Just completed a small intimate painting called, “The Prince Who Emerged from a Basin of Milk”.  Its an image I’ve had in my mind for the past year. Actually that’s not quite true. I think it’s a core image for me. To be honest, the image first became manifest as far back as 2005, where this face emerged in a portrait I made from my memory of a young man that I new once in Seattle. He modeled for me many times that year ( I was in college at the University of Washington at the time) and was the basis of a whole series of drawings that I exhibited there. But the real result of all those studies of him was that I started to realize how I could reveal a remembered image with a certain quality of accuracy and attention to truthfulness by a combination process of observing my memories as if they were objects in my field of vision, observing the changes in the materials as I worked them, and remembering the topography of the subject with my hands. From that process, I later developed the process that resulted in what I think of as the ‘Navel Drawings’ – all those works on paper which sustained my attention through graduate school.

By the time I picked up the paint brushes again in 2008, learning to observe remembered visual percepts had given way to learning to observe envisioned or invented percepts. That’s why today my paintings are developed largely by invention, but enriched with intercession of models, mirrors and other visual guides.

But some pieces are just envisioned from beginning to end, like this one. My model is a combination of mythic and actual figures and personas that I have known and observed well. The content is personal – signaled by a bodily attitude that I respond to psychologically, emotionally, and physically, with a yearning for something to come. That attention to ‘emergence’ is a core theme in all of my adult work. I first saw discussed in literature when I given to read a little Heidegger in graduate school – his “Question Concerning Technology”, and always feel the pulse of it when I think of the Shroud of Turin, or catch a glimpse of the soapy limbs of a crucified-Christ.

As I was reading through a wonderful collection of Italian Folktales this year, I came across one called “The Foppish King” in which a young, handsome king becomes so vain about his looks that his bragging causes his wife, the queen, to grumble one day that there just might be some man more beautiful than him. He hears her comment and becomes enraged, challenging his wife to find a more beautiful man than he or her head will be cut off.

So she seeks help in this and eventually finds out that there is a prince, who is so beautiful that he must be looked upon through seven veils to shield people from his radiance. So the king and his wife go to see the prince, and beg his father to let them look in on him as he sleeps. As the veils are removed, his radiant beauty becomes so overwhelming that the king faints and eventually dies from shame.

The queen, having returned home, is so haunted by the vision of the sleeping prince that she is cannot rest until she sees him again. So a wise woman gives her three golden balls and instructions to place the golden balls into a basin of clean, pure milk. She asks the chambermaid to bring the basin of milk, and when she places the balls into it, the prince emerges out from the milk and is fully revealed to her gaze. Every night, she summons the prince to her chamber in this manner.

But one night, the demons whisper to the chamber maid, causing her to suspect that these meetings are evil. So the chambermaid grinds up some glass into a fine powder and mixes it into the milk before she brings it to the queen. This time, when the prince emerges, he is covered with blood from head to toe; the invisible glass shards cutting his flesh as he emerges through the tainted milk. Betrayed, the prince sees the queen believes it was she who hurt him, and renouncing his love for her, he disappears back through the basin of milk. The prince arrives back at his father’s house fatally wounded, and the whole kingdom shrouds itself in black waiting for their radiant prince to die.

I wont tell you the rest of the story. Suffice it to say that the image of ‘The Prince Who Emerged from a Basin of Milk’ is an one that bothered me in such a way when I read this story that I have spent the last year pushing it out of my mind, and have only just recently begun to name it and deliberately make work about it. This small piece is by no means the pinnacle of my efforts in handling this theme. I suspect that what has been evoked in my imagination through the story, connecting me yet again to such a rich ‘complex’ of images and meanings that I have only just begun to scratch the surface of it. But I made a conscious start in this little painting. It will be on display at the Artist House Gallery for the month of December 2009.

I keep going back to my artist statement and making slight modifications. The really sticky area, the place that keeps changing, is the part that makes me bother to draw or paint the body in the first place. In my effort to understand what it is that I’m up to when I start a piece, I’ve been paying close attention to how I talk about it. Because if I say it a certain way, and it irritates me, then I know its probably not completely accurate.

Fortunately, I picked up a copy of Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception, which is shedding quite a bit of light on the subject of what the artist is ‘up to’ from a psychological and even a physiological standpoint. This re-discovery of Arnheim is home sweet home for my mind because I picked up on this sort of ‘gestalt’ spirit when I was a student at the University of Washington. I knew Arnheim’s voice through my teachers because they knew him through theirs in and around the 1970s. Now I’m being given back some of the language that I had once found so impressive and fascinating as an undergraduate. It couldn’t have come at a better time. It was and is still exceedingly practical.

However, I don’t want to jump to any windy conclusions until I have made a thorough study of the book for myself. Suffice it to say that I’m onto something.

Today I found this remark in another classic I’m going through called How to Read a Book. Its applies to my situation in art, both in describing my work process and in the process of working itself. The author says of the subject:

“If he [the reader, or in this case, the artist] is sensitive to the difference between passages he can readily understand and those he cannot, he will probably be able to locate the [parts] that carry the main burden of meaning.

If we understand 'passages' to mean those found not only in our reading of literature but also in our reading of nature and of our own work, this remark rings true. It offers us a sound guideline that can be applied both during our work in the studio and in our subsequent thinking about our work. The authors then makes this remark which really startled me and made me smile:

… be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.”

Columbo couldn’t have said it better! We are to be detectives when making art as well as in thinking about our work. And after all, isn’t the study of art, if not the practice of art itself, an investigation of nature? 

Its summer now. The April show at Artist’s House has come and gone. A good show. Several of the pieces sold; all the new work is available for viewing in the ‘portfolios’ section of this site under ‘more oil paintings.’ Please let me know what you think.

To see more of my writing and recent updates please follow this link:

michaelshelbyedwards.wordpress.com

Its very cold in Philadelphia at this time – its especially cold on the boat. This is probably a good thing because my studio is heated during the day, which makes it particularly inviting and well worth the train-ride into the lower northeast. I’m currently preparing for a group show in march – “Back to Cézanne” and another one in April – open themed. After spending the last three quarters of a year working exclusively on miniature panel paintings, I feel its time to begin opening up my work to a larger scale. I recently prepared several moderately sized birch panels (no smaller than 10 x 10 and no bigger than 24 x 24) and have started work on a larger canvas painting.

It’s been over two years since I worked on a canvas, and finding the springiness of the stretched canvas to be an unsatisfactory ground for my work, I decided to pull the staples out one by one and mount the bare canvas directly onto the wall of my studio - a method which I have never before attempted. I find now after working this way, that the piece is naturally taking on many of the material qualities of my dry media works on paper (I often refer to these as the “navel drawings”). I find now that while the oil paint and medium is more difficult to move than say, charcoal or pastel, with time and plenty of elbow-grease, the steel wool and sandpaper seem to move the particles of dry or semi-dry oil paint in a manner similar to that of the “navel drawings” and as a result the content of the painting is beginning to take on a very direct connection to those drawings.

This is a good thing. I’m looking for unity between the contents and processes involved in the “navel” drawings and those of my oil paintings, and this way of making oil painting, on body-sized, loose canvas mounted on the wall provides a clear solution to this.

At the same time, my waxing interest in early renaissance painting is taking me deeper into a world of firm smooth surfaces and deep, placid dream-like spaces filled with languid alabaster figures. I have no desire to compromise this world by scratching into it will steel wool any more than I would like to put a ground plane into the navel drawings and or make them anything less than ensoul-ed sheets of paper. The marriage of these two disparate ways of working is yielding some very promising offspring, but nothing so comprehensive as to supersede or replace either parent. For now these alchemical components are strongest each in their own original state, but the experimentation continues nonetheless.

Many people ask me to explain my "naval" or "belly" drawings. The significance of the belly and the naval in my images is something that is being revealed to me even now. These images have always seemed to come into my work of their own accord. The connotations that they hold for me are constantly swinging from delightful to embarrassing; redemptive to demonic. While I was just beginning to work with these images in the fall of 2006, I ran across the article below.† It seemed to me then to be a missing link or maybe a key to the content of the belly drawings. Shortly after that, I found that these meanings seemed to correspond to my internal (and external) condition so directly that they were like premonitions or prophesy. Feeling alarmed by what the navels seemed to be saying, it was necessary to put these drawings away and work on other things for awhile. In those months my work splayed out into several other directions; ink drawings, etchings, oil portraits, etc. These diversions were rewarding but the navels and their language was never far away. Now the time has come to return to them and face them directly. The navels are not happy things, although they smile and sometimes laugh. Sometimes they laugh at me; sometimes with me. The last thing I want to do is make negative or morbid imagery. The world doesn’t need that. I’m not looking for pity or fear. I am looking for redemption—for this work, for this body, for this particular part of human nature that they seem to always be grinning about. So now the naval drawings have been brought out of incubation and allowed to breathe and influence other drawings and, perhaps, take on newer and more hopeful associations.