G: Nah, If I were to do it people would say that, when you do it, to paraphrase Linz ... "Newberry's an artist, so anything goes!"
New: O.K, what I am all about: …vibrations, channeling a million flights of energy, that cris-cross, in thin colors with different textures, thoughts and passions collide, play, defuse and blood pulses and litheness soars…
Michael N.: ... yes, there are many cases of great artists, like Rubens, using assistants to paint or sculpt parts of works.
G: Sigh! Well that's 2 down! What's next, Van Gogh really had both his ears? Tell us about Michelangelo, I am confident that is 'safe' ground.
New: Yes! Not about Van Gogh, but Michelangelo is sublime by every standard I know except that he used male models for his female subjects!? Damn, it is so fucking hard to be a pure and truthful artist!!! He did try to have assistants on the Sistine Chapel but fired them and re-did their work when they couldn’t even paint garlands up to his standard.
G: On a serious note, your comments about Rodin, Ruebens, and Koons - how does this affect your estimation of them within your hierarchy of the term ‘greatness’?
New: Koons is easy. He is a great postmodernist.
Michelangelo and da Vinci set the awesome standard of artist as creator and not as an artisan. They took commissions and preceded to elevate everything they touched and the collector/patron swallowed it. Rubens is a great, great painter: passion, knowledge, spontaneity fly off his brush. But he is no Roark, as he was on the “take” how to “knock-off” huge commissioned works of royalty, making ugly subjects beautiful, having assistants paint in entire backgrounds…definitely a pragmatist.
Rodin conveyed his fear of seeing work by Michelanglo and get this: when Rodin saw the Captives he felt relief, in the sense that he was given permission not to finish off work. The Captives are a group of unfinished sculptures of M’s. M did not conceive of them as finished but simply had more work than going on than he could all do, like making the dome of St. Peter’s, Sistine Chapel, The Last Judgment, etc. Rodin went home rationalizing the Captives has the standard and preceded to leave whole sections of bodies in raw clay states, or leaving whole parts of bodies off. Which is no problem for studies or sketches but is very questionable if we think of “masterpiece” has a great completed work. BTW, anyone who is familiar with life-drawing has seen or experienced how much easier it is to have an interesting drawing as a spontaneous gesture sketch…and then the pain and horror of developing a full on finished work, and how much easier it is to kill the piece the more you work on it. A finished piece full of life is not anything to take for granted.
BTW, I am here in California, and I have already painted 11 plein air landscapes, it has been exhilarating, everyone has different colors and moods…
Michael
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The Thinker
