artamaze by Katherine Hilden

http://khilden.com

Knead and Draw

Posted in faces, Failed Effort, Negative space, Technique and Demo, tagged F.G.Stephens, John Everett Millay, Kneaded Eraser, Preraphaelites on March 23, 2022| 2 Comments »

A Kneaded Eraser is soft like dough. You massage it –knead it—until it has the shape of the area in your drawing that you want to remove or lighten. For example, if you’re drawing a face and you want to put a highlight in the pupil, you shape your eraser into a point and dab that on the pupil to remove the graphite.

John Everett Millais drew his fellow Preraphaelite artist F.G. Stephens in 1853. What makes this a powerful drawing is how Millais combines two opposites: a subtle, soft drawing technique with the presence of a strong, even confronting personality.

So, this was a challenging exercise. Faces are always challenging because of the emotion that we project into them. In this face students apparently got mesmerized by the piercing gaze and couldn’t believe how soft it was at the same time.

One student confronted the eye separately and drew it masterfully.

But then drawing the eye in the face was problematic. Isn’t that interesting! It’s not a matter of technique, but emotion.

Technically, the Kneaded Eraser was supposed to play the leading role in achieving subtlety. The shadow that covers most of the face was put down first. Then the Kneaded Eraser was scripted to make its entrance and perform. Look at me, I’m not just cleaning up, I’m here to actually DRAW.

Drawing by removing is a powerful technique. For a beginning artist it may feel counter-intuitive.

In the second drawing we did, the Kneaded Eraser asserted itself. Next.

In and Out of Focus

Posted in Composition, Cropping, Negative space, Seeing, Semiotics, tagged benthic entity, Biden, composition, Jefferson, Oval Office on April 22, 2021| Leave a Comment »

To get this shot the photographer had to have been sitting or kneeling on the floor at the edge of the coffee table with the flower arrangement. Seeing this photo in the newspaper (NYTimes) may have been shocking to some people who may have thought it simply was the only shot they could get from that event in the Oval Office. I don’t think so. I think it was the BEST shot. I think it was chosen among many because this view is artful and expressive.

To appreciate this photo with the out-of-focus flowers in the foreground, let’s remind ourselves of the standard Oval Office photo. (I have blurred out the faces to make it easier to concentrate on overall composition and the gestures of these four characters.)

Symmetry rules! Look at the placements of the paintings and the sculptures. Why are these important? Because symmetry conveys the feeling of rationality, stability and order. That’s what we want in our government. Even the placement of the four people is symmetrical in the photographer’s frame. Wonderful.

Then why is this picture comical? Because the rationality of the geometry in the picture is contradicted by the absurdity of the non-communication taking place here. The woman is articulating a point to which the man on the couch respectfully listens. These two are completely disconnected from the two figures in the background. In the chair at the left someone has arranged a department store dummy. In the chair on the right, two pectoral fins are flapping while a long ventral stripe defines this noisy benthic entity.

The drama in this photo, therefore, consists in the contrast between the rigorous geometry of the stage set and the disorder created by the characters on the stage.

Now back to the first picture, the one with the out-of-focus flowers.

There is no symmetry, not even Jefferson’s portrait is in the middle. No symmetry = no stasis = movement. Movement here doesn’t mean somebody jumping, it means excitement in the mind.

We don’t even get a sense of the three-dimensional space of this room. The photo looks like a collage. Your eye moves through this restless collage: flowers, man, portrait, lampshade. The focus is on Biden, partly because you recognize him as the president, but also because the lines of the portrait’s frame behind him converge on his head, like an arrow. Notice how the lines of the Jefferson frame direct your attention at the president’s head. But that masked presidential face occupies a very small part of the photo surface. What actually dominates the composition? The flower arrangement in the foreground! About a fourth of the whole photo! And it’s out of focus!!

Why is this important? Because we’re looking not at the documentation of an event but rather at a juxtaposition—yes, a collage–of elements that invite interpretation. Your mind races to see connections: Biden-Jefferson, flowers-environment, decisions-environment, past-future, known-unknown, et al.

So, this photo is a work of art.

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Rag Time

Posted in Imagination, Negative space, Semiotics, tagged clothing industry, environmental art, Rachel Monroe, Rag Chair, re-purposing, The Atlantic on April 6, 2021| Leave a Comment »

A man is walking in front of a pile of discarded clothing three times his height.

Online you can now snatch up a Remy Rag Chair for $6,800. A bit steep, you say. But maybe it’s the least you can do for the planet.

The above image is from last month’s Atlantic about discarded clothing: “Ultra-fast Fashion Is Eating the World.”

Here are some points made by this article:

There’s a fashion company that offers fresh styles twice a week, driving competitors that are “slower” out of business.
The fashion industry stays competitive by producing cheaper, less durable clothing made from synthetic fibers.
Americans believe that clothes should be cheap, abundant and new.
Americans buy a piece of clothing every five days, on average.
It’s estimated that the fashion industry generates 4 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. The United Nations says it accounts for 20 percent of global wastewater.
The human toll of fast fashion is inestimable since prices are kept low through labor by systematically exploited workers.

And what role does social media play in all this? No surprise here: the more we use social media, the more time and money we spend shopping on line.

One teenager who used to buy tons of clothes and promote them (paid by the clothing line) on social media matured into a pre-med student who now makes stylish clothes out of what she already has. Re-purposing! She says: “Secondhand clothing and thrifting is so hot right now.”

That’s good news. Now if we could just figure out how to make the Rag Chair in the garage, with some friends helping. Maybe Rag Chair parties could become hot.

What if every small town and neighborhood had its own environmental artist?

Environmental art started in the ‘60’s.

Glowing Prairie Grasses, Horizontal View

Posted in Composition, Cropping, Landscape, Negative space, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged backlighting, composition, diagonals, golden section, shadows on March 13, 2021| 3 Comments »

My prairie grasses glow backlit in the late afternoon sun. I grab the phone, step out the front door and frame the shot.

I love this glow. Oh, how I love this glow, let me count the ways.

What I mean is, if I put the glow in the middle of the frame, the picture will die on me. When we say a picture is “dead” what we’re talking about is our attention. When an image engages your attention it’s because the composition moves your eye through the frame and lights up your brain.

I can tell you how it lit up mine.

In my first shot I took a horizontal view because of the variety of diagonal lines formed by the A) crack in the cement, B) straight line of the wall, C) shadows of the grass and D) tree in the background. That’s nice because it’s the same element (diagonal lines) expressed by different shapes and reference.

The other compositional whammo is the Golden Section. This seems to be built into my retina, because here it is again.

In summary, we have three compositional dynamics working here.

The horizontal frame establishes a tranquil, thoughtful mood.
The diagonals, varied and upward moving, are restless, energetic and optimistic.
The Golden Section anchors you in our aesthetic tradition.

How can this be a worthwhile image to look at? It’s such an ordinary subject matter. If you frame this — not cropped!– somebody coming to your house could make a face and say, are you kidding me? What if you had it as an image filling your 50” TV screen! Ha, look at that.

Consider the composition, pure and simple:

In the next post we’ll go vertical to see what can happen there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Patchett

An introvert again

Posted in Imagination, Negative space, Seeing, Therapy, tagged Ann Patchett, Francisco de Zurbaran, Harpers Magazine, These Precious Days on February 10, 2021| Leave a Comment »

“Most of the writers and artists I know were made for sheltering in place. The world asks us to engage, and for the most part we can, but given the choice we’d rather stay home. I know how to structure my time. I can write an entire novel without showing a page of it to anyone. I can motivate myself without a deadline or a contract. I was happy, even thrilled, to stop traveling. I had spent my professional life looking at my calendar, counting down the days I had left at home. Now every engagement I had scheduled in 2020 was canceled. With each day, I felt some piece of scaffolding fall away. I no longer needed the protection. I was an introvert again.”

———from Ann Patchett, These Precious Days. Published in Harper’s Magazine, January 2021

For the full story, https://harpers.org/archive/2021/01/these-precious-days-ann-patchett-psilocybin-tom-hanks-sooki-raphael/

Cup of Water and A Rose, Francisco de Zurbarán, 1598-1664

https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk0364ow8HhwjPjQNrj7ifLsXwv-tZQ:1609707412251&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=orazio+gentileschi&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjX_f6z04DuAhVDPq0KHcHsArgQiR56BAgcEAI&biw=1274&bih=836#imgrc=nd4inKpPywjfBM

The Lute Player by Orazio Gentileschi

Posted in Achievement, Composition, Illustration, Imagination, Negative space, Semiotics, tagged Artemisia Gentileschi, Lute Player, Orazio Gentileschi, portraits of women, Renaissance on January 3, 2021| 2 Comments »

We have this painting at the National Gallery in Washington.

You may not believe this was painted in 1612. Surrounded by its Italian Renaissance neighbors, it stands out. It is stunning.

What makes this image so distinct?

-the woman is fully clothed

-her clothing is not opulent

-she is not presenting herself

-she is turning her back to us

-she is absorbed in her music

-she has an interior life

-she is not a symbol or a saint

-this is not an illustration of Christian or Greek mythology

-this is a person

-there is no message, no moral, no lesson

Not only that, the composition is asymmetrical. How did he get away with this? In 1612! In Rom!

The image engages us the way modern art engages us.

-the painter places the human figure off center

-half of the painting is a void, with the table cloth minimally suggested

-the foreshortened violin on the table points at us, as if to address us: hey you, you’re part of this.

When you walk through a museum you can spot a Gentileschi from a long distance. He painted women unlike any of his contemporaries did.

Except his daughter, Artemisia Gentileschi, who was his student.

Orazio Gentileschi, 1563 Tuscany – 1639 London

Lute Player, 56-1/2 x 50-3/4, Natl Gal of Art, Washington DC, 1612-15

Find more of his paintings at:

https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk00_5B1hIExLDZoTfK3KAWVvje7PqQ:1607908360102&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=clyfford+still&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjgh4q1pcztAhVBeawKHQQ7A9MQiR56BAgnEAI&biw=1462&bih=836

Clifford Still

Posted in abstraction, Achievement, Color, Composition, Left-Right, Negative space, tagged Clifford Still, Clifford Still Museum on December 13, 2020| 2 Comments »

I came across this drawing recently and can’t get it out of my mind.

It’s small, 12x9in. Pastel on paper. 1951

All I can think of doing to it is flip it horizontally and, behold, it doesn’t work in this view.

What we have here is a non-representational image of such internal tension that it cannot be altered.

It looks like nothing. Nothing?

When I look at this drawing–the original, on top– I want to project a vertical structure or a tree trunk between the red and black lines. But that vanishes immediately. What’s left is the quick markmaking, apparently unconscious, and the dominance of “negative space.”

The choice of deep yellow paper is uncanny. Imagine the paper gray or green or blue. No go.

Clifford Still is known for his huge paintings, as seen in the Clifford Still Museum in Denver.

This painting, PH812, also from 1951, measures 115 x 104 inches.

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.