a new direction
May 8, 2005
Wake Up. Wash Face. Do Routine. Now Paint.
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

CHRIS OFILI'S watercolors at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the spring art season's rapturous sleeper, are of imaginary heads. There are 181 of them, all the same size, of men and women in bright African garb, deliriously colored and intricately detailed. Mr. Ofili is, obviously, the British artist (lately transplanted to Trinidad) whose "Holy Virgin Mary," with elephant dung, caused a ruckus a few years back when the "Sensation" show was at the Brooklyn Museum. He is also adept at rather lovely, clever and not at all inflammatory art, including these silhouettes and straight-on portraits, which are titled "Afro-Muses."

Mr. Ofili, it turns out, has been painting his watercolor heads nearly every day for 10 years - for himself, mostly, although some of them have made their way into the world. Watercoloring is his daily ritual. A few years ago he added the occasional bird or flower, to stop the routine from becoming a rut.

Everyone has routines. What works for one person may not for someone else. Routines can be comforting. They may be our jobs. They define our limits and we try to make something constructive out of them.

The myth is that artists are somehow different. That they leap from one peak of inspiration to another. That they reject limits - that this is precisely what makes them artists. But of course that's not true. Most artists work as the rest of us do, incrementally, day by day, according to their own habits. That most art does not rise above the level of routine has nothing necessarily to do with the value of having a ritual.

Twyla Tharp wakes up every day at 5:30 and takes a cab to the gym. Chopin played Bach. Beethoven strolled around Vienna with a sketch pad first thing in the morning. Giorgio Morandi spent decades painting the same dusty bunch of small bottles, bowls and biscuit tins. Chuck Close paints and draws and makes prints of nearly identical dots or marks, which, depending on how they're arranged, turn into different faces. "Having a routine, knowing what to do," he has said, "gives me a sense of freedom and keeps me from going crazy. It's calming." He calls his method Zenlike, "like raking gravel in a monastery."

There are routines and there are routines. On Kawara, the Japanese-born artist, paints the date. Since the 1960's, he has made thousands of "Today" paintings. His routine entails at least four or five coats of the same brand of paint, the letters white and hand-drawn, always in roughly the same proportion to the size of the canvas.

Out of routine comes inspiration. That's the idea, anyway. To grasp what's exceptional, you first have to know what's routine. I once spent several months watching the American realist painter Philip Pearlstein paint a picture of two nudes. He has followed the same routine for years. One of the models, Desirée Alvarez, who is also an artist, said that the value of watching someone else's studio routine was "in terms of discipline and day-to-dayness and commitment to work even when it isn't going well."

"I know Philip is interested in Zen monks," she continued. "They have their routines, because they think that within routine, and only within routine, enlightenment comes."

Mr. Ofili said, "That's exactly it," when we spoke the other day about his daily routine. He arrives in his studio at 9 or 10 in the morning, he explained. He sets aside a corner for watercolors and drawings "away from center stage," meaning where he paints his big, collaged oil paintings. "I consider that corner of the studio to be my comfort zone," he said. First, he tears a large sheet of paper, always the same size, into eight pieces, all about 6 by 9 inches. Then he loosens up with some pencil marks, "nothing statements, which have no function."

"They're not a guide," he went on, they're just a way to say something and nothing with a physical mark that is nothing except a start."

Watercolor goes on top. He estimated that each head takes 5 to 15 minutes. Occasionally he'll paint while on the phone. He may finish one watercolor or 10 in the course of a day.

"There have been days I have not made them," he added. "Sometimes it felt absolutely necessary to do pencil drawings instead. It was cleansing. There's a beautiful sound that pencil makes when it's scratching on paper. Very soothing. Watercolor is like waving a conductor's baton. It's very quick. I almost don't even have to think."

"Sometimes," he added, "I will return to the watercolors in the evening. And that's a completely different atmosphere. If things haven't gone well during the day, I can calm down. The big paintings are like a performance - me looking at me. It's self-conscious. There's a lot of getting up close to the canvas, then stepping back, reflecting on decisions, thinking about gestures. I try to take on all sorts of issues and ideas. So my mind is busy. With watercolor, it's just about the colors and the faces. They're free to go any way they want to go. I may tell myself, 'This will be the last one I do.' Then I'll do another. That's liberating."

No two heads are quite alike. There are ballooning Afros and pointy beards, ponytails and hairdos that resemble butterfly wings, earrings that look like fishhooks or like raindrops, necklaces in gold, turquoise or emerald. The heads are as modest and charming as the work that made Mr. Ofili famous is outsize and occasionally over the top. It is wrong to make too much of them. But if they can become repetitive, they convey - like the passing of days, each day akin to the previous one but also a little different - something about the nature of variety in life, which can be subtle.

Despite the care he has taken to attend to this daily ritual, Mr. Ofili said he had never really stopped to think about it so explicitly until someone happened to ask. "I never realized I was so set in my ways until now," he said, thinking it over during our conversation. "But I guess I have tons of rules. They say Morandi mixed and mixed color until he felt there was no color left and then he would begin to paint. He painted his little objects, but I think he was trying to paint what you might call the spaces between the objects. Philip Guston is another example. He had his own routine. He was heavily into political subject matter, into issues in his own life, but he was looking to get beyond those issues, to find the zone. He talked about the process of painting as an emptying out: he said everyone was in the studio with him when he started and gradually they all left until finally he left, too, and then there was only the work."

"In the end, it doesn't really matter what you paint," Mr. Ofili concluded. "It's all just a routine to connect yourself finally with other people. Someone else's routine would seem restrictive to me. But rules and limits are something to push against. It's like doing your morning exercise. Things don't kick in until you push at your limits."

After we spoke, I came across the composer Eric Satie's "Memoirs of an Amnesiac." It's an irreverent gem, like his music. "The artist must regulate his life," Satie wrote, then listed his daily activities:

Up at 7:18. From 10:23 to 11:47: inspiration. Lunch at 12:11. Leave the table by 12:14. Only white foods, including boiled chicken and camphorized sausage. More inspiration: 3:12 to 4:07. Bed at 10:37. "Once a week I wake up with a start at 3:19," he wrote. That's on Tuesday.

"I sleep with one eye open. My sleep is very deep. My bed is round, with a hole in the middle for my head."

Hey, whatever works.
- posted by ...lg... @ 10:25