Those who quarrel with “boxes”, by which I take it they mean unyielding categories and rigid boundaries, should have no problem with me. I do use names for concepts so I’ll have “pot lifters” we can agree on, but my categories are biomorphic. That is, they have wiggly boundaries and they are processes that change over time. They are amoebas. New names pop up and old names fade off, but sometimes revive. The criteria is nourishment for thought.
A pot-lifter. The nose clamps onto the edge of the hot kettle. Then it releases.
Anyway, I was surprised and pleased to discover the painting genre called “Tonalist” at www.askart.com. The term was invented to counter “Luminist” (light) painting, very pale and without brush strokes -- very smooth and vanilla. Another style is Fauvist, which is wildly bright, using a primary color wheel palette: red, green, yellow, purple, turquoise, etc. -- either with or without recognizable figures. In Impressionism the figures don’t matter much. See www.noicegallery.com/ for excellent examples by Marshall Noice, the photographer who used to collaborate with Bob Scriver.
Tonalist (dark) might be chocolate or maybe navy blue or gray. In terms of Western art, Tonalist paintings might be the nighthawks riding herd under the stars or campfires seen from a distance, perhaps by a wolf. Frank Tenney Johnson was famous for his night paintings, which were quite dark. We had a FTJ on the wall so we could study it and tried to duplicate it by painting a regular scene and then covering the whole thing with a thin layer of what we thought might be moonlight: blue-green. It was interesting; it wasn’t quite the same.
Frank Tenney Johnson
Frederic Remington painted enough night images for a whole show. http://www.nga.gov/feature/remington/
Impressionists encourage painting outdoors in nature (plein air) to capture the light; I don’t know how artists manage to paint in the dark so I presume they work from notes. In movie-making one can use a filter called “day for night,” which slips a dark scrim over the whole scene. I suppose that in music the equivalent mood might be muted, yearning, grieving or possibly sexually intimate. Clair de Lune. Tonalism is broadly considered “spiritual,” in the way that nature at dawn or gloaming seems mysterious but hints at larger powers, other worlds.
Russell Chatham is usually seen as a landscape painter and is often more of a Luminist sort of Tonalist since he likes snow and bleached grass. www.russellchatham.com/ The over all light/dark dimension is less relevant than contrast which he controls with value, unsaturated color, and the warm/cool spectrum. Chatham identifies Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) and James Whistler (1834-1903) as major influences: they are his grandfather’s generation, Edwardians. His actual maternal grandfather, Gottardo Piazzoni, was also a well-respected painter in California and Russ grew up with him and his work.
This post on Tonalist painting is actually just an excuse to talk about Chatham. He is exactly the same age as me, our births within hours of each other, except that I was emerging in Portland and he was near San Francisco. He had much better connections, he was male, and his gift was painting -- and fishing. In fact, this series of interviews with him are for him as much of an excuse to talk about fishing as about painting. The two pursuits are more alike than one might guess. I’d love to be able to do either, but I have bad muscle-control and lousy eye/hand coordination. So I write.
Chatham talks about “emotional positioning,” which I take to be whether one is able to be solitary, to concentrate, to persist, and so on. He’s a studio guy indoors and a fisherman outdoors, but one of his big loves is a really good restaurant. Livingston is a small Montana town but it has accumulated a lot of writers and actors on ranches. The lack in Livingston was a decent restaurant sophisticated enough for such folk, so Chatham started one. It went broke, several times. Some people said it was because he wouldn’t focus on it, others said it was because he was too generous to women. (There are worse faults, obviously.) He was busy. He also wrote and he ran a publishing company, where he published friends like Jim Harrison. If people in Livingston were so anxious to have a fine restaurant, they were free to start another one.
Most of what I know about Chatham is second-hand. The first time I ever met him in person was a decade ago at the Montana Festival of the Book where he was on a panel, the only discussant who had really thought deeply about what he was doing. The others sort of blew it off. What he said then has stuck with me. The main point was that the idea is not to make money, but to do a quality job. The others just wanted to make money at the author’s expense. But more than that, it’s a matter of that “emotional positioning” concept. He’s enough Italian to live with his senses, enough Swiss to do it in an orderly manner. (I assume you’ll understand that nationalities are just another set of pot-lifters.) He is neither a kamikaze hedonist nor a tight ass.
Russ’ comments on that panel are summed up at this link:
http://jacket2.org/commentary/russell-chatham-clark-city-press-livingston-montana-conversation-noel-king Note that he’s talking in 1998 and things are quite different now. Forget “better” or “worse” -- just different. Some of this is still very relevant.
So what IS quality? I don’t think it can be defined exactly. It’s kind of a vibe, a wholeness, a pleasure. I don’t think it’s helpful to think in terms of what the “high culture” people say is worthy. They have too little experience with real life. The worthiness comes out of the doing -- it’s in the artist’s hands. I used to hold out for a change in Paul Schilpp’s definition of art as “the expression of a person’s relationship to the universe”, me insisting it had to be a “communication” to qualify. Now I’ve changed my mind. Art IS a person’s relationship to the universe.
Below are links for a set of videos interviewing Chatham. The maker of the vids is his helper so they know and trust each other, but Chatham is always easy like this.
The first impulse when one learns about a guy like Chatham is wanting to go be with him, to participate in his life. It’s a child’s response, often disguised as a lover’s desire. If we all went to live with Russ, he would be crushed, changed, destroyed. Of course, he’s smart and resourceful so he can slip away, but what a shame to make him leave his own places and people. Build your own! Pull him into you. Better yet, live your life as he does, but in your own way.
By now I can summon up many of his paintings in my mind’s eye, which is not to discount the experience of something like the fabulous huge Chatham paintings at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. “Seasons” is a collection of twelve original paintings representing the months of the year. They are yards across, mural-sized, and yet it’s possible to see that they grew out of the little paint box he still has, the dimensions of a child’s school notebook. Who knows what is growing out of a contemporary child’s tablet right now? Of course, the tablet will be electronic, so that’s what the art might also be.
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