Two Very Old Artists Looking at the Same Thing I watched as two older artists talked about that thing called painting One said she was amazed at how the paint hopped from her bucket onto the canvas dripping this way or that as it would Surprising her the next day by how it had dried She said she never wanted to be a famous artist just a really great one that let the paint do the work while she took the credit The other artist spoke of rolling paint over slippery glue Dictating situations in which the paint would dry into chance patterns Nudging chaos in lovely and mysterious ways Surprising him the next day by how it had dried He said he never wanted to be a famous artist just a really great one that let the paint do the work while he took the credit I watch these older artists talk about this activity this phenomenon called painting This fixing of paint to canvas into shapes and forms regardless of the excuse of which or whom is in control of how the pain...

Over-Splatter and Photographic Support While the concept of using splotches and drips, on front and backs of Jackson Pollock’s painting, to ascertain the sequence of creation may seem intuitive at best, photographic evidence supports the veracity of the over-splatter tool. Three specific paintings photographed during their sequential creation provide a baseline that makes clear the numbering method used to assign inventory control is clearly not an indicator of sequence. Both photographic evidence offered by the Namuth images and examination of over-splatter establish the following order of creation. The numbers assigned to the paintings by Parsons are 30, 31, 32. 30 is the MoMA (Number One) painting, 31 belongs to the MET (Autumn Rhythm), and 32 is in Dusseldorf. Not only is it irrefutable in the Namuth images, but supported by the over-splatter on the completed works that the order in which these three artworks were painted is: 31, followed by 30, and lastly 32. Since...

Punching In I watched an old movie that took place many years ago. It was before my time, save one familiar element: workers punching in for work, out for lunch, back in after lunch, then back out at the end of the day. The sound of a time stamp on an hourly worker’s time stub. Pick up your timecard from the OUT board, Punch In, Place the card on the IN board. Pick up your card from the IN board, Punch Out, place it in the OUT board. Punch In, Punch Out, Punch In, Punch Out, Punch In, Punch Out, Punch In, Punch Out. It was what hourly workers did to get paid. The checks were always a week later. They weren’t very much, after the deductions. But it was money. Spent already. I recall that the purpose of timecards was to keep a worker honest. There were ways around it, such as punching a friend’s card for them, giving them more hours than they really logged. But never mind that. Making minimum wage and punching a card seemed somehow humiliating. It was just the way it ...

The Patience Teacher The largest issue I always have Is waiting for the paint to dry Large canvas or small panel The paint knows only to dry At the same rate Always teaching me patience One day I will learn visit Sandy Kinnee.com

Pollock’s The Deep Staple gunned canvas Plenty of bristles Forever floating In a vanilla Milkshake sea Protected long After Jackson’s Death by a polished Aluminum Kulicke frame Likely welded by So-called minor Artist Robert Kulicke Himself Pollock makes It obvious He is painting Not on the floor With a stick Using a bargain House painters Brush for Do it yourselfers Horse hairs shed Everywhere Deliver an overt Message: "I can Paint also With a brush" Looking closely at Jackson Pollock’s 1953 painting: The Deep In the collection of the Centre Pompidou. visit Sandy Kinnee.com

Clement Greenberg Wearing a Helmet (or the conversation he and I never had) I, too, would be skeptical of the following tale if this hadn’t involved me. This event I am about to describe took place back in the 1970s while I worked at a college art museum. The curator of modern art, whom I very recently spoke with (2018), remembered this visit, but not the purpose. There was no talk, event or exhibition. My role was to drive Clement Greenberg to the airport. During the drive we talked mainly about Picasso’s death and his late work. I, unfortunately, remember no details of the conversation except that neither one of us cared much for Picasso’s late work. I believe Greenberg said that someday in the future people may give the paintings more consideration. I wish I had thought to record our conversation and I most certainly wish that I had at that time the knowledge and interest, which I now have in Pollock, so I might ask the questions that I would like answered. In particula...

Traditionally it works this way: The artist paints a picture. The art dealer shows it to a collector. Collector buys it and pays the dealer. The dealer gives a portion to the artist. The artist pays bills, which include studio rent. The dealer has bills to pay as well. The collector wakes up early each morning and smiles at the new framed artifact hanging in a hallway between the bedroom and bath. It works that way in fairy tales, the showing and sale of the artwork enable the artist to keep painting. It also gives the artist some emotional validation and an outlet for sharing his talent. What person doesn’t wish to share the fruits of his or her labors? It’s only natural we want others to taste, to read, to touch, to hear, to see, to appreciate what we do or make or create. “Come listen to this…”. It is human to want others to appreciate your work. But frankly, it can be a pain in the ass to stop working, when it is working that fills your spirit, just so others can take a peek...

Snow Day Pagan is such a strange word for you to use in connection with snowmen. I expect you intend something such as pre-Christian or pre-Muslim or pre-Organized religion. Snowmen are connected to those cultures and peoples who live in climates that have snow and especially have a history with the Ice Age. Those who stayed in place during the harsh winters rather than migrating great distances can relate to the snowman. To others the snowman is a game or curiosity. Is my book based upon fact, complete with smoking gun? No. Have you ever made a snowman and six months later examined the remains of what had been the snowman? When was the last time you ate a turkey for Thanksgiving? Where are the remains that prove you ate the bird? I have no proof that Ice Age humans made a decision to substitute human sacrifice with symbolic snowmen. But, when you look at any ancient children’s game you will find a darker origin that has been sanitized during the past hundred or so year...

The So-Called Cardboard That Toulouse Lautrec Painted Upon Not all cardboard is created equal. Let me point out that Henri Toulouse Lautrec worked on canvas, paper, and what is called cardboard. The type of cardboard is not what comes to mind when we picture cardboard. It is neither corrugated nor the brownish processed kraft material composed of wood pulp. It is a pressed material that is sometimes known as pasteboard. The color is generally a neutral grey. If one takes a commercially available artist’s canvas panel and peals off the canvas, you would have a piece of pasteboard that approximates the material HTL painted upon using essence (gasoline) thinned oil paint. The medium allows for a non-gloss finish to the color When you see an illustration of one of Luatrec's paintings done with this medium on board you miss the luscious matte quality of the way the material first soaks into the pasteboard and then evaporates. So, why did Henri de Toulouse Lautrec use this p...

Today I Will Not Buy a Bottle of Ink I have a brush and a bit of dried ink in the bottm of my inkwell If I dampen the hairs of my brush resuscitate the residue I may not need to go buy a fresh bottle of India ink So what if the ink dries Gray not black visit Sandy Kinnee.com

Found a Cave We found a cave Well maybe some credit to the dog He was chasing a rabbit Fell in Barked and barked We came to his rescue Deep hole Ran home to the tool shed Came back with rope Tied one end to a tree Got the dog out While in the pit Noticed it ran off Into pitch black Sprinted home again For a lantern This time Caves are like Halloween Night minus Moon and stars We crawled then Walked Crawled on our knees Do you know the smell Of kerosene lit Dank dirt? Imagine trick or treat After midnight No one comes to the door We pass through What we later call Galleries Stone chambers Convoluted Contorted walls Here and there Marks that Seem animal-like Might be depictions Of creatures Yet lack frames Silly scratches And smears of pigment Upon the rough surface We go back to The shed returning With chisels and hammers With great effort We plumb the walls Make a fine wine cellar Painted the walls mint green Maybe...

On the Flat No one has asked me a particular and obvious question. Why do most painters paint on an easel and I don’t? Perhaps they think they know the answer, that I am influenced by Pollock, a dripper-wanna-be. Or, the rejection of the easel could be a statement or choice. Maybe I do it because it’s different. No. The simple truth doesn’t go back to when I was three and painted with bare hands on the front porch floor with forest green oil paint, the better part of a gallon, too. It was because I have always worked on flat horizontal surfaces. If a large enough table was available that would be where I would draw or paint, otherwise the floor would do. Most kids have floors and tables. Everyone works that way or begins working on the flat. In art school you are expected to use an easel, unless you are focused on printmaking. Guess what? Etching, lithography, woodblock, and screenprinting were my media. All print forms are done on the flat. So, it is quite obvious t...

Ugly Art He Said Brian wondered how I could spend so much time making ugly art when there is so much beauty in the world to paint Why not paint the lake in the morning? Roses and marigolds in a vase? Or the way sunlight makes a halo out of hair if you stand in just the right spot in the late afternoon? Brian was an old man I was a kid fresh out of art school Years passed And then Brian became an older man and didn't sleep anymore After his wife Lilian passed away she the one whose hair looked like a halo in the late afternoon Brian set up a studio in his basement A horizontal sheet of plywood covered his pool table A slab of Sumi ink, brushes, paper He promised to show me what he'd been doing down there alone and I promised to go look He said I'm sorry for what I said about you wasting time making ugly art It isn't ugly at all once you look at it instead of hair glowing in the late afternoon light "It is it...

On the Hanging of Unstretched Canvas As my paintings are not painted on an easel, but on the floor from all sides, there is no actual up or down. There is only painted side and unpainted side. (in some cases, both sides of the canvas are painted). In a perfect world I would invite those participating in the artwork to experience the painting as I do, by walking around and stepping on the canvas. I like to think of the painting as a canoe or a rowboat or kayak. You may enter it or swim around it, looking in. It is only when you get into the boat that you can let it carry you away. There is nothing wrong with watching a kayak from a distance, but it is not the same experience as is intended for the vehicle. My paintings are intended to carry one away from the day to day, not necessarily to white water. As there is no imperative horizontal or vertical, no absolute right or left. The unstretched paintings may be hung either horizontal or vertical. There is only a sense ...

Would You Toss Me a Fish? What I write often begins as a mental burst that I must immediately jot down or lose. If paper is available, I scribble the thought. If not, I put it on my phone. Yet, even if the note is recorded on the phone, it is essentially a scrawl or doodle. Typically, the initial idea is a kernel. If I know I am going to have to wait to sit at my laptop, I usually write something title-like, as a mnemonic device. The thing that got me wanting to write can then be recalled at the appropriate time. Maybe the core is a phrase or simply a topic or a sensation. Like most things summoned by a mnemonic key, there is frequently also some older memory evoked. Whether given the opportunity in the moment, or later, I record my thoughts quickly. The words tend to come to me in a stream. In a manner of speaking, it is the reverse of bailing out a leaky boat. I scoop up the thoughts by the bucket load and pour them into my dinghy. I dump them as scribbles using the ...

A Reading in a Gallery It was the first and only time I read my pieces in public. Lucky for me the attendance was sparse. What the small number of people meant was that I tortured fewer people than I might have. The venue was adjacent to an art gallery, a small hall. There were chairs and a lectern and a microphone. So, the trappings looked serious. The idea was, simply put, listening to what I had written would open doors for those who looked at my visual work. The short pieces, poems, and dream recordings stood on their own, not illustrations for visual art. Nor was the artwork an illustration of the writing. Each piece was short, but many short pieces added up. Still the reading might help understand my work, which has often been described as visually poetic. So, I recited one little piece, and like eating potato chips or peanuts, read another. I asked how long we had the room. The room was mine as long as I wanted. After a few pieces I asked if I should continue. Th...

On the Naming of Paintings You would think that that guy who writes poems would want to name each of his paintings (which are in fact visual poetry) with individual and interesting titles. Certainly Erato, the muse of erotic poetry might whisper a whole string of suggestions as she licks his ear but he has more or less silenced her except for that tiny bit about her tongue probing his ear. He has a particular muse in mind to assist in the naming of paintings She has yet to figure out how this might work visit Sandy Kinnee.com

Looking for Needles It helps to know what a needle looks like, even if you don't know shit about sewing. Knowing what hay doesn't look like is another way to go about it.

The Boy Who Painted Blue Elephants He was an optimistic and hopeful young artist with buckets and buckets of promise. But at age 24 an ancient Roman elephant fell on him, breaking his only left leg and radically altering the remaining seventy-six years of his artistic career. From that day forward the focus of his paintings was the depiction of Evil and aggressive Elephants. Between 1971 and 1980 the elephant paintings were all limited to shades of blue. Art critics and historians suggested a link to Picasso’s “Blue Period.” However, the sad truth is he never really fancied and therefore did not want to emulate Pablo Picasso. Instead, the leg broken by the elephant event caused him to limp so severely that he veered toward the left. In the art supply store, where he purchased his supplies, colors were arranged with reds on the right side of the display and blues on the extreme left. No matter how much he might have wanted to buy a tube of cadmium red or yellow ochre, his l...

The Turkey in the Basement It was the one thing that kept him alive, otherwise my grandmother would have chopped his head off yesterday. He was a smart turkey. He had discovered a hiding place, under the kitchen, in a space that was never dug out when the basement was excavated. It was now a crawl space littered with turkey droppings, barely enough space for an escaped turkey, not enough for a grown man to slither into to trap a turkey. The gobbler my grandmother had been raising, unbeknownst to her grandson, had fled the coop. He was evading capture in the basement. How he had gotten there, I never learned. As I tell this tale, you might be tempted to hope the bird will become a folk hero or befriend some spider with a bizarre talent and perfect spelling. But no. This will not end well for the turkey. Today is the third Wednesday in November. We all know that by some magical and fragrant means, a delicious celebratory feast is due tomorrow, and the centerpiece is a golden ...

The Former Studio in Ohio My first painting studio Was in an apartment With oak floors I protected the wood with Plastic sheeting and A layer of masonite My muse failed to Warn me What might happen Hardwood studio floor Stained blue and green By accident Warped here and there More by water Than color Young artists Are not taught about This in Art school This is a post MFA Surprise bonus A free lesson visit Sandy Kinnee.com

A Celestial Ceiling of Rorschach Something in the wiring of our brains makes us look for patterns. We need to recognize our surroundings and identify experiences. Familiarity breeds comfort as well as contempt. But we seek comfort first. Comfort comes once we find our bearings. Contempt is a luxury. To find our place in the universe we examine and mark and lay claim to those things we can hold. Some of this claiming and marking is physical. Other knowledge is held in the eyes and mind. We impose patterns to reveal the rhythms beyond them. We look to the clouds, scan the stars, stare at paint stains, listen to repetitions, we look at random and fixed items and seek for reference points. We want the world to make sense to us. If something isn’t ordered if something isn’t clearly organized, we organize it. Intently searching the stars, we construct constellations. We gather colored sand and arrange it on a board, forming a mandela. We are organizers. What can be ...

Going to Monet's Garden Too Soon I grew up with an ingrained sense that flowers must be grown. No matter where I lived I would plant what I knew best: marigolds, cosmos, bachelor buttons, and any of the various fall bulbs. Daffodils were my lifelong favorites. If I didn't have space, I'd go back to my parents house and plant something. In the late 70's I'd heard that Monet's garden at Giverny were being reclaimed. In 1979 I was working at Stanley Hayter's "Atelier 17" in Paris and decided to visit the garden with my wife, Gale Murray, and two Canadians. We found the location of the gardens and plotted our trip via the train to Vernon and received directions that Giverny was only 5 kilometers away. We had prepared the typical French d'jeunier: a baguette, a hunk of Caprice de Dieux, Jambon, tomats, vin, Volvic, some cornishons, and a selection of tartlettes. Our plan was to eat our lunch in the garden. The weather was hot and sunny;...

How to Draw a Chair The flint pathways of the Jardin du Luxembourg provide a seemingly endless drawing surface for the numerous chairs which abound in the park. This is a superb place in which to learn how to draw a chair. The chairs are all painted the same pea greenish color. There are several types, some with arm rests, some designed for sunning or napping, all are constructed of hollow metal tubing with slats to sit upon. These slats while not designed for this purpose, also collect pigeon poop. The chairs make delightful drawing gadgets. Unlike a pen or pencil that deposits a single line upon paper, the chairs may make four marks simultaneously with their four legs on the “sketchbook” of the flinty paths. One can draw, aka “drag” a chair with one or both hands, most frequently grasping the back rest. One should avoid lifting a chair to reposition it, one should always drag these chairs to incise or “plow” grooves, cut furrows, into the dust of the path. While drawing ...

Brown Paper Grocery Bag Drawings I was four or five years old and knew This boy and that girl only from afar Sounds from their moving lips Not words just strange noises They looked like drawings of people Made with a yellow pencil On a brown paper bag, then erased Not a new yellow pencil On the first day of school But the kind of pencil that someone Chews and bites, a stubby pencil With a hard nub of a pink eraser I did not play with these children They did not play with me Their mothers looked at the dirt Their mothers were also erased Drawings on brown grocery bags No one spoke of these wraiths Beings that came one week And vanished the next Hauntingly invisible Five Birthday Candles and a Gauze Fuse Having been born after World War II, what would I, as a small child know of massive scale human displacement? How was my little brain to deal with the idea that most men I saw had two legs and my neighbor only one. I took it as mat...

Folding Laundry In Rome Perhaps they were songbirds squabbling outside in the trees They seem not to notice that the sun engulfs them and warms their feathers They squawk in spite of an absence of the dark and spitting clouds that until yesterday had plagued my short Roman Holiday These birds should be rejoicing, singing hosannas Instead, they peck at each other and I stand inside folding laundry before it wrinkles. Brautigan’s Laundry A dirty shirt rinsed in whiskey and put into a hot drier, then forgotten; coming out still dirty, smelling of booze, and more wrinkled than ever. I had entered Richard Brautigan's houses, cabins, hotel rooms, apartments and not only gone through his filthy laundry, but tried it all on, piece by piece Writing is laundry (is this a poem within a poem?) When all the shirts have been washed, dried, and hung. After the socks cleaned and matched put into drawe...

That Old Shipwreck Scene Neither that rainstorm in the middle of the night Nor the brilliant sunlit day changes a thing The castaways are doomed Those well-fed victims clinging to a black raft Mounted on the wall in the Louvre Will float adrift forever waving at that distant ship Never to be rescued Yet never to eat nor starve And I say well fed because these are models Parisians with full bellies and not those Who at the moment depicted Had neither nibble nor sip for two weeks Always in torment much like a frozen ball Of worms or tangled marionettes smeared with tar Painted with bitumen a fake paint And their tipsy raft is lost upon choppy water Meringue on lemon pie not yet cut into wedges Never placed on the table with fork and cup of tea Just a raft of people who have perpetually Lost their boat and are fated to float till the end of time Last night’s rain will not quench their thirst None of the thousands who walk through the gallery May p...

The Fabrication of Nothing: The Erased de Kooning Drawing On a cool morning, with a touch of winter in the air, it can make us smile to see evidence of our own breath. It surprises us when we see our own breath made visible. We take air for granted, we don’t have to see it. Some art is like air. Robert Rauschenberg’s white on white paintings and his “Erased de Kooning Drawing” are artworks we don’t need to see to understand. The concept satisfies our minds, well enough to bypass our eyes. The weight of these artworks is not physical, but completely conceptual. Yet, they do exist as objects. Robert Rauschenberg painstakingly erased a Willelm deKooning drawing, producing the infamous “Erased deKooning Drawing”, of 1953. One action obliterated another act, creating while destroying, making while undoing. It was as bold as it was blasphemous. The “Erased de Kooning Drawing” is known mainly to artists and modernists. Amongst this group it is legendary. However, few a...