Ben Haggard

This summer I studied with Santa Fe-based painter and teacher Jakki Koufman. She was offering a studio critique and over a period of weeks I was able to bring in paintings for her thoughtful evaluations. It was helpful and expanding to listen in on her conversations with each of the other participants. But it was even more helpful to be encouraged to become more articulate about my own work.

She used Hans Hoffman’s metaphor of “push/pull” to characterize the dynamism in my paintings. Hoffman developed his theory as an alternative to classical understandings of perspective. He described the role of color relationships in pulling the eye into or pushing it out from the pictorial plane, and the tension among marks that moves the eye through the painting and beyond its borders.

This gave me a new vocabulary for something I had been doing intentionally but was unable to adequately describe. I have been exploring for years the edge between marks that are strong and call attention to themselves, and the integrity of the visual image as a whole. This edge is for me the place where the most life and energy become available to (or through) the image.

When one of my paintings “works” for me, its drawing or color threatens to fly apart, to become so agitated as to be incoherent. Edges are violated or ignored; bright colors recede as dark neutrals push forward; the object dissolves into its atmosphere; distortions become almost caricatures. But there is always a stronger force holding it together—the inner logic of the relationships among the marks that capture or describe the relationships I experience in the visible world.

The purpose of this captured energy is an experience of a two-dimensional surface as living volume. Not as an illusion of space or three-dimensionality—although that can happen as a by-product—but as a coherent form imbued with the inner light that allows it to be encountered as living and real by another.

This for me is the correct meaning of realism, the realism of the 12th century Romanesque sculptors who captured and conveyed the inner light of their world, rather than slavishly copying its outer appearances. It is the realism of Giotto’s saints, Grunewald’s crucifixions, Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta. It is the source of Leo Marchutz’s visual brilliance, gleaned from his close study of Cezanne.

For this reason, I don’t think of my lineage as Post-Impressionist or Expressionist, although the painters associated with those schools offer a visual language with which I feel a kinship. For me, the lineage represents an unbroken line from cave paintings to the present, a tradition that has always sought to render the spiritual or energetic reality behind the manifest world.

Shortly after I posted my last blog entry, I received the following letter from Sam Bjorklund, my teacher at the Leo Marchutz School in Aix-en-Provence and an extraordinary painter. In it, he expands on the role of “presence” in his own artistic process. (For more on Sam, visit his website at http://web.me.com/bluemonk2/Site/S.B._FINE_ART_WELCOME.html)

Dear Ben,

Interestingly you speak of ‘meditation’, and being present. This is a practice that has been a part of my life for many years. Slowly I think they are beginning to blend into a state that is mine and guides my work, my working sessions. I have pretty much given up taking on projects, tasks or challenges. Rather I am finding that if I can create the open space, the subject will find me, and more often than not, the ‘how to’. It is very much a process of letting go. I look back and look at all the things I had to ‘fight’ with, and realize that the only real moments of success had little to do with me. Moments of grace where somehow I was not in the way of things happening.

I also remember a statement I found in the chicken coops of Leo’s house at Chateau Noir written by an architect friend of his. The thrust was that Leo should have no concern with the finished product, with the end. That his only job was to stay present and devote himself to the good of the work at hand, the process. This was something with which I struggled for many years, always hoping for results that could justify the hard work and to a certain degree suffering that went into the whole task. In other words, what could satisfy my poor insatiable ego.

That was a lot of years ago, and I still find it the principal concern. I do believe I have made progress, but then I am not sure about anything at this point, because whenever my mind creeps in I have learned that I must distrust it, not believe a word it says.

What you write about time, and what you are after in the moment of work, takes me to lines in the Four Quartets about how evasive time is, how the present contains the past and the future. I have had moments in my work, or rather periods or phases of my work, where I seemed to be floating in a space that contained no time. At those moments there seems not to be room for error, because I don’t seem to be doing much, just standing there recording something, some correlation between the colors on my palette, what is in front of my eyes, and the canvas or paper. I was able to find that most readily in the watercolors of many years ago. And more recently in oils where I sink into a work and a state of working where I really don’t seem to be part of it, just sure that something in me knows exactly what to do from one stroke to the next.

This happened at a point for me in Memphis back in the 80s, and recently I have found it again in my studio in Florida, working, strangely enough, from a photograph. I guess it is the trance you speak of. But it is full of assurance – the absence of doubt, of struggle. And it can carry on over days, weeks and even months if I don’t get distracted. More and more I find an increased dependence upon meditation not only before the work, but constant, ongoing. Flannery O’Connor called it the “habit of Art.” I would say, the habit of simply being present not only in the moment but in the work.

My process has changed. It used to be short, quick. Watercolors from less than an hour to maximum a couple hours. Oils, if they were to ‘work’, were a single session of from an hour to a few hours, on rare occasions maybe a long 5 or 6 hour session (exhausting, those). Now there is just putting in some time on a single painting, getting present. There is not really a beginning and not an end.

What seems important, I’ve found, is that each session end on an up stroke. I mean at a point where I feel deep inside that it is going well and could maybe go like that for a long time. I’m in the state, but it’s time to go. Just so I don’t end in a sentiment of frustration or struggle. Rather grace. Never look back at the painting, don’t look at it between sessions. Then I can easily come back, sit quietly in front of it a moment and be right back in the flow. I think I got this many years ago from reading Hemingway’s Moveable Feast where he describes writing in the cafes of Paris. How he would always quit when it was going well, so he felt anxious to get back the next day.

S

Rembrandt: late.

Not long ago a friend expressed to me her dismay that I had been so harshly critical, even dismissive, in my postings on Liebermann and Corinth.  Why, she wondered, hadn’t I simply appreciated the work that I do admire, as I had with Bonnard?  Wouldn’t that have been more gracious, less gratuitous?  I believe these are good questions, so I have continued to think about them.

My answer rests on a distinction between “appreciation” and “discrimination.” To appreciate is “to value or regard highly; to raise or increase in value.”  To discriminate is “to note or observe a difference; to distinguish accurately.”  As Joe puts it, a food enthusiast might be able to appreciate cotton candy, but one would think he lacked discrimination if he ate a lot of it.

This distinction is fundamental to how I think and work as an artist.  I can appreciate all kinds of things—ceramic figurines, B movies, tacky drag, Jello desserts with tiny pastel marshmallows, “My Fair Lady” sing-alongs.  I triangulate among the values these things represent in themselves, the context within which I hold them (which, in the examples above, might be irony or “camp”) and the contribution they make to my own creative life—a process that is most potent when it simultaneously works both objectively and subjectively.  In this way I elevate or appreciate their value.

Discrimination, on the other hand, is the ability (which I find must be continually developed and refined) to make accurate distinctions.  If I am to grow as an artist, I need to hone my ability to distinguish good work from bad, successful from failed, authentic from false, meaningful from vacuous, spiritual from mechanical, vital and challenging from safe and familiar.  As I mature, I expect the distinctions I make to become more numerous, interdependent, and subtle.

I use a different part of my mind to discriminate than I do to appreciate.  One drives toward excellence, the other toward potential.  One works on discovering when and how something is good, the other seeks to see the good in everything.  They are not mutually exclusive—they are simply different mental operations.  Nevertheless, my friend’s point is well taken:  the harsh critic will himself be one-sided and inauthentic if he fails to also hold in mind the larger context in which everything can be appreciated.

Rembrandt: early.

Last in a series–I have been so impressed by the late paintings of this relatively obscure German impressionist/expressionist that I wanted to share them.  This last group is paintings of religious and/or mythological themes.  To enlarge, double click on image.

This time it’s still lifes.  To enlarge, double-click on image.