Nostalgic for Childhood
Twenty years ago, I was fascinated by the beauty of the fine arts and desirous to learn the drawing. However, as an ungifted kid with a great diffidence deeply in the heart, I always hesitated to draw —— can I draw the lines in the right place? Can I paint the colors in a harmonious way? This kind of diffidence led me to another way of life —— I became a normal adult struggling with the normal life. But there were always something commotion beneath the surface of the normal life, and this commotion led me back to art again —— about 1 year ago, I started to learn drawing and painting from the very beginning. At that time, I delightedly found myself can see something that other person cannot see. Unexpectedly, I absorbed the traditional art techniques like the sponge and sometimes could impress people with the realistic pictures. However, as I made progress with my technique I lost my spirits unawares, which is the most important thing in art. Until one day, the instructor asked me the question —— “What do you want to express?”
All of sudden, I realized drawing technically well alone meant nothing. I love drawing not only because I like to impress people, but also because I want to say something by my charcoal. Then I reviewed the drawings of the contemporary artists in VITAMIN D, I got a totally new perspective of them, especially Yoshitomo Nara’s little girls. My first impression of Nara’s drawing was: there were just illustrations. But when I reviewed it, I strongly felt the rebellion nature of humanity came alive through his robust, manga-looking figures. The images are accessible, arbitrarily drawn, the narrations are compelling and rough, and any viewer can interpret them in a deeply personal way. As an 80’s grew up with mangas, comics and animations, I found those primitive and innocent images stoke my heart by evoking the little me who was lost in my adult body years ago, reminding me that the fable of love and loneliness had never lost its power. Large crescent eyes, sneer on the lips, Nara’s vulnerable little girls are standing up defiantly to the world of adults. The drawings show the Nara’s nostalgic for the childhood, which is always an inseverable part inside the adults. The part that is showing the refusal to make the soul slave of the body, the part that loves simple ways of life and that is somewhat impatient with the business of making money. Nara’s drawings bring the emotion of inquietude and angry from his heart and arouse the sympathetic response from the viewers. He breaks the rules of traditional aesthetic, Asian kitsch and Disney dreams, just like his characters fight against the ordinary boring adult life —— with self-confidence, self-determination, individuality and freedom, which all the actists would learn from.
Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing by Emma Dexter (Author)
Rodin! O Rodin!
I learned about Auguste Rodin’s Sculpture when I was very little, as symbols of human emotion and character. I was deeply inspired by his emotion-laden representations of human body, and began to observe and think, trying to discover the beauty of ordinary men and women
It was my first time to watch the real Rodin sculptures in Standford Museum 20 months ago, so close, so clear. I stood in front of them almost for a whole day, just cannot withdraw my eyes from them. They looked realistic — the sense of movement was so strong and the form, light and shadow was astonishingly accurate. However, as Rodin said, “It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic sculpture”, he also freed the art of sculpture from the repetition of traditional patterns, and combine Michelangelo’s mystery of the human form with his own sense of human nature.
Besides emphasizing of emotional tension, Rodin’s “unfinishedness” which characterized many of his sculptures also showed his contemporary spirit. From his sculpture “Mediation”, we can see the left arm was “broken off” at the shoulder, the right leg was crashed and the back of the torso was absent, but the “missing parts” made the audiences more focus on the intellectual theme of his work, and his talent for texture allowed him to let every part of the body speak for the whole.
Standing in front of Rodin’s sculptures, I see the magic of line, form, light and textures; feel the emotion of suffering, conflict, passion and desperation; hear the screaming and singing from the bronze , from time to time, for hours and hours.
The Train From Munich
With its great curving of the flock of white doves leading up to the the shallow foreground where groups of figures climb the stairs form the left and descend the stairs at right, the composition of ” The Train from Munich” instantly arrest the viewers. The artist constructed a very compact, finite space of a train station with a doorway to the tunnel ( from where we can see the train’s headlight) and a waiting room in the center. They are two male figures standing in front of the structure and frame this center area. Inside the waiting room sits a Young girl looking out through the window in a deep though. A man stands in her opposite side, while another man seated in the back of the room, who looks like the sitting figure in Interior I. A dog is running down from the stairs at the right side of the space. At the top right is a tiny city scape and some banners ( Per museum’s comment, they are military banners and they evokes a portent of evils to come). There are some empty trains in the top left. A group of three boys are standing and looking at the unknown space. Three standing men in the same oppressive gesture creating a poignant atmosphere, in contrast to the sleepy and indifferent characters in the left bottom.
This composition shows many levels of the image as it is in the whole series —- 2-Dimensional surface with meticulous details, 3-Dimensionality of spatial illusions with meditative center and focal point (the girl in the waiting room and the male figure with dog standing in front of the waiting room), and 4-Dimensionality with time: past and present exist synchronously that bring the viewer drama and emotional impact.
The utilization and distribution of light are also significant. The light smoke fills the dim background, and comes to the front through the tunnel, creating a mystery and enigmatic atmosphere. The birds give us the brightest light on the print, draw the viewers’ attention at first sight and rendering more emphatic the feeling of struggle —- are they trying to escape the suffocating surroundings?
The print as a whole is a triumph of equilibrium in the balance of flight and rest. There are flying birds, moving people and running dog in the foreground, while in deeper space the characters are just standing or sitting. But they are linked —- the girl in the waiting room is looking outside and the bird in the top is flying inside. Then we get the collage that intersects and converges on the mystery of the artist’s inner space.
Milton emphasized the importance of the shadows and reflection by using the mirrors. The viewer is made to feel that the space is far deeper than is possible with the reflections in the doorway glass. The coming train look so tiny and distant that the space is pushed back farther psychologically, through perspective construction. The reflection figures of the doorman are transparent and ghostlike, fading into the architecture. The repetitiveness makes them look like the crowd of impersonal, anonymous and mechanical, as if they are echoing in the space. The collage of the train headlight and the shadow figures dramatize the story with the oppressive, dark, smoky atmosphere, and give the whole picture its gripping power.
Appreciating the Milton drawing is typically a pleasurable experience. His works are filled with delightful and provocative images that hard to be interpreted into words. As a critical writing says: ” it recalls the linear precision of Durer, the sinuosity of Blake, the tenebrosity of Rembrandt, the luminosity of Turner.” *
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* James A. W. Heffernan, Peter Milton’s Turn: An American Printmaker Marks the End of the Millennium. From Word & Image, Vol. 16, No. 2, April – June 2000, and Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions, James A. W. Heffernan, Baylor University Press, 2006.
About the Show: ” POP to Present” is an exhibition in Stanford Museum which has 60 works of modern and contemporary art on view created since the 1950s. According to the Museum, the aim of “POP to present” is to encourage the viewer’s engagement with this art by sharing a variety of different interpretations and comments about the work on display. The works on the show are encompassing different approaches and media, and evoke complex feeling through their dynamic visual impact.
About the Series: ” Interiors Series” contains seven individual prints and five of them are on the show. They are: Interiors I: Family Reunion, 1984; Interiors IV: Hotel Paradise Cafe, 1987; Interiors V: Water Music, 1988; Interiors VI: Surroundings, 1989, Interiors VII: The Train From Munich. All of these prints were done by artist’s exquisitely sinuous draftsmanship, and combined mystery and reality in a unified pictorial space. In this series, The viewer comes upon lots of unexpected things but all drawings seem so harmonious and all-of-a-piece.The artist definitely has the master storyteller’s technique for making the incongruous seem altogether coherent.That makes the series quite out of common in this contemporary exhibition.
Interiors VII: The Train From Munich, 1991 resist-ground etching and engraving Peter Milton
Where are the songs I used to know
I am always fascinated by gardening and plants like flowers. They grow out of an intense love of life. Some artist said they show the refusal to make the soul selave of the body. I think there is inner richness of soul in those artists who love simple ways of life and who are somewhat impatient with the business of making money. Nowadays, even in China, where the Taoist philosophgy has been worked for several thousand years, life still goes in merrily with lots of people beliving in wealth and fame and power. Every time I see my water bottle, a picture of Tao Yuan Ming, the greatest poet and recluse in China, always comes to my mind. It was his love of nature and ignorence of social success that were expressed in the poem written in November, A.D. 415:
“… …
Why not go home,
Seeing that my field and garden with weeds are over grown?
Myself have made my soul sever to my body,
Why have vain regrets and mourn alone?
These the trees, happy of heart, grow marvelously green,
And spring water gushes forth with a gurgling sound.
I admire how things grow and prosper according to
Their seasons
And feel that thus, too
Shall my life go its round.
… …
Enough!
How long yet shall I this mortal shape keep?
Why not take life as it comes, and
Why hustle and bustle like one on and errand bound?
Wealth and power are not my ambitions, and
Unattainable is the abode of the gods!
I would go forth alone on a bright morning
Or perhaps, planting my cane
Begin to pluck the weeds,
And till the ground
… …
(*the poem was translated and published by Chinese scholar Lin, Yutang in 1937)
Why not go home
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