the open field — painting music

the open field is a series of music paintings i have been working on for the last fifteen years.  you can find the paintings and a little book i wrote on painting music at the above link.

the sublime theme

Five hundred years ago the artist was in a great position.  Employment by the church was steady and contracts were awarded competitively.  Regardless of one’s belief system (most of the great artists were pagan/agnostic/humanists) one was given a sublime theme to paint.   Take Rosso Fiorentino’s “Depostion,”

To my knowledge this is the only Renaissance painting that shows Christ in a beatific state of bliss… That is, the painter took the scripture quite literally and painted the crucified man entered into Paradise. The concept that a soul might enter Paradise is a sublime theme shared by many religions, but never in Christian art, save for Rosso’s painting, do we find the smiling golden Christ.  By the way, this painting has been called “the most disturbing painting to come out of the Renaissance”*.. go figure.

What happened to the sublime theme?

The late director Ingmar Bergman said art lost its sublime theme when painting stopped being worship. What theme replaced it? The cult of individualism which Bergman says turned artists into sheep bleating about their isolation.

Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; “eternal values,” “immortality,” and “masterpiece” were terms not applicable to his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.
Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny each other’s existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal.
Ingmar Bergman, “Why I Make Movies,” Horizon 3, no. 1 (September 1960

As art became more egocentric art became boring! What are the sublime themes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries? DeKooning’s “Woman” series was sublime; Hirst’s “Diamond Skull” is diabolic.

Music is the Sublime Theme

We know that art at its best can uplift the human spirit. Even Picasso’s Guernica, comparable only to Goya’s series “The Horrors of War,” showing the violence of war seeks  to produce peace… sounding the alarm, to expose foreverand to counteract the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.  This painting is a scream against wartime atrocities, especially war on civilians.  It is a painting so powerful and disturbing that even in 2003 in advance of the Iraq War arguments made in the UN by Colin Powell the Bush administration had the tapestry of Guernica taken down.**

 Painting Music

We know that music can and does uplift the human spirit.   Can paintings take musical structure as its subject to create these forms… wrest them out of time and space and materiality… to depict these musical forms two dimensionally so that we might have the same experience of the spirit exalted?

In a word, yes.

Roy LeMaistre, “Beethoven in the Key of A,” 1935

Paul Klee “Bach Fugue in Red,” 1921

Kandinsky, “Composition 9,” 1936

*

Maybe some of you remember the first time you saw this passage from Disney’s “Fantasia” by Oskar Fischinger.

Oskar Fischinger, Fantasia, 1940

Notes:
“Italian painting : artists and their masterpieces throughout the ages;” Zuffi, Castria, Rodgers; Koneman, 1998; p.179; “This is without question one of the most disturbing pictures of the sixteenth century.” One has to ask, “More disturbing than Bosch and Brueghel? Wow!”
** “What’s behind the UN’s cover-up of Picasso’s Guernica? “; David Cohen, Slate, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2003