Good Morning Jack

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 28 December

Good Morning Jack…

It’s Christmas day.  The antebellum home sits on a hill overlooking the neighboring farm.  There are horses, of course, and a few donkeys.  But there is also a camel, some llamas and gazelles.  I want to say there is an ostrich but I honestly can’t remember.  It’s a clear oversight if there isn’t. 

Christmas is all about family.  You look at a home and its surroundings and you have to know the entire shebang is centered on the love of a woman.

This is her brother.  A man works his life, not for exotic cars or luxurious homes, but for dignity and the respect of those he loves most.

The barn is a mysterious place.  It’s nestled amidst trees and near a pasture.  A cat lives inside.  He startled me when he made a flying leap from the loft, sailing ten feet to the ground.  Landing on his feet he went lickety-split out the barn door and straight for a thick hedge.

It’s an obligation for the man of the house to fall asleep after eating.  His wife is wide awake but she’s happy to be near him.

The young lady in charge of festive atmosphere happened to dress as a mouse for the occasion.

Seldom does it get better than this.  They can’t believe how lucky they are to know each other.

Happy New Year!

Love,

          Dad

Outlaws with Paint

Vlaminck     The Orchard     1905

What do you make of using all this intense color to create a landscape?  The reds, blues and yellows are like those found in a basic box of crayons.  They are chosen for reasons other than depicting trees and brush.  Emotion is expressed here; that of the artist and of the viewer, as well.  Blue and green constrain the energy of red and yellow.  That’s a start.  The frenetic, oil laden brush strokes stir up an overall agitation.  The trunk of the tree gives our eyes a resting spot.  It’s 1905 and this is the work of Maurice de Vlaminck – one of the early practitioners of Fauvism.  The expressive brushwork reminds us of van Gogh but the charged colors point elsewhere for its source.  We’ll be looking for someone unconcerned with dimension.  His choice of colors might seem arbitrary.

van Gogh     Self Portrait     1889

van Gogh     Wheat Field     1889

Let’s first look to van Gogh.  He shows little concern for modeling form.  Such an approach would distract from the mood he intends to convey.  The mountains flow as a river, separating the sharp glint of sky from the warm turbulence of wheat ready for harvest.  Amidst it all a man swings his scythe.  Can he be representing us?  We are strangers on this Earth.  Our life a pilgrim’s progress – a passage from Earth’s womb to the uncertain realm that is God’s.   Of course it could just be the scene of a man reaping the late summer harvest.

Gauguin     Tahitian Landscape     1897

Gauguin     Self-Portrait with Halo     1889

Gauguin freed color from representing nature.  Where van Gogh might choose deep blue to depict a mountain shadow Gauguin would ignore what he saw and instead provide a flat field of red if it suited his purpose.  His self-portrait of 1899 foretells the work of Henri Matisse by about fifteen years.  Decorative design substitutes for the illusion of form.  The painting insists on remaining flat.  Color is as much the topic as is Gauguin’s sardonic portrayal of himself.   

Matisse     Lady on a Terrace     1907

Why would one of the great Twentieth Century artists deliberately give his painting the look of a crude postcard?  Imagine the impact of the colors if the scene had been skillfully rendered.  Carefully considered design and color would be swept aside by our admiration for storyline and the masterful modeling of form and depth.  We might mistake landscape for the subject when Matisse is actually exploring the matter of yellows and reds. 

Matisse     Self-Portrait in a Striped T-Shirt     1906

Someone gave the name of ‘Wild Beasts’, or Fauves, to the followers of Matisse.  They were the Beastie Boys of Parisian art salons.  How could anyone find art in these garish pictures?  This is the work of anarchists who knowingly perpetrate fraud on those foolish enough to purchase these insults to Western civilization.    

Picasso     Self-Portrait     1907

Picasso     Nude Women     1906

Henri Matisse was undisputed leader of the Fauves while his greatest artistic rival defied categories and would be known simply as Picasso.  He mastered classical oil painting while still a youth living with his parents.  He could have made a splendid living for himself painting portraits of the wealthy.  Ha!  Look at this self-portrait.  Picasso is an arrogant son-of-a-bitch.  The only person good enough to judge his work is himself.  The best of his work dares you to say otherwise.  The Fauves may have coaxed him away from a rose palette but he would always be a movement of one – except for his brief collaboration with Georges Braque and the development of Cubism. 

Dufy     Self-Portrait     1899

Raoul Dufy would become one of the Beastie Boys of color.  A few years prior to his transformation he painted himself as a disdainful, callow youth with a pugnacious tilt of the hat.  Compare the image with that of Picasso.  They are of similar age.  One wishes to sell you on his self-assurance.  The other doesn't care what you think. 

Dufy     Boats at Martigues     1908

Dufy     Martigues

Now look at Dufy under the influence.  He’s absorbed the intensity of Vlaminck and the audacity of Matisse.  Such is the fire that burns within youth.  Dufy’s running with the bulls would be spectacular but short-lived.  He returned to the portrayal of substance.  Forms once again exhibited weight.  His return to the subjects of classical masters was refreshed with the influence of Cézanne.

Macke     Self-Portrait     1906

Macke     Woman with a Yellow Jacket     1913

August Macke is all of nineteen in this portrait he painted of himself.  Possibly he’s struggling at growing a beard.  It’s 1906 and the Fauves are the talk of the avant-garde.  Within a year he will be swept up by the excitement of the Paris art scene.  Macke is enraptured with color.  He composes luminous fields of reds, yellows and blues.  The people populating his paintings are barely implied.  His love affair with Fauvism lasts but a couple of years.  He’s intrigued by Robert Delaunay’s work at coloring Cubist structure.  Form once again matters.  See the woman before the window.  Look at all the unexpected facets that required his expertise in color.  What painter of illusion could resist this play of light and dark? 

Macke     Woman in front of a Large Window

Malevich     Self-Portrait     1910

Here’s the portrait of the Russian painter, Kazimir Malevich.  He’s giving us the look of serious intent.  The back of his mind, though, is filled with thoughts of sex.  How can you not savor the sensual backdrop he provides us?  Now view his study of the crucified Christ – it’s nearly drenched with runny yellow.  Everyone, including the pious old saints, is stripped to their unadorned flesh.  Kazimir will likely undress you with his eyes.  So what direction does this man of sensual desire take himself?  He arrives at the doorstep of Piet Mondrian – the artist celebrated for painting pure abstraction:  a few black lines, intersecting perpendicular to one another; a white background; a box or rectangle here and there, filled with basic blue or red or yellow.  For Malevich these compositions are music.  It views like Stravinsky sounds – a romance unadorned.  Malevich exiles all things organic.  Make abstract geometric.  Make it simple, simpler, simplest.  Finally, Malevich falls off the deep end with White Box on White.  The box is curiously set ajar.  Actually it’s not really a box because it doesn’t quite fit in the canvas.  It’s five-sided.  It only gives you the illusion of being square.  Brilliant!  Malevich gives us the simplest geometry, void of primary colors.  He nearly renounces the pictorial narrative.  Still, we have to ask ourselves, “Why is the box askew?”  Actually, it’s not a box.  It’s a square.  Wait!  It can’t be a square if there are five sides.  But there really are only four sides because part of the square is out of the picture.  Who says – the artist?  Hmm.  Guess who created a storyline out of radically minimal abstraction?

Malevich     Sketch for Fresco     1907

Malevich  White Box on White     1917

Good Morning Jessicca

Letter to my Daughter
Sunday, 21 December

Marcella and Jeremy

Good Morning Jessicca…

Four days until Christmas and I think I am about finished with my shopping.  Last year I was making last minute decisions Christmas Eve, which is more like me.  I rely on something catching my eye.  That’s different!  It may or may not be but, whatever it is, it stands apart from what I’ve been wading through looking around for what feels right.  Picking out a gift is always very personal.  That means I have to like it.  Sure, it’s not for me but I’m not going to purchase a gift strictly on the basis of hoping they find something appealing about it while I can’t imagine what they would see in it.  That’s aiming in the dark.  The gift one purchases should always reflect something of the person giving it.  We feel good giving it partly because we see the value in what is being given.  Then we hope they like it because it is important they are happy with the gift because they are important to us.  It’s a gift because it is given with the best intentions to a loved one or sincere friend.  A gift does not involve the self-serving quid pro quo of a business arrangement.  You know the best kind of gift?  Your child gives their special crayon drawing to you along with some dandelion flowers.   It’s straight from one heart to another.  Perfect.

Your big brother Jeremy is headed to Europe with his wife, Marcella, just after Christmas.  They will be visiting her family.  I hope they have a wonderful time but I always worry just a bit.  My mind always contains a list of things that may go wrong.  I’m reminded of the many evils in life.  I become especially superstitious.  I’m helpless in determining events large and small.  Plane accidents, terrorist acts, car wrecks, matters of the heart… I have no say in preventing any of these horrors.  I can’t even prepare myself for the shock.  I’m always blindsided.  I suspect I shouldn’t even be writing of such things.  Vapors from Hell are released with the slightest pretext.

When I was very young I went with my grandparents to the wedding of a cousin.  We stayed for a bit of the celebration afterwards and then we headed home.  It was a long drive.  Once we arrived a neighbor came by to say a message awaited us at the telephone company.  My grandparents didn’t have a phone so we drove to the nearest town having the phone company office.   A woman at the switchboard passed along the message.  Evelyn and her new husband had died in a plane crash.  It had rained the night before.  Apparently moisture had gotten into the fuel system and the plane stalled on takeoff, crashing into trees near the end of the runway.  My grandmother was beside herself.  Her sister’s daughter was gone.  The honeymoon would be postponed. 

Jeremy came to visit me a little over a year ago.  He’s quite tall, a couple inches more than me.  We had a cookout in the backyard the day after he arrived.  I remember he wore a t-shirt with birds on the front – finches and such, with their names beneath their picture.  He was among strangers but his conversation blended in effortlessly with the topics of interest to these people.  He has a natural reserve but it seemed appealing.  He appeared open to accepting everyone on their own terms.  Where he was comfortable I might have felt on trial.  I marvel at how well he handles people and situations.  He’s not like me. 

Christmas is still a bigger family event than Thanksgiving.  Both are bigger than the Fourth of July.  It’s arguable but I think Easter is a close fourth.  Thanksgiving definitely brings extended family together.  So do the others but maybe to a lesser degree.   Still, these all seem family oriented holidays.  The joy feels artificial without loved ones around.  There’s just no amount of hoopla and drinking that will make the day truly festive.  We simply need these times to connect with the people that matter most.  Merry Christmas.

Love,

          Dad

Good Morning Justin

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 14 December

Good Morning Justin…

Saturday night was the occasion for the biggest event of the year.  It was time to flood the center of town with season greeters dressed in their best winter garb.  We all count the days until the annual Kannapolis Christmas Parade.

Out front of the Old Stone Vino they were selling hot chocolate and cider so long as it lasts.  As it turns out it didn’t last all that long.

The owners of this establishment once provided the townsfolk with fine cuisine and wine that featured intriguing complexity.  But they gave up.  Now they offer everyone’s favorite fare – burgers and brew.

Dogs always make their appearance at the parade.  This year featured a three legged dog running down the center of the street.  I couldn’t get a picture of him.  He was too fast.

Some floats assembled across from a field, near the Exxon station and local minimart.  People were anxious to get the procession started.

With a flurry of police sirens the parade officially begins just as the clock strikes six.  It’s about the lights, you know, so we wait until it’s good and dark.

We’re standing at the intersection of Main and Earnhardt Boulevard – named after hometown hero Dale Earnhardt, NASCAR’s famous number 3.  We have a statue nearby, commemorating his life.

It’s good to have your smartphone with plenty of battery life so you can record these special moments.  It makes for good viewing on Facebook.

People arrive in seasonal hats and they aren't always in the parade itself.  No one need be a mere bystander to the celebration.

Here comes the Fire Department.  Some people make it here every year – among them a local pizza parlor and a dentist handing out toothbrushes.  I didn’t see the tow truck company this year, though.

I didn’t see a single person inside the police station.  Ring the bell inside and no one answers.  They were all at the parade.

You know one thing that makes a kid happy?  Put them in a small wooden wagon with plenty of bright lights and pull them down the street.  They were too shy to shout “Merry Christmas” but people cheered anyway.

This old guy’s bones ache from the cold but no one is going to keep him from enjoying the magic of the season.  It’s a moment to feel truly grounded.  You’re a part of something joyful.  Kind of makes one a little teary.  Your nose begins to run.

There were so many bands in the parade this year.  I think there must have been seven or eight.  Buses brought them in from North Cabarrus and Rowan County.  There was even the Marching Hawks from West Mecklenburg, near Charlotte.    They were definitely something jazzy and new.

People came for the lights and, seriously, this parade was definitely about the lights.

What’s a Christmas parade without a manger scene?  Here we have Joseph and Mary with the Christ child.  Santa was there, as well.  He’s been around a long time.

I wonder how many people asked this guy if the parade is going to be on local TV news.

One of the more shocking moments of the parade came with the surprise appearance of the Abominable Snowman.

It took over an hour and a half for all the participants to march by.  As always, I think there were more people in the parade than there were standing by watching.

Don’t you know it was a chorus line of little girls that stole the show?

It was the Kannapolis Wonders band of A. L. Brown High School that finished out the parade… just ahead of Santa and his sleigh, of course.  Ho, ho, ho.

Love,

          Dad

Good Morning Jacob

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 7 December

Good Morning Jacob…

The rate of technological change we experience as individuals can give us the impression that humanity’s lot steadily improves.  Growth in scientific knowledge generally improves the quality of life by most people’s estimate.  Whether humanity has similarly progressed in the realms of politics, philosophy and the arts is something passionately argued.  These are areas guided as much by the human heart as they are by intellect.  Yet a convincing argument can be made that governance has benefitted from the development of democratic institutions; mankind is more compassionate when the inviolable rights of the individual are honored; and the visual arts has broadened its impact with the development of perspective, photography and motion pictures.  Who would argue we are better served if we turn back the clock and give up any of these developments?

Nicolas Poussin:  Orpheus and Eurydice - 1651

Nicolas Poussin’s 1651 painting, Orpheus and Eurydice, skillfully renders the illusion of a three dimensional world though painted onto a flat surface.  It takes full advantage of techniques developed by Renaissance artists, using single-point perspective as well as the lesser appreciated atmospheric perspective – acknowledging colors appear less saturated the further they are from the viewer.  The use of chiaroscuro, the treatment of light and shade, makes for a persuasive depiction of form.  Poussin provides a window onto his world, a civilization that celebrates the power of human reason to overcome age-old obstacles to mankind’s progress.  This approach was powerful during the Age of Enlightenment because it was a refreshing, inspirational view of mankind’s condition.  This expression by the masters of 16^th century art became a convention that dictated the style of Western art for nearly three hundred years.  By the 19^th century these methods were considered stale theater by artists demanding more personal expression; with its emphasis on creativity, sensuality, and immediate, authentic emotion.

Claude Monet:  Water Lillies - 1914

The Impressionists of the late 19^th century created a new palette suited to portraying their spontaneous reaction to what their eye caught before them.  They moved their easels to the bright outdoors from their isolated studio and became enchanted with a landscape bathed with sunlight.  The shimmering light, the ever-changing tone and mood as the sun traveled across the sky, was intoxicating.  Impressionist painters like Monet abandoned most all considerations in order to capture light’s elusive effervescence.    

Vincent Van Gogh:  The Sower - 1888

The Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh employed the Impressionist’s vivid colors to dramatically externalize his personal sympathies upon the landscape.  These works of the period burst forth with a passion that was suddenly free from deadening constraints.  The energies of youth radiated onto unvisited avenues with newly minted unimagined forms of creativity.  It was inevitable that someone substantial would eventually call a halt to the excesses and attempt to reinstate something of the traditional.

Paul Cezanne:  Houses at L'Estaque - 1880

Paul Cezanne felt Impressionism had abandoned much that was still essential to Western art.  The romance with color had pushed a reverence for form nearly out of the picture.  It was time to reestablish structure.  There was legitimate need for the illusion of substance, providing dimension on the flat painted surface.  Without dimension there is no dynamics.  Painting becomes a simple decorative design.  But the dark contrasts of chiaroscuro were out.  Cezanne would instead employ contrasting cool and warm colors to give a sense of depth and dimension.  His experiments would result in a fresh, recasting of Western art with a clean, simplified geometric look.  Detail was gone.  Verisimilitude:  sacrificed in favor of the sensual brushworking of oils onto canvas.  After all, we’re not making reality here.  We’re doing paint.

Chokwe Mask

 The colonialist ambitions of Europe exposed artists of Western civilization to new approaches of expressing the human form and psychology in art.  These mysterious, exotic masks and sculptures were exciting; powerful images, direct in their appeal and intuitive in their creation.  Flesh need not appear as flesh.  The head can be any assemblage of eyes, mouth and nose.  Extremes of imagination work to dramatize a human essence that is otherwise near impossible to portray.  About this same time Western thought is shaken with new ideas of the intellect.  Freud publishes his Interpretations of Dreams in 1900.  We are confronted with evidence that our minds remain basically instinctual and sexual desire permeates our everyday lives.  In that same year Max Planck’s revelations on the indeterminate nature of physical matter, his theory of Quantum Mechanics, undermines our Newtonian certitude.  Five years later Einstein releases his Special Theory of Relativity.  The conclusions are revolutionary.  Matter is a form of energy.  Space and time are related, not separate and distinct.  What time it is depends on where you are in the universe and how fast you are going.  We don’t all experience the same reality.

Pablo Picasso:  Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Art is not created in a vacuum.  Artists may be made subliminally aware of dynamics that shift great civilizations like tectonic plates on a suddenly agitated molten sea.  Take a look at Picasso’s iconic statement of 1907.  No single 20^th century painting portrays the unhinging of Western society from its traditional mooring like this bizarre portrayal of the women of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.  We are here confronted by the nude women of a brothel.  Our anticipation of erotic pleasure is instead replaced with feelings of dread and anxiety.  Picasso has presented us with an indeterminate reality.  The love and tenderness we normally associate with femininity is replaced with judgmental stares and insinuations of barbaric acts.  Picasso bids good-bye to our long, confident love affair with the Enlightenment.  We are now cut adrift in a cold, uncertain world.

As it turns out the Twentieth Century was a time of both unparalleled human catastrophe and scientific progress.  Despite two global wars our civilizations rose to unprecedented heights in economic prosperity and technological development.  The art of the Western world has pursued numerous avenues of creative exploration, including cubism and various forms of abstraction.  Painters in oil have brought new approaches to representational art with works by artists ranging in vision from Lucian Freud to Francis Bacon.  Movies are all the rage and photography has democratized art.

Can we say these revolutionary strides in the visual arts demonstrate progress over the last couple of centuries?  Or is it reasonable to conclude, as did Picasso, that art has a timeless quality – it expresses an immutable human essence – traits not subject to alteration by scientific advancement.  Maybe the craft of art is more likened to the nature of a love shared by two people for one another.  Couples of long ago fell in love by the warmth of a fire, beneath the inky night stars.  Today they express their love sharing a bed, each with a smart phone in hand or casually browsing their iPad.  In each instance the need for love is maintained but its expression is determined by the nature of its context.

Love,

          Dad