a multi-disciplinary dialog
The Jolly Roger Bar, 12th and Madison. Oil on board, 12 x 16″
As you know, I’ve been painting around Portland, here and there, returning often to sites to note what else is there, what I may have missed, what more is available for turning into paint.
These paintings have a certain “feel” to them — a style that fits with the record of my visits. I work on-site and then tweak and fiddle in the studio. I also find myself making larger, stranger, studio-begot contributions to the sets of pieces.
I am continuing to re- and re-read Schmid’s chapter on edges, because I’m not sure I have a decently full grasp of what he’s saying.
The book is Alla Prima: Everything I Know About Painting by Richard Schmid ($50 USD in soft cover from him; more from Amazon and more in hard cover).
Schmid begins his chapter by saying “Think about edges the way you would think about kissing someone…. Think of edges as exquisite subtleties, as the means to transmit romance, as ways to make your dabs or paint whisper or shout and reach nuances beyond the range of color. Think of them as visual poetry… but especially think of edges as you would the agents of expression in music….pianissimo (very soft), andante (flowing), allegro vivace (fast and lively), maestoso (majestic), fortissimo con sforzando (whamo!).
Despite all the discussion and analysis on A&P, I seldom, if ever, carry it consciously in my head when I’m out photographing. If it happens to be there at the start, it soon flees as I focus on the subject. Sub-consciously, who’s to say? In any case, in my first outing after writing about complexity, I made some pictures that not only relate to that issue, but seem to have a loose resemblance to some of the drawings discussed. They also involve the edges June brought up recently, so I’ll have a look at that, as well.
Sand makes for soft curvatures.
Close-ups of the dunes show more… »
Stone People at Old Mission Peninsula, fully submerged in the Great Lake a decade or so ago, are now exposed,
An ideal blog post should be a nutritious snack like a granola bar: a little filling but not too heavy, containing a few sweet nuggets, and hopefully good for you. Well, you know how there’s usually a little spilled flour, a sticky spot of honey, and a few escaped raisins lying around after a cooking stint? And possibly a few items from earlier efforts? Welcome to my clean-up post.
One stray ingredient is one I deliberately left out of last week’s post on some modern Chinese abstract artists, for reasons of space and time. But Che Chuang’s painting of a head, shown above, struck a real chord with me. It reminded me strongly of two heads of my own that have appeared in these pages. The level of abstraction, original color, and even shape are not so very different.
My ongoing look into Japanese and Chinese painting has turned up a few new/old ideas, and blown me away with some new discoveries. It’s becoming quite clear why I felt attracted to it; these are themes I’ve written on before in the context of my own photography (e.g. here and here).
The first idea is about the level of abstraction frequently present. Many of those mountains and rivers seem as much about shapes and textures as about landscape, more evocative than representational. Sometimes there’s an interesting mix of broad abstraction and realistic detail, as in the thousand-year-old Travelers amid Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan, shown at left.
A second realization is that, like similar works at different times, this one by Fan Kuan smacks of the sublime. This is evident in the language used to describe it by historian Patricia Ebrey (Cambridge Illustrated History of China, or Wikipedia):
Jutting boulders, tough scrub trees, a mule train on the road, and a temple in the forest on the cliff are all vividly depicted. There is a suitable break between the foreground and the towering central peak behind, which is treated as if it were a backdrop, suspended and fitted into a slot behind the foreground. There are human figures in this scene, but it is easy to imagine them overpowered by the magnitude and mystery of their surroundings.