Not Exactly

The shapes and colors in this painting are so simple and straight forward that your first impulse may be to label what you’re seeing.  What is being depicted here?  What is the artist trying to tell me?  Must be something or else there would be more ambiguity, right?  But notice that your efforts to interpret along these lines (lines !) fail. Granted, someone in class saw a black terrier.  Now suppose you take that suggestion and think of the painting as being a depiction of a black terrier.  Try. This will last you a second and then fizz away.

Imagine these shapes in soft pastel colors.  You can even imagine them outlined in neat bold lines.  What happens in your mind?  Nothing.

The effect of this painting relies on high contrast colors. Because of the high contrast, you expect a statement. Your expectation is not fulfilled. Instead you see blocks of color applied with a pallet knife, leaving raggedy edges.  Therein lies your pleasure in looking at this.

Painting in acylic, 36”x36,” by Janice Fleckman

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Black-Black-Black

So elegant, witty, lively!  The white lines are scratched into the black, revealing the white under-painting.

Additional texture comes from glued-on fabric, including burlap. The painting manages to have gravitas and levity at the same time.

Terry Fohrman, acrylic on canvas, 24” x 48”

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Lava Paint

Art supply stores carry many special-effects paints. The one used here is Lava Paint.  When applied thick, as here, where it was actually squeezed directly out of the tube onto the canvas, it dries black.  When dragged with a brush, the lava dust will appear as individual black dots because the suspension dries clear.

Jack Sherborne, 30” x 40”

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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Painting with Gauze

This acrylic painting is on 300 lb water color paper, which is heavier than chipboard and has uneven edges, because it’s handmade. Using acrylic paint the artist attached gauze and later a white coarse weave that got semi-cancelled by an insistent black brush stroke. The composition consists of rectilinear shapes boldly applied with a large brush.  The gauze, which becomes visible only close up, adds not only a surprising texture but also an unexpected contrapuntal  delicacy to this otherwise sturdy composition.

Jan Fleckman, acrylic on paper, ~30” x 24”

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In Half

Working with a center line, whether vertical or horizontal, challenges the painter. How do you prevent this thing from becoming static?  How do you overcome the invitation to symmetry? How to you create movement?

In this painting the challenge is heightened by the choice of black vs. white. Now look what happens at the dividing line between the two fields. At (2) a large round shape that straddles both fields attracts your attention by virtue of its size, circularity and texture—it’s glued on burlap.  At (1) and (3) lines cross the divide.  These are powerful because the eye finds lines irresistible and traces them wherever they lead.

The blue line at (3) gracefully sweeps upward towards the right.  At the light red dot (4) it traces an orbital path.  Because the red rectangles at (6) suggest a stable architectural element (perhaps a window), they add a rational anchor to a universe in which amorphous planes float randomly.  At the same time the red dot perches precariously on one corner (4).  This becomes the focal point of the painting, deeply satisfying and at the same time restless.

But wait, there’s a twist in the plot.  When the artist submitted the painting to the Studio Exhibit she reversed it.  Notice that the focal point in this new orientation is one of those amorphous shapes (5). The effect is edgy.

We are deprived of the satisfaction we found previously in the red dot perched on the corner of the red rectangles. In this orientation, the red dot and the red rectangles are resting on the bottom edge, not going anywhere. They’ve settled, they lack drama.

It’s a brilliant painting.  Buy it.  Hang it, not over your couch, but in front of it. Sit.  Look at it in one orientation, then next week turn it over and look again.  Allow yourself to be unsettled. Get to know your perceptual quirkiness.

The Studio Exhibit at the Evanston Art Center will be up til January 29.

Terry Fohrman, Not Black and White.  Acrylic on canvas, 24” x 48”

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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Dashing

I love not knowing what to say about a painting.  It’s a sign that I’m really looking.

The top layer of this painting consists of the horizontal dashes.  The effect is two-fold.  Because they’re on top you feel you need to look at them.  But when you focus on them you realize there’s nothing to look at.  This makes you focus on the layers under the dashes.  But the dashes obscure that layer.  You soon realize that there’s no clarity in the lower layers either.

The reason you don’t give up is that the effect of this layering is scintillating.  The painting shimmers, not like metallic kitsch, not at all.  It shimmers epistemologically.  As soon as you think you’ve grasped it, it slips away.  There are certain brains that love this effect.  Count me in.

Keven Wilder.  Oil on canvas, ~40” x 30”

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Playing Big

Picture this big, about 48” high.

If this painting were small, say about 12” high, the circles would look like bubbles and you might describe the painting as “cute” and “playful.”  A painting that’s bigger than you is never “cute.”

This painting by Cassandra Buccellato has a playful feeling, granted, but isn’t its play on a conceptual level?

The drips in the underpainting evoke chaos. Chaos is not a little mess, but a big solar system deal.  The circular windows impose order, not a rigid predictable order but some order, a wistful order as in “the best we can.”  The portholes we catch in this frame appear to be of an endless stream, drifting by.  I’m reminded of telescopes and the cans-o-worms they reveal: questions all the way down.

Mixed metaphors?  Well, yes, I’d rather contemplate this visually.

Painting by Cassandra Buccellato, oil on canvas, ~48” x 60”

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/3288/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/finding-order-in-chaos/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/order-interrupted/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/beyond-realism/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/naming-the-abstract/https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/willow-painting/

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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All Individuals

There are twelve people in the Mondrian group and every one of these artist/students has a different approach.  We admire each other’s work, but do our own thing. This is enormously satisfying to me.

Here’s Keven Wilder’s first painting of this fall term, oil on canvas, 36” x 36.” The under-painting is red.  The red lines were scraped in while the greens were still wet.  Making a statement by a process of subtraction is exhilarating.  You don’t see this in the reproduction or at a distance.  You have to move in close and then the red lines strike like a revelation, which, in fact, they are.

I invite you to see this saying-something-by-not-saying as a key to entering abstraction.

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/07/24/treesnot/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/confetti/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/exhibit-at-ethical-humanist-society/

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Trees…Not

One of the painters in my “What Would Mondrian Do?” group often brings photos of flowers and trees to class to kick off a painting session.

Keven Wilder is an accomplished painter.  The collectors of her work eagerly follow her latest output. The reception of this painting has been enthusiastic.

I’m glad.  I find the enthusiastic response of non-representational art very encouraging.  It’s a measure of progress in human consciousness, I think, not to be tied to the literal.

Nobody looks at this painting and says, “Oh, yes, trees. I see the blue sky and the vertical tree trunks and the horizontal branches.”

People who love this painting love it even after they find out that the artist started with a photo of trees against a clear sky.  They don’t get hung up on trees.  Sorry there.

People who love this painting love its color, shapes, texture, process, surprises.  It’s not an illustration, abstraction or diagram of anything.  It’s an object in itself.

An object of contemplation.

Keven Wilder showed this painting at the Ethical Humanist Society earlier this year.

Thank you, Keven!

http://ethicalhuman.org/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/exhibit-at-ethical-humanist-society/

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Finding the Courage

I haven’t worked on the caricatures for my facefame blog since, oh my, January. In the winter and spring months I was up to here in printer’s ink, modifiers, press settings, the ol’ hot plate, solvents, exhaust fans and periodic printshop fatigue. Printmaking is not for the faint of heart or lungs. In five months I pulled (that’s how printmakers talk) 152 prints, and many more if you count the rejects. But more on that later, much later. This past week I finally summoned the courage to see if I could get back into the facefame-caricature mode. (facefame.wordpress.com)
I like reading Lorrie Moore. I pulled up the Google images for Lorrie Moore on my 24” computer screen, leaned the customary drawing board against my desk and drew her with the customary Stabilo aquarellable pencil. Twenty minutes, maybe all of thirty, and there was this intelligent, witty face on my paper. I was rather pleased. Well, I thought, the hiatus on facefame has just ended. I love drawing like this and there are plenty of writers and other artists (maybe even politicians in this presidential circus) that I’m eager to draw.
The next day, the drawing didn’t look good any more. It looked pleasing, you know, goody-goody. It said “look how well the artist controls the medium; a little ironic, but at the same time it has that classical feeling; being done in sepia, it alludes to the mighty Renaissance and who doesn’t love Leonardo and Michelangelo.” Time to put it aside, reconsider.
How can I bring this drawing into the 20th century, ok, the 21st? To do that, the drawing needs to be a bit edgy. Maybe adjusting the size will help. I took it to Kinko’s and shrunk it, from 14×11 to about 11×9. Now, loosely tracing that size to my aquarellable paper, I was less tempted by detail and literalness. I leaned into the pencil, deposited a lot of black stuff, smeared with a damp paper towel, textured the paper (in printmaking that’s called tone) and found my caricaturing zone. I knew I was in it when I drew her right iris with a flick of the pencil. That cranked up my courage and then adding the color patches was a sure thing, easy in the sense of “hey-it’s-my-drawing.”
This happens all the time, this wanting to please and then realizing the next hour, or the next day, that what you really need to do is summon your courage and do strong work.

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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