Art & Perception

Not long ago, Françesca enjoyed typing random letters into a text editor for about ten minutes a day. Now that she is nearing five years old, that doesn’t satisfy her any longer. She learned how to use the mouse, and she’s beginning to understand how to use the Safari web browser. She can spend an hour on-line without a break.What to do? This is the point where Hanneke and I have a choice. We can take the computer away and have our kids grow up in a “traditional” pre-internet household. Or we can let them go online and accept the consequences.

I am of two minds about this. One view is that the kids should be able to grow up in an internet-free home, the way we grew up. The opposing view is that the kids should go online because the internet is part of the world we live in — keeping the kids away from it would be like refusing to let them learn to read or write.

I am torn between these two views, but I am leaning toward letting her go online because:

1. Our kids will come into contact with the internet no matter what we do.
2. By guiding her internet use at home, we can help Fran find and be involved in the positive things on the internet; for example, looking at artwork by other children her age.
3. The internet is intensely stimulating, of course. My response is that we need to make our “off-line” home environment even more fun, more stimulating, so that the internet is not such a magnet for the kids.

Anyone else out there with similar problems / opportunities?

This landscape painting by Tracy Helgeson caught my eye. This work is something of a new departure in Tracy’s work, I think. She often works on the border between abstraction and reality, but in this painting there is a cross-over, albeit a subtle one. The result is almost unsettling, but I like it. A question for her is, does she want to go further with this? There is also a psychological element to this landscape painting, as I see it, which captures my attention.

Tracy’s blog raises interesting questions about what it means to be an artist today. In the past, artists liked to cloak themselves and their work in mystery. Tracy is open about her work (good, bad, unfinished) and her difficulties in the process of creating and selling. There is a refreshing and direct quality to her writing style that makes mysterious 20th century artists seem a bit comic in comparison. Is Tracy a good example of what 21th century artists will be doing, or should she hide her unfinished work and cultivate a more refined public image?

Drawing still-life from her imagination has given a new dynamism to Hanneke’s work. Look at the rhythm of the forms she creates here. This looks like it would be awfully complex to paint (and where is she going to find a skull?).

I have to confess that I used to think of still-life as the most boring art from. Hanneke van Oosterhout’s paintings have raised my appreciation of ordinary everyday objects, which is nice. But her imaginary still-life drawings add a whole new level of intellectual and artistic interest for me in the still-life genre.

This drawing of a glass of beer is exciting despite being of a mundane topic. I think that working from imagination allows Hanneke to tap into a new level of creativity (sorry for the lousy pun).

Where she is going with this approach, what will be the final result, remains to be seen.

This snail doesn’t seem to like beer so much.

Now on Follow the Painting.

Hanneke van Oosterhout started making imaginary still-life in an accidental way, but now she is beginning to focus on it purposefully. Here is one example she drew in about half an hour.

“It’s great to be able to work so freely,” she said while drawing. “I don’t feel stiff. It’s wonderful because you don’t need to look up [at a real still-life], you just keep on drawing . . .”

Hanneke added, “It’s handy, because you don’t have to buy all that stuff!” meaning the objects. But in fact, the objects she draws are ones that she has in her studio (and her memory, of course). This raises the possibility of combining the imaginary image with real-life detail in an oil painting.

I think that still-life would be of little interest as an art-form if it were a pure reflection of inanimate objects. And yet it is precisely the “still” aspect of this genre that makes it of special interest to painters. The artist has the time to study fine details, or subtleties of composition in a still-life that are more challenging when painting a portrait from life, or a cityscape on a crowded street.

Hanneke van Oosterhout was recently “trapped” in a smoky cafe for hours with nothing to do. Fortunately she had her sketch book with her and she made these two drawings from her imagination.

Something about these drawings pleased her. When she was able to return to her studio the next day, she attempted to construct a real still-life that combined aspects of the two drawings.

This still-life drawing is nice, but it lacks something that we can see in the imaginary drawings.

Comparing the real and imaginary drawings, we can easily see the important differences. The real still-life, like most of Hanneke’s still-life pictures, is a centered composition. It has a conventional feel of balance which is somewhat dull. The imaginary still-life drawings are both unbalanced, with the main weight of the objects skewed somewhat to the right side.

Another difference is evident in the perspective. The vessel in all three drawings is seen directly from the side. To achieve this constraint in the real still-life, the fruit on the table top is also seen from the side. But in the imaginary still-life, the table top and fruit are seen from a different perspective, from above. We seem to look down on the table top while looking at the vessel from the side. This merging of different perspective points lends an interesting quality to the imaginary drawings. When drawing more or less literally from a real still-life, this quality is lost.

Does the real still-life need to be drawn from only one viewpoint?

Are there other fundamental differences between real and imaginary drawings that I have missed?