Homage to Giacometti Part 4
Landscapes, Still Lifes, Place & Presence
Photographs Inspired by or Related to the Paintings,
Drawings & Sculptures of Alberto Giacometti
1. Introduction : "Portraits" Heads Faces
2. Line-Drawing Photograph Portraits
3. Figures & Triadic Visual Poems
4. Landscapes, Still Lifes, Place and Presence
5. Regarding Giacometti's Fear of Death
6. Vision, Re-vision and "Recurrence of Creation"
7. New Work, Commentaries, Epilogue
Introduction
After Giacometti returned to Paris after the war and experienced his Epiphany of 1945 (see part 1 of this project) his work began focusing more on "the wonders" of the outer world. James Lord, writing about the new works of the early1950's stated: they were made to be outward embodiments of inner states, whether conscious or unconscious. . . . The artist's progress was divided almost equally between visionary introspection and objective visual concentration. . . A single creative culmination would be the outcome of two techniques made to fuse in the representational unity of insight and intent. James Lord, Giacometti, A Biography pg. 309
An image which unites a visionary insight with its corresponding reflection in the outer world is precisely the definition of a symbol. A living symbol is nothing less than ineffabel presence in a most palpable, visible form. For example, the pencil drawing below, entitled Tree, probably made in Paris in1950 functions for me as a symbol. It is an excellent example of an image which fuses "visionary introspection" with "objective visual concentration."
Fig. 1 Tree, 1950, pencil
Drawing for Giacometti (as it was of his mentor Cezanne) was at the very heart of anything he would make in painting and sculpture. It all began with drawing. The lines in Giacometti's drawings (and many of his paintings as well) are so profoundly full of visual energy, space, and light--the light of the inner world--that their graceful radiance, their living presence touches and enlivens me when I take the time to carefully contemplate them.
Of course Giacometti's sculptures are also physical manifestations line. They often seem to me to be drawings in three dimensions. A perfect example of this are two related figurative compositions The Forest and The Glade (shown below) which he made in 1950. The linear forms embody the childhood memories of the "wonder" of the natural world that probably initiated their making. The sculptures have a stillness about them; their vertical, textural presence invokes an experience perhaps of fir trees "standing" tall and silent in the corner of a forest. The varying lengths and widths and surfaces--and the spaces manifested between them--create (negative-space) forms which have their own luminous presences as well.
Yves Bonnefoy suggests that perhaps Giacometti looked at landscapes as he did people; I would add that perhaps he looked at people as he did landscapes. Giacometti certainty looked at everything with the same visionary insight and intention which unveiled that Truth which was his alone and which he found so challenging, and ultimately impossible to recreate in paint or plaster or clay. In the 1950's Giacometti finally allowed himself to make images that were equivalent to his visionary experiences. The Forest and The Glade compositions of female figurines are excellent examples of this.
Fig. 2 The Forest (composition with five figures and a head) 1950 bronze
Fig. 3 The Glade (composition with nine figures) 1950 bronze
The two compositions were formed by "chance" according to Giacometti. He had been trying to come to terms with an impulse to construct a composition of figurative forms but could not find a satisfactory solution. One day he accidentally noticed some forgotten figurines laying on the floor of his studio, partially hidden in the dust. They appeared to him as if constellated in two distinct groups, so he carefully picked each group up and placed the figurines on their own separate plinths according to how he had found them.
To my surprise [writes Giacometti] The Glade seemed to confirm the impression I had had the previous autumn at the sight of a glade (or rather a wild meadow with trees and shrubs on the edge of the forest) which attracted me greatly. I would have liked to paint it, to make something of it, and I went away feeling sorry to lose it. The Forest reminded me of a corner of the forest seen during a number of years in my childhood, in which the trees (behind which could be seen blocks of gneiss) always seemed to me to be like people who have stopped still while walking, talking to one another.
The 1950's was a profoundly productive time for Giacometti. In terms of landscape, which writers frequently pay little attention to, Giacometti enjoyed painting in the landscapes of his childhood days near his place of birth, Stampa, on the boundaries where Italy and Switzerland met, and in the nearby northern village of Maloja, where his parents owned a summer home. The paintings are so internalized that they are (it seems to me) as much about a Place on the edge of his soul as they are about a place on the edge of a forest. The image below has such a magical, interior presence of Place.
Fig. 4 Giacometti, The Garden at Stampa, 1954 oil
If the color is a bit drab, or gray in this painting, that was something Giacometti had finally learned to live with. No matter how hard he tried (for he did love color, he said) the paintings always ended up gray. This was something out of his control; we see it in all his paintings. But the lack of color is compensated for by a playful movement of energy in the lines that inform a structural complexity and unveil an interior luminosity that is truly transcendent. The intensely swirling lines become contained by a sense of their own unity, which is nothing less than the instinctual Oneness of the natural world. The internal churning of the lines invokes for me the unbridled presence and creative power of the wind--something I am familiar with, living here in Western New York on the edge of a meadow at the foot of the Bristol Hills. I am providing below several images from my project Windswept Landscapes.
Fig. 5 Windswept Landscape, South-West Meadow, Summer
Like Giacometti, structure is at the heart of most of my own work. I have never succeeded at making "friends" with color; it has always been a mystery to me. If color is of any special significance in my photographs it is due only to an intuitive understanding, a built-in instinct. I have no more control over or understanding of color than I have control over the wind (which goes where it needs to go.) When I completed my very first color photography project, in 1989, River Songs I was told by a respected colleague that the images were more about light and structure than color.
Fig. 6 "Eating the Sun" River Songs 1998-99
For the past six years, 201l through 2017, I have been making many symmetrical photographs, and in these works it becomes quite clear how structure has dominated the work. Everything unfolds and radiates out of the center point of these images. Forms vibrate with visual energy as they appear to be exploding outward from an internal point of origin seated at the center of the image.
Fig. 7 Symmetrical Photograph, 2017 "Tree Branch and Lawn"
Giacometti would create vibratory light affects in his drawings in the 1950's and 60's by opening spaces in selected lines, and portions of the image, with swift "wind-like" strokes of his erasure. Some of the drawings he made in the Stampa and Maloja landscapes in the mid 1950's (see below) were filled with a transforming light energy that at once seemed to shoot through the imagery but also emerge from within the image itself through the open spaces created by the erasures.
Fig. 8 Landscape, Stampa. 1955 Pencil
Fig. 9 Mountain at Maloja, 19557 Pencil
Fig. 10 "Windswept Landscapes" (Bristol Hills, New York )
Fig. 11 "Windswept Landscapes" (Meadow, snow. wind)
Fig. 12 "Windswept Landscapes" (Canandaigua Lake and Bristol Hills)
Fig. 13 "Windswept Landscapes" ("Wild Eye" --Snow Patch on Rolling Hill )
Fig. 14 "Windswept Landscapes" (Figure standing in a windswept forest)
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Place
James Lord tells some fascinating stories about Giacometti's paralyzing compulsive behaviors, all of which have to do with getting things placed in their necessary order. Giacometti always wore the same cloths (tweed jacket, a tie, and baggy pants); he ate the same thing every morning (hard boiled eggs and coffee); he smoked constantly; he could not sleep until he managed a precise ordering of his shoes and socks by the bed. And equally as important, the light had to be on in his small bedroom--he would not sleep in a darkened room.
Here in Giacometti's own words is his accounting of an almost desperate need for a certain kind of order: "In my room," Giacometti explained, " I found myself unable to do anything for days on end because I could not discover the exact and satisfying arrangement of objects on my table. On it, for example, were a pack of cigarettes, a pencil, a saucer, a pad of paper, a box, etc. The shapes, colors, and volumes of these objects maintained between themselves intimate and precise plastic relations which determined for each one its sole proper placement. The search for this order, either by reflection or by trial and error, was a veritable torment for me. So long as I had not found it, I was as if paralyzed, unable to leave my room to keep an appointment." James Lord, Giacometti, A Biography pg. 152
But it is true that order relates to a sense of place, and I find in many of Giacometti's best works a strong feeling of Place. By Place I mean a feeling of living presence, an ephemeral quality, similar to the spirit or personality of a person one is trying to capture in a portrait. Place is a quality of essence, uniquely different in feel according to the particular, precise relationships that exist between things in a given space. Giacometti approached an explanation of this when he wrote: The shapes, colors, and volumes of these objects maintained between themselves intimate and precise plastic relations which determined for each one its sole proper placement.
I experience the presence of Place in many of Giacometti's painted portraits. The environment the figure is situated within, the atmospheric pictorial space and visual energy or "aura" that surrounds the head or figure . . . it all has something to do with a sense of Place. I can also sense Place in certain of his sculptural compositions, such as The Glade, and The Forest. And as we will see later, below, some of his still lifes are merged with a sense of Place.
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The three drawings below were made in 1963, in a hotel room where Giacometti stayed while recovering from major stomach surgery. His studio would have been too uncomfortable and too unhealthy for him, so he tried to make the best of this temporary inconvenience by drawing what he "saw" in those foreign spaces, remarkable drawings that are surely about light, but also about an essential quality of Place.
Light plays a vital role in pictorially unveiling the subtle mysteries of any Place. In these hotel room drawings we see how the light becomes not only palpable but also transcendent through the use of erasure which opens the lines and allows the light inside the image to radiate out. Despite the ordinariness of the subject matter, these drawings have a quality of translucency and transparency that make them, for me, hauntingly other-worldly. These drawings, living images of transcendence, are revelations of Giacometti's unique visionary abilities.
Fig. 15 Hotel Room, 1963 pencil drawing
Fig. 16 Hotel Room, 1963 pencil drawing
Fig. 17 Hotel Room, 1963 pencil drawing
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Fig. 18 Studio, 1953
This painting, Studio, 1953 is simultaneously an image of Place (literally, Giacometti's studio), and a still life image, of apples placed on a stool. So many of Giacometti's still lifes pay Homage to his hero, the Master Artist, Cezanne. The painting above, and the one below, are perfect examples of how Giacometti could create images that merge and transcend traditional categories of creativity. "Still Life" and "Place" mean nothing when a painting, drawing or sculpture achieves such a profound sense of order and at the same time an other-worldly sense of internal light. In these remarkable works the familiar apparent world is transcended and the mysteries of existence, of being are unveiled.
The painting below, The Sideboard of 1957 is for me more than a still life, and more than a revelation of place. The image is about the aliveness and transforming creative power of light. The light in this image is not the kind of light that merely illuminates things; it is light, the ineffable mystery; it is the light by which human vision is made possible; the light which manifests the things of the material world.
Fig. 19 The Sideboard, 1957
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Still Life
The lesson of Cezanne had taught Giacometti that only absolute fidelity to
psychic and visual experience, however surprising or unpredictable,
can mark an artistic work with integrity. Moreover, he was
to learn that an artist can discover through arduous
practice how to be true in creative terms
to his deepest feelings without
to his deepest feelings without
openly indulging them.
James Lord, Giacometti,
A Biography pg. 104
Fig. 20 Apple on Sideboard, 1937
I wrote about this 1937 painting in the third part of my Homage to Giacometti project. We see here Giacometti placing his primary still life object, the solitary apple, far away from the viewer. In the apple's smallness and distance, perhaps the viewer becomes hyper-sensitive to the apple's presence in the nearly overwhelming surrounding space. But when we speak of presence in regards to this image, it is not simply the presence of the apple that we are responding to, for the place in which the apple is situated is equally important. In this image, it seems to me Place and Object cannot be separated. They are interdependent, both equal parts of something much greater, something beyond thinking and beyond saying. The apple and the place have become reflections of each other, that is, they are one and the same, a unity greater than the sum of the parts. In this regard, then, the image functions for me as a symbol which unveils--for lack a better way of saying it--Unitary Reality.
Fig. 21 Apples, pencil 1959
Fig. 22 Still Life with apples, 1958
Fig. 22, Still Life with apples is very much like the painting Apple on the Sideboard (Fig. 20 above). The space surrounding the apples is highly charged with living, vital energy. They gain their sense of presence from the atmosphere or "aura" that perhaps is an extension of the apples, similar to the "auras" that hovered above or extended from the heads and figures in several of Giacometti's most fascinating portraits and nudes.
What is a still life? if not a "portrait" of a living configuration of objects, their precisely ordered relationships to each other . . . their unknown unity manifested as the whole within the larger pictorial context, a totality that is itself the experience of presence that transcends the apparent subject matter?
Fig. 23 Still Life with flowers, 1953
How is this paining, Still Life with Flowers, any different than Giacometti's landscapes and his most remarkable portrait paintings? The energy, the structure, the internal light is what I respond to. I cannot even see the subject matter. Rather, I experience the movement and energy of lines, an intrinsic order that just barely holds onto any semblance of appearance, categories of meaning, or pictorial conventions. Every thing has become transparent and translucent. Space and objects are in a process of merging into each other.
Fig. 24 Still Life, 1958-59? pencil
Fig. 25 (Fig 8) Landscape, Stampa. 1955 Pencil
These last two drawings (Fig. 24 & 25) also point to what I want to make quite clear: Giacometti's amazing visionary insight gave him direct access to the essential creative energy from which all things manifest into appearance. Despite Giacometti's constant feeling that his works did not succeed at articulating what he "saw," nonetheless the spirit of his visionary perceptions does come through his art works, as an experience of presence.
In the yoga that I practice, the creative power of the universe is known as shakti, the divine Consciousness which pervades all that is and all that is not. Giacometti's best works are the visual symbolic embodiment of the shakti, the light of Consciousness, the light of the Self. When we speak of presence in relation to Giacometti's works of art, we are affirming our experience of a sense of being, the mystery of existence, the creative energy that embodies and illuminates his work.
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The word photograph comes from the Greek; it means "light writing" or "light drawing." My intention as a photographer is to make symbolic images, images alive with the radiance of unity, the presence of the Self. I am concluding this project with a sequence of six recently made photographs which function for me as symbols.
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Six
Photographs
Light & Reflections
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Still Lifes
Landscapes
Place
Presence
Fig. 26 Pumpkin, chair, light & reflections in our front storm door
Fig. 27 Rain-drenched side of house, reflecting light from a summer storm evening sky
Fig. 28 Evening Summer Storm Sky, reflecting on the pond in the South-West Meadow
Fig. 29 Looking inside, past the raindrops collected on a window screen
with reflections of the meadow and evening storm sky
Fig. 30 Early morning view of the Meadow
through our foggy picture window and reflections
Fig. 31 Early morning sunlight, shadows, transparent object & reflections on sideboard
Afterword
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Introspection
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The Inner World
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In the most meaningful possible terms, for me, Giacometti's work is about the "inner world": about insight or interior vision; about "visionary introspection." Giacometti's best works are images which conjoin corresponding reflections from the inner and outer worlds. Symbols are images which affirm and make palpably present the Unity of Being, which in the yoga I practice is said to be synonymous with "the divine Self."
Since 2011, when I began creating what for me was a very important project "An Imaginary Book" a whole series of projects followed which I have placed together under the categorical title The Sacred Art Photography Projects. Through this ongoing aspect of my creative process I have finally understood how my photography is an integral part my yogic practices. See my project Photography and Yoga.
Though I do not consider the Homage to Giacometti project one of my Sacred Art Projects, Giacomtti's work nonetheless is for me a powerful manifestation of what in yoga is known as the creative power of the universe, or shakti.
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I read this morning (August 22, 2017) something I want to share with you. The passage seems a perfect addition to all that I have been trying to articulate about my relation to Giacometti's work. It comes from the book Satsang with Baba : Questions and Answers with Swami Muktananda (Vol. 4). Swami Muktananda was one of the great modern day saints of India, and the founder of the Siddha Yoga Path which I have been practicing since 1987.
Someone who had spent a month with Swami Muktananda at his ashram in Ganeshpuri, India was about to leave the ashram and return to the United States. He asked, how could he continue to serve Baba and do the yogic practices when he would be so far away . . . on the other side of the world?
Here is how Baba responded to the question:
America appears to be very distant to you because you do not yet know yourself fully. If you continue to do in America what you have been doing here--meditating and advancing in meditation--and if you get to know yourself fully, India won't be far from America even for you. In fact you will find all countries quite near.
This is what Lord Krishna said to Arjuna in the 10th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. He says, "Arjuna, the universe may appear vast, but to Me it is nothing more than a mustard seed in My palm." That is also true for you. If you become close to your Self, you will find that America and India are very close to each other.
If you continue to meditate, and chant God's names, and remember the Lord there as you do here, you will be serving me. . . To honor the inner Self is to serve me.
Always remember that the inner world is far nobler, far more beautiful, far superior to the outer world. Therefore, roam much less in the outer world and dwell far more in the inner world. Where is the other side of the world? It only appears that way to you. The truth is that the entire universe is within you in a corner of your heart.
It's wrong to think that you will be at the other side of the world. Things appear to be like that because you don't yet know your own reality. The whole world surrounding you is a tiny orb within your being. The yogic sages say, "What land is greater than the Self? The Self pervades all lands, all countries; the entire universe is just a drop within the Self." Vol Four, Satsang with Baba, Questions and Answers with Swami Muktananda
This project was posted on my Welcome Page
August 24, 2017
Homage to Giacometti, Projects List
2. Line-Drawing Photograph Portraits
3. Figures & Triadic Visual Poems
4. Landscapes, Still Lifes, Place and Presence
5. Regarding Giacometti's Fear of Death
6. Vision, Re-vision and "Recurrence of Creation"
7. New Work, Commentaries, Epilogue
Related online projects
Welcome Page for this website TheDepartingLandscape.blogspot.com which includes the complete listing of my online photography projects, my resume, contact information, and much more.
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