Johannes von Gumppenberg

The Bent for Merriment

9/2/2016

I am told that volumes are written on humor. Somewhere, decades ago I read, “Incongruity inspires laughter.”

We know that not all which exists can be personally meaningful to us. When we encounter something which thus captures us it is because this something engages our minds or touches our hearts. Similarly, to inspire mirth, mere incongruity is not enough. The need is for an unfolding remarkably surpassing daily commonplaces.

The lovely smile gracing features in a tranquil, happy moment, as well as festive merriment, are – I think – relatives of humor, for they take us, however briefly, above the mundane dullness of existence.

When humor in its biting form is put into an utterance, someone will be someone’s prey whose day no longer will be dull. The benign tease looks upon himself as masterful, but does so peaceably and without inflicting pain. It seems an amiable way to have this fun when one’s victim is only pretended, but not real.

Harmless Cyclops Breathing in the Cold

A Cyclops is a gigantic, man-devouring mythological being with but a single eye. My Cyclops here is “average-man” – a little plump – bald – middle-aged. But if he resembles closely someone another someone knows, that other someone’s laughter can be more gloating than well-meaning.

Let me now recall a masterful political cartoon by MacNelly – masterful because there was no victim: a sturdy housewife, during the Bill Clinton years says to a baffled-looking pollster, “I like the dirt-bag.”
The “LIKE”-ing and the presidential “dirt-bag” make odd company. Yet the liking takes out all sting from the unwashed name. So some of us, at least, smiled or even laughed indulgently and fondly.

Is not such jesting a deal more loveable than that which gains a triumph through sharpening the claws of ridicule?

Summary

Mirth includes always the endeavor to master the occasion which arouses it. By that feature humor supplies a true and valuable recourse when hard adversity taxes our courage. And it is a fine conceit indeed to find a way to feel indulgently forgiving toward the President of the United States.

Even our gift of receptivity, to happy hours we can regard with smiles, subdues for us the drab, and maybe troubling, every-days.

A number of the topics in this series were familiar ground of which I sought to improve my understanding. Though I have had my fun, I have never studied how I had it – never studied humor. So I have to hope that this, my first attempt, has not been too awkward and inept.

Modern Art -- Forbidden Art

8/26/2016

In Hitler’s Germany Modern Art was a forbidden art.

In the first years following the war I saw samples of this art with only uncomprehending eyes. Then in the USA took place at Rhode Island School of Design my first meeting with the art of my own time. It was “love at first sight.” I felt I had arrived to take a part in a sun-rise burst of color and an unprecedented inventive excellence of form.

Sometimes that fulfillment seemed in reach just around the corner. Hitler’s stranglehold was the obvious tyranny. Many tyrannies of fashions advancing ever like invasive weeds into the art community bring to us a slyly sneaking, but also more enduring, trouble.

The Art Student and the Art School

One kind of art in vogue or another dominates from time to time. There is also a seeming plenitude of variety. We note, however, a fashion in our schools which has grown a weighty burden. It is, contempt for what we name “academic learning.”

From Modern Art can arise – and partly have arisen – insights of fundamental learning useful to the valuation of any period.

In our time all profess admiration for the excellence of Paul Cézanne. That achievement was three-fold: composition, solid form, and color. These are the essentials of the painter’s art.

At Yale Josef Albers set up the course for a right study of color and composition. This gain, now lost mostly to neglect and then oblivion, needed to be cultivated and enlarged.

Solid form has been my chosen work. This was not a mere modeling in light and shade. Instead, the aim was the precise description of the volumes while taking possession of each surface as a field of action to be creatively explored for free display.

It is an oddity that all our art community talks admiration for Cézanne but treats negligently that to which Cézanne gave his industrious care.

There are several helps where our talent is not quite enough.

My illustration demonstrates that any shape arrangement can be made to fit the perspective situation of any form. Thereby, every surface is made usable as the designer-artist’s personal field of action.

Form Description

Alert and sharpened eyes must contribute here accurate observing. So is made available a treasury of shape and color combinations our brain cannot invent. These serve best when we re-design in order to improve, not copy, them.

By the simplicity of overlap and by seeing background and figure separations, we can discern near and distant. Solid structures in precise perspective and in the perspective of intervening atmospheric mist supply the facts of actual space.

Shaping Lines and Tone Here or There as Intervening Mists

The space of picture-making is not a featureless void. Ruled by inventive purpose, the mist of atmosphere may overlay what is our will to keep somewhat – but not wholly – out of sight. Thus we remind the viewer of these two perspectives, that of the vanishing point and that provided by the atmosphere, but employ them entirely to carry to completion a creative goal.

We step forward with our best designs.
The nearest point of the sphere lies in the center of the circular perimeter. But the weight of this display shows well above that middle point.

Our burden is not the occasional dominance of one art form in short-lived vogue. It is that our schools have enslaved their students to a needless ignorance. Yet the learning that I speak of might have been unfolded excellently with a modern outlook on shape and color and design.

Because our schools have been thus negligent too often, their students abide still in chains – less visible than those of past dread times – but I think they do exist.

The art of the galleries may inspire us, but must not lead. For the galleries are a commercial corner-cutting world. Composition, solid form, and color, supported by a treasury of profound observing, are the indispensable-best study plan.

Note: The structure of forms and the causes by which we judge near and far derive from observation. These may therefore be joined in one class of learning with the pattern-play of shapes and colors on the surfaces of solids.

Tasks To Do, So Art Can Be

7/29/2016

The cave painters of Altamira and Lascaux needed to know all the lore and crafts which held body and soul together in Stone Age times.

Here and now the division of labor lets us choose the skills and studies able to give close help in visual art, leaving the remoter tasks to other hands.
We learn about drawing, sculpture and painting. Some artists more than others value keen observation, lettering skills, anatomy, structure and geometry, or print making techniques.

When I was still a quite small boy, not all those studies did then yet occupy my mind. But the skill of blending colors seemed most desirably miraculous.

Artists will simulate blending through altering the frequency of markings by the brush or pen. These can be individually seen because they are separately and deliberately set in place.

“A Land of Fire and Ice”

My painting offers an extended graduation from white to blue, and several narrow passages of blending to render in blurring boundaries some of the adjoining color fields.

The blendings belong in visual art because they are visible within a work to our naked eye. Yet they are also a product of an intrusion into a microscopic world.

On Loan from the Invisible

However nimble the work of our pigment-laden brush, we cannot tell exactly where the microscopic particles of colors will fall in place.
The pattern is likely similar – though not identical to – that of my sample of the small black squares. For, whatever our finger-tip sensibility that moves the brush, the colored particles remain largely self-arranging and self-sorting.

Out of sources in nature and from disciplines of endeavor beyond art we use what can be made visible in our pictorial work.
Derived from shaded modeling seen all around us, graduated blending is a most often practiced craft in visual art.

More than 75 years ago it seemed a miracle to me, and still I name it “wonderful” that – wielded with dexterity and due diligence – the brush will cause tiniest particles of colored dust to do my bidding.
So far the occurrence is unexplained and likely to remain that way – gift of a benign Providence.

Absolute Truth

7/8/2016

Dogmatical self-assertion is often met with this riposte: “There is no absolute truth.”

Only un-importantly is this correct. However, that reproach against another’s speech is also entirely mistaken. For no one is ever able to even try to pronounce absolutely. All we say is inescapably bound to a subject matter. It cannot be absolute of that subject matter and, so, independent.

A runner as fast as lightning cannot exist, but the idea is derived from elements we have experienced. We may therefore picture this or speak about it. Though this runner will never become bodily real, he can become a true creation of metaphor or a magic tale.

But no one can express – rightly or mistakenly – anything empty of subject matter. To tell me meaningly, “There is no absolute truth,” is to say that, “A nothing is, in fact, a nothing.”

All we say and all we think – true or false – is bound to its own territory of regard and, in another study, I will pursue that outlook.

A Very Lucky Lady

7/1/2016

Monika’s husband is a living “good example.” When once we came to talking, Monika rendered full account of all the helpful chores her Richard happily and always performed for her ease and for her pleasure.

So exhaustive was her numeration that I felt need to comment:

     Johannes: “This raises an interesting question.”
      Lucky Lady: “What do I do?”
      Johannes: “Yes?”
      Lucky Lady: “I look pretty.”

That, I truthfully conceded, the lady did indeed most competently and becomingly.

The Lady Who Said, "Damn the Greeks!"

6/24/2016

Our friend Natasha industriously nurtures a conceit she is “allergic” to exercise. When I sang the praises to her of the Greek ideal of bodily excellence joined to a clear and incisive mind, the lady told me, “Damn the Greeks!”

Now great Ajax and Achilles grimly frown. Almighty Zeus from Mt. Olympus thunders wrathfully. Athena the Grey-Eyed and Bright Apollo are in tears. All Hellas mourns, and even Stony-Hearted ’Hannes grieves.

Yet there was a better and more winsome way I could have offered my appeal. Because the Greeks prized Beauty.

Our Natasha owns and travels with a store of lovely clothes to all parts of the world. For she is a pretty princess, and I think she knows it.

So, let me recommend – with humble duty – exercise as BEAUTY-TREATMENT.
Yr. Obednt. Servant,

The Election

6/17/2016

This year, as always, if I like a candidate, I will give that candidate my vote, and numbers of my fellow Americans will do the same.

The conventions and the campaigns to follow may clear away some misgivings and some doubts. So far, however, both anticipated party choices are exceptionally ill-received by the electorate.

Hence, too many citizens may avoid the polls. Please don’t do that – instead consider: a “WRITE-IN VOTE.”
Let that be Humphrey Bogart, or Maureen O’Hara, or Kamehameha the Great, King of Hawaii 1810-19, or name your favorite niece.

This will do little good in 2016. But a notable count of “write-ins” will mean a powerful message – and a painful – to the loser. For they will thus learn they likely would have won, had they offered a person better able to win the people’s trust.
But keeping ourselves at home will never do, because that will mean we do not care. Therein lies exceeding danger.

Another Lady Tells Me "No!"

5/27/2016

I have long been fond of exercise and, to gain a useful layman’s lore, studied some bone and muscle anatomy and kinesiology. For, real expertise is out of my reach, and “Do this – do that” directives leave much unclear.

I therefore sought mainly “first-pace comprehension” and tried to pass it on as “first-pace explaining.” For example, it is easier to give time to warming up when I learn that warm muscles deliver more of their power. In the muscular action of breathing, this brings to us a most welcome “second wind.” The experts know all this and more, yet seldom put any of it into words.

My “first-pace explainings” are a help to a fine lady who has begun “working out” with me. Our friend has lauded me most liberally as a patient, gentle, and altogether sterling, ancient pedagogue.

As twice a week is a scanty fitness effort, I inquired: “Do you keep up with your work at home – I mean – when I am not looking?”
My nice lady: “No!”
And so, with her prettiest mocking smile, “milady” shot me through the heart.

Josef Albers

5/6/2016

If you read my log you will have met one of my great teachers. Josef Albers is a second.
Albers’ color course at Yale was then the sole basic design study really foundational to our work to follow. Colored papers – torn or cut – gave more color learning than paint and brush could have supplied.

Colored papers taught also the “simultaneous contrast color-change.” One color may so alter upon different grounds that we give this single color different names – here, once “purple” and, once “ochre.”

Albers did not waste his words teaching us not to allow one content or another into the middle of a work, nor on recommending “balance.” What he said was more weighty and a deal more useful. Of a student’s painting he remarked, “I can read this. This is FLOWERS in a bowl.” It was not neglected bitsy pretties in a BOWL. To thus serve the theme and striving of a work teaches how inclusions either damage or support our effort.

        “I do not believe in self-expression.” Albers’ utterance here causes me to remember another by a friend to a foreign friend, both figures of fiction: “If you can’t be yourself, you’ll have nothing to put in the pot.” We easily miss that the two sayings tell the same meaning from opposite directions of regard.
        Albers held that the unimproved, uncorrected self was not the equal of educated and industrious creative individuality.
        The friend said to the friend, “Let not one of our bad examples tempt you. But bring to us the good you own and join it to the good already here in place.”
        It is what Albers once said to me of German and American traits – and said it in his native tongue: “Man muss beide im Guten vereinen.”   “One must unite the two in that which is good.”

Reply to Nicholas Cage

4/22/2016

        A lady poet and a friend of mine opened a series of her verses quoting Nicholas Cage. I do not recall the words verbatim, but the awful meaning was unmistakable and clear: Life is awful; we love all the wrong people; our hearts get broken; then we die.

        I trust, foolishly perhaps, for myself and for my fellows in a better turn of luck.
                                                           Our day is dire.
                                                           Right people love right people wrongly.
                                                            If your heart be broke,
                                                            do not presume to die –
                                                            repair another broken heart
                                                            imperfectly,
                                                            because you both are human.
                                                            In due time, depart this life
                                                            with Grace.

                           We are right people, you and I,
                            but bunglers in the craftsmanship of love.
                            Dreamily we look for bliss into a distant sky,
                            though our lacks need tending here and not above.

                            We are right people, you and I.

Comment:
Do today's problems come more from loving the wrong people or right people wrongly ?

Fundamental Learning

3/25/2016

Of the several fine teachers who instructed me as a young man, three were truly great. One, to those who did not know him, Charles Sylvia, the Swimming Coach of Springfield College, will be a surprise. At the start of summer over an extended weekend, Professor Sylvia conducted an aquatics school to sharpen our craft for the summer’s work of teaching aquatic skills to kids.

With lucid intellect and with concision – the need to save time obvious – Charles Sylvia complemented and gathered into clear coherence the particles of our comprehension. Sylvia then named that coherence “Basic Knowledge.”

Insights and aptitudes acquired singly come together as principles – that is, as rules we use in the work we do. If from such rules is built a useful whole, we will have gained a body of fundamental lore or Basic Knowledge.

My sketch below was drawn to explain descriptive geometry to a one-time student. The rendering is a model of Orthographic Projection, the enabling tool of the early industrial age.

In level-drafting, the model delivers the three views we mostly want, thus:

By their ground plan and elevation renderings, and deep perspective views, we might mistakenly suppose the architects and artists of the Renaissance to have mastered descriptive geometry already – not so. The work was done three hundred years later at the time of Napoleon by Gaspard Monge.

Through his edifice of fundamental learning, Gaspard Monge made himself preceptor of the progressive world, and saved that student time – not to squander, but to build and to create. His is a most excellent example of that Basic Knowledge that Professor Sylvia wanted us to learn and put to use.

You might comment on a teacher whose "fundamental" teachings went well beyond the announced course subject matter . . . .

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