Art: Food for the soul

Our next stop was the Accademia Gallery (AG), for a look at the famous David.  This most famous work by Michelangelo Buonaroti (and how many of you knew ol’ Michelangelo had a last name?) was begun when the artist was only 26, and took him three years to finish. This puts me in mind of Mozart, writing all those symphonies and other works before he was 20.  A genius is a genius, what can one say.  David originally stood in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, which we were to visit later, and which really is one’s idea of a palace.  Today it houses the city government of Florence, and has an imitation David out front, as in 1875 the original was moved to the AG.

At the AG there were the usual long lines, coming from both directions along the narrow sidewalk on the narrow street.  As a group we were whisked to the front of one of the lines (there are definitely advantages to being a group!), ‘though we still had to wait a bit.  Once inside we were led by our guide to the Gallery of the Slaves, which leads to the statue of David, standing by itself in the center of its own well-lit rotunda.  In the dimly-lit GoftheS, it’s easy to be distracted by that big, beautiful man-child up there on his pedestal. I tried to pay attention to what the guide was saying about the Slaves, but unfortunately I had left my headphones at the hotel, and even standing near him didn’t help much, as the place was so noisy – a high-ceilinged, echoing room full of other guides talking to other groups – so I finally gave up, and just went to look at each of the slaves.

These are not crack-the-whip slaves, but rather slaves of the marble, trying to come out.  For that was Michelangelo’s belief: that sculptures lurked within the marble, and just needed the artist’s help to reveal themselves.  There are four of them, and they are in various stages of being revealed (or, one might say, finished).  Two of them especially look very crude, very unfinished.  To me they demonstrate that a “work in progress” might be intellectually interesting – and provide guides with lots to talk about – but emotional satisfaction comes from the finished product.

As to David, whom I ventured to visit next, while our guide was still pontificating on the Slaves, he is absolutely amazing.  The subtle muscles, the knees, the abs, the perfect buttocks, and that calm,

smooth, boyish face.  I’ve long held that the Mona Lisa, that millions also flock to see, is way overrated, but Michel-angelo’s David is not.  To see the real thing, not a picture in a book, is a deep pleasure.

By the time our guide had moved the group into the David room, I had moved on, to the two galleries that lie on either side.  These are taken up with those overblown paintings that I’ve mentioned I’m not crazy about: swirling robes, voluptuous women, chunky cherubim on fat clouds, everybody looking some degree of pained.  But what was interesting about these paintings was that they had all been restored, and there were small pictures below them, that showed what they had looked like before the restorers (or “cleaners”) went to work.  What a difference!  What a fascinating, but painstaking, job that must be.

I found fascinating the room at the far end of one of these galleries, called the 19^th Century Room.  Here are lot of busts of regular folks who (nonetheless) could afford to have busts made of themselves.  These are not the austere, essentially interchangeable busts (and in some cases full figures) of classical Rome and Greece, but pictures in plaster cast (from which the final marble statues were made) that actually show what the sitter looked like, capturing not only dress and hairstyles, but expression, suggestions of personality.  It made me want to rush out and have a bust made of myself, although I really should have had that done before the days of a fattened face and drooping jowls were upon me.

Mary Magdalene by unknown artist, 1280-1285

I also visited two small galleries that contained beautiful examples of 14^th century art – wood panels with gold leaf backgrounds, rich colors, Madonnas with ugly baby Jesuses who looked like miniature grown men, story-telling squares surrounding the main figure, halos around the saints, the angels, the Madonnas, almost a total lack of depth perception.  These are not realistic paintings, but serene religious commentaries, meant to inspire and instruct.  

And while I was enjoying all of this, the rest of the group were still standing around David, while the guide went on and on.  Pat said he eventually got to where he was telling them about other groups he had led, which included famous sport and entertainment celebrities who made amazingly stupid comments about the statues.  Perillo Tours, I think perhaps this part of your Marco Polo Tour could be improved upon.

Wonder Woman Meets Spiderman

I just returned from my first comic con, i.e., Comic convention. My brother, the cartoonist Bob Camp, invited me to join him at the Doubletree Hotel in Portland this weekend, while he did his comic con thing. Bob attends these events, which take place all over the country, to make a little extra cash. He sits at his table prepared to draw sketches of Ren and Stimpy, the animated cartoon characters that made him rich and famous, or anyway moderately famous, back in the early '90s. It amazes me that people are still interested in that psychotic dog and incredibly stupid cat, but apparently the series developed a regular cult following, still going strong after all these years; for these people, Bob is a celebrity.

It also amazed me to sit and watch Bob whip out these sketches, while the people who were paying for them stood and watched his every move. And he assured me that the two or three or four requests an hour he was getting "was nothing" compared to some of the comic conventions, where he is drawing nonstop for six to seven hours. Incredible stamina, it seems to me, on top of the talent and concentration required to produce the sketches themselves.

Bob has done so many other things since Ren & Stimpy, which was, after all, twenty years ago; but this remains his biggest claim to fame, and is what gets him invited to these things.

I wandered around the room at one point, just to see what else was happening. There were a number of cartoonists like Bob, available for drawings on demand, as well as having examples of their work for sale, from poster-sized to post card sized, even printed on the front of T-shirts. A lot of the artwork was macabre to downright gruesome. But what there was much more of was merchandise. People selling everything from vintage comic books (lots of those, though Bob told me that at other conventions that aspect is huge), to toys, to comic-related collectables. There were also plenty of people strolling around in costumes representing favorite comic characters. The whole thing struck me as weird, but harmless.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the whole experience was the breakfast we had this morning with two of Bob's fellow artists. Interestingly, both of these guys know Bob from back in the days when he was drawing for Marvel Comics, in New York City, before he moved into animation. The inevitable "claim to fame" of one of them, Rick Parker, is that he produced all of the artwork for the comic book offshoot of the Bevis and Butthead T.V. cartoon. If any characters are less appealing than Ren & Stimpy it is surely Bevis and Butthead! And a lot of Rick's work these days I would have to put into the macabre-to-downright-gruesome category I mentioned above. And yet, Rick is an extremely nice fellow! It would seem he just has an...interest-ing...take on the world.

In fact, one of the things he said, and Mort Todd, the other fellow having breakfast with us, (claim to fame: Cracked Magazine, and more recently, Tales from the Crypt comic series) chimed in in agree-ment: when they were kids, their mothers were always asking them why they didn't draw pretty pictures, nice pictures. But pretty and nice just struck these guys as boring, uninteresting.

Though I'm glad to have experienced one -- and am especially glad to have had the opportunity to spend time with my brother, whom I see so rarely -- I can't say a comic convention is my kind of thing. But then, I've never been into comic books -- except for maybe Betty and Veronica, when I was about 10 (much too nice for Rick or Mort or brother Bob, I'm sure) -- nor cartoons, particularly. I enjoy animated features like Shrek or Ice Age (on which brother Bob worked) or The Lion King as much as the next middle-brow person, but the cartoon shows that appear on television just strike me as a total waste of my time. The Simpsons has never seemed anything but stupid to me, -- and I've never found stupid amusing -- and I've already indicated my feelings about Ren & Stimpy (though most of those show do have their amusing moments), Bevis and Butthead, and the macabre to downright gruesome stuff that seems to be so popular with many folk these days. But the people who produce these things really are all artists, creative people eager to make something, even if it's not nice, or pretty. More power to them.

The Wyeths have it

At the Farnsworth, I quickly lost interest in our guided tour, and set out exploring on my own. The modern works on display in the ground floor galleries were for the most part Robert Indiana's smooth, brightly colored word sculptures -- LOVE, HOPE, EAT -- which are blandly pretty. Much of the art in the exhibit American Art Between the Wars --paintings done by artists working in Maine from the late 1890s to the early 1940s (which is not my idea of "between the wars") was not very good, looking clumsy, amateurish. These were disappointments, but the Tribute to Andrew Wyeth exhibit, while small, was excellent; several wonderful paintings by this adopted son of Maine (he was actually from Pennsylvania, but spent most of his childhood summers on the mid-coast of Maine) that I'd never seen before. One, called The Belfry, was almost surrealistic -- a small church belfry, with little birds flying all around it...sitting on a table in an old attic. Another, called Room after Room, has an interesting perspective: the viewer is looking through an open doorway at a woman in a chair, with another open doorway beyond her, leading into another room. But that wasn't what I found most fascinating about the picture. Rather, it was Wyeth's perfect depiction of the old wood of the walls (the setting is, as often in Wyeth's paintings, an old farm house). The different shades of brown, of grey, of blue, produced a texture: rough, old wood.

One of my favorite courses in college was my Survey of Art course. It did exactly what a liberal arts course should do: broadened my horizons, introduced me to new possibilities, new ways of looking at the world. One of the most memorable lessons I got from that course was that paintings are not really "that which is represented," they're paint. The instructor, with whom I had endless arguments about what is art? (I called myself the class philistine, but really I was just the one with petit bourgeois tastes who spoke up), would have us go stand close to a painting, so close that the picture was essentially lost; all we could see was the paint. And that's what he wanted us to see; he wanted us to understand that these marvelous effects we got -- these pictures we saw -- when we stood back and admired them from a distance, were first and foremost paint, put on the canvas by a person who was hoping to convey through that paint what he was seeing, or what he was feeling about what he was seeing, or simply what he was feeling. Getting this glimpse of the nuts and bolts of the artist's work vastly increased my respect for what artists do, though I have always been a big appreciator of their finished products.

To this day I still walk up close to paintings in an art museum and look at the paint. This is how I could see the greys, the blues, the different shades of brown, in Wyeth's Room after Room. A marvel.

The museum also owns a old, converted church a block away, that is now the Wyeth Center, dedicated mainly to revolving works by Andrew's father N.C., and his son James, more commonly referred to as Jamie. Here I was surprised to find that the illustrations by N.C. (and I swear I never knew that N.C. Wyeth's first name was Newell), didn't do much for me. I realized I much preferred the sometimes melancholy, subdued-tones depictions of old farmhouses, old farmhouse windows, of his son. The most interesting thing I heard the guide say on the tour I abandoned was that N.C. was always after his son to put more color into his paintings. But the old man was wrong.

Light in the rain

I was somewhat disappointed that the lunch that was included with our train excursion to Rockland was not a seafood meal at a nice restaurant, but rather our choice of plastic-wrapped sandwiches, chips, cookies and beverage at the Atlantic Bakery Co, which is a small, attractive, yes, bakery, that serves sandwiches. However, my turkey with cheese and sun-dried tomatoes on sesame-seeded bread was excellent, as were the kettle-cooked sea-salted potato chips and (especially) the pistachio/apricot/oat cookie. Service is order-at-the-counter, seating is a matter of grab one when you can, but fortunately turn-over was steady, so that by the time we had gotten through the line to present our vouchers, and gone to the various spots in the room to collect our choices (refrigerated case for the sandwiches, nearby table to pluck a packet of chips from a basket, another table to siphon off coffee or tea (i.e., hot water for same) from industrial-sized thermoses, pastry case for cookies) needed seats had usually appeared. I found myself sitting at a small table with a young woman from Maine, married to a very tall, lean young man from the British midlands. They'd met in Wales, where they were both attending university. The three of us were always at the far edge of the group photos Barbara, the organizer, kept insisting on; we would all have preferred not to be in them at all. (Alisha explained her and Mathew's reason: they weren't really Simmons alumni, but simply friends of Barbara's. My reason is I hate having my picture taken.)

We were to be treated to a guided tour of the Farnsworth, just across Main Street from the ABC, at 2 p.m. That was half an hour away, so I opened my umbrella once more and walked a short dis-tance down Main to a lovely, spacious, well-lighted art gallery, the Dowling Walsh, one of twenty-three galleries in this small town. What initially pulled me in was a wonderful ship's model in the window, that I immediately wished I could buy for my sea-loving friend Ernest. (I rarely visit an art gallery that I don't see something I wish I could purchase for a friend, or for myself. If I were wealthy, I would spend a lot of money on works of art.) Once inside I found myself impressed by the paintings of Colin Page, that exhibit a beautiful use of sunlight. I am very enamoured of light in paintings, which is why paintings that do not suggest light, but merely color (I think of Gauguin and Matisse, for example) do nothing for me.

One of Page's paintings, called Blueberry Harvester, was basically of an old farm truck, with a long flatbed attached, pulled up in a farm yard. A very mundane subject, but the scene was permeated with the light of a beautiful sunny day. Proof that a good artist can make a beautiful painting from any subject.

In an adjoining room I was much taken with a picture entitled After Grass, by Richard Vickerson: a long, low dull brown building with a red roof; in front of it, great rolls of golden hay in a field of dull gold, above, a pale, pale blue-to-white sky. Wonderful lines to the house. Almost a Hopper-like simplicity and sense of isolation to the picture. Very Maine-like, I thought, although as a matter of fact Vickerson is Canadian, from nearby Prince Edward Island, where I imagine things look a lot like they do in the northern part of Maine.

Most of the paintings in this room were landscapes by Thomas Paquette. I found some of them to be lovely and interesting, but all rather disturbing, because of the quality of the paint, which some-times looked flat, dull, unable to reflect light. When I reached the table where a copy of the catalog lay, I learned that these were gouaches; consulting an art glossary once I got home, I found that gouach is a type of watercolor paint mixed with a white pigment called body color, which renders the paint opaque. That was the dullness, the flatness I was seeing: opacity. That effect often distracted me from the scene itself; I was too aware of the paint. Nonetheless, there were one or two of his small scenes of the coun-tryside of southern France, where the serenity of the sunsoaked landscape offset the flat smears of color on the mountainside, that I could see myself hanging in my living room, had I the $2,800 to purchase them.

Works by all of these artists can be seen on Dowling Walsh's web site (www.dowlingwalsh.com), an example of what a gift the Internet can be.

Art for Art's sake

The day I visited the Wadsworth-Longfellow House I found myself arriving just as the 3 o’clock guided tour filled up. “Couldn’t you squeeze one more person in?” I asked. Sorry, the docent said, “I had to squeeze in the last person.” They try to limit the tours to 13 people because of the space available throughout the house. I was the first person to go on the list for the 4 o’clock tour, but it was only 2:30. What to do with myself for an hour and a half on a cool, drizzly day in downtown Portland?

Portland is not the most scintillating place to wander around, except possibly down on Commercial Street, which runs along the bay. This is a small city of low-rises with a working class feel to it. Except for a few jewelry stores most of the retail establishments have, as in so many other cities, wandered off to the mall. In the summer Congress Street is bustling with tourists, but on my particular Saturday afternoon at the end of September there were few people on the street, and a sizable number of them seemed to be, if not quite homeless, close to it. I walked a couple of blocks south, and spotted the Maine College of Art, housed in a renovated former department store. Maine, like the rest of New England, is extremely diligent about preserving old buildings, but there isn’t really anything noteworthy about the Porteous Building. But there were a couple of galleries open and free on the ground floor, so I wandered through.

The most arresting, and amusing, exhibit consisted of an entire wall covered with lists and notes-to-self. Hundreds of grocery lists, to-do lists, chore-assignments-for-the-cooperative lists, written neatly or more often scribbled on post-it stickies, notepad paper with kittens or flowers at the top, torn sheets of notebook paper. I pulled out the pad of paper I’m never without and scribbled a few. The following list conjured up a middle-class mom with an SUV and 2.3 kids:

Water plants
Swim
Newspaper
Haircut
Library
LL Bean – return items
Recycling
Bandaids (Batman)
Coop – gluten-free waffles
Call dr.

On a snippet of lavender paper was scrawled:
Sun.
11 a.m.
Smelly Cat! (A bath was planned?)

The following harried note on a yellow post-it I could certainly identify with:

Do math again in my checkbook!
email Charles

On a torn sheet of notebook paper:
1) Clean your room
2) Read for 30 minutes
3) Practice your piano for 30 minutes
If you don’t do this Becca will call me @work & tell me.
Have a Great Day! Love, Mom

And on and on they went; it was absolutely fascinating and delightful. This to my mind is contemporary art at its most imaginative, taking an ordinary everyday something or other and making it into something else, or something we see as something else. Can’t you just imagine the sequence of thought that led to the idea for this exhibit? Damn, where’s that grocery list? God, I’m forever making lists. Everybody’s forever making lists. Just think of all the lists and notes to themselves people write in their lifetimes...

Hey! Imagine a wall full of nothing but lists, grocery lists, to-do lists...

Something my Survey of Art teacher in college kept saying was that art was about making people see things differently. This exhibit did that.

From music to art

A couple of weekends ago I did something I’ve been wanting to do ever since I first heard their ad on the radio (good ol’ WBACH again): I went to visit the Wiscasset Bay Gallery in the town that claims to be the “prettiest village in Maine.” Quite as much I love listening to music, I love looking at art. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that these two, along with traveling and writing, are among my primary joys in life (and what are yours?) But looking at art is a pleasure I rarely indulge in these days, for some murky reasons, not least of which is that I very rarely do anything for pleasure these days. I work, eat (and cook, and grocery shop, and clean up), and sleep. That seems to be it, to far too great an extent. I could now go into the reasons for this being the case, but we’ll save that for another time.

I don’t know if it really is the “prettiest village in Maine” – seems a rather presumptuous claim to me – but Wiscasset certainly has all the requirements: big old New England houses, with big old New England trees, little shops along the short business stretch of Main Street, which is also Route 1 (which you can take the full length of the Maine coast, if you’ve got all the time in the world and the patience of Job). The shops lean heavily in the direction of Antiques, which is typical of small Maine towns. I sometimes wonder: where do all these antiques come from? How is it there are enough to fill all these hundred of shops?

The village is up one of the myriad jagged fingers of the sea that make the Maine coast so tattered. To see it today it’s hard to believe that in the 1700s it was the largest seaport north of Boston. Where on this particular Saturday afternoon I saw only one small motor boat, complete with dog, there would once have been lined up a dozen tall-masted sailing ships.

The gallery, which is right there on Main, a short distance from the bridge that spans the Sheepscot River, had plenty of lovely art, that was depressingly expensive. There was one large seascape by the artist Keith Oehmig that I would have purchased on the spot for my friend Ernest – who loves the sea, and even more, where the sea meets the land: beaches, small seaports, docks and marinas – had it not been that the $8,500 price tag was out of my league. But, then, for this Starving Librarian anything over, say, $50 would be out of her league. I committed the amusing faux pas of asking the genteel saleswoman – and the salespeople in art galleries always seem to be genteel, or insufferably hoity, so rare to encounter just plain folks in such positions – about the artist “whose work you seem to have so much of – is his name Ohmia?”

“Eh-mig,” she pronounced, (I’d read it wrong, thought the final ‘g’ was an ‘a’.) “And actually, that’s my husband. This is his gallery.” I felt suitably foolish, but she laughingly assured me that everyone got the name wrong, and she did not seem to be offended at what might have been perceived as a wondering why they had so much of this one particular artist’s work.

Actually, most of his paintings are good, and a few are quite good. And I think he must be a pretty remarkable person – according to their web site he began collecting and dealing in art in 1985, at the ripe old age of 22, having graduated from college only the year before. So here he is at 45 with his classy little gallery, and he paints. Nice work if you can get it. And oh, yes, he’s originally from Tennessee. Here’s obviously someone who chose his home...

On my way back to my car – parked down the side street that lies just above the river – I heard the hoarse yelling of a train, signaling its approach to a crossing. This little side street ends at a public boat slip, and just before that is the railroad line. So I got to watch an old train, that looked like it was from the 50s, come chugging in, pause long enough for people to get on or off, and then roll away, toward (as I later learned) its ultimate destination of Rockland, farther up the coast.

A perusal of the Internet told me that this was the Maine Eastern Railroad, that runs May through October between Brunswick and Rockland, allowing passengers to see all the little coastal towns and scenery in-between. And this makes me think ‘hmmm.’ Because another of the joys of my life is trains.