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.

Depth Perception in Brown County

Posted in Achievement, Composition, Cropping, Illustration, Landscape, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged Brown County State Park, Fredric Edwin Church, Mary Shieldsmith, perspective on November 8, 2020| Leave a Comment »

The illusion of depth and perspective in an image is so beguiling that we—smart, scientific and skeptical—willingly suspend disbelief and get sucked into the illusion of receding space created on a flat surface.

You don’t have to trek through Ecuador, like Fredric Erwin Church, to get this thrill. Step out your front door and there you’ll find receding space as far as the eye can see even if that’s only to the end of the block. Your camera will aid you because it will flatten the view for you, i.e. it will compact the three-dimensional reality in front of you into a framed two-dimensional surface.

When you treat yourself to a hike in the nearby state park, well, the phrase “as far as they eye can see” is ecstatically notched up.

The most powerful part is (1) because it’s the closest plant to the viewer and it sets the sense of scale. All other plants—and that’s all we see—are therefore seen in relation to (1), with the result that we sense how far back they are.

You can compare this analysis to that of Fredric Edwin Church’s painting in the previous post.

The progression from foreground plants to distant hills –and pine trees way in the distance at upper left–occurs in similar layers. Church manipulates the gradations of color and light to heightened effect and just because he can. In the photo, however, the gradations appear more subtle and to lovers of subtlety that effect may actually be more thrilling than the technique in Church’s painting.

But wait, there’s more. Even before you notice the little plant in the lower left corner, you want to look at this image. It contains an approximation of the Golden Section. You may not even know what that is, but our environment, both cultural and biological, has conditioned you to like this ratio.

The photographer may not have made all these compositional calculations consciously. This sense can be cultivated intuitively.

Knowing how to analyze why this works does not in the least spoil the pleasure of perception. On the contrary, look how it deepens your experience.

(Click image for enlargement.)

Mary Shieldsmith , Brown County State Park, 2020

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.

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 »

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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.

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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 »

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Edward Hopper in Paris

Posted in Galleries, Illustration, inspiration, tagged Amedeo Modigliani, Andre Breton, Constantin Brancusi, Edward Hopper, Fernand Leger, Hemingway, James Joyce, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, Roaring 20's on August 10, 2020| Leave a Comment »

In the 1920’s Edward Hopper was working part time as an illustrator for the Hotel Management industry. He hated the job since he thought of himself as a fine artist, but he needed the money. To get away from the illustrator’s grind he traveled to Europe three times in that decade.

A generation of writers and artists woke up after the horrible butchery of the “Great War” to realize that the old war-honoring culture of their forefathers had to be thrown out, the whole corseted, velvety, tasseled, lacy, medallioned, epauletted, pious-pompous thing. The new generation invented new ways of seeing and thinking.

During his trips to Europe Hopper stayed mainly in Paris. Ah, Paris in the 20’s! The city was buzzing with Cubism and Surrealism. Recently starving artists were now being shown in major galleries: Picasso, Modigliani, Gris, Leger and Brancusi, to name a few. When you went out for coffee you might spot James Joyce, André Breton or Hemingway at the next table. So much to see and learn!

Edward Hopper wanted none of it. His indifference to new ideas was so thorough that, as he later recalled, he hadn’t even heard of Picasso then.

What about the roar of the roaring 20’s. Would he have buttoned his spats and stepped out one night to catch Josephine Baker showing off her knees in the Charleston? Unlikely.

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But we know he took the train to Amsterdam where he admired Rembrandt’s paintings.

Did he ever hop a train to, say, Berlin to visit museums and galleries there? He might have been interested in German museums. But galleries in wild, experimental Berlin showing modern art?

No chance of that. But let’s imagine he did. Next.

Edward Hopper at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Posted in Composition, Failed Effort, Illustration, Semiotics, tagged alienation, Edward Hopper, geometry, human form, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Newfields, satire on August 8, 2020| 1 Comment »

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The Indianapolis Museum of Art (“Newfields’) reopened on July 17^th with an exhibit about Edward Hopper.

I am glad the curators included some of his drawings because they present the most lively work in this show.

The above drawing is dated in the 1950’s. It may have been a study for the painting “People in the Sun,” 1960.

What fascinates me is that the drawing is lively and energetic, while the painting is, well, dead.

Hopper’s mind as he contemplated a man in a lawn chair looking over a desolate landscape was nevertheless agitated. We don’t know by what–memories or necessary imminent decisions or shocking insights. It’s an agitated drawing scribbled out in a frenzy of concentration, took maybe all of five minutes.

But the painting looks like sheer drudgery, as if he just wanted to get it done and be finished with it.

Sunning

If the artist intended to satirize the alienation of modern life, he failed. I think, the image fails as satire because it lacks wit.

We instantly recognize it as a Hopper because human forms are part of the geometry of the composition.

Let that be my introduction to Edward Hopper at the IMA. You can tell that I have issues with this show and with the interpretation of this artist.

So far we have some key concepts: agitation, alienation, drudgery, modern life, geometry, human form, satire and wit.

Stay tuned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9B8ij0GGBI

Paul Giamatti is Drawing in his Quiet Quarantine Room

Posted in Cartooning, faces, Illustration, Imagination, inspiration, Therapy, tagged drawing therapy, Paul Giamatti, pleasure of drawing, quarantine, Stephen Colbert on July 15, 2020| Leave a Comment »

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“There’s really not much to do. I’ve tried to do a little writing. I’ve been drawing again, which I hadn’t done in many years, that’s been a wonderful thing, actually, having this time on one’s hands, to take up things again….A lot of my life I wanted to be some kind of artist, a cartoonist or some sort of illustrator…

All I can do is sort of weird funny faces…I just kind of do these faces…I got a lot of time on my hands….honestly, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing…I never really took any lessons….It’s been fun to do it again….it’s been a good thing.”

Giamatti is in a Zoom (or Zoom-ish) conversation with Stephen Colbert and he’s saying that this self-isolation has a good effect. He has rediscovered the pleasure of drawing!

At that point the conversation had a chance of going deeper into how drawing feels in the mind, how it’s developed over centuries, how it’s taught or not taught and such, but this is TV, so Colbert takes the shallow turn and suggests Giamatti could do a graphic novel. That’s ok.

Nevertheless, we had witnessed a subtle moment in American television: we heard a big star saying to another big star in the entertainment industry that being alone in your quiet room and drawing—that is a wonderful thing.

Yes, it is.

You can see that conversation at