Philip Guston | Painting OWU

“Remember that a painting – before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.” -Maurice Denis, 19th c. painter.

“The plastic arts, at their most perfect, must become music and move us by the immediacy of their sensuous presence.” -Schiller, 19th c. poet.

Maurice Denis’ statement above was a battle cry against the moribund academic painting of the 19th century, and a key to how this course is organized. One of the most popular salon painters of Denis’ time, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, said of Manet, “Manet doesn’t know how to finish a painting.” Manet’s retort was, “Bouguereau doesn’t know how to begin a painting.”

How do you begin a painting? What are you most aware of? How does your awareness move, shift, or splinter as you push the work along? How do you define your task at each stage as the painting develops? Are your thoughts dominated by the struggle to create a likeness, or by a desire to depict a particular subject matter? To what degree are you aware of the medium itself, its tactility or even its smell? What ideas come to you from the material itself in terms of how it can be manipulated?

When you look at paintings in museums or galleries you only see how they ended, not how they began. We begin the semester by looking at paint itself. Marshall McLuhan’s dictum: “The medium is the message,” is our motto. To impose a bit of structure on the problem -like the grain of sand around which the oyster spins the pearl – we borrow on the earliest roots of painting: the emblematic images of the paleolithic cave painters, a strategy that has been adopted by many contemporary artists. Paul Klee, Philip Guston, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Susan Rothenberg, Basquiat, Andrew Crane, Vivienne Voorland, and Jayne Johnson are pictured here along with comparisons to their prehistoric ancestors. Despite the sophistication gained in the intervening millenia, there is still something in painting that remains of the ritual magic of its origins.