Art & Perception

Germany is celebrating Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), an important representative of early expressionism, on the 100th anniversary of her death. From 1906 to 1907, she painted nude self-portraits, at that time an unprecedented opus by a female painter.

Her work inspired me to compare female nudity seen through her eyes in 1906/07 to those painted by males between 1918 and 1570 - Modigliani, Gauguin, Renoir and Tintoretto.

I. Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (1918) Paula Modersohn-Becker (1906)

II. Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin (1891/94) and Paula Modersohn-Becker (1906)

III. Tintoretto (1570) and Paula Modersohn Becker (1906)

IV. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1875) and Paula Modersohn Becker (1907) Continue reading First Female Nude Self-Portraits

Anita Shapolsky gallery last month hosted a very eclectic exhibition titled ‘Writers who paint’. Among others, it had under its purview artworks by accomplished writers like Jonatham Lethem, Jack Kerouac, W. B. Yeats and Aldous Huxley. I thought the idea was a very cool one, firstly, you had insight into their minds through their writing and now you could explore their paintings, drawings and other objects of their visual imagination through the lens of the individual’s written words. It is precisely for this reason that I think that the artist blogs are a new form of a self-portrait that an artist can develop temporally…
Of course, some of the few art blogs that seemed to cover this event seemed to think otherwise. The comments were very telling of the age of specialization we live in and what happens if we transgress even a little bit from our supposed spheres of expertise.

“Writers should stick to their areas of competence”
“Writers doing art results in art that is just not good”
“More bad art strung together upon a theme”
“Cult of the celebrity in overdrive”
“While you can accidentally take a good photograph, it takes years to become a good photographer”

While I think that the wisdom of the online crowds is a marker for the current times, reading some of these comments gives one a view that unless one is specialized in the arts (like an art degree or is a full time artist), there is a danger of their art being perceived as inferior to full time artist. What happened to the age of renaissance men and women who could dabble in multiple fields and excel at many of them? Are the lanes leading that great town called Specialization getting so narrow that only people with the right calling cards and pedigree are offered entry at the appropriate tavern houses along the way?

I am most interested in your comments.

Weldon Kees, ‘After Hours’, Oil on canvas, 33″ x 43″

Winter is now here, having held off till mid-November. Last weekend I headed in to Pine Creek Falls, hoping to find an entrancing combination of ice, snow, water, and rock, as I had last year at this time. That’s when I had the first inklings of waterfalls as a potential subject. As I gear up for another round with Jay, attempting to come to grips with what that subject means to me, it seemed a good idea to return to the source.

Continue reading When yin turns to yang

Let’s try for those images again.

Pele representation

Carved Pele in fruit mode.

Pele perfume bottles

Sorry for the inconvenience

For this last year I have been a Project Learn volunteer, helping Leon brush up on his reading skills. I have doodled during lulls in the sessions. Recently, my idle scratchings revisited an old compulsive tic. Some twenty years ago I stumbled across one of those holes in the fabric of existence that I have often felt a need to patch. I discovered that Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanism, was visually underrepresented in traditional Hawaiian art. Since then I have gone so far as to attempt carved wood and plaster visualizations, along with paintings, all of which I have thrown out.

I began to wonder, while scanning these doodles into the computer, how they might be worked up in Photoshop. Here are some results. But before showing these, I would like to review a few Pele things.

This painting is typical of how Pele is visualized these days: a volcanically-adorned woman, or a tableau depicting an episode taken from her narrative. I have tried to treat Pele in a more symbolic way, pulling together “woman, island, lava and symbolic depiction” as more or less geometric constructs. A parade of discards testifies to my great success.

Continue reading Pele and Project Learn

Probably because I grew up in the careless and tasteless 1950’s, before Lady Bird pointed out that the landscape was filling with garbage, but after logging and poverty had been pretty well trashed my neck of the woods — that is, because I had a visually impoverished childhood — I find living in this city a continuing visual delight.

Even the rain has its moments.

So I thought for as a bit of thanks-giving, I would meander around Portland Oregon, pointing out the sights that I like. Some of these are constant public presences, like the statue of Harvey Scott in Mt. Tabor Park. Scott was a city “father” as well as an anti-suffragist newsman. (I keep scheming of ways to bring his perfidy to the attention of the city mothers).

Continue reading Where I Live, Portland Oregon USA

While I had always harbored an unexplained inclination towards abstraction, it is only recently that I have started to explore this form a little more in detail. Part of the exploration involves trying out hitherto untried (at least by me) combination of materials on masonite.  Here are two paintings that I attempted recently using a combination of wet gesso, Indian spices and acrylic.

Sunil Gangadharan, ‘Untitled_111007′, Acrylic, Indian spices, latex based housepaint and gesso on dricore, 24″ X 24″

To achieve the dynamic effects and an impasto finish, it was imperative that I work wet on wet - which also meant I could not mull too much on the outcome, just add the colors and the paints as relevant and then stand back and ponder the results… 

Pure abstraction is somewhat akin to nature, random interplays of relevant forces that yield unpredictable patterns, moods and feelings. 

At certain points during creation of these paintings, I felt some of these interplays intensely.

Sunil Gangadharan, ‘Untitled_111707′, Acrylic, Indian spices and gesso on dricore, 24″ X 24″

I’ve come across another UK artist whose art is informed by intriguing ideas, among them aural-visual synesthesia. Kevin Laycock, who teaches painting at the School of Design of the University of Leeds, is a musician himself, and very interested in the relationship of painting and design to music. To quote from a statement at the Drumcroon Gallery:

Kevin Laycock’s recent paintings explore the structure of ‘Colour Symphony’, an orchestral work created in 1922 by the composer Arthur Bliss. The composer, who was known for creating music with unusual combinations of instrument and voice, had set out to explore the musical associations of colour. In these paintings, Kevin Laycock is returning the musical score to the colour that inspired it, exploring the qualities of colour in music and paint, finding a painted equivalent for the musical structures and sounds.

Continue reading Uncertain Harmonies: Kevin Laycock

Fall Dune

Continue reading innate expression?

I assume most of you have heard about the WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike. I’m not sure how much attention it gets in other parts of the country (or the world, for that matter), but here in Los Angeles it’s a big story. This is after all an entertainment industry town, and the effects of the strike can be felt in every part of our local economy. My wife is a writer and a WGA member, as are many of our friends.

The strike has come about because of a disagreement between the corporations who own the movie and tv studios and the writers who create their content over how much, if at all, the writers should be compensated for their creative work. The writers contend that they should be getting a slightly larger share from the sale of DVDs of the movies they wrote. From the sale of a $28.95 DVD, the writer of the movie currently gets 4 cents, or as comedian Tim Kazurinsky points out, that ’s 4 cents out of 2,895 cents. The writers are asking for 8 cents.

But a bigger issue, and possibly the main one, is that the networks and studios want to pay the writers nothing, that’s ZERO $, for tv shows and movies that they (the corporations) post on their web sites. The corporations claim that these streaming videos are “promotional”, and that they shouldn’t have to compensate the writers for posting them. But these “promotional” shows have commercials, just like any regular tv show, and are a huge source of income for the studios. They just want to keep it all for themselves.

As Mark Harris notes in his Entertainment Weekly Online column, “Why the Striking Writers Are Right”:

“The problem with this position is that writers deserve a share of revenue for material they help to create. Not a share only if the revenue is really, really a lot. A share, period. If it turns out that streaming video is a goldmine, then both sides will get a lot of money. If it turns out not to be, they’ll get less. Corporations are fond of reminding their employees that they’re all a ‘’family'’ during tough times. But when families sit down to dinner, Dad doesn’t get to say, ‘’I'm gonna eat until I decide I’m full, and then we’ll see if there’s anything left for the rest of you.'’ The right of a writer to earn money from work that continues to generate revenue cannot be dependent on how comfy studio and network heads are with the fullness of their own coffers.”

The studios are responding to the strike by showing reruns, and more reality and talk shows. But many of the more popular talk shows themselves will have to be reruns, since people like David Letterman and Jay Leno don’t come up with all those clever lines off the tops of their heads. They are created by a staff of, you guessed it, writers. To their credit, both Leno and Letterman are supporting the writers’ position in this dispute.

For the personal reasons mentioned above, and also on principle, as an artist, I’m siding with the writers as well. It seems obvious to me that the people who profit from the success of a creative product should include the artists who actually created it, not just the executives who made the phone calls and brokered the deals. I don’t watch a whole lot of tv to begin with, but until this strike is over I’m not planning on watching any. I’m going to vote with my remote, and say no to corporate greed. I hope many other people do the same.

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Here are a couple of videos about the strike that you might find interesting:
Tim Kazurinsky on WGN
the writers of The Office

Virginalis sancta frequentia

Hinc virginalis sancta frequentia,
Gertrudis, Agnes, Prisca, Cecilia,
Lucia, Petronilla, Tecla,
Agatha, Barbara, Juliana,

Multeque quarum nomina non lego.
aut lecta nunc his addere negligo,
dignas Deo quas fecit esse
integritas anime fidesque.

Tali magistra vel duce praevia
abominantes terrea gaudia,
in carne praeter carnis usum
angelicam tenuere vitam.

He pervagantes prata recentia
pro velle querunt serta decentia,
rosas legentes passionis
lilia vel violas amoris.

Over the course of the last year I have made a number of cut wood letters. I have done so in order to gain process experience and to find the right combination of typefaces, dimensions and treatments in search of a decent question and answer linkage.

Watch a presidential debate and see the tangled relationships between the moderator’s questions and the varied kinds of responses. Messy and devious as it may become at times, the question and answer relationship is a fundamental aspect of the intellectual process. As such it calls out for plastic representation.

The final solution will likely be a tangled mass of big block letters. In the meanwhile I’ll settle for an equally tangled mass of this last year’s experiments.

These are three photos of one piece.

I’m still looking for the right colors. Early on I was giving each letter its own hues and patterns. This raised the visual density, but detracted from any clarity of intention. When undecided, I usually fall back to aluminum paint.

Continue reading Q and A