Art & Perception

This is what I call my “Queens day” picture. It is of a very old cup that was given out when a Dutch princess was born, and of a pastry desert that you can only buy on the queen’s birthday. I wanted to do something with this very old cup and this thing you can eat on this special day because I found it such a challenging combination. Also, a painting in which the color orange is the head character is a challenge because it is not an easy color to paint with, and maybe not an easy color to look at. The House of Orange is the Dutch royal family.

This picture is not about primary colors, I think.

There are more interesting painting challenges in this picture. For example, mother of pearl in the handle of the spoon and fork. Here is a 640 KB version of the image if you would like to take a closer look.

What do you think about the composition? Could it be improved by cropping, or is it about right?

I don’t know why anyone would have a problem with it, but commercial art is cool.

N.C. Wyeth — Title Unknown (I just like this one.)

All right, I do know why some people would have a problem. Working with clients can be ghastly. I remember saying these exact words to one guy one time, “Look dude, I’m not your art dog.”

“But I’m paaaaying you,” he whined while amazingly managing a smug smile, thinking, no doubt, that he’d just laid on me an argument for which there could be no possible riposte.

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Guest post by June Underwood

We often say that certain works of art “talk” to each other, that artworks can carry on dialogs with each other, or that an exhibit carries on its own “conversation.” Today I’m thinking of that interchange among works of art.

You might say I’m thinking about exhibits. However, I use “exhibits” loosely, meaning the exhibits in our minds and ones seen among blogs and websites. We are accustomed to the formal groupings of museums and galleries, and we can all easily come up with categories that curators must use to form exhibits. But I want to ponder the works themselves in a somewhat more casual mode. I’m thinking of those movable feasts that we encounter and move around in the compartments of our minds.

A specific example: such an exhibit might be arranged in the mind by allowing Steve’s rabbit to converse with his derelict houses in his series “Ghost Light.” The house photos seem full of empty space; the rabbit photo is full of texture. But putting the two into the same space, comparing and contrasting what we see as we group them in this way, some conversations seem to emerge.

Then, to add a different voice to the mix, I meandered through Colin’s photographs “of the day”. And I found another that I think might enter the conversation here.

Colin’s photo is also black & white, also “empty while full” but doesn’t have the same sense of mortality and loss as either of Steve’s. Is it the subject matter that gives it a different voice? Or the formal elements? Do Steve’s photos elegize in a kind anthropomorphism, while Colin’s stoutly refuse to romanticize? Are Steve’s photographs speaking in the voice of the grief-stricken while Colin’s have a jauntier tone? What might the dialog between them be? And what caused Colin’s photos to be, for the most part, not a very good conversational match with Steve’s? (This last is clearly subjective, based on a quick study and a tired mind – but fun to contemplate anyway).

Which brings me back to more general questions: within your own mind, is there a visual ecology among the artworks you love, where they feed one another? If so, are there ways to define and delineate that ecology which might move it from the personal pondering to more universal conceptions.

Do different art sets demand, in your mind, different kinds of ecologies and promote different viewing mindsets? Which works can be put together without canceling one another or without one bullying the other? What allows works to converse in a meaningful way — theme? style? medium? artist? chronology? period, size, or something not listed here? Or, conversely, what elements make for absolute incompatibility? If you had access to all the art in the world, what sets would you think of exhibiting?

Not so incidentally, my reason for asking these questions is personal. I am engaged in a multi-year project on a single theme, the life within ancient geologies and land formations of the high desert landscape of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in eastern Oregon. I am processing that landscape in a multitude of media and modes. I have done and will continue to do pleine aire painting (oil and watercolor), photographs (summation and reference rather than “hey look at this), studio oils and watercolors (mostly as studies but some finished, complete-in-themselves). All these versions of the landscape will, I hope, culminate in works done with my primary media, the stitched textiles, painted, pieced, appliquéd, representational and abstract. I am in the very early stages of this rather too ambitious process, and so I am circling the questions of why/how/when/if among the pieces that I have in front of me.

As I proceed through the variations on this landscape, I hope to be more methodical about moving from memory and photograph through oil and watercolor to textiles, from representational to semi-abstract to abstract. But right now I have a mixed conglomerate of pieces, ranging from postcard sized watercolors, to an 8 x 9 foot painted textile, probably a total of 60 or 70 pieces in different media. As I work in this way, I contemplate if and in what ways, each work speaks to the others. I have multiple “exhibiting” spaces within the house and studio, and I arrange and rearrange my work on the walls and easels to see what happens.

I’m trying to get a feel for what disparate media working on a single set of imagery might have to say to one another [two examples are shown in this post.] If you would like to see more of my work in this project, you can go here.

I am travelling in New England engaged in my two great passions, dance and photography. I have announced to the dance world that I am preparing a book of my contra dance photography. Nothing like going public with an idea to force one to actually proceed with it.

Here is one of the conundrums with which I am faced, and it goes to the heart of photography as both a descriptive and an abstracting medium. At dinner last night, David Millstone challenged me about what I wanted this book project to represent. Is it about the contra dance world, or is it about photography of contra dance? Is it a narrative description of a subculture I happen to belong to, or is it a series of solutions to finding resolved images in a complex, dynamic environment?

Mostly I come to dance, because it feeds my soul and my bliss. Because dancing is so close to my heart, it is a natural subject to turn my photographic attention toward. I know the feeling of dance, and the creative challenge is to make work that also has that feeling present. But I’m also responding to light and shadow, movement and expresion, all those things that can make an interesting photograph. I stand back, and I want to work with what I’m seeing.

This challenge speaks to one of the great paradoxes of photography as a creative, interactive process. Our source material is the external world. We take a picture, which has a complex cascade of metaphoric and literal meanings and implications. Take it where? Take it from what, or whom? It implies a duality, there’s the photographer, then there’s the thing that the photograph is taken of, or from, if you wish to include the soul-snatching metaphor. Relationally, it brings forth the conflict of choosing between being a witness or a participant.

To master the photographic process requires a fluency in the sequence of chemical, or now, electronic processes that create an object with its own presence and reality. The photograph resembles something that we understand as a document of a given moment and place, but it is nonetheless a highly abstracted artifact of a lot of technology. My jollies come from being able to see from one end to the other of that tunnel of process at the very moment I am engaged in the intitial framing and exposure. And I choose to play with that process in a really complicated environment, a contra dance floor.

My resolution to the duality conflict—am I a participant or a witness?—is to not resolve it. I flit back and forth. When I want a break from dancing, I take pictures. If it’s a dance where I think bodily harm can be avoided, I’ll dance with the camera. I want those stances to be as close to each other as I can manage. I want both aspects to be present in the work.

I expect much of my job for the next few months will be figuring out just what form this project is going to take.

This past Tuesday I attended a lecture and discussion panel with three gallery owners who talked about how they got into the business, what they see their role and relationship to the artist is etc. Someone in the audience brought up Internet sales and did they work with artist who also sold their work on line.

If you are currently doing both, selling via your website and through a gallery, what are the agreements that you have in place with the gallery? Do you sell certain types of work on-line but not through the gallery?

Technorati Tags: galleries, art, paintings, sales

Red gauche on paper

Let’s for a moment accept the proposition that children artists can be considered “real artists.” What an odd type of artist a child makes, if you think about it. What a short career a child has as an artist, always in transition. Who could be worse at writing an artist’s statement than a child?

Please look at the painting above and ask yourself, what does it depict? I have looked at this artwork many times and I always have had more or less the same interpretation of the content. But what was the artist’s intention? Are our views similar? Why don’t I ask the artist? In fact, I am the artist. I painted this sometime during the early 1970’s, but I have no memory of doing so. I have no idea what I intended. I somehow doubt that my interpretation of the picture (which I remember from later in my childhood) is in fact what I was thinking when I painted it.

The painting is framed behind glass, which makes it difficult to photograph. My mother made frames for many of my sister’s and my artworks, without which they would certainly have been lost. Children’s art was the main artwork in our house when I was growing up. If it were not for this early encouragement, I probably would not have become an artist.

Do you frame your children’s art? Do you ever think of the long-term implications of doing so (or not doing so)?

. . .

[Update]
I enjoyed reading the different interpretations of this painting by Sunil, Steve, Rex, Leslie, June, and Birgit. I never had the idea of a giant figure on the right before, but Sunil’s comment made me look at the picture in a different way. An area of agreement is that the picture shows a man. I would really like to know what I thought I was doing when I made this.

I’ve been thinking about this picture a lot, about the role of the “artist.” Here is what I think: my mother’s role in this picture was something like that of a photographer. She didn’t “make” the image by hand, but she created the conditions for it to be made. Presumably it was one of many paintings. She selected this one, framed it and saved it. I think she chose this image for a reason, because it is a compelling. She could also have made a compelling photograph of a pattern of clouds in the sky that looked a lot like a man on a dock or a boat, or what have you. I think my role as a three or four year old painter is completely accidental.

Is children’s art art? It seems to me that it can be, but a parent or some adult has an important role to play in making it art — selecting what is good and presenting it as art.

[UPDATE 2]

Things are pretty quiet around here culture-wise, given the lack of college students (and perhaps the long-awaited onset of winter weather). So perhaps I can be forgiven for my lack of posting. But I have been thinking about art-criticism in the abstract, raising some questions that ought to be of practical relevance to my own activity as a semi-serious art-critic and blogger. So I’d like to initiate a series of posts on the subject.

A while back, I had a brief exchange with Franklin of Artblog.net, who announced that he was quitting art-criticism, in large part because of its perceived incompatibility with being an artist. As he wrote, “They’re contradictory exercises, professionally and temperamentally.” In response to my request for clarification, he responded:

Petty hatreds and unjustifiable loves that are unbecoming in a critic are a necessary part of an artist’s inclinations. I’ll continue to criticize to the extent that it helps me think about art, but I am stepping out of the role of capital-C Critic, and the title’s implications of fair-mindedness and responsibility. I relinquish efforts to make my writing strive for either. As a critic, that wouldn’t be right. As an artist, it’s fine.

This seems like a reasonable position and it appears to be widespread conventional wisdom. Yet I had some reservations, and so I responded:

I think they’re unbecoming if you put them up front and in the center. Indeed, a Critic should strive to be open-minded and go beyond idiosyncratic likes and dislikes. But it also seems disingenuous to me to pretend that criticism is a wholly neutral, disinterested affair. The critic is a judge, but also somebody who takes genuine pleasure (or displeasure) in artworks, just like anybody else. So it seems like there should be a middle ground, a way of letting two voices speak.

I have little to add to this impromptu “theory” at the moment, but I would like to illustrate what I take to be the difference between an enthusiastic review and a cool-headed, dispassionate one. For the former category, I’ll submit for your attention this piece I wrote about Boston painter (and former teacher of mine) Gerry Bergstein. For the latter, here is a piece I wrote about recently deceased Ithaca painter John Hartell. Both are nominally “positive” reviews, with regards to most of the work, if not to certain curatorial decisions. Both contain level-headed analysis and interpretation. But I think something of my differing enthusiasms comes through in the writing.

As one of only a handful of local individuals writing criticism of the visual arts, I believe that it is my ethical responsibility to cover as wide a variety of subjects as I am competent to cover. (In my newspaper writing, not so much in my blogging.) And I believe that it is important to be fair and balanced in doing so. But to try and repress my “petty hatreds and unjustifiable loves” entirely suggests to me an alienated approach to arts, one foreign not just to most artists, but to most amateur enthusiasts. Actually, I am willing to repress the hatreds; the loves however should be allowed to bubble to the surface once in a while. At least that’s the idea.