Art & Perception

Title: Peace of Mind
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 101×76 cm

Some of you already know that I’ve been copying Emily Carr paintings for the last week or so, attempting to understand more fully how she does forests and trees.

Emily Carr, Cedar Sanctuary, 38 x 26″, Oil on paper, 1942

I’ve learned a lot through this exercise [ including the rule that I must paint-over or otherwise destroy the copies I’ve made before someone comes into the studio and exclaims with pleasure over them. Such an exclamation forces me to admit that what the complimenter is seeing is a copy, causing embarassment all round.] Carr’s finding of shapes in the complexity, of making color within the shapes, and of “draping” her branches are all valuable for my own art-making thoughts.

However, during this process, I had other kinds of questions occur.

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Uncondiotionally 2009

Tittle: Unconditionally
Size: 102×76 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas

Don’t know if you all read on my web biography that recently I have embarked in a deep and personal spiritual journey that has opened a door to the ethereal world of Reiki and crystal healing.
Through meditation and welcoming my Spirit and Angels to guide me through my work I have learned to give Reiki to my paint tubes and canvases before I start a painting.
My intentions are to create more than just a painting, but share a healing experience through the vision of the Divine irradiating a sense of peace and love of nature.

I am not sure if you all seen the film ‘The Secret’ but there is a very interesting part about a Feng Shui consultant working with a painter and how his works become the reality in his life through the law of attraction.

What are your intentions in your creations? Are you attracting what you want into your life through your works? Are you really showing your world and the true inner self?
What do you really want to achieve?
Your true self is how you feel yourself when nobody’s watching. It is where your deepest thoughts live. It is what you ultimately think of yourself, how you treat yourself and what you fear others might see inside you. It is your most native and real personality, your true Spirit!

Once you change the way you feel about yourself and evoke it into your works, the law of attraction will change your life. You are the magnificent creator of your own reality!

Even if you don’t care greatly about Picasso, I recommend the Charlie Rose interview with Françoise Gilot, who lived ten years with the man. A talented artist herself, and very independent-minded, Gilot frequently discussed art with Picasso. Much of what he said about how he worked has come to us through her. For example, regarding the rather complex, high cubist paintings, he said than in the “early stages” there were almost no “references to natural forms…I painted them in afterwards.” Braque had a similar working procedure. Rather than abstract from an initial representation of a scene, these cubists–at least for a time as their approach evolved–roughly laid out their abstract, faceted spaces and forms, then filled in enough clues to suggest the subject. Those clues could appear in rather disconnected spots. I believe it was the dealer Kahnweiler who said they had developed a way to free objects, showing that they existed without showing where they were located.
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Running Free by Angela Ferreira

Title: Running Free
Size: 102×127 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas

A reference to a recent New Yorker Critic at Large (March 30th)  review suggests that a work of art is good if it rises out of necessity and if the artist is capable of carrying out the idea to its appropriate end. As a letter writer paraphrases:

“This matters; this has purpose” and “I can do this, I am able, I can carry out this task to its appropriate end” (correspondence from Joachim B. Lyon, Stanford, California, New Yorker, May 4, 2009).

I found these notions both bemusing and contra-indicated. What do you think?

(Oh, and here’s an image from Rhyolite Nevada ghost town. I don’t know if it has either purpose or, if I paint it, as I intend to do, if I am adequate to the chore.)

Tittle: Rebirth Net
Size: 76×61 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas