Intentionality

Right now, I have two series of paintings that I'm working on -- an abstract series that I began a year ago, and a series of Oregon landscapes inspired by the shapes and patterns of quilts. For all of my current work, I'm focusing on my improving my brushwork and on internationalism.

A while back, I attended a meeting of the Artists Breakfast Group here in Rochester and the photographer, Bruno Chalifour, spoke to us about his work. One of the things that he said that struck me the most was that he considered the primary difference between master artists and amateur artists to be the level of intention in the final work. He was not suggesting that artists shouldn't make mistakes, that they should always work with a plan, or that they should avoid having moments of discovery -- instead he was simply saying that the master artist is not careless. The master artist considers every square inch of their piece and makes decisions. Nothing is "just there" because it wouldn't get out of the way or the artist was too lazy to cover it up.

Now, I realize that some of you may be saying to yourselves, "But wait! What about Dadaism? What about the idea that perfection is unattainable and that chance is an inevitable part of life that we should embrace?" Well, I actually think these two ideas can co-exist. Chance is inevitable, but it is how you respond to chance that matters. In other words, say the artist accidentally drops a blob of paint on the canvas where they didn't initially mean to. Well, the artist has a choice. If it was a good accident, the artist will consider it and make it part of the painting -- perhaps even incorporating similar blobs elsewhere so that it fits in and makes the whole work better. If it was a bad blob, the artist wipes it away or covers it up and moves on. The artist does not just shrug and continue on as if it didn't happen.

In a similar vein, I want my brushwork to look intentional. That is -- bold strokes look bold and subtle strokes look subtle. I want to avoid scumbling for the sake of covering space and filling up the work and I want to avoid using weak dry-brush strokes unless the strokes that I am making should be weak or done dry-brush.

For example, this work that I did last year is okay, but I think the strokes are a bit weak and unintentional:

Whereas, this work that I finished this afternoon has more successful brushwork:

What do you think? If you are an artist, do you try to work intentionally or not? What exercises and philosophies do you use to improve your brushwork?

In the frame -- Out of the frame

Lately, I've been very interested in the idea of creating compositions that fill the picture frame to the point of  bursting, without actually bursting. I want my pictures to balance on that knife edge of being full without gushing out of the frame. I was talking this weekend with Nancy Jo Gambacurta at a Shoe Factory round table and I realized that her pictures are perfect (and also gorgeous) examples of what I mean by "bursting". Elements rush out of the frame at every angle, as if the canvas is capturing only a tiny piece of a much larger whole. The painting not only takes up the space of the frame, but also expands out of it, so that the viewer also begins to notice the empty space around the picture itself, imaging how it might also be filled with additional details.

In contrast, consider Sumi-e drawings, also known as Japanese Ink and Wash Painting. According to the blog Poemas del rio Wang, "A Japanese painter was commissioned by an American to paint him a picture. The picture has been made. In its lower corner a little bird sat on the branch of a cherry tree. The whole upper part of the painting was empty. The American examined the image with an unhappy face, and he asked the painter to paint something else on it as well, for it looks so empty. The Japanese refused to do so. When he was called to account, he explained that if he painted all the surface, the bird would have no room to fly." The picture below (taken from the Poemas blog post) illustrates this point.

Theories about room to fly aside, it is true that Japanese paintings are usually not crowded -- they have lots of space for the eye to rest. The viewer's gaze does not wander outside of the frame, but stays firmly inside the picture. While Nancy's paintings are expansive and push the eye out of the frame, the bird painting is intimate and draws the eye into the painting.

What I want to do is to crowd my paintings with richness and color the way Nancy does, but also to capture that the sense of closeness and stillness that the Sum-i paintings usually have. In other words, I want it to seem like the painting itself is a world unto itself containing everything, and that there is nothing at all important outside of the frame. If an element leaves the picture, it is only to emphasize that that really, the bulk of what you need to see is already before you. I think Cat Ball was my first painting where I successfully achieved this effect.

I'm still playing with ideas of in and out in my mind. In the future, my paintings won't necessarily be contained in exactly the same way that Cat Ball is contained, but I will certainly be thinking about how I can push a painting to seem full in this specific way.

Picking Paintings

The Shoe Factory has posted its submission form for their upcoming 2012 February Exhibit: "Unconditional Love: Cats and Dogs" (http://www.shoefactoryarts.com/CallforArtists.html). I can submit two pieces, but I just finished painting three, so now I get to choose.

Painting 1: Cat Ball

Painting 2: Cat Stretching

Painting 3: Odd-Eyed Cat

Now, intuitively, I feel like the Cat Stretching is the one that doesn't belong -- it has fewer layers, that cat body is a bit smaller, and it is a bit more gestural. However, I can also see an argument for excluding Odd-Eyed Cat because of its higher contrast value and because its background is more "finished" looking.

But perhaps I should figure out which ones are just plain best and not worry about whether they "go together." Anyone want to help me choose? What do you think?

The Hive Mind of the Internet is Nothing Like the Borg

I'm going to take a break from art blogging to write about something that occurred to me at dinner tonight: the hive mind of the Internet is nothing like the Borg. So, if you're nerdy like me and remember the Star Trek episodes from the 90s, you are already familiar with the Borg. If not, here's a quick primer: The Borg are a super-creepy community of half-cyborg half-biped creatures that fly around the known universe in a mechanical cube trying to "assimilate" all humanoid races into Borg. A Borg person is connected through computer chips and tubes to a "queen" Borg who does all the thinking for them -- basically she's a parasitic organism that increases her influence by making clone-like zombies of herself that can all think and act in unison to carry out her will.

Uhh . . . Sorry, guys, I think you have the wrong address.

Anyhow, a few years ago, philosophers and random bloggers were floating around the idea that humanity was destined to first physically merge with computers and then, second, form a collective consciousness called an Omega Point (for example, see this blog entry from 2007: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/09/ai-singularit-2.html). This theory is related to the idea of a Technological Singularity. Remember the giant glowing baby that the main character "evolved" into at the ending of Space Odyssey: 2001? It's kind of like that, but with Borg, everybody thinks as one, overtones. The idea always struck me as interesting, if a bit silly.

So today, as I was thinking about memes, it became clear to me that the mechanisms of social media do not wipe out human individuality at all. Instead, the Internet allows single individuals to have greater influence than they ever have before. Unlike the Borg who "think" whatever the Queen thinks and say whatever she says, the echo chamber of the Internet is highly dependent upon masses of individuals who each uniquely decide whether something is worth repeating or not. Memes survive and are repeated, partially because a meme itself is "sticky" -- memorable, simple, and interesting in some way (cat videos), but also because massive amounts of unrelated individual gatekeepers see things online and then either repeat them or leave them to languish in obscurity.

Interestingly, the Human Megaphone created by Occupy protesters is actually the opposite of how social media works. One protester yells "human megaphone." Other protesters repeat "human megaphone" and then all the repeaters listen for what the first protester says next so that they can repeat the phrase over and over at a loud volume until the whole crowd is saying it. The reason this method of disseminating information is so effective is because all the protesters have homogeneous interests to some extent and have informally agreed to support and promote each others efforts. In other words, there are no gatekeepers, only repeaters. In the wild world of the Internet no such agreement exists. People will only repeat what they want to repeat; there is no unifying goal nor shared beliefs. In summation, the hive mind of the Internet looks a lot more like this:

Working From Photographs

Today I finished working on my painting of two pink peonies. For my flower series, I have been working from live sketches and photographs. First, I make thumbnail sketches to choose the best cropping and then I make notes about the original colors I see, since the human eye can always see more than a camera. Finally, I use the thumbnails to take some photos. The photos capture the finer details and exact lighting of the moment.

Contemporary painters are split on the use of photography as a tool to create paintings. On the one hand, you have traditional painters that believe using photography is a crutch that will hamper the development of personal style, and on the other hand you have photorealists who champion the use of photographs, even multiple photographs, pointing out that painters have always used technology to help compose work. Van Gogh, for example, used a tool called a perspective frame. 

 Basically, as you can see from the picture above, it's a wooden frame with strings attached. The painter holds it up in front of her while looking at a scene, and the perspective frame helps her keep the middle of the scene in the middle of the painting. Before Van Gogh, painters used Camera Obscuras and Durer drew this picture of a device that he used called a Perspective Machine.

The reason traditional painters worry about using photography is because of a historic fear that photography will eventually replace painting and cause it to become obsolete. Alternately, they ask why that one would use paint to represent a scene realistically when the camera is obviously so good at this task. Instead, why not use paint to do what only paint can do . . . i.e. create abstract compositions that show off the quality of the paint itself, or heavily stylized work that comes from the imagination. Interestingly, even Van Gogh encountered this challenge to his work from fellow painter Gaugain, who felt that painters should paint from the imagination and not from observation. Gaugain even went so far as to suggest that a painter should only paint from memory and never have the subject of the work in the room while working. Van Gogh, in contrast, preferred to paint by looking directly at still lives or while out painting en plein air.

I would like to master painting from observation, using the tools that are available to me. I have years of drawing experience, and could rely solely on my drawing skills to help me quickly sketch a scene. I also have some painting experience and could, like the impressionists, try to capture a moment quickly with bold strokes before it disappears. Currently, however, I am using photography to aid my sketching and painting because I want to extend my ability to observe a moment past the moment itself. I want to improve my ability to study a single instance of lighting at my leisure, and the camera lets me do that.

I also have some additional reasons for using photography as a tool. When I was younger, I had an uncorrected astigmatism that caused me to lack depth perception. In other words, things looked flatter to me than they did to the average person. This past year, I finally had my vision adjusted correctly and now perceive the world in its full 3D glory. Surprisingly, this affected my ability to draw. Because drawings are inherently flat, seeing the world as flat was actually an advantage when I was composing. When I see the world in 3D now,  I see objects first and shapes second. I'm in the process of retraining my brain to "see" shapes and shades in a dimensional reality. Snapping a quick picture helps me to check what I see against an artificially created flat image.

I also take pictures of my painting throughout the entire painting process. This is less to document my work and more to gain a new perspective on it. With digital photography, I can see a picture on a monitor instantly. What this does for me, is it allows me to see a very small version of my work. I can walk back to see the picture from a different distance, but I can only do so within the confines of the room. The photographs give me a quick way of shrinking the work to mimic what it would look like from a greater distance away. The same thing is true when capturing the original image that I work from. Snapping a picture lets me quickly assess whether or not something that I am looking at up close would also look good from a distance.

We See What We Know

Recently, I've been watching the television show Brain Games. In one episode, they demonstrated that human visual perception can accurately construct a scene from very few points of data -- for instance, a handful of colored moving dots on a black background can easily be recognized by most people as as two people dancing or two people fighting. However, when the moving dots are associated with a less familiar activity, such as two people sword fencing, it becomes much harder to interpret what the dots represent. It actually becomes difficult to tell that the dots even represent people. The take-home lesson from this seems to be that it's very easy to show people something that they expect to see and very difficult to show people something that they don't expect to see. You literally can't see what you don't know as well as you can see what you do know.

I got to thinking about this as it applies to painting and art and realized that this same lesson does in fact carry over, but with a twist. Why, for instance, does Bob Ross teach people to paint trees and mountains and streams? Why are there never animals in his work? Or humans? When Bob Ross paints his trees and clouds he is never worried about making sure that the lighting in the scene has been figured out correctly, and yet I always recognize what it is that he is trying to paint. That's because he knows that your brain needs very few signals (dots) to instantly "see" a tree. This means that trees have a lot of room for error since our brains can kindly fill in lots of missing data -- and that makes trees and clouds good candidates for things that beginners can paint and feel good about.

Animals, on the other hand, although they are familiar, are less ubiquitous than trees. If you try to picture a deer in your mind right now, you can do it, but if I ask you to picture the exact curve of the deer's legs the details are probably a bit fuzzy. Try to picture a cat's ears or tail, and you will probably come up with a clearer image. That's because you interact with cats more than you interact with deer, and so all the neural pathways leading to the idea of "cat" are a bit better connected. Unfortunately, the distance Bob Ross paints his scenes from precludes being able to see any cats, and it's not a good idea for Bob Ross to try and teach beginners how to paint deer by the stream since human brains need accurately painted cues to see the somewhat less familiar deer.

Why doesn't Bob Ross add people to his paintings then since we are more familiar with them than deer or even trees? In one sense, the idea that people are more familiar to us than deer and trees is true. It's easy for our brains to take two dots and a half circle and instantly see a smiley face. A generic smiley face won't register as "realistic" though in the same way that a few dabs of green paint register as a "realistic" tree. It will register as "cartoony." This is because, to some extent, we don't need to identify very small differences between tree branches and one deer is pretty much the same as another deer to us humans give or take an inch. As soon as we can see that it's a tree or a deer, the brain stops classifying and stops to rest. Faces, on the other hand, are how we tell one another apart, and so it's very important for the brain to pick up on every subtle difference between one face and another face so that we can be socially successful. Thus, if a painter doesn't get tiny details right on a face, it will register as distorted, strange, or unidentifiable. In other words, faces need more "dots" than trees in order for our brains to read them right.

In general, this idea of recognizing something from very few cues reminds me of Mondrian's trees (take a look at them here). His early tree is pretty representational, and his last tree is highly abstracted, and yet, most viewers can tell that the last three paintings in the series, despite how different they look, are actually the same exact tree.