Here is an excerpt showing the boundary between the  left aspect of the vessel and its background:

Looking at this excerpt here on the web shows a clear boundary between the vessel and the background. However, in the museum, standing back from this painting and viewing it from some distance made the boundary disappear. The left aspect of the vessel melted into the background. It was a fun experiment going close to the painting and then moving away while observing the boundary disappear, giving the impression that the top of the vessel was vertically cut in half.

GM finished this second painting before his death in 1964:

Here is its excerpt showing the left aspect of the vessel against the background:

This excerpt of the 1964 painting indicates the similarity in color between the vessel and the background. Here the boundary can be sensed from different directions of the paint strokes. A fascinating method.

A comment on the color in Morandi’s paintings: The pictures shown here were scanned from the book currently sold at the Met ‘Giorgio Morandi 1890 – 1964’. After I bought the book, I compared the colors of its reproduction with the actual colors of the paintings while standing right in front of the  paintings and I took notes. Regrettably, the colors in all the reproductions are consistently warmer than the beautifully cool colors in the paintings. GM painted cool yellows, reds, greys and not in the warmer, ‘candified’ hues shown in the reproductions. What a disservice to the GM’s legacy to falsify the colors in what may be become an important resource book.  I attempted to reduce some of  false warmth by desaturating yellow in my scanned photos.

What do I like in the two paintings shown here besides their ‘dissolving boundaries’? In the 1960 painting, the cool red is fascinating. There is a ‘vibration’ between the white vessel in front, the oval of the  top of the red vessel and the cooler greyish vessel in the back. In GM’s last 1964 painting, the cool, feeble looking yellow of the vessel contrasts with the clear turquoise (clearer than apparent on the web pic) of the round shape in front. I had not seen this turquoise hue in any of his other paintings. – At death’s door, GM expressed something like ‘how very much he still wanted to realize his new ideas with painting’ – a touching thought.

In summary, during my first visit of the Morandi exhibition, I embraced two of his 1914 Natura Morta because of their clear lines. In contrast, during my second visit, I learned to very much appreciate the two Natura Morta shown here, painted about 50 years later.

It’s been instructive to continue experimenting with photography à la Morandi: not attempting to imitate, but rather to explore some of the themes he seems to be working with, or at least what I find myself working with as I go about it. One thing I realized looking at more of his pictures, both online at the Metropolitan and the Morandi Museum, and also in a book found at the library, is that he was often interested in the modeling of masses by the light falling on him. This was contrary to my impression from the quite flat images that seem to be more common. Perhaps working in both modes was his own form of experimentation.

My first job was to find a plain background, and also work with lighter, more Morandi-like colors (though I personally tend to prefer dark ones) than before. In arranging a still life with bottles, etc, I was very aware that it was hard for me to get anything interesting. I certainly didn’t succeed. On the other hand, I can’t say I find Morandi’s arrangements very interesting, either. It became quite clear that playing with edge alignments, making them rhyme or overlap or extend, afforded a necessary compensating interest that occupied Morandi even more than it did me. Picture after picture from the book exhibited the same kinds of relationships. In this vein, Morandi was said by his friend Roberto Longhi to have admired Seurat for “mathematically” planned compositions and Mondrian for his strict rigor (for more, click on “The Care for the Image” at the Morandi Museum home page.

Another observation on composition: Morandi seems to have had little concern for the negative space in his still lifes, or at least they seem unremarkable that way. His objects are, in fact, almost always jammed together, leaving no negative space at all. My second composition, with one bottle well off to the side, is very un-Morandi.

In general, Morandi’s attention seems to have been mostly on the individual objects, and certain aspects of their close relationships. I noticed that one effect of vague boundaries or coincidental alignments is to draw the eye to those places, where I find a local appeal stronger than the whole.

I did make one attempt to create a more “painterly” image by partially posterizing it to simulate a limited palette. Below, the top image is the result of that treatment, the bottom is the original. I’ve deliberately not overemphasized this, so you have to look a little closely to see the difference.

If nothing else, this exercise has convinced me of the usefulness of copying as a means of learning style and technique. It’s been helpful for me in getting to know Morandi. And I expect that some aspects of his approach will find their way into future photographs.

Have you ever engaged in copying as an instructional method? Was it effective for you?

Birgit’s post and subsequent discussion on Giorgio Morandi has inspired me to try my hand at the same subject using photography. Not with the goal of trying to create an imitation Morandi, but more as an exploration for myself of some of the same ideas I see and enjoy in his paintings. I don’t claim these are necessarily Morandi’s ideas, but I think the process will certainly help me understand his work better. Essentially, I am taking up again the concept of studio as laboratory.

Here I present my first attempt, having had so far just a half-hour stolen from Thanksgiving activities yesterday. I grabbed a few bottles lying about and cleared off a table, though I didn’t manage to set up a simple background (hence the crop to remove distracting elements). I was primarily interested in playing with elusive boundaries. In the arrangement I photographed, the two blue bottles on the left merge (can you tell which is in front?), and the green bottle on the right merges with both the olive oil-filled bottle and the dark part of the background.  (The degree to which these remain slightly distinguishable will depend on your monitor settings; on my laptop, it depends quite noticeably on angle of view.)

One of the fun aspects of this micro-project was working with the color in relatively large patches. In this set-up, the colors were relatively dark compared with Morandi’s. Like his, they are partially de-saturated. This is a combination I happen to like, but I definitely want to try lighter colors also. Another aspect I enjoyed was the highlights and refracted lights, the simultaneous reflectivity and transparency. This is absent from Morandi’s work; he painted his bottles before painting the pictures, I presume to avoid these higher contrasts, as well as to provide the colors he wanted.

I photographed from a similar viewpoint as Morandi’s, well above the level of the table. The physical optics then dictated that the edges of the bottles were not parallel to the edges of the image, appearing to lean outward. I corrected this digitally to get the same distortion that Morandi preferred, whether intuitively or deliberately. I hadn’t been consciously aware of this earlier when looking at Morandi’s paintings, but I think it may contribute to the sense of “naive” simplicity that I get from his work.

As the title implies, I’m hoping to continue with this series. I’ve removed labels from a few more bottles, and am looking around for boxes or similar objects to add. Do you have any suggestions, or experiments to propose for this laboratory?

Upon entering the exhibition, my attention was captivated by two Natura Morta, both painted in  1918. This picture, copied from the web, has a reasonably faithful likeness:

Here is the one that I liked even better because of its sense of optical illusion. Its actual coloration is the same as in the still life above.  Unfortunately, the copy available on the web possesses a garish yellow that I was able to reduce somewhat, using AP. At the MET, one is not allowed to take a snapshot in a  special exhibition.

The sharpness, fine shadings and elegance and some sense of optical illusion in these two paintings is fascinating.

Other paintings in this exhibition are the type of still life for which Morandi is better known. Here are some of them, chronologically arranged – 1941, 1949, 1956, 1961, 1964:

Perusing these later, more popular still lifes now on the web,  I am beginning to appreciate them better, largely for their interesting color schemes.

In the interval between the startling change in Morandi’s still lifes from 1918 to 1941, he painted landscapes such as the two Paesaggios from 1935 and 1942:

Any comments?