artamaze by Katherine Hilden

Not Levitating

Posted in Composition, inspiration, Seeing, Semiotics, Surreal, tagged Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni on November 12, 2020| 1 Comment »

Time to watch “Blow Up” again.

This Won’t Sell

Posted in Achievement, Composition, Cropping, literalness, Pattern, tagged lines and dots, no curb appeal on November 2, 2020| 2 Comments »

No real estate agent would like this photo. It doesn’t show off the house. No curb appeal! And what’s with the trees!?

Sorry, sir/madam, this picture is not about the house. It’s not even about Halloween.

Well, what then!!! –It’s not about anything.–Sound of doors slamming.

This is the last of three frames I took of this scene. The first two have too much context. Then I saw the juxtaposition of the straight vertical trees and the pumpkins marching horizontally. Click.

I saw an image, a play of lines and dots.

Here’s the first shot, rejected, due to too much information/illustration.

Walk-Zoom-Click

Posted in Composition, Cropping, Landscape, literalness, Negative space, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged Art and Illusion, E.H.Gombrich, Fairfield Porter, landscape on November 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »

The back-lighting stopped me in my tracks. The shadow was as dark as the tree trunk itself. They looked continuous as if they were of the same substance. The lawn looked as if it had been spray painted DA-glo. Mind you, this photo is not tweaked. My phone camera saw this strange light effect. Drama like this is momentary. Click.

I immediately zoomed in. No distraction, no nice residential context with a house. What we get now is…

…a repetition of forms. On the right, spiky triangles. On the left, and spilling onto the big triangle, you see amorphous meanderings.

Do we still have trees, lawn and late afternoon lighting? Yes, we’re still reminded of how wonderful these real lawns in our neighborhoods are.

We also have just the opposite: flat patterns on a flat surface confined in a rectangular frame.

Now it may dawn on you that you’re having an art experience. “Art does not stand for something outside itself” –Fairfield Porter, remember.

You can focus on the picture surface or what it represents, but not both at the same time — as Gombrich said in Art and Illusion.

But you can practice toggling back and forth between the two ways of seeing. Practice that!

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?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80fb7Lt0z58

“The Architecture of Happiness”

Posted in Architecture, Imagination, inspiration, Semiotics, tagged Alain de Botton, Archtecture of Happiness., The perfect home on September 22, 2020| 1 Comment »

Alain de Botton published this book in 2006. His prose can be purple and dense. You’ll be inclined to read slowly and thoughtfully. That’s a good thing because you’ll want to reflect on our built environment. How does the space you live in effect you—your view of life and your imagination?

I recommend you savor the book at your own pace whenever you get to it, but watch the three episodes that he narrates on you tube—as soon as possible:

Why the urgency and why now? Simply put, because we go for walks now. It’s nice to head for the woods, but it’s also stimulating to walk through the half deserted streets of our towns. Alain de Botton will nudge you to observe and question why buildings are the way they are. Do the buildings you encounter and the spaces you enter make you feel happy, optimistic, resourceful, energetic? Or, do you feel, ermm, locked down?

Fairfield Porter and your interesting junk mail

Posted in Composition, Illustration, inspiration, Landscape, Negative space, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged Ann Ireland, East Coast painter, Fairfield Porter, L.L.Bean, negative space on August 30, 2020| 2 Comments »

PinesLake1

If the concept of negative space eludes you or you don’t quite see what the big deal about it is, consider this painting. Notice how the lake pushes against the pine trees. I don’t mean the actual lake, of course. I mean the surface on the painting that represents the lake.

Notice how this technique flattens the 3-dimensional landscape into a 2-dimensional surface. That sounds so banal, doesn’t it, and the word “flatten” sounds so blah.

But the visual thrill of this technique is undeniable. Even after you have it figured out, your mind loves playing this game: now it’s foreground, now it’s background.

PinesLake2

Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) excelled at this. I’m grateful to him for making the modern way of seeing so accessible.

Why am I bringing up Fairfield Porter now? Because of a bit of junk mail. When I got the L.L.Bean catalog in the mail yesterday, I immediately thought of Porter. At first glance I thought L.L.Bean, an East coast company, was using one of his paintings on their cover. Was this a passage from a Fairfield Porter landscape?

LLBeanCatalog

Porter was born in Winnetka, Illinois. He moved to the East coast to attend Harvard, then stayed and became a celebrated East coast painter. His influence in this painting on the catalog cover is undeniable.

Could the artist be from the East coast? I looked for the fine print on the inside cover. Yes. The artist is Anne Ireland and the L.L.Bean cover painting, inspired by the Maine coast, is titled “Changing Weather.”

Moral of the story: 1) see if you can switch negative space to positive and 2) notice how interesting your junk mail is.

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir

Edward Hopper and Film Noir

Posted in literalness, Semiotics, tagged American Gothic, Art Institute of Chicago, Edward Hopper, film noir, Grant Wood, Morning Sun, Nighthawk, Norman Rockwell, parody, satire on August 23, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Nighthawks1942

Film noir is defined as “a style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.”

The central characters in film noir are often gangsters, detectives and a femme fatale.

Hopper’s paintings are also characterized by “a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.”

Nighthawks, 1942, is his most famous painting. (The Art Institute of Chicago snatched it up as soon as its paint was dry and it is, along with Grant Wood’s American Gothic, one of the reasons people go to the AI.)

It’s not a Norman Rockwell family scene, is it? Two guys in fedoras and a skinny redhead in a red dress, smokin’ and drinkin’ coffee way past midnight. What kind of characters are these? A gangster, a gum shoe and a dame? Sounds about right to me.

Film noir drew them in from the late 20’ to the 50’s. The look of the genre became stylized and predictable. When any art is worked out according to a formula, it can only crank out material for so long before it invites satire and parody.

As does Hopper:

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Ten years after Nighthawk, Edward Hopper was still working with his wooden, predictable formula. Here’s Morning Sun from 1952 and a parody I gleaned from the internet.

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https://www.google.com/search?sa=X&sxsrf=ALeKk00bTzmOgQZ5Yx88JNsnDKd–FkCjQ:1598208829948&q=Nighthawks+(painting)&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgFuLQz9U3yEg2LlHiBLHMDHPNM7SUspOt9Msyi0sTc-ITi0qQmJnFJVbl-UXZxY8YY7kFXv64JywVMmnNyWuMflxEaBJS4WJzzSvJLKkUkuLikYLbrcEgxcUF51kxaTDxLGIV9ctMzyjJSCzPLlbQKEjMBOrLS9cEABz2VzCzAAAA&npsic=0&tbs=kac:1,kac_so:0&ved=2ahUKEwj_xNfs_7HrAhWWLs0KHcusC0AQ-BYwJHoECB8QLg