artamaze by Katherine Hilden

And a Splash of Green

Posted in abstraction, Achievement, Color, Composition, Seeing, tagged edges, green, Keren Vishny, red on November 21, 2014| Leave a Comment »

For the artist, the pleasure and challenge of painting. For the viewer, the pleasure and desire to look. This painting doesn’t leave you alone, you keep associating colors and traveling along the bumpy edges. Just look, for example, how the bits of green keep moving your eye through this painting, even though the red is dominant. (There are splashes of green in the black field, but the camera didn’t pick them up, unfortunately.)
Painting by Keren Vishny, 40×30. Acrylic on canvas
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Inspired by Turner

Posted in abstraction, Color, Composition, inspiration, Landscape, Romantic, tagged awe, color, Elaine, green, longing, romantic, seascape, sublime, terror, Turner on December 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I presented the ideas of Johannes Itten in that class (see previous post) and also the paintings of Turner.

Art historians discuss Turner in connection with the aesthetic of the Sublime, a central idea in Romanticism. The Sublime was opposed to beauty, restraint, balance, harmony. Romantic poets felt tormented by infinite longing and passion that could not be contained. In their debates about form and content , form lost its former respect. The content of turbulent emotion and the newly discovered dark aspects of the psyche—not as sin but as depth and authenticity—were seen to correspond to the awe and terror of natural forces , such as mountains and oceans.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 –1851) is famous for his seascapes, which are most often turbulent and terrifying: burning ships; ship wrecks; drowning, shackled slaves; blazing orange skies. Though he was a member of the Royal Academy, he had to endure much ridicule from his contemporaries who preferred polite, sedate , well-ordered pictures to be mollified by.

Turner also painted landscapes. He hated the color green and painted landscapes while avoiding that color. What is a landscape? We keep coming back to that question in my landscape class. Turner assures us that it’s not about the color green.

I didn’t present the Sublime in class. Just looking at Turner gives you goose bumps and you GET it. Elaine C. again faced a white canvas by putting down color and letting the form follow. This is a small painting, about 12 x 16. If it were 48 x 64, it would pull us into the Romantic Sublime.

Tall and Skinny “Untitled”

Posted in abstraction, Collage, Composition, inspiration, Landscape, Negative space, Texture, tagged convex, Elaine, figure-ground, green, orange on November 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

We don’t often see this format in painting, tall and skinny. This is the kind of proportion you are likely to get if you take a collage as your point of departure. The collage that Elaine C. worked from was a small passage, about 1¼” x 3”, isolated from a larger collage. This proportion does not come in readymade frames. No problem, there are other supports. Artists have painted on board for centuries. Elaine chose sanded, knot-free plywood. I encourage this sort of departure from the “readymade” in my classes.

The colors in the collage were black and red with a snippet of green. As she started painting, she planned on layering the paint, using under-painting. The under-painting for the red was green. But then the green became textural and drippy and too interesting to cover up. The painting process took over and the original inspiration, the collage in black and red, had served its purpose and was surpassed.

The painting (48” x 20”) holds our attention because of its luminous colors, its texture and its play on the figure-ground question.

Let me expand on that last point a bit. The question is, what’s on top of what? The light green diamond at #1 is undoubtedly the topmost element. We see it that way because it is a clearly identifiable shape that we see in its entirety. Everything else is fragmentary and our perception keeps shifting: is the green on top of the orange or the orange on top of the green? We tend to read warm colors (orange in this case) as coming forward and cool colors (green) as receding. But here we read the green as on top because of #5, which connects to the main orange mass (#4) and makes us read orange as the back ground. This in itself creates tension, since we want to read the cool green as background. But the orange keeps coming forward, not only because it’s a warm color, but also because of its shape: it pushes its convex bays into the green at #3, #4 and #5. Convex shapes invade and assert themselves as dominant.

But notice the little black square in the upper right at #6. That was the last thing Elaine painted. “It needs something up there,” she said. Yes, it did. And look what that little black square does. It is an absolute—black!—and it’s the only element defined by clean straight edges. You can’t ignore it. Your eye keeps moving up to that corner. After you’ve gone back and forth with the green-orange-foreground-background question for a while, that little black square throws you another mystery. Is IT what’s behind all the color, is IT the ground? Must be. Since it’s cut off by the picture’s edge it looks like it’s part of something bigger. But it’s disturbing, that the ultimate background in this painting is represented by such a tiny surface. Disturbing, but not overwhelmingly so. That’s just it: all this subtle tension in the midst of this luminous, glorious color and the captivating texture.

The next post will relate this painting to a 19^th century painting at the Art Institute of Chicago.

For more on working from collages, go to “collage” under Categories.

André Derain and More Than Green

Posted in Achievement, Composition, Imagination, Landscape, tagged Charlene, color, Derain, Fauves, fire, green on August 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »

When André Derain painted this landscape in 1906, this is not what he saw. The painting is called “The Turning Road, L’Estaque.” That’s a town in southern France, I’ve been there and I can testify to the fact that the trees there are not red and neither is the grass. It’s all green green green.

What Derain saw is closer to what Charlene W. saw when she painted three trees near the Evanston Art Center. Tree trunks tend to be brownish-gray and grass is inevitably as green as grass. This relentless greenness is one of the challenges of landscape painting. Not that we don’t like green. On the contrary, the various shades of green in nature are cool, refreshing and relaxing. We seek out such relaxing sites and it’s probably why we like to sit on the porch and enjoy our lawns.

But the experience of a real landscape comes with the fresh scent of rain, perhaps, or a breeze that makes us close our eyes in appreciation. In a painting we don’t have these accompanying sensations. All we have is a rectangle with color and shapes. I can’t think of any painting that is as truly green as the landscape that inspired it. And while we’ve had all blue paintings (Yves Klein), all black paintings (Ad Reinhardt) and all white paintings (Robert Ryman), I’ve never come across an all green painting. Hmm, what is it about the color green…someone please make an all green painting so we can think about this more clearly.

Charlene, looking at all that green, turned to me and said, I want to have more color. I showed her a book on Fauvism and she immediately recognized kindred spirits in that movement. “Les Fauves” means “the wild beasts,” an appellation attached to painters who showed their work in 1906 in Paris and shocked the dove-gray spats off the critics. Surely civilization as they knew it was coming to an end. Well, it hasn’t and in my opinion has gotten a whole lot better in the past century. One thing that’s improved, seems to me, is our love of color.

Charlene’s landscape looks as if it were on fire. Photosynthesis gives us the color green in vegetation, granted. But in the larger picture, the oxygen that photosynthesis produces will become part of some combustion somewhere, maybe in your body—and your brain. In your retina. In your optic nerve.