Welcome to my first blog post on PaulNagleArt.com. The purpose of this blog is to inform you about my work, allow you to navigate the work and learn about art and life.
July 2020 "The Pivot" Blog 002
artificium (Latin)
Origin & history I
Noun
artificium (genitive artificiī) (neut.)
artifice (English)
Origin & history
Borrowing from Middle French artifice, from Latin artificium.
Noun
artifice (pl. artifices)
-
A crafty but underhanded deception.
-
A strategic maneuver that uses some clever means to avoid detection or capture.
Blog #2 for July 2020 “The Pivot”
I would like to recognize Enzo Torcoletti, who I wrote about in “An Origin Story”. He is the sculptor and professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida who mentored me and is an inspiration to many former students and artists.
The last paragraph of Blog #1 I stated my intention to explain my long standing mindset about art. I have made a conscious change in my practice which has taken a lot of time and study.
I had an annoying experience as I was preparing to attend a conference in Boston. While reading some of the posts on a forum for professional art educators I was alarmed by an assertion of one post to remove all art made by european male artists of the last 500 years from general art education curriculum K-12. Not too shocking, and predictable given the climate in our culture. Not such a radical idea as much of 20th century art was effective at removing the institutional 18th and 19th century effects of academic art and its instruction, while unassumingly replacing it with a new academy. So this assertion by a doctoral student in art education from a major university was revisiting a tired all too obvious argument, to intentionally make a point, ignoring unintentional destructive aspects of this idea. The fixation of this ban is actually on subject matter of the “Western canon” as it is called. I don't think this person had the awareness to see it. “The Western Canon” is not subject matter, meaning, or representation of an ideal society the period tried to create. That is a product of patronage, those who paid for the art, which is a historical concern left to the focus of other disciplines in the humanities. The “Western Canon” for artists and teachers of artists is the science, design and engineering of drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture. See Praxiteles, “Aphrodite” a goddess, or Polykleitos, “Doryphoros” a warrior bearing a spear. And I assert teaching of young art makers is like teaching young readers. Reading teachers want students to read so they teach the ways of reading, the mechanics, the sounds, and then the ways of writers, the formation of letters and words so on and so forth. The goal being to create competent readers and writers who communicate effectively for the rest of their lives.
The relevance of this argument to my story is how it turned my attention. I had been in a self imposed study of drawing and painting to update our drawing and painting curriculum. I work in a large high school program where I had been teaching digital photography and filmmaking for three years. I had this thought. Photography is considered art, and film making is also art, and in each of those art forms it is essential students forgo self expression and first learn to use technical equipment and software programs before becoming expressionistic provocative artists. It stands to reason that in art classes where you presumably make drawings as a plan, design, and maybe a finished work that a certain degree of knowledge with tools, materials, and technique is not only important, it should be required. Again to compare with the teaching of reading, teaching drawing can be a focused study which delivers life long skills around design, painting and sculpture. Skills which can lead to appreciation of various art forms, creative distortions and new innovations, along with an understanding of content and context.
One day a student who couldn't be more than 14 years old told me emphatically “art is anything!”, it was 2019. What did they know? What was I to teach them if art is anything? How many people think this? How many people disregard art? This idea essentially negates that art is something? The widely diverse movements of 20th century art explored these ideas, and in this blog, I will stick to describing my pivot from the idea art is anything, to the information I found for drawing programs. My goal is for students to grow evidenced by the work they produce and how they talk about it. It is imperative their competence with drawing and composition is commensurate with their age and maturity. I found a very tough program and it changed the way I think, understand art, teach art and practice in my studio whether I'm making a drawing, a painting or a sculpture. What I found also led me to an incredible contemporary movement of like minded artists who are creating and innovating new drawing, painting, sculpture and design in the 21st century.
The first influential find was Myron Barnstone. Barnstone taught drawing, painting and design for 40+ years in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania both at the college level and in an eponymous private school. The quality of his instruction came through immediately in a very crowded video learning environment, just watch his Introduction to Drawing on YouTube, you'll understand quickly the depth he takes with his students.(https://youtu.be/KnB1E7Zhda4)
What the Barnstone foundation began to do shortly after Myron passed was release several courses of his lectures which are incredibly rich with an artist's perspective into a historical narrative of how the structure and practice of drawing and design developed. Barnstone reaches into the past to show how a knowledge once widely practiced existed through the 20th century but a relatively small group of contemporary artists carried it on. And luckily several writers recorded it in books enjoying a resurgence in popularity. I witnessed the growth of this knowledge since I discovered it in 2016, and there is a real thirst for it. Several of Barnstone's former students are key developers of the contemporary classical movement. Juliette Aristides has published a series of fabulous books on the topic.
Through Barnstone's courses I realized how the structure of drawing has a deep deep history and connection to a diversity of disciplines rooted in the humanities. This study is for everyone! It is not inherently exclusive, restrictive, or biased. And, subject matter and content is not important! I can follow this statement by saying his study of color has the same result. There are centuries of gathered information in his studio and in the life's work of online artist teachers like Cesar Santos, Stephan Bauman, and entire online schools like The New Masters Academy, where I studied drawing from a student of the famous Repin Academy in Russia, the only unbroken traditional school of drawing and painting, some 300 years, in the world.
So the Barnstone was highly influential to the pivot I made. It took me two years of work to get through the practice. While working through the Barnstone method I found other artists who came out of the ateliers which have sprouted up around the U.S. and the world. These schools are engaged in a similar venture to Barnstone, passing down the once secret technical knowledge of drawing, design, painting and sculpture to art students seeking solidly grounded understanding of art through classical training. Because of these people and the way art colleges and universities maintain the modernist tradition, now the new academy, there is a great many opportunities online to learn as much as you can about the science, practice and art of drawing and painting. I must emphasize I am able to translate what I learned for my students and there is much content to bring to them already prepared for their level, tastes and preferences.
To bring this entry to an end I will reiterate that this information comes from a long history tracing from ancient Egypt through the renaissance in Europe to the late 19th century of French and American art. Barnstone is one of those people who persisted with this knowledge into the 20th century. He does not reject abstraction, he merges toward quality, strong design and knowledgeable informed work by all kinds of artists from a variety of cultures. This is where my pivot began, this is where I started to study new/old information for my personal work and for my students. Who at the tender age of 14 know that Art is something, if anything, and who want to make something special for themselves and the world they will inhabit. They do need someone to lead them to it, to artificium, artifice, and eventually art.
Coming soon, August “The Library” Blog 003
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Welcome to my first blog post on PaulNagleArt.com. The purpose of this blog is to inform you about my work, allow you to navigate the work and learn about art and life. Let’s be honest, I want my artwork to be out in the world and I am more than pleased to see my paintings go to new homes where they contribute to the quality of your life. I am particularly attached to the recent production and the path I am on. I am very optimistic about the work I will be doing. There are many reasons for this optimism, the origins of which I’ll discuss in this, my first blog post, “A Brief History”.
In the meantime I hope you enjoy the series of works in the “Light, Space, and Air” gallery, the “Buildings and Land” gallery, and “Still Life and Objects” gallery on www.paulnagleart.com. There is accompanying text to each image which requires a few more clicks for insight into each painting.
I want to address where I’ve come from because you may have had a similar experience, you’re interested in knowing more about me the painter of these paintings, or you may be looking for another point of view, or like many of my students over the years, you may be considering connecting your life to art and that is an exhilarating idea yet daunting and full of mystery!
I went to Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida to play tennis. I didn’t have much focus on what to study but in my second year as a Business Administration major I started to study art, drawing and design. I met my drawing professor and he was a sculptor with a studio residence outside of town. I learned that he had studied at classical academies in Italy from an early age, and then he came to Canada for college and went on to Florida State University for his graduate work. He was a relatively young professor at the time. His sculpture is a modern take on classical elements. It is figurative, it is balanced, it is simple forms beset by elegant curves. He carves stone and with traditional techniques creates modernist works primarily focused on the female torso. I learned much from this mercurial talent who produces sculpture with various materials. I formed my early understanding of Art at this point and I was transfixed.
My goal was to be technically proficient and reproduce what I saw, and to pursue competence with materials. I innately understood this with little training and education up to that time. So being the immature irreverent student I wanted to know more about the radical work of modern abstract art I had learned about in art history and saw in museums. What I learned was 20th century artists rejected that which came before and reacted in opposition to their teachers, in some cases, for a new freedom and way to define the modern world. This was my idea of the time, and I found it to be prevalent through college, universities and art schools and the Art world.
I wanted to know how artists of the 20th century and contemporary artists came to their conclusions about what art is and could be. I read books, went to museums and traveled abroad to seek these answers. I pursued advanced degrees and continued my focus on contemporary art and artists. Then I became a public school teacher and maintained these interests hardening and maturing my point of view. After a long period of focus on the ideas of modern and contemporary art which informed and held my beliefs, guided my thinking about art and how to practice it, I have changed. I have done an about-face, a pivot!
I will discuss in the next blog post how this pivot happened and what I discovered. Back to this post….
To keep this brief and to the point, what I discovered is the idea of newness and novelty has a value in the contemporary art world and it contributes to the perception people have of an art object and its significance. The reality is much of that significance is derived from the attributes of the artist and how they are positioned. I am not saying that these ideas of positioning are unique to the 20th century, but there is an attribute which is missing in much of 20th and 21st century art. My point is in my development as a practitioner of drawing, painting, sculpture, I focused on how to be more novel. I was missing an entire element of significance to art, and so was the rest of the art world, except for a few who dared to continue on through the desert which was the 20th century. It was a desert of abandoned methods and techniques of lost insights and battered structures of a once highly developed visual language. It had been stripped bare and carried across the threshold into a technological postwar age. As I mentioned before, a few artists carried on in obscurity with the whole of the visual language somewhat intact, ill positioned to be noticed. To just refer to the notion of a visual language is incomplete, requisite to communicate with that language fully are the drawing, painting, sculpting practices transcendent of each generation whose weight was buoyed by these practices. Those who were pushed aside as a new era fitting itself with new images and new forms of representation quietly practiced, taught, researched and persevered in continuing the old transcendent ways.
Perhaps I am being vague, no I’m purposely being vague because this is a huge subject and it has taken me years to uncover it for myself. And I am by no means done. However for those of you who have known me throughout the period of time I am discussing here and you know of my work then and now, I am defining this as a point of departure. Perhaps that is really what this blog post is about.
I will continue this story in the next blog “The Pivot” where I’d like to share why, and how I decided to change my long standing mindset about art. I think this story will serve two purposes, the very minor aspect is to explain where my new fascination with realism and fine art painting is coming from. The major aspect is for those who love to look at paintings, have responses to them but may not know exactly how to explain the differences. Also this is an attempt to have an aesthetic conversation that honors the gifts of the past and the innovations of the present. Both have their shortcomings, flaws, encumbrances, bad reputations, crimes and misdemeanors. Why? Because it is the tracings of humanity that’s why.
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