artamaze by Katherine Hilden

Light Slivers

Posted in abstraction, Color, Composition, Illustration, Landscape, Pattern, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged color vs. black/white, composition, landscape, light effect on November 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »

After you’ve identified this photo as a so-what view of a lawn, check that off and see if this might have some formal element worth noticing.

It does. You can see it better in black/white.

The light zig-zags down from top to bottom with increasing looseness as if it came from some juggler’s pen light.

That’s it? Yes, for this little exercise in seeing it’s enough to notice that the slivers of light appear to be superimposed on a surface.

The light slivers exist on one plane and the grass on another. If you also notice that the grass makes vertical lines and the light forms horizontal lines, you’ve got a composition worth contemplating.

I’d like to print this up in high resolution, 6 ft high, and position it at the end of a long hall way.

My camera clicked it in color. We are used to seeing images in color. But color is not necessarily more powerful than b/w. Do you agree that the b/w is a more stimulating image?

Btw, all this is relevant to both photography and painting. Not such a little exercise, after all.

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.

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

John Singer Sargent’s brilliant watercolor

Posted in Achievement, Color, Composition, Imagination, Landscape, Negative space, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged bright colors, color, John Singer Sargent, landscape, negative space, watercolor on September 10, 2020| Leave a Comment »

At first glance you may see a slap dash watercolor sketch, maybe a preparation for a painting.

Look again. Take time to look. Stay with it.

Two things will happen. One, you notice that he works with a very limited palette: blue, green and sepia with a touch of yellow. Two, the white of the paper showing through serves to define shapes.

To see how brilliant this painting is, let’s mess with it. Let’s imagine some passer-by looked over his shoulder and suggested he “cheer it up” by adding some bright colors. Why not put in some flowers? Like this…

Doesn’t work. It’s a contemporary cliché to say bright colors cheer things up. “ Brighten things up,” we say. By demanding attention, bright colors spoil the overall effect and break up the composition.

Now, what about the composition. It’s quite rigorous, actually.

Far from being a surface of daubs, this painting hangs together by calculated geometry.

Go back to the top and look at Sargent’s painting again. Squint a little and eliminate the two figures and their straight-edged objects: books, easel, stool, and palette. Now the waterfall and the foliage are hardly discernible and the painting really is a mess of daubs.

Watercolor is the most demanding painting medium. You have to plan way ahead because corrections will gum up your surface. To make the painting luminous—the desired effect—the white of the paper has to stay pristine. Meaning, no corrections!

And negative space! Notice how the painter’s right shoulder is indicated indirectly, by having the background push against its contour. Ditto the book of the friend. Find other examples.

This painting , btw, is from 1914.

John Singer Sargent, 1856-1925

Shapes and Light

Posted in abstraction, Achievement, Color, Composition, Landscape, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged aesthetic experience, landscape, Terry Fohrman on September 27, 2016| 2 Comments »

That divide between the green and red fields tempts you to see a landscape with a high horizon. It’s a recurring temptation, isn’t it. Feels so nice, ah, a landscape and so you stay with it and think landscapey thoughts.

Then the forms take over. The foremost shapes are the green cross, red rectangle (1) and the two circles (2) (3). Shapes lying flat on the canvas simply destroy the landscape illusion. Good. Now you’re sliding into an aesthetic experience. Shapes and light.

Terry Fohrman, oil on panel, 24” x 30”

Black, Red and that Yellow Squarish Thing

Posted in Achievement, Color, Imagination, Landscape, Surreal, tagged abstraction, composition, landscape, Maria Palacios, negative space, seeing on February 21, 2016| Leave a Comment »

15OctRedBlackYellHoriz
It’s something. But what!
I can explain why you would want to figure out what this represents: 1) there are definite shapes, 2) they’re clearly delineated, 3) they’re centrally placed and 4) there’s even an illusion of a horizon. So, of course, your smart, verbal brain gets to work on this puzzle. As soon as you’ve decided that the yellow square represents a structure, a building, say, you can move to the dip on its right and decide that here you have a valley and then you keep moving to the right and you can see an extended city block and, oh dear, this is not working. It’s just not coherent as a landscape at all. Even if you stick to the landscape-cityscape interpretation, what’s underneath the horizontal black mass just doesn’t compute. I mean, what’s that lavender roundish thing and that blue triangle there and then that blue smudge? Your brain now goes into overdrive and crashes. Wonderful! You’re having an aesthetic experience. You have entered the state of pure seeing. Congratulations.
It’s not easy to make art like this. Takes tremendous concentration.
Painting by Maria Palacios. Acrylic on canvas, 30”x 40”
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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Let It Be

Posted in abstraction, Achievement, Color, Composition, Landscape, Negative space, Seeing, Technique and Demo, Therapy, tagged ancient Greeks, Cassie buccellato, colonade, landscape, paradox, Parthenon, Richard Diebenkorn on September 3, 2015| 3 Comments »

Picture it large. It’s 48” wide.
You want to see it as a landscape, right? There’s that horizon line from the left, a third of the way down. Above that the colors are blue-ish and atmospheric. So that’s comforting. You’re on your way to an interpretation. Oh, good, you think, I can figure this out. You keep looking. What else can you latch on to, what else can you identify? Errrmmm, what’s the blue blotch, what’s the red trapezoid, what are those black strokes? Frustration sets in. No, wait, there’s that receding white brush stroke, that seems to suggest perspective. Wonderful, a sense of perspective. You keep looking for more landscape clues, but, alas, the landscape reference falls apart, it simply does not hold up. That’s your moment of release, of liberation. Exhale. Now you’re looking at the painting and enjoying it because now you’re actually seeing it.
After you stop figuring it out and you surrender to looking, you notice the little black splatters. And where are they? They are where the major forms of the composition converge. You missed them earlier. How could you miss these dots? Because they’re nothing. And yet the great big red, blue, and black shapes point to this nothing.
I, for one, love paradox. Takes my breath away.
The composition as a whole reminds me of Diebenkorn’s landscapes. Notice how his shapes converge, but on nothing.
It’s an aesthetic that goes way back to the ancient Greeks, who designed the Parthenon so that the center of the pediment facade would be an open space, not a column. We’ll get to that, later sometime.
Painting by Cassandra Buccellato, oil on canvas, ~40”x48”
Richard Diebenkorn, (1922-1993)

Not so Calm

Posted in abstraction, Achievement, Color, Composition, Left-Right, Technique and Demo, Texture, tagged Arlene Tarpey, horison, landscape, tension, turbulence on November 23, 2014| Leave a Comment »

The colors are subdued, these creams and ochers, even the red seems saturated and calm. But the brushstrokes are energetic, the feeling of turbulence being enhanced by the white’s rift into what seems to be a landscape. Well, not so quick with that interpretation! True, there’s a horizontal line and that triggers the association to landscape. But that light upward strip on the upper left (green arrows) destroys that illusion. That strip is actually quite powerful in the composition. It not only subverts the illusion of landscape, it creates tension by virtue of its thinness and thereby moves the eye to the upper left. Without it, the “white turbulent rift” just right off middle would dominate mercilessly and demand some literal interpretation. As is, the viewer’s mind sees form and that’s a good place to be. Thanks be to modernism.
Painting by Arlene Tarpey, ~16×20, acrylic.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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Brave New White

Posted in abstraction, Achievement, Color, Composition, Imagination, Landscape, tagged abstraction, Harold Bauer, landscape, white on November 20, 2014| 1 Comment »

It’s not quite white, has some grayish texture. But we’ll call it white because it’s so dramatic against the blue. This painting started as a landscape and got more and more geometrical and crisp. The white swirl is pure invention. Brilliant. If this were painted much larger it would be brrrrilllllianttttt.
Painting by Harold Bauer, ~20×16. Oil on canvas.
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