Painting and The Art of Long Looking: From MAD Magazine To Willem de Kooning

Where once I was blind, now can see

Originally published by The Art Districts

The author standing before an Adolph Gottlieb at SF MOMA

I think now, more than ever, we find ourselves confounded by art. Hardly anyone can provide a precise definition, a precise purpose for it, and there is an endless, nauseous quibbling over what art is “good”, and therefore what is also nonsense.

And while art certainly stretches far beyond the visual, it is most often painting that we associate with the word art. Particularly, Modern Art, now practically a byname for those rascal paintings that are flung and dripped, splattered and schlocky. And despite some of them being regarded as masterpieces, still, they are the target of much mockery today. Yes, it seems that much of painting, particularly abstraction, fails to instantly impress the viewer.

However, much of art is in need of some amount of context. This context, needn’t be rooted in praise nor honor, but in history, facts. That is to say when a certain piece of art was made can be as important as why it was made.

The when and the why in some cases are indelibly connected. But in the cases where contextualization may be absent, or at any rate fails the viewer, it is the art of long looking that may heighten our senses, increase our awareness, and therefore our appreciation. The eyes, like the ears and taste buds, often require their own training. This endeavor, of course, is not short, but long. I can only describe my very own visual odyssey to give the reader a sense of what I mean.

It was my father who gave me my first piece of “art”, so to speak. It was the Gray’s Anatomy coloring book that outlined the names of the various muscles and bones of the human body. My father was a doctor, and I suppose he was giving me a piece of himself, a piece of his training. I spent many afternoons coloring in the human shapes, as children of that age often do.

Courtesy of Amazon

Later on, I became interested in illustration through various cartoons and comics. My grandmother cutout the Sunday Funnies and sent them to me in small batches of newsprint squares. I devoured the comics of The Family Circus and Beetle Bailey, among many others.

Too, there was Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes and the political cartoons of Mike Luckovich. And though this type of illustration would likely never make its way into the realm of “high” art, surely, contained in them were the expressive marks, those that are found in the face, in the eyes, the mouth, that could not be underestimated. As a child, there is little concern for what is highbrow or low. The cartoons were expressive, humorous, and exciting. After all, this is what cartoons are meant to be.

Now, comics are not necessarily life-like in the academic sense, but they are just as true. Clearly, in the face of a simple caricature, the truth is often revealed. As we have seen with the modern-day emoji, accuracy of emotion is devastatingly simple. And even though the lines of these cartoons were basic, they perfectly captured the essence, the spirit, of whatever precise emotion, whether subtle or explosive, that the characters were feeling.

Bill Waterson and Calvin and Hobbes. Image published by The New York Post

It was not until I was a little older that those faces and caricatures would evolve into more complex dynamics and narratives. I was several years older when I discovered MAD Magazine, and their masterfully rendered caricatures of celebrities and politicians which illustrated their pop-culture critiques, and the satirizing of nearly everything. It was there that I had learned, in many ways, how to draw. That the thickness of the curvature of a jawline is not a steady thing; that motion can be illustrated through form, that a falling cigar from the mouth of a television host can signal their startled nature.

I also learned that an artist could provoke, could entertain, could be rebellious, could look at the modern world and its culture with keen eyes. MAD Magazine, in that way, was not a book of cartoons, it was the catalyst for something much larger inside myself. A movement, if you will—a personal movement within my own spirit. I didn’t know what it was, but I spent several years learning how to draw like that, how to properly render a caricature. I copied. I imitated. I studied and I stared. MAD Magazine was the first instance I can recall of any “long looking”. Yes, the illustrations are instantly impressive, but you learn little by flipping too quickly for the next punchline. Garfield and Calvin & Hobbes felt simplistic in comparison. MAD Magazine felt as if it were produced by masters of line, form, color and—wicked humor. There was an evolution there, whether I could articulate that growth or not.

A startled Letterman on the cover MAD’s August 2000 issue

The wonderful caricatures of MAD Magazine’s Mort Drucker

Later on, in middle school, I was a decent illustrator, but not a serious artist. I knew I was good at it because the illustrations I drew looked like their subjects, and were impressive to my peers. Still, I had no idea about “art” in the sense of culture—never thought once about Picasso, never held a brush, never read a poem outside of a school assignment. I was beginning to look long, although, not very wide. Of course, I was only becoming born in regards to my visual education.

It was not until I was in the seventh grade did I see my first painting. Although I had been to Paris some two years before, had been to the Louvre, had seen the grand halls decorated in the masters—no, art did not take hold of me then. The images slipped away in their grandiosity and density. The Mona Lisa, behind its glass cell, was an antique, of sorts. I admired it as a piece of history, but it did not enter my conscious as a piece of art, funny as that may sound.

It had left no discernible or indelible impact. No, it was not until the seventh grade, in the gallery for student’s work, did I truly see paintings for the first time. We were encouraged to look, to ponder, to investigate the possibility of art in a more serious way. Like most of the students, I was left unimpressed.
Almost all of the student paintings, the so-called “art”, were abstracts.

Like many often do, one student remarked, “I think I can see a face this painting”. Now even then, with little knowledge of painting or abstraction, I knew—there was no face. I knew, for whatever reason, the student had missed the mark. But I could offer no defense or comment of my own. I wished there had been a face. At least, if there was a face, there was something to grapple with. I was looking at the confounding abstract pieces, only hoping to find what I had already understood art to be. This is a common error, and is therefore forgivable. At least, in the painting of a face, there would be something, I thought. For someone who had spent so much time with accurate picture rendering, I could not take abstraction into consideration instantaneously. I just could not see it. I simply had not looked long enough.

Two years later, in high school, I was taking academically-centered drawing classes, where cartoons or caricatures were nowhere to be found. We focused on still lives, form, shadow, contour, shading, line. Not long inside that greyish, immaculate drawing studio, I became transfixed by the sights and sounds emanating from the painting studio just across the hall, where graduates of the drawing class splashed and dripped in hyper color, hammered and sawed to make canvases, played loud rock music and sang and danced. But the work they made in that studio I rarely understood. I could not say whether it was good or not. Still, I had not looked long enough to develop a discerning eye.

Curiosity struck me, however. I would begin to stroll through the painting studio daily, as a guest. The room burst with color, paint on the floor, on the windows. Every inch that could hold a blot of paint seemed to be bespeckled in it. As it were, most of the painting students painted in pure abstraction as Mr. Greenway, the teacher, was an abstract painter himself. And in the corner of the studio, he had his own easel set up, where he would work alongside the students. His work left an inexplicable impression on me as a young student. Finally, painting, in whatever form or process, gripped me. I knew nothing of painting still, but it was a magnetic force whose attraction I embraced, and whose energy would not go unconfronted.

Too young to join the class, I started painting at home. I would haul left over pieces of plywood from my father’s workroom, and paint with house paint, spray paint, etc. Whatever I could get my hands on became the tools of my expression.

Drawing and the art of the caricature had become a preamble of an exercise. The long looking of MAD Magazine had fully evolved into something else. My eyes, once relegated only to the beauty of the absolute rendering, were now transfixed by painters like Pablo Picasso and Vincent Van Gogh. Of course, I had seen these works before, as we all had, but now, with newer eyes, inflamed with new possibilities.

Van Gogh’s infamous Sunflowers

Cubist painting from Pablo Picasso, inching towards pure abstraction

Suddenly, I was painting in pure abstraction. With years of trying to render the perfect line, and several years of passing through the student gallery full of abstract paintings, I had looked long enough to see value in the pursuit. I could understand the merits of some form of abstract picture rendering; however, I was still unaccustomed to the varieties of abstract-expressionism. While I could appreciate some parts of the genre, I could not understand it thoroughly, still, I had not looked long enough. 

In fact, there was a particular poster that hung in the studio that would go unmoved for the entirety of my three-year high school career. It was a print of Willem de Kooning’s Door to the River. I had no understanding of who de Kooning was or what the painting was all about. I can say though, it irked me.

de Kooning’s Door to the River

I could not understand how a painting of this nature was any “good”, or why the the teacher chose to keep it hung among unlimited options. But through my very own education, I had begun to see paint differently. Eventually, I began to soak up the works of every artist from the New York School. I devoured the monographs of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko. I began to understand the dynamics of paint, which excited me. That expression was not only rendered in objective picture rendering, but in the force, the attitudinal quality of the stroke, that became evident in the forceful works of expressionism and action painting. I became transfixed by abstraction. I was beginning to understand the nature of color, of texture, of picture balance and therefor the value of the off-balanced. The names I mentioned above would soon become my heroes.

In what I can only describe as an evolution of sight, through the long looking of my own paintings, and the long looking of others, I came around to Door to the River. So much so that I can never “unsee” it. It remains as it always was, an expressionistic painting in the pastel hues of flesh tone, yellow, blue and grey. But I often think of that painting, can see it with my eyes closed, for it was the image that served as the most forceful catalyst for my sight, as a painter and an observer of art. At that time, the picture lacked any historical or factual context. I knew nothing of how ab-ex came to be, or why it was important to the individual painter. But in it, I felt the robust energy of a rebellious spirit, one that I could weave into my own. And just like I did with the caricatures of MAD Magazine, I began to imitate, in order to learn. These paintings were much more difficult to execute than I thought. That is when it began for me. That is when I began to look long, and move through the visual world with a more developed eye.

I cannot say exactly what day it was. But because the piece irked me, and was hung with a sense of pride by Mr. Greenway, it forced my eye, daily. Within the picture, like my curiosity of painting itself, were elements that would not go unconfronted. There, lying in wait, was something calling out to be found. But there was a day—a day that I saw the piece as I always had for the last time, and simultaneously saw the piece as I do now, for the first time. It appeared, suddenly, to carry its own weight. I had enough experience with paint to see the value and the confidence of the linear strokes. To understand those do not come as easy as one would anticipate. I understood, visually, why the painting needed its large yellow shape at the top, as a counterweight to the streaking nature of the vertical lines throughout its midsection. Too, it became clear that the painting was layered over many times, producing the effect of peering through several dimensions. Also, the ricochet of the paint from the brush is done just so to produce the faintest dashes, darting the canvas at just the right moments. The painting now embodied a spirited, bombastic energy that was at once courageous, explosive, yet subtle and graceful.

Postscript:

Of course, this piece of writing is merely a small simplified anecdote, a bullet point grouping of images and artists that encouraged the evolution of my work, both aesthetic and conceptual. What I wish to impart to the reader is a note of encouragement. That with all forms of art, and human expression, that the evolution of one’s work and appreciation can grow from unlikely sources. That a film, previously dismissed, may earn your ringing endorsement upon a second viewing. That a song, once tossed aside, may hit your ears differently when heard in a different context. Many times, our first impressions of the world around us can lead to disappointment, because something has failed to meet our expectations. But the world, and the beauty within it, can often catch us off guard. It takes courage to see beauty in a world full of ugliness, especially when many see so little beauty at all. But I cannot tell you what is beautiful or not. Only you can do that. Only when you have looked long enough, and have found some faith in the process of finding it. Whenever we are confronted with something that confounds us, it may be an indicator of a second look, a kind of revisiting. For what confounds us could be the roar of a personal revolution or whisper of a kind, a whisper so subtle, that in a hurry, may go unnoticed.

JSV

2024

Continue Reading: