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Oil pastel.
St. Pete #1
28 Wednesday Nov 2012
Posted in Art
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Terribly curious, one of these had a tag of Cage…do you have an entry with the backstory on these? Ironically, since our course, I have revisited the canvas for expression verses the poem! I’m not a painter nor a poet….
“I’m not a painter nor a poet…”
I love that. I feel the same way.
Before Modpo I knew about John Cage’s music, but not his poetry. I also didn’t know that late in life he did aleatoric watercolors. He
used I Ching to randomly generate the images in his paintings. I didn’t use the I Ching but used a similar method to his- using oil pastel crayon rather than watercolor. It was #2 and #4 that are in Cage’s style.
The thing I find liberating is that he was all about getting the ego out of the way so the artwork creates itself. This is very helpful to me, because ego usually ruins the work.
I would love to see your paintings, Angela. I found Modpo freed me up in multiple arts.
I should clarify that these were done with oil pastel crayons on drawing paper. I am looking forward to playing with the technique on canvas.
I’m curious, where do I learn more about Cage’s art using I Ching? I just left amazon and was toying with buying “Silence” — have you read any of his books or books about him?
As for my art– I dug a canvas out that is about 20 years old — layers of red acrylic and a wolf face (abstract). Over the weekend I started slashing it with white paint — nothing great, just inspired by thoughts that came to mind about the wolf in relation to global destruction. I will post it on the blog if I continue to mess with it…i may write a bit about my thoughts on the process of art/inspiration/etc.. Thanks for asking, ~ a
Angela- I’d love to see your wolf painting.
I picked up _Silence_. I haven’t read it yet but I have read _Every Day Is A Good Day_ which I gather was a companion piece to an exhibition of Cage’s watercolors after his death. I found it very interesting and very helpful.
There’s not a lot out there about Cage’s methods; he didn’t keep records from what I understand, and from what I read even he forgot what methods he used! But I can outline what I’ve picked up so far. The advice I kept reading when researching his methods was: if you’re interested in this mode of working, you’re better off trying to devise your own method rather than to to dry to unearth Cage’s method. (That makes a lot of sense to me anyway).
Cage used the I Ching as a random number generator. He did not use the text or the interpretation of the hexagrams. Originally he used the traditional coin-throwing method, but that took hours to generate all the hexagrams he needed, so he had a friend write a computer program to generate random hexagrams (numbers) between 1 and 64. (Surely we now have Web sites that would do this for us). So, he would come into the studio with dozens of hexagrams prepared.
Let’s take the case of his New River Watercolors. he had a number of river rocks that he would assign the number 1-64. He would lay out a grid on the paper (that may not encompass the entire canvas- in some paintings, for example, he only used the lower half).
he would predetermine colors (always a mix- he felt colors out of the can were not interesting, and it was one criticism of many he leveled at Jackson Pollock that Pollock used colors straight from he can). Each color would be assigned a number or set of numbers so that each had an equal chance.
His procedure, then, was basically to ask the I Ching how many rocks should be in the painting and where they should be placed. He’d ask the I Ching what color paint should be used. He’d then trace around the rocks using that color paint. (I believe he used a feather to paint these).
In other paintings, he had a collection of brushes and would ask the I Ching which brush to use and for how long a stroke. Sometimes he used smoked paper or branded the paper with a hot Japanese teapot.
The key for me was figuring out how the I Ching was used. Once I got that, I could see what he was doing.
When I did these little pieces (St. Pete #2 and #4) I was sitting on the beach with a 9 x 12″ drawing pad and oil pastel crayons. I didn’t go through the rigorous randomization procedure- I just blindly tossed shells on the paper, and selected the pastel without looking at the box. (In some of his etchings Cage would draw without looking). One could argue then that what I did was not aleatoric (chance) at all, but improvisation (which Cage loathed)- but hey, it was an enjoyable hour or so on the beach.
Mark ~ thank you so much for the information! Cage certainly believed in making art difficult…he may have removed the ego, but he didn’t remove the mind. I admire his methods but it becomes so complicated…. It isn’t that I am now a huge fan of Cage, but I am intrigued and think I must find a copy of Silence to understand a bit more about him. Perhaps what I do admire Is his ingenuity. I forget what it was called, but he did recordings of noise on location in the boroughs generated by another complicated system. This type of sound experiment intriges me — there is a random nature to it.
I understand all about ego and self-crit in writing and painting. It destroys the muse. Keep at it if it Feeds you, you know? Cheers ~ a
Absolutely. I feel the same way about Cage- I do enjoy what he does but I’m not trying to be a clone of his. The more I can learn about how he did what he did, the more I can feed the Muse, and the better off I am as an artist. Cage really stimulated me as a writer first, but also as a painter and visual artist. Maybe he’ll have an effect on me as a musician too- but I have to get through today’s concerts first before I can explore that!.
By the way, this one (#1) wasn’t meant to be aleatoric or abstract at all. I was trying to draw St. Pete Beach, but my drawing skills are pitiful (in part because ego gets in the way and I get self-critical; I try too hard). Cage’s method frees me from that problem. I noticed as the drawing progressed that it was terrible representational art, but I liked the color and rhythm and voila! Abstract.
(If you rotate this 90 degrees and look in what is now the top left corner you see what was supposed to be a seagull).
Cage would probably use something like this now: http://www.random.org/integers/