The Real Triumph of Vincent Van Gogh

This week I am busy working on two paintings, one of the mission church at Chimayo, New Mexico, and another large commissioned piece of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The thick layering process that my works go through often involves setting one aside in favor of another so that a dry surface can set up and I can later go back over the top of it without cutting into the paint.

I am very excited to now have paintings in the Taos Fine Art Gallery in Taos, NM. This is a beautiful gallery right in the center of Taos, featuring a wide range of artists from contemporary to classic. One painting from the group of 8 works originally taken to Taos has already sold, and we're certainly hoping for a good summer season there.

I've recently been thinking a great deal about the life and work of Vincent Van Gogh. It occurs to me that I believe what dominates his persona are the twin perceptions his difficult life and his work. I think perhaps that art lovers have been far too consumed with the idea of the "peintre maudit", who lives and suffers for their work. This is, of course, quite true for many artists like Van Gogh and Modigliani - but this is not the extent of it and nor should it be. What has always struck me as amazing about Van Gogh was not that all of his works were masterpieces - clearly I think that he did some very poor quality works - but that there are enough masterpieces in his collection that we should be humbled most by the fact that he managed an astounding output of work while battling hopeless despair, mental illness, and terrible luck in love. That somewhere, when the entire world was spinning around him, he was able to find a quiet spot of optimism to create and thrive in. Later, while battling what many believed was epilepsy combined with other psychological disorders - he managed to go on working in his lucid periods, and create, even in the confines of an insane asylum - true masterpieces like the "Irises" at St Remy.

So shouldn't it be better said that he accomplished all that he did in spite of his despair and illness? Yes, I believe so. I think that the man shone through best through his work and his letters, and the picture that emerges is a person of great tenderness, of deep, sharp intelligence and sense of purpose - and someone who must have had a great deal of physical strength and endurance to spend years of hardship, often without sufficient food or self care - surviving on coffee at some points and scrimping on food in order that he could buy paint.

I think that is should also be better known that Van Gogh did not die unknown. In fact it is probably more fair to say that he died on the cusp of becoming known. He had had a critical article written by Aurier who praised him immensely. He had the respect of many of his fellow artists - notably Pissaro. It is also not generally well known that Van Gogh had exhibited ten paintings at the Salon des Independants in March of 1890, and that Theo Van Gogh had written to Vincent that "Your paintings in the show were very successful. Monet said your pictures were the best in the whole exhibition." It stands to reason that if, in 1890, a certain Claude Monet made a comment like that - then Vincent was no longer an unknown quantity. What would any of us give, if we lived in that time, to have received such praise from Claude Monet?

The legacy of Van Gogh is a legacy that lives on in the rest of us, whenever we use a blazing yellow, when we load our brushes and carve out new imagery in a thick, undulating surface of paint. Vincent broke down the walls that so many of us were able to step over so much more easily. My only wish would have been that he could have had some idea that he was to become one of the most renowned creative artists in the history of the world - then perhaps that lonely gunshot in the fields of Auvers in 1890 would have never happened.

Visit Neil Myers' official website at http://www.neilmyersart.com/

Hitch Your Wagon to a Star

This week I am working on a 24 x 30 in. canvas of sunflowers. I've always enjoyed still life painting, and near the very start of my art career I sold more still life paintings than landscapes! But I later came to the conclusion that my mentor Jean-Claude Quilici had perfected the still life to such a point to where I did not know where to go with it. I had a great fear that any still life I did would look too much like his! That is because his are the most perfect I know and I feel that they could scarcely be improved on. But over the past few weeks I realized that I had a great desire to paint sunflowers and irises again - so I figured that I would do it without trying to reinvent the genre. Just give in to the joy of doing it, and not over think the matter.

I found myself thinking about Jean-Claude Quilici again when I was fortunate to receive a magazine "Pratique des Arts" and an accompanying DVD in the mail. In the DVD a woman from the magazine follows Jean-Claude Quilici on an outing to paint at Les Baux in southern France, and discusses art and his career. During the DVD we get a wonderful change to see Jean-Claude at work, and to see his process of formulating a painting - something that not even I had ever seen directly. Quilici is a very intelligent, perceptive man - coupled with a humble nature and a joie de vivre that is quite compelling - I am pleased to call him my master and friend. I believe it was Ralph Waldo Emerson that said "Hitch your wagon to a star." At whatever points in my own art career that doubt had begun to creep in, I had the example of Quilici held up in front of me so as to say that it could be done because he did it. Keep the faith.

In other wonderful news, my wife and I are heading to Taos, New Mexico to deliver a group of my paintings to the Taos Fine Art Gallery. After May 17th my work will be directly available through that gallery for the New Mexico summer, and I am very excited about the chance to show work in historic Taos. One of the 7 paintings slated to go to Taos has already sold, even before delivery - so I am delighted!

Just this past week I posted a new group of springtime in Arizona painting on my new paintings page of my website http://www.neilmyers.homestead.com/ , so do drop by for a look. I'll soon be reposting works on "The Painter's Closet" web page as well.

And I do want to tell you all about the music of a dear friend of mine, Deanna Johnston. Deanna was one of the last women left standing on the CBS show Rockstar INXS, and she has an amazing, powerful voice that has been compared to the classic vocals of Janis Joplin. Deanna has recently completed an EP that is now for sale. I have a copy and have been listening to it like crazy - you can get a copy at her official site www.deannajohnston.net/ .

http://www.neilmyers.homestead.com/

Arizona Spring

This week and I am just finishing up 3 New Mexico themed paintings that will likely be going on display at the Taos Fine Art Gallery in Taos, NM. One painting is a landscape of Ghost Ranch, New Mexico - with the former home of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe in the image. Another is a vertical landscape that came from near Canyon Road in Santa Fe - and the last is a study of ladders and shadows against the wall at the Acoma Pueblo. Perhaps it comes through in my work that I have felt as artistically at home in New Mexico just as I have in Arizona. New Mexico is a beautiful state, with very friendly people and a landscape and history that should make anyone with a keen eye interested.

However I am happy to report that Spring is underway in Southern Arizona - birds are singing every morning with a little more gusto than usual. The days have turned warm and the buds are popping on the Paloverde trees. Soon the Paloverdes around town will bathe the desert in the most profound yellow hues you can imagine. Made all the more interesting by the fact that the branches and trunks of the Paloverdes are green! Still other yellows have preceded the arrival of the Paloverdes - two great blooms that have already been amazing this year are the Mexican Gold Poppies and the Brittlebrush. Both bloom yellow as well - or rather, the poppies more true to their name bloom in a yellow-gold tone. The Brittlebrush bloom up and down the hillsides of our mountains, mostly on the sunny side of things - and when you are able to contemplate a landscape where Giant Saguaros stand tall over what looks like a sea of yellow - then words immediately begin to fail the viewer. All you can think is 'yellow, yellow, yellow' so powerful and beautiful. It would not be a stretch to conceive that if Van Gogh had set to work on Brittlebrush and Poppies with the gusto that he tackled his sunflowers - then he would have felt at home in this all pervading blooming of yellow sun like apparitions.

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I took a hike up the Sutherland Trail at Catalina State park, and though we'd gone around most parts of that park - we had to curse ourselves for the fact that we had not yet visited this trail. But it so happened that when we did the poppies were blooming in grassy meadows, and there were all sorts of wildflowers springing up - pushed along gently by a rainstorm that had proceeded them about a week before - and around and among the yellows and golds were blue flowers, white blooms, all sorts of mixes of hues sprinkled along hillsides and beneath the towering gaze of the Saguaros. It seemed like in the desert tangle of spines and spikes and grass, every color had come to fruition at once.

I shot photos from all along the Sutherland trail, many of which I dare say will go into summertime paintings that will be posted on my website in the next couple of months. I'm just about to start a few of them.

A good friend in New York city told me that they are still experiencing a chilly climate - and that she had longed for the dry, warm air of the West. And in that same sense it made me thankful that I know this place speaks to me in a very basic sense - and that I would not be happy in a place too cold for too long. Soon I know the brutal heat of summer will be on us and we'll all be wishing we were in places like...New York, perhaps! But I love the plants and the sun - and vibrant, fiery landscapes beneath it.

Judging from the chirping and chattering of the birds outside - I'd say they agree with me.

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Controlled Exaggerations

This week I am working on retouching several new paintings, among them a large frieze like piece called "Giants of the Desert II", which is a kind of homage to our local icon, the Saguaro. This one was inspired by some of the beautiful scenes along skyline drive in Tucson. In the new way that I have been working, I finish a painting 90% then set it to dry for a week or two, thereafter the touch ups are much easier and the results are better. Those of you who have seen my work in the flesh know that the paint is extremely thick, and if you continue to work details into thick paint you cut into the texture of it - disturbing the carefully honed shapes that I make in the paint with my palette knife. The process of completing a work is slow, but I have always seen the process as a simple matter of details - it is the result which really matters.

This week I've also been watching a fantastic British documentary called "How Art Shaped the World". In this documentary the commentator spends a great deal of time talking about how research into ancient art has proven that it was hard-wired into the human brain that we should enjoy seeing something other than pure naturalism reproduced. He talks about how there was a brief period in the sculpture of ancient Greece where pure naturalism was achieved, but then it was immediately abandoned and even the human body was subject to exaggerations - commensurate with the Greek ideals of physical beauty and fitness.

I was immediately set to thinking about my work and how it relates to this principle. I've often called my work "controlled exaggerations" or a kind of "synthetic painting." I experienced very early on in my explorations of art a feeling basically identical to the ancient Greeks - that pure reality once achieved told us little - almost nothing. I heard it said that some of the early Impressionist painters had this brought home to them just after the advent of the camera and photography - and that those painters didn't see the slightest point in representing pure visual reality when all you needed to do was take a photo. Save for the fact that the images of the day would be black and white, they would be, pure reality.

So, that is to say, in the age of high resolution digital photography, what is to be done if you are a painter? For me the answer was in a few simple sensations - the first sensation was one of color, but not of normal color - of something higher, brighter, more exaggerated and sensational. And the second main sensation was one of form, mostly brought about by the use of thick paint. By starting at visual reality, but reading it through my own sensations of bright colors and thick paint - I arrived at something I felt I had not seen before. It was closest, not surprisingly, to my mentor Jean-Claude Quilici - but it was not quite that either. There was more brushwork, and perhaps a slightly more abstract color scheme. There was some Van Gogh there also, but there was also a conscious effort to do cleaner, sharper works than the often quickly produced, impulsive Van Goghs. (He could complete 3 paintings in one day. Many of mine take 1 - 2 weeks to complete.) Out of all that emerged a style, something that even I recognized had some good points of distinction.

And when I thought about these things, it occurred to me that I was creating works that would give me more happiness than the best, sharpest digital image - or the best same effort of a realistic painter - I was making something that was a combination of emotion and visual reality. The end product was a hybrid. I realized that the painterly ability to reproduce pure visual reality told me only one thing - that the person has strong stylistic skills. In truth, it tells me little else. That is why some of the best artists, the ones we talk about and the ones that have had a lasting impact on our consciousnesses - they have taken strong artistic abilities and combined them with pure emotion - and thus they have opened many, many other doors of human expression - without having stopped cold behind the door of pure visual reality.

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Success and What Comes After

This week I have just finished a new vertical of Saguaros at Catalina State Park called "Winter Light on Saguaros." An entire new group of works are now in the studio drying and posted online at:

http://neilmyers.homestead.com/newworks.html . This is my 'New Works' page.

Recent fortunate events have left me thinking a great deal about the trappings of success. For those who know me personally, one of my biggest personality problems is my near inability to slow down long enough to enjoy the success that I have already had. To me, all of that is in the past tense - and my laser-focus is usually limited to what is on the easel now, and where I think the next good painting is going to come from. It's not in my personality to say "I've arrived". I think all that will be more than open for interpretation long after I am gone. Even after some of the best sales I've ever had in January and February of this year - I remained stricken by the thought of what to do now?

That leads me to the inevitable next conclusion, and that is that it is of utmost importance to find new subjects. Even now into my 5th year of painting in the Southwest, I am eagerly looking for new subjects to explore, including those outside of this region. One of the paintings that I've most enjoyed doing this past month was "Giant Sequoias". And some art-collector friends of mine have suggest that I should attempt paintings of Mount Rainer, and also the Golden Gate Bridge. I'm eager for the challenge, because that releases me a bit from the bulk of my work which is Southwestern. In that lies the knowledge that I believe that this style I work in can be applied to virtually any landscape with beautiful results.

One of the unspoken of aspects of art is the art of finding a proper subject. The importance of this cannot be emphasized enough. How do you find new angles on the landscapes around you? Where are the landscapes in your region that you have not explored? Have you not featured any prominent aspects of your region - things that may make great paintings? What kind of painting needs to exist to fill a void of work that is not currently there? What kind of image is required to make people see things anew? What remains to be said, or expressed? Where is the fire hidden in the rocks?

I encourage all artists to spend some time thinking about those roads that have not yet been tread. We know that there are images to be explored that our viewers, and even ourselves, will enjoy and benefit from.

Never rest on anyone's laurels, least of all your own. Success pays the bills and buys the next stack of canvases - but transcendence is only going to be reached if we focus our relentless gaze on the future - on the road not taken. So, what now? That is the question you must ask yourself on all those days after. Therein lies the possibility of rebirth and creation.

http://www.neilmyers.homestead.com/

Tubac Arts Festival

This week I am working on two Sedona paintings. One is a dried tree with the red mountains of Sedona behind - the other is a series of three red-rock spires towering above a valley of pine trees. I've always enjoyed the color challenges brought out by painting landscapes of Sedona. You get every range of red to orange on your palette, and the colors are sometimes very hard to make. But if the paintings are forcibly executed and the harmonic qualities of the reds and ochres are achieved - then interesting images emerge.

At the moment I'm getting prepared for the Tubac Arts Festival, which runs from Feb. 6 - Feb. 10th in Tubac, AZ. Tubac is a lovely small town full of art galleries and a great history in our local art scene. It is situated just under an hour's driving south of Tucson, just above the Mexican border town of Nogales. I will be doing a demonstration tomorrow at Cobalt Fine Arts from 1-3pm. If you happen to be in Tubac tomorrow, drop by and say hello! There will also be an opening on the evening of Feb. 8th for myself, Fred Collins, and Natasha Isenhour.

I'm very happy that 4 of my paintings have sold before the opening has even happened - so I send my sincerest thanks to those collectors who've purchased my work.

And to give you all a bit of a scoop on one of my next projects, and I'm planning to do a painting of the Giant Sequoias of California. We had the pleasure of briefly visiting the Mariposa grove of Sequoias at Yosimite National Park in 2006. We walked down a path for a good distance to get to them, and as we did it had begun to rain. By the time we got there it was pouring rain, we were all soaking wet and the few photographs that we have from our time in the Sequoia grove have haunted me, and now my wife and I are trying to think of a way to sneak in another trip to the region to see Sequoia National Park. I see at least one painting - maybe more, of these great trees waiting to be done. And it occured to me that I'd seen photographers taking artful shots of the Sequoias, but I have never seen a painting of one. I have visions in my head of the giant bases of these trees rendered in thick paint, with their reddish-sienna colors shining through.

Thinking about the Sequoias, Redwoods, and the old growth forests of the west, one can easily see why such amazing forests MUST be preserved. I well remember those few minutes we spent in the pouring rain at the bases of these giant trees -and the feeling that I had, as if spending time among nature's gods. Everyone should feel this, and everyone should be concerned at the sound of chainsaws in our old growth forests.

http://www.neilmyers.homestead.com/

Tubac Arts Festival & Jean-Claude Quilici

This week I am in the process of finishing a large 30 x 40 inch canvas of Taos Pueblo. This appealing symphony of ochre colors always serves as a reminder of what a challenge it is to paint a Pueblo structure and do it well. Many artists like to depict single Pueblo structures or homes of that style - I attempt, much like my mentor Jean-Claude Quilici, to capture the largesse of Taos and Acoma, and to pay proper homage to their beauty and uniqueness.

At this point in the exhibit season, many of us Southern Arizona artists turn our attention to the Tubac Arts festival. This year's festival runs February 6-10, and it features countless interesting attractions and artistic displays in historic Tubac, AZ. I will have paintings on display at Cobalt Fine Arts Gallery at 5 Camino Otero, so I encourage everyone to stop by. On display at Cobalt Fine Arts are some of the last remaining unsold pieces from a large group exhibited this past November - notably "Arizona The Beautiful" and "Saguaros Under a Monsoon Sky."

This week I had an interesting discussion with a musician friend of mine, and we were thinking about the issue of originality. I believe now, more than ever, true originality is urgently necessary for any kind of real creative success. With more than 6 billion people on planet earth , it is getting harder and harder to arrive at an idea that is truly new and invigorating - especially in the art world. Yet there are many cases in art history where painters actually drifted together, because they found they came to similar styles while working separately. Braque and Picasso realized that their own experiments in painting were leading them to analytical cubism - so they decided to collaborate. Monet and Renoir often placed their easels side by side in front of the subject, and came out with canvases that were in a similar spirit, but subtly different. The post-impressionists like Van Gogh and Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec drifted together as a sort of natural extension in deciding where to pick up from the impressionists. But I have never been a part of any group of artists, and in some sense I am happy for that. Working alone I feel I have managed to create something distinct - paintings that are not to be confused with any other Southern Arizona artist. And I have always been hyper-aware of how often I've walked in galleries in the west and seen a blur of indistinguishable paintings. It was sometimes as if the signatures on the paintings could have been inter-changed and nobody would notice.

That does not mean I have not had my own inspirations and my own master. From the very early days, around 1992 when I did my first oil paintings, I was always attracted to bright colored paint and the thick application of it. This occurred with no prompting, just a confirmation of instincts. And in about 1994 I had the pleasure of learning about contemporary French artist Jean-Claude Quilici. Quilici happened to be the cousin of one of my great friends, the French professor Dr. Augustin Quilici, from Lenoir-Rhyne College. Dr Quilici showed me Jean-Claude's work, and I was enthralled. This was it! This was the place to start.

Jean-Claude Quilici has garnered many accomplishments in his years of painting - for me, he offered regular friendship and encouragement, copies of books and of his works, as well as posters with full color reproductions. He was wise enough to offer encouragement and advice, but we never studied together and he never directed me to do this or that with my work. He did what a great artist should do, offer himself as an example if needed - but leave the student to find his or her own direction. I think Jean-Claude also knew that the discoveries that really matter are those we make alone in the studio, or in front of the subject - not something rambled over in a loud, raucous discussion of artists.

To this day, I can honestly admit that few things make me happier than seeing examples of Jean-Claude's work that I have not seen before. We've met twice, and we still keep in touch by mail. His work continues to soar in excellence and vibrancy - and I openly consider him my "maitre" and friend.

I do encourage everyone to make themselves familiar with the work of Jean-Claude Quilici, and by doing so, those of you with an interest in my work will see the seeds of inspiration that have given rise to my very own paintings.

Visit Neil's official paintings website at www.neilmyers.homestead.com