Autumn Ocean

Autumn Ocean

Oil on canvas panel, 2015, A. De Monte

I have a feeling this is a painting that people won’t “get.” That’s what I get for being a realist who feels more comfortable working from memory than from photographs.  Well, Thomas Cole preferred to paint his oil sketches from memory (preferring pencil for on-site sketching) as he wanted to forget lesser details and have the features with the greater emotional impact left strong upon his mind: “Have you not found, I have, that I never succeed in painting scenes, however beautiful, immediately on returning from them.  I must wait for Time to draw a veil over the common details, the unessential parts, which shall leave the great features, whether the beautiful or the sublime, dominant in the mind.”       But my painting here is a finished work and not a sketch, although it is small and experimental in terms of technique.  I would love to do things more officially as the HRS did with many preparatory sketches and studies and finished paintings in a larger format, but, alas, time and circumstances don’t permit. 

Whatever, I like this one anyway.  What I was going for was to capture an effect of light I noticed upon the water in autumn.  The sea becomes a steely grey and the waves become opaque, with one side with a strong glare, and the other with a metallic opacity.  If you can see in my reproduction, I make an effort to have artistic brushwork.  I know my impasto isn’t as steep as what you see in Modern art, but neither was the impasto of the HRS.  Many art historians who must have never seen HRS paintings up close (or perhaps they unjustly judge the historic works with modern eyes) claim they used “invisible brushstrokes,” and nothing could have been further from the truth.  There was an aesthetic back then that dictated the brushstrokes, in their direction and texture (as well as the paint’s transparency or opacity), should resemble the objects depicted – and Cole was striving for this before Ruskin’s Modern Painters came out.  Cole actually faulted Turner because his rocks were not painted with as much “solidity” (opacity) as they had in nature.  So you can see that our American painters had their own opinions and were not servile derivatives of the British school as some of the earliest modern writers on the HRS would have us believe.  There was certainly respect and influence for the British school by HRS painters, though it must be understood the HRS had independent beliefs.  Church took that brushwork aesthetic to heights no other painter did, and that is one of the reasons he is my favorite.  But now I’m off on a tangent…

So how did I go about this painting?  In a nutshell, I first used sgraffito techniques to do the initial modelling on the waves.  While that was wet, and also in a refining session after it was dry, I placed bold, singular strokes of pure lead white for the gloss on the waves.  After that dried, I did the same on the other side of the waves with a shadow color which was applied thinner than the white.  With me it’s not so much an economy of brushstrokes (I will have as many brushstrokes as necessary to get the job done) as it is textured calligraphy.  That is what Church did.  In most Church paintings, one leaf is one brushstroke, applied as thick or thin as befits the depiction of that species. 

I think it came out pretty.  This is a good picture to zone-out on, whether you picture yourself within it or get lost in its abstract elements.  At least, that’s what I do with it.  I will always maintain that there is much greater potential for abstraction in realism than there is in any other school of art-making.  There is far more abstraction in nature than in “independent” human invention.  Really, I take no issue with abstraction when it takes no issue with me.  But I can never be reconciled to Modernism’s art-for-art’s-sake (is art a god? art would do well to remember just who its master is – art shall do my bidding!).  

So, I have written you a long and disjointed post that wanders far from the issue at hand.  But what I want my readers to take away is this:  there are many more things at play in realistic art than just a realistic depiction of the subject, and that goes for both contemporary and historic art in representational styles.  We too have got artistic dialogues going, concern for old and new techniques, applications for abstraction, attempts to channel and influence emotion, and a desire to make something meaningful, among many other things.  The potential for realism is far, far, far from exhausted.