artamaze by Katherine Hilden

Light Slivers

Posted in abstraction, Color, Composition, Illustration, Landscape, Pattern, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged color vs. black/white, composition, landscape, light effect on November 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »

After you’ve identified this photo as a so-what view of a lawn, check that off and see if this might have some formal element worth noticing.

It does. You can see it better in black/white.

The light zig-zags down from top to bottom with increasing looseness as if it came from some juggler’s pen light.

That’s it? Yes, for this little exercise in seeing it’s enough to notice that the slivers of light appear to be superimposed on a surface.

The light slivers exist on one plane and the grass on another. If you also notice that the grass makes vertical lines and the light forms horizontal lines, you’ve got a composition worth contemplating.

I’d like to print this up in high resolution, 6 ft high, and position it at the end of a long hall way.

My camera clicked it in color. We are used to seeing images in color. But color is not necessarily more powerful than b/w. Do you agree that the b/w is a more stimulating image?

Btw, all this is relevant to both photography and painting. Not such a little exercise, after all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw7tkgVnRTw

Pierre Soulage

Posted in abstraction, Achievement, Color, Composition, Imagination, inspiration, Semiotics, Technique and Demo, Texture, tagged beyond black, outrenoir, Pierre Soulage, Rodez on November 14, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Even as a child, Soulage says, he liked black because it made the rest of the paper look all the more white.

When he was sixty, his paintings became all black, a black he calls outrenoir, which translates roughly as “beyond black.”

He doesn’t think of himself as painting with black paint, but with light. The light reflects off the thick, textured black paint and that is what you see. “I made these because I found that the light reflected by the black surface elicits certain emotions in me. These aren’t monochromes. The fact that light can come from the color which is supposedly the absence of light is already quite moving, and it is interesting to see how this happens.”

He was born December 24, 1919. Approaching 101, he says he’s looking forward to more ideas to come to him.

The Musée Soulage, in Rodez , Southern France, is devoted to his work.

I recommend the following links for more images of his work and of interviews with him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azb6K-R_q8M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylZGz3NuidA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eydws5jJ6ys

https://www.google.com/search?q=pierre%20soulages&tbm=isch&tbs=rimg:CR8aTYMxIqhvYaEYr1reAWak&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBsQuIIBahcKEwjQo_2WloPtAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQFw&biw=1294&bih=836#imgrc=R9rQFXyA7wEFTM&imgdii=4-kpwBo3-mMrfM

https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk01-AFktcIGO9n0dcMT9GRy-irtSdw:1605223481914&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=pierre+soulages&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj3oLK7k_7sAhVSgK0KHVh7AGIQiR56BAgPEBA&biw=1378&bih=836#imgrc=Tj_-pYUAPfkJYM&imgdii=AM1Kn5-I38wLFM

Two days ago I was reminded of Pierre Soulage when I took the photo posted as “Not Levitating.” When I framed the shot I saw the uncanny light that was coming through the front doors glass panel in late afternoon. On the photo, which is unedited, the light “column” at the left appears so substantial that its weight equals that of the blue sphere, which would otherwise have to dominant the composition.

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/11/12/not-levitating/

Walking in the Neighborhood

Posted in abstraction, Color, Composition, Cropping, Illustration, Landscape, literalness, Negative space, Seeing, Texture, Therapy, tagged black/white photo, composition, landscape, shadows on October 31, 2020| Leave a Comment »

You’re walking in late afternoon when the shadows are very long. You notice that shadows can take strange, aggressive shapes on an expanse of lawn. Click. In the picture the shadow looks even stranger than it did in reality. Why is that?

Walk on. At an intersection you see shadows on the distant lawn. Click.

But you took a wide angle, getting the street into the frame of your camera. It’s merely a documentation of this corner of an unremarkable street.

You raise your arms and you zoom in on the distant lawn. Click. Now you have an image of triangular shapes on a green surface with some rectangle in the upper part of the frame. This is getting interesting. But you still have the street in there.

Now crop the reference to the street because it’s too much context, which makes the image point to something outside itself.

Why is this interesting? Because now you have an image that can be seen two ways: one, as a reference to a green lawn with triangular shadows cast by neighboring buildings and two, as a pattern of geometrical forms that refer to nothing outside of themselves.

If you want to see this duality even more clearly, take out the color.

Now you have an arrangement of shapes that “does not stand for something outside itself.” Is this art? Hmmm, maybe.

On second look, yes. Notice how the image has a unifying texture: the bricks of the wall have specks of black shadows that echo the specks of leaves on the lawn. This unifying texture has nothing to do with what’s being represented. “Art does not stand for something outside itself,” as Fairfield Porter would put it.

You can frame this, hang it on a wall, glance at it in passing and momentarily inhabit the realm of form, which is pure feeling. Like music.

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/10/27/artspeak-then/

Artspeak, Now

Posted in abstraction, Composition, literalness, Negative space, Semiotics, Still life, tagged abstract art, Art in America, Fairfield Porter, non-objective art, Olga Balema on October 30, 2020| Leave a Comment »

If you plowed through those two pages from Fairfield Porter (in the last post), you noticed that his thinking has peaks of clarity and ruts of generalizations.

He says, the new American painting is “more accurately called non-objective than abstract.” That’s a peak. It’s a good distinction. Whenever we hear painting described as “abstract” we should translate that as “non-objective.” Thank you, Fairfield.

Then, on the second page, we have “art does not stand for something outside itself.” That’s another peak. Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr. Porter!!!!

The rest of that page is erudite theorizing that must have pleased his publisher. This new non-objective art was shocking enough; the critical language had to break it gently to the public. After all, everybody assumed that art had to represent something. It was a cultural given that it would be absurd to look at art that was so presumptuous as to stand on its own. It took a while for the shock of the new to wear off. But the shock did gradually dampen down and now Artspeak unabashedly talks about art as it is.

Here’s a review, chosen randomly, from last September’s Art in America.

The whole review describes the physical materials and how they were placed in the exhibit space. There’s no mention of symbolism, historical references or why anybody should go see this.

Yes, indeed, art does not stand for something outside itself, as Fairfield Porter said sixty years ago. But I wonder if he would find this installation too challenging to look at. Too absurd? Too hard to pay attention to?

Paying attention! That’s the key. Paying attention to what’s actually in front of you is not so easy.

In the next few posts, let’s zoom in on this problem of paying attention. How hard can that be!? For example, if I say this image is art, can I say it does not stand for something outside itself? That is, how hard can it be to pay attention to this image–as image?

Hopper and Feininger

Posted in abstraction, Architecture, Composition, Illustration, tagged Art Institute of Chicago, Edwrd Hopper, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Lionel Feininger on August 23, 2020| Leave a Comment »

night-windows.jpg!Large

You won’t learn anything about existentialism in this post, existentialism being the de rigueur ism to bring up when you need to sound smart in a conversation about modern art.

Instead of being smart, let’s play a game. Let’s imagine you stumbled upon an exhibit at, say, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where the paintings of Lionel Feininger (1871-1956) and Edward Hopper (1882-1967) were shown side by side. (That’s a game good museums actually like to play, which is what makes them so exiting to go to. At the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, paintings are moved around frequently so that you can see a familiar painting next to new neighbors and therefore gain new insights without anyone lecturing you about anything.)

GaberndorfII1924

Feininger was a prolific artist, who early in his career worked figuratively, even as a caricaturist and cartoonist, and later tended to work with linear forms in his compositions. In the 1920’s, when Hopper was visiting Europe, Feininger was teaching at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar and then in Dessau. There’s no chance that they met, given Hopper’s disinterest in modern art.

No matter. They were contemporaries, working with architectural forms in their paintings. It’s only fair to put them side by side.

The first thing you notice is the figure in the Hopper painting. Now try to imagine the painting without the figure.

night-windowsCOPY

It doesn’t hold your attention, does it?

Look at some Feininger compositions. Do they need a human figure to grab you? No. These compositions are engaging and absorbing as they are.

Gelmeroda

Hopper seems to be primarily interested in geometrical patterns, but because what he comes up with is flat, hard-edged and obvious, he adds a figure to focus your attention. The figure inevitably looks isolated and alienated, which makes for a facile match with existentialist jargon.

new-york-office copy

new-york-office

https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk02oupxlpD-j3izaofSkMqzO847GNQ:1593207610303&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=barbara+bordnick+flowers&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi1j6ntuKDqAhVFOs0KHQzqA2sQ7Al6BAgCEB0&biw=1536&bih=848

Zooming In

Posted in abstraction, Achievement, Cropping, literalness, Roundness, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged Barbara Bordnick, flowers, Georgia O'Keefe, Searchings on June 26, 2020| Leave a Comment »

CloseUp3email

In 2002 the photographer Barbara Bordnick published “Searchings. Secret Landscapes of Flowers.” In this large-format book, the close-up photos of flowers measure 10”x14.” They are astonishing. You know it’s a flower and the flower’s name is given. At the same time you are obviously looking at something other than a little flower–you’re imagining landscape formations or some atmospheric effect.

Georgia O’Keefe, famous for her huge paintings of flowers said, “If you look, really look at a flower, it becomes your world.”

These flower photos make excellent subjects to work from, to practice drawing fluid lines and the shading of round forms.

Here’s a student work in graphite, about 12”x18.”

FlowerLarge

When the color photo is Xeroxed in black/white, it’s easier for the student to see the tonal values, since part of the work has already been done by eliminating color.

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The book is easy to get online and it’s inexpensive. You can also find some of these flower images at

SearchingsBarbaraBordnick_

Red has What? Red has Gravitas

Posted in abstraction, Achievement, Color, Seeing, Semiotics, Technique and Demo, tagged Cassie buccellato, evolution, gravitas in color, red, ripe fruit, sweetness on March 3, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Every language has a word for three colors: black, white and what would you think? Yellow, mauve, turquoise, chartreuse, magenta, grey, beige, orange, purple? Nope, RED. Oh, of course, you say.

There are languages that lump all other colors into one word, something like “colorful.”

Why would we single out the color red above all others? Look at strawberries, apples, cherries. The color red evolved in nature, in fruit specifically, simultaneously with our love of sweetness. Ripe fruit tends to be red and sweet. Think strawberry. Our evolved taste buds longing for sweetness—and, therefore, red—lead us to eat the strawberry. It’s the strawberry’s way of spreading its seeds and thereby assuring its proliferation.

But we think red is important because it satisfies our craving for sweetness. The red fruit is a source of nourishment and calories to burn and therefore is important for our survival.

It’s not that your mouth is watering when you see red in a painting. The association is more subtle. Red is deeply connected to survival. So, red has gravitas.

Test other colors for gravitas:

Not so much, wouldn’t you agree.

Again, this exercise in seeing is brought to you courtesy Adobe Photoshop.

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/03/03/red-and-repetition/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/02/20/green-anyone/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/02/19/those-blues/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/red-and-rational/

Red and Repetition

Posted in abstraction, Achievement, Color, Composition, inspiration, Seeing, Semiotics, Technique and Demo, tagged Aimless Love, Billy Collins, Cassie buccellato, painting, poetry on March 3, 2019| 1 Comment »

You know by now that I like to ferret out why a painting or drawing holds my attention. In an abstract painting this is particularly puzzling because no reference, no narrative, no memory is evoked. Then how is it that these bold non-referential brush marks can be so compelling?

There are two factors. One is composition, the other is color.

The composition here is based on repetition. There are three “brackets” of different size, orientation and articulation. By articulation I mean how clearly the “bracket motif” is stated. The small one at upper right looks like an emergent, potential bracket. The largest one of the three is more elaborate than the mid-size one at upper left. The artist, I’m sure did not analyze her process this way, but rather painted intuitively. And that’s because the repetition of forms is so compelling in a composition. We like repetition, rhythm and rhyme in poetry and music. And also in our visual art.

What about that yellow dot? Go back up to the original painting and notice how your eye goes back to this tiny element and how fascinated you are by it. That’s it! The small yellow dot breaks the repetition, it adds a high note.

The second factor is color, which will come up in the next post.

As I was working on this analysis, I randomly pulled a book off the shelf. It was a book of poetry by Billy Collins, “Aimless Love.” I opened it at random and read:

Lucky for some of us,

poetry is a place where both are true at once,

where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction.

Cassie Buccellato, painting in oil, 6′ x 4-1/4′

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/black/

Green Anyone?

Posted in abstraction, Color, Imagination, Seeing, Semiotics, Technique and Demo, Therapy, tagged Barnet Newman, Bruce Nauman, color therapy, green, Kasimis Malevich, Maria Lalic, Red Square, Shopgirl, Steve Martin, Tate, Yves Klein on February 20, 2019| 1 Comment »

In the early 2000’s green was a fashionable color, meaning it was associated with romantic love. In Steve Martin’s 2005 movie Shopgirl (he wrote the screenplay) the walls of the shopgirl’s apartment were green. I remember thinking, how odd, I thought green walls were for hospitals.

So it goes with color associations. We talked about that earlier, in the post about blue.

There have been paintings of solid black (Barnett Newman), solid blue (Yves Klein), solid white (Bruce Nauman) and solid red (Malevich). But solid green?

In the 1990’s the Tate showed large solid color paintings by Maria Lalic, including a green that is, however, not applied evenly and flat but thinly striped. So we can’t count it. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/maria-lalic-2639

What is it about green? Why has nobody made a solid green painting? Kazimir Malevich would not have shown a Green Square next to his Red Square in 1915.

On the internet you can look up “color therapy,” and read that green is the most therapeutic color: “This is the most basic color of all in healing. It is the color which you always use first and last.” https://www.aetherius.org/healing-yourself-and-others/color-therapy/ Is that why walking in parks and woods is restful? But then, consider that there’s more hitting the senses in the woods than green-green-green.

A given color will affect us differently in different contexts.

Try this.

It’s 3 feet square. In what room of your house would you like to see this? Really? For how long?

Next, imagine walking unassumingly into a museum or gallery and there it is, it 8’ x 8.’ Your whole visual field is filled, it envelops you, nothing else exists. Here you have green and its complementary color, red, for maximum contrast. The Malevich juxtaposition in 1915 would have been comical, but here the contrast may give you a profound jolt.

Now let’s take another break from color. What happens when you switch abruptly between the Renaissance sensibility and the modern sensibility in which we’ve been immersing ourselves here? We will now toggle back again from 2000 to 1500.

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/red-and-rational/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/02/19/those-blues/

http://www.katherinehilden.com