The Virgin of The Rocks, Leonardo da Vinci

A current exhibition at The National Gallery in London

features two version of Leonardo’s painting

The Virgin of The Rocks. One lives in Paris at the Louvre

and the other at The National Gallery in London. I had been lecturing

in art history and didn’t learn there were two paintings

until last year when I visited London and the first thing I saw

walking into the National Gallery was The Virgin of The Rocks.

I was confused at first because I had last seen the painting in Paris

and this one, though similar in pictorial content was quite different

in tonality than I remembered. The Paris version has always been one of my

favorite paintings. Done in 1483 by Leonardo as an alter piece for a church

it is thought upon completion it was taken by one of the Sforza Dukes to be given as

a wedding present. Hence another was needed to fulfill the obligation of the commission.

In Paris there are always huge crowds around the Mona Lisa while other masterful

Leonardo paintings remain practically unseen. It is a shame. But one could stand

in the quite empty salon where this paintings hangs and study it at one’s leisure.

The babies alone, Jesus and John, are worth seeing for the brilliance of

the chiaroscuro rendering of their bodies. It was a young Leonardo at the height of

enthusiasm for the process of painting who created this work. The London version, done probably with the threat of a law suit, understandably lacks some of the

sparkle of the original.

A brief article in Art Forum magazine by Martin Kemp, January 2012, shows both pictures.

The Paris version can be seen in detail at Mark Harden’s Artchive, http://www.artchive.com, a fantastic resource for looking at art and art history.

Stephen Zeifman Speaks About His Artistic Practice

STEPHEN ZEIFMAN 'NEWFOUNDLAND' from CHEYMORE GALLERY on Vimeo.

A Brief History of Western Art from The Renaissance to the Present

From Giotto around 1300 to Raphael around 1500, from the early Renaissance to the High Renaissance, from say Giotto’s Lamentation Over Christ to Raphael’s School Of Athens the struggle of the artist was to render three-dimensional reality convincingly on a two dimensional surface. It is all an illusion and things like perspective, which can be taught now in ten minutes, took about one hundred and eighty years to perfect and develop as something theoretical that could be easily passed from one artist to the next. In this time there were amazing artists and masterpieces created. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Simone Martini, Massacio, Van Eyck, Fra Angelico, Parmigianino. Montegna, to name just a few. Once these skills were mastered each artist could use them to articulate their vision and for the next three hundred and fifty years some phenomenal art was created. Everything from Bosch to Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Vermeer, Pousin, Claude Lorraine, David, Ingres, Goya, Turner, Delacroix. All amazing artists who left spectacular paintings. These works had so much depth and substance and were built on big themes for the most part. Think of music at the time and think of painting and the complexity was similar. Then something happened in 1862 that was the beginning of Modernism, of the modernist dialectic, the argument with painting about painting itself. The arrival of photography on the scene had something to do with it but it is only a fraction of the story. These people were artists and artists don't like convention and the world of art, commercially, was changing as well. An artist's survival was no longer dependant on a patron whether it be the church or the nobility. In 1862 Manet painted Olympia, a nude who is reclining and starring out of the picture directly at the viewer. She is a prostitute and she has a maid and a dog and lovely satin sheets on her bed. What Manet did was remove any sentimentality from his painting, and most of his subsequent painting. He said to himself, I will let the viewer decide how he feels. I will not manipulate the viewer’s feelings about this woman. No poor down trodden exploited sex worker. The viewer will have to confront her and meet her gaze. From Manet to Cézanne there was a progression of reducing the expectations, reducing the idea of what a painting was. Monet, Gaugin and Cézanne were the great innovators but there were great practitioners like Degas and Van Gogh as well. What happened is that with Cézanne, even the human form was reduced to it essential shapes. His fruits and his portraits and his bathers and his landscapes were all about reducing the existing reality to fundamental shapes. His work is powerful and when you really look at it you feel you are in a room with an artist thinking unlike any artist ever thought before. He is not called the "Father of Modern Art" for nothing. What was now no longer in a picture was any illusion of depth or perspective, and any attempt to disguise the fact that what you were regarding could not be anything but a painting. Flat picture space, no emotional content, no attempt at photographic representation. Then Matisse freed colour from its moorings of logic and Picasso threw out any of the previous rules and created Cubism which was a way of playing with the picture surface and having fun with the illusion of form. Following Matisse, Kandinsky in 1910 painted a picture that was purely abstract: an arrangement of shape and colour in a picture space. A composition in other words that was only about colour and form. All painting is such an arrangement though some forms sometimes represent things other do not nor in the modernist tradition do they have to. Think of how music was changing. Think of Satie. Think of Elvis Presley, think of Jazz. The painting in question, Voice of Fire by Barnett Newman,  that the National Gallery bought for a million or so dollars was in this Modernist tradition. No one said you have to like it but it is important to know where it came from. With Cézanne and Picasso artists stopped making work for the sole pleasure of the viewer. Modernism demanded that the viewer bring something to the table. When that is possible the experience of art opens up enormously. One can take as great pleasure in beholding a room full of Rothkos as one can looking at a da Vinci. One's experience is different but the painting is the source of great pleasure and excitement and can stir the spirit and the soul.

from the Primacy of Drawing

Learning to draw…remains an activity of enormous importance and potency for education as a whole. Learning to observe, to investigate, to analyse, to compare, to critique, to select, to imagine, to play and to invent constitutes the veritable paradigm of functioning effectively in the world.

Deanna Petherbridge, THE PRIMACY OF DRAWING, Yale University Press

The House and Studio FromThe West and The South

On Becoming Visually Impaired

We become visually lazy living in big urban centres and we teach our selves to stop looking, to make no eye contact, to not appear to be staring. Riding on the subway is an experience contrary to so much of what it can mean to be human. In the urban centre other people are potential threats and one must be alert to danger at all times but one doesn’t want to invite danger by making eye contact with the wrong person and in fact one doesn’t want to invite a friendly exchange with a stranger either, so the gaze is inward and on the floor or the ceiling. How uncomfortable it is to ride amongst people and try at all times not to have any contact with these people whatsoever. Then out on the street there is concrete and buildings, few of which have any aesthetic dimension, and regardless are all familiar from years of walking the same streets to work or home, and so the glance is down to watch your step and not much else. The attempt to not see, the habit of not seeing, the effort exerted to not see or not even look, takes its toll and requires work at the visual gym to overcome.

Pico Iyer/ The Joy of Quiet/ New York Times/ December 29, 2011

“A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.”

This quote from a piece by Pico Iyer called THE JOY OF QUIET that appeared in The New York Times of December 29, 2011 is one of many ideas mentioned that support the underlying methodology of the Mill Road Studio. The program we offer is low tech and involves drawing and painting with long walks on stunning rural trails overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Reception for cell phones is poor and after a few days people just give up trying and are content with firing off a quick email to tell the kids that they have arrived safely and are fine.

We start with a three hour life drawing session in the studio and immediately the stresses and strains of the daily routine back home or at the office begin to fall away with the participant experiencing a heightened visual awareness as a reward. This visual awareness that develops, like muscle tone, over the first few days of drawing in the studio and in the landscape help the participant connect in a meaningful way with the surrounding beauty. Our idea being to lead people, through artistic practice, to a state of focus, of being in the moment and the psychic renewal that can come from being able to sustain this.

Visual art practice is the vehicle but the degree of a participant’s previous experience as a practitioner is not a significant factor in finding some inner peace. Doing the work has other rewards as well like the satisfaction of learning something new and the pleasure that can be had from making something tangible and concrete, like a relief print, a still life painting, or a drawing of the human figure that did not exist before and was, for so many, not even considered as something achievable.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet

 

Experiencing great art can be transcendent, like meditation, an immersion in the complexities of human expression and beauty.

Art is there for the looking like the sky and the trees and the ripples on the sea.

Alan W. Watts from BEAT ZEN SQUARE ZEN AND ZEN

I do not even style myself a Zen Buddhist. For the aspect of Zen in which I am personally interested is nothing that can be organized, taught, transmitted, certified or wrapped up in any kind of system. It can't even be followed, for everyone has to find it for himself. As Plotinus said, it is "a flight of the alone to the Alone," and as old Zen poem says:

If you do not get it from yourself,
Where will you go for it?


                                           

Dawn

Newfoundland, Stephen Zeifman, Cheymore Gallery, Tuxedo Park, NY

Painting, Photography and Assemblage  currently on display
at CHEYMORE GALLERY in Tuxedo Park, NY

www.cheymoregallery.com

Skerwink Trail

Fox Island Trail

Close to Home

Studio View - Morning

The Studio

Drawing

What does it mean to have skill and understanding in visual art? Does it mean drawing accurately, expressing feelings and ideas creatively and competently with a variety of media, being interested in and coming to understand the work of others? It is all of these things—while learning through practice and experience to see, analyze, examine, take risks, and develop confidence while relieving stress and finding personal harmony and balance.

There are no tricks to achieving this competence. There is only practice and persistence. Drawing, for example, is a physical skill involving hand and eye coordination that can only develop over time. It is about seeing clearly, about trusting what the eye sees and ignoring what the brain wishes to see. There are methods and techniques for building form with shadow and light that are made more understandable through observation, practice and experimentation with various media like charcoal, graphite and conté.

Landscape - A Line Out

Life Drawing

Artists

An artist is someone who never loses a sense of the power of the symbols he or she creates. So many of us lose that sense around age six or seven when suddenly the circle with two dots and a crinkly line is no longer Mommy and we look with envy and longing at the precocious child beside us in class whose drawing looks more like a photograph. We want to do that too but can’t because we need to practice doing it and there might not be time in school or motivation outside of school or support for pursuing the practice. That kid who can instinctively draw well is like the kid who can sink baskets or serve and volley in tennis or do lovely pirouettes on figure skates or hit a fast pitch or bend it like Beckham in soccer. But does the fact of others’ skills in sports stop people from playing, and through their play becoming ever more skilled themselves? What is it about art that at such a young age the perception of someone else’s superior skill is enough to turn a child off for life?

The Mill Road Studio Method

The Mill Road Studio, the building itself, is a lovely, well proportioned structure that sits on a hill over looking the Atlantic Ocean on the east coast of Newfoundland in a relatively remote area three hundred kilometers from St. John’s, the oldest city in North America. The building takes full advantage of the natural clarity of the light, with a number of large windows and two doors. The building sits on a north-south axis and is infused with light from dawn to sunset. There is a stove for heat and a fan in the peak of the ceiling, 20 feet high, that can distribute heat more or less evenly throughout the building. The walls are rough, revealing the way the building was constructed, and canvases can be hung on nails hammered into the vertical supports. The floor is wood and there is a sink, a laundry tub, for washing brushes and other implements. All in all it is a casual, inviting space, where a person coming to the program would not feel constrained or worried about making a mess with whatever materials they were using. There is a model stand and a backdrop can be hung to help define the figure in the space. Wooden stools and tables made of planks resting on saw horses are the primary furnishings in the building.

Newfoundland is about four hundred and fifty miles out at sea off the east coast of the Canadian mainland. There are two ferries: one is a six-hour voyage and the other is fourteen hours. The six-hour ferry leaves the traveler about ten hours by car from the Mill Road Studio. The fourteen-hour voyage leaves a two hour drive. The traveler can fly to St. John’s and then rent a car for a three-hour trip or hire a taxi that runs regularly from the airport to Bonavista, a town located where Cabot first landed in 1497. I am telling you this to illustrate that getting to the Mill Road Studio involves travelling quite a distance and it is a distance not only in miles but from the comforts of big city life to a rugged rural situation, with certain amenities, but one that is located right on the eastern edge of North America.

The program at Mill Road Studio has been developed as an art program that can help anyone, from the absolute beginner to the professional, expand their skills and comprehension of the process of making visual art. But it is also a transformative experience that has art practice as a foundation that can inspire and support a shift in perception and awareness. This is possible in part because of the remote setting and the lack of distraction that comes with being far away from work and the family home. The location, essentially out at sea, provides for variety and unpredictable weather. There can be fog and rain and wind and warm sunshine and clear skies and dramatically cloudy skies and t-shirt warmth to parka chill and this can all happen over a few days in July. This coupled with the stunning physical environment—with its rock cliffs jutting straight up from the sea, and the clusters of forest, and the rolling hills and the wild flowers, and the ever-present vista of the sea stretching as far as the eye can see —help a visitor shake off the tensions and concerns of their regular daily lives. The physical situation of the studio and the surrounding area imposes itself in a way that leaves little room for defense. It may not happen in the first few hours but it does happen after a few days. The physical environment inspires awe. Combine this with poor cell phone service and a program that is free of technology, and a visitor can rediscover the quiet places in themselves that may be lost to the rigours and demands of being a professional in a competitive urban culture.

The Mill Road Studio program covers some fundamentals of drawing, painting and printmaking. So far these are in the realm of the working from life or the landscape but the participant can bring whatever nuance of personal expression and creativity to the work being done. There is a three-hour session in the morning from nine until twelve and then lunch is served in the house at a long table with a stunning view of the coastline, the sky and the sea. After lunch there is another three-hour working session but not all of the time is spent in the studio. There are some outstanding trails in the area and hiking these trails is an important part of the program. It helps to get the participant to live in the moment and to engage in something for pure pleasure and excitement that is not about an outcome. Walking the trails and then stopping along the way, once or twice, with a sketch book allows for the possibility of the participant to connect more fully with the landscape than if they were just ticking the trail off a to-do list and taking a few pictures along the way. The rhythm of the walk is like the rhythm of working in the studio with a life model or a still life installation. To gain the most benefit from the experience it is essential to be able to immerse in the process at hand. This is a difficult thing for many people to do but there is something about being out there on the edge that encourages this immersion in a more natural way than, say, going to a meditation class in the morning on the way to work. Losing sight of the worries and stresses of daily life, even for a short time, even for a couple of hours or a few days, allows for some personal renewal, a revitalization of the spirit. Add to this the pleasure to be had in making something new, something that demanded the learning of technique once thought to be out of range, and the feeling of confidence brought by this kind of achievement. The participant often experiences a sense of well being and a renewed desire and determination to break the restrictive habits that have formed over time.

View From Studio