There are certain levels of creativity that transcend technique.
I don’t like nearly all modern painters. But have you ever stood in front of a Van Gogh? It’s terrifying stuff. There is technique in it. He did his thing, over and over, always pushing forward, getting faster, further out, until he was simply expressing himself directly. He was deranged. If art is a look into another man’s mind, he gave us a peek into a maniac’s thought process. For example, you don’t critique his painting of the postman. You deal with it.
I think it’s twice as ghastly because he liked the guy. This is my friend. his fingers are turning into snakes.
Just when you’re reeling from that sort of thing, he announces he can take it up a notch, or ten if you’re interested. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds got nothin’ on him:
Moving on, what, exactly, made titanic egoists like Hemingway, Joyce, and Eliot flop on the floor in front of Ezra Pound, and declare him “il miglior fabbro“? It’s from Dante, and means “the better craftsman,” or something close to that.
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
— Poetry (April 1913)
There’s audacity figured into all this. Some people are good at eliciting gasps. Pound sure did. But audacity alone is just shamelessness. Madonna and a million other talentless people show you what 100 % audacity and a certain moral flexibility, bordering on contortion, can yield. It ain’t art.
The video is Dan Hicks, along with some agglomeration of his Hot Licks. I’m not sure what it takes to put yourself out there like that. He had the chops to be normal, but not the desire. He’s one of those people who needed to sail over the horizon, to see what’s out there. The danger, of course, is that no matter how far you go, the horizon remains the horizon. Whatever. At least he had time to break off rock music’s femur and beat it over the head with it while he was sailing along.
I got up at 3:30 this morning because I had to write something, or die trying. It was about the 1970s. In the dark, alone, sweltering in the silence, I scared myself, just thinking about it. I stopped for a moment to salute il miglior fabbro.
By all accounts, Bud Jamison was an affable sort of guy. He certainly had a genial face. He used to play cops and tough guys, too, but it’s his big smile I remember most. He appeared in 450 movies and “shorts” in 30 years. With that sort of resume, he must have played every sort of person at one time or another. Except for a skinny person, of course.
Most of the movies were silent. It’s almost beside the point to describe many of those. Bud tries to punch Charlie Chaplin in The Champion, which is great fun. He’s “That Guy” in a lot of ancient stuff. However, I don’t know about you, but I’m not clamoring for a re-release of John Barrymore’s rendition of Ahab in 1930’s version of Moby Dick, even if I can see Bud play an uncredited shipping agent in it. So it will be Bud’s curse or blessing to be remembered forevermore by almost everyone who recognizes him at all as the guy who suffers along while the Three Stooges do their thing near him or to him. He made 38 shorts with the Stooges, including the very first one.
My mother hated the Three Stooges. We were forbidden from watching them. Back in the day, there wasn’t much on television after school. The Stooges were run on a nearly endless loop on the off-brand teevee stations that couldn’t afford to show anything but re-runs of ancient entertainments. So you can imagine how well the interdiction about watching them went. Mom played pretty good defense when it was man-to-man, but faltered a bit when she had to switch to zone.
She testified that she was certain that if we watched the Stooges, I’d eventually hit my little brother in the head with an ax. That was just another of the endless series of moral panics that has gripped the American female zeitgeist down through the ages. Of course I would have liked to hit my little brother in the head with an ax from time to time, but I didn’t need the Stooges to urge me on. Who hasn’t wanted to hit their little brother with an ax, or drag a crosscut saw across their fontanel, or grab their nose with a pliers? But like most moral panics, there was no real danger of stuff like that happening. We didn’t own an ax.
In a broad sort of a way, there were only two camps in the recycled vaudeville teevee audiences. The Three Stooges, and the Marx Brothers. The Marx Brothers made full length movies, and the Stooges made shorts, but they were essentially weird doppelgangers of each other. It’s easy to say the Stooges were more lowbrow, because the Marx Brothers relied more on wit. But I’m not so sure that’s fair. The Stooges, like Bud, were genial. I like snark as much as the next guy, so I can enjoy the Marx Brothers movies, but in its heart it’s a bit nasty.
America has become a very snarky place. The teevee got really snarky after a while, when all the gentle humor was expunged and replaced with nothing but situational cutting remarks, doled out by the half hour. The Stooges hit each other, and made fools of themselves, but they didn’t ever exhibit a truly mean bone in their body, except by compound fracture, of course. Groucho was funny, but he helped adumbrate the proto-bile we’re all drowning in. They were both sets of Everyman, with posh operators, authority figures, and criminals taking whacks at them. The Stooges were better at taking haughty people down a peg when you get right down to it, just by being themselves, really. Like they did to Bud, when it was required:
“Gosh, I’d sure like to help. You know, I haven’t had a paintbrush in my hand in years.” There it is. That’s Bud Jamison disease, and I’ve got it bad.
You see, I’m on the sidelines now, as far as doing anything practical in the real world. At one time or another, I’ve done all sorts of manual labor that results in the world being physically altered by the end of the day. Besides the stuff I built or repaired out in the landscape, at any time in the last thirty years or so I’ve been able to go downstairs and return with whatever was required at the time, everything from a dining room table to a patched bicycle tire. Now I live in an apartment, and my tools fit in a shoe box, and I get to see people doing practical things, and think, Gosh, I’d sure like to help.
So I saw this video about mimicking oak woodgraining by a man who appears to paint scenery for lord knows what.
He’s disabled, so we have to make allowances. By disabled, I mean he’s English or British or something. He’s required by the Magnum Cortex or whatever they use for laws over there to talk with that funny accent, and call everything by its wrong name. He’s required to call shellac “button polish,” and starts blabbering about PVA, which stands for poly-vinyl-acetate. The poor sod is forced to talk in acronyms instead of saying Elmer’s Glue and being done with it. Then he’s probably got a gun to his head, and they force him to call latex paint “emulsion paint.” Just because it’s a British gun and will probably hang fire, doesn’t mean the threat won’t feel real. They really treat folks unfairly over there.
Everyone in the good ol’ USA calls every kind of paint you can wash out of your brushes (and your nose hairs, if you’re like most housepainters) using only water. Of course latex and acrylic paint (emulsion) are two different things, but no American can keep two things in their head at the same time, alongside all that freedom we keep in there. And man, did my eye twitch when he called a roller cover a “rag roller.” English, do you speak it? I’m pretty sure I do. Fairly sure. Whatever.
At any rate, videos like this turn me right into Bud Jamison. I’m sure if I told David Rowse, the pleasant and talented fellow who made the video, that Gosh, I’d sure like to help. You know, I haven’t had a paintbrush in my hand in years, he might be tempted to tell me to go mix up a batch of spotted paint. Fair enough. But in addition to being a busybody, I’d be the worst kind of busybody extant: I wouldn’t offer to help. I’d offer advice. That’s miles worse.
Of course my method is what we fellows in the painting trade used to call “quick and dirty.” You know, like having sex with a car mechanic.
Anyone can review my technique in an old couple of posts here: Graining a door.
And please remember my braggart’s motto: I can do it better than anyone who can do it faster, and I can do it faster than anyone who can do it better.
There’s a limited window of opportunity to paint the exterior of your house here in western Maine. The winters start early and end late. The days get very short very fast. Back when I lived in Massachusetts, I used to figure that once Halloween rolled around, you can’t work effectively outside anymore. In Maine, you can forget about the first 30 days of October, too.
So anytime I get a chance, with good weather, not too many bugs, not too much direct sun, not too much chance of rain, and no way to make up an excuse to avoid it for no good reason, I paint stuff outside. I had a one-day window to paint a portion of the house that really needed it, and I took it.
When we first moved here, this is what the area in question looked like:
There’s a fifteen-foot drop to your death off that platform. There was once a catwalk that stretched over to the door, but it decided it wanted to see Australia before it died, and headed in that direction. The platform was a bad idea even before that. The valley made by the two rooflines above dumps a lot of water right there, and plenty of snow in the winter. There is a flight of concrete stairs buried in the ground on the right. They built a wall and filled it in with this and that when they decided they needed a parking space more than stairs to the basement. There’s a pull chain light fixture with a broken bulb in the socket on the wall, if you need a jolt to get going in the morning.
Here’s the view looking down from a second floor window. As you can see, there’s a railing where you don’t need it, and it stops when you do. Plenty of cable TV wires, on the roof, though. Every one of the screws they used to run them along the metal roofing leaked until I fixed them. Rain indoors is a small price to pay for Family Feud reruns, I guess.
I dangerproofed the railing right away when we moved in. Just posts and the top and bottom rail, because lumber is expensive, and too much safety around the house makes dull children. But this summer, I found myself with some 2x4s hanging around and put in some crossbucks. I painted the whole thing Montgomery White when I was done, to match the house trim.
The platform was another matter. Buried under the rotting wood and indoor/outdoor carpet, I found two concrete steps. They’d come out hard if I tried to demolish them, so I decided to work with them. We made a little garden spot for pots:
Victorians liked pierced fence and railing slats like these. They’re pretty simple to make and lend a little interest to a drab spot. The plants turned in to mini-jungle pretty quick, and covered the steps almost completely.
All that was in the summer. With the days getting shorter, we have to limit the real estate we’re renovating to stay in our one-day window of opportunity. We’ll paint this corner:
It was in need of a lot of attention. That metal apparatus is the pellet stove exhaust. I’ve removed the candy cane portion of vertical pipe to get at the wall. Burning wood pellets is pretty clean, compared to firewood, but eventually the soffit and eave above got pretty dirty looking. Burn fifty tons of anything, and you’ll get soot.
The scraping was pretty easy, all in all. Just a little elbow grease. People make all sorts of mistakes diagnosing peeling paint. I could ask for opinions from internet wags and “pro” painters alike why this paint is peeling, and they’d all get it wrong. The paint peeled because the roof leaked. I showed you the metal roof above, peppered with holes from the ghosts of cable TV past. Ice dams formed in the valley, water backed up behind it, and the water got behind the siding. In the spring, it wanted to go outside, same as we did. It pushed the paint off on the way out.
If you hire a “pro” painter, they’ll probably tell you that you need to pressure-wash the house first. This involves injecting hundreds of gallons of water in to your siding under the guise of washing it. It will want to get back out in the spring too, and take the paint off on the way, so you can start the process all over again. So wash your siding with a long-handled brush in a bucket of water with a little detergent, and rinse it off with a hose and you’ll be fine. I did.
We’ve re-roofed, and I filled in at least 70-percent of the little holes, and I have a roof rake that helps avoid ice dams. I doubt I’ll have any more problems here. About half the house could use a fresh coat of paint, but this is the worst spot, so we’ll put it first in line.
This is me falling off a ladder, or having a coughing fit, or sleeping, or something similar. Before I paint, I caulk all the seams and putty the odd nailhole. Preparation is all the work. Painting is easy and fast.
That’s late afternoon sun, and I’m finishing up. Whew. I guess we made it.
[I’m painting the laundry room today. Tune in tomorrow to see if I screwed it up]
Well, here is this fellow, Joseph Zbukvic, doing the impossible, and letting you watch him do it. He’s painting in watercolors and ending up with something other than a mess. John Singer Sargent could do it, but he was a magician, not really an artist.
Notice: Many of the girls in classical paintings are dressed for the tanning booth, not for work, and descents into hell used to refer to more disturbing things than a Mork and Mindy marathon on TV
Tag: painting
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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