Oh yeah, I can create something

I forget sometimes. After dropping Jami off at the airport yesterday, I visited the NC museum and the Ackland. While I sat in the NC museum, looking at a Jennifer Bartlett painting, a simple series of views of a house, loosely painted, reminiscent of Monet's haystacks, using the palette of analytic cubism (grays, browns, and black, applied in short cezannesque stroke groupings that allowed the color of the underlying ground to come through), a woman and her friend came by, looked at the work for a second, and one said, "this does nothing for me," and walked on. Pity, I thought: I was getting so much from it. Where did her adamant assertion come from? I have to say that people say odd things about art; almost as many odd things as they might say about Church or scripture. Everytime I hear someone talk about the rapture or confidently about Revelation and who the beast is I'm astonished: they seem unaware of the novelty and lack of scholarly and historic basis for these interpretations in the 2000 year history of the Church (but it's probably the lack of evidence that more than suffices for proof itself). Back to the Bartlett painting, or any painting (like the Rothko I looked at at the Nasher at Duke today), I wondered what it was in paintings that I love so much.
I love looking at paintings; as I've grown older I've loved all kinds of paintings: old and new, abstract and figurative, expressionist and kitschified (although it took a long time to appreciate Jeff Koons). I get something from modern art especially. Modernism freed the artist to make mistakes, to comment, to bend the conventions, to break the conventions, to reconceive and reconfigure, allowing all things to be art or nothing to be art. It's not nihilism; it's the embrace of abundance and freedom. There are certain paintings that freed the soul. The Bartlett is like that; it speaks but you must listen. And I think that that's a big part of it - listening. Walk up to a challenging painting like a Rothko, a big expanse of two or three color planes, flat against the canvas surface, soft edged - an absence of representation, maybe a quote of landscape. Don't force a meaning on it. Don't pull it into the familiar. To look at art is to practice restraint in interpretation. Don't look away and let it speak.
Thankfully there are good museums here and good paintings. Yesterday I went to the Ackland and they had a room of drawings, all in varying degrees of abstraction or representation; all in varying degrees of development, some with color some in black and white. A wonderful Schnabel drawing called Barbados is just a mass of deep indigo with some wash. If it's negative space it's suffocating the ground of the paper; if it's positive space, it's swallowing the ground. Something so simple could be so active, so evocative.
Lately I've been trying to write an artist statement, which for me is difficult: it's like describing the inner workings of the soul laying them bare- submitted for autopsy. But I think that that's an irrational fear. What I discovered sitting in the museum the other day was that I make art for myself. It's common to hear that an artist or writer creates for an audience, but I realized that I've only occasionally done that, and that the results are mixed on that score. My best work I've made for myself, as an outworking of an inner need. And I have to say that the art I get the most from, that artist must have created for his or her self. It may be that audiences may discover some rapport with something I've done, but this was not a necessary intention on my part.

There's no Cy Twombly at the NC Museum

But there's lots of other things, marvelous paintings by Diebenkorn, Stella, Morris Louis (advertised on the website but not out in the gallery), Robert Motherwell, a gigantic Kiefer (that outdoes the one in Atlanta for ostentation, encrusted paint, dangling objects embedded the surface, and obtuseness of meaning); as well as a Kirchner, a Nolde, a Jawlensky (or a Schmidt Rutloff); along with some Wyeths; plus a wealth of European, Egyptian, and Ancient works. It was greatly pleasing, a fine culmination to a Sunday trip back from Smithfield. In our little corner of the South a fine artistic experience can be cobbled from the Ackland in Chapel Hill, the Nasher at Duke, and the North Carolina Museum at Raleigh. Still All of these places are trumped by the Chicago Art Institute, any museum in Manhattan (Imagine if you wanted to visit three collections there - the Frick, MoMa and the Met or the Guggenheim, plus any gallery hopping you might want to do), the MFA in Boston (plus the Gardener). A person could spend years gleaning the ultimate artistic experience: visiting Russia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, England, NY, Boston, DC, LA, Santa Fe - not to mention seeing such monumental things as the pyramids, Angor Wat, the Forbidden City, various cathedrals, the Dome of the Rock, the mosques of Cordova and Granada. Human culture is rich in aesthetic expression and we scratch the surface of it in our ordinary lives, where we seem oddly contented.
We were walking around the museum in Raleigh and what did we find 10 minutes before closing? Peter Aertsen's The Meat Stall of 1551. I was taken aback because my copy of Janson's Art History (the piece of ballast every art student taking a survey course carries in a backpack to place on tiny coffee shop tables for perusal with cappuccino in hand) says that the painting is in Uppsala, Sweden. It is the very same painting down to the twirling sausage casing and the ascendant pig's head. A magnificent calf's head dominates the painting. In the background: the holy family flies into Egypt on layover from Beirut. This painting is a wonderful celebration of all things carnivorous: all things bright and beautiful - our Lord God broiled them all. Here is the answer to the question What would Jesus grill? Would he today turn hot dogs into Brats? Would Moses hit the rock and a Dogfish Head 90 minute IPA or a Duvel pour out? An updated Leviticus should have a verse reading "he that pisseth water and call it beer, shall be acursed; for weak watery beer that has no umph (which only virtue is that it's cheap) is an abomination."
I spoke with my friend Joe this afternoon and he told me that Twain's has a Rye beer that is like drinking a ham. I almost rent my garments: how appropriate for the town of Smithfield, where the streets are decked with tenderloin, that it should have a hamish beer.
Smithfield does have a wonderful German restaurant called Edelweiss where an ex-serviceman and his German wife cook up authentic German food. It's meat heaven. I had a Roulade, which is a beef rolled with sausage, served with fat and sauerkraut. I had a dark wheat beer with that: not Meisel but the other one.
I can't wait to return to the NC Museum of Art. I love looking at paintings. I especially love looking at crazy paintings (not the typical gallery line up of "please buy me; you'll never know I'm there" offerings). If only the Woodruff in Atlanta were as accessible by car.