A Sense of Things

The Telfair Museum in Savannah  is currently showing a vibrant collection of Robert Henri's portraits done in Spain, Spanish Sojourns: Robert Henri and the Spirit of Spain.  Henri was an important American artist in the early 20th century realist Ashcan Movement.  He excelled at portraiture, was a noted teacher and left an extensive, wide-ranging body of work.

Etching of Robert Henri by Ashcan artist John Sloan 1902

The Telfair exhibition captures the flash, bravado and complexity of Spanish culture, as Henri experienced it during his seven visits there between 1900 and 1926.  His often full length portraits of dancers, gypsies, bullfighters and peasants convey a bold sense of each sitter's individuality, a sense of that person at that moment in time.

The Spanish Gypsy, 1912, Robert Henri (American, 1865–1929) (Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Robert Henri himself remarked, "Drawing is not following a line on the model; it is drawing your sense of the thing." His drawings are often succinct, but they do convey that sense of what he saw and experienced. His paintings capture the same feeling, as he clearly drew with his paintbrush as well as with other media.  There is a fascinating and extensive collection of Henri's paintings and a few drawings at Poul Webb's blog, Art & Artists, and as you scroll through the images, each portrait is indeed clearly of an individual,  However, as always, I tend to gravitate to the drawings and landscapes, rather than the portraiture.  They often seem more powerfully to capture Henri's own dictum about the "sense of the thing".

Robert Henri, Pencil Drawing of a Small Child

Robert Henri, Images of Figures Sitting at an Outdoor Café, graphite on paper

Robert Henri, Nude Model with Blue and Red Skirt, watercolour, (Image courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Robert Henri, 1906 Procession in Spain, oil on canvas, Private collection

Robert Henri, 1910, Morning Reflection, oil on canvas, Private collection

Robert Henri, 1913, Irish Landscape, oil on canvas, Private collecton

Robert Henri, 1913, West Coast of Ireland, oil on canvas (Image courtesy of Everson Museum of Art - Syracuse, NY)

Yet, despite all the serious drawing and painting he did, one of the delicious comments that Henri left is this drawing.

Robert Henri, 1910-12, For Art's Sake, pen & ink on paper

He certainly caught the sense of things!

Unexpected Delights

It always makes my heart skip a beat when you round a corner in a museum and there you spot some totally unexpected delight. Usually it is something small, often unpretentious and yet sings of an artist's creativity and honesty.

Quite why I am drawn to such pieces of art, I am not sure, but when a piece speaks of creative integrity, any fellow artist warms to it. An artist knows that there is often serious effort, sometimes even struggle, to create a work. So you respect someone who has succeeded, who has created something special, something distinctive and of lasting value.

This week, at the Telfair Museum's Jepson Center, in Savannah, Georgia, I found a delicious trove of small, beautiful objects that sang. They were in a small exhibition, Allure of the Near East, lent by the Huntington Museum of Art. Amongst the many objects collected by Drs. Joseph B. and Omayma Touma and donated to the Huntington to further an understanding and appreciation of all the complex cultures in the Middle East was a small group of early Iranian and other glass vials, vases and bottles. I have always loved early glass, with the iridescence of time on the simple coloured forms.  Many of the early ones that one meets in exhibitions are Roman, Iranian or Sassanian (which encompassed Iraq, Iran and central Asia) in origin, such as these illustrated below.

A Parthian green glass vessel, Iran, circa 3rd Century A.D (image courtesy of Bonhams)

Roman, iridescent vessel, 1st-2nd century (Image courtesy of  Boston Museum of Fine Arts)

Three Roman glass vessels, c. 2nd-4th century AD, (Image courtesy of Archaeological Museum, Istanbul )

Sassanian cut glass bowl, 6th century  (Image courtesy of the British Museum)

Bottle, Mediterranean, Eastern, 4th century, late 3rd-4th century. Glass.  (Image courtesy of the Huntington Museum of Art)

Canteen Flask,Mediterranean, Eastern, 3th century, 3rd-4th century glass. Overall: 3 3/4" x 2 7/8" x 7/8". (Image courtesy of the Huntington Museum of Art)

Unguentarium, Mediterranean, Eastern, 2nd to 3rd century glass (Image courtesy of the Huntington Museum of Art)

There were other delights, but perhaps, again, the simple ones stay in my mind's eye.  One was a  nineteenth century/early twentieth century hanging ceramic oil lamp, beautifully lit and displayed, reminded me of the stillness of time, the peace now so sadly absent from so many parts of the Middle East, and the humble integrity of that artist's creation.

Serendipity always rewards, I have decided.  My Telfair visit reconfirmed this beautifully.

Watercolor Magic

Mary Whyte is a watercolourist whom I have long admired, ever since I saw her work at her husband's gallery, Coleman Fine Art, in Charleston, South Carolina.  It was thus a treat to be able to see a large body of her work, Working South, currently on display at the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia.

Trap, Crabber, Pinpoint, GA, watercolour on paper, 2008, 30 x 38, image courtesy of Mary Whyte

The exhibition apparently grew out of one of those lucky coincidences and flashes of inspiration: she was painting a portrait of a Greenville banker and they were commenting on the number of lay-offs announced in the local textile mills.  A chance reply to her about the fact that in ten years, all the mills would be gone sparked the idea to record and paint people who were working in the large number of disappearing occupations; from crabbers and textile mill workers to loggers and small hog farmers.  Mary Whyte set out to find and paint workers in these different worlds in the South.  Three years of work produced the exhibition now at the Telfair.

There is a felicitous mixture of large finished watercolour paintings and the small studies and preparatory drawings on display.  It is always good to see how careful preparations and study, learning about the people, the places, the look and feel of a subject, with accompanying journal notes, small drawings and paintings, help ensure a good result in the final work of art.  It is a salient point we all ought to register as artists!

New Year, watercolour painting of a milliner from Atlanta, GA; 2009, 22 1/2 x 29, image courtesy of Mary Whyte

What is also fascinating and impressive about these watercolours is their combination of tight realism in faces, hands and arms for each portrait, and then the fluid, abstract use of watercolour's rich capacity to meld and swirl billows of colour in other parts of the painting.  Underpinning all this skill is, in each case, a sense of dramatic, arresting composition, an arrangement of shapes that goes to the essence of the occupation or industry Whyte is depicting.

Crossing, Ferryboat captain, Valley View, KY, 2009, watercolour, 15 x 30, image courtesy of Mary Whyte

Eclipse, tobacco farmer. Gretna, VA, watercolour, 2009, 22 x 30, image courtesy of Mary Whyte

One of the most interesting of these paintings, for me, was this highly evocative depiction of elderly musicians marching to honour the dead in this Miami, FL, cemetery, a custom that is almost gone.  Whtye's ability to go from tight, detailed realism to the most diaphanous of "mists" of colour, melding bodies and ground, with the mighty banyan tree as abstract counterpoint, was impressive.

Pilgrimage. Funeral band, Miami, FL. watercolour, 2009, 39 x 48, image courtesy of Mary Whyte

Perhaps the most valuable remark - for fellow artists as well as for viewers -  that Mary Whyte makes in the book accompanying the exhibition, Working South; Paintings and Sketches by Mary Whyte, is :  "true art is not about copying. Every painting is an invention.  Each painting we make is about our observation and the feeling about what we are seeing.  Not one painting represented in this book is exactly what I saw, but each is exactly what I felt." (page 8)

This exhibition is well worth visiting - several times!

A Dedication to Line-making

There is a very talented and dedicated artist whose work is currently on display at the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia - Curtis Bartone. His ability to make lines sing and tell dense, thoughtful stories is remarkable.

I first met Curtis when we both were part of the 2006 Luster of Silversilverpoint exhibition at the Telfair Museum, and we later coincided with the second Luster of Silver exhibition at the Evansville Museum of Arts, Evansville, IN in 2009. When I first saw Curtis' fine lines in his silverpoint drawings, I was impressed and intrigued, for he uses his skills to make thought-provoking juxtapositions of human activity and nature.

Curtis Bartone; Forbidden, 2009; Lithograph on Arches 88; 22 x 28 inches; Courtesy of the Artist

In his current large exhibition at the Telfair, Domain: Drawings, Etchings and Lithographs, which runs from February 4th to June 26th, 2011, Curtis Bartone pulls one into realms that challenge one's assumptions about life on our planet, while leaving the viewer marvelling at his skills in etching and lithography, as well as in creating huge graphite or charcoal drawings and luminous silverpoints. Every work rewards careful study, like the print shown here, entitled Forbidden. In each drawing or print, dense lines build up compositions of flora and fauna against backdrops that jar, challenge and provoke our concepts of how we humans coexist with nature.

Domain is an exhibition that warrants repeated visits. The printer's skill and the draughtsman's skill, allied to an intense, informed series of disturbingly beautiful yet troubling messages, are such that you can't absorb everything all at one visit. Go and celebrate a master "line-maker" and draughtsman. Bravo, Curtis!