So Blue

This painting started with dripping paint, not with any plans to create a landscape. But the line where the blue stops suggests a horizon and then with that reference, the drips can be interpreted as a row of receding trees. The dash of orange suggested itself because as the complementary color to blue, it would heighten the intensity of the blue. So, yes, it can be seen as a landscape with mountains, trees and possibly a sunrise. And it’s paint. Paint! It’s both. But because your mind can’t focus on both at the same time, it goes into overdrive and that gives you a high. That’s the high of modernism. Aren’t we lucky!!
Painting by Cassandra Buccellato, oil on canvas, 36×36.
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Harvest the Crop

This was the black lace-up boot on some crumpled up cloth, what artists in their rarified line of work are allowed to call “Still life with boot and drapery.”

So you have this boot in front of you and you think you have to draw it because, well, obviously that’s the object you’ve been given to draw.  A duh moment.

When Maggy had drawn the boot and surrounding drapery, the boot looked good, but the drawing didn’t.  Meaning, the page of her charcoal marks, didn’t “work,” meaning it was not fun to look at.  What was fun to look at, however, was her markmaking.  So,  let’s not give up on this thing.  She played with cropping by placing strips of white paper over her large drawing, trying to find a window that could stand on its own.  Voilá!

This is an invaluable step in your art making and in no way a judgment that the original drawing was a failure.  Look what it contained!  You just had to find it.

Now, this is fun to look at.  “Fun” is a sloppy word, isn’t it, but what it means is that your eye loves the texture and your attention is held by all these alignments and echoes.  Notice, also, that the page falls into quadrants (see also post 6.30) and that the vacancy at upper right (orange) adds tension to the other three quadrants.

Yes, but what IS it?  It’s an image that plays with me.  Why would I want a boot instead!

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John Baldessari, the Horizon and the Frame

My painting class is called “Impressions of Landscape.”   The recurring question is:  what is a landscape?  To make a landscape do you need a tree, a house, a mountain, clouds, a path leading somewhere? What?

You need a horizon line.  That’s not an aesthetic decision.  It’s not a matter of taste or personal preference.  It’s what your brain demands.  The horizon line is how it orients itself and it’s how it knows that the body it’s in charge of is standing up.

Once you accept that bare essential, you are free to play and goof off and be whimsical and testy.   I mentioned the work of John Baldessari in class and how his work subverts assumptions about language and frames of reference.

Sometimes goofing off, being whimsical and testy involves a lot of work.  One of my students, an architect, took up the dual challenge of paring down a landscape to the horizon line and subverting assumptions about frames.  His piece, measuring over one hundred horizontal inches, consists of three canvases of equal size, precisely spaced, and arranged in a descending arc.

The viewer is likely to question whether this is a landscape and feel, vaguely at first, that something is moving and then feel that he is moving.  He will go back and forth between the disorienting, sinking feeling and the assurance of the horizon line.  Creating this effect is a major accomplishment.  The photo at the top of this text does not do justice to the work because of the studio clutter around it.  This highly original triptych by Peter Brinckerhoff deserves to be shown on a white gallery wall all by itself.  It requires space and time for contemplation.  John Baldessari and fans of conceptual art would like this, I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baldessari

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Pile of Pots: Drawing by Linné

As in Austin’s drawing (see previous post), this drawing by Linné goes for huge.  But with a crucial difference.  Austin’s pots look monumental, Linné’s are just plain big.  Austin gives us gravitas, Linné gives us humor.  What’s so funny here?  I’m not saying it’s a knee-slapping kind of funny, but I do think the high horizon lends wit to the thing.

Mind you, he didn’t see a horizon, he saw a little table with a rumpled cloth and some pots.  He invented the horizon.  Now, the placement of the horizon in a drawing or painting gives us a crucial bit of information:  it gives us the eye level of the observer.  When you’re standing at the beach looking out at the water, the horizon will be as high as you, meaning your eyes; when you lie down on your towel, the volume of the water will appear to have shrunken down to a sliver because your eyes are now very low.

I’m reminded of the beach because Linné has invented not just any horizon line but the horizon of some ocean, “the wine-dark sea.”  You know where you are in this drawing:  you’re strolling on a beach and ahead of you is this enormous pile of crockery.  How enormous?  Since Linné, the artist “looking at this scene,” is about six feet tall, that pot leaning on the right is about six feet in diameter.  The whole pile is about eleven feet high.  It’s an intelligent and funny image–in a sneaky sort of way.  It’s witty.

This is the fifth drawing from that still life of pots.  In the next post, I’ll talk about what instruction I gave to the class as I was setting up the exercise.

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