Up-drip, Side-drip

Dripping paint on a canvas conveys the feeling of immediacy and urgency, doesn’t it.  It’s as if you were standing next to the artist while she was painting and you were witnessing the physicality of this gooey substance in its tug with gravity.

Now, paint drips down, not up.  I say that, because we often turn a canvas upside-down to see if that view will work better or, at least, what the new view will teach us.  When a drip is seen upside-down, it may work and it may not.  If the dripping paint is thick, it most often will look disturbing when seen upside down. If the dripping paint is highly diluted and therefore thin, it will run down fast and in a fairly straight line all the way to the bottom edge of the canvas.  It will read primarily as a straight line and only on closer inspection will you see that it’s actually a drip. It will read as a straight line even when the canvas is turned upside-down.

This kind of double take tickles the mind.

The brushstrokes and color blotches look random.  And, certainly, the drips by their very nature are random. But notice, the composition is severely rectilinear.  Notice also, that in the painting process the canvas was rotated more than once: sideways drips.   It’s the coexistence of this grid effect with the drippy-splashy-rubbing paint that makes for deep drama.  We like drama.

The drips obeying gravity—as they were created in the first place—look less exiting.  Or do they?

Veronica Sax, painting in acrylic on canvas, 30” x 30,” November 2016

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Paint Drips

Didn’t paint drip in the 15^th century?  It must have. Even egg tempera must have gotten runny sometimes.  But dripping paint was a no-no til the end of the 19^th century.  Unthinkable; what a disgrace; quick, clean it up and let no one see how paint behaves.  In the 20th century paint was finally allowed to behave like paint.

If you’re not a painter you may think this is easy.  How hard can it be to splash paint on a piece of cloth, you say!

If you’re a contemporary painter and you have never let paint drip, hmm, that may be because you haven’t been able to. Maybe allowing paint to drip is like yoga: you stretch and it’s uncomfortable at first.

As the instructor in the “Mondrian Class” I get ecstatic—ooh, ahh—when someone first ventures into drip mode. It just happens. As with yoga, I think it’s accompanied by an exhalation of all sorts of thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots.

The above painting was produced in two class periods.  The student, Pamela Habel, has only been with us for one semester.

In her previous painting, left, we can see her warming up to the idea of allowing the paint to drip.

Pamela Habel, acrylic on canvas, each painting 40” x 30”

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Energetic Drips

How can drips feel energetic?! It’s all down, down. That’s true, but if the format of the painting is vertical, that verticality in itself conveys energy. Like a person standing up.
Compare the vertical format to the horizontal. Here’s a horizontal passage from the painting. Same drips, but the feeling is not energetic. The horizontal format is restful and the drips lack energy.

Another view would be the following, where the drip lines are horizontal. Horizontal lines are inherently more restful, like a person lying down. You can see that this view is more restful than the original.

Now go back to the original at the top. The drips are like a torrent, stormy and very energetic, indeed.
Painting by Keren Vishny, acrylic on canvas, 40”x30”
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Off With Your Head!

Holbein must have been charming, wise and super-diplomatic.  He drew the ladies of the court of Henry VIII and had to paint the big burly beheading  potentate himself. You remember six-wives Henry, the one who said, “Off with your head, Ann Boleyn!”  Hans Holbein(1497-1543) was a skilled draftsman, but was his hand shaking a little, just a little, when he faced the vain, all-powerful king?

When we draw people, we’re often constrained by the desire to please them.  Your art gets cramped when you’re focused on anything but your art.  So, off with your head, I’m drawing!  When we have a model, I remind the students that they’re not drawing to please the model but only to struggle with their work, the medium, the concept, the surprises that occur in the working process.  When we don’t have a model, we often work from printed images.  In this case, a student/artist chose a photo of the young Queen Elizabeth, when she visited Chicago in the ‘50’s.  Notice that

these drawings are not flattering, but instead explore the potential of the medium to create a page of studies with mood and character.  The markmaking is scratchy, the contours are blurred, and oh, the drips!  To mood and character, let’s add a touch of irony.  Once you know that The Queen was the model, the page becomes a bit comical, which makes you reflect deeper and that’s a good thing.  When that happens, you’re looking at art.

Maggy  Shell, worked on gloss paper with the Stabilo-All-Aquarellable pencil.———–

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Leonardo da Vinci and Urban Decay

In “The Blot and the Diagram,” Kenneth Clarke talked about Leonardo’s intellectual range.  His formidable brain loved to analyze systems (diagrams); but he was also fascinated by chaotic forms (blots).  In his notebooks Leonardo tells us that he often would stop to look at a wall that was water stained, cracked or peeling.   He writes, contemplating such chaotic forms stimulates the imagination.

I think of Leonardo as one of us,  he shared our sensibility, with his insatiable curiosity and courage, his scientific approach; his playfulness; his openness to possibilities; his skepticism; his use of inconsistencies; his caricatures; and for the purpose of this post, his embrace of accidentals.  In this sense, Kenneth Clark says, he anticipated modern art.  About 120 years ago, when paint started dripping on a canvas, it was sometimes allowed to do so.  By the 1940’s dripping paint had come to represent an aesthetic in itself, with Jackson Polack it’s most famous representative.  An aesthetic of chance occurrence was edging out the old aesthetic of control.

If you’ve ever seen Urban Decay Photography, you know that it speaks to the modern sensibility.  At first, it may be shocking (never was to me, though) but then it sinks in and reaches you at a very deep  level of your  life experience. Where the old sensibility measured time teleologically, this new sensibility embraces time– how shall we say—mystically, as an element of constant surprise and potential.  And isn’t that where we live, from one moment of consciousness to the next and to get to the next moment, we have to let the previous moment die.

Decay.  Urban Decay.

What other kind of decay is there?  Well, obviously, rural decay.  But that’s too fast and predictable, since in a season or two the new crop grows out of the compost of the old.  But Urban Decay is slow and it’s not predictable, because it’s about ideas.  What we see crumbling is not just that wall, that arch, that mural, that tracery, that tile floor, etc, but the ideas, values and hierarchies these things once defended.

 

My shot of the CTA tracks at Wabash and Madison (above) has some of that reflection in it.  It has that reference to crumbling urban structures and the reminder that these structures are inventions, as man-made and ephemeral as the ideas and hopes from which they sprang.  But that shot illustrates one other element we find in Urban Decay Photography:  severe composition.  In this case, it’s three horizontal stripes, progressing from narrow at to top, to wider in the middle, to widest at the bottom, creating a progression.

This emphasis on form is what distinguishes Urban Decay Photos.  It is well worth your while to study this genre. Here’s a link, for a start:

http://www.pics-site.com/2010/07/11/urban-decay-photography/

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