Morandi for Robert

This writing was in response to my amazing painter friend and mentor, Robert Royhl, who lives in Montana and couldn't see the Morandi retrospective on the East Coast last year. He asked me to observe Morandi's whites and tell me what they were like, having heard that they were remarkable.

I'm not sure about the whites my friend Robert asked me to see for him? (As if he could borrow my eyes.) When Morandi painted, lead white was still in use and not illegal or known to be harmful. It is possible he used that as an undercoat or even in the paint itself? It did look like he used something other than Titanium. I would guess Zinc. Its a softer white than Titanium, and there was A LOT of white, like marble dust, mixed into all his colors.

I thought the show was curiously intellectually, but not as awe inspiring as the Turner show that we had seen together last year at the National Gallery. (I left that show exhausted, feeling like I just had had esthetic sex all day long.) I did find Morandi's show extremely optimistic though. Here is a man that painted quietly and persistently until his death in the 1960's, his life ending about the same time the art world was telling us that painting is dead. And yet, I was looking at objects that quietly asserted that the fundamentals still mattered, composition and form was still alive, painting was still powerful.

Being in Italy over the past several years made me understand better what might be considered as Morandi's Italian sensibilities. Italy is a nation of stone builders and masons. It doesn't use the same structural materials we do in North America. Its a world built of mortar pressed between stone, not clapboard, vinyl, steel or concrete. Walking the Italian streets of stone, on the cobbled sidewalks next to masonry buildings with ceramic tiled roofs, in the hill top villages across from the mountains that are being quarried for marble, one can taste the dust in the air. In the same manner in which Morandi spreads his paint like plaster, thick between his heavy objects like mortar, he paints like a mason with a trowel.