Painting helps you open your eyes very wide and really, really look at something.  You can catch something amazing with your eyes wide open like that.  It happens anywhere.  Wonderful recent examples of great seeing in the theatre happened for me in the puppeteer Basil Twist's recreation of his piece Dogugaeshi at the Japan Society, and the director Robert Lepage's Blue Dragon at BAM.  

     Twist stretches the definition of a puppet.  In his hands,  common objects like window frames and countless rectangular panels of beautifully patterned and painted paper become puppets.  He creates living collages.  In Dogugaeshi, Twist builds upon a stage mechanism that commonly provides background for traditional Japanese puppet theater.  The audience views a succession of intricately painted screens.  Each pair of screens opens to reveal yet another pair.  My favorite part of Dogugaeshi comes near the very end.  Here, pairs of screens snap open in a very long and very rapid sequence.  Twist draws the viewer speedily into his theatrical space.  I felt like I had been taken miles away from my seat by the time we reached a pair of screens that opened to reveal a strip of very bright white light.  That strip grew to become a full rectangle of light.  As if that wasn't enough magic, I was stunned again when the puppeteers entered the scene.  I knew that the final rectangle had to be small.  After all, it was miles away.  Nonetheless, I was shocked to see how in relationship to the puppeteers, it was minuscule.  The puppeteers loomed so large.  So, the screen had to be very, very, very small; or maybe, the puppetters are giants after all.

     Lepage's revisiting of the painter character from his famous Dragon's Trilogy, after a twenty year absence, is also visually stunning and unique. Lepage, like Twist, provides us with gorgeous screens that open and close, come and go; and there is that same blue whirlwind in which the viewer feels caught.  Given my interests in portraits and ideas about self and identity, especially the idea of a dialogical self,  I would have to pick as my favorite moments in this piece those about and when the young Chinese painter snaps a photograph of herself with her iphone immediately after a phone conversation.  She captures an image of herself at emotionally charged moments that she then transforms into large self portraits.  We see these portraits as they hang in an exhibition that Lepage presents as one of his many extraordinary scenes on his two level stage.   But there are so many more favorite moments.  Lepage tells a simple story about three people:  the middle age male painter who is now running a gallery in Shanghai, his long estranged wife who has come to China to adopt a child, and the young woman painter who is represented by the gallery owner and is his girlfriend.     He tells their simple story by using very high tech stage mechanisms and setting it the midst of currently high stake geopolitical realities.  While leaving the theatre, I overheard another audience member say, "It's banal, the story is banal."  It don't think her word is right, given the importance of the big questions Lepage raises through his close look at three lives.  I wish I could have quoted Lepage's own words to her:

                             My main preoccupation is what are we about right now ? With simple, everyday life stories, 
                      there are hints of the big picture.  How do you make that resound?

     Words are never enough.  For images and more words on Basil Twist, click here to visit his website, www.basiltwist.com.  There is a great deal of information about Robert Lepage on the internet, click here for a site, http://lacaserne.net/index2.php/robertlepage/ that is a good place to start.
      




        

Picasso is quoted to have said:  One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.

 Indeed, a peach is all one needs.  This whole painting for a peach (or better, a bunch of peaches taken one at a time) is in its final stages on my easel.   

When I recently looked at my studio wall, I saw an awful lot of grey in the paintings displayed.  As prior blogs note, grey is very important; but suddenly it seemed there was a little too much and some color was in order.  Luckily, we were still in the midst of local peach season and a house guest had recently given us a beautiful French tea towel from her trip to the south of France.  What more color could a painter ask for.  Picasso was right, just the peach would have done it. 

At left is a reproduction of the oil painting, Still Life with Fruits and Bread, 1641 by the Dutch painter, Pieter Claesz.  I saw it up close at the wonderful Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.  The image may be clearer if you click on and visit the Center's website: (http://fllac.vassar.edu/collections/medieval_renaissance_baroque.html).

Claesz is a master of still life painting. He presents a highly naturalistic scene yet his work is filled with symbolic references.  His objects reflect the grand and glamorous but also remind us of the inevitable passing of time (the watch in this painting and the nuts cracked open),  and its link to human mortality (many of his paintings include a human skull).  When I saw this painting at Vassar's gallery, I was struck by the extraordinary technique, the amazing use of light and dark, and of course the reflections seen on the metal and glass surfaces. I am fascinated by what we see both "on its own" and through something else. 

This reproduction of Claesz's painting has hung in my studio for nearly three years.  One recent day, it made it's way off the wall and came to pay a visit by my easel.  I set up a new still life and enjoyed how Claesz's work inspired my  choices.  

Letting Claesz be my guide felt easy in many ways, like a simple matching process.  The white cloth, some of it smooth, some of it bunched up,  easily fell into the foreground.  The  bunched up part provided a nice painting opportunity. I could capture folds and creases through contrast of lights and darks and subtle variations in color.  I set up the middle and back ground to be darker in tone.  I filled the middle ground with lots of objects, many many more than I typically include.  With those, I aimed to capture the same spirit of hospitality that Claesz invoked, welcoming guests to a party with food and drink almost ready for consumption.

But then, the connection with Claesz began to weaken.  Try as I might, I couldn't put in as many objects as he had without the painting becoming oppressive.  And I couldn't make it as dark as he had.   Three hundred plus years have done a lot for lighting.  Our eyes are not accustomed to seeing things in such a dark space as his.  And then there are those specific objects.    I couldn't imagine serving and or painting Claesz's roasted bird, with lumps of fat under the crispy skin and head and feet still attached.  Also, the symbolic value of many of his items would escape most current viewers.  I doubt that anyone looking at my pistachio nuts (right lower side of painting) would think of the passage of time and mortality.    

So, along with the many links across the long sweep of the history of still life painting, there are differences.  I think we can celebrate both.