from beyond the cadre of my ideas and hover mystically above the wild Ionian horse that is now lost to man.
Have you ever sat in a railway station and watched people killing time? Do they not sit a little like crestfallen angels-with their broken arches and their fallen stomachs? Those eternal few minutes in which they are condemned to be alone with themselves-does it not put umbrella ribs in their wings?
All the angels in religious art are false. If you want to see angels you must go to the Grand Central Depot, or the Gare St. Lazare. Especially the Gare St. LazareSalle des Pas Perdus.
My theory of painting is to get the drawing done with as quickly as possible and slap in the color. After all, I’m a colorist, not a draught horse. Alors, out with the tubes!
I start painting the side of a house, in raw umber. Not very effective. I put a liberal dash of crimson alizarin in the wall next to it. A little too pretty, too Italian. All in all, I’m not starting out so well with my colors. There’s a rainy day atmosphere somewhat reminiscent of Utrillo. I don’t like Utrillo’s quiet imbecility, nor his rainy days, nor his suburban streets. I don’t like the way his women stick their behinds out at you either…. I get the bread knife out. May as well try a loaded impasto. In the act of squeezing out a generous assortment of colors the impulse seizes me to add a gondola to the composition. Directly below the bridge I insert it, which automatically launches it.
And now suddenly I know the reason for the gondola. Among the Renoirs the other day there was a Venetian scene, and the inevitable gondola of course. Now what intrigued me, weakly enough, was that the man who sat in the gondola was so distinctly a man, though he was only a speck of black, hardly separable from all the other specks which made up the sunlight, the choppy sea, the crumbling palaces, the sailboats, etc. He was just a speck in that fiery combination of colors-and yet he was distinctly a man. You could even tell that he was a Frenchman and that he was of the 1870’s or thereabouts….
This isn’t the end of the gondola. Two days before I left for America-1927 or ‘8-we held a big session at the house. It was at the height of my water-color career.
It began in a peculiar way, this water-color mania. Through hunger, I might say. That and the extreme cold. For weeks I had been hanging out with my friend Joe in poolrooms and comfort stations, wherever there was animal heat and no expense. On our way back to the morgue one evening we noticed a reproduction of Turner’s in the window of a department store. That’s exactly the way in which it all began. One of the most active, one of the most enjoyable periods of my barren life. When I say that we littered the floor with paintings I am not exaggerating. As fast as they dried we hung them up-and the next day we took them down and hung up another collection. We painted on the backs of old ones, we washed them off, we scraped them with the knife, and in the course of these experiments we discovered, by accident, some astonishing things. We discovered how to get interesting results with coffee grounds and bread crumbs, with coal and arnica; we laid the paintings in the bathtub and let them soak for hours, and then with a loaded brush we approached these dripping omelettes and we let fly at them. Turner started all this-and the severe winter of 1927-‘28.
Two nights before my departure, as I was saying, a number of painters come to the house to inspect our work. They are all good eggs and not above taking an interest in the work of amateurs. The water colors are lying about on the floor, as usual, drying. As a last experiment we walk over them, spilling a little wine as we go. Astonishing what effects a dirty heel will produce, or a drop of wine falling from a height of three feet with the best of intentions. The enthusiasm mounts. Two of my friends are working on the walls with chunks of coal. Another is
Have you ever sat in a railway station and watched people killing time? Do they not sit a little like crestfallen angels-with their broken arches and their fallen stomachs? Those eternal few minutes in which they are condemned to be alone with themselves-does it not put umbrella ribs in their wings?
All the angels in religious art are false. If you want to see angels you must go to the Grand Central Depot, or the Gare St. Lazare. Especially the Gare St. LazareSalle des Pas Perdus.
My theory of painting is to get the drawing done with as quickly as possible and slap in the color. After all, I’m a colorist, not a draught horse. Alors, out with the tubes!
I start painting the side of a house, in raw umber. Not very effective. I put a liberal dash of crimson alizarin in the wall next to it. A little too pretty, too Italian. All in all, I’m not starting out so well with my colors. There’s a rainy day atmosphere somewhat reminiscent of Utrillo. I don’t like Utrillo’s quiet imbecility, nor his rainy days, nor his suburban streets. I don’t like the way his women stick their behinds out at you either…. I get the bread knife out. May as well try a loaded impasto. In the act of squeezing out a generous assortment of colors the impulse seizes me to add a gondola to the composition. Directly below the bridge I insert it, which automatically launches it.
And now suddenly I know the reason for the gondola. Among the Renoirs the other day there was a Venetian scene, and the inevitable gondola of course. Now what intrigued me, weakly enough, was that the man who sat in the gondola was so distinctly a man, though he was only a speck of black, hardly separable from all the other specks which made up the sunlight, the choppy sea, the crumbling palaces, the sailboats, etc. He was just a speck in that fiery combination of colors-and yet he was distinctly a man. You could even tell that he was a Frenchman and that he was of the 1870’s or thereabouts….
This isn’t the end of the gondola. Two days before I left for America-1927 or ‘8-we held a big session at the house. It was at the height of my water-color career.
It began in a peculiar way, this water-color mania. Through hunger, I might say. That and the extreme cold. For weeks I had been hanging out with my friend Joe in poolrooms and comfort stations, wherever there was animal heat and no expense. On our way back to the morgue one evening we noticed a reproduction of Turner’s in the window of a department store. That’s exactly the way in which it all began. One of the most active, one of the most enjoyable periods of my barren life. When I say that we littered the floor with paintings I am not exaggerating. As fast as they dried we hung them up-and the next day we took them down and hung up another collection. We painted on the backs of old ones, we washed them off, we scraped them with the knife, and in the course of these experiments we discovered, by accident, some astonishing things. We discovered how to get interesting results with coffee grounds and bread crumbs, with coal and arnica; we laid the paintings in the bathtub and let them soak for hours, and then with a loaded brush we approached these dripping omelettes and we let fly at them. Turner started all this-and the severe winter of 1927-‘28.
Two nights before my departure, as I was saying, a number of painters come to the house to inspect our work. They are all good eggs and not above taking an interest in the work of amateurs. The water colors are lying about on the floor, as usual, drying. As a last experiment we walk over them, spilling a little wine as we go. Astonishing what effects a dirty heel will produce, or a drop of wine falling from a height of three feet with the best of intentions. The enthusiasm mounts. Two of my friends are working on the walls with chunks of coal. Another is
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