Altamira Bull, Cave Painting

The Chalk Horse

I once heard a world-class marathon runner say that if he skips training for one day, he notices it. Two days, and his competitors notice it. Three days, and the crowd notices it.  

     I was traveling a couple of weeks ago and didn’t paint for several days. I got the point where, before publishing another post, I needed to focus on painting until I produced something worthwhile. I can usually paint realistic watercolors, but the work that really captures my imagination, that excites me, are quick, impressionistic sketches that somehow capture the essence of a subject. Those I can only do after several days of continuous work, and even then only when the art gods are with me. 

Once I was talking to Robert Frost about a poem of his that is so beautifully written, it is considered by some to be actually perfect.  It is called 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.'  And I asked him, "You must have worked a long time on that.  It must have been done in the middle of the winter.  What was your experience?"  He said, 'Andy, I'll tell you about that.  I'd been writing a very complicated, long-drawn-out poem, almost a story type of poem entitled 'Death of a Hired Man.' I had finished at two o'clock in the morning.  It was a hot August night, and I was exhausted.  I walked out on the porch of my house and looked at the mountain range.  It came to me in a flash!  I wrote it on an envelope I had in my pocket, and I only changed one word.  It came out just like that."
-       Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth, A Conversation With Andrew Wyeth

The more experience a person has, the more simplicity is profound.

-       Keith Jarrett, pianist. Jarrett’s album, The Melody At Night, With You offers an interesting and beautiful example of minimalist music.

You can often tell roughly when a painting or movie was created. The fifties, the sixties, the seventies each have their look, for instance, as do the 1800s. Very little art can be described as timeless. An example of a work that is timeless, in my opinion, is the Chalk Horse, or Uffington White Horse, a 360-foot-long line drawing etched into a hill in the England countryside 3,000 years ago.  

     Picasso was strongly influenced by prehistoric art, by cave paintings and African masks.  In addition to the quote mentioned earlier, which he said after visiting the Altamira caves (circa 1939), there is this quote of Picasso by his secretary, Jaime Sabartés (circa 1954),

“Primitive sculpture has never been surpassed. Have you noticed the precision of the lines engraved in the caverns?...You have seen reproductions....The Assyrian bas-reliefs still keep a similar purity of expression.”

Below, I offer a chronicle of my struggles with a particular painting. The first six didn’t capture what I had in mind. I tried to compensate by adding more paint. That almost never works.

I sculpt salmon over and over. Because that needs to happen, for me and the place here. To create that tilth. You create that thing over and over again. You are bored beyond tears. You finally get it. You told the story three hundred times, and you come to realize what the story was about. And I don’t know what the story is half the time. But you keep doing it.
-       Tom Jay, sculptor, Heron Dance Interview.