Learning about art

On this beautiful late summer day with a light breeze and glaring sun, I walked the half mile to Old Austerlitz where an art workshop was taking place. five or six participants were deep into the second day of the program, adding oil paint color to the brownish hued base acrylic painting they had done the day before. The artists were deep into their work attempting to get the exact colors of the sun soaked landscapes and buildings, and the appropriate shadows. It was fascinating to see.

This was another of my "where has this been all my life" experiences. I went to catholic schools when I was young. Art was not on the daily agenda for most of us, unless making mother's day cards with a rosary as the border around it, or pasting construction paper together to make some strange silhouette of the nativity,  is considered art. My time in high school was spent on the important things like math, language, literature, history. There was no time for art. Some kids did manage to take some art classes, and I must say I admire that now.

Some aspects of it still confound me though. I remember going to the National Gallery of Art in the early 1960s to an exhibition of contemporary art. One piece that I will always remember was a totally black canvas entitled "Nine shades of black." As I gazed at this work which I thought took a lot of guts to hang up, I began to notice the different shades, and there were nine carefully drawn squares (3 X 3) with the nine different shades. I had to study it a long time before I could be sure there were nine different shades of black, and none of them were a dark shade of brown. It didn't grab me like some of the other paintings did at the time, but of all of them, this one I remember.

Abstract Painting contains three distinct shades of black, which become visible only after prolonged looking. Reinhardt was intensely sensitive to such subtle variations. He explained, “There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.” When Reinhardt’s black paintings were first exhibited at MoMA, in 1963, their reductive imagery and stark palette shocked visitors, prompting at least one Museum membership cancellation in protest.

http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78976

And this painting brings me back to the workshop. When I went there on the first day, after the artists had done a lot of work in acrylics in the searing sun or buggy shade, they were discussing some of the points of painting which are probably elementary, but were news to me. They talked about paintings that were content rich, color rich, or line rich, and if you didn't have content, then the other two are very important. For some reason, the "Nine shades of black" didn't measure up in any of the three categories, at least in my view. Yet it made it to the National Gallery of art. My guess is the artist was famous and this was a curious study that he put into the collection.

I hope to take a course in art one of these years. Maybe even do the workshop if it is offered again. My grandchildren should be able to brag about the grandfather who started painting when he was very old, and not only will he have a lot of silly blogs on the library shelf, but some "art work" to store in the closet.