a multi-disciplinary dialog
Who is the most influential art blogger? Ed Winkleman, of course. I haven’t been following his blog as closely as I would like to, but yesterday I took a look and the title of his recent post Art About Art got me excited. I’ve been working on an essay about this general subject “art about art”, and I wondered if I had been scooped. In fact, there was no connection; Winkleman’s post could have been titled “Art about making art,” how artwork depicting artists “caught in the act” of creation tells us about how artists did what they did. In my own experience this is a fruitful avenue for research, because there is much to be learned about studio practice from old paintings, (how to store brushes in linseed oil, for example, or how the palette was laid out in the 15th century). There is also much to learn from ancient art about the making, painting, and firing of ancient Greek ceramics.
Back to art about art — the concept of depicting art in art opens a lot of possibilities. The imaginary vase painting still life above is an example. I have long been fascinated by Athenian vase painting because of the potential of the vase to act as a “frame” for drawings and paintings on the vase itself. This fascination led me to a long love affair with ceramics and kiln building — that’s for another time though. The painting above is a technical study in how to paint a representation of a vase with oil colors on canvas. The form of the vase is based on studies of a stamnos in a museum in nearby Leiden, while the “red figure painting” is based on a painting on an amphora in the same museum. I studied these ancient objects by drawing in my sketchbook at the museum, then created this fantasy synthesis in my studio.
In fact, I worked out the rough form of the vase together with Hanneke van Oosterhout in a large painting we did together. I made this study to develop the technique for painting the vase before overpainting it in the large painting.
Every blog post should end with a question, right? Okay then, what do you think about Ed Winkleman’s blog? Or, what do you think about “art about art”? Or, what do you think of collaborating on artwork?
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related post: Art about art and doing a 180
I have been doing pretty well with my New Year’s resolutions: to draw, paint, sculpt and photograph each day. Part of the key is to make the energy barrier for each activity as low as possible. With painting in oil, an important consideration is, how to clean my brushes?
Here is what Cennino Cennini wrote (probably in the 14th century):
. . . have a plate of tin or lead which is one finger deep all around, like a lamp; and keep it half full of oil, and keep your brushes in it when idle, so that they will not dry up.
In Cennino Cennini’s time, artists did not use organic solvents for oil painting. To keep their oil painting brushes from drying up, they stored them in linseed oil. A slight improvement on Cennini’s method is to have the hair of the brush in oil, while the handle remains oil free.
The advantage of storing brushes in linseed oil is that it is easier and faster to clean them. The painter does not need to remove the oil, only the pigment.
How do you clean your brushes?
Thanks to my New Years resolutions, I took my camera on my walk this morning. Making photos every day — what’s the big deal? Photography is just a matter of pressing a button, right?
I did the same walk around the harbor that I do every day when I am in Wilhelmshaven. But today I felt exhausted afterwards, and it wasn’t from the physical weight of the camera. I felt tired because I used my out-of-shape “photographic vision,” a special way of looking at the world through a camera. It took about half an hour of walking and shooting to get into “photographic vision,” and it now persists for some time after I put down the camera. “Photographic vision” lets me take photographs without using a camera, in a sense. I assume all the photographers have this; probably the professionals live with it all the time. For an amateur like me, it yields a sort of “mental muscle ache,” something like what you feel when you first start exercising muscles that you didn’t realize you had. All the more reason for the daily workout!
Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is it will be well worth while, and will do you a world of good.
In 2006 I made sculpture; at the close of the year I began to take an interest in photography. What I found was that weeks could pass without my even touching a paint brush. Recently, I have been painting daily without doing any sculpture or photography at all.
Is it good to abandon one art form for another, even temporarily? One could argue that, in some cases, it is good. But here is another way to think about it, in analogy to physical exercise: would it be good to give up daily exercise for the sake of art? Thinking of it this way, the answer is, of course not.
My goal for 2007 is to draw, to paint, to do sculpture and to do photography, every single day.
My goal is not to try to accomplish something remarkable every day in these various media. The goal is to keep myself in “condition” or “artistically fit” in the same way that I stay “physically fit.” Stated in this way, I don’t think this New Year’s resolution is too ambitious to follow. We shall see . . .
Do you have New Year’s resolutions pertaining to art that you would like to share?
