I occasionally worry that my tendency to analyze—some might call that an understatement—could be a negative influence on my work, causing me to lose spontaneity or fall into one rut or another. But I’ve now proven to my satisfaction that any effect is both unconscious and ineffective. Here’s how it happened.

Last early Sunday morning I went wandering about the northern Gallatin Valley, which is to me what Hockney’s East Yorkshire is to him, namely the local cultivated landscape. I was well past halfway through when the idea come to me that I had been photographing with an eye to flat patterns of tone, broad swaths of dark and light, with accents here and there. Gone was the three-dimensional landscape, extending into deep space. I was succeeding in the effort commented on last week: I was thinking about the two-dimensional picture, and without even remembering to try.

2

That’s the thought I still had with me two days later as I sat down to process images at the computer. But as I worked, the realization slowly grew that I had not only not abolished projective space, I had even enhanced it beyond the usual. The bright, hazy air between the foreground and the Bridger mountains, lit from behind, produced a tremendous aerial perspective, which seemed to be strengthened further by the relative unformity of the recession in bands moving up the picture.

3

I found this light-space effect particularly interesting because it seemed to be the opposite of what I had thought of as convention that light could highlight an important foreground element, which then stands clearly forward of a darker background. Looking into that a bit, it appears that landscape masters such as Poussin and Claude Lorrain were actually more subtle, typically using light more surgically to create a receding succession of brighter areas.

4

Notice that in these photographs, the mountains are not so far away as they were for June in the desert, and I had no missing middle distance problems, although there were some hidden stretches in the first three images. Rather, it is the mountains that almost disappear, remaining just faintly there like a Cheshire grin. You don’t so much see the mountains as the air before them. (Hockney, by the way, seems to eschew aerial perspective altogether, along with other familiar methods.)

5

So much for knowing what I was doing. But that begs the question of whether my current understanding is any more accurate. Do these photographs in fact give you a sense of depth as strongly as they do me? And do you sometimes change your mind completely about how you think your artwork works?

Uncondiotionally 2009

Tittle: Unconditionally
Size: 102×76 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas

Don’t know if you all read on my web biography that recently I have embarked in a deep and personal spiritual journey that has opened a door to the ethereal world of Reiki and crystal healing.
Through meditation and welcoming my Spirit and Angels to guide me through my work I have learned to give Reiki to my paint tubes and canvases before I start a painting.
My intentions are to create more than just a painting, but share a healing experience through the vision of the Divine irradiating a sense of peace and love of nature.

I am not sure if you all seen the film ‘The Secret’ but there is a very interesting part about a Feng Shui consultant working with a painter and how his works become the reality in his life through the law of attraction.

What are your intentions in your creations? Are you attracting what you want into your life through your works? Are you really showing your world and the true inner self?
What do you really want to achieve?
Your true self is how you feel yourself when nobody’s watching. It is where your deepest thoughts live. It is what you ultimately think of yourself, how you treat yourself and what you fear others might see inside you. It is your most native and real personality, your true Spirit!

Once you change the way you feel about yourself and evoke it into your works, the law of attraction will change your life. You are the magnificent creator of your own reality!

Even if you don’t care greatly about Picasso, I recommend the Charlie Rose interview with Françoise Gilot, who lived ten years with the man. A talented artist herself, and very independent-minded, Gilot frequently discussed art with Picasso. Much of what he said about how he worked has come to us through her. For example, regarding the rather complex, high cubist paintings, he said than in the “early stages” there were almost no “references to natural forms…I painted them in afterwards.” Braque had a similar working procedure. Rather than abstract from an initial representation of a scene, these cubists–at least for a time as their approach evolved–roughly laid out their abstract, faceted spaces and forms, then filled in enough clues to suggest the subject. Those clues could appear in rather disconnected spots. I believe it was the dealer Kahnweiler who said they had developed a way to free objects, showing that they existed without showing where they were located.

Picasso was first introduced to Gilot in 1943, when he begged an introduction from an actor friend, who was sitting nearby at a restaurant with Gilot and another painter. I’ve seen it told several places that Picasso approached their table carrying a bowl of cherries, but Gilot mentions that he also left with them! After they began living together in 1946, Picasso painted a series of portraits of Gilot entitled Femme-fleur (loosely, Flower woman), shown here in order. With their hair transformed into a leaf canopy, they have an intriguing relationship to a well-known 1948 Robert Capa photo of the two at the beach.

Elsewhere on the Picasso front, I’ve started listening to TJ Clark’s Mellon Lectures as podcast from the National Gallery of Art (thanks to Namaste Nancy for the reminder). He’s a wonderful and detailed reader of paintings. But in an odd moment near the beginning, he appeared needlessly and overly scornful of those interested in the artist’s biography. No doubt, in the case of Picasso, there’s much third-hand gossip, and I suspect a good deal of what’s been written about his life would be worth reading. Nevertheless, he’s a fascinating and powerful character, fun to learn about even if I didn’t feel I was gaining some insight into his art.

I see the importance of being able to deal with an artwork in its own terms. But it seems not only limiting, but self-deceptive to claim that external knowledge is irrelevant. (I hasten to say that Clark himself does not make such an extreme claim, though he appears to have some distaste for personal history, despite frequently citing Gilot as a source.) Could we learn from art anything about ourselves, others, and the world, if those things were not involved in the work?

Do you have an interest in the personal histories of artists you care about? Or do you prefer to experience the art from a more “purist” perspective?

I wanted to compare an Albers “Homage To The Square” iteration to a similar, but mechanical version as rendered in Adobe Illustrator.

The Albers image was chosen because it appears that he was trying for a gradation in a single hue. I lifted from a site where it is being offered as a poster. Therefore, it may be chromatically inaccurate - but what hey.

I created a replica of the outer limits and the innermost rectilinear shape in their respective relationships. I then sampled the poster for the colors of the outermost and innermost elements and then blended the elements, calling for one interim shape.

Obviously the interim shape is at issue. The Illustrator version splits the difference in size between inner and outer, as it does the color. Not so with Albers who made the interim more imposing in size and saturation, and to my eye it looks a whole lot better.

Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

It struck me this might be relevant to speculations about the narrative tendencies of a panoramic format, where the question arose of whether one reads left-to-right or vice-versa, which would affect the direction of any implicit narrative. The answer seems to depend on the way you read a book in your language. But I hadn’t thought it would depend on which wall of a gallery the picture was hung, as it would for the Kuuk Thaayorre.

That led me to search for eye-tracking studies of picture viewing. I didn’t get too far, but I did come across an article on the difference between artists and non-artists. Which yellow tracks below represents the path of an artist’s gaze? [Warning: answer in the next paragraph]

I think most artists will guess it’s not the one on the left. It seems reasonable to me that the artist is interested in detail and technique everywhere, and in the relations of all parts to whole. The explanation in the article is roughly the same thing said inversely: non-artists are more focused on salient features like people and faces. But the more interesting ideas are in the comments, such as

This seems similar to studies of eye-movement in the sightreading of music. Those who are particularly good at sightreading are constantly looking over the entire page, whereas novices look mostly at the exact spot they are playing.

and

By the looks of it the non-artist is seeing the scene as if it was real, sizing up the doorway and figure on the first, checking the distance from the horizon on the second.

Whereas the artist appears to be looking at the flat image only as a two dimensional space.

Aside: while deep into the results of a Google search on eye-tracking, I encountered a story not of viewing, but of creating a picture using that technology. The Hawaiian artist Peggy Chun, progressively incapacitated by ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), used various methods to continue painting, eventually making use of eye-tracking and finally of a direct brain interface to make pictures.

So I’ve learned just a little about how we look at pictures. But as to how that affects our experience of them, I’m not much the wiser. I can imagine that one’s sensitivity to narrative elements might depend on whether one’s default ordering matched the composition of the picture. Perhaps viewers from different cultures might extract differing stories from the same work for this reason.

Running Free by Angela Ferreira

Title: Running Free
Size: 102×127 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas