Art & Perception

Sunil Gangadharan, ‘Battery’, Oil on masonite, 40″ X 44″  

I have been exploring new ways of laying a face to the canvas and a technique that I am recently starting to understand is to pattern splotches of color rather than create defined areas of light and dark. It is a time consuming technique even if it looks very random. Previously, the light / dark areas seemed more deliberate and planned with the result that some of my older paintings had ‘islands’ which accentuated the lighting and lack of (no, I am not complaining, only comparing).

In this technique, I did not try and consciously paint ‘islands of light’. Rather, I developed the effects of light from using results of a higher valued hue playing on the transparency of the white ground overlaid with lower valued hues and thicker splotches of paint for completion of darker areas. So here are two new paintings and no contortional contretemps (as June playfully referred to questions/issues raised as a result of my posts). 

Comments are most welcome.

Sunil Gangadharan, ‘Belphegor’, Oil on masonite, 40″ X 44″

Another re-visitation in my recent tour was the Montana ghost town of Bannack, where I have photographed my Ghost Light series. Although I’m not sure a project ever really ends, it does go through phases. I feel this one is nearly dormant: I still enjoy the location, I find photographs I want to make, but there’s a sense of approaching completion. The initial vision was about spaces and light and the stories suggested there (someone wrote me she kept looking at one of the pictures while, in fact, writing a story). Now I’m filling out with additions that make a more rounded view of the place, but may not advance the key ideas much.

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I’ve been doing a lot of painting and now I am preparing a website for the images. Here is one that was photographed today. Comments?

Inspired by textures of rock and water, I studied beach texture at a popular creek flowing into a Great Lake.

I mostly came early in the morning, not to inconvenience little people playing at the creek. But one morning, there was a retired person from Arizona reminiscing about his favorite childhood haunt. more… »

People on this site take their photography seriously.

Me, I play around. I take my camera to a tidy little pond with a walkway in a nearby metro park, where I capture whatever the season and the light permit. Photographing the plant life there is somewhat like shooting fish in a barrel.

There are things that I forswore, but now I swear I do. I once considered the extent of my cunning to constitute the limits of my accomplishment, and looked askance at any number of the tools that I now unabashedly employ. And the images that I bring back from the pond are increasingly subjected to my ever laxer and self-indulgent propensities. Instead of rolling up my sleeves on location and really getting into the moment, I point and shoot and place my faith in the little Photoshop of horrors. This sort of thing was not supposed to happen – my parents raised me better than to click like that.

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Some time back (2005) the BBC conducted a poll in England that asked people to pick out the most popular painting in their land. In a field crowded with van Gogh’s evocative pictures and Monet’s breathtaking impressions, the winner turned out to be a rather ordinary-by-today’s-standards painting by J.M.W. Turner titled the ‘The Fighting Temeraire’. Somewhat more surprising was the fact that the second prize also went to a similarly bucolic oil painting by Constable – ‘The Haywain’. (Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck was ranked fourth – one of my favorites) more… »

The problem with the blog is fixed and we are back in business :-)