I’m back from the road trip, muddling about until my body decides it’s home.
Muddling about includes mulling over ideas, thoughts, notions, and niggles that life has handed me. Here’s a set of thoughts that I’ve maundered through in the last few days.
People, making conversation with the plein air worker, often ask “How long have you been painting?” My stock answer is “Oh, about 5 years.”
But I was cleaning up some old piles of stuff today, and ran across a whole covey of watercolors and acrylics that were dated 1999. Now my math is bad, but not that bad. Somehow time, or memory, had gotten short-circuited. I remember the class now; it was “painting the figure in watercolor,” and I stumbled into it by mistake, much, I suspect, to the horror of the very nice instructor.
Rosie, Winter, 1999, watercolor, 15 x 22″
The revelation that I have actually been painting with some fulsomeness (the pile of paintings was quite large) since 1999, was followed by another, which came about from looking at these 1999 watercolor paintings and having to rethink a notion I had arrived at earlier that day.
I had been on an art “date” with a friend, whose insights into art are always illuminating. She talked about the “dead” color in one of the landscape painters whose work we were examining; when I quizzed her on “dead” color, she elaborated and showed me a number of paintings where the color either added liveliness or deadened the effect. I was impressed by her observations, and when I went home, I saw that some of the paintings I was despairing over might be saved by livelier color. While I was tweaking the color, I devised a theory about my own art development that went something like this:
When I first started painting, I concentrated on composition and representation. Then I moved on to focus on shape and forms. Then I seemed to be working mostly on paint, paint quality and brush strokes. Only now was I focused on color.
The listing of this process made sense to me. And I like these kinds of tidying up of my life experiences; it gives me a great sense of control.
That sense of control was proven almost immediately false, when I came across my 1999 watercolors:
Instructor Bob, Winter, 1999, watercolor, 9 x 12″
Unknown Model, winter 1999, Watecolor, 12 x 20″
Self-Portrait, Winter 1999, Acrylic on canvas, 22 x 30″
Blanche, Winter 1999, watercolor, 14 x 20″
These do not seem to me to be paintings of someone who isn’t thinking about color. Even the grey and pink self-portrait pulls the color and content together for me. Of course, some of this comes out of a lack of control of the paint medium — this was my first go at watercolor portraits and figures, so I was wrestling mightily with a lot of variables. But in the these paintings, the colors are, I would say, enlivening.
What happened, I now suspect, is I moved to oils. Oils can be made more precise — one isn’t stuck with whatever color dripped off the brush. Moreover, the oil paintings are done in the field, with local color guiding choices and perhaps confining imagination. Or maybe I am just moving away from my roots in textiles, where color choices are easier because the manufacturer or dyer gives the artist the color ready-made and the materials can be auditioned before being brought together in a final forum.
Adding fiber to the thought mix came about partly because I’m working on a small quilted textile piece for a fall invitational and the colors in it are vastly different from the ones I’ve been painting. I hadn’t noticed this until I started writing this post and was casting about my photo files for examples.
I’ve Been Here, Work in Progress 2008, 12 x 12″
Haines Public Library, 2008, Oil on board, 12 x 16″
This last is the kind of work I’m doing now. I think the color is lively enough here, but it’s of a very different kind from freewheeling lavishness seen in the 1999 work — and in the current textile piece.
Steve tells us that we should nibble at thought in these posts, but I have an appetite which seems to make my nibbles other’s meals. I would like to know — have you sorted through your art career process in a way that seemed to tidy it up, only to discover that it isn’t tidy at all? Or to discover that you really do know where you’ve been and how and why you got here? And what are your thoughts on color and how it works, besides to identify the red car above as probably not from Arizona (where all cars are white.)
Me too: I was cleaning up some old piles of stuff today…
Three full days of perusing my images and deleting 100 Gigabytes or so, helped me to invent a database for filing the remainder.
This exercise helped me to verify that I am not a photographer of the indoors (Bob Martin alerted me to a terrific indoor painter, Vilhelm Hammershøi, whose work is presently exhibited a the Royal Academy of Arts) and outdoors of human habitation. Even though I like wild life, there is very little of it, presumably due to the lack of a high-powered zoom lens. With respect to humans, I like them in meaningful activities, mostly performed by children, with an occasional adult reading a book or hiking up a trail. The categories ‘quality of water’, and ‘geometries’ of sand dunes and mudflats have lots of images. I also try my eyes on trees, largely cotton woods, but find them very difficult to photograph.
At first, I was fatigued after this excessive visual stimulation and felt that I would never take another picture. But now, slowly, I am reaping the rewards and the images are percolating through my mind. My plan is to surf through my computer files, perhaps, once a month, hoping to find my direction(s).
I don’t know yet whether I will continue to solely use photography to enhance my visual perception of whether I will divide myself between photography and learning to put the images in my mind to paper or canvas.
Birgit,
Your categorizing sounds like a fine way to get hold of the inordinate amount of materials it’s possible to generate. The categories could change, of course (“plays of light and shade,” “vertical forms,” “mysterious paths”) which would only add to the richness of what you can learn from them.
I’m a great fan of categories, provided that we know they are provisional, useful mostly for immediate purposes, and likely to be misunderstood by others around us. Jer is always trying to redo my files for me in a more “rational” way. Pfffffft, I say.
Do you have a tentative grasp on direction, other than ruminating on whether to use photography or something else to affix the images? Are there categories that you think you’ve pretty well exhausted, or are you still enthralled with paths that meander toward mysterious ends and children who sometimes can be seen meandering down them?
June,
Pondering one’s personal art history is an illuminating exercise, especially when invalidated. A similar thing happened to me, when, like Birgit, I was going through old photographs (see Oops…).
It seems we have a tendency to think in terms of a linear, progressive narrative, but I think the spiral that Ed Winkleman wrote about recently is a better representation. We just keep cycling back to earlier concerns, though each time with a different emphasis or viewpoint. Actually, even a spiral implies greater regularity than is typical (Ed sort of incorporates that into his notion, but this is only a loose metaphor, anyway).
I’m curious to know what you and your friend mean by “live” color, if it can be put in words. Does it just have to do with bright or contrasty to catch the eye? I often find I like quite muted colors–but perhaps you’d expect that from a black-and-white photographer.
P.S. Though your work may be abundant, it’s never fulsome.
Steve,
You are right about the Winkleman spiral — I had read that, but forgot that I had. It does make sense. However, I still think some color in my painting was lost when I went to oils and toward verisimiltude.
I too wanted to know about “live” or “lively” color, and found she had some trouble putting it into words. But I could see what she was driving at when she did comparisons of images.
It’s not always bright or contrasty — in fact, sometime a dull color will enliven a scene that suffers from helter-skelter brightness. But the friend and I both shudder when faced with “tasteful” work, and there’s a tendency for muted colors to fall into that category, particularly in textiles where “tasteful” and “well-modulated” can be the overriding rule.
I’m already afraid that I’ve gone beyond the lively color to the overwhelming color in some of my recent reworkings (you can check them out on southeastmain on Sunday ( http://southeastmain.wordpress.com/ ).
But “muted” isn’t the same as tasteful or “modulated” and I find your work exciting in its stretch and play of value and line. And of course, you are always reevaluating what you are doing — more analytic than I am about your work. That’s interesting in itself — a different way to proceed, I suspect.
Oops, my comment got eaten by the wolves of the ether. I’ll get back to you, Steve, tomorrow. I probably won’t be able to remember what brilliant things I said though….
June,
For some reason the spam filter mis-identified your comment as spam. Perhaps it doesn’t hold with “verisimiltude.” The comment has returned from the ether.
Dear Friends, what inspiration on a Sunday morning! Learning about “verisimilitude”, I ended up reading about Karl Popper’s ideas.
Do I have a tentative Grasp on direction?
Starting out photographing the big sand bowls of the Sleeping Bear Dunes, I was chaffing under the limitations of my camera to depict the 3-dimensionality of what I saw. Going to a large format camera did not appear solve that problem. One, there are already plenty of photographers that dramatize a landscape by taking such wow! pictures. And second, adding drama does not achieve what I wanted. I then decided to use photography to accumulate information on color and texture of motifs. To depict my sense of what the geometry should look like, I planned to go out with my sketchbook.
Last year, I sketched at Otter Creek, a convenient location, just a 5 min car ride from my house, early am, before the heat and beach people show up. I meant to continue this year and perhaps even to paint there and I bought a portable easel. Over the winter, Otter Creek changed its course, eating that part of the lakeshore. The changed geometry did not appeal to me and I stayed with photography. Nature foiled my plan to become a plein air artist.
I thought that, in my photography, I gravitate towards more minimalist motifs. A forest edge consisting of tall maples, rich with leaves, whipped by a storm has been beyond my ability to depict while I like what I did with a small stand of cottonwoods in the winter. But that does not explain why I like my verbascum. Perhaps, I am attracted to motifs that could be imagined to portrait some human aspect?
Did I exhaust a category? I have plenty of shots showing waves and the streaming of currents in the Great Lake that I consider reference material.
The most rewarding way to go will be to come up with subcategories such as ‘vertical lines’. I imagine that developing tentative subcategories will illuminate my ‘spiraling’ to myself.
Hi, I’m June’s friend who made the remarks about color and its being alive or dead. I have been thinking how to put this into words that explain my reaction and use of those descriptions. By the way, I was a painter many years ago and now work in textiles.
By “lively” I am not talking about brightness or intensity of color as much as crispness and the “cleanness” of color. I find nothing so deadening in a painting as the use of muddied color to indicate shadows or black muddled into the color for the same purpose. Contrast with clear lights and rich darks feels cleaner than muddied almost lights and almost darks.Easy assumptions about color, ie, trees are green, apples are red, with no complexity or variation feel flat and dead. Shadows with no color in them are flat and dead. Paintings with no sense of illumination feel flat and dead. For me color is what communicates the feeling, the mood, the drama and is a way of making a painting a very personal expression beyond strict attention to attempts to duplicate nature.
Not sure I’ve added anything to the discussion, but while I know what I mean, it became a challenge to try to communicate it to someone else.
Thanks, terry, that helps. “Muddy” is about the most damning adjective I use for color. And I also tend to prefer interesting colors over conventional or realistic ones. So I suspect we may have similar taste in color, though, in photography, I’m usually happy with a nearly monochrome rendition.
Going from painting to textile art, you’ve traveled in the reverse direction from June. Does that shift have anything to do with your concern for color? I would imagine, perhaps naively, that painting would provide more variety and control for a colorist.
Hi Terry,
Do you dye your own fabrics? If yes, do you use natural or synthetic dyes?
About color in shadows:
June,
In an earlier post, if I remember correctly, you told us that your painting instructor saw color in shadows that you had trouble seeing. I assumed that you meant the color of the object that was throwing the shadow.
Terry,
Thinking about your comment Shadows with no color in them are flat and dead. I wonder whether you refer to the color of the area that the shadow projects into?
Thus, how do I portrait the color of a shadow?
I guess now I am part of this discussion! Questions to answer.
Does the shift from painting to textiles have anything to do with my concern for color? No. I find the color possibilities are similar in both media. I use mostly commercial fabrics, but I do a lot of painting on them, so this vastly broadens the color choices that I have. To answer Birgit, I do very little dyeing of fabric, but when I do I use synthetic dyes.
As to color in shadows. Of course the surface onto which the shadow falls affects the color of the shadow, but I think it is also affected by the colors reflected from the object casting the shadow and the ambient light as well as one’s imagination. The practice of mooshing a little black or grey into the color of the surface on which the shadow is cast produces, in my opinion, a dirty smudge instead of a shadow.
If you are interested, you can see some of my older work here: http://the-portfolio.blogspot.com/
I haven’t kept this site up, so newer work is not there, but there’s not that much of it anyway!
[Note: this comment did not appear publicly until after #16 below. It accidentally fell into a
heffalumpspam trap. -SD]Hi all,
I can’t answer questions put to Terry — I’m still sussing out the possibilities for myself. For example, I know that the shadow takes on the color of the thing upon which it is lying — a shadow of a blue object on green grass (unless there’s transparency involved) will be a darker shade of green. And it will vary in hue and value, just as grass varies in hue and value. That much I understand.
But this morning I saw a shadow of a white baseboard on an off-white wall that was as blue as the sky. I couldn’t find any place where the blue was coming from — not the floor, not the curtains, not the light itself (although that’s more of a possibility). Something was filtering that lighted within the shadow in a wholly unexpected way.
I also know that the so-called primary colors are hues made from a single unmixed pigment or dye. Secondary colors are the mix of two pigments or dyes. Tertiary colors mix the two with yet another, and often result in muddiness. When I read words like “clean color” I fall back into the primary/secondary distinctions but find that that contradicts other ideas of richness.
So my problem is while I understand words like “clean” and “muddy” and “rich” I don’t see them — unless I’m with Terry, who does see them and can point them out so clearly that I see them also. I should add that now that I”m consciously looking at my own work, I can sometimes see that it lacks “richness” of color and I can correct for that. But I feel a bit like I’m poking around in the dark, sometimes finding the treasure and sometimes stoving my finger against a hard unknown object.
Birgit,
“Subcategories” might be one of the ways to come to what I have called “meaning” in response to Jay’s post (“Dear June.”)
Categorizing for me is a way to understand and see meaning, however temporary the categories (and meaning) might be. I almost always see a human context in your photography, as opposed to Steve’s, where I see a deliberate eschewing of the human. Even your verbascum (which makes me smile, by the way) feels like a deliberate planting, an in-your-face duo who refuse to be subdued.
I have to add that I absolutely know what Terry means when she says “color is what communicates the feeling, the mood, the drama and is a way of making a painting a very personal expression beyond strict attention to attempts to duplicate nature.”
This makes whole and perfect sense to me, even if/when I can’t achieve it.
June,
Sounds like you had light from the blue sky falling on the whitish wall, next to the part illuminated by yellow sun.
I have enjoyed reading your process and it truly gets me thinking. Yes it is a spiral journey.
Terry — are there examples you can cite that we might be able to access via the web?
I don’t know if this is what you mean by live and dead tones, but I’m thinking about Whistler’s Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black: Portrait of Theodore Duret (at the Metropolitan Museum in NY). In the painting, Duret is wearing black evening dress and has a pink cloak (“for a masquerade” according to Whistler’s instructions to him) draped over his arm. The background is that silvery smoky taupe that Whistler did so well. The point of all this set-up is that if you hold up your hand and blot out the black, the pink goes dingy gray; likewise if you blot out the pink the black goes dead. The exquisite relationship of the tones makes the portrait. I realize it’s hard to appreciate on a monitor, but is that the kind of thing you have in mind?
This typically long address will take you to the painting on the Met’s site:
http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/collection_database/Arrangement_in_Flesh_Colour_and_Black_Portrait_of_James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler/ViewObject.aspx?depNm=all&pID=0&kWd=whistler&vW=1&Pg=1&St=0&StOd=1&vT=1&OID=20013586
June:
I’ve been looking at your watercolors while taking a break from moving plaster about. I am musing over possible profundities to add to this string and coming up dry. But a few things have caught my eye: there’s a nice sense of balance in the postures and proportions of your sitters even though photographic accuracy was not, perhaps, a goal. Instructor Bob and Unknown, with their wet-on-wet look have nice visual surprises in the facial features and in the relationship of heads to backgrounds. Instructor Bob is especially provocative with his Mohawk, arrowhead, Gorbachev reddish feature, which, for its unbidden aspect, fits right in. And the way Unknown melts into her background is inspired.
You know, one can be precise with watercolors in that one can lay down a trial patch of color on a margin to see how it looks.
Thanks, Robin and Melanie,
Jay — if I ever take up watercolor again, I’ll remember your advice. I keep finding new pure hues in oils that delight me….
Birgit — I looked up Karl Popper on Wikipedia and was struck by this quote (from Wikipedia): “He proposed three worlds: World One, being the physical world, or physical states; World Two, being the world of mind, or mental states, ideas, and perceptions; and World Three, being the body of human knowledge expressed in its manifold forms, or the products of the second world made manifest in the materials of the first world (i.e.–books, papers, paintings, symphonies, and all the products of the human mind). World Three, he argued, was the product of individual human beings in exactly the same sense that an animal path is the product of individual animals, and that, as such, has an existence and evolution independent of any individual knowing subjects. The influence of World Three, in his view, on the individual human mind (World Two) is at least as strong as the influence of World One.”
I keep thinking about human perception and how what we see and experience is negotiated through our brains, and the individual brain seems to have different paths which have grown through earlier experiences. Or so I understand it. Popper seems to be in agreement with recent neurological studies.
June,
Reading more about Karl Popper in Wikipedia, I found that he wrote a book with John Carew Eccles, 1977, The Self and Its Brain. As a graduate student, I knew of Eccles because he visited my mentors. This was towards the end of Eccles’ science (laboratory) career. I was struck by a talk that he gave because, in addition, to lecturing on his electrophysiology he also talked about his spiritualism. But I have not followed up on his more philosophical writings.
Another memory that came back to me relates to mysticism. As a child, I once thought how tedious it was to have to relearn so many things that I once knew.