Some artists obsessively repeat motifs in their work. They spend their lives redoing a painting, endlessly exploring a theme or device or color scheme. I’ve never understood this. I tend to get bored with an idea and want to move on to something else. What is the point of repetition?
Monet’s haystacks are one extreme example of repetition as life choice. Once I saw at an exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute of a dozen or so of his haystacks arrayed in a large room to follow the light around from sunrise to sunset. It was possible to stand in the entrance to this room and see the changes the daylight made on a haystack. Monet’s focus on light change was like that of a scientist trying to manage an experiment by controlling one variable. Only light changed. And with that one change, everything changed.
Yet I don’t think his paintings would endure if they merely explored technique. There must be more to this repetition than technical study. I decided the best way to understand repetition was try it myself. For my first experiment I limited my palette to single color families such as gold, red, purple, green, grey. This idea yielded some pleasant but overly realistic floral studies.
For a second experiment, I tried confining a palette to colors of tiles from the Talavera region in Mexico, electric blues, oxide reds, hard greens. Vase with Flowers (see September 7) was part of this series. I liked these paintings but I can’t say I understood Monet’s haystack obsession better because of this experiment. I was more than ready to move to a new theme after a few months. Monet had explored his haystacks for years.
I’m now trying a frog obsession. I impose no color, light or composition rules on myself, just subject matter, and I think I’m finally beginning to get it. The lines of a frog’s body are fun. The stomach is comic, the eyes pop, the toes splay and curl. Every line is almost a jump. Even a sitting frog is active. Frogs, if not an obsession yet, have at least become fascinating to me, but the fascination is not in the frog. It’s with potential movement. Monet’s haystacks when displayed by changing daylight, moved with the day. They were a movie. My frogs cannot sit still. They want to move.
I think the lesson from this experiment is that artists are always chasing what they cannot have. A musician cannot have color. A filmmaker cannot have the silence of the soul. A novelist cannot have a wordless sunset. And a painter cannot have movement. Part of becoming an artist is to chase the unseekable. I paint my frogs over and over because I want to dance.
Above top: Chain of Frogs, digital drawing. Copyright 2009 ptw
Above: Smiling Frog, pencil on paper. Copyright 2009 ptw
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