Marching Arches

These cropped forms suggest some architectural element, with variations. Or, maybe, chair backs. In any case, something well designed, serious and possibly monumental. At the same time, unstable and meaningless. If they are structures, you can see that they lack bracing but are, nevertheless, solid. They’re grand in some way. And there are many of them, this we can infer from the cropping.
This, therefore, is a painting that at first glance suggests clarity of statement. But if you fall for its seduction, you’ll soon chase yourself in circular thinking and you end up not “getting” it at all. This is a good thing. You’re looking at art.
Painting by Harold Bauer. Oil on canvas, ~30” x 24”
Now let’s flip it horizontally. Oh, look! The flipped version seems much friendlier, more accessible. It lacks the gravitas of the original. I would not ponder this version, I would consider it “lite,” a bit decorative, merely clever.
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Rhythm in Art

Kandinsky would have liked this painting.

As with music, rhythm is an important element in visual art. In this painting by Arlene Tarpey, we see the repetition of circular and elliptical shapes. There are three patterns: the literal statement of bicycle wheels, the row on top of distinct circles, and the row at the bottom of ellipses in a blur. Your eye goes round and round, but, because of the variations in the pattern, never gets bored. It’s hard not to get entranced. The composition as a whole sweeps the attention upward, to the upper right corner because that’s where the human figure is—always a trump card in any visual work—and also because of the small red collage, way in the corner. What is that? Can’t tell, it’s too small and it’s just a scrap. But we can make out that it shows the rhythm of a set of vertical lines. Voila, a reinforcement of the work’s theme, this time in counterpoint: linear vs. circular. If this little red patch had circles in it, that wouldn’t work, would be boring, too much of the same. The black vertical lines echo the rhythm motif and at the same time provide counterpoint.
Arlene Tarpey, mixed media (acrylic, pastel, collage on paper), ~16″x20″

Now let’s flip it horizontally (in Photoshop).

Oooo, totally different feeling!  In which version is she going faster?  When she’s going towards the left or to the right?

Kandinsky didn’t talk about this left-right business and I don’t know what the musical analogy for the left-right flip would be.  But in image making, left and right are weighty issues, as you can see from this example. 

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Delicate Drawing, Left-Right

Look what happens when we flip the previously posted drawing.

It FEELS different.  How?

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Mmmm, Garbage Cans

 

Never leave home without it:  your pocket Sony or your iPhone, not because you’re expecting a call but because it can take pictures.  I don’t mean pictures as documentation of facts, or because you’re planning a photography exhibit, but as an exercise in seeing. Pure and simple.

When you’re winding through your neighborhood on your power walk, you’ll notice the clever things people do with their entrances and shrubs and you’re reminded of how your own domicile will never make it into Architectural Digest. Your eye is outer-directed.

Now try an alley. Notice that you have the place to yourself and your seeing becomes more intense, more internal. When you veer off into an alley, you’ve turned off your “certified beauty” sensor. Your eye searches for shapes and juxtapositions.  Mmmm, garbage cans. But you don’t see garbage or think garbage, you just see the shapes and the negative spaces.  Click.

What you zoom in on teaches you something about how you see.  When I review my photos, I notice a repeated composition. What to do with that?  Puzzle over it, go deeper, work with it.

My ankle-weighted walking shots are composed in a sweating hurry. Some of them invite cropping in Photoshop, that fabulous tool for nuanced seeing.  Crop that shot!  Crop it again and again until you see form with only a sigh of memory of the garbage can.  Ahhh!

And then you can flip it and notice that it’s better that way.  Ah-hah.————————————————————-

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