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Artist Mel Steele turned 85 recently. I have known Mel for nearly five decades, through the motorcycle years, the goat-herding years, the gun collecting years, the opera years. He is my brother-in-law and a friend. And I love his recent paintings as much as I’ve loved any art I’ve seen in person. So, I thought I might write a little something about his work.

I made my living as an art critic, and during my time as a journalist, I made it a practice never to write about the art of any of my friends, both because I feared insulting them through misunderstanding, but mostly because I wanted to avoid the charge of favoritism. (There were artists I wrote about who later became friends, but that was different.)

But I have been retired now for a dozen years, and I would not write anything about Mel’s paintings that I have not said to him face-to-face.

Mel Steele was born two years before America joined World War II, and was raised in Madison, N.C., about 30 miles north of Greensboro, and I doubt there was any question about what he would be when he grew up. From childhood, he had a brilliant talent for draftsmanship. I remember seeing a small painting of a rooster head he made when a schoolboy and it was as fully finished as any professional illustrator could have managed — almost photographic in its detail.

He has always drawn and painted animals.

But what do you become when you are an enormously talented child? There is not a lot of expectation for a rural North Carolina boy to become a famous painter. He could have grown up to become a plumber, like his father, and perhaps doodled on his customer’s bills.

He wound up going to the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) at age 20 and became a commercial artist, graduating from talented amateur to knowing professional. Commercial art seemed like the only meaningful way to use his gifts. Selling paintings in art galleries is an iffy prospect; a paid job is more dependable. As fashion-photographer great Richard Avedon once said about his own choice, “You can’t really make a living photographing trees.”

Yet, at school, Mel was introduced to the larger world of contemporary art. It was 1959, and New York had become the world center for art, with the buzz of abstract painting at the center.

Mel entered school wanting to paint like Norman Rockwell, but, as he says, “Most of the leading guys weren’t teaching just the standard way; they were teaching what was going on right now.” And that meant Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg. Mel loved the new work.

“Asheville” Willem de Kooning, 1948

But there was still that need to make a living, and when he graduated, he worked in advertising, employed initially for Belk department stores. Later, he opened up his own agency in Charlotte, N.C. He was good at what he was doing, enough so that he could pick and choose his clients. And move out of the city to a farmhouse in Rockingham County, N.C., where he and his wife, Deborah Ballington, took up raising goats and chickens.

This is when I first came to know Mel and Deborah, when my wife — Mel’s sister, Carole —and I would visit and get fed goat meat (absolutely fabulous) and perhaps do a bit of target shooting in the yard. (I was introduced to the .45 caliber Browning semi-automatic pistol, which had the kick of an angry horse and could knock a tree stump off its feet.)

And by then, Mel had begun selling what are euphemistically called “limited edition prints” of rural scenes. These were essentially “posters” made from painted originals, printed up in volume and given evocative titles, like Down East or Wentworth Winter.

Most regions of the U.S. have some populist art tradition that sells well commercially. In Maryland, it is pictures of skipjacks on Chesapeake Bay; in Maine, it is lobstering; in Arizona, it is cactus or Indians; in Texas, cowboys. In North Carolina, it was barns. Mel painted barns and farming scenes and became known statewide for his paintings and the prints made from them.

He did well with these, enough he could buy some land in the woods outside of Reidsville, N.C., and design and build a new house and studio. And his prints were popular enough, he could begin selling not just the prints, but the original paintings.

Mel would sometimes cynically denigrate the art he was making, thinking of it as hack work. But it put food on his table and motorcycles in his garage. In retrospect, these images were better than they needed to be. They often had some edge to them, such as the print of a fox skulking near a barn, titled Thief, and presumably looking for chickens to grab.

Thief

Or, more graphically, a dead rabbit, run over in the road.

Highway 704

I say these prints were made better than they needed to be, and compared with many of the regional prints from around the country, they were. The most famous in North Carolina is Bob Timberlake, who has turned his talent into a marketing juggernaut, selling prints and furniture from his gallery in Lexington, N.C. But compared with Mel’s paintings, Timberlake’s are simplified and verge on the cartoonish. And they traffic in a greeting-card sort of nostalgia.

“Boyd’s Creek” Bob Timberlake

There is a long tradition of such sentimental fluff. People have always longed for a past they remember as better than it was. Victorian genre painting is full of such stuff. And artists, such as Paul Detlefsen, made a career out of sentimental Americana, painted for calendars and nowadays reproduced on jigsaw puzzles. Happy ragamuffin farmboys with fishin’ poles, covered bridges, horse-drawn wagons.

By Paul Detlefsen

The point is, the artists who make these images never actually lived such lives — Detlefsen was born in Denmark. It is a fictional history they proffer, a mythologized lie.

“Old School On the Hill” P. Buckley Moss

I don’t know if P. Buckley Moss had any real talent — she didn’t really need it for the kind of work she did, cartoonish prints of Mennonite farmers in northern Virginia — but Mel put some solid effort into his prints.

Of course such prints all play on a kind of sentimental nostalgia, but the nostalgia in Mel’s prints is earned: He and his sister did live for a while in a log cabin growing up. They did know the houses and barns that show up in his prints. And rather than knock off simplified versions, he worked hard on detail and finish.

“The Thicket’s Edge” Mel Steele

Not that there wasn’t some tacky marketing involved. Mel knew his audience and often played to them. When he thought he could sell three prints instead of a single one, he tried making “trilogies,” such as the “Quilt Trilogy” — three prints featuring old-timey quilts in them.

Or, discovering that he could charge more if his prints were “remarqued” — that is, a small detail from the image could be repainted in miniature on the border in actual paint — he began doing just that. You got a tiny bit of genuine painting along with your photomechanical print of the main picture. There should be no forgetting this was a commercial endeavor.

Timberlake had published a coffee-table book to market his prints and Mel did the same, in a 1993 book called Weathered Wood & Rust. The text is godawful and smarmy — they hired a writer to come up with some cliché-filled pabulum — but the images were beautifully made.

Marketing was an essential part of the limited-edition print business. But such things could get out of hand. I remember visiting the Moss studio in Virginia and seeing a framed print for sale with added “value” for having three signatures. First, on the original painting, which was then photographed and printed in large-number editions, with each prints given a second signature. And third, after the prints was framed, the glass was given an extra John Hancock, with gold ink. I don’t remember Mel ever going that far.

I’ve spent a long time on this part of Mel’s career. I believe he often felt sheepish about courting popular fandom when what he was really interested in was more serious art. I have been telling him for years that he has nothing to be ashamed of for those populist prints. They really were often so much better than they needed to be.

I’ve pointed out that his subjects, while they may have had an aura of nostalgia about them, were nevertheless genuine to his life and upbringing. I believe he felt genuine emotion toward them — even if he might have expressed a knowing disdain for what might have been taken as “cornball.” His professional training led him in one direction; his life experience informed another.

I want to discuss two prints in particular. The first is Mitchell’s Mercantile, a gouache from 1980, that is just an old chair on a store’s front porch.

Mitchell’s Mercantile

One of the things you notice in Bob Timberlake’s prints is their general lack of shadow. They are “cartoonish” in the sense that their subjects are simplified and usually portrayed in an overall wash of light. In Mel’s pictures, real objects tend to throw real shadows. Also, in the popular prints of other artists, objects — buildings, people, animals — are generalized, sketchy and not particular. But this chair on this porch is not just a chair, it is this chair. It is almost photographic; Mel has spent time and effort to look and to pay attention to the world. This is not some generalized metal chair.

Paying attention is the unacknowledged secret of fine art. That is true of abstract art as well as naturalistic art. Nothing is glossed over or ignored. And so, the very exact angle that the chair’s seat leans back is paid attention to. The quotidian is afforded dignity. It is the idea behind the German expression “Ding an Sich.” The Thing in Itself.

One does not need to get all academic over it. But look at the chair, the wood floor, the rusted Coke sign and the light that plays out over it all, from a distinct direction and shaping the images and recognize that Mel Steele has looked with care and internalized each millimeter of his picture.

The other print is my favorite of all of them, and that is for entirely personal reasons. When Carole and I moved in together in the early 1980s, we lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, along the New River in Ashe County and many of the hills were cleared for cattle, and other hills were natural “balds.”

West Jefferson

Mel made a painting of this bare and unprepossessing landscape. It resonated strongly for me. I know this landscape and no one I know has better caught its sense of isolation and innigkeit — of being alone in an expansive space. I am convinced Mel made this picture because he felt something genuine in it. Surely it could never have been one of his more popular sellers. (In fact, Deborah tells me it was never made for sale, but as a Christmas gift for several valued regular collectors of his work.)

So, there are two directions I sense Mel has always been pulled in. On one hand, as a professional and commercial artist, he knows his public and is able to aim his work at that market. But on the other hand, he truly wants to make something worth more than mere dollars, and so even making commercial work, puts an extra effort into it — and something personal — that lifts it above its mere purpose.

I shouldn’t overstate my case here. Mel has made his share of purely pandering images, and often they are not as well crafted, and maybe a little more quickly tossed off. The buying public is looking for rural nostalgia and Mel could give it to them. But in his best prints, he has invested himself and his life experience.

His success in the print world meant that he could also sell original paintings in art galleries, and accept commissions. And he made quite a few paintings for himself. Landscapes,

still lifes,

portraits

— even the motorcycles he loved and collected (he had been a big motocross fan as a young man

Which showed up in a series of motorcycle paintings

He experimented with a series of paintings made from little squares with letters, numbers of text in them, such as the red pepper. A detail shows how the picture is made up of tiny glyphs.

He made another series of copies of famous paintings, usually in oil crayon, but always he made little “improvements” in them (as he called them), like this copy of Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey.

Mel could take on any style of art. His popular prints were photorealistic. But he could also do impressionistic

Or primitive

Or design work

Or even sculpture

Mel can tackle pretty much any style or genre. Yet, what he really wanted to do, since his early days at art school, was the abstract painting he discovered there.

It sometimes needs to be pointed out that abstract painting isn’t necessarily easier or faster than detailed realism. In fact, quality in any variety of art depends on careful attention to color, line, design, mass, balance, and a sense of depth (or lack of, when that is the point). A successful photo-realist scene will only work as art if all its parts work in harmony. A good abstract painting is the same as a good realistic painting, except without a subject matter you can name — like a barn or owl.

Believe me, as an art critic (often asked to judge local art shows and give out blue ribbons), I saw a deplorable boatload of bad abstract painting, and almost always, the problem was that the artist really just threw some colors on the canvas in a haphazard fashion. Bad abstract art is a dime-a-dozen.

Bad, indifferent, tossed haphazardly

It isn’t just the public, but too often the artists themselves, that think an abstract is made by energetically slathering paint on the canvas, and that the energy of its creation will be conveyed to the appreciative viewer. Das ist schlamperei. Sloppy; lazy; careless.

Sometimes a painting can give the appearance of spontaneity, but such doesn’t happen through accident. One may look at an abstract painting by Mel’s hero, Willem de Kooning, and believe he tosses them off in a fit of athletic frenzy, but there is film of the artist painting and mostly he stands back from his easel by about 10 feet and looks at the canvas for two or three minutes and then approaches with his brush and adds a few strokes and steps back again to look. It is a slow accumulation of careful decisions made through a lot of just looking and thinking.

I have watched paintings by Mel in the process of being “builded.” He likes to work alone, but I have snuck into his studio in off hours and seen paintings change slowly over days until he gets the final version he is happy with. Whole quarters of the canvas may be covered over and repainted; new details added or others scrubbed out.

Subtle differences in three states of the same work

When the famous Japanese Ikiyo-e artist, Hokusai, turned 80 he said, “I have drawn things since I was six. All that I made before the age of 65 is not worth counting. At 73, I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At 90 I will enter into the secret of things. At 110, everything — every dot, every dash — will live.”

Mediocre artists will find a “style” and stick with it. Better artists continue to grow their whole lives. You can follow the growing maturity of Mel’s abstract work from his early canvases to his most recent.

His early abstracts suffer from the rigorous training he got at art school. His abstract paintings are notably careful, well-lined, almost as if he were making photorealist versions of abstract paintings. When architects attempt to make gallery art, they often make this sort of deracinated art — more design-y than resonant. It’s what I have always called “architect’s art.”

Even in this early work, you can see some through-lines to the later. Unlike many abstract paintings, which may as well be wall-paper, Mel tends to situate shapes against a background. Often the background is a tiny sliver at the top of the canvas, sometimes the shapes occupy a spot at the center like a vase of flowers on a table.

You see that in the early paintings and in more recent ones.

This gives Mel’s abstracts a solid sense of structure. Squiggles don’t just run off the edge of the frame.

He also uses the size of shapes and their colors to create a sense of near-and-far, a sense of depth in the painting, so you can look at it as if you were gazing at a landscape. (I don’t want to get caught up here in an argument about Clement Greenberg, the influential mid-century critic who claimed that painting should be flat and that two-dimensionality was its essential fact and that to attempt the illusion of depth was somehow anti-art. That was always pure balderdash and if he had had eyes instead of theories, he would have seen that.)

Some shapes cover up parts of other shapes. Cool colors and darker shades can recede while warmer colors and brighter ones can appear more forward. It isn’t all just a great bowl of oatmeal. There is visual structure available to those who take the time to immerse themselves in the art. Art takes time to look at and the longer you look, the more complex the painting, and the more intense the emotions that may be evoked.

I mentioned that in his more commercial prints, at least in the best of them, Mel found ways to put his own life into them. Unlike some popular print artists, who present a nostalgic world that never actually existed, Mel’s barns and farm houses are part of the life he’s actually lived — at least in his childhood, and after a city life in Charlotte, once again in his life back in rural Rockingham County.

When I have gone to visit Mel and Deborah in Reidsville, as I drive north from Winston-Salem on U.S. 158, I pass many tobacco barns like the ones in his prints. They are still there, and there is often a damaged barbed-wire fence around them. Nostalgia-mongers love white picket fences; there’s little quite so warm and fuzzy about barbed wire. Yet, it’s that detail that makes Mel’s print carry a weight greeting-card art never even attempts.

Softer art likes flowers; Mel’s best paintings show weeds.

And I think there is something similar in the abstract paintings. In most of them, there is a recurring detail of zebra stripes. A shape, either large or small, will be crossed with black-and-white stripes. I’ve asked Mel why and he doesn’t have a thought-out answer. “I just like it,” he says. But Mel grew up in a house in Madison, N.C., just across the street from a railroad grade crossing. I suspect that this detail has lodged in his consciousness and shows up as an emotional nexus in work that is otherwise non-figurative.

After all, the front door of his studio-home is striped also, and a spooky mask that sits on his wall. You can find these stripes all around his house, including on throw pillows on his sofa.

Like many creative people, Mel doesn’t seem to want to look too deeply into, or talk about the wellsprings of his work. Many artists I’ve talked to are afraid if they look too closely, their inspiration might dry up.

One should always be wary of claiming to know what is going on in another person’s noggin. And I may have completely misunderstood Mel’s muse. If so, I’m sorry. It is only a guess, from watching from the outside.

But over a very long work life, Mel has seemed to avoid talking about anything too deep in his art, while at the same time putting great effort into its making, even when less care would have been enough.

For the past dozen years or so, Mel has painted landscapes on commission for certain collectors, mostly sold through his agent, and painted canvas after canvas working on his abstracts, using patches of color, on top or beneath each other, as if they were landscape paintings of imaginary shapes rather than trees and streams.

You can see the layout of shapes running through the middle of these canvases, with a clear patch — almost a sky — above and another patch, almost like a meadow, below. The fact that the middle is made up of a bustle of shapes and colors might stand in for a forest — except that they don’t need to. It is sufficient that they are tangible shapes.

It is the way some classical music has a “program” that tells you the story being depicted in the orchestra, but if you didn’t know the program, you would still be able to feel the movement of the music in a specific direction.

It is in this sense that I say Mel’s abstracts can be seen as quasi landscapes. Not that they are meant to be literally so, but that they display a visual form that mimics the mental idea we have of a landscape. Take away anything in a scene that has a name and this is what is left. Color, shape, form, space, frame.

I have included a passel of Mel’s artwork in the blog entry, but I have at least another 200 images I simply don’t have room for. Mel has been an extraordinarily prolific and various artist, using many styles and many media over the years — gouache, oil crayon, acrylic, pen-and-ink. There is almost no style, genre or medium he has not taken on over the past 60 years.

He is better than he lets on.

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Critics are not all thumbs

January 16, 2024

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At the bottom of every product entry on the Amazon webpage you will find customer reviews. Some are quite thoughtful, others merely complain that the package they got was dented. Too often, close reading shows that the review shown is for some other product altogether and simply slung in with the rest by someone — or some algorithm — that wasn’t paying close attention.

Check out Google’s list of restaurants near you and you will find any number of reviews by those who have eaten there, and often with an iPhone photo of their dinner plate. These range from “The worst scungilli I’ve ever tasted” to “The cleanest restroom I’ve had to use.” Again, perhaps with a photo.

My favorites are those where someone posts a four-star CD review with the words, “I haven’t heard this yet.”

More than ever, we are led to believe that “everyone’s a critic.” Opinions are like noses (I’m being polite): Everyone’s got one. But I spent 30 years of my life as a professional art critic, and it has always bothered me that the wider public seems to think that real criticism, by people who are actually paid to think about such things, is little more than “I liked it,” or “I didn’t like it.”

On such a level, yes, everyone’s opinion is valid. If you liked it, then to say so is an obvious truth. But that is not what a professional critic is paid to do.

Granted, there are some people out there with the title on the masthead who do little more than report their likes and dislikes. But the kind of criticism I’m talking about — and that I did my best to engage in — has very little to do with simple likes and dislikes.

I was paid, rather, for my range of knowledge about the subject, about the history of it, the variety of it, the consensus about it, and my ability to say something meaningful and coherent — and interesting — about it.

I was paid to explain what I was seeing, put it in context, say why it is important — or not — and, especially with new art, to attempt to unknot difficulties that may make understanding elusive. The art world is full of “elusive.”

I began as a freelance art critic with the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va. in the mid-1980s, and became staff critic with The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, Ariz., in 1987, where I worked for 25 years until I retired in 2012. By then, newspapers were in decline and few still had any critics on staff as layoffs became as regular as seasons. When I left, I was not replaced. All across the nation, critics are not being replaced; lights are blinking out all over the heavens. The loss is considerable.

I have continued to post about art on this blog. There was a long piece about Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat. Another on the long echoes from the pose of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus. I wrote about photographers Nan Goldin and Garry Winogrand. Some of these have been the most frequently visited blog entries on my site.

Over those three decades in journalism, I covered an awful lot of art, both locally and nationally. Much of the art, I loved. Some not so much, and there were even shows of art I had little sympathy for. All of it, I tried to say something real about and meaningful. So, I feel I have established my bona fides to write about criticism.

My tastes didn’t stop me from recognizing quality or importance, even if it was art I didn’t much care for. And there was, correspondingly, art I knew wasn’t especially important that I really, really enjoyed. My likes and dislikes didn’t count much, and weren’t supposed to.

Let me give you some examples either way.

One of the very few times I had a contretemps with my editor was about a show at the Phoenix Art Museum of art by the so-called Mexican Muralists. I mentioned to my editor that I was thinking of giving the show a pass and she nearly bit my head off, making it absolutely clear that I wasn’t being paid not to write about an important show, or to care whether I liked the work. I knew this, of course, but I had to confess my lack of simpatico with the work. Of course, I wrote about it. Without expressing my own qualms.

In general, I have little love for art that is primarily propaganda, and that is just what the work of Diego Rivera or David Siqueiros is. There is good ol’ Karl Marx pointing the way to the future for the downtrodden campesinos. There are the peasants displaying solidarity by all wearing the exact same clothes and carrying the exact same weapons. For me, this is a big snooze.

And on top of that, the colors used favor rather dull browns and ochers. It just isn’t very inviting or attractive art. Nevertheless, the movement, from the 1920s through the 1940s, defines an era of Mexican culture, and was immensely important. And, moreover, some of the muralist art was clearly better than other, and it was my job to show that and explain why and how.

It should be pointed out that it isn’t Mexican art I have a problem with. I love the crazy work of Frida Kahlo; I wrote an appreciative review of Rufino Tamayo for ARTnews magazine. I enjoy the skeletons and calaveras of Jose Posada and the volcanic landscapes of Dr. Atl. And all that colonial-era art, and all the bright, colorful, energetic folk art.

It’s just the dreary, politically sentimentalized work of the muralists I dislike.

Let me give you some other examples. There is no question but that the pointillist works of Georges Seurat are masterpieces, and important in the history of art. But I find Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grandes Jattes a huge bore. Stiff and unyielding, all the life sucked out of what should be a bustling joy. It seems to me a painting made to justify a theory, and not something that had any more lively reason to burst out of his imagination.

And there is his older contemporary Camille Pissarro. I don’t dislike Pissarro’s painting, but it just seems a trifle dull. He is the painterly version of a composer who can write perfect fugues, knows voice-leading, and can orchestrate magnificently, and yet cannot write a tune I can whistle.

I’m specifically writing about art I have actually seen in person, and not just stuff I find in books or magazines. Reproduction cannot give anyone a clear idea of the art, its size, gloss, color. You can only get the iconography and some loose sense of everything else.

The necessity of seeing the art in person was brought home by Paul Cezanne. I never cared much for the work of Cezanne. But then, I spent some time with the actual work, and it exploded in my eye with form and color that just eludes reproduction. Now, Cezanne is one of my most loved artists and I kick myself for all those years when I paid him scarce attention. Those apples and pears — I want to lick the paint off the canvas.

Another confession: I never cared for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. I’ve been to the Louvre now, several times, and in person, the Mona Lisa is no more exciting. It is a small, rather ordinary portrait. Yes, the sfumato technique is quite pretty, but the painting itself does not deserve the fame it seems to suffer.

On the other hand, I do love the same artist’s Ginevra de’ Benci, at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It has all the glow and spirit that poor Mona Lisa just doesn’t have.

But even Ginevra doesn’t draw the pleasure from me that I get from Raphael’s portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, one of the most perfect paintings I have ever seen.

Rembrandt saw the portrait, copied it in pen and ink, and later used it as inspiration for one of his self-portraits, now at the National Gallery in Washington. I love that one, too.

So, it is not that I hate great paintings and love minor ones. It is just a matter of taste. My taste drifts toward some and is left unmoved by other. But, as a critic, I certainly know the difference.

I have no issue with anyone liking or disliking any piece of art. Not everything has to appeal to everyone. If you think Damien Hirst’s pickled shark is disgusting, I have no issue with you. If you think the hands on Michelangelo’s David too large, and his privates too small, that’s fair. Even if you find yourself moved emotionally by the light inside the cottage of a work by Thomas Kinkade, I say, enjoy. But that doesn’t qualify you as a critic.

The art I love — and “love” is not too strong a word — includes some famous and important paintings. I grew up with Picasso’s Guernica when it was hanging at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In my teen years, I visited MoMA often and thought I’d have Guernica to see for my lifetime. But it returned to Spain in 1981. Seeing it stretched across 25 feet of wallspace helped steer me into a life with art.

I loved seeing Jackson Pollock’s One Number 31, also at MoMA, back when abstract art was still seen with suspicion by the public. It hit me like a brick, and I loved its visual busy-ness and textural depth. It was a painting I could lose myself in.

In Boston, I finally saw Paul Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, another panoramic picture. Unlike the Mona Lisa, it makes a stronger affect in person than reproduced.

At the National Gallery in Washington, there are a number of paintings I visit, as if on a pilgrimage. Perhaps the main one is Mary Queen of Heaven by the 15th-century Master of the St. Lucy Legend, an unknown artist (so many were anonymous back then) with a magical ability to create detailed fabric and rich color. It is not one of the superstars of the collection, but it is dear to me. It is 7 feet tall, and busy with detail. I love art that highlights texture and color, and am less drawn to iconography or storytelling for itself (such as features in propaganda). The virgin Mary means nothing to me religiously, but this painting I worship.

All the work of Claude Monet pleases me, but it is the large waterlilies that move me. When I finally got to see the group of them at the Orangerie in Paris, I had to sit down. Two oval rooms with walls banded with waterlilies. It was a holy place.

These are all works that both give me great pleasure, and are also historically important works, anthologized in any art history text.

Yet, some of the art that I love most and that gives me great pleasure is art not especially important, or at least not widely known. There are so-called “local artists” who never get the national reputation; there are artists I know personally and whose work speaks to me in part because I see their personalities so clearly in what they produce.

I love the art of Arizona’s Mayme Kratz. I’ve written about her work several times. Mostly, she finds discarded bits of the natural world — seeds, husks, birdnests, grains, twigs, shells — and embeds them in patterns in colored acrylic, finished with a fine sheen. They are intensely beautiful. Kratz makes a living from her work and has buyers and collectors, but I don’t know why she isn’t featured in galleries in New York or Berlin. Her work deserves to be.

Tucson painter Jim Waid has a growing reputation and has representation outside of Arizona. But his large canvases, electric with color and texture, were featured (during my time) primarily at one gallery in Scottsdale. As I wrote about him for the newspaper, “Is there any reason that David Hockney is ubiquitous and that Jim Waid is not? Waid is clearly as good a painter, and his canvases as original and distinctive, yet Hockney jet sets, and Waid paints in his studio in Tucson.” One of the highlights of my year was the annual Waid show at Riva Yares Gallery.

My brother, Craig Nilsen, is a painter and printmaker from Virginia. I have seen his work all his life and I cannot help but see him in the paintings so particularly and often heartbreakingly. He is now retired, as I am, and I am lucky to own quite a few of his pieces. I love them all.

And finally, my brother-in-law Mel Steele, who has a pretty good reputation in North Carolina, although not always for his best work. He made his living for years selling prints of North Carolina rural scenes. But his real work has always been his abstractions, layers of shapes and colors, creating virtual depth and space on the canvas. I am not alone in enjoying his art, but I feel my life would be much less rich without it.

And so, I feel as if my immersion in art has two channels: One is the official one, where I write for a public and attempt to be somewhat objective; and a second which is what I feel most emotionally connected with.

There are many other examples of work I feel deep in my bones, but I can’t catalog them all. What I can say, is that a life immersed in paintings, as in music, dance, film, theater, architecture and literature, is a life more deeply connected with being human. I am grateful for having been able to make a living writing about it all.

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Dueling Westerns

August 8, 2023

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My brother-in-law, Mel Steele, is a painter whose work I not only admire, but truly enjoy. They give my eyes great pleasure.

We visit Mel and his wife, Deborah, a few times each year and usually I bring along a big bag of DVDs, mostly art or foreign films. Mel and I share a common taste for such things.

Indeed, our tastes match up surprisingly well, not only in movies, but in music and art as well. We love the more difficult music, like Bartok quartets or 20th century operas, and for all that we get along admirably.

But there is a sticking point, a point of contention that we have never been able to resolve. There is a movie he hates and I love; and one I cannot stand that he adores. And I see no way of settling the dispute.

Mel grew up in Madison, N.C., in the 1940s and ’50s and only a block from his house was the local movie theater. He and his sister went to the movies at least once a week growing up. They saw all the usual Hollywood offerings, with Burt Lancaster, Greer Garson, Veronica Lake, Dorothy Lamour, Kirk Douglas — you get the picture.

I am a few years younger than Mel and since there was no movie house where I grew up, my film education came via television — old movies packaged by studios for rebroadcast on fledgling TV channels, such as WOR-TV from New York and its Million Dollar Movie. I was fed a lot of films from the 1930s, and, of course, all those marvelous-awful sci-fi films made for a pittance with Richard Carlson or Sonny Tufts.

I don’t know if our different childhoods made the difference, or what, but that sticking point revolves around the best Western (not the motel chain). I mentioned once that I love The Searchers from 1956, a film in which John Wayne shows that he can actually act. It is a tough film, in which Wayne is an unsympathetic character, a bigot returned from the Civil War, having fought for the Confederacy. For my money, it is the best Western ever made, highlighting the shadings of culture clash and personality.

“Can’t stand the thing,” says Mel. “Can’t stand John Wayne.”

Indeed, it seems as if the presence of Wayne is the primary objection Mel has to the film. And I suspect that Mel’s dislike of Wayne has more to do with Wayne’s later right-wing politics — and the number of undistinguished star vehicles he made as an ever-paunchier alpha male — than with Wayne’s actual performance in The Searchers.

It is clear that Wayne didn’t always have to act, and could rely on nothing more than his screen persona in lesser films, such as North to Alaska, The Comancheros, McLintock!, Hatari, or The War Wagon. He seemed always to be playing a caricature of himself.

And then, there are those absolutely embarrassing moments in The Alamo or The Green Berets. Wayne’s shallow jingoism does not wear well. Nor does his support of the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon.

I used to share Mel’s disdain for John Wayne. The actor was pretty much a punchline. Really? Genghis Khan in The Conqueror? Gimme a break.

I first became acquainted with Wayne when I was a little kid, watching ancient Westerns on TV, where he was Stony Brook in the Three Mesquiteers films, or as “Singing Sandy” in a bunch of old Republic or Monogram Westerns. Compared with some of the old cowboys, Wayne had a graceful presence on screen, if no great acting chops.

Only as an adult, did I come across films in which Wayne played a character not merely himself. After seeing Howard Hawks’ Red River, director John Ford famously said, “Who knew the big lug could actually act?” Well, he could, even if he didn’t always feel the need to.

Then there are such films as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, where he convincingly played a part 20 years older than he was at the time. And most of all, perhaps, his role as John Books in The Shootist, his final film, in when he seems to want to prove once and for all he can be an actor and not just a star.

Mel, of course, was having none of it. “Can’t stand the guy.”

In contrast, Mel proclaimed that the greatest Western ever is Shane, a movie I cannot abide. For me, it is the epitome of Hollywood phoniness. It is pure artifice, with not a believable moment in it.

Even its widescreen projection on release was fake: Paramount wanted something to compete with the then-new Cinemascope and Panavision — both anamorphic widescreen formats — and so they cropped the original Academy Ratio Shane at top and bottom to make a phony widescreen version.

“But it’s so beautiful,” Mel says. “Look at that landscape.” Yeah, I feel, a rip-off of Ansel Adams, with the Teton Mountains prominent in the background. It seems so self-consciously meaningful, so arty, so pretentiously “mythic,” that I cannot take it seriously. There is not a second in it that feels real — apart from the acting of Jean Arthur, who is the only fully human character in the film. These are not people but ideas moving around in the plot, as if they each wore a sign telling us what they signify. Again, only Arthur feels like a real person.

Allegory, for me, is always a tough sell.

I’ve never been able to warm to Alan Ladd. He is one of those movie stars from that era of Hollywood movie in which the dying studios made turkey after turkey.

Van Heflin always feels to me like someone the studios felt they could turn into a major star, but never managed to.

And Brandon deWilde is a blank-faced homunculus, as if that look of animal stupidity should be taken as the face of innocence. Actually the kid gives me the creeps.

The Searchers, in contrast, is filled with all the great character actors that John Ford used over and over. They are people, not cardboard cutouts.

Perhaps I have overstated my case. There are other great Westerns that may be as good as The Searchers. Ford probably made them. Modern Westerns tend to be more period-aware and historically better informed. And perhaps Shane isn’t the worst Western. There are plenty of hack Westerns with much less ambition than George Stevens brought to his work.

But the fact is, the comic disagreement Mel and I had was about these two films in particular. I was not able to persuade him; he was not able to persuade me. Let’s leave it at that.

Leftovers: A sequel

June 29, 2023

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Kitao Shigemasa “Birds in Yellow Plum”

Recently I posted a piece about the history of naturalist illustration. It was a subject so huge — and with so many gorgeous images, that I could not begin to include some of my favorite things from the thousands of images I collected.

For instance, I had to rule out all of the non-Western art, and some of my favorite non-scientific animal art. And so, I felt I should write a follow-up piece for a few of the leftovers.

Most of the art I covered was meant to illustrate botanical collections in an era when new plants were constantly being added to the list of recognized species, and were meant to accompany scientific books written by specialists.

From “Plantae Asiaticae Rariores” of Nathaniel Wallich

For instance, there was Nathaniel Wallich, the Danish-born botanist who collected plants in India and published his Plantae Asiaticae Rariores in three volumes from 1830 to 1833, with illustrations by a half-dozen artists, both Indian and European.

From “Treasury of Nature,” Albertus Seba

The collection I missed most in the earlier essay was Albertus Seba (1665-1736). His interest was less scientific and more one of abject curiosity. He collected tons of oddities from around the world in his “curiosity cabinet,” and in 1734 published his Locupletissimi Rerum Naturalium Thesauri Accurata Descriptio et Iconibus Artificiosissimus Expressio per Universam Physices Historiam (“A Careful Description and Exceedingly Artistic Expression in Pictures of the Exceedingly Rich Treasury of Nature Throughout the Entire History of Natural Science,” illustrated from beginning to end with engraved plates.

Crab from Albertus Seba

The original 4-volume publication included 445 illustrations and Seba’s collecting helped Carl von Linne in his binomial classification system.

But, there are tons of bird, plant, and animal pictures meant for the general public, mostly throughout the 19th century.

Wood engravings of plants

Unfortunately, most of those artists worked anonymously, pumping out pictures for books, magazines and posters. Animals, especially those of exotic locales, were always popular pictures with the public. And most of those were made in the process called wood engraving — a bit like woodcuts, but made with a burin on the end-grain of dense hardwoods and printed very like a copper plate engraving.

Wood engravings of animals

The best-known wood engravings were probably the book illustrations of Gustave Doré. But the technique was nearly ubiquitous in the Victorian era.

From “A History of British Birds” by William Yarrell

Wood engravings occasionally accompanied serious scientific work, also, such as those in A History of British Birds, published in 1843 by William Yarrell (1784-1856). Its wood-engraving illustrations were carried out by two artists, Alexander Fussell and John Thompson.

Such art is meant primarily to identify plants and animals, but sometimes an artist’s intent is merely to look closely at and study his subject. And, as with the botanical illustration, to separate the subject from its context to better see it on its own.

Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci

Artists have always done this, often in sketches, sometimes as studies for larger, more serious and integrated paintings, sometimes purely for its own sake. Leonardo drew lots of them.

Drawings by John Ruskin

And it was the very point that critic John Ruskin made in Victorian times for the art of drawing: He felt that sketching forced close observation and that essence was found in detail. He aimed his eye at plants, birds, even rock formations, to come to know them better.

Drawings by Ruskin

The most significant class of nature art left out of my original essay are the many kachō-e prints and paintings by Japanese artists, ranging from the 17th century to the 20th. I was sorry to leave them out.

Masayoshi, “Gray Thrush”

Kachō-e are so-called “bird and flower” pictures, although the subjects include fish and insects, too. Their ancestry runs back to huaniaochua (“bird and flower” paintings) popular in Chinese beginning in the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907).

The work influenced much of art throughout Asia, and came to Japan, popularized by translations of the Chinese classic instruction book, Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, published in parts from 1679 to 1701. The final chapters instruct how to best paint huaniaochua-style art.

Pages from “Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden”

The Chinese influence was felt all through the continent, not only in Japan and Korea, but as far west as Persia, where it inspired the golomorgh (“Bird and Tree”) paintings popular in the Safavid period (1501-1736).

Golomorgh art

In Islamic art, the paintings take on an allegorical bent, with the birds (sometimes butterflies) standing in for the lover and the flower for the beloved.

But by far the biggest influence was in Japanese art, and the popular ukiyo-e style, mostly woodblock prints made from the 18th through the early 20th century. Ukiyo-e (“Pictures of the floating world”) were popular images of famous actors, courtesans, historical figures, landscapes, genre scenes — and nature. The nature genre was called kachō-e, or “bird and flower pictures.”

One of the early masters of the form was Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806). He published a Book of Birds ca. 1790 (the dating is often uncertain, as records were not always kept, and popular books were published and republished, often with new plates, or new cuttings of old designs — precise dating can be guesswork).

Each image was matched to poetry, written in elegant calligraphy on the empty parts of the image. For this one, named for the mejiro, or Japanese White-Eye (on the left) and the enaga or Long-Tailed Tit (on the right) has two poems. The first: “Pushed out of his honey-filled nest following a fight, the white-eyes bird seems not to mind at all,” while the other says “Come and let yourself be mine; For us the nights will be as long as the tit’s tail.”

Utamaro followed with a Picture Book of Selected Insects, about the same time, which showed dragonflies, beetles, bees, grasshoppers and other buggy life on beautifully drawn leaves and flowers. When Viking Press published a beautiful facsimile edition of the book in 1984, they must have worried about the title, so they renamed it Songs of the Garden. Much more attractive.

In the west, the two most famous ukiyo-e artists are Hokusai and Hiroshige, near contemporaries. They both made kachō-e prints.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) called himself “Old Man Mad with Painting,” and worked in every conceivable genre. He was a one-man image factory. His curiosity spanned everything he could come in contact with. He even experimented with linear perspective after coming in contact with European art.

Hokusai manga

In his sketchbook, or manga, he made pictures of everything he saw. The black-and-white drawings were made into woodblock prints. He tried just about everything. (Most famous, of course, for his “Great Wave off Kanagawa,” which has been reproduced endlessly.)

There is a proverbial saying in Japan: “Hokusai is the greater artist, but I love Hiroshige more.” It is hard not to be entranced by the atmospheric and almost Impressionistic work of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858). Known for his landscape images, he also made a pile of bird-and-flower prints. Most often in the elongated vertical format known as hosoban.

There are so many of them, it is hard to choose just a few examples.

But he also published several books of fish and sea creatures, a “small” book of fish and a “large” book, each titled as such. I cannot help but post as many of Hiroshige’s images as I can. They are so seductive and beautiful.

It is usually said — by snooty connoisseurs — that ukiyo-e standards began to decline in the 19th century and the genre ended by the 20th. But instead, I believe it simply changed with the exposure of Japanese artists to the rest of the world with the Meiji Restoration (1868). Where once Japan’s culture was insulated from the outside, it now opened its arms to new influences.

Hiroshige and Van Gogh

(The artistic fertilization went in both directions, as ukiyo-e art began arriving in Europe and artists such as Van Gogh were blown away by the freshness and style of the Japanese prints.)

And kachō-e changed from a popular and demotic art form to one created by new designers who saw themselves less as craftsmen and more as western-style “artists.” The esthetic, called shinsaku-hanga, became more refined, if less adventurous. It was a retrospective art, honoring the masters and styles of the past.

Birds by Kono Bairei

And artists such as Kono Bairei (1844-1895) continued the birds-and-flowers tradition, but with a turn to more naturalistic drawing, albeit in a stylized setting.

Bairei fish

He also took on fish.

The work of Imao Kainen (1845-1924) maintains that almost-western realism in highly decorative compositions.

By Imao Kainen

The most famous of the shinsaku-hanga artists was probably Ohara Koson (1877-1945). He was a teacher at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and met American scholar Ernest Fenollosa, who encouraged him to export his bird prints to America. His work now sits in most American art museum collections.

By Ohara Koson

It wasn’t only Van Gogh who responded to the Japanese style. One of my favorite and largely unknown illustrators of natural history was Charles Philip Hexom (1884-1959). He was a teacher at Luther College in Dacorah, Iowa, and made many cover illustrations for Nature Magazine from the 1920s into the early ’50s.

The use of flat outlining and spot-color were common to both ukiyo-e and Hexom’s covers.

I don’t know why the work of Charles Hexom hasn’t been collected and published in a book. He seems to have been forgotten. He deserves to be remembered.

Beatrix Potter watercolors

Nature art may be a sub-genre in the world of fine art, but it is a fertile one. One finds captivating and beautiful illustration everywhere. Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) before she became a children’s author, used her drawing talent to study nature. She became an expert on mushrooms and fungi. One of her admirers was the Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir John Everett Millais, who told her: “Plenty of people can draw, but you have observation.”

Again, I have left out so much. So, just as a little P.S. to this tiny essay, I want to mention the early paintings of my brother-in-law Mel Steele, who could paint rings around anyone even as a boy and moved on to bigger things and a long career.

And my own minor essay into the field as a photographer. I found that I could put live flowers on my flatbed scanner and get beautiful prints that could be reproduced in fine detail at almost any size.

Friesia, iris and daffodils

I have made many photographs of flowers, birds and insects, not so much to create art as to focus my attention on the world around me. Paying attention is, I believe, the prime directive for life.

Click on any image to enlarge

Pecking

August 6, 2021

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I sit across the table from my brother at the seafood restaurant in Virginia and he doodles on a napkin with a Sharpie.

My brother is an artist — primarily a printmaker, but more recently a painter. And while he isn’t terribly prolific, he is constantly drawing. His mind is always coming up with visual ideas and he jots them down. Most never go anywhere, but he just cannot stop himself from playing. It is his way of processing experience: What he sees he transforms.

Lee Friedlander

It reminds me of the photographer Lee Friedlander, who describes his addiction to making photographs as “pecking.” Like a hen darting at cracked corn on the ground, he clicks his camera — peck, peck, peck. Some of the results of his pecking turn into finished photographs he displays in galleries and publishes in books. But there is an improvisatory quality to his work that comes — like a jazz musician woodshedding — from constantly working his instrument.

Among the images caught by pecking, Friedlander will periodically find something he hadn’t considered before, and thus his body of work takes a new direction, constantly refreshing his art.

In part, the importance of this kind of sketching is that it is not art — or rather, not meant as art. It is more the flexing of an esthetic muscle. One can become intellectually paralyzed if all you aim at is writing deathless prose, or painting the museum masterpiece, or composing the next Eroica. Not everything needs to be The Brothers Karamazov. There is great value in just pecking. It keeps your senses alive.

Mel Steele

I periodically visit my brother-in-law, Mel Steele, who is also an artist, a very accomplished artist who regularly sells his paintings to clients both private and corporate.

I often spend a portion of my time doodling — pecking — with my tiny point-and-shoot digital camera. We would sit on their patio talking about the things one yammers on about with one’s relations — old times, where former acquaintances have gone, the horror of recent politics, the joys of fishing — and I would distractedly point my camera around me at the things one seldom notices.

I wasn’t thinking of making art. I barely paid attention to what I was doing with the camera, but I pecked. The result is a kind of notebook of the things we lived among, seen in some different way, so as to lift them from their context, to suck them out of the everydayness they languish in.

It reminded me of an assignment I used to give my photography students, some 35 years ago, when I taught the subject at the same school where my brother also taught. “Make a photograph of something so I cannot tell what it is.” I made sure they understood I didn’t mean to make it out of focus or poorly run through the darkroom, but to find something we see everyday, but pay so little attention to, that when faced with its presence, we might be baffled until that moment when, the proud student, having fooled us all, tells us what we’re looking at and we all let out a gasp of breath and say, “Of course, now I see it.”

Try it:

Quiz photo No. 1 (Answers at the end of story)

These pecked pictures are mostly details.

Quiz photo No. 2

They are not the grand view or the concatenated whole, but the tiny bits out of which the larger scene is built.

Quiz photo No. 3

Most of us pay attention only to the whole, when we pay attention at all; for most Americans — maybe most humans anywhere — only use their eyes for useful things. They see the road they drive on, the cloud that tells them it will rain, the house, the car, closet. But every house has a door, and every door a door-handle; every car has tires and every tire a tread and each tread is made up of an intricate series of rubber squiggles and dents. Attention must be paid.

Aime Groulx

Many years before, when I taught photography at a private art school in Greensboro, N.C., the artist Aime Groulx, who ran the school, made a photograph he called Doorknob to the Doors of Perception. I still have my copy. It was his version of “pecking.”

Doorknob to the Doors of Perception

Paying attention to the details means being able to see the whole more acutely, more vividly. The generalized view is the unconsidered view. When you see a house, you are seeing an “it.” When you notice the details, they provide the character of the house and it warms, has personality and becomes a Buberesque “thou.” The “thou” is a different way of addressing the world and one that makes not only the world more alive, but the seer also.

(It doesn’t hurt that isolating detail makes it more necessary to create a design. You can make a photo of a house and just plop it in the middle of the frame and we can all say, “Yes, that’s a house,” and let the naming of it be the end-all. But if you find the tiny bits, they have to organize them in the frame to make something interesting enough to warrant looking at.)

Side panels of a pickup truck

Sectioning out a detail not only makes you look more closely, but forces your viewer to look more closely, too. Puzzling out what he sees without the plethora of context makes him hone in on its shape, color, and texture. It is a forced look, not a casual one.

So, when I gave my students that assignment, it wasn’t just to be clever, but to make them pay attention to the minutiae that are the bricks of the visual world they inhabit. And paying attention is a form of reverence.

The mental view of the world is telescopic. It zooms from the blue watery globe in the blackness of space, down to the map of the U.S., to your state, to your city — each step focusing on closer detail — and then to your street, to your house, to the room you are sitting in to the armrest you are tapping your fingers on, to the hairs on your knuckles. Always more detail.

Turn from the tapping hand to the floor and see the woodgrain in the flooring, or the ceiling and see the cobweb you had not noticed before. The clothes you are wearing has a texture and a color. The wrinkles in the shirt of blouse are replications of the drapery in Greek sculpture.

Each of these details is a microcosm, worth looking at — it is your world, after all. What did William Blake write? “To see the world in a blade of grass. And heaven in a wild flower. To hold infinity in the palm of your hand. And eternity in an hour.”

Or, as he scribbled in annotation to the pages of Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses, “To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is alone the distinction of merit.”

The general is the world of politicians and businessmen, of carnival barkers and evangelists. Dogma, ideology, commercial advertisement, are founded on generalizations, while what genuinely matters in our lives is the particular. It is generalizations that permit the destruction of Bamiyan Buddha statues, the bombing of synagogues, mosques and Sikh temples. The stoning of homosexuals. It is generalizations that lurk behind the Shoah. It was generalization that justified the enslavement of a race of people.

To know any individual is to know the stereotype is a lie. The world, and its peoples, are infinitely complex and varied. So much so, that no broad statement can ever be anything but a lie. And so, there is actually a moral level to this paying of attention to detail, to the minutiae, to the individual.

And so, you peck. Finding this bit or that bit, that shape, that texture, that precise color. This is the context of your life.

You can focus your attention on color. How much yellow is in your field of view at this moment. Look around. Single it out. Or blue. How many different blues can you spot right now? Paying attention is being alive; paying attention is reverence. Attention must be paid.

Duck eggs

Your life is not made up of the broad swathes, but of the minute details, and when we pay too much attention to the big picture, we are likely to miss the particles that give that picture its character.

And when you come to make your art, write your novel, dance your dance, that detail means there is a truth to what you do, a reality behind the fantasy that gives it depth and meaning.

Exercise makes your muscles strong. Pecking keeps your senses alive and alert. Peck Peck Peck

Click on any image to enlarge

Answers to quiz: No. 1 — the twill of denim jeans; No. 2 — dried coffee stains on a white table top; No. 3 — garden hose on patio tiles.

Going pro

July 20, 2021

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In addition to this blog, which I have been writing since 2012, I have written a monthly essay for the Spirit of the Senses salon group in Phoenix, Ariz., since 2015. I was, at various times, a presenter for the salon, which arranges six to 10 or so lectures or performances each month for its subscribers. Among the other presenters are authors, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, musicians, lawyers and businessmen, each with a topic of interest to those with curious minds. I recently felt that perhaps some of those essays might find a wider audience if I republished them on my own blog. This is one, from Sept. 4, 2019, is now updated and slightly rewritten.

One of my great pleasures, when I was an art critic, was visiting artist studios. Certainly, there was usually a mess, spattered paint, cans dripping or tubes squeezed, and rags and brushes. Things taped to the walls, papers scattered and, often, music blaring. But there was also a sense of purpose, a sense that someone here knew what he or she was doing.

I had that sense again recently while visiting my brother-in-law, the painter Mel Steele. I love his work. And I can watch over time as he works and reworks his canvas, trying this or that to make it better.

Mel is a professional. And by that, I don’t just mean he sells his work, or that he is talented. That goes without saying. I mean something more particular. It is something I see in the work and work habits of many artists I have come across, from Jim Waid to James Turrell.

I have been thinking about the manifest difference between the work of an amateur and that of a professional. And I don’t mean to denigrate the work of amateurs. Indeed, there are professionals stunning mediocrity and there are amateurs hugely talented. No, I mean something about the approach to the work.

This is something that I have been cogitating about since retiring. Without making any great boast about my own writing, I can say with utter confidence that I wrote as a professional. This is not a claim about quality or greatness, but about some inner acquaintance with the nitty-gritty of the craft. It has been 10 years since I worked for The Arizona Republic and I can say with confidence that writers never really retire: They just stop getting paid.

In 25 years with the newspaper, I wrote three-and-a-half million words. Since retiring, I have written another million-and-a-half for this blog. My fingers get itchy if they don’t pound a keyboard.

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes that the secret to achieving meaningful achievement is to repeat something 10,000 times. The book has been trashed by many critics as a kind of pop psychology, but without taking the actual number as gospel, certainly one of the things that makes a professional is that repetition. You don’t become a professional — as I mean it here — by being hired. You do it over the long haul, writing every day for years. Or painting every day for years. Or dancing, or playing violin. Or, for that matter, plumbing or dealing in the stock market.

For all that patience, what you get are several things. First, you get better at what you do. But you also become familiar with the business. By that, I don’t just mean the financial side of the work, but the daily bits of familiar habit. As a writer, that means understanding deadlines, the importance of editors and copy editors, the argot of the trade — point size, picas, inches, folios, air, heds, ledes, trims, slots, cutlines, sidebars, widows, and more than I can even now remember. But was once the lingo of my daily life.

If told I had 10 inches to fill on deadline, I could write a piece that would come in at 10 inches, give or take nary more than a line, before I even measured it. You just have the feel of it. Occasionally, I would return to the office from a concert at 10:50 p.m. to write a review and have 10 minutes to file before deadline. I could whip that sucker out: Ten inches in 10 minutes, and feel at the end like a rodeo cowboy tying the feet of a calf and throwing my arms out in triumph.

More important, you divest yourself of the bad habits of your amateur years and your novitiate. You unconsciously avoid using the same word twice in paragraph; you vary your sentence length; You know instinctively to include just the amount of background your reader needs, without burdening him or her with unnecessary detail; and you know in what order to present that background. You become aware of consistency within a piece. You know the difference between first ref and subsequent. You don’t leave readers hanging with unfamiliar and unexplained acronyms. Do you know where commas fall? Do you abbreviate “street” or not? All this comes with familiarity and practice. And becomes second nature.

I now look with embarrassment at something I wrote when I first came to the newspaper business because I see all the stupid mistakes I made. Rookie mistakes. Over time and countless deadlines, you leave those inelegancies behind.

Most of all, you gain a comfort level: a sense that you know what you’re doing. Like a pianist who can run his spider fingers up and down the keyboard and confidently hit each B-flat as it passes. Or a painter who automatically reaches for the Hooker’s green because the Phthalo won’t give him the shade he needs.

You watch Jacques Pepin on TV slicing an onion and you can see how second-nature it has become, how quickly and accurately he does it. He knows how to make an omelet because, as he preaches, he’s done it 10,000 times. There may be more creative or innovative chefs out there, even among amateurs, but you have to admire Pepin for his confident professionalism.

Nor is a professional precious about his work. Museum curators can be fussy about white gloves and humidity levels, but the artists themselves are seldom so concerned. If they screw up, “I can always paint another one.” It is not unusual for Mel to paint over some detail he was unhappy with, even weeks or months later, to alter the work. It is only amateur writers who bitch and moan about editors changing their sacred texts. Editors (good editors — and I was lucky to have only good ones) make the writing better, cleaner, more precise. Even such things as cutting stories to fit news holes won’t perturb the professional. He may negotiate, but he won’t whine.

I’ve written about artists and journalists because that is the world I know best. But much the same could be said about professional musicians, construction foremen or career diplomats. Professionalism, as I mean it here, is not simply about being paid; it is an attitude. An approach to the work. A comfort level and familiarity, an ease, an assurance.

And any true professional can spot a navvy in an instant. You won’t necessarily feel superior, but you will feel a kind of pity for the poor beginner. There is so much to learn that is entirely beyond merely talent.

Capturing souls

June 20, 2015

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Portrait photographs come in basically two varieties: the formal and the candid. These days, with selfies monopolizing the social media, almost all portraits are informal. And when asked, most people say they prefer the candid picture, perhaps because the formal portrait has fossilized into the Olan Mills mall photo, in garish color against phony backgrounds. It would be hard to make an esthetic case for these assembly-line excrescences, with their banal smiles and enforced familial geniality.

Then, there is a prejudice against artifice: Many people prefer the snapshots because they seem more natural, more spontaneous. If you look at one of those highly massaged portraits by Yousef Karsh, there would seem nothing less spontaneous. Every light, every specular reflection in an eye, seems calculated, even marmoreal, like his portrait of composer Jean Sibelius. If we’re a “rock and roll” nation, we are one that values the brash, the riff, the off-the-cuff: Indeed, we trust it to be more “truthful” than the rhetoric of the planned, controlled and considered. As Allen Ginsberg mendaciously preached: “First thought, best thought.” (Despite the fact that his best poems, such as Howl, were thoroughly revised and rewritten; we have the typescript for evidence, with all its emendations.)

Yet, some of our most iconic images — the ones we remember, the ones that fix in our minds some large truth about their subjects, are exactly the careful, posed and arranged portraits, such as Karsh’s take on Winston Churchill — a photo that might have won the war all by itself.

The idea of the formal portrait survives, even in the gaudy, awful Olan Mills photos: The idea that the subject wants to be seen in his Sunday best, with his best teeth put forward for posterity: “This is how I want to be remembered.” Even though the actual life may be more squalid or confused, or complex– certainly infinitely richer. But “this version is the one with the barnacles scraped off.”

The photographer Richard Avedon said, “What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable — and they’re screaming the next minute. I’ve never seen a family album of screaming people.”

But when done well, it isn’t the vanity of the subject that is portrayed, but the insight of the photographer. A good portrait should tell us something about the subject that the subject doesn’t want us to know, or is not aware of, or is somehow larger than the public face intended.

A photographic portrait also tells us something about the artist who makes it. This is something that Avedon always stressed.

“My portraits are always more about me than they are about the people I’ve photographed,” he said. You can spot an Avedon immediately: It’s style is uniquely his. The same can be said for Irving Penn, or for Arnold Newman, or Yousef Karsh — any of those who made a name as portraitists. An Avedon portrait — or a Penn — is a world view, consistent from image to image.

And it is in this sense that the portrait rises from vanity icon to art. The picture tells us not merely, what does this person look like, but rather the larger message: This is what being human is.

It is in the eyes, most often, that the humanity is tethered. You can see the light behind them. Nothing is worse than a picture of someone who is bored with the process of being photographed: The eyes turn into ball bearings, lifeless and extinct. A good portrait is a picture, instead, of being alive, of being in the moment, even if that moment is for posterity, or for eternity.

I bring all this up, because in the age before I became a writer, I thought I would be a photographer. It was in the days of chemicals and dim amber lights, and I became a proficient darkroom worker: My prints, I say with some pride, were as good as anyone’s.

And I took many portraits, working my way through the learning and development that any artist goes through: Imitation, innovation and finally, something personal that emerges.

Most of these portraits were friends or more. I went through cameras, always seeking the right one, never actually finding it: Nikons, Rolleis, Hasselblads. I went through lighting schemes, through backdrops.

And I went through the history of portraiture, from Holbein to Raphael to Rembrandt to Gainsborough to Chuck Close. The model I felt closest to was the Renaissance portrait, such as Raphael’s portrait of Baldassare Castiglione. Here was a face to look at: Eyes that had seen a good deal of the best and worst of the world: It registers. There is also a sense of moment; this is for posterity. The figure makes a pyramid in the frame, giving it foundation and security. The background is broken into interesting shapes — the so-called negative space, not ignored, but make essential to the impact of the image.

I saw something of the same in the photographs of Avedon: formality, interesting negative space, and the centrality of eyes.

There is one major difference between these great images and the Olan Mills smile-o-thons: So many of them have equivocal expressions on their faces. They aren’t genial and smiling; indeed, it’s hard to quite know what they are expressing. There is a neutrality to their faces; not slack, as if thoughtless, but rather as if thoughts were unresolved.

In other words, the faces were not billboards flashing their message, but rather something denser, meant to be read and fathomed. Not the momentary but the monumental.

This is a portrait of Henry Parrish Lippincott Hackett, I made it in about 1973. It is a model of what I was trying to get in those years.

Of course, they were also shapes in a frame, and the graphic quality of the images counted for a lot, such as the eye of Picasso in Penn’s version, or the indistinct edge of Eisenhower’s head in Avedon’s portrait.

I used the eye in a photo I made of Pam Henry, in the mid-1970s.

Other imitations, conscious or otherwise can be found in other portraits I made from 1970 to about 1986, when I gave up teaching photography and became a writer at The Arizona Republic.

My Degas:

Not a conscious imitation, but clearly a resonance of Ingres in a portrait of artist Mel Steele.

This is Doug Nufer in 1978, when he was officially dubbed “The World’s Most Obscene Man,” against Avedon’s portrait of Willem de Kooning. Nufer has since gone on to become one of the avant-garde literary lights of Seattle.

Or, Botticelli’s Venus in a picture of Kathy Elks.

But it wasn’t all imitation. It was an education, and a slow development of what I was trying to find in portraiture. I wanted it to be formal; I wanted it to be graphic; I wanted it to be more than a snapshot reminder of who my friends were. When I was teaching photography, I ran a course on portraiture and I was not so much concerned with the usual lighting schemes or lens choices, but with engaging with the sitter, finding something human there. And while book after book told us that we should use a long lens for more natural perspective, I found that a normal lens, or even a wide angle lens brought the photographer and the sitter closer together, making interaction unavoidable: The photographer could not be aloof from the sitter, as though the sitter were a mere object, and the sitter could not be indifferent to the photographer invading his private space. The interaction was forced. Always use a short lens, I taught. Get in their faces.

Here is artist and friend, Charles Williams, who returned the favor by making a drawing of my wife and me.

Second lesson: Always have the sitter look into the lens, so that in the photograph, he gazes out of the picture into the eyes of the person looking at the image. This makes the portrait not a neutral event, but it forces the viewer to have a relationship with the subject. In other words, the photographer confronts the sitter; the photograph confronts the viewer. This makes for a more active work of art.

These are three photos I took for The Carolina Peacemaker, when I worked for that weekly black newspaper in Greensboro, N.C. I was looking for that directness, rather than the mere animation that most photo editors want.

Third, no smiles. Unless they are genuine and are more than a tightened muscle at the mouth corner. There is a story about Greta Garbo, when an observer at a studio shoot said afterwards, “I couldn’t see her doing anything,” and the film director said, “But it will show up on film, just wait and see.” And of course, when the dailies were screened, every emotion ran riot across her face — primarily because she didn’t underline each one melodramatically. The film sees things you don’t. Let it do its job.

There were many other points in the course, but these three were most important, even if they ran counter to what is usually taught. After all, I told my students at the beginning of every class that I considered it my job as a teacher in the art department, not to train them for careers, but to make them unemployable. I wanted them to dig deeper than the stereotype. Many of them did. It was a great class.

When I moved to Arizona and started work at the newspaper, I stopped taking as many photographs. I spent my time writing the two-and-a-half million words I pumped out in 25 years. There were photos meant to illustrate stories, but my emphasis had shifted.

Now, I still make the occasional photograph, and I still use the shorter lens, the in-your-face, and the attention to eyes.

And I’ve gotten older, and so have my friends. You saw my Ingres-photo of brother-in-law Mel Steele. Here he is a couple of months ago, more informal — almost a snapshot, but with the lessons I learned from years of looking.

—Richard Nilsen

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