Artsplaining, with John Springer, Pt. 2

Continuing my interview with John Springer, an artist living in France

Salt Marsh Morning, John Springer.

Welcome to the second part of my interview with John. For part one, see here.

So since we’ve been talking about color, how would you describe your color palette? I’m looking back over several pieces and to my eyes there’s a through-line. These colors are all found in nature, sure, but you’re focusing on something specific. Not just brown, but a specific brown. Not just yellow but...like, ochre? Ochre is a good name for a color, right?

I would ask you to show me in a painting exactly what you are talking about, but I think I can answer your question. I’ll just quote Van Gogh:

I study nature, so as not to do foolish things, to remain reasonable; however, I don’t care much whether my color is exactly the same, as long as it looks as beautiful on my canvas as it looks in nature. 

When you’re talking about not yellow but an ochre and not brown but a specific brown, you’re referring to the nuances of color. Ochre is a good name for a color. It’s a broken yellow (a tertiary color, which I’ll explain below), and it’s a tube you can buy from the paint store. It’s beautiful as a color, but if you just put that down in your painting and then start applying other nuanced colors, there’s no relationship.

So how do you find the color that relates to ochre? Instead of buying ochre from the art store, you find it by creating an ochre on your palette from a combination of the primaries red, yellow, and blue. How do you get from yellow to yellow-ochre? Well, it actually will come from adding a little purple, which you have to make by mixing a combination of your reds and blues. If you go to put a purple in your yellow and your color turns a mossy green, then there is too much blue in your purple and it needs more red. If your purple when mixed with your yellow turns muted orange, then too much red.

So you experiment, and as you search for your warm colors you are also creating your cool colors, their complements, spreading them organized around your palette, and always looking back to what you’re seeing in nature. Yellow-Purple, Red-Green, Blue-Orange. These are the complements, and they complement each other in warmth as well. They agree with each other. But they still are not colors true to the colors of nature because they only contain two of the primary colors. It’s only when you mix some combination of red, blue, and yellow that you create colors that actually exist in the universe. All light is some combination of these three colors. Tertiary colors are broken colors. That is what it means when one says breaking colors. 

You break the colors so some of all color exists across your whole painting. Why do this? Because it creates a visual harmony. Color temperature, or hue, is what allows depth to be rendered. Warm colors read as closer, cool colors further away. But it’s not that easy. The difficulty and the wonderful mystery comes from the nuances. Values are essential, how light or dark the strokes appear regardless of color. Imagine that you are colorblind and can only see in black and white, but within that limitation you can see the entire range of the lightest light to the darkest dark (the values). If the values are rendered right then what you will have before you is a wonderful drawing, and that tends to make for a wonderful painting.

View of Arles, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888.

All good painting depends on studying values, which means all good painting demands the ability to draw. Not drawn objects and distances, but drawing the light. If you can render light in drawing, drawing with your paintbrush while creating depth with color, you’re on the way to creating something whole. And where the you comes in is that you are the one observing, mixing, putting strokes down, observing the stroke, observing nature, mixing, putting a stroke down, observing, looking. There is a certain thoughtlessness happening. Actually what is happening is you are deleting superfluous ideas and giving full birth to your imagination, which in the case of a painter is expressed in color and values. When you step back and let a painting sit, and do more and more, putting enough distance between your emotional attachment to the work, eventually you will look and compare to find that some work is better than others. These are where the paintings have formed a harmonious whole. This is a way to become a colorist. 

My palette (for now): I have six colors. A warm red, a cool red, a warm blue, a cool blue, a warm yellow, a cool yellow, and some white.

Doge’s Palace, Morning Study, John Springer.

Doge’s Palace from San Giorgio, John Springer.

This is a vague and uninspired question, but I’m not sure how else to dress it up. What is it like to be an artist right now? What’s going well and what’s going less than well?

Here’s an answer to what is not going so well — because artists have been wanting this forever, and it is a cliché and goes without saying — but I’m going to put you to sleep and say it anyway.

Extended contact with nature is happening less and less with people, in general. Maybe it has been that way since the creation of the wheel, then the steam engine, then interstate system, and then scooters. (I am stealing John Muir’s/Francis D’Assisi’s thunder now.)

For a concrete example, I worked for an outdoor school once where their bread-and-butter was a month-long trip in the woods. Semesters were even more ideal. Life-changing experiences guaranteed (or definitive hatred for sleeping in tents). Anything less being a compromised experience. In the past decade or so they cannot fill these trips and are making them shorter and shorter. Like, two weeks is even a big ask for the diminishing clientele. There is less perceived value of long-term immersion. So via art I am committed to finding a way to bring the extended contact with nature back into society through both creating and encouraging looking longer. (This message is brought to you by The Sierra Club.)

So why is it good to be a landscape painter now after saying no one cares? Because it is easier to get passionate about it as it goes away. And I hope that people are going to begin to look more for meaning in art beyond just something pretty on the wall. Landscape is something everyone can connect with. If I can paint humanity within a landscape, which I try to do, then I hope that it will eventually be appreciated more than just wacky colors and stylistic renderings that artists latch to because they look good above the couch. Not much of my hopes or methods have met with success yet this go-round. I am going frustratingly slow in putting my work out there. Not because I do not have work but because I am trying to go about the art business methodically and not just in your face, which is apparently the only way.

So you’re raising a point I want to explore, which has a couple components to it. First, how do you navigate that problem of painting as art versus painting as decor? Obviously it’s not really an issue for me as a writer; my problem is even more hopeless. I’d love it if people paid me just to signify their refined taste or cultural credentials or whatever. That would be a great problem to have.

But really, no one wants their creative work reduced to a commodity or, like, content. Musicians are struggling here, too. Is there any way to avoid this stuff?

Yeah, writers must be faced with an even worse dilemma. No one is going to hang an essay on the wall. That sucks.

I think for painting as art vs. decor, it comes from your mentality before you even begin a painting, and this can exist on both the writing and music level, too. The thought of “paint to sell” instead of “just paint and see what happens” is what ends in decor, or products. It’s not necessarily an artist’s flaw for wanting to sell because that’s the underlying nature of the current art world.

Say someone is just beginning and they do two paintings. One is more liked by their viewers (however large or small the pool is) than the other. So the artist is incentivized to create more paintings like the popular one. And the artificial selection continues. The artists are of course making it themselves, but their success is totally governed by the greater committee, so their work is at least half governed by outside forces. So what, right? Shouldn’t artists get feedback on if their painting is good or not? In the right setting, yes, but when there’s no basis for measuring art out there other than what is trending then that is harmful. Maybe the most harmful thing.

On the flip side is an artist who ignores any outside insight and purely follows their own intuition. I really think this rarely happens successfully because either the artist claims total individuality by being encouraged by the greater committee and then really doing what everyone wants, or they just refuse to take any insight and go down rabbit holes of experimentation which yield no results.

But how to avoid all this and create untainted art? I think it takes an acceptance that it’s going to take a while to make progress and get anywhere before you grow. You need to step away from distraction. This is something no artist wants to hear. But look at almost any famous artist from the past — musicians and writers, too. They had bank rollers of differing proportions to allow them to sit in the creative incubator and just practice and fail over and again until they came up with something amazingly individual. Cézanne was rich and spent his whole life just painting around his parents’ home. Van Gogh — who was struggling, for sure — still had a stipend from his brother. The Beatles had their time to hang out in the studio and make their last albums, which through their seemingly dysfunctional sessions transcend anything they had yet made. The Band, too, with the Big Pink. This is where the creation of timeless stuff comes from, because they’re just digging deep into their own practice, while also having a group of mentors or friends around them who they trust in providing good insight.

Obviously this isn’t the perfect formula, but this happening with enough artists overtime is bound to pump out a lot more solid art than just following the current whims.

It’s strange that art like Monet’s, which was originally considered scandalous, is now the sort of thing you use as a screensaver or see in a dentist’s office.

For Monet and the waterlilies, those are his masterpieces. The culmination of a lifetime of practice. You can stare at them forever. The thing is, they are beautiful in their immediacy, and they are iconic — so you see them everywhere getting watered down (pun not intended) which is frustrating. Unfortunate. I think this whole new Van Gogh Experience is the worst thing to happen to Van Gogh since he cut off his own ear.

Wheat Field with Cypresses, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889.

Van Gogh and Cézanne had no audience while they were alive, though. Very few people “got it.” The Beatles and The Band obviously didn’t have that problem. So how did Van Gogh go from utter failure to a borderline lifestyle brand? That’s a little uncharitable, but you know what I mean.

Van Gogh was an art dealer for three years in his uncle’s galleries long before he got into painting. That’s where he developed his eye, discovering how some artists go about making strong and cohesive paintings. Cézanne had a similar exposure experience in his early years as an artist in Paris surrounded by artists and daily access to the Louvre. 

There is the mentorship factor, too. Cézanne learned to paint from Pissarro, who was a student of Corot, the premier landscape painter from the school of 1830. Van Gogh indirectly learned to paint by studying artists in depth such as Corot, Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Millet. Then both artists experimented with what they knew; practiced, practiced, practiced; looked to nature; saw more; learned more; did all of this ceaselessly, and eventually it all melded into their authentic form.

Comparing this sort of historical experience and mentorship to the musicians mentioned above, they were creating something new, and also they were the bridge to the music from the past. And they knew it sounded good because they were comfortable and confident in what they were doing, even if the greater public did not get it yet. It was the group collaboration, kind of like the artist circle collaboration.

Ville-d’Avray, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, 1850-1875.

But why weren’t the artists appreciated at the time? The suppression of the new alternative art being created by the police state Academie des Beaux Arts. Ingres’ influence and determination to stifle anything that was different carried on all the way until basically the beginning of the twentieth century when Impressionism had become accepted. But that acceptance of Impressionism was still in small circles and not at all across the board. And Van Gogh’s work, which was even more innovative, was delayed in catching on for even longer. Cézanne was declared by the Impressionists the best of all of them, especially by Monet and Renoir. Picasso, the rising star, attached himself to Cézanne and so brought fame to the dead artist. But he was mostly appreciated in America and his fame in Europe came way later.

There’s infinite baggage associated with how Van Gogh is viewed today. Forever he is known as the crazy artist who cut off his ear and gave it to a prostitute. Yes, that happened. People also claim the reason his artwork is so wavy and psychedelic was because he either was a schizophrenic, or he was constantly drinking absinthe and hallucinating extreme colors and painted cattywampus trees and upturned mountains. All of these things mainly because “he was crazy.” He absolutely suffered from mental illness, the exact diagnosis of which we can never prove. He absolutely drank a lot, but so did everyone else. Yet anyone who spends a few hours reading his letters will realize there’s something way off in the common narrative and that he may have been more clear minded, methodical, and intelligent than is assumed.

The way he’s a brand now is because his paintings, whatever people think about him, are relatable to most people because they are marvelously colorful and different from anyone else’s. The issue now is that enough people have delved just a little bit into him as a person and have made him a champion of mental health. Now everything about him, these murals and IMAX experiences, are about him as a tortured soul outcast that we can sympathize with and learn from psychologically. Denouncing this sounds bad. I think it’s great for people to connect with art on a broad scale. But the public thinks this is what he would have wanted.

What has happened is a distraction from the art itself. Any of his paintings in a museum people just see as reflections of themselves — someone who also had anxiety or was neglected. The art was all Van Gogh was dedicated to. The humility of his work is what makes his artistic personality so powerful and thus his work powerful. He absolutely wanted to move people deeply. But how we view him now is so far removed from the art. That trend removes us from all art, or at least how to look at it. Artists today think (because the world tells them) that all artwork is supposed to be about themselves, or about some group of people. That’s what schools teach now.

Castres, Evening, John Springer.

Castres, Morning Sketch, John Springer.

How often do you think about failure? Obviously I’m not talking about Silicon Valley-variety failure — i.e., failure backed by money, or failure as a legitimate career credential — but actual failure. Setting out to do something and losing. Do you think about that?

I think we have already covered my approach to failure in an individual painting (get up, try again), but in terms of on a grander scale, I would say I think of failure about 30% of the time. But that 30% weighs a lot more than the 70% dreaming of a bright and innovative future in the world of art dealing. 

For failure as an artist, I see that as having my artwork disappearing, being put in attics and eventually thrown away. Most artists want their work to last, and I am one of those. I paint on canvas with oil, which has a long shelf life if people are willing to take care of it. I’m not selling drawings on napkins. But the desire for longevity, of my artwork living after I die, comes from a determination for what I put into my painting to continue, not just one painting that I really like and do not want to see destroyed. An example of the latter is like when you just get done with a painting you think is good and drop it in the dirt or it falls on your palette, ruining it. As much as that gets me (and it does happen) I shrug it off in funny frustration. 

The failure for me which is not an option is the disappearance of a painting tradition. This sounds arrogant and is, I guess. I don’t see myself as a lone torch carrier, but the fact is, few artists these days prioritize the practice of painting over the product. I don’t really know how to say it, but the world of figurative painting is being swallowed up, or already is, by contented mediocrity. “Great! That sold. Keep doing that and I will be a success.” I don’t really think that many painters today have lofty dreams of their work becoming timeless. I think the dream of the modern painter is to become successful enough at selling your work to be able to compare your success with that of your peers who are in more traditional careers and have vacation homes. The idea of there even being a lineage that continues today from artwork of the past is sort of a laugh to most people. 

I am not sure where the fault lies for that. One could blame modernism, post-modernism, post-post...but I’m no expert on that. Maybe it’s just that there is no room today for considering the past as important as the present (if not more so). It is an idea we don’t have the patience to consider. 

I am hereby sealing my (hopefully temporary) reputation as a snob.

I don’t think so. Besides, better to risk being seen as a snob than to settle for being mid.

To wit, you mentioned cave painting earlier. Have you seen Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the Werner Herzog documentary?

Oh yeah, I have seen that. It’s amazing. I listen to the soundtrack often. Although you can’t go in the real caves anymore they have made some pretty awesome reproductions near the sites. Cave painting is unreal. I think there are many subtle links back to it in artistic form throughout history even to the 20th century. An older artist I know once said that not all cave paintings were created equal, which I found abominable at first. Then actually looking at the different panels in depth, of course that is true. Then it’s not just archaeology anymore but something to learn from.

Any other films, books, podcasts, etc., you’d recommend for people interested in art history or theory?

I would recommend History of Impression by John Rewald. It is the definitive work for that period of art history and is an amazing read. Artists’ diaries as well such as Van Gogh’s letters or Delacroix’s journal are great resources for insight and inspiration. Reading poetry, too. 

I would also recommend the book The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. His theories and discussions on architecture and civilization are endlessly applicable not just to art but to living in a society as well.

And The Lord of the Rings.

As an artist, what advice would you give to anyone who wants to make stuff — anything broadly creative — but is struggling, or just getting started, or struggling to get started?

I would say to someone getting started not to force it. Just let it happen. Do not go too fast. Don’t think you need to achieve any initial success to call yourself an artist. Once you are committed to an art form, then you are an artist. Look at your life as an artist or a maker of things as an endless practice with lots of failure. If you don’t find yourself getting it exactly like you wanted it from the beginning then you are doing it right. The main thing is to just keep creating and never become satisfied and comfortable with an achievement. There is always something more to discover.

Fountain Aix, John Springer.

Thanks for reading! And thanks to John for several months of correspondence, a lot of which I (harshly) cut for length. Maybe we’ll continue the conversation another time, or maybe I’ll interview another person who’s more interesting than myself. Maybe you!

For more of John’s work, check out his showroom and Society of Irregulars — and if the mood strikes, support independent (human!) artists.