Contrast is Everything
Monica is away this week, taking the Art World by storm at The Other Art Fair, Los Angeles, so I am stepping in with some musings from my own studio and classroom.
Caravaggio, The Calling of St Matthew, 1599-1600 (detail)
It’s September and my time has shifted in recent weeks from unstructured studio time to spending most of my week in the classroom. I’m helping young artists learn to paint and draw and while I have a pencil or palette knife in hand most of the day, it is in the service of helping foster another artist’s vision, not necessarily my own. I return to my studio at the end of the day with my head still in the classroom, mulling over how to best equip new painters with the tools that I’ve been working with for so many years now.
In painting, I start by introducing students to the role that light and dark play in shaping a picture. Painters after all, almost always paint about light. It’s a simple idea: color is light reflected and painters use that knowledge to shape their pictures. Some portray light in the service of illuminating a landscape, others in realizing the form of a head or an apple on a table. Some, like me, work abstractly, but still pay attention to the role of light. For me it is my most primal motivation to paint. My students start with black and white, getting to know this goopy stuff called paint and attempt to corral the unwieldy material into simple compositions. It’s not easy and I won’t tell them, but it doesn’t get any easier even after years of painting.
We look for light and the shapes it makes on objects and between them. Light, after all, only exists alongside its counterpart, darkness, the two in contrast to one another. It is in the contrast, in the differences between things where the interesting stuff starts to happen. I had a professor in graduate school, Raphael Diluzio, who used to say, “Contrast is Everything.” The more I paint, the more I appreciate that statement.
San Luigi dei Franceschi, Rome
I first traveled to Rome as a student, on a mission to see as many Caravaggio paintings as I could find. Caravaggio (1571-1610) was one of the great, innovating masters of Chiaroscuro, meaning “the play of light and dark”, and his work captured me early on. His paintings are scattered around the city, in several churches and palazzos, my favorite, the St Matthew cycle, at San Luigi dei Franchesci. San Luigi sits inconspicuously between Piazza Navona (ground zero for gelato in Rome) and the Pantheon (very near our favorite art supply store, Ditta Poggi). Past the unassuming exterior is a gorgeous but modest-sized church with striking gold ornamentation on the ceilings and arches. The Caravaggio masterworks, centered around the life of St. Matthew were painted in the early 1600’s and are hanging in the Contarelli Chapel in a front corner of the church. You put a fifty cent Euro coin in a box and the lights turn on, revealing the drama of Matthew’s life as only Caravaggio could have painted it. His studio was nearby, and I always picture the painter gathering up his cast of characters from the piazza and arranging the motley group in front of an oil lamp in a dark studio, working furiously through the night. Out of the darkness he brought light and life.
The Calling of St Matthew, Caravaggio, 1599-1600
The critic Jon Berger once wrote of Caravaggio that:
“His chiaroscuro allowed him to banish daylight. Shadows, he felt, offered shelter as can four walls and a roof.” The darkness for Caravaggio “smells of candles, over-ripe melons, damp washing waiting to be hung out the next day: it is the darkness of stairwells, gambling corners, cheap lodgings, sudden encounters. And the promise is not in what will flare against it, but in the darkness itself. The shelter it offers is only relative, for the chiaroscuro reveals violence, suffering, longing, mortality, but at least it reveals them intimately.” *
The last time I visited San Luigi, I was working on a commission painting for a client who was looking for something dramatic and Baroque – abstract, but Baroque. I knew Caravaggio would have something to teach me on the subject. The contrast in my work, a formal thing I am aware of from the first moments of the painting, is there to create light, a glow and inner warmth. If Caravaggio finds shelter in the dark, I find hope in the light. Contrast for me appears in moments of sunlight after a rain or a warm Spring day after a harsh Winter. In those moments of contrast, I find a deeper kind of beauty. Those moments usually found in nature are the ones I’m looking to create in my work. To work they need to be unexpected, I need to be surprised by what I find in the color and contrast. Really, contrast is beauty: warmth among cool shadows and persistent light against the dark. It’s almost spiritual. I swear that when I encounter deep contrast in painting – the light in Caravaggio or on Rembrandt’s cheek, in the deep dark paintings of Helen Frankenthaler or in Bonnard’s warm interiors – I can feel it in my bones. The contrast moves me, in fact, it is everything.
Roman Holiday by Michael Rich oil on canvas, 62 x 51”
Monica in LA at The Other Art Fair, LA!
*Jon Berger, Caravaggio: A Contemporary View, Studio International, 1983, Volume 196, Number 998