Josse Ford :: Art Journeys and Conversation ::

Big Wave Surfing, how much do you love your work as an artist?

I'm a fan of big-wave surfing. One winter I was on a painting trip in Oahu, when I went for a drive to the pipeline to watch some of the big wave surfers catch some big ones. That day the waves were enormous and only about six surfers were out. Scores of surfers and tourists sat on the shore and watched in awe at these tiny specks, dwarfed by massive crashing waves as high as buildings, and marveled at the courage of man.

Last week was the Mavericks Surf contest in Half Moon Bay and today the elite of the world surfers wait on call, for the go ahead for Eddie Aikau invitational big wave surf event at the Pipeline in Hawaii, for the waves to meet the 40 foot requirement. The New York Times ran an article on the preparation these surfers put into their craft. As well as being superb athletes they spend hours studying weather patterns, ocean currents and whatever it takes to understand the movement of the ocean. Such painstaking preparation can mean the difference between life and death. With waves over 50 foot high there is no room for error.

I paint on location. The first thing I do when I arrive in a beautiful place such as Hawaii is spend a few days just looking at the ocean. Studying it's waves, it's light, it's energy until I feel I have reached an understanding of the special gifts that the location has to offer. This is absolutely vital if you want to capture the spirit of a place on the canvas.

Art is like surfing. You have to love it and be willing to do whatever it takes to master your craft. You have to have a big vision and you have to have a big passion for the vision that you want to share with the world. You have to be willing to whatever it takes to get it out in the world. I can think of no more noble calling than to help up a torch for what is great and beautiful and light. The following picture is one of the great surfing locations on Maui. I painted it because when I watch Big Wave surfers I am transported into a place that reflects the courage and grace of the human spirit, dancing with the enormous power of Nature. A great piece of art like Van Gogh's "Starry Night" or one of Turners paintings does the same thing for me. So how about you, what inspires the arti spirit for you?

Big Wave by Josse Ford.

Technorati Tags: art, art marketing, artists, Hawaiian, ocean

"The Eloquent Nude" - an excellent documentary on the life of photographer Edward Weston

Yesterday i saw an excellent documentary called "The Eloquent Nude" directed by Ian McCluskey. The film tells the story of the relationship between Weston and his muse, Charis Wilson. Charis inspired a series of nudes that inspired some of the most famous and beautiful images of the twentieth century. Weston was also known for his black and white abstractions of nature. Their relationship unfolds through interviews with Charis, aged 90, telling her stories, Weston's black and white photographs, and engaging reenactments of the couple's travels.

Nude, 1936 (227N)
Edward Weston negative, Cole Weston print

Edward Weston lived on the California coast, near Big Sur, and was a contemporary of Steiglitz, Georgia O'Keefe, and Ansel Adams. The 1940s was my favorite time in American art history. So many great artists and photographers came together in New York and California, immortalizing the beauty and wildness of nature. A spiritual thread runs through their work, a desire to know truth and perfection through the practice of their art. Interestingly enough, it was through the stress of commercial pressure that their relationship started to disintegrate. The happiest years of their work together was when they were traveling around the country on the first Guggenheim grant awarded to a photographer.

I feel a close affinity with the artist from those days because traveling around in my RV painting the national parks in the States is such a source of joy for me. I have traveled all over the world, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Africa but it still the grand mountains and the wild deserts that inspires and informs my art. I am preparing for another art journey to the mountain and deserts of New Mexico. The stormy skies are quite something in late August! I'll be adding some photographs from my last trip there to the photo galleries soon.

Edward Weston photographed shells, forlorn desert dunes, the San Louis Obisco coastline, the Sierra mountains, clouds in the desert. And his eye turned everything that he saw into a window, that leads us into a more refined, shimmering world.

Shell by Edward Weston, available from the Contessa Gallery

The film can be seen today at 5pm at the Riverview Theater, 3800 42nd Ave S., Minneapolis. I would highly recommend make the effort and see the film as it is hauntingly memorable. If you don't live in Minneapolis, support the project by buying a DVD here.

Technorati Tags: art, film, journeys, photography, women

Hawaii Photos Published in Schmap travel guide

Some of my photos from the Big Island have been published in the Schmap Hawaii Guide. This is an on-line worldwide travel guide. As you know Hawaii is my favorite place for plein-air painting trips. Hawaii is an interesting melting point of many different cultures: Hawaiian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese. It also had a beautiful light for painting as well as some of the most stunning coastlines. If you would like to read more about Hawaii's colorful past I would highly recommend James Michener's "Hawaii."

"Hawaii: A Novel" (James A. Michener)

You can see more photos from Hawaii at my Flickr photo sharing account here.

Chinese Gardens in Hilo, Hawaii

Hula Dancers, Hawaii,

Place of Refuge, Kona

Technorati Tags: art, culture, Hawaiian, journeys, nature, ocean

A Call To All Artists

Here's a call to action from Nietzsche:

"We, the new, the nameless, the hard-to-understand, we firstlings of a yet untried future - we require for a new end also a new means, namely, a new healthiness, stronger, sharper, tougher, bolder, and merrier than any healthiness hitherto. He whose soul longs to experience the whole range of hitherto recognized values and desirabilities, and to circumnavigate all the coasts of this ideal "Mediterranean Sea" who, from the adventures of his most personal experience, wants to know how it feels to be a conqueror and discoverer of the ideal - as likewise how it is with the artist, the saint, the legislator, the sage, the scholar, the devotee, the prophet, and the godly Nonconformist of the old style: __ requires one thing above all for that purpose, great healthiness - such healthiness as one not only possesses, but also constantly acquires and must acquire, because one continually sacrifices it again, and must sacrifice it! __ And now, after having being long on the way in this fashion, we Argonauts of the Ideal, who are more courageous perhaps than prudent, and often enough shipwrecked and brought to grief, nevertheless, as said above, healthier than people would like to admit, dangerously healthy, always healthy again, __ it would seem, as if in recompense for it all, that we still have an undiscovered country before us, the boundaries of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to all countries and corners of the ideal known hitherto, a world so over-rich in the beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the frightful, and the divine, that our curiosity as well as our thirst for the possession thereof, have got out of hand __ alas! that nothing will any longer satisfy us!
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom

Technorati Tags: art, spiritual art

Andrea Zittel at the Whitney

Recently I attended a panel at the Whitney curated by Andrea Zittel. Andrea and her friends who live at Joshua Tree talked about their influences and experiences on building community in the context of art. Here's what the Whitney had to say about the event:
"Well known for her research and design of domestic and external environments, Andrea Zittel creates experimental models for contemporary life, or what she calls "systems for living." Her current project, the desert studio and home A-Z West in Joshua Tree, California, explores all aspects of the everyday, from home furniture and house guests to food and clothing, as part of her investigation into the contours of human nature and human needs. One such A-Z project, Wagon Stations, comprises mobile living stations customized by individuals invited to join Zittel's desert community; several will be on view beginning February 9 at the Whitney Museum at Altria."

I've always liked Andrea Zittel. I first saw her work at the Whitney where she had a film on her daily routine as an artist at Joshua Tree. I appreciated it because the film had a great sense of humor. And then, of course, there's the desert. As Andrea herself has to say of the desert: "After living in the desert for six years, I have come to believe that most of us are drawn here because each of us is looking for some version of personal freedom." The A-Z wagons represent small, portable structures, customized by each artist, an ode to personal freedom. Traveling through the desert in my RV, painting, I can totally relate to the need for a space of one's own, even better if we can take it with us on our art journeys.

A Wagon in It's Native Environment

A Wagon Station from the installation at the Whitney, Altria

The panel itself meandered across a lot of different territories, from activist 60s art to camping out in a large tent in the middle of the Freize Art Fair, in London. What struck me, however, was just how much fun these artists were having being artists. They seemed to live in a world so far removed from our ordinary world of "getting ahead" and commercial considerations. How refreshing! This is what it must be like to live fully in the artist archetype, not an small pokey garret, starving but noble, but in a world of childlike wonder, innocence, creating magnificent worlds of your own choosing, without regard to whether of not anyone else gets it. I can't remember the last time I felt like that - probably the last time I was out in the desert.

Further thoughts from "The Artist's Mentor":
"In one of his letters from Tahiti, Gaugin had written that he felt he had to go back beyond the horses of the Parthenon, back to the rocking-horse of his childhood. It is easy to smile at this preoccupation of modern artists with the simple and the childlike, and yet it should not be hard to understand it. For artists feel that this directness and simplicity is the one thing that cannot be learnt. Every other trick of the trade can be acquired. Every effect becomes easy to imitate after it has been shown that it can be done. Many artists feel that the museums and exhibitions are full of works of such amazing facility and skill that nothing is gained by continuing along those lines; that they are in danger of losing their souls and becoming slick manufacturers of paintings or sculptures unless they become as little children.
-- E.H. Gombrich

"The Artist's Mentor : Inspiration from the World's Most Creative Minds" (Ian Jackman)

Technorati Tags: art, artists, culture, desert, journeys, women

Back from Painting Trip

Back from a wonderful time in Provincetown or PTown as it is affectionately known by the locals. I loved the light and color and worked on a series of lighthouses, ocean scenes and marsh/ponds while I was there. Here's a work in progress from the marsh photo that I share in an earlier post.

I caught up with some old friends there and had a wonderful dinner in an old building along the sea shore in Provincetown. The building was bought up many years ago by a collective of artists and writers. Amongst the company that night were fellow artists and sea-faring adventurers who spent most of their time in boats on the ocean. One lovely man that I met, Richard Bailey, was captain of the Tall Ship Rose, a replica of an 18th century Royal Navy frigate that cruised the American coast during the Revolutionary War. The boat was used during the making of Peter Weir's "Master and Commander.

HMS Rose 2002 © 2003 Scott Kennedy

Amongst the painters was Paul Resika, colorist and student of Hans Hoffman.

I didn't get a chance to visit the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center but plan on visiting during my next visit. Here's a bit of history:

"The Fine Arts Work Center buildings are historic art studios in a town that is famous for its contributions to art history. For over a hundred years, artists and writers have found the atmosphere of Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod particularly suited to them. Henry Thoreau was probably the first writer to come to Provincetown, in 1849. Eugene O'Neill wrote his first play here at a time when he was known to the art community as an obscure writer of one-act plays. O'Neill's first play was produced by the Provincetown Players the winter of 1916, before he went to New York with his actors to win recognition and fame. John Dos Passos lived and worked in Provincetown. In the late 20's, he was known by the artists not as a writer but as a painter who showed his paintings with them at the local Provincetown Art Association. Stanley Kunitz, Norman Mailer, Alan Dugan, B. H. Friedman, and Mark Strand are contemporary writers who have lived and worked in Provincetown and are active in the Work Center Program.

Charles Hawthorne is credited with founding the first art colony in America in Provincetown in 1899. Starting in 1914, Hawthorne lived and worked in studios of what is now the Fine Arts Work Center. Among his students in the teens were Edwin Dickinson, Ross Moffett and Karl Knaths, all living and working in the studios of 24 Pearl Street, and later gaining national and international acclaim. Fritz Bultman, Paul Burlin, Adolph Gottlieb, Helen Frankenthaler, Myron Stout, and Marsden Hartley are among other famous artists who worked in these studios. Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Claus Oldenburg, Milton Avery, Jack Tworkov and Edward Hopper have all participated in the art community here. Important paintings by Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, and Edward Hopper have centered around their involvement in this small seaport town."

Technorati Tags: art, artists, culture, film, journeys, ocean

On Location, Painting in Cape Cod

I'm on a painting trip in Cape Cod, experiencing glorious fall weather and painting oceans and marshes. Cape Cod has a rich tradition as an artist's colony with painters such as Henry Hensch and Charles Hawthorn, the impressionists, through to Hans Hoffman and Mark Rothko, the abstract expressionists. Thoreau made Cape Cod famous in his book of the same name.

I have been finding the light especially gorgeous and have been doing two paintings a day since I got here - an early morning and a late afternoon set up. The sunsets are especially colorful. The National Park "Province Lands" is just a mile from where I am camped and I have a choice of several elevated locations from which to paint the surrounding dunes and ocean.

The photo above is one of the marshes in the national park and a great source of lights and darks for a late afternoon painting session. Capturing the water and the waterlilies floating on the surface is especially interesting. I like the curve of the foliage along the edges.

Technorati Tags: art, journeys, nature, pastel

Robert Smithson at the Whitney

Recently I visited the Robert Smithson exhibition at the Whitney. Smithson believed that art existed beyond the confines of the museum. His work covered a wide range: earthworks, sculpture, photography and film. His themes were the landscape, language, the monument and site specific artworks. He was fascinated by industrial landscapes. He was self-taught as an artist, although he did attend the Arts Students League. He loved to read - he had more than a thousand books in his library.

Like me, he had a love of travel and journeys in search of his artistic inspiration and settings. His writings tied together mythology, science. It wasn't so much his art that excited me about this exhibition but the torrent of ideas, and connections pursued, the traces of which he left behind in his journals and essays. Normally conceptual art leaves me unmoved, bored, cold, even insulted that the pure, rigorous discipline of seeking ever economies of visual description should have been replaced by such a pretentious impostor. But Robert's ideas electrified, made me think, opened inviting worlds. Poet/Philosopher/Artist he was a living testament that being an artist is a state of consciousness, a calling, a journey into the unknown, a "what if".

Here's his words on his most famous work, "The Spiral Jetty":

"Chemically speaking, our blood is analogous in composition to the primordial seas. Following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to some pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye adrift in an antediluvian ocean. On the slopes of Rozel point I closed my eyes, and the sun burned crimson through the lids. I opened them and the Great Salt Lake was bleeding scarlet streaks. My sight was saturated by the color of red algae circulating in the heart of the lake, pumping into ruby currents. No they were veins and arteries sucking up obscure sediments. My eyes became combustion chambers, churning orbs of blood blazing by the light of the sun. All was enveloped in a flaming chromosphere."

At that place he had a vision of an immobile cyclone and "Spiral Jetty" was born. A counter clockwise spiral that took 600 tonnes of earth and rock and suggested new ways of looking at art. The "Spiral Jetty" has undergone many changes. In 1970 it went underwater and reemerged 20 years later. It's surface changed from black to white. It has become akin to a national monument. People who otherwise have never heard of Smithson, make the journey over forlorn, rough roads to stare in wonder at it's monumental strangeness. After all, what was he thinking. A giant spiral, in the middle of nowhere, connecting our ancient path with it's neighbor, the post-industrial jetty - his favorite preoccupation.

Photo © Estate of Robert Smithson.

Resources

• New York Times review
• New Yorker review
• Robert Smithson website

Technorati Tags: art, artists, culture, journeys, nature, spiritual art

Cezanne, Pissarro, Gauguin Symposium at Moma

A couple of weekends ago I spent a day listening to different ideas on what motivated the intense friendship between the artist Cezanne and his master and friend, Pissarro. The keynote lecture was given by Richard Brettell, Professor of Art and Aesthetics, University of Texas at Dallas.

Here's what I learned from Richard:

CEZANNE AND PISSARRO
Cezanne and Pissarro were friends for 15 years. Pissarro was a generous man and was always a central figure in all the various artistic groups of his day. He was also different from the other artists, older, fiercely intelligent, he came from a larger world. He was also friends with Gauguin. Courbet was important an important influence to all of the impressionists.

Pissarro and Cezanne spent many a day painting side by side plein air. Their relationship was convivial but also competitive. The impressionists painted not only in response to a motif but also in response to their companion artist. Through the conflict of opposition in ideas and style, they struggled to find their voice as an artist through opposition to the other.

They also painted recurring motifs such as houses and farms. But it was more than just a reworking of a recurring idea, it was a way of communicating visually with the other artist. The paintings were painted with the idea that the other artist would see it and would respond. As a result, studying the paintings tell us a huge amount about the relationship between Cezanne and Pissaro which is why the exhibition at the MoMA with the paired paintings was such an excellent opportunity to see into the worlds of these two great artists.

PISSARRO AND GAUGUIN
Pissarro and Gauguin spent six years together. In 1879 Cezanne invited Gauguin to join his first impressionist exhibition. Gauguin exhibited a sculpture. Gauguin had made a lot of money as a businessman and he collected a lot of art. Even in his early paintings there's a pecularity about them, a bit like Daumier on acid.

One of Pissarro's great gifts to his fellow artists is that he pushed other artists to be strong and to be themselves while he would push himself to be different from them. Both Cezanne and Gauguin painted pictures in "response" to Pissarro. Both Gauguin and Pissarro were obsessed with painting upward, "making patterns of the world vertically".

Another interesting detail about their relationship is that they needed to paint apart from each other, when they painted side by side the paintings generally failed. Pissarro was obsessed with his own failures as an artist. He was often correcting and redoing his own paintings.

PISSARRO AND SEURAT
in 1885 Pissarro met Seurat. It was a revelation for him. He discovered a new approach to uniform pictorial surface and color theory. They had a short working relationship.

Of all the artists, only Van Gogh didn't have a strong interaction with Pissarro.

RESOURCES

• Selected audio recordings of the symposium can be downloaded here.
• An online version of the exhibition can be seen here.

Technorati Tags: art, artists, impressionist, spiritual art

Friday's Featured Painting - Kona Morning

Kona Morning, Pastel on paper, 2003, Josse Ford

The light in Kona haunts me. This painting was created in the early morning with the light washing out the windswept bay in the distance. Kona's a great place to visit for coffee and the wonderful art galleries.

Technorati Tags: art, spiritual art