The Bonds of Bonsai

The bonsai trees are back out in their courtyard at the Chicago Botanic Garden.  I went there today to teach my class on Calligraphy and Floral Decoration, and it was hard to walk through the garden to my classroom without “stopping to smell the roses”.

After three hours of demonstrating how to twist and turn the brush to evoke the vitality of living things in sumi ink, I walked outside to see the real thing.  I came upon this ostentatiously robust  bonsai azalea tree.

I’ve felt some ambivalence about bonsai, ever since Ted and I followed the signs to an artist’s ceramic studio while visiting wine country in Sonoma County, Callifornia.  The signs said “Pottery and Bonsai”, and sure enough, the studio had pots and little trees.  I’ll never forget overhearing a guy say, “I hate bonsai– they torture the trees, man!”  Which may be true, inasmuch as one can torture a vegetative life form.  But, we human beings also submit ourselves to torture for the sake of art and beauty– bonsais are the ballerinas of the plant world.  They’re trees in tiny toe shoes.

Even calligraphers can be tortured for their art.  During months of physical therapy to untie the knots I created in my neck by spending hours hunched over my drafting board, my physical therapist told me that I’d been in training like an athelete, only I had trained my body to be deformed.  After so many three-hour painting and calligraphy shifts, I actually felt I was turning to stone, like a gargoyle.  I contemplate my output,  what must be miles of border designs and lines of lettering that would stretch from here to Milwaukee, and sometimes I wonder just how much a person must paint.

And I answer myself, until she drops.  But, at least she can stop to smell the azaleas.

Free Yourself: It’s Passover!

May this Passover bring freedom and redemption to all who are enslaved.  May we find ways to free ourselves from the constricts of mind and attitude that bind us.  May we be open to new ways of solving the problems that face our world.

The Artful Vagabond

"Three Sheets To the Wind", a collage I did some years back, expresses for me the crazy exhilaration of the creative process.

Serena Kovalosky, an artist and traveler, wrote about my work on her blog, The Artful Vagabond.  It is a delightful blog:  I subscribe, and every day there appears in my inbox a short dispatch from Serena telling yet another reason she loves being an artist.  So inspiring!

Sunrise Ketubah

Sunrise Ketubah

I just finished this ketubah.  It makes me yearn for little spring buds and new green leaves.

Who’s In Charge Here?

"Interior With Cubist Chair," by Susan Chertkow

There has been much debate lately in the advanced painting class I teach at the Art Center, Highland Park, over whether or not an artist should explain “what she meant” when she created a work of art.  Stephanie looked at Susan’s series of paintings and asked her, “What were you thinking about?  What does this mean to you?”  Susan replied, “It doesn’t matter what it means to me, what matters is what it means to you, to the viewer.”  Stephanie made the case that it is interesting to know what the artist’s intention or story is.

I weighed in to say that, as the creator of a work, I don’t feel that my version of what it “means” is any more significant than anyone else’s.  In fact, once I finish a painting, what it means for me usually changes.  I’ve been painting long enough to have people show me works they bought from me decades ago, and not only do I not remember what I was thinking when I made it, occasionally I don’t exactly remember the piece!  (This is a rather disorienting feeling, since I remember selling it to them, and I can easily recognize my style, as familiar as looking at the shape of my own fingers.)

Serena Kovalosky, in her blog “365 Days Of Everything I Love About Being An Artist,” addressed the idea of interpreting art by saying:  ”I’m not particularly attached to my translation of a piece and I find it fascinating to learn how my work affects others.  I’ll offer my version, discuss my influences as I was creating it, and I’ll gladly share the technicals.  But what people will remember most is how my work made them feel.”

I go a little further than Serena.  Not only do I enjoy hearing what other people bring to my work, I have found that sharing my version seems to quash their creative response.  Once they hear my “version,” they no longer feel theirs is valid.  I always hope that the engaged viewer actually has a creative experience when reacting to art, whether it’s visual, music or literary.

The great literary critic William Gass explores the notion of the “self” in art in his new book, Life Sentences.  As discussed by reviewer Adam Kirsch in the New York Times, Gass says:  ”‘What works of art testify to is the presence in this world of consciousness, consciousness of many extraordinary kinds,’ he writes…  But this is ‘not that of the artists themselves, for theirs are often much the same as any other person’s…  It is not the writer’s awareness I am speaking of but the awareness he or she makes.  For that is what fine writing does:  it creates a unique verbal consciousness.’”

This is a fascinating idea:  that art creates a unique consciousness in the viewer’s experience of it.  This goes beyond what I tell my students, that the art should always “speak for itself.”  What do you think:  do you prefer to know the artist’s story behind his/her work, or would you rather experience it without explanation?

Happy Hanukah!

Art Fraud Case Begs Question: What Makes Art Valuable?

Today, two parallel stories of art authentication/fraud enquiry appeared in the news.  ”Old Man With Beard”, thought since the 1960′s to be a skilful copy by one of Rembrandt’s students, was examined with the latest x-ray technology, revealing a hidden drawing of a Rembrandt self-portrait beneath the painting, clinching its authenticity as his work.

“Bearded Old Man”, 1630, by Rembrandt van Rijn

“In Black and White,” 1960, by Robert Motherwell

Fake Robert Motherwell painting

Counterfeit Jackson Pollock painting

“Image No. 8,” 1949, by Jackson Pollock

On the other hand, the New York Times reveals in an explosive story today that millions of dollars of paintings purported to be by Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn may be fakes.  They were brokered by Glafira Rosales, who claimed they were from the personal collection of a “close family friend” who insisted on anonymity, and sold by blue-chip galleries and art dealers, including Knoedler & Co., which abruptly closed its doors this week.

The Times article details the FBI investigation, which is fascinating.  In addition to a lack of provenance (the documented ownership trail of a work of art), the paintings were not subjected to simple pigment tests, which have now revealed that some of the paints used to create them were not yet available at the time, to the artists who supposedly created them.  Curators and dealers with sterling reputations are falling under the juggernaut of this investigation.

It is incredible to me that these fakes, which convinced the experts (who weren’t looking too hard), could have simply been done without anachronistic paints, and might still retain their “value”.  The lack of the most basic due-diligence on the part of the “experts” is stunning, and calls to question their complicity in the fraud.  How many more are out there?

Beyond all the detective work, I wonder:  If a painting looks like a Pollock or a Motherwell, and is loved and respected for its “inspiration”, is it really less of a “masterpiece” than an authentic work?  If we really can’t tell without the help of a lab, is it really that special?  I like Motherwell, Rothko and Pollock, but $17 million??

I daresay that convincingly faking a Rembrandt would be beyond the technical and artistic abilities of anyone alive.  The Rembrandts that have been called into question were produced by his students, under his tutelage, perhaps with help from his own hand.  If a painting is so easily copied, what’s all the fuss?

What do you think?

(For a fascinating investigative journalism piece on the mechanisms of art forgery, see “Three Indicted in Sale of Fake Famous-Name Prints” from the Chicago Tribune, April, 2011.)

Sailing Ketubah

Sailing Anniversary Ketubah

I just finished this ketubah for an anniversary celebration.  (See my preliminary sketch here.  The original sketch included their Briard dogs, but we decided to leave them out. )  It was commissioned by a couple who spend much of their time sailing on Lake Michigan.

Working on it brought me back to my sailing days.  I learned to sail at Camp Ramah in Canada, and worked there as a sailing instructor.  I went on to teach sailing lessons at the Hoofers Sailing  Club at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  I tried to capture the power of the wind in the sails, the rhythm and rocking of the waves and the freshness and energy of being out on the lake on a sail-boat.  (See more of my ketubahs here.)

Do You Feel A Chill In The Air?

Winter Birches Ketubah, by Judith Joseph. Egg tempera and ink, 18" X 24".

I recently finished this ketubah for a couple who love to spend time in the woods in New Hampshire.  They asked for a snowy scene of birch trees in the moonlight, with the tracks of a wolf and a bear.  I added some little silvery evergreen trees, and the red branches of the willow, drawing on my memory of many winters spent  in northern Wisconsin.

Looking for wildness locally, I took my daily walk by the forest preserve (Chipilli Woods) near my house.  As I walked by the tree-lined clearing at dusk, I scanned the field for the sight of any wildlife.  I had the uncanny feeling that something was watching me, and sure enough, my eyes rested upon a large coyote.  I stopped and met its gaze.  It didn’t flinch.  Actually, it was pretty large and solid for a coyote, and not rangy and leggy like the ones I’ve seen around here.  Could it be a wolf?  There were no people around, and it really seemed wild, not like someone’s dog– especially the way it was WATCHING ME!  When I’ve seen coyotes, they’re usually shy, and kind of keep to the edges of the woods.  I’ve never seen a coyote hold its ground and just stare me down.  It was staring at me the way I’ve seen hawks in the neighborhood stare at Yorkies.

Tomorrow I’ll go back to the field and see if I can find any tracks.  Wolf-tracks (I now know, from painting them) are larger than dogs or coyotes.  It’s unlikely I’ll be able to find them in a grassy field, but I’ll take a look, all the same.  (In full daylight.)

What do you think?  Have you heard of any wolf-sightings in Northern Illinois?

Looking For Wildness

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If you live in an urban or suburban area, wildness is hard to find.  I found it at Gallery Park in the Glen, a recently developed suburb that was created when the Glenview Naval Air Base was decommissioned.  Along the verge and in between all the runways, naturalists found original, untouched Illinois prairie.  Amazingly, in our era of greed and despoilment, environmentalists successfully lobbied for a set-aside of this untouched biodiversity, and the Glen planners preserved a pristine wetland/prairie area in the heart of the development.

I have found that I can briskly walk its paved paths and crushed gravel trails, which loop through neck-high grasses, for an hour without repeating my path.  I see:  a sandhill crane, many ducks, egrets, little birds that tweet up from the path, masses of purple asters, wild roses, weeping willows, oaks.

Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic, writes in today’s paper:  ”Chicago’s high-toned Latin motto, ‘Urbs in Horto’ (City in a Garden), makes it sound as though the expansive open spaces of the city’s lakefront extend to every corner of the city.  They don’t.”

Kamin goes on to quote Perry Duis, a University of Illinois at Chicago historian, speaking about the dearth of green spaces planned into post-Great Fire Chicago:  ”The older industrial areas were so jammed by the expansion of factories that any kind of open space was considered to be sort of a luxury.   It’s just logical… Chicago is the most thoroughly capitalistic city there is.”

As protestors mass on Wall St. and LaSalle St. in revolt against rampant corporate greed, it is well to bear in mind the environmental results of greed, in its most basic impact on our communities.  If you can find yourself some wildness, embrace it and appreciate it, and fight for it.