Images 1 and 3 below, especially, read as illustrations to me, while image 2 acts as more of a bridge. As readers know, I tend towards quiet, observational photographs. There is a progression present moving outdoors-in, to a more intimate space.

Click through for more.

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Edward Hopper practiced deep color complentarity in his paintings, balancing cool and warm. I first noticed his use of red here, and it got me thinking:

‘Red is powerful. Hopper’s using it with purpose.‘

This got me thinking a little further: ‘How much red is too much?‘

One ‘painterly’ problem: Red attracts the eye quickly, and William Eggleston went boldly red where other man had, perhaps, gone before.

Henri Matisse went full red one time, but there’s much more: Expert lines, curves, and composition (no focal point) make me feel at home. In fact, I think this domestically-minded Frenchman’s put most of his life’s purpose into his painting.

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What’s the most aggressive, yet soothing, use of red I’ve seen consistently throughout my life?

Probably a Coke can, billboard, or truck. Check out this Arthur Meyerson photo with a Coke truck in context.

Another color problem: Color draws the eye quickly. Color is powerful. It snatches your eye and mind. The original black-and-white photographers thought color photography would distract, vulgarize, and commercialize; away from subject and composition, especially given the camera technology at the time.

Sacre bleu!

It turns out the old guys weren’t entirely wrong, as many advertisers and fashion photographers barf color all over the place. Some expertly upchuck. Others, alas, puke like Brits on holiday in Ibiza.

Kids with crayons and iPads, shock and awe pop-artist and portraitists, movie directors, and even ideologues making their propaganda, use color freely. We’re all being gradually exposed to the newer synthetic AI stuff coming down the pike. We are living, I believe, amidst an information revolution (storage, access, process and attention). I mean, unless you’re color blind, you see the world in color.

Remember that one sunset and her makeup and the city behind her all blended together?

On that note, Dear Reader, this has been one of the best approaches I’ve found so far along my later, more limited, photographic journey in life:

‘Beware of color theories. Theories in color photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point. A color philosophy comes much closer to the truth. Beware of scientific color tests. They are as quickly outdated as a timetable. Their truth is short lived. Most theories are the result of an attempt to bring one’s practical experiences into a formula. There is no formula. There are only confirmations to formulas which one has already discovered oneself. I myself love to read theories without ever using them when working.‘

Hopefully, I’ve jarred something loose inside your head.

You do the rest.

Harry Gruyaert’s celebrated, but I’d argue he’s still underrated for his mastery of color.

From Kenn Sava, Gruyaert’s not a portraitist, per se:

‘It’s not the person that interests me most. It’s the person in its environment. To me, all the elements are important. I don’t have any particular intention. It’s just what I see.

I think humans have such a great idea about ourselves, but nature is so much more powerful.’

A Conversation With Photographer Harry Gruyaert

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According to the interview, American pop-art influenced Gruyaert, potentially freeing him from elements of European formalism (pushing him into some great color work). If you’re interested in seeing fine color, atmospheric and ‘lived-in’ photography, I’d recommend Rivages.

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As for pop-art, it can often be colorful, innovative, intuitive and non-serious…on the surface.

Frank O’Hara’s mid-century American poems are surprisingly visual. The idea of a wild freedom wrapped within casual conversation; a moment to moment associative intensity is achieved through O’Hara’s form. This is often where we long to be, on the edges of possibilities, living intensely with others (even through memory, sometimes especially through nostalgia and memory).

Also, the poem suggests this freedom as a return to our animal natures; which involves a certain view of Nature, functioning as a Romantically primitive return to Nature. Frankly, it’s a pretty good love poem.

Animals

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days.’

–Frank O’Hara.

As for color, perhaps this also doesn’t mean color must be completely abstracted into the ambitious meaning-making mission of Mark Rothko. I mean, the sky is blue, the trees green, and the balloons red and yellow.

‘Mark Rothko sought to make paintings that would bring people to tears. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” he declared. “And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions….If you…are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.”

Seal the compound…I mean chapel. (come to Houston, land of little zoning, fair pilegrim).

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Readers will know this blog maintains skepticism for pop-art Neo-dadaism and the consecration of ordinary objects along the Duchamp line (‘American Standard’?). Making Duchampian exceptions rules, even clever rules, can desecrate what’s important.

Everyday people, living right, must keep the important things in view, namely wife/husband/children/parents/death/taxes/health/time; not merely their own impulses nor artistic visions (artists remain acutely aware of such indifference). Meaning is usually to be found within love for another, and this usually means everyday people (& the everyday within us) lives between the sacred and profane: The 9-5 grind and the unexpected conversation about grandma’s death, the enveloping silence afterwards.

Artists, at their best, point towards wisdom, truth and beauty regarding everyday things. All the artists I’m linking to are doing so in one way or another, although ‘how’ and ‘how well’ are endlessly disputed.

I’ve already seen a thousand urinals in my life, Marcel, even a few in my dreams.

The triumph of the conceptual over the actual, the mass-produced over the created; perhaps these aren’t entirely healthy trends. The retreat into (S)elf, and the retreat into irony alongside (A)rt as commodity, perhaps these are dead-ends as much as they are freshly-paved streets. The lamentations of art as (R)eligion could be a leading indicator of a deeper hunger for meaning; a hunger with as many bad as good outcomes for artists and everyday people…

Some food for thought, Dear Reader.

As a contrast, here’s some American art that’s more grounded; some realism with psychological depth, albeit with impressionist influence.

Night Shadows by Edward Hopper:

The black and white was made in 1924.

I think Raymond Chandler’s High Window is among the best of the American detective novel.

Here are some quotations of his, if you’re interested.

“Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America.”

Here is the link. It’s been a long time since they just reviewed the book and not the author.

Boy, oh boy, James Ellroy: America’s best current historical crime fiction writer, showing up to entertain, shock and vulgarize: