Stefan Umaerus - Blog 2012, Painted Mountain

Blog about the art project Painted Mountain, 2012. My E-mail address is: stefan@stefanumaerus.com

Painted Mountain

Art project by Stefan Umaerus & Chely Depablos

With our Thank you to Geraldina Whaley-Ewers, Atlanta, Georgia for placing Painted Mountain for future exhibitions at museums and exhibition spaces in the southern states of the United States of America.

With a special Thank You to Marbian Depablos and Francisco Gómez, Caracas, Venezuela.

This is my blog about Painted Mountain, a series of painting about my experience of the Amazon rainforest, and one of the most ancient geological formations on planet Earth, the tepuis, or table mountains in south-eastern Venezuela, on the border to Brazil.

I visited with Chely a few years ago, to prepare for the art project. The paintings are based on my memories, my photos from Canaima, Roraima, the Ayuntepui.

Mine is not a literal representation. It is an interpration. I am a translator. My paintings are short hand.

Aug 14th, 2012

Most paintings very close to completion. Details to be completed last. Chely arrived in Caracas for the family wedding on Aug 11th.

Details from the latest paintings for Painted Mountain.

Aug 2nd, 2012

Looked at the latest of my painings all together this morning. They are coherent visually and as a theme. The most exceptional painting for me in this series is The Guarded Landscape. Difficult to paint. Parts of this painting are very close to 19th century landscape painting in color and texture, as in some of the paintings by Courbet at the Metropolitan Museum. I virtually never paint like this. The composition and the colors made The Guarded Landscape come alive. Painted Mountain is a painter"s painting and makes a virtue out of versatility. It is a return to when I started to paint and tried every expression imaginable.

The view of El Avila from La Boyera, El Hatillo, Caracas, 2012

My first year at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, I took over the studio of a young man who had committed suicide. His drawings and notes were in the cupboard. I remember them very clearly. They were drawings of heads drawn in perspective delineated in very thin dotted brush strokes in the primary colors of red yellow and blue. One of his hand written notes said:

“There is no way more efficient to wipe out a person than verbally, by word of mouth.”

I paint to create presence in the world, for me and for others. Though I very seldom paint people or portraits, my art is one of delineation. I am a universe within myself, and it contains many pictures to paint. For me art is a gift. You have it or you don't.

Chely and I ended our participation in Embrace! by visiting Berlin. The cathedral scarred by bullet holes, too many to count. My inner vision looked east, to Pomerania and the Baltic Sea. Past history and spider webs, Drops of water glimmering in the sun.

July 30th, 2012

Asked Chely to buy extra art supplies at New York Central by sending photos of what I need extra. Chely sent a photo from the counter at NY Central. First time I buy something long distance by Blackberry!

Painted Mountain is turning into an egg tempera extravaganza. Looking at the paintings by the American master of egg tempera Andrew Wyeth on the Internet in the evening.

Starting to see new possibilities for Painted Mountain. The world as is and Painted Mountain opening doors of perception. I just have to be there to make it visible. Herman Hesse wrote a book about this. Do not remember the title.

July 24th, 2012

Could not buy extra anything in the hardware store. Today is another national holiday in Venezuela.

Continued with the painting El Labirinto de las Piedras. Could not get the expression right. Realized the painting had turned into another painting from my sketches, a much happier painting than the graveyard of El Museo Napoleonico. Gisa's dog Napoleon's ears are taking shape as part of the painting and his presence guides me. I want my paintings to be alive.

Showed the painting to a young member of the Depablos family clan. His opinion was that it looked very cosmic. I agree with that.

Anyway. Painting the details in the evening on El Labirinto de las Piedras, I am swept away by my thoughts. This is the spirit of “Toyen”. The subtle shifts of nuance and other worlds breaking through.

Woke up with a nightmare of being in a political rally in East Germany, during the time of the DDR. The forest in the morning clears away the cobwebs of my dreams. Wish it was always that easy. The dogs start barking when I pass by on my way to the national park. The middle class and affluent Caracas is high security, or in Spanish; “seguridad porque la inseguridad”.

Quote
TOYEN, Marie Cermínová (September 21, 1902, Prague – November 9, 1980, Paris), known as Toyen, was a Czech painter, draftsperson and illustrator and a member of the surrealist movement.
End quote
from Wikipedia

Details from El Labirinto de Las Piedras, Stefan Umærus, 2012

July 20th, 2012

Final touches for three of my paintings. Painted Mountain is taking on a life of it's own; rich in symbolism and in color. Painting the pictures is not quite as I expected. Wake up in the morning thinking I should be more open, not do finished compositions. I do quite the opposite. Turns out this was the solution. Painting is like cutting gems.

Now the first four paintings are present every which way.

Detail from The Guarded Landscape, Stefan Umærus, 2012.

Above: Details from The Fog and the Fury, Stefan Umærus, 2012.

July 11th, 2012

Will call the painting I am working on today "The Guarded Landscape". Too dark in the evening to see if colors are all there. The cross is there, open to interpretation. Lay awake at night wonder what it means. Looked it up on the Internet. Not surprisingly crosses come in many variations.

Quote
The cross is one of the most ancient human symbols, and is used by many religions, such as Christianity. It is frequently a representation of the division of the world into four elements (Chevalier, 1997) or cardinal points, or alternately as the union of the concepts of divinity, the vertical line, and the world, the horizontal line (Koch, 1955).
End quote
from Wikipedia

Divinity vertical. World horizontal. This makes some sense. There are around as many countries in the world as there are tepuis. All armed to their teeth, and as guarded as the steep mountain sides protecting the mesas. This is why I have exhibited in many different countries, six to date. One node is taken out, another one kicks in, just as with the Internet.

With past reviews in all the world's main languages, my work should be ironclad. The normal interpretation and evaluation of art is local and by nationality only, so I am caught in a paradox. To take this bull by the horns is my greatest challenge at the moment. One of our friends suggests I should become a brand name, to become competitive with nations and corporations, or to quote a line from Carl Theodore Dreyer's 1928 motion picture about the trial of Jeanne D'Arc: Inquisition: "Who taught you the "Pater Noster". Jeanne D'Arc: "My mother".

Detail from Joan of Arc, 1879. Jules Bastien-Lepage (French, 1848–1884)
Oil on canvas. In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. New York.

July 10th, 2012

Continuing with seven paintings, all at the same time. Painting tempera under paintings like in renaissance paintings in thin layers.

From left to right in the under painting for "El Labirinto de Las Piedras" - working name - petrified Napoleon Bonaparte with hat. The ears of our friend Gisa Colasante's dog, also named Napoleon. Gisa thinks it is super cool that Napoleon now will be famous. Finally a portrait of a small bird turned to stone. This is the portrait of a colibri I found trapped, trying to fly out through the glass in the closed window in the space where I paint. The bird dropped dead when I came in the morning and pretended to be dead. I opened the window and the colibri did fly away in the morning light.

I never know exactly what to paint next when starting on a painting. They present themselves as enigmas with many layers of meaning. I try to resolve them as I work with them. They show me the way. But not always. Sometimes I see something clearly in mind as a starting point. This is how I started "Painted Mountain".

With todays painting I started to see the center as a cross, like the red cross, but with better proportions. Started to draw the cross shape thinking it should be aluminum-leaf. Discovered that would destroy the whole image underneath the cross shape. Realized the cross was there when I finished painting for the day, but as a negative image. Just have to make it a final image.

July 6th, 2012

Finished the drawings for six paintings in three days. One is complete.

Gave a short introducton to Painted Mountain to Marbian, Chely's sister, yesterday evening. Thank you to Marbian's hospitality I am creating this art project in her new house.

The wild and dramatic beauty of the tepuis is our planet as it was early in geological time, pristine, millions of years ago. This is because the area remains remote, isolated and high above sea level, The mesas at an altitude of 3-4000 meters are cold, wrapped in clouds, humid and barren. A multitude of rock formations. The forest below on the plateaus is abundant and deep green. Explorers have visited the tepuis, and explored caves the length of the island of Manhattan.

Above: Details from my first painting for the series Painted Mountain. Oil, tempera, aluminum- and copperleaf on canvas.

Chely and I are not explorers of geography. We travel the vertical paths. This is what my paintings express. This is the world as is 2012.

The mesas are sacred ground to the indian tribes of Venezuela. The territory of the Pemón shamans.

Thank you for giving me the gift and to allow me to translate this guarded landscape in a parallel time and space; ours.

July 5th , 2012

Have been working twelve hours straight, with just a short break for lunch and dinner for two days. Will continue today with sketches for three more paintings.I resolve compositions when awake in the night time. Realized I had to emphasize their presence as paintings, anchor them in reality as art works and let color speak for itself. Everything here grows and decays fast and in abundance. The sunlight is bright, the colors are intense and the shadows are deep and dark.

Flying over the Ayuntepui, which Chely and I did a few years ago, the flat surface on top of the tepui looks barren and forbidding. The table mountains are isolated habitats, high above sea level. Almost impossible to reach on foot. Many are unexplored. The scale of the landscape is beyond imagination.

The landscape is trying to tell me something. It took me a long time to figure out the basics of the message, and why I paint at all.

Some tepuis are the area of small countries. The images of the mountain sides, the mist and the forest continues in my mind when I close my eyes in the darkness of night when I paint in the day time. The scale and velocity of the images is nothing I could formulate myself, the images are like a motion picture. Our guide in Canaima, Eulalia, said she traveled the tepuis like this as well. Eulalia is a pemón, an indian tribe on the Gran Sabana. Chely asked Eulalia if somebody from another country could travel the tepuis like she did. Eulalia and I found the question irrelevant, and we kept silent for a while, before answering.

This blog is as much about my memories - I exhibited in Caracas twenty years ago - as it is about Painted Mountain.