Your Painting as Gold Mine

This is a passage from a larger painting, which will appear at the end of this post.

When  you’re working on a painting, it may happen that you feel you’re getting carried away and that you can’t see the unity in what’s on your canvas.  You love all the parts but you feel that as a whole it  doesn’t hang together. This often happens as a painting draws near completing and the artist becomes self-conscious about having to please an audience.

In that case, you can pull out your camera (or phone) and take pictures of just passages of the painting.  You’ll discover that within your painting there are any number of potential paintings.  This exercise will refresh your eye and your mind.  It will remind you of what you love in a painting and lead you back to focusing on your individual sensibility.  The audience will find itself.

Painting by Patty Cohen, oil on canvas, 24”x24”

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

Now consider the following passages from Patty’s painting as potential paintings in themselves.  Imagine them as large paintings.

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Studio Gallery at the Evanston Art Center

The exhibit of my Thursday morning painting students will be up for only one more day.  Get on a jet plane, hop in your Chevy, saddle your horse, slide through that worm hole! Don’t miss this show.

Most of these paintings have been analyzed and celebrated in previous posts here and you may find it worth your while to review.

The class is called “What Would Mondrian Do?”

Congratulations to Patty Cohen, Bruce Boyer, Harold Bauer, Lorna Grothe-Shawver and Lauren Myers-Hinkle! It’s a great pleasure for me to be working with you.

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Painting, Resolved

Could the artist/student, Patty Cohen, add more paint, scrape some off, glue raw canvas onto the surface, punch a hole….?  Of course, all sorts of things can be done to this image at any stage of its development.  But, it was declared finished in the last class of Spring term.  “Finished” means “resolved.”   Nobody can explain exactly what “resolved” means, but the artist knows—and feels the resolution.
The rich texture cannot be duplicated here.  I just want to point to the dynamic of its composition:  zigzag plus stability.

The three black areas (connected by yellow lines in my analysis) move the eye to read a triangle firmly planted on a side that is parallel to the bottom edge of the canvas.  That imparts a feeling of stability, which makes for a solid context in which the zigzags can go wild (blue, green).  Notice also that the upper left section is not as tame as it may at first appear.  It’s in muted tones, but is sectioned (pink) in such a way that its forms converge towards the middle.  This subtle focus also adds to the sense of stability—we like looking at the center of a painting.

You would think that such a turbulent composition would work in another orientation.  If you rotate the canvas, however, you’ll see that the other three orientations don’t work.  My sense is that this is due to the three black areas, which we prefer in the form a triangle (yellow) that’s firmly grounded.

Congratulations, Patty!

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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