The Hammock Papers: Piazzoni.

28 March 2011

Piazzoni.

Piazzoni, The Forest, 1945

The Monterey Museum of Art, La Mirada, will feature Russell Chatham's grandfather, Gottardo Piazzoni, in an exhibition entitled "From Dawn To Dusk."

More here.

Adams, Gottardo Piazzoni in his Studio, San Francisco, 1932

Piazzoni has frequently been labeled a mystic. He perceived nature and the landscape as the embodiment of God, and in his paintings he sought a communion with both, yet he was not religious in the doctrinaire sense. His family was Roman Catholic and he had attended church regularly when a boy in Switzerland, but later in life went to church only on Easter Sunday at the Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmelo in Carmel. Piazzoni's religion was not to be found indoors, but in nature. "He appreciated everything about nature," his daughter recalled. For Piazzoni, nature, like his lapsed Catholicism, could be the source of powerful ritual. It is still something of a family legend that he knew and celebrated the exact moment of the full moon.

He knew exactly where the moon would be coming up, and we'd sit there and wait, and wait for the moon. And pretty soon you'd see the light. There was nothing to disturb this moon and the light would start coming up behind the hill...the more we could see the moon the more we'd yell and scream till the whole moon would show, and then we'd clap, and yell, and scream--hooray, hooray!

Boost your knowledge a little more here.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL