a multi-disciplinary dialog
I’ve been working on a series of photographs of the homes in my neighborhood. This project started after about three years of walks with my dog at different times of the day and encompasses a whole gamut of thoughts and feelings that I’ve had towards my home.
The more I saw the same things every day, the more meaning all of it took on for me until I had to get my camera and take photos. I suppose there’s a lot I could write about but I want to focus on two ideas regarding this project:
Now for something completely different from my usual inanimate landscapes. Probably almost every photographer in Montana has done horses at some point. They were actually a major subject of my first photos when I started up with digital photography, and starred in my first self-assigned project (not on the web site; I guess it’s still in progress). But they were eventually neglected as I mostly pursued my long-term interest in landscape and abstraction. Then I saw some postcards of the Horse Nudes portfolio of Kathe Lesage and realized what I’d been missing. Last weekend I had a chance to do something about it.
A photograph offers so many (and so obvious) advantages as a source for painting as to raise the question: why would any responsible person even consider painting a landscape outdoors?
I’ve been thinking about this while painting outside lately. I think the answer comes down to this: I need to ask, what is it that I am painting when I paint a landscape?
Is it the landscape?
Or is it my being there, my reaction to the landscape? more… »
The dunes have a fall towards the Great Lake that is difficult to capture in its full steepness.
Below a raven and crashing wave:
Color is a difficult thing to get your arms around. In fact I think one could spend a whole lifetime trying to understand this facet of art and become proficient in only a miniscule percentage of the approximately three million degrees of color difference that the untrained human visual cortex could distinguish easily. On the canvas, getting the right overall value of a particular hue such that the harmony of the whole remains preserved is rendered even more difficult given the reality that most oil paint companies make a maximum of about 60 unique hues of differing chromaticity. As I trudge through the long stairwell leading to my color nirvana, I have realized that there are two ways of approaching and understanding it. The approach is a bit dichotomous, but it seems to serve me well. more… »
In my current studio phase I’ve been experimenting with an idea that goes back a while, but was most recently brought to life by a show I saw that included the painter Michael Haykin. I’ve been wanting to find a way to combine images in a way that yields something that is more than the sum of its parts. Probably most artists have considered making a Cubist-like multi-perspective image, but as June found out in her struggle to make Cubist biscuits, it’s not at all easy. I certainly haven’t had much success myself, but this time around I do feel I’ve learned something that will affect future work.
Last week Steve pointed out that a lens-based optical system like a camera or the eye can only focus at one field of depth at a time — meaning, as some sample images he presented illustrated, that other parts of the scene will be out of focus. The images Steve presented were of a landscape. In one image, some plants in the foreground were in focus, whereas a distant mountain was a blur. In the second image, the mountain was in focus, the foreground a blur. [Here I have combined them in one image.] Why, Steve asked for the original images, did painters — at least before the invention of photography — not paint the blur like this? More generally, why don’t artists paint what they see? more… »
