Painting

Jeanette Winterson is aphoristic and she is musical.  Here are some riffs, sequential and not.

... Art is aerobic.

Study of Tree Trunks, John Constable 1821

It is shocking too. The most conservative and least interested person will probably tell you that he or she likes Constable. But would our stalwart have liked Constable in 1824 when he exhibited at the Paris Salon and caused a riot? We forget that every true shock in art, whether books, paintings or music, eventually becomes a commonplace, even a standard, to later generations. It is not that those works are tired out and have nothing more to offer, it is that their discoveries are gradually diluted by lesser artists who can only copy but do know how to make a thing accessible and desirable. At last, what was new becomes so well known that we cannot separate it from its cultural associations and time-honoured values. To the average eye, now, Constable is a pretty landscape painter, not a revolutionary who daubed bright colour against bright colour ungraded by chiaroscuro. We have had a hundred and fifty years to get used to the man who turned his back on the studio picture, took his easel outdoors and painted in a rapture of light. It is easy to copy Constable. It was not easy to be Constable.

...

I move gingerly around the paintings I own because I know they are looking at me as closely as I am looking at them. There is a constant exchange of emotion between us, between the three of us; the artist I need never meet, the painting in its own right, and me, the one who loves it and can no longer live independent of it. The triangle of exchange alters, is fluid, is subtle, is profound and is one of those unverifiable facts that anyone who cares for painting soon discovers. The picture on my wall, art object and art process, is a living line of movement, a wave of colour that repercusses in my body, colouring it, colouring the new present, the future, and even the past, which cannot now be considered outside of the light of the painting. I think of something I did, the picture catches me, adds to the thought, changes the meaning of thought and past. The totality of the picture comments on the totality of what I am. The greater the picture the more complete this process is.

Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, Jeanette Winterson 1995

I tried to adjust this photo in Adobe Lightroom but exposure and color temperature adjustments kept taking the image away from what originally attracted me to it—I post it here As Shot—it looked like a forgotten painting, an old master, possibly attributed to the Dutch school, but certainly of disputed provenance, hanging in a dimly lit corner of the Prado and seen through centuries of ambering varnish.

When I returned from Paris in the early 80's, I continued my study of painting at the Arts Students League on West 57th Street. 

I attended classes in Life Drawing taught by Robert Beverly Hale and classes in Abstract Painting taught by Richard Pousette-Dart, the former was a Curator of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum and the latter had paintings in the Met's Abstract Expressionist collection displayed alongside the drip paintings of Jackson Pollack; but no matter the aestehtic wisdom these two may have passed along to me, what I remember when I look through the viewfinder of my Nikon, poised to photograph my sheep, was from a less hearalded painting instructor at the League, Peter Golfinopoulis who said, "A work is it's context."  

Here, I photograph the context of the clouds and the text of the sheep.