Ben Haggard

I use the term “all-at-onceness” to describe a quality I am always trying to capture in painting. All-at-onceness is related to the experience of seeing something—really seeing it—in the present moment, whole, unmediated and without deliberation. The idea is inherently paradoxical: an experience so completely in present time that it is outside of time. This is what I am trying to produce, images so immediate that they operate outside of time.

This demands a concentrated working process. In my case, I have to work very rapidly if I am to sustain a state of altered awareness (or trance as I usually think of it) where I have no experience of time. This is like a meditation practice, though more active.

The approach is related to “alla prima” painting, where oil painters apply wet paint over wet paint to complete a painting in a single session. Alla prima painting was central to the practice of the Impressionists, especially Monet, who sought to capture the qualities of light operating at a particular time of day. For me it reached one of its highest expressions in the work of van Gogh, who painted two masterpieces a day during the last period of his life, working in a state of heightened concentration and perception that is difficult for me to imagine.

All-at-onceness is also, I imagine, related to Asian practices of calligraphy and Sumi painting, where the painter hones the instruments of body and mind to allow essence (or, perhaps, absence) to be transmitted unimpeded.

My primary influence was Leo Marchutz, who dedicated himself to extending the discoveries of Cezanne’s late work, especially the watercolors. Leo was able to capture with a few gestures an entire world, spiritual and outside of time, illuminated by an inner light. I have neither his temperament nor his restraint, but his work seeded in me a faith that painting could still serve a spiritual function for both painter and viewer.

“Did you write a blog about it?” Well, uh, no.

“Well at least you got some photos didn’t you?!?” Um, well, not really…

Lisa was quizzing me about my three week visit to Republic in the remote Upper Peninsula of northern Michigan. I had been telling her about the strawberry Jell-O we made and her journalistic instincts got the better of her. “That’s so cool,” she told me.

On my insistence, several of us had gone to pick strawberries. The U.P. is almost entirely rural, and u-pick strawberries, raspberries and blueberries are common. (Not to mention the miles and miles of wild berries that grow along the roads and railway embankments.) The weather had been unseasonably cool and wet and the ripe strawberries were rotting fast on the plants. I checked each berry carefully as it went into the lug, eating on the spot the ones that were too perfectly ripe. On the way home the car filled with a delicate perfume.

The next afternoon we made jam—strawberries, sure-gel and sugar. The recipe insisted on 6 cups of sugar for 2 cups of fruit. We reversed the ratio and got a delicious conserve but an unsure gel. That didn’t stop us from putting it on everything.

The next project was Jell-O. Jell-O is ubiquitous in the Midwest, central to regional identity. “Salad” in local parlance refers to Jell-O with carrots or fruit in it. In our attempt to go native and fit in, Joe and I were making homemade Jell-O with plain gelatin and fresh fruit. We raided the local St. Vincent de Paul for authentic Jell-O molds and scoured vintage copies of “The Joys of Jell-O” for inspiration. In the rugged backwoods of northern Michigan we were pioneering a Jell-O renaissance!

A half gallon of strawberries were cored, cut and sugared to release their juices. The gelatin was melted in hot water and stirred in. Spoonfuls of homemade jam were added to intensify the flavor and the whole thing poured into a mold. Brilliant! The essence of strawberries captured in a perfect mid-summer form.

We went on to experiment with uncooked strawberry pies (pastry cream in a baked pie shell buried in strawberries with a little gelatin), strawberry parfait (homemade strawberry Jell-O unmolded onto a basin of fresh tapioca pudding), and strawberry dessert (Joe made a sponge cake, cut it up and stirred it into homemade Jell-O and served it with whipped cream).

And there were still plenty of strawberries left over to put on cereal in the morning. The day before our visit ended, the wild blueberries and raspberries came ripe. And the chokecherries and pin cherries were on the horizon. If we’d had another month there we could have transformed the world of Jell-O forever.

Nine years ago, I had never heard of the Berlin painter Max Liebermann. At that time, my initial encounters in Berlin’s old national gallery were negative—dreary realist canvases and second rate impressionism in the (equally dreary) style of Manet. So his late work came as a shock to me. The brushwork in the paintings from his garden during the last thirty years of his long life was broad, loose, fluid. The color was intelligent and abstract enough to open up the light of his surfaces. Art historians attribute his increasing abstraction to his declining eyesight. I see it as the realization of his vision.

Liebermann’s late work completely eclipses his early (and highly successful) career as a painter to northern Germany’s bourgeois society. His greatest accomplishments as a painter coincide with the period of the Weimar Republic. (Liebermann, a Jew, died broken hearted in 1935.) During this time he was also the head of the German Academy and helped foster one of the world’s great outpourings of artistic creativity. Post-impressionism, Expressionism, and the Bauhaus School were among the host of groups who flourished during his tenure.

I don’t know what to make of the extraordinary body of work Liebermann produced between 1911 and 1935. I have gone back to the earlier paintings and drawings, seeking the roots of this flowering and I suppose they are there, especially in the work that emerged at the beginning of the century. But I would not have predicted the older painter from the younger.

In this regard, Liebermann is like so many other painters. Rembrandt was celebrated as a young man—a flashy pyro-technician long on lively detail and short on psychological insight. His great work coincides with his decline into poverty and obscurity. Pisarro stumbled around in the desert of pointillism before regaining his calling at the end of his life. Turner was always a wild man, but his late work was generations ahead of its time. Kokoschka’s early experiments in expressionism made him world famous. But his late landscapes and portraits—though derided by critics as retrograde and inferior—are the great work.

They speak for themselves…

1. Janet Baker, La Spectre de la Rose (from Nuits d’Ete), Berlioz, Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Herbert Blomstedt, conductor, 1972
2. Arleen Auger, Et Incarnatus est (from the Great Mass in C Minor), Mozart, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Leonard Bernstein, conductor, 1990
3. Leontyne Price, Fiorenza Cossotto, Luciano Pavarotti, Nikolai Ghiaurov, Offertorio (from the Requiem), Verdi, La Scala Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan, conductor, 1967
4.Maureen Forrester, Urlicht (from Symphony #2), Mahler, Glenn Gould, conductor

It was a pretty good party in die Zvergenwelt.