century was the century when art departed from reality. The end of the Victorian era and the coming of a century of war paralleled the rise of abstraction, expressionism, and all of the other -isms that followed. It was as if aesthetic and intellectual life shattered. Artists on the cutting edge abandoned representation of the world for pure paint and form without subject. The examples are many, from Piet Mondrian to Jackson Pollock. And in the mid-20th century abstract art was seemingly triumphant. After all, why would anyone

Piet Modrian, "Tableau I," oil on panel, 1921

paint or draw an object or person when photography could give you the same image? Instead, let us explore the depths of the human experience and psyche. Or lets explore the physicality of paint or relationships among colors or even how light mixes colors.

Representation and realism are not synonymous. Consider that Pablo Picasso is considered a titan of abstract art as the inventor of Cubism. Cubist works are representations of the world in an abstracted way. That is, there are recognizable, if distorted, things like hands and noses in cubist works. Realism seeks to show us the actual particulars of a thing or person. Abstraction can show us a different view or altered reality of a thing or person. Realism was also an art movement that sought to show things truthfully and without superimposed narrative or supernatural elements.

Anyway, during the last half of the 20th century representations of the real world continued to captivate us despite the rise of abstract -isms.

Realistic artwork continues to be popular, and varies from the truly photographic Photorealism, as in the work Ralph Goings and others to several different sorts of "realism." Some realist artists became famous, if not beloved by their contemporary critics. An excellent example is Andrew Wyeth. His work continues popular throughout the decades despite being dismissed by art critics.  Another is Edward Hopper, whose work is representative of the real world, but is not actually realism. There are numerous others.

Edward Hopper, "Early Sunday Morning," oil on canvas. 1930

Simply because a picture shows what seems to be "real" it is almost certain that it does not. Even the most realistic or hyper-realistic painting is a thing made of pigment spread on a two dimensional surface and intended to show a three dimensional subject. To cite a well-known example, Edward Hopper painted realistic city scenes often devoid of people. His use of the shapes of the city--mostly rectilinear--with slanting light gives his "Early Sunday Morning" echoes of deep pathos and loneliness. Although he was reticent about his work, Mr. Hopper once said that perhaps he was painting loneliness but he also said once that all he really wanted to do was paint light on a wall. Regardless, his compositions carry strong abstract qualities.

Hoff, "Paint Palace," oil on panel, 2016

For those of us interested in one another and in the human condition, it seems only logical that realistic art would be popular. The range of subject matter, inclusion of implied or depicted narrative, thoughtful composition, and an appropriate palette of colors are among the many variations within contemporary realism.

My own work, especially cityscapes, is a kind of contemporary realism. A good example is Paint Palace, which is a view of the old Pearl Paint building in New York, a venerable art supplies business that folded some years ago. Instead of the usual full frontal view of the facade I chose to show only a piece of the gaudy red and white Victorian building, fronted by an old New York lamp post. While the cityscape is realistic, it is clearly only paint, with a strong interest in how the paint was applied and less interest in architectural realism. The echoing arches from the lamp post to the doors on the building and arches on lower windows were only some of the shapes that made painting this small oil a lot of fun. It sold long ago.