Window Walk

Your mind naturally associates to “window.”  But look, there’s no view to the outside, which is why we walk over and stand in front of a window.  This is pure window.  Like a Gothic stained glass window, except here there’s no story to be instructed by.  Pure light, which, come to think of it, is Gothic Architecture’s metaphor for the divine.  Well, I’ll stop just short of calling this painting divine, but allow me to say, it’s glorious.  You allow and you agree, of course.

You can’t stop looking at it.   As you celebrate windowness and you’re grateful for the invention of glass with its capacity to transmit and reflect light, you’re mind does wander.  You start looking at the quality of the brush stroke, the transitions from one luminous color to another and then there’s a little quirkiness that holds your attention.

First, notice that your eye does not dwell on any of the four corners.  That’s because there’s no detail in the corners, they’re filled with blocks of color and some blurry lines.  It’s true those lines do guide your eye there but only briefly and then they move back inward. Our eyes evolved to find details and movement interesting.

Where do we find details and movement?

What are those funny little red dots?  Looks like footprints.  If you have the privilege of looking at this painting up close, you’ll notice that they are fingerprints.  The artist must have dipped her fingertips into the red paint on her palette and then walked them across the canvas. As the paint was transferred she went back to the palette to dip in again.  Her fingers walked diagonally upward on the canvas from right to left.  Pure invention.  What a delight!

It’s nice to be reminded that we’re a species that invents.

You can see this painting by Veronica Sax at the Evanston Art Center’s Studio Show til January 29.

https://www.evanstonartcenter.org/exhibitions/eac-student-exhibition

Veronica Sax, Not, Just… Acrylic on canvas, 40”x 30”

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Vary the Contour

In whatever drawing you’re working on, try darkening the outline (=contour) of the shapes arbitrarily. If it’s a figure, darken the outline of the forearm. See how that affects your perception of depth. Or press your pencil down harder when you’re outlining one side of the face. Immerse yourself in how this feels.
In the drawing shown above, the artist indicates the upper arm with a heavy line, while the forearm is drawn faintly. We immediately get the sense that the upper arm is in shadow and the forearm catches the light. She achieves this effect without classical anatomical drawing, using gradations of shadow and reflected light. But you can see that her coarse use of lines is actually based on an understanding of anatomy.
Drawing by Gaby Edgerton, aquarellable pencil on gloss paper, 17”x11”
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Still-Life, a Misnomer

It’s even worse in French, “nature morte.”  But there’s nothing dead about it!  In English we call it “still life,” not much better.  There’s nothing still about it, either!  Only the life part is true.

Imagine a studio/classroom: white walls, dirty sink, paint-splattered chairs and tables, a shelf in the corner full of bottles, bowls and plastic flowers and such.  The teacher pulls out a small table and piles some drapery on it along with bottles, an old shoe, a round ball of twine and for a touch of color, a plastic peony.  Well, yes, it’s not going anywhere.   But it isn’t still.  Just look at this drawing.

The artist saw these every-day objects as vibrant and lively. This is how an artist sees. It’s not just one thing and then another.  There are recognizable, distinct objects, yes,  but the artist perceives transition and movement. What speaks to the artist is not so much the shape of things,  but the lively interflow of light and dark.

Drawing focuses the mind.  When the mind sees this way, everything pulsates.  Still life, bhaaah!

To continue your study of contour and its adventures through the definition by line, omission and negative space, zoom in and follow the left contour of the white bottle in Alejandra’s drawing. The eye is engaged , surprised and refreshed.   An impressionist delight—true to life.

 

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Composition Study: Glenview Library with “Inner Light”

It was about 4 o’clock and the light favored Glenview Road. I was waiting on the side street, having just pulled out of the library’s parking lot.  I went over the to-do list for that evening in my head: emails, phone calls, drawings to finish,  a blog to write, what to do for dinner, you know, the usual stuff.  Here I was, stuck in traffic and who enjoys waiting for a light to turn green!  Well, actually, for me, it’s often a welcome moment.   It was a long light. Going over the chores list once is enough.  After that, I switch into visual.  I looked around.  There was something eerie about this late afternoon lighting. All I noticed at first was the low hanging thick gray cloud cover.  And then, there on my left was the library, with the peaks of the roof line illuminated in the rapidly setting sun.  Since this was not a bright sunny day at all and the ominous, leaden sky gave no hint of a sun anywhere, the peaks of the gabled roof line appeared to be glowing from within. I rolled down the window and fumbled for my camera.  I took just one frame.  The light changed on Glenview Road and I turned into the intersection.

I feared the worst for this shot:  It was just too dramatic.  When things seem to be glowing from within, you’re on thin ice.  The figures of Rembrandt and Caravaggio often come at us out of tarry, pessimistic blackness and they shine like lanterns. But for the epigoni, depicting figures that glow with an inner fire leads inevitable to preachy kitsch.

What saves this photo from the glowing ash heap of kitsch, I think, is the severity of the composition.  Saved by zig-zagging triangles!  Notice that the shrub in the lower right corner gives us a triangle standing on a point that is outside the frame.  Notice also, that the zig-zags go down from left to right and the illuminated peaks work in counterpoint, by going up.  Counterpoint pulls you from the brink of kitsch, any day.

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Skies over Tahiti

Sunsets and cloud formations often take our breath away.  We stop walking, stop pedaling and stop driving so that we can give in to shameless gaping, all sophistication abandoned.  What we’re looking at are light rays and water vapors.  Light rays bending over the horizon and water vapors clumping in the troposphere, however well we may understand the physics that produce the effects, will still stop us in our tracks.  For centuries, light has been a metaphor in our literature and art for concepts like hope, transcendence and peace.  In the late 18^th century, with the rise of Romanticism and then the sense of the Sublime in the early 19^th century, light effects and cloud formations became major rock stars on the stage of the poetic imagination.

The Hudson River Valley painters are a great example.  Thomas Moran (1837-1926), for example, painted awe-inspiring landscapes, often of enormous dimensions and involving spectacular cloud formations and light effects.

But a painting of rays and vapors often falls flat.  Think of the sentimental sunset paintings you’ve winced at while strolling through a summer art fair.  You want to say, dude, the 19^th century is like so yesterday. We still love the real thing, the sunset, but our notion of painting has taken a sharp turn.  A hundred years of abstraction have taught us that the painting is an artifact. We have come to appreciate the power of composition and we are less likely to be manipulated by the sentimental intentions of Sunday painters.

In walks Elaine C. with her photos of Tahiti.  Breathtaking, if you imagine what it must have been like to be there.  We spread out these wonderful photos and looked in amazement and a little envy.  But the task at hand was to stop gasping and set to work on making a painting!  Lo and behold, in her display of 4 x 6 photos, there was this one, where the clouds and the mountain range had gotten together that magical romantic evening in Tahiti to form the wildest, most dynamic composition possible: the Z.  It’s quite uncanny.  It’s this rigorous geometry that rescues the composition from the sobs and sighs of sentimentality.  The work on this painting (16 x 20) was difficult and time consuming because the artist/student had to reconcile two opposites:  the amorphous, soft form of clouds and the distinct zig-zag of the overall composition.

In the Tahiti photo, the bottom of the frame shows a body of water, but in the painting this sliver becomes  an expanse of green meadow—for the sake of color.  We can do that because we’re painters.

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Reflected Light

When Fredéric Bazille (1841-1870) paints his sleeve, he  wants to create the illusion of roundness and therefore he has to show a sliver of reflected light.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In the engraving of The Death of Mary, Martin Schongauer (1450-1491) stops his burin (engraving tool) before he gets to the edge of the kneeling leg because in order to show  that the calf muscles are round, he has to leave that strip of reflected light.

 

 

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In the Middle Ages, the appreciation of the roundness of flesh is discouraged by the ecclesiastical powers that commission art works.  Therefore, reflected light is out the window, so to speak.  Here in this church fresco from 1164, we get harsh lines outlining some sorrowful faces that enact a didactic story for our instruction.  But, it’s safe to say, not for our enjoyment.

 

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When we skip the dour Dark Ages and let in the fresh air of the pagans, we discover the healthy-body-in-a-healthy-mind culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans.  Though we know of their flesh and drapery loving art primarily through sculptures, some of their frescoes did survive centuries of destruction by warfare and weather.  When we look closely, we can see that they knew about painting reflected light.

We have no name for the artist who painted this languid torso. Whoever he was, he was a student of light and how it plays on round forms.  It’s only through careful observation of direct and reflected light that the illusion of a round form can be created on a flat surface.

This pursuit of light effects on round flesh and clinging and billowing cloth became one of the obsessions of Renaissance painters (the other being perspective).  Creating the illusion of roundness on a flat surface (painting, drawing)  demands much concentration, skill and perseverance; a future post here will take a look at the technical demands. Soon.

In the middle of the 19^th century, with the beginnings of Modernism and the influence of Asian art on Western painters, the illusion of roundness lost its allure. That, also, is a topic for a future post.

In the meantime, here’s an idea of how to look at paintings to get the importance of reflected light:  just make an exercise of ignoring all other aspects of the work and zoom in on that sliver of light.  Illuminating!

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