Robert Francis James

I have to work constantly, but not in order to arrive at the finish, which attracts the admiration of imbeciles. I must strive to complete only for the satisfaction of becoming truer and wiser. — Paul Cezanne One of my teachers used Cezanne’s Still Life with Water Jug to illustrate good composition. Her point was: although unfinished, the painting holds up, as a result of its careful design. Cezanne often left his paintings unfinished for fear of ruining them with a mistaken brush mark and because he strove not for closure, but “only for the satisfaction of becoming truer and wiser.” I asked the teacher whether she’d ever leave a painting unfinished. She answered, “No, because I always want to express myself completely.” Since childhood, I have loved unfinished paintings. I recall staring for hours on end at Stuart’s unfinished George Washington hanging above the chalkboard in my elementary school classrooms, thinking, “How perfect it is!” For better or worse, I often leave m...

I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting. ―  Paul Nash Paintings of wars may be our least favorite genre. Unless they’re heroic—like  The Death of Montcalm or  Washington Crossing the Delaware —museums rarely display them, and you almost never see them in homes. Given the thin market, painters have shunned the genre, unless commissioned. Two of my favorites who worked on commission—both landscapists—were the British surrealist Paul Nash and the American realist Peter Hurd. Paul Nash (1889-1946) trained at London’s Slade School of Art and the famed Omega Workshops, run by members of the Bloomsbury Group. When World War I broke out, Nash volunteered for officer training. A broken rib sent him home from the Western Front in June 1917 to recuperate. While hospitalized, he completed drawings of the front that were so well received they were exhibited in two galleries, and as a resu...

If you want to become a painter, you can; but it goes hand in hand with difficulty, worries, disappointments, melancholy, and powerlessness. — Vincent Van Gogh The agonies. They visit artists more often than tourists visit Disneyland. Van Gogh named them accurately: difficulty, worries, disappointments, melancholy, and powerlessness. A painter in one of my classes, for example, has been working for months on a family portrait. She can’t let it go. She paints and paints and repaints the same three small areas, hoping to perfect each likeness. The teacher and the other students have begged her for weeks to stop, but she’s unwilling. She’s suffering the agonies, those same blue meanies Van Gogh described. In another of my classes, the teacher reacted strongly to a tonal painting of some azaleas I had done between sessions. She asked why I’d painted it tonally. After all, flowers are pretty colorful. What was I thinking? I told her my painting was based on a black and ...

  We all lean toward prolixity. — Samuel Butler I’m putting into conscious practice Harold Speed’s advice to “leave out the details” and go for a “large and simple statement.” (Speed’s is identical to John Singer Sargent’s advice to “omit all but the most essential elements.”) And so serendipity and the fates must have colluded to put in front of me “Brevity,” a passage from The Notebooks of Samuel Butler . A scanner  if there ever was one, Butler studied painting at several London art schools before leaving the field for a career as a writer. His time there left him a lifelong pal of the painter Charles Gogin. In “Brevity,” Butler describes a chummy evening’s conversation with Gogin (one of many recounted in The Notebooks ). “I said that in writing it took more time and trouble to get a thing short than long,” Butler writes. Gogin replies that it was the same with painting. “It was harder not to paint a detail than to paint it,” he says, and “easier to put in all...

It is a great happiness when men’s professions and their inclinations accord. — Francis Bacon Over 41 million Americans work as freelancers, according to Forbes , and despite a booming job market—the best in five decades—most want to stay put. In a recent survey , 82% of fulltime freelancers said they’re happy working on their own and 76% said they’re satisfied with their careers. Only 7% said they planned to look for a permanent job. Forbes attributes freelancers’ job satisfaction to the risk-taker’s mindset and a penchant for control. The magazine makes no mention of happiness —the sweet spot where, in the words of British painter Francis Bacon, professions and inclinations accord. I think that has a lot to do with. You could accurately say I’ve had two professions and am now engaged in a third. For two decades, I was an ad man; for two more, a copywriter; and now I’m an artist, a profession I love and hope to pursue for at least two decades, although you never know. I have to...

  Like the members a ’60s reunion band, 50 protestors gathered in Manhattan’s Columbus Square last week for the “ Ruins of Modernity Tour .” The event—meant to be a raucous gallery tour at the Museum of Modern Art—was the fourth of 10 planned protests against MoMA, whose donors and administrators, the protestors claim, are “colonizers.” Their organization, the International Imagination of Anti-National Anti-Imperialist Feelings, is calling for a “post-MoMA future” where billionaires no longer control the institution. The group comprises “art workers, organizers, activists, thinkers, friends, lovers, and teachers” who oppose “the institution of MoMA and the systemic harm it perpetuates.” While “MoMA respects the right to protest,” according to its director, museum guards denied the Ruins of Modernity Tour entry when it arrived at the front door. One protestor was struck by a guard. “Now, it’s personal,” said an eyewitness. MoMa claims the protestors brought trouble onto thems...