Art & Perception

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… »

David Lewis-Williams in The Mind in the Cave and Inside the Neolithic Mind postulates that religion has its origins in hard-wired brain functions he calls “states of altered consciousness.” Among these altered states are the hypnogogic (just prior to and awakening from sleep) as well as states induced by consciously chosen activities, for example, rhythmic dancing, meditation, and persistent highly rhythmical sound patterns. And then there are the other well-known states, whether chosen or inflicted, that alter consciousness — ingestion of psychotropic substances, intense concentration, fatigue, hunger, sensory deprivation, extreme pain, migraine, temporal lobe epilepsy, hyperventilation, electrical stimulation, near-death experiences, and schizophrenia and other pathological conditions (Inside the Neolithic Mind, page 46).

These states of consciousness, combined with homo sapiens’ ability to remember the visions that occur in such states, says Lewis-Williams, account for the rise of religion, some social organizations (primarily religious hierarchies), and the early paintings and art found in western Europe at places like the caves of Lascaux well as in the Near East around the upper reaches of the Tigris-Euphrates, Jordan, and Turkey. 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.

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I was struck by Sunil’s post about his alteration/destruction of work into which he had put so much effort. In fact, I liked his revised “Palimpsest” very much, although I can see that it doesn’t resemble much of what he has shown us before this.

Because I have so many failed, partly completed, destroyed, altered, and despised pieces sitting around in boxes, baskets, photos and my memory, I thought I’d run through a taxonomy of my bad work and its place in my art-making universe. Ultimately my question is whether I’ve made adequate categories of “failure” or if there are others that could be added; in addition, I wonder if you can suss out what “runs” your failures — what, particularly if it’s not just a problem of quality, causes you to throw up your hands and ditch work.

So here are my categories. There’s work that simply fails — period, full stop. There’s work that gets altered, thus morphing into something else. There are series that come to an abrupt halt. And finally there’s work that’s put on hold.
Failed work has its own subcategories, of course, including failures to work the materials, failures of skill, failures of insight, and failures of resonances within one’s conceptual worlds. more… »

I’ve not posted here for the last month, as I’ve been deep into computer management issues. Creativity has been at a low ebb, as has been anything cogent to say about the process. But I’m on the road now, which always gets me creatively engaged with my surroundings.

We’re visiting friends on Salt Spring Island, which is between the BC mainland and Vancouver Island. The hills and sea coves are spectacular, of course. Walking with friends at Ruckle Provincial Park, I explored the woods and beach with my camera as they conversed. I felt like the off leash dog lingering behind to check out the compelling scents along the trail.

Washed up on the rocky coast, with all the other woodsy flotsam, was a huge stump with its ring of roots, whitened by many seasons in the sun. I’m a sucker for these sorts of things. No matter that this is a well worn rut in photographic explorations–the reason photographers are attracted to eroded rocks and convoluted trees is that they’re interesting natural forms to stare at. I am not above joining the fray, so long as I get to do it in relative solitude.

The more I started poking around this stump, the more I appreciated how this was one of the more complex shapes in a natural object that I had encountered in awhile. By taking pictures of it, sitting in it and looking, and looking, and extracting more shapely photographs, and looking some more, I got to “know” this thing. I crawled in close, and I backed off and saw how it sat in the larger landscape. I began a relationship.

We had about 30 minutes together, this stump and I. Most people, and me in another mood, would have walked by, glanced at the stump, thought, hey, that’s cool looking, and gone on their way. The camera was an excuse to linger and really feel what this spot was like for the duration.

Cennino Cennini devotes his Il Libro dell’ Arte (late 14th c.) to a practical explanation of the materials and techniques of painting. And yet Cennino also writes of painting as an occupation that deserves “to be crowned with poetry”, because the painter has the ability to compose from the imagination, “presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist.”
It might seem there is a mismatch between focusing on the physical aspects of the work, and at the same time emphasizing the role of imagination in creating art. But this combination of the mundane and the fanciful is appropriate for a simple reason: an artist creating from the world of the mind must nonetheless work in the world of the materials. The physical nature of those materials, and the way the artist uses them, will inevitably influence how the inner world of the mind is discovered and expressed.

Contemporary artist Hanneke van den Bergh recognizes and makes use of this interplay of the imaginary and the physical in her clay sculpture. She explains “I like to make the heads by moving a little lump of clay until I can just see the face. I like this quality of the imaginary form beginning to emerge from the raw material.” Van den Bergh does not attempt to disguise the properties of her materials. In the example shown here, Danae III, she leaves visible the coils with which she constructs the main form. The contrast of the repeating pattern of coils with the rhythm of the body contributes to the expressive effect of the work. “By avoiding too much detail,” she says, “I maintain the contrast between material — the physical — and the imaginary.”

Some weeks ago there was a discussion on this blog about why I don’t photograph people as part of my studies of Manhattan.  Since that discussion, I have, of course, become obsessed with photographing people.  In case you were looking for an example of how we influence each other on this blog, you now have a very good example.

With all respect for the various and wonderful women of the world, as a man there is an undeniable connection between my brain, my eye and my penis so, not surprisingly as a gay man I have pretty much focused my camera on me…and the streets of Manhattan are chock a block full of beautiful and sexy  men. And at the risk of stereotyping and generalizing, as walkers, men and women are very different.  Men are going somewhere and they are focused on that–even if it’s nowhere–almost oblivious to there surroundings.  Women are observers. They’re moving more slowly and looking at store windows, how other women are dressed, what possible threats there may be to their safety–and if they’re being led by a man, they are never looking forward.  It’s actually pretty funny to observe.

I’ve also learned that male Manhattanites are so focused on their “missions” that you can stick a camera up a man’s ass and he’s likely not to notice unless it has a vibration mode–and even then he might mistake it for a passing subway train.   As a result I’m loving the ability to capture unposed body language and, more specifically,  Manhattan male motion.

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