Art & Perception

I’m on the road with Jer, working on painting scenes from many tiny hamlets in the high desert of eastern Oregon. We started on Monday, it is now Thursday, and I have eight 12 x 16″ plein air oil paintings in my boxes in the back of the Honda. I also have a peeling nose (in spite of all precautions against the sun) and a whole set of images, some photos, some memories, of Oregon’s outback.The paintings are too raw to be shown right now, but here are some photos of things I painted:

The Heppner, Oregon, courthouse and uplands

The Condon Library and Lennox Heating and Cooling Store (circa 1903, erstwhile bank and saloon)

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Looking back through the years, I do not remember when I started painting with oils and watercolors… maybe I was about 13. To be honest mostly of I know today has come from my own experiences of try and error.

To me, making a painting was never an issue but something that happens naturally with whatever materials come to my hands. Oils are my favorites, but recently I’ve been painting in a very quick method and found out that a mixture of acrylics, oils, glitter and others mediums work better for my new style.

In the past 3 years I decided to do a Fine Art degree as a nice “add on” to my previous qualifications. To my disappointment, I have learn nothing new but of a chaotic, hypocrite and delusional world from the Art teachers.

If you an artist with already some success and experience I recommend you to aim higher and not to go back to an educational institution. You see, despite your good intentions you setting yourself back and giving your own murder sentence to the chances of being ‘stepped on’ and muffled by the tutors, who also called themselves artists. You must have no previous artistic experience because no matter how you try to please and befriend this so called “artist teachers” you will always be seen as a threat rather than a student.

Unfortunately we live in a world that demands all this qualifications to be taken seriously. I have learned from my own mistakes, maybe because I was a bit naïve, full of dreams and hopes that a new qualification would push my career further, but realize that I brought this to myself to the point I had nothing but verbal abuse, bullying, harassment, intimidation and discrimination from lecturers. In the end I felt from as high I dreamed and have gain nothing but a new pretty BA words in my cv and an awful demoralizing experience I must rather forget!

More new painting in my redesigned website www.magicpaintings.com

Jer and I are now at the Montana Artists’ Refuge, Basin, Montana, in the southwest part of the state. I am painting, he is writing and editing, and we are both experiencing the dislocation and joy of a new adventure.

While the residency has all kinds of ins-and-outs, basically I came here to paint. And painting is what I’ve been doing.

Basin lies in a geographical bowl, surrounded by pine-covered mountains. It’s a mining town — still has a functioning gold mine — and seems to have had its moments of prosperity, most of which were in the past.

Basin Street, Basin, Montana. The main drag.

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Karl recently mentioned here that he prefers (and revels) painting in the context of his reaction to his surroundings. He averred to say that a photo of the landscape would not do justice because 

“Photographs record what a place looked like at a particular moment. They don’t record what it felt like to be there” 

My personal experience is a little different. more… »

Sunil’s recent post was most provocative. It’s not often that someone seeks comment about his or her self portrait. Turns out that Sunil may have opened a rich vein.

I appreciate the opportunity to witness a participant, not just through the trajectories of post and comment, but as the individual presents his or herself in an image.

In that spirit I would like to throw my mug in the ring.

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When I first showed these rock formations I’m calling Bones of the Earth, I was quite unsure what to do with them (I still am…). They seemed to invite a number of treatments. In particular, I found myself wishing I could paint them. Since I’d been admiring Sunil’s paintings of late, I naturally wondered how he might handle them: “Sunil, are you out there? Imagine these rocks as a weathered old face, what would you do with it?” I was not thinking that Sunil would actually see a face in them, but rather that considering the rock surface as skin might suggest coloring and brushwork that would give an interesting treatment. That was before my own musings on the power of face recognition. And if anyone has an over-developed fusiform gyrus in his brain, it’s Sunil (I can barely rotate 90 degrees, he easily does 180). Well, as you can guess, Sunil did see a face there — in fact three — and has recently posted on his blog the painting that resulted. It’s reproduced (with permission) below:

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Farmland, 36 x 43, painted cotton

I have lived many places, and in each, I have always had a strong sense of the place itself — the trees and plants, the nature of the cultivated earth, the nature of the uncultivated earth, the sky, winds, air, light — I can describe all these with a fair amount of detail.

But I seldom had to try to recap in art what I know about a place where I no longer live. However, now I am doing so.

“Paint what’s around you,” seems to be a sound admonition, but what is around me is the opposite, environmentally speaking, of what I am painting. more… »