It’s not technique that makes you fall in love with art; learning technique opens the way so you can explore art’s ancient and miraculous forces. Art’s power is in what it means to you, how a work of art, like music, touches you personally at a level beyond words and makes you want to create something that does that too. Art’s job is to shake us awake, lift us up, and make us pay attention to the mystery and poetry in everyday life.
All excellent art does this, but only certain paintings make it their entire focus and explicit subject matter. Sargent’s moodily lit tableaux of street scenes in Venice do this exceptionally well.
John Singer Sargent, A Street in Venice, 1880-82, oil
During several visits to Venice in the 1880s, John Singer Sargent chose to paint the everyday lives of its inhabitants rather than the city’s landmarks. His Street in Venice’s(above) narrow alleyway, with its peeling plaster walls and a burst of light at the far end, draw us into a mysterious situation. A woman steps over the threshold of a wine cellar, looking straight out at us as if momentarily distracted from a private meeting. The man facing her intently seems unaware of being observed.
The technique is masterful, but Sargent uses it not for its own sake but to support the emotional content of the work. The color, composition and paint handling support and express Sargent’s creative vision of the poetry of life going on in the secret nooks and alleys of the ancient city.
Note in the detail below the different kinds of pant-handling involved in portraying the young man’s fashionable shoes and trousers against the old city’s worn and time-battered stone. In the stone street, Sargent used a pale gray “scumble” to create texture. He applied a pasty opaque layer of pale grayish white over the dry darker gray paint below it.
DETAIL of the above
Feeling the wonder in art and learning to create it begins and proceeds with raw material worked on devotedly by conscious effort in many paintings over time. A single painting begins with a rudimentary sketch, a novel with a rough first draft. The poet Mark Strand traces the history of music (and by extension, art itself) through a related process of historical transformation and personal immersion, the result of a full emotional investment in the creative process and a life lived deeply and creatively combined:
THE EVERYDAY ENCHANTMENT OF MUSIC
A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music. Then the music was polished until it became the memory of a night in Venice when tears of the sea fell from the Bridge of Sighs, which in turn was polished until it ceased to be and in its place stood the empty home of a heart in trouble. Then suddenly there was sun and the music came back and traffic was moving and off in the distance, at the edge of the city, a long line of clouds appeared, and there was thunder, which, however menacing, would become music, and the memory of what happened after Venice would begin, and what happened after the home of the troubled heart broke in two would also begin.
– Mark Strand
John Singer Sargent, A Venice Interior, oil, 1882
We can’t know what secrets the hearts of the figures in these paintings keep, only that they keep them. The absence of a single objectively readable narrative in Sargent’s Venice paintings gives them a power like that of instrumental music to evoke whole streams of feelings and ideas. Like characters in a mysterious drama, the women in the dimly lit Venice Interior (above) do not relate to each other in obvious ways. Two string together Venetian glass beads; others seem frozen, either in private reverie or a pause in conversation.
Meaning flickers on an off in the dark, the way the bright light shines through the windows, drawing us toward the reflective floor toward the back. It’s a study in ordinary mysteries, rendered in grays, whites, blacks, and earths. Intrigue shimmers amid the uncertainties like the unexpected accents in vivid red and the sudden needle-stab of sunlight at the far end of the room.
DETAIL of the above
From each of these “street scenes” Sargent conjures an entire world. Each passing moment, as if spellbound, remains as suspended outside of time as it is cooly sheltered from the heat of the piazza beyond.
If you’re enchanted by Sargent’s technique, you might want to look into the Thomas Jefferson Kitts combo set of two instructional videos, Sargent and Sorolla (whom Monet himself called “the master of light”), in his Techniques of a Master series.
Flowers Fields Take 1st Place in Laguna
Michael Hill, “Flower Fields at Dusk,” oil, 16 x 20 in.
Laguna Plein Air Painters Association (LPAPA, California) opened its annual “From Dusk to Dawn” event at the LPAPA Gallery recently and has announced the 2023 award winners.
From the gallery:
Award winners for the juried art show included First Prize winner “Flower Fields at Dusk” (shown at top) by Michael Hill; Second Place, “Evening Serenity “ by David Marty; Third Place award went to “Almost There” by Denise Busony; Honorable Mention “Evening Treasure” by Linda Glover Gooch, and Facebook Fans People’s Choice Award to “Sunset on the Hill” by Mikyoung Osburn.
