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We all frame our own unique and personal universes with the limitations of our perceptions, beliefs and thoughts. We do this consciously or unconsciously or a mixture of both. These are the limits of our personal world view.
A frame is the border—the edge of our ability to perceive, know or imagine reality. In art it usually surrounds the edges of a work, especially a painting, thus physically defining and expanding the work's space.
Both physically and metaphorically our frames can expand or contract. Human thought energy has been measuring, expanding and contracting around the subjects' heads as far back as the nineteen-seventies by Yale University scientists. Thoughts, conscious or unconscious -- and a belief is a thought – are things.
Stick three inch wide frame around a painting and the work needs to take up more wall space. As children mature into adults their frames of reference and understanding enlarge. Spiritual growth involves letting go of ideas and beliefs, often ego driven that hold us in, keep us small.
There is an idiomatic expression, sometimes said when one feels desperate and is reaching one's limits, “I am being driven over the edge!” That edge is a metaphorical cliff, the edge of a personal frame.
Like many other artists, especially contemporary and modern, I often paint “frames” on the canvas or support of my paintings. The frames are almost always the words of (letters are strokes) psalms because psalms are prayers. Prayers reach out, usually hopefully, sometimes desperately or with joyous gratitude to the beyond of our physical, even spiritual limitations, to the IAM that some of us glimpse but never fully able to understand, experience or know.
Often a phrase from the particular psalm that frames a painting is chosen for the work's title. Last night as I was painting Psalm 19 , my favorite, I had some insight into my frames and work.
From the very first very small experimental paintings using the Hebrew letters from Bible texts for strokes to symbolize elementary physics pre-particles, the essential building blocks of our physical universe, I have tended to paint frames. It somehow seemed “right” and since I was just fooling around, experimenting, I allowed my artistic intuition full rein.
Originally, when I began to use the Psalms regularly for the frames, the idea was that the frames would usually be gold or silver, maybe copper metallic.. I still intend to do that, but so far, the frames are almost always golden.
I realized that for me gold tends to signify that the painting is religious. In my several visits a week to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I was a girl, I spent a lot of time in the medieval areas. I wondered at the various kinds of golden halos, but mainly I looked an the many, and various versions of Mary with the baby Jesus. This may seem strange for a young Jew, but I tried to fill all the time I could by pursuits away from a difficult home life, and the great museums and galleries, especially the Met were my havens. My young attraction to those loving Madonna mother is evident but not religious. [Note: the irony and blessing is that without that difficult home life I would never have spent all that time in the museums and galleries learning or become the artist I am today.]
I did recognize that I was looking at religious art. The medieval works use gold, a color and substance almost always missing from the paintings in the other, more modern galleries. I came to associate gold and silver with art and items (such as menorahs and candlesticks) with religious significance. When I see gold on a painting, I tend to look for a spiritual intent.
So, I am signifying my religious intent by painting frames around the inner narrative imagery with gold and/or silver.
However, I also recognize that by using precious metals I am signifying hope, even optimism and blessings, when I intend to symbolize the borders of our understandings. There are times, when the gold I use is darker, or various shades are used to indicate the shades of understandings and beliefs.
The “frames” are painted fairly quickly (for me) and are becoming more painterly strokes, more what I learned from the Frans Hals, whose strokes portray intensely human, earthy subjects, who I would often visit, after the more ethereal images of the Met's medieval wing. So the strokes of my frames are thick, textural, and passionate with joy or desperation. They are usually purposefully “messy” as are our unexamined beliefs, whether we hold them with some degree of consciousness or not.
In the Met, if one goes upstairs to the galleries of the Impressionists and Post Impressionists, it is easy to see how revered these works are by the frames the Met has selected for them. These are the same types of gilded ornate frames that are used for most of the museums other treasures of Western Art that are pre-modern, or Renaissance and beyond. As a young, basically artistically ignorant girl, these frames signified the works were important and accepted, as accepted as the more natural imagery and works of Rembrandt, Vermeer, David and Delacroix.
The newest art was that of the Abstract Expressionist and Pop artists. Even at MoMA , a place that certainly revered Modern Art, the frames were different for the newest works – sometimes there were no frames at all! Between the ages of twelve to fourteen, I assumed that this indicated these new works were less revered by those who ran the museums and thus really knew about art.
Then, as an older, and artistically wiser teenager (I had Bertram Katz teaching art history at the High School of Music and Art) I began to appreciate the courage of the unframed artists whose works defied being framed in. Picasso's Guernica and Monet's large Water Lilies were unframed at MoMA, and those works always resonate with me.
Andy Warhol used the gold paint understanding from religious icons and the gold frames idea when he made Gold Marilyn
I suppose to some unconscious degree, expensive, ornate gold frames signify financial value. Secondary market art galleries use them for that purpose on paintings.
In a previous artistic experiment (that went nowhere important enough for me to pursue), I experimented with painting using frames. The main thing I appreciated about those earlier works were my frames, which were readable words or frames more like the type often painted by Roy De Forest, which visually refer back to the narrative subject of the painting. Those initial frames were not gold.
My painted frames do not usually extend to the edge or near edge of the frame (leaving space for an additional wood or metal hanging frame), but have another area or painted narrative realm outside the painted frame of the narrative imagery. That area is important.
Originally and often when working with acrylics, I painted an initial background, which is something I learned working with oils. Artists use this to unify a painting. However, my background was painted with a color that was not fully mixed, creating variations and interest, especially since it was thinned and the strokes of the text I use for it, usually Deut . 6:4, overlap creating variations of texture and color.
When I began to also use watercolor pencils on paper, which creates translucent effects, I had to choose between painting the area outside the frames distinctly, or painting the initial imagery and then superimpose the frame upon that so the edges of the imagery surround the frame. I use both, depending on the intention of the work.
Recently, a new type of gesso has been developed that allows artists to use watercolors on canvas. I had already experimented on paper with using water color pencils (so I can write the letters of my symbol-strokes) with ink, gouache and finally acrylics. Painting on canvas gives me a better, stronger support so I can apply the many layers of painted letters, especially when using acrylics. My newest and largest works begin with layers of work with water color pencils, which are then covered with additional layers of tiny symbol-strokes in acrylics.
This new mixed media way of working gave me a new problem, as I needed to something that would reference the unknown or unrecognized universe(s) beyond the frame of our prayer and hopes, dreams, and conscious or unconscious beliefs. The first painting of this lot had the inside imagery, and then sat plopped on the easel for two weeks while I figured and prayed my way around this dilemma.
My current answer is to paint referencing both the physical Torah scroll texts and those of the medieval Bibles, laboriously created by scribes in illuminated manuscripts. So I paint in dark, blackish ink, then wash a scroll colored glaze over that, using the Deut. 6: 4 letters for strokes. Then the gold frame is painted so that it overlaps the inside edges of the outer unknown along with the edges of the inner reality narrative of the painting – again more layers, but much larger strokes usually. I am just completing the third of these paintings.
I find that almost all of the paintings of the Genesis: Sunset-Sunrise series, except for the very smallest and several where I was experimenting with new materials (such as watercolor pencils on canvas) have gold frames. It just seemed intuitively correct as I went along, as if the painted frames are a part of the concept of this series.. Now I think I understand why.
The Imagery in the Genesis: Sunset-Sunrise series involves landscapes and seascapes. There may be a building, such as a lighthouse or windmill, but painting sunsets and sunsets means being outdoors with a hearty view of the sky. Usually, the paintings narrative imagery comes from scenes and photographic studies that actually exist no more than five miles from my home and studio. I have watched as development has come in and overtaken so much of the woods and nature, I have loved since I first saw it when I was four years old. As in most areas of the world, the weather has become strange, as I write this we are having a heat spell, it today was like a summer day, over 85 degrees in the middle of October, and although I should be raking leaves, they are not turning and instead of the heat, I have a fan on in the studio where I write and paint.
I want to frame the actual landscapes my neighborhood in gold and call to the land that is special and needs to be treated with reverence. It is my personal echo of how the earth needs to be treated with care and reverence.. For me that references the latest scientific information as well as biblical theology which shares a reverence for the earth with many religions, including that of most Native Americans, such as the Shinnecock Nation, whose reservation is four miles from my place.
Theologically and scientifically we are never able to perceive the full scope of physical reality, no matter how acute our senses. For instance, we know there are X-rays and infrared light, yet we can only perceive them using instruments, never with our own eyes. Although we cannot expand our senses (only correct them with eyeglasses, hearing aids, surgery, etc.), but we can expand our understandings, explore our unconscious and limiting beliefs and expand the boundaries of our personal unique frames.
Tuesday, October 9. 2007
To read more about the painted frames often found around Judy Rey Wasserman's paintings, see: Why the Painted Frames (or Borders)?
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