MESSINGER'S TULIPS
I have been looking at a recent painting by Diane Messinger called Tulips I. Here is a photograph of it.
I first saw the painting hanging on a wall in the artist's studio. It intrigued me because I found myself
liking it but could not figure out why. I now think I know: Tulips I tells a story to which I resonate for
the simple reason that I recognize it intuitively as both true and important.
Trying to tell that story in words would reveal it to be fairly complicated. Even told well, it would not
necessarily be understood by everyone hearing it. There would ensue debates, disagreements,
arguments. The painting, by contrast, tells the story in one instant -- elegantly, in other words. A canvas,
a little paint, a few brushstrokes: one, two, three -- almost slapdash. “It is thus,” it says.
What is thus? That that is how we see!
“Who is we?” I hear you ask. “That certainly is not how I see. I have never seen tulips in a vase looking
like Messinger paints them.”
I haven't either. But then, I have never tried to paint them. I have never looked at tulips in a vase with a
painter's eye. I have never focused on them wondering intently how to paint them. I am pretty sure,
however, that were I to do that, they would look more like Messinger's tulips than like yours or mine. If
you don't believe that, try it.
Painters are urged to paint what they see, not what they know. That sounds like good advice, at least
when addressed to someone who wants to paint realistic-looking landscapes. Forget everything you
think you know about trees, for example; just look at them and paint what you see.
In actuality, it is somewhat tricky advice. Once you look hard at a stand of trees with a view to painting
it, you start to see things that you know are not there. And the longer you look, the more of them you
see.
Suppose that the trees are pitch pines and that you are looking at them on a sunny summer day. Their
trunks and branches are for the most part a shade of reddish violet, paler here, darker there, shifting into
a deeper bluish violet in the shadows, and so on. Seen against the equally variable greens of the pine
needles, or the dappled ground, all those violets grow in intensity. And seen against the branches, the
greens become greener. Look at the changing scene long enough and it turns into a riot of vibrating
color. And in the midst of it all, the solid, steady shapes of trunks and branches seem to come alive and
join in the dance.
If your experience is like mine, that is what you end up seeing. But if you paint it, it will not look much
like a stand of pitch pines.
One tends to write off this kind of seeing as the effect of retinal fatigue or of eye strain. It can be that
occasionally, but it is not usually. Very familiar with retinal fatigue, a painter learns to recognize the
phenomenon and to give his eyes a rest when it sets in. This is something else. But please notice that in
the tendency to diagnose eye problems so as to explain away the dancing trees speaks the assumption
that a stand of trees does not really look like that. Well, what does it really look like? The way it looks
when you do not look at it too carefully or too intently, or do not focus too hard? (What counts as too
hard?) The way it looks in a photograph? The way it looks when you force a measure of detachment
upon yourself, which is to say, when you shut down some of your receptivity? The way it looks to an
arborialist who is not trying to paint it? The way it looks most of the time to people who do not dignify
a stand of trees with a second look?
Attention and focus itself, especially when animated by a vigorous agenda, changes what we see. Is
attention ever not animated by some agenda? How about the agenda not to let oneself be carried away –
the agenda not to look with an agenda, with half-dead eyes, so to speak? If you pay attention to this sort
of thing, you'll notice that that too changes how things look. They'll wear the look of things not looked
at. That too is a particular look.
Back to the tulips.
My wife is an avid gardener. She also loves flowers. She maintains a so-called cutting garden just so
that, except during the winter months, our vases in the house always have fresh flowers in them,
including tulips when those are in season.
Walking into our living room or bedroom, I'll notice a vase of tulips lovingly arranged. Their colors
enhance the space. My knowing that my wife placed them there also makes a difference. They would
not look the same if, for instance, we had a maid whose morning duties included putting fresh flowers
in every room. Still, the quality of the attention that I pay those flowers differs greatly from what it
would be if I were trying to paint them. I just see a vase of tulips with distinctive shapes and colors
presented to advantage. That seeing is mixed with appreciation for my wife's gesture. That is all. Were I
intent on painting that vase, my focus, animated by that project, would cause me to see a lot of other
things, like the colors dancing.
Would those things be there to be seen? They would to eyes similarly animated.
The moment I choose to paint tulips in a vase, and before I even start painting, I have begun to look at
them differently. I have singled them out from all that I could possibly paint. And all the complex
passions that drive me to paint in the first place come together in that particular choice and animate my
focus. What do I actually hope to accomplish with such a painting? The answer depends on why I paint
at all. It is not likely to be simple, but whatever it is, it changes what and how I see.
Why did Messinger choose to paint the tulips in her vase? I am guessing that she glanced at them with
a painter's eyes and was astounded by the possibilities she discerned, astounded perhaps by what a
humble vase of tulips looks like when you really look at it. She saw a story in it that was both true and
worth telling. It was a story about tulips, about herself, but ultimately about us. So she took on the task
of capturing the essence of that story in a few brushstrokes.
The story would not necessarily be interesting, let alone moving, if all it revealed was that she sees
things in idiosyncratic ways. It is interesting precisely because, in relation to the way we see when we
merely tiptoe through the world barely engaged in it, or crash through it oblivious, we all see in
idiosyncratic ways, and the painting forcefully reminds us of that.
This is not a a particularly pretty truth or one that we necessarily welcome. In its misleading customary
version, it purports to be that to eyes that look at it carefully or honestly, the world will reveal itself to
be unexpectedly beautiful. That is not inevitably so. It may reveal itself instead as disconcerting,
seriously off-putting, or downright harrowing. At the very least, it will reveal itself as stranger than we
are comfortable with it being or would like it to be. A less courageous artist than Messinger would
make some concessions to that fact. Her tulips would look more like tulips are supposed to look, and do
to the safely half-closed eyes with which most of us navigate through the world most of the time. Such
a painting would be comforting as opposed to disconcerting. By contrast, Messinger's is
uncompromising -- in your face, so to speak. This is the world I see, she says, and chances are that I am
not the only one. How about you, for example?
All of this assumes, of course, that one does not instantly flee from the sight into soothing talk about
how this is what expressionist painting does – as though the latter had basically nothing to do with
human affairs but served merely as an outlet for people with strange visual obsessions or oddly intense
private emotions to have their say. Occasionally interesting perhaps – good color composition, etc. -but nothing to do with the rest of us!
The flight into that sort of cliché and obfuscation is also driven by an agenda, namely the desire or need
to invalidate a discomfiting truth. Eyes animated by it will see Messinger's painting as, well, Modern
Art, a visually incomprehensible exercise in God only knows what. They will see a trivial painting in
which the yellows push the blues and vice versa, or the reds the greens. Nothing new about that! But
that is the beauty of Tulips I, that even that hostile impoverished reaction represents a perfect
confirmation of the disturbing truth it tells about us.
When she paints the human figure, Messinger's paintings are quite a bit harder on the eye and therefore
more likely to trigger flights into dismissive obfuscation. Her flower paintings are gentle by
comparison. But they tell the same story, are aimed at the same target and arguably more effective
simply because they are more likely to hit it.