Monday, November 21, 2011
Chuck Close on Creativity
'Inspiration is for amateurs, and the rest of us just show up and get to work."
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Quote from Barnett Newman
"The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical."
- Barnett Newman
- Barnett Newman
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Seeing It All and Making It Your Own
Many things come together to make a painter's work uniquely his. When I first started going out to paint, I would drive around all day looking for the subject, some one-of-a-kind, memorable vista. Now I know that what makes a painting memorable is not so much the subject but rather looking at it with Emerson's transparent eyeball. I have seen wonderful paintings of chicken coops, shoes, a white shirt, a slab of beef hanging in a packing house, and so forth. So I burn less gas these days, and now when I go out, I find great subjects just by opening up to what is available to me.
Every artist has his own way of transcribing what he sees. For me, line is a very important element. There are directional lines that guide a viewer's eyes through the painting. An unfortunate composition can stop the onlooker in his tracks or make him feel he has been wandering through a maze. The horizon line is an inescapable fact in landscape painting. And so too are vanishing points where all lines converge. These naturally occur in Nature and are not hard to observe. What is hard to observe is the "lay of the land," where the foreground ends and what delineates the middle and the distant. I find directional lines useful to establish these relationships among elements of a composition.
The kind of line that interests me most are the lines, staccato, long, squiggly, jittery, looping, slicing, that are the artist's chosen calligraphy of the day. These hand movements in relation to a particular subject are what record the movement of the artist's mind in dialogue with his subject. Cy Twombly, a contemporary abstract artist, says of his use of line, "My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake ... to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt."
To have the purity of a child's line, in my mind, an artist must be wielding line in the same way a child does, unself-consciously, free again of preconceptions about how line is going to function except at the moment he is painting. If I cannot "feel" the line, I cannot paint the movement of clouds or tree limbs. I want such elements in my paintings to look in flux, not frozen. Movement is one of the hardest things to capture whether I am painting a horse, a person, or a windy day.
Color is another highly idiosyncratic element. You can recognize a great artist by the colors he consistently uses, or at least recognize colors he prefers in a particular period. One artist will paint exclusively with primary colors, another in subtle hues as removed as possible from what comes out of his paint tubes. I love layering color, hard to do without over-mixing and turning the outcome into mud. The color harmonies I find in Nature are infinitely more interesting than any suggested by terms like monochromatic, triadic, complimentary, and so forth.
When artists admire one another's works, it is often for these complexities--arrangements that could never be described by a simple formula. I think to be a "painter's painter," as we say, an artist has to move beyond what is expected to create what has not been seen and could not have been anticipated. I take as the highest compliment, another artist's remark, "You really struggled with this area, didn't you?" And, "You don't get that kind of richness easily."
Every artist has his own way of transcribing what he sees. For me, line is a very important element. There are directional lines that guide a viewer's eyes through the painting. An unfortunate composition can stop the onlooker in his tracks or make him feel he has been wandering through a maze. The horizon line is an inescapable fact in landscape painting. And so too are vanishing points where all lines converge. These naturally occur in Nature and are not hard to observe. What is hard to observe is the "lay of the land," where the foreground ends and what delineates the middle and the distant. I find directional lines useful to establish these relationships among elements of a composition.
The kind of line that interests me most are the lines, staccato, long, squiggly, jittery, looping, slicing, that are the artist's chosen calligraphy of the day. These hand movements in relation to a particular subject are what record the movement of the artist's mind in dialogue with his subject. Cy Twombly, a contemporary abstract artist, says of his use of line, "My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake ... to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt."
To have the purity of a child's line, in my mind, an artist must be wielding line in the same way a child does, unself-consciously, free again of preconceptions about how line is going to function except at the moment he is painting. If I cannot "feel" the line, I cannot paint the movement of clouds or tree limbs. I want such elements in my paintings to look in flux, not frozen. Movement is one of the hardest things to capture whether I am painting a horse, a person, or a windy day.
Color is another highly idiosyncratic element. You can recognize a great artist by the colors he consistently uses, or at least recognize colors he prefers in a particular period. One artist will paint exclusively with primary colors, another in subtle hues as removed as possible from what comes out of his paint tubes. I love layering color, hard to do without over-mixing and turning the outcome into mud. The color harmonies I find in Nature are infinitely more interesting than any suggested by terms like monochromatic, triadic, complimentary, and so forth.
When artists admire one another's works, it is often for these complexities--arrangements that could never be described by a simple formula. I think to be a "painter's painter," as we say, an artist has to move beyond what is expected to create what has not been seen and could not have been anticipated. I take as the highest compliment, another artist's remark, "You really struggled with this area, didn't you?" And, "You don't get that kind of richness easily."
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
Everything Seems So Insistent
Leave out anything that distracts from your composition. This is a luxury that painters enjoy over photographers. Once your eye finds the focal point of your painting, everything else must be subsumed. I try to go with my first impression and start to work rapidly on the elements that made me want to paint my subject in the first place. Some painters plan with all sorts of conventional composition formulas in mind, but I find this stultifying. When I was a professor, I couldn't lecture from notes. If I did so, my class became deadly boring. I needed a free exchange of ideas to discover the truth of my lecture. And new truths undoubtedly. When I go out to paint, I try to turn off my thinking processes and paint according to the vigor of my first impression. Pierre Bonnard said something like a painting well composed is already half painted. I know for certain that no amount of gorgeous color can make up for a poor composition. My compositions come about by the same dialogue that directed my former lectures.
When I am preparing to paint, I will walk about until something directs me to question its insistence that we communicate. Once I am in from of this bully or seductress, whichever you prefer, I try to feel what it so compelling. This is my composition because my focal point has announced itself. We enter into dialogue. My task becomes to make its surroundings cede to it, this marvel that wants to reveal itself to me. Paul Cezanne talks about painters being able to discover things never before seen in Nature. This intimate dialogue between the painter and his subject is unique, pulsating with life if he allows his own nature to respond fully in an idiosyncratic way.
If you have difficulty finding a focal point, try thinking of your painting as an experiment in memory. Look intently. Close your eyes. Try to recall with your eyes closed what was your strongest impression. Do this twice more and three is the charm. Then, open your eyes and try to paint with vigor your first impressions without stopping to think. Hold nothing back. Make mistakes. That's why we have palette knives--to scrape off the effluvia of enthusiasm.
When I am preparing to paint, I will walk about until something directs me to question its insistence that we communicate. Once I am in from of this bully or seductress, whichever you prefer, I try to feel what it so compelling. This is my composition because my focal point has announced itself. We enter into dialogue. My task becomes to make its surroundings cede to it, this marvel that wants to reveal itself to me. Paul Cezanne talks about painters being able to discover things never before seen in Nature. This intimate dialogue between the painter and his subject is unique, pulsating with life if he allows his own nature to respond fully in an idiosyncratic way.
If you have difficulty finding a focal point, try thinking of your painting as an experiment in memory. Look intently. Close your eyes. Try to recall with your eyes closed what was your strongest impression. Do this twice more and three is the charm. Then, open your eyes and try to paint with vigor your first impressions without stopping to think. Hold nothing back. Make mistakes. That's why we have palette knives--to scrape off the effluvia of enthusiasm.
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