Art & Perception

I’m just back from a pleine aire, oil painting workshop and it seems that my topic — to paint in the middle in the muddle or to recollect in tranquility — has arisen again on A&P. Hi Sunil…..

Obviously I’m fascinated with the immediate ambiance as much as I am with the final product. The milieu from which I just returned, however, had its problems. The big one was the lack of focus within the landscapes we were asked to paint. So the topic of the day is — how do you find your viewpoints and hold them? more… »

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.

more… »

I had the good fortune to go to a very good group show at the MoMA recently with the provocative title ‘What is painting?’. One among the many works that I ran into was by a lady artist of the 1970’s Lee Lozano. Not having studied at art school, I did not know much about her (well, I did later find out that she really is not a household name) until I came back home and read up a little bit about her. The more I read, the more I was fascinated by how she had managed to integrate art and life into a seamless whole. From reading, I surmised that her desire for painting went beyond the confines of the canvas and she tried through her art/life to incorporate the viewer and her life in a strange union.

more… »

The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.

Nothing is less real than realism…details are confusing…it is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.

I’m in a maundering mood, trying to pin down the meaning of a tiny revelation I had the other day.

I was doing my 7 AM walk with my digital camera, getting photos of flowers, shrubbery, moss, walls, the usual panoply of residential flora on the pleasant July streets of Portland Oregon. But suddenly I found myself seeing the foliage and supports, stems and stamens, bricks and buds, as Art.

more… »

I could be accused of being stuck on my waterfall project lately, but my excuse is that it seems to connect to various other recent posts and comments. Anyway, it’s the work that I’m closest to at the moment, so it makes sense to write about it while it’s fresh. Fresh enough that the ideas are still churning around without order, which in truth is how I like it. I’m inclined by nature to let things ferment in their untidiness, not attempting to resolve or define, hoping/knowing that that will happen on its own eventually.

So this post is partly a record of the connection between concepts and execution, between thinking about the photographs and making them. In the present case, this is a pretty loose and interactive connection, perhaps similar to David’s “chickens, then eggs, then more chickens…” or Leslie’s “dialogue with the idea going back and forth with the making in a pretty comfortable way.” Karl also has been considering the role of concept in art, and I think his question, “Is art something we make, or discover?” is about the same thing. In other words, do we create from a concept or learn by doing? The answer, of course, is that both go on at once, but how it plays out is always different, even for me alone on this single project.

more… »

As regular readers may know, I’ve been intrigued by resemblances noted between some of my photographs, particularly the recent waterfall series, and those of Clyfford Still, the eccentric Abstract Expressionist determined to go his own way, living most of his life in relative isolation from the art world. Over the last year or so, I have sensed some movement toward abstraction in my work and I would like to explore that. What is abstraction for me? How does it relate to representation? What and how does it mean? I’m not aiming for a more sophisticated Statement, I’m just trying to better understand what I do and what others have done and what I can learn from it.

more… »