DONKEY COLOR

donkey jen in landscape

I see Donkey Jen out the window rubbing her neck in the fork of the dogwood tree. The woman who took care of Jenny before Jen came here told me donkey liked having her neck rubbed, but no place else and definitely don't touch her legs. I put my hand on Jenny's back and she moves away. I touch her leg and she pulls back. She doesn't even like me to touch her neck until after she's seen me petting Jack. Then she wants to be touched. Every time I've seen her at the dogwood tree, she rubs both sides of her neck in the tree's fork, scratching herself. I keep my hands off both the donkeys mostly. It's how they are with each other. When they reach out to touch, they kick. I talk to them and leave them their own rights to their bodies. Their color is so enigmatic to me, I look at them in awe sometimes for the colors they are. Closest I can find a name for is Taupe, a tan color. The name taupe doesn't tell me anything. It could be every shade between dark tan to light tan. I tend to think of their color as "landscape." Their color fits well especially in a semi-desert landscape of their origin, something like south Texas desert. Here, they blend into winter landscape of the grass turned light brown, the leaves on the ground a darker brown, rocks, a kind of pointillist landscape of varieties of brown from light to dark. Browns are often difficult colors to use painting as brown has such a tendency to look flat, lifeless, dull. Yet, when an artist like Neil Jenney paints dirt, the brown is vibrant and still looks like dirt. Marcel Duchamp's series of cubist/futurist paintings, Nude Descending the Staircase, Bride Stripped Bare By Bachelors Even, were painted in shades of yellow between raw yellow to dark brown, and they are retinally vibrant staying in the range of yellows, which I see brown the darker end of same color.

 

donkey jack in landscape

 

The meadow, in effect, is yellow now with a haze of green shoots slowly changing the meadow's color to yellow-green and eventually green, half of which is yellow. The taupe or beige color that the donkeys are has no name as far as I know. Their color is an enigma to me because I cannot find the foundation color to start from. One way of looking at them, I'd want to start with Paynes Gray. Another way of looking at them I'd want to start with raw umber. Another way, I'd want to start with white. Each one of those ways would not be it. It's brown, it's gray and it's off-white. I suppose it is what we call a neutral color, a color that doesn't appear to be a color, colorless. To complicate it further, Jack and Jenny are not the same color. Jack's color leans to gray, but when I look at it as gray, it's brown. When I look at it brown, it's gray. Jenny's variation of donkey landscape color leans very slightly toward cocoa. Seen individually, they seem like the same color, and side by side the difference is radical. Deer carry a variation of the same landscape color. It's the original camouflage. Hunters wear clothes with complex camouflage patterns, largely because hunters shoot from trees in this time. On the ground, it seems like the natural camouflage or black would work best. I'm not a hunter, so I can't say. The donkeys have made for themselves a place to roll in the dirt. Jack scratched at the grass in the place he wanted to use until the grass is gone from a circle with the circumference of a donkey body. They keep one spot in the meadow for dust bathing. The dust keeps fleas and other bugs down. When I put my hand on Jack's back, a cloud of dust rises the same color as his back. I wonder how much of his color is determined by all the dust in his hair. 

 

jack left, jenny right

 

The woman I bought Jenny from told me when she got Jenny (Daisy), she was eat up with fleas. She covered Jenny with used motor oil. It worked. I don't question any further for Jenny's reluctance to be touched. That oil stayed in her hair until weather eventually cleared it away or it was washed off with soap, equally terrible for the donkey. I know Jenny hated it. I choose not to push her beyond her will, knowing she's been through a torment from hell. Animals are as vain about their hair as we humans are. I tell her she has beautiful hair. Jenny loves being talked to so much, I get my interaction thrill from talking to her, speaking into her nostrils like they are ears. She is smelling my breath and feeling the exhalation from every word. Jack isn't particular about being spoken to into his nostrils. He just likes being talked to. This morning I found his braying note. I've sought it for some time. This morning I went out the door and he started singing. I found his note and sang it back to him. It was cold this morning making puffs of breath cloud with his every bray. I loved it that I'd found his note. He sang a note, I sang the note. We went back and forth like this, Jack looking at me like to say this is really fun. He walked to me singing and it seemed like he couldn't stop, he fluttered his lips and made grunt sounds winding down. I handed him a chunk of carrot. It was fun for me that I finally found his note, though am unable yet to get it without Jack's lead. This morning in slanted light they appear darker than later in the day. Photos I get of them in full sunlight, the side of the donkey in shade is almost black and the light side nearly white. The color lightens with sunlight. If the color lightens in the sun, it must darken in the night for round the clock camouflage. I'm recalling that I cannot see them in the night, even when I know I am looking at one of them. I find donkeys with the flashlight and when I turn the light away, they vanish. The hair must have a reflective quality to it, mirroring both light and dark.

 

 barnett newman

who's afraid of red, yellow and blue?

 

That's where I would start trying to mix a color for either one of them, a light color and a dark color. I've not even made one attempt to mix their colors. For me, no color is the hardest color of all to mix. I've begun making sketches of the donkeys, painting them dark red. I want to make basic, simple images of them red, outlined in blue, on green below and blue above, colors straight out of the tube. I'm out of white now, so thought I'd not use white. Enough is left in the tube to take care of the noses and bellies. I want basic, simple, red, yellow, blue, green, orange, purple. No blacks, no whites. Three small ones are in progress. I want them to be about red, yellow and blue. I think of Barnett Newman's magnificent work I had the great good fortune to see before it was destroyed, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? It is among my very most favorite works of art I've laid eyes upon. I love its bold red. It seemed like about twenty feet long. I slowly walked the length of it feeling the red. It was powerful. Brings to mind the time I had only ten minutes to see a whole Vuillard show, which I wanted to spend all day with. I nearly ran, no time to spend with any one piece, so I opened up, put mind into hyper-drive and felt it. It was every bit as memorable as the Newman. Memory of Vuillard is dark sage green. It feels like I got more of Vuillard in those ten minutes than if I'd spent three hours. It would be forgotten by now if I'd received the show leisurely. I'm choosing to reduce the colors I use to red, yellow and blue, primarily, basic, raw colors. From years of buying tubes of paint, I have plenty, no need to buy more. If I don't already have it, it will not to be necessary. Whatever paper, canvas, canvas paper, wood I have is what I'll use. No buying anything except turpentine, dammar varnish and linseed oil. I could use some new brushes, but the ones I have still work. Who says I need to use a brush? All I want to paint now is red donkeys very simply.

        

edouard vuillard

 

 

neil jenney

 

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PAINTING SPARTA COURTHOUSE

sparta courthouse day

 

 

 sparta courthouse night

These are the two most recently completed art objects. I've been at them for several months, mostly drying coats of oil-based paint. The back wall, the colors, each have seven or eight layers of color. I cut out one square and one rectangle of corrugated cardboard for each color. I painted one side of the cardboard with one color and pressed it onto the surface, rubbing it as evenly as I could for each layer. The two outer rectangles were given the same sequence of blues, and the square in the middle got its own sequence of blues from light to dark. Each layer of paint did not print evenly in its own way. I like the translucent quality of oil paint. Each layer shows some of the layer under it. I find that color depth can be found in several layers. If I were to use just one layer of blue in each section, it would be dull and flat, the colors would have little vibrancy. I built the layers, a couple weeks between each application, until I was satisfied the color had reached a vibration I was looking for. Vibration is the word I use here, because it's the word I mean. I was looking for the vibration I see in a Mark Rothko work, the colors suggesting the light is coming through them like stained-glass. In the case of the day courthouse, I used several shades of orange between canary yellow and almost red. It was depth in the colors I was looking for. Each layer I'd assess while it was drying and felt it needed another layer. Kept on like that until the layer I assessed had the quality of light I was looking for. It's hard to name, like that pink suggestion of an aura on a dove's dust-colored feathers.  

 

neil jenney

 

It has been several years I've wanted to paint the Sparta courthouse, but have been unable to find the way I wanted to paint it. Can't get a good photograph of it for the dozen or so wires draped across the front and all the highway signs on the pole at the corner. It is a photogenic courthouse and no way to photograph it without the distraction of wires and signs. I did get a photo of it in the coffee shop window that was quite nice, full sun on the courthouse. It was clear as a photograph on the window and all the words on the glass had the courthouse for a background. And it was easy to get the picture without getting a selfie in the reflection. That was the only photo I've made of the courthouse that had the zip I think of verging on art. I'd been looking at approaching it in the least brushstrokes, the least lines, let its shape be its art. This had been floating around in my head for some years, but I hadn't made any attempt to apply it. One afternoon in the coffee shop with nobody there to talk with and I'd finished the word jumble puzzle in the Winston-Salem Journal, I sat on the stool at the bar, gaping out the window, adrift in not-thinking, and saw it. Rectangles of orange, four vertical white lines, a pyramid on top, framed in white. Just a few lines. Reduced it to architectural intent, its drawing-board composition: county courthouse. It occupied my mind for several days looking for how to approach it. I was thinking on a flat surface. I found two wooden boxes I've been keeping for probably fifteen years, waiting for the vision of what to do with them. I had some strips of wood that were the right size, cut them to length, columns. The boxes had a sliding lid on them. I think they were originally meant to hold two liquor bottles. They were minimally put together in a factory.
   

neil jenney

 

I liked that the boxes were so simply made they were like a blank canvas. All I needed to do was apply the paint and fix the vertical posts in place. First attempt was thinking I could superglue the posts into place and they'd stay forever. I laugh at myself now. That didn't even come close to working. Nails it had to be. Two five-eighths inch headless nails at either end of each column. Had to hold the nails with needlenose pliers and tap-tap with the hammer. It was easy through the outer pine of the box, then it hit the fir the columns were made from and it was like driving them into steel. Bent a few. Drove the nails below the surface with a punch and filled in the holes with finger spackling. Painted the whole box with a coat of acrylic primer, the columns too. It was after painting it all white that I put the colors on the back, took as long as needed. Had two boxes, but didn't take to making two. First reason: I'm not a factory. I like everything to be the first time. Eventually, it came to mind to make another one blue, day and night. This way I can make two that are not the same. They're independent entities and they make a pair. I like them best as a pair. They are two distinctly different feelings. The one is warm sunlight and the other is cool moonlight. The sliding lid only needed the white pyramid and the blue above. The finger hole I let be the sun and the moon. Chose not to put something in or behind it, gold for sun, silver for moon. That I didn't like. But I do like letting the color on the wall or whatever is behind it, around it, its context, be the color in the circle of sun or moon

 

neil jenney

 

Light, whether window light or from a lamp, casts shadows from the four vertical lines across the front onto the colors in back, changing the colors. The shadows cast on it make vertical rectangles increasing the variety of shades in each color. The shadows become a part of the whole. Moving my head back and forth it changes continually. My feeling about this image is a fusion of abstract expressionism and minimalism. Hearing a tape by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Creative Fire, she told of how the forest was the original sanctuary where one could commune with God, Goddess. Trees became symbolized in columns around temples. The columns make a sanctuary of the scene behind them. In town, it is the courthouse. In my wooden boxes, the scene in the sanctuary is color play. It was all play. I refused to take any part of it seriously. I had nothing to go by for what colors I was seeking, layer upon layer, just waiting to see which layer brings it to the feeling I was seeking. Feeling is the only word I know. It was not feeling like anger or sympathy, a totally visual feeling, felt only visually. I can only think of it as looking for a particular vibration, not a vibe projected from what I "want," but by feeling after each application of color, each new vibration.  Mind was in there too, making decisions. Then there is the pyramid held up by the four tree trunks. I thought for about five seconds how fun it would be to paint a caravan of tiny camels walking across the front of the pyramids. That turns it into a cigarette commercial and abolishes the simple lines. Not going there. Whether these painted boxes are art or art-wannabe is not mine to decide. In my own estimation, I think they touch art a little bit. I feel like I reached the original vision. It's always disappointing at first to see the vision materialized, an object in the world of matter with my name on it, a thing. The glow of the vision is gone. I feel like first visioning it was pretty accurate to how it worked out. Asked do I call it a painting or a sculpture, I suppose I'd have to say sculpture, if necessary to pick either/or. Could also call it a painting because I did not make the box. I'll go with painted sculpture.

 

neil jenney himself

 

 

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