raw canvas / so many areas were left unfinished

Paul Cézanne, The Bathers

Donald M. Anderson, Elements of Design. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961—

Toward the end of his career [Paul] Cézanne often found that raw canvas provided the proper tone for some passages. Max Weber, the distinguished American painter, relates that when Henri Rousseau, the primitive genius, saw such a passage in Cézanne’s The Bathers, he remarked, “Too bad he left so many places unfinished. I wish I had it in my studio, I could finish it nicely.”

pare down and reduce the form to minimum

Above Roy R. Behrens, Whiplash (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Akio Morita, Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony. New York: Signet, 1988—

Whereas Americans and Europeans often develop complex large-scale solutions to problems, the Japanese constantly pare down and reduce the complexity of products and ideas to the barest minimum. They streamline the design, reduce the number of parts. The influence of Zen and haiku poetry are often evident in the simplicity and utility of Japanese design.

RELATED LINKS

Art, Design and Gestalt Theory

How Form Functions

Embedded Figures in Art, Design, and Architecture

Entangled threesome | a walking Läocoon

Coles Phillips "fadeaway" magazine cover illustration (1916)

Above Magazine cover illustration for the October 1916 issue of Good Housekeeping by Coles Phillips (1880-1927). As shown in this example, he was especially known for paintings in which edges of the figure merge with the background. Tragically, he died of tuberculosis at the early age of 47. We reproduced another work of his in an earlier blog post.

•••

Ford Maddox Ford as quoted by Simon Nowell-Smith, compiler, The Legend of the Master (London, Constable, 1947), p. 44—

I was once walking with him [Henry James] and Mr. John Galsworthy…[whose] dachshund Maximilian ran sheep, so, not to curtail the animal’s exercise, the Master had provided it with a leash at least ten yards long. Mr. Galsworthy and I walked one on each side of James listening obediently while he talked. In order to round off an immense sentence the great man halted…He planted his [walking] stick firmly into the ground and went on and on and on. Maximilian passed between our six legs again and again, threading his leash behind him. Mr. Galsworthy and I stood silent. In any case we must have resembled the Laocöon, but when Maximilian had finished the resemblance must have been overwhelming. The Master finished his reflections, attempted to hurry on, found that impossible. Then we liberated ourselves with difficulty. He turned on me, his eyes fairly blazing, lifting his cane on high and slamming it into the ground: “H…” he exclaimed, “you are painfully young, but at no more than the age to which you have attained, the playing of such tricks is an imbecility! An im…be…cility!”

Joseph Podlesnik's Phenomenal Photography

Photograph © Joseph Podlesnik 2019

An Arizona-based friend and artist Joseph Podlesnik recently sent me a visual metamorphosis, the stages in the development of chair design. I thought it was appropriate because Joe himself is a metamorphosis, albeit not one you should sit on.

This fall he is teaching an online course in photography for Cornell University, his graduate alma mater. When I first met him forty-plus years ago, he was an undergraduate in painting and drawing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and admired for his skillfulness at drawing from life. His drawings were astonishing because they were so “true” to immediate sight, and yet they appeared to have happened effortlessly.

Here is a favorite self-portrait I’ve posted before. He does look squiggly in real life—but not that much.

Some years later, he began to make short films about his family, that relied on those same virtues of looseness entwined with precision. In recent years, he has evolved into photography. But not just photography, but Joe Podlesnik photographs.

A recent one (for which he received a prize in a nationwide competition) is shown above. But I am also reminded that in 2016, two years before my retirement, my students designed a series of posters, called Almost Seeing, about the photographs he was making then.

For more, see his website here.

Trammels | Home II | Mary Snyder Behrens

Home II © Mary Snyder Behrens 2005

Above Mary Snyder Behrens, Home II (Trammel Series), mixed media.

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Raphael Soyer, Diary of an Artist. Washington DC: New Republic Books, 1977, p. xi—

I had an exhibition, and nothing was sold. My vivid memory of that time is of a sense of embarrassment and a feeling that my paintings were of no value. We were in great financial need, and when someone offered to buy the contents of my studio—drawings and paintings, all for $1000 plus an old Packard—I consented. Two men came with a pushcart, and while they were loading my work, I was painting.

Trammels | Gape | Mary Snyder Behrens

Gape © Mary Snyder Behrens, mixed media 2004

Earl K. Peckham, quoted in Robert Bruce Williams, ed., John Dewey, Recollections (Washington DC: University Press of America, 1970), p. 12—

[American philosopher John] Dewey was speaking slowly and very carefully [in an evening class in 1935 at Columbia University], also in simply constructed sentences, which was typical of his style. I was listening intently to a point. Many of the class seemed to have left the area of thought. Dewey himself seemed to have left, to have gone into his own world. I felt that I was with him regardless of the seeming absence of the other members of the class. He hesitated after his point was made, and he looked at me through his thick bifocals. I said to him in a too loud, nervous voice, “Doesn’t emotion play a part in this thought process?” His stare fixed on me. I was embarrassed. He was silent—then he walked slowly over to the window and looked into the night, for the better part of two minutes. Then he looked back and fixed his stare at me (at least that is how I felt) and he said in a very slow and almost inaudible voice—but he knew I heard and he seemed to me not to care if anyone else heard or not—“Knowledge is a small cup of water floating on a sea of emotion.”

Synergistic Postage Stamp | Stephanie Mathena

Synergistic Stamp (2012) © Stephanie Mathena

In the fall semester of 2012, I asked my beginning graphic design students at the University of Northern Iowa to design a synergistic postage stamp. This was done in two stages: First, they designed a single stamp, and second, they repeated that stamp so that it became a block (above). Once assembled as a block, the stamps produced new, unanticipated pattern consequences. In this particular solution, there's a wonderful interplay of figure and ground.

Synergistic Postage Stamp | Danielle Shearer

Synergistic Stamp (2012) © Danielle Shearer

In the fall semester of 2012, I asked my beginning graphic design students at the University of Northern Iowa to design a synergistic postage stamp. This was done in two stages: First, they designed a single stamp (above), and second, they repeated that stamp so that it became a block (below). Once assembled as a block, the stamps produced new, unanticipated pattern consequences.

Block of Stamps (2012) © Danielle Shearer

Synergistic Postage Stamp | Randy Timm

Synergistic Stamp (2012) © Randy Timm

In the fall semester of 2012, I asked my beginning graphic design students at the University of Northern Iowa to design a synergistic postage stamp. This was done in two stages: First, they designed a single stamp (above), and second, they repeated that stamp so that it became a block (below). Once assembled as a block, the stamps produced new, unanticipated pattern consequences.

Block of Stamps (2012) © Randy Timm

Joseph Podlesnik | Marksman Par Excellence

© Joseph Podlesnik, Self-Portrait

In the early 1980s, Joseph Podlesnik and I were both living in Milwaukee. He was a student, and I was a teacher. Out of kindness, he likes to say that I was his teacher, but I don't think I taught him much, if anything. For one thing, I was a graphic designer, a collagist who had more or less given up drawing a few years earlier. But I have always loved strong drawing, and Joe, even as an undergraduate, was an extraordinary drawing-based artist (I hesitate to say "draftsman" because that doesn't quite describe his work), admired by teachers and students alike. Now he himself is a teacher, and he teaches drawing in a way that is based on intensified seeing. I continue to be amazed by his drawings, as well as his knowledge of vision. Above, for example, is a magnificent self-portrait he did about 8 or 10 years ago, using only a ballpoint pen. What impresses me so much is that every mark is both dead-on accurate and alive. I am reminded of what Hungarian-born artist-designer Gyorgy Kepes wrote in The New Landscape in Art and Science (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1956)—

There are two basic morphological archetypes—expression of order, coherence, discipline, stability on the one hand; expression of chaos, movement, vitality, change on the other.

It is common enough to see drawings that adhere too much to one of those polarities, while all but ignoring the other extreme. Joe Podlesnik (in his films as well as his drawings) achieves a masterful mixture of both.

David Meyer | On Ernie Summers

Coles Phillips, Know All Men by These Presents (c1910). Library of Congress.

The following passages are from David Meyer's memoir of his friend Ernest Summers, in Ernie and Me (c2003)—

His antics in restaurants were always entertaining. "As Shakespeare once said, 'What foods these morsels be!'" was his usual comment when a meal was served... He would scoop up unused silverware into his coat sleeves and let it spill out again as he was paying for the meal. He was never rude to waiters, but he often confounded them. He kept a stack of freshly minted one-dollar bills glued together at one end so they appeared to be a pad of paper. As Ernie tore off singles to pay a bill, the expressions on the faces of the wait staff or cashiers were wonderful to watch. Decades before the advent of portable cell phones, he carried a phone receiver with a cord attached to the inside of his suit coat. A ringing device was in his pocket. We would be in a restaurant and as the waitress was taking the order, Ernie would have the phone "ring." He'd reach into his coat, pull out the receiver and put it to his ear. After saying "Hello" and "Hold on," he would hand it to the waitress and say, "It's for you." No one I saw who was given that fake phone ever hesitated saying "Hello" into its receiver.

...

On our first introduction he asked me how old I was.

"Seven," I think I told him.

"D'you know how old I was when I was your age?" he asked.

"No."

"I was eight."

It wasn't only waiters Ernie confounded; children were included.

"If S-O-U-P spells 'soup,'" he'd say, "What does G-O-U-P spell?"

"Goop?"

"No... 'Go up,'" he'd reply.

He'd also show how he had eleven fingers. "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six," he's say, counting backwards, "and five on this hand makes eleven."

Early on he gave me a piece of advice which I have never forgotten:

He who takes what isn't his'n,

Pays a fine or goes to prison.

Implicitness, Closure and Flow | Csikszentmihalyi

Diagram © Roy R. Behrens (2011)

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. NY: Harper and Row, 1990, p. 53—

Whenever I took our hunting dog, Hussar, for a walk in the open fields he liked to play a very simple game—the prototype of the most culturally widespread game of human children, escape and pursuit. He would run circles around me at top speed, with his tongue hanging out and his eyes warily watching every move I made, daring me to catch him. Occasionally I would take a lunge, and if I was lucky I got to touch him. Now the interesting part is that whenever I was tired, and moved half-heartedly, Hussar would run much tighter circles, making it relatively easy for me to catch him; on the other hand, if I was in good shape and willing to extend myself, he would enlarge the diameter of his circle. In this way, the difficulty of the game was kept contant. With an uncanny sense for the fine balancings of challenges and skills, he would make sure that the game would yield the maximum enjoyment for us both.

[Compare Arthur Koestler's contention (in The Act of Creation) that the value of cryptic communication "is not to obscure the message, but to make it more luminous by compelling the recipient to work it out for himself—to re-create it."]