An artist must use recent and distant achievements in their art for education and inspiration.  You must know the work of your precursors on as many levels as possible.  You cannot not know the history of your art.  Imagine your art as an arena or as a schoolyard.  This schoolyard is full of upperclassmen and very tough classmates.  The quality of your work is directly related to how many of their lunches you eat or at least get a bite of prior to getting your ass kicked.

The worlds of contemporary painting and music are over-crowded with wall flowers, people who huddle along the fences minding their own business, doing their own thing -  things that are always hermetic, untutored, pale, boring, frantic, peculiar, lame, self-absorbed and unfulfilling.  Get out in the center, walk up to Picasso, grab his lunch sack, add some onions or peppers to his bologna sandwich and call it your own.  The next day go over to Van Gogh, grab his lunch pail, take out his peanut butter sandwich and add some sliced banana and call it your own.  Every artist of note has confronted a wide array of precursors – they all got their asses handed to them, got their noses bloodied time and again for their audacity, for their courage.  They collected battle scars from their encounters with the work that defined their canon.

You can always spot an artist who simply looked at a lot of reproductions or visited a lot of museums and failed to actually experiment with paint – it is as if they had no encounters with the schoolyard dominators at all.  You can tell which musicians huddled over by the backstop with a small circle of admiring friends while the big boys controlled the center.  The torch of one’s art must be taken from many other artists who may be alive or dead.  You will get clobbered but there is at least a chance for a measure of pride for valiant effort.  Muhammad Ali, a great artist of the boxing ring, got hit so ferociously and so many times that he was permanently injured.

Force a series of encounters with the contenders in your schoolyard or be doomed to mediocrity.  “Hey Beethoven what did mommy pack our little music man today?”  “Jackson Pollock !  Yeah you – I’m talkin’ to you – let’s see it – what you got in the sack? Ouch!  Jackson packs quite a wallop.  “You guys wait here – I wanna bite of that Hendrix kid’s apple.”  Go after your precursors one at a time.  Get into their heads.  Steal as many of their ideas as you can process.  Picasso said, when accused of stealing ideas from other artists, “I steal from everybody – I try not to steal from myself.”

Willem de Kooning’s access to Cezanne was blocked during his formative years, the 1930s and 1940s, by the feverish cult of Picasso thus he never saw Cubism for what it is, Cezanne shorthand, not some cosmic invention from whole cloth.  Jackson Pollock also suffered from this myopia. These two painters banged their heads silly against Picasso like loose shutters in a hurricane while the magic, beauty and grace of Cezanne eluded them thus de Koonings un-mooring after his great masterpiece “Excavation” and the early “Woman” series.  Arshille Gorky,  de Kooning’s mentor, was completely obsessed with Cezanne to the point of mimicking his imagery in a very accurate manner.  Gorky’s obsession with Cezanne turned out to be an excellent launching pad into an original vision.  Gorky could instinctively avoid the dragon’s lair of Picasso.

In creative endeavors like architecture and painting one is continually at risk of perpetuating the banal.  Banality is disappointing and avoiding it is getting more difficult.  Perhaps this is a function of getting older (everyone is a poet at twenty).  All of the usual excuses for not delivering excellence are so reasonable and understandable to all.  Excellence is unreasonable.  It is an aberration.  It is freakish.  It is hiding all around us.  It is in small places.  It is crouching in corners and scurrying into myriad cracks in our rude and hectic culture.  There are many imposters: shiny stuff, new slick things and fast things as well as things with mighty advertising budgets.  Excellence is usually quiet and it must be captured by stealth.  Excellence is a very sharp knife.  It cuts through all of the clutter that surrounds us and it makes the agents of that clutter embarrassed.  Excellence is buoyant and radiant and fresh and fun.  Look! I ‘ve found some right here.  Hey! There’s some over there!  How do you know when you have found it?  Banality is noisy and shiny as well as dull and common.  Excellence is quieter and it engages your imagination.  It makes you happy.

Bliss may be small in its manifestation and large in its effect.  If one examines the drawings of the masters, one sees a quality of line that radiates the presence of bliss.  This line quality is that of assurance, grace, truth and so -  beauty.  Without this quality of bliss there is no mastery.  A knowing eye can see, smell, feel  fear in the drawn line.  Fear is the absence of bliss.  Fear is the black hole to the radiant star of bliss.  There are  times when fear in art is compelling and it may be a driving force for remarkable and popular art  but it is not a factor  in the poetics of mastery.   In mastery all fear has been translated into bliss.   If a draughtsman misses the bliss, he must proceed to his bag of tricks to deliver a work worthy of  sharing.  If you miss the bliss in oil paint, then toil on the canvas may suffice.  If you miss it in watercolor  try again another day.  A painting produced in a state of  bliss allows room in its being for the full participation of an enlightened viewer.  There are blank places, rest stops, easy places to enter the work, to share the joy.  Paint speaks:  “join me on a journey to a magic place, a stunning place, a vital, vibrant  and powerful place.”  Matisse invites you in, Turner invites you into his storms,  Chardin invites you into his kitchens and dining rooms.  Jasper Johns and Eric Fischl invite.   Inferior art tries to seduce  with  vague or arcane concepts, hyperglycemic colors, crowded composition, over-worked technique – work that transmits of a fear of not pleasing an audience.  Inferior painting reeks of the fear of failure.  It is blah.  Bliss allows you entry and takes you on a journey of delight.  You share the bliss of the creator – the artist.  Fear art is  a one-trick pony, a one-note Johnny, a one night stand.  It is worth a one minute perusal in a museum and can  inspire reams of text.  It is often over-sized.  Inflated scale is the first trick of bliss gone south.  The second trick is polish and shine.  Knowing that the human touch will reveal you – erase the mark altogether,  thus our Warhol induced, celebration of the machine-made object.  See Murikami, Koons, Hirst: active masters of the assembly line.  Although the bliss of the act of creation may be missing from this work, it is nonetheless conceptually rich and  fun to look at.   Russell Chatham’s postage stamp size watercolors carry more bliss-freight per square inch than even Turner’s late vapor.  Blissful art attracts,  blah art explodes in your eyes then bores you forever after, see Caravaggio.

The epochal (500 year) paradigm shift of 1912 which affected all art,  science and politics was deeply affected by black emancipation penetrating the lapsed Enlightenment project in Europe i.e. the U.S. Civil War, six hundred thousand white men and thousands of black men die in order to acknowledge a non-white culture as citizens rather than property.  This potent event revitalized art and science that had been exhausted by the urban nightmare of nineteenth and early twentieth century labor abuse.  How to explain the fifty year delay?  It can take Europeans at least one generation to absorb the astounding drama and forcefulness of the reifications of the American character.  Declaration of Independence 1776 – French Revolution 1789.   Picasso celebrates Lincoln in “Le Demoiselles d’Avignon”

Henri Matisse is underestimated by almost everyone and commonly viewed as Picasso’s inferior when discussing paradigm shifting innovations in painting during the early years of the twentieth century.  This is a shame and it is not at all accurate.  This misconstrue comes from Gertrude Stein who bore a grudge toward Matisse for remaining socially, emotionally aloof from her and her cozy circle.  One can easily assert that Matisse fully grasped and experimented with the paradigm-destroying features of Cezanne’s late work: non- mimetic drawing, flattened, democratized picture plane, creating form with color, unpinned station point, simultaneity, warped linear perspective etc.  Matisse’s bold experiments with simultaneity occurred from 1901 through 1920 before his languid odalisques but for the first seven years of the century Matisse was bravely taking most of the arrows for the modern movement while Picasso was dallying in his lachrymose pastiche of Puvis de Chavannes (blue and Rose periods) waiting for the smoke to clear, waiting for the Indians to leave the building.  Once the rabid fervor over modern painting calmed down to a mild, gut-churning roar, Picasso along with his wife Braque make their appearance with their cogent abstraction of all things late Cezanne – Cubism and carry all of the glory of bold, earth-shattering innovation to the army of young painters, sculptors and architects in Paris in 1910.  Cubism is a shorthand for seven years of Matisse’s experiments with Cezanne’s innovations with some tribal motifs added for dramatic effect
It was Picasso’s bande that included the greatest writers  of the time, avante- garde pitchmen,  Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Cocteau (later) who launched the myth that Picasso was the heavy lifter for twentieth century artistic innovation.  This along with Henri Matisse’s self-immolating remark about wanting to make “pictures for a tired working man to enjoy while stretched out on his sofa” – a remark made after ten years of fierce battle – who wouldn’t want to rest up a bit.  Picasso had a p.r. machine to expand the perception of his particular contributions and Matisse did not.  The situation is similar to the settlement of the New England Western Addition (present day Ohio) during the early nineteenth century.  The men who fought Indians, cut trees, surveyed the land, platted new townships i.e. those who did the brutal heavy, dangerous work went bankrupt allowing the following generation of speculators to make a killing.  Matisse is the true pioneer of modern painting and Picasso is clearly a latecomer although a potent and important one.  Abe Lincoln was a latecomer to Indiana but an effective member of the community.  Cubism was simply easier to grasp, more transferable than the early oeuvre of Matisse and the Fauves.  The foot soldiers of the Parisian avante- garde could traipse through Picasso’s studio and see all they needed in order to grasp Cezanne.  Picasso and Braque’s Cubism is Cezanne in a pill.