A Painting’s Meaning is Inherent in its Strokes

A painting must have strokes of some kind, whether made with a brush, air brush, pen, pencil, crayon or even poured on to a support (think Pollock)or else there is no painting. A painting can exist without color – there have been paintings that were all the same color, most famously black or white. Thus paintings can vary as to perspective, design, use of color, and actually any other elements except there must be paint or medium of some sort and a support. One way or another some kind of stroke is essential.

When I was in sixth grade we studied Morse code. I was not very good at learning it as I was instantly entranced by the patterns made by the dashes and dots. My classmates and I would write out words and then simple sentences using the code. I suppose the teacher thought she was giving us lessons in history and science, but I was applying it to art. Or thinking it could be applied somehow.

On weekends my Dad and I would do things together, and when the weather was inclement I always had the same suggestion, to go to an art museum. So, within a week of the Moonset of the Morse code curriculum, I was standing in front of a work by van Gogh, who was always my favorite, when I had an epiphany. Vincent van Gogh's dots and dashes were Morse code!

That van Gogh was painting in Morse code seemed so obvious to me, that when I turned to ask my Dad if I was correct, I instantly thought better of it. If it was so obvious, then I would only look stupid for just seeing it. It was at this moment that I began to appreciate the very strokes in a painting.

As a child and most especially during my middle and high school years, I spent an unusual amount of time roaming in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Once I was in middle school, they were my safe havens, accessible with my student's bus and train passes, also free for me as a student, plus they were warm and dry, providing me with an escape at the very least twice a week after school, plus a morning or afternoon on a weekend. Thus, for six years I spent between 8 to 12 hours a week freely roaming these museums. The guards knew me and I knew them by name too.

I recall taking a print out of Morse code with me once so I could “read” van Gogh's messages. I spent a whole afternoon working at it to no avail. I blamed myself, for as I said, I wasn't much good at Morse code. There was also the problem that some of the strokes overlapped and partially obscured others. Was I seeing a dot or a dash? Yet, I had learned to appreciate van Gogh's strokes.

It was a good thing that the guards knew me, and respected that I would not harm or touch the paintings or do anything too wild. I still have better than normal sight close up (I can read the finest print easily) and I would practically stick my nose in a painting to get up as close as I could. I would memorize some strokes or a color and rush around to a painting I wanted to compare this vision to while I retained it.

I learned how the masters used strokes to convey mood, shapes, perspective and design – and meaning . Most great painters have a style all their own and often that includes their brushwork.

Islamic and Jewish art has always included letters, often as a part of the design or as the design itself. Christian art, especially medieval and iconographic art can include writing, especially a title or biblical reference to the work. Chinese and Japanese have included letters, Modern artists have included Andy Warhol using advertising words, such as Campbell's Soups, Robert Indiana and Jasper Johns who used both letters and numbers. In contemporary art, we have Word Art.

The letters in the kinds of works mentioned above are also some of the strokes of the painting (or strokes combine to create the letters or numbers). They are meant to be read and understood.

The strokes of the Impressionists, which broke drastically with everything that went before, were meant to capture the light. Once the subject of a painting was not actually the narrative portrayed, but something else, in this case the light portrayed by the strokes, Modern Art was born.

When I began the experiment that led to founding UnGraven Image, I approached the project based on Impressionism, reasoning if the Impressionists painted light, which is what physicists measure speed by and what those of the Abrahamic faiths believe was the first created, why not paint to show the smallest sub particles that are the basis for our physical universe?

Once I had the idea for using the Hebrew letters to represent the smallest pre-particles (called membranes, strings and/or wave-like motions by physicists) I needed a bunch of Hebrew letters to use. I began with Shabbat prayer books, and very soon had Hebrew Bibles as that best fulfilled the theology my experiment was based upon.

Since both the theology and scientific theory I was painting is unseen by our naked etyes and even by our most sophisticated equipment (electron accelerator) so far, it seemed appropriate to overlap and glaze over the letters thus making them also basically indecipherable and certainly rendering the texts used for the strokes as unreadable. Although I now realize this was a giant leap in art, for me it was barely a small step based on my previous misunderstanding about Van Gogh's strokes and Morse code.

If strokes are essential to a painting, then the strokes themselves give an intrinsic meaning to each and every work. In UnGraven Image theory, the strokes are symbolic and taken from Biblical texts to symbolically represent the essential pre-particles of the universe. Although I paint images that are secular, the basic meaning of the painting is in the strokes themselves, an understanding that for all artists has always included the very strokes chosen and painted.

Below is a close up of a section from a painting by Judy Rey Wasserman entitled, Thy Way Was In The Sea, 2007, acrylic on canvas.   It gives a good view of the strokes.

February 6, 2006