Art & Perception

Who is the most influential art blogger? Ed Winkleman, of course. I haven’t been following his blog as closely as I would like to, but yesterday I took a look and the title of his recent post Art About Art got me excited. I’ve been working on an essay about this general subject “art about art”, and I wondered if I had been scooped. In fact, there was no connection; Winkleman’s post could have been titled “Art about making art,” how artwork depicting artists “caught in the act” of creation tells us about how artists did what they did. In my own experience this is a fruitful avenue for research, because there is much to be learned about studio practice from old paintings, (how to store brushes in linseed oil, for example, or how the palette was laid out in the 15th century). There is also much to learn from ancient art about the making, painting, and firing of ancient Greek ceramics.

Back to art about art — the concept of depicting art in art opens a lot of possibilities. The imaginary vase painting still life above is an example. I have long been fascinated by Athenian vase painting because of the potential of the vase to act as a “frame” for drawings and paintings on the vase itself. This fascination led me to a long love affair with ceramics and kiln building — that’s for another time though. The painting above is a technical study in how to paint a representation of a vase with oil colors on canvas. The form of the vase is based on studies of a stamnos in a museum in nearby Leiden, while the “red figure painting” is based on a painting on an amphora in the same museum. I studied these ancient objects by drawing in my sketchbook at the museum, then created this fantasy synthesis in my studio.

In fact, I worked out the rough form of the vase together with Hanneke van Oosterhout in a large painting we did together. I made this study to develop the technique for painting the vase before overpainting it in the large painting.

Every blog post should end with a question, right? Okay then, what do you think about Ed Winkleman’s blog? Or, what do you think about “art about art”? Or, what do you think of collaborating on artwork?

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related post: Art about art and doing a 180

Larger version

If you could hang out for an evening talking with any living person (or persons), who would your top 5 choices be? Here’s my list:

1. Thomas Pynchon
2. Brian Eno or Stewart Brand (or both)
3. Woody Allen
4. Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen (or both)
5. the Dalai Lama

  Who would you choose?

In a recent post, Hanneke showed us a beautiful pencil drawing of three pears. In the comments, she and Karl expressed interest in comparing this drawing with a photograph. I decided to experiment along these lines, and above I’ve posted a first result (click on the image for a larger view). I plan to vary a number of factors involved in creating the image; you can help me decide what would be interesting to try.

In this first effort, I used one of Hanneke’s tricks: a dark background. The pears were ones I happened to have in the house, and are different from Hanneke’s, not as nice in shape. I used a similar arrangement to hers, with natural illumination from a nearby window. I’m not thrilled with my composition, but I didn’t take much time, and I can do a better job when I come back to this. Please give me your thoughts on things you like or don’t like about the composition.

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1. Turpentine Trouble?
2. Storing Brushes
3. Cleaning Brushes
4. Shaping Brushes
5. Transporting Brushes

I have been doing pretty well with my New Year’s resolutions: to draw, paint, sculpt and photograph each day. Part of the key is to make the energy barrier for each activity as low as possible. With painting in oil, an important consideration is, how to clean my brushes?

Here is what Cennino Cennini wrote (probably in the 14th century):

. . . have a plate of tin or lead which is one finger deep all around, like a lamp; and keep it half full of oil, and keep your brushes in it when idle, so that they will not dry up.

In Cennino Cennini’s time, artists did not use organic solvents for oil painting. To keep their oil painting brushes from drying up, they stored them in linseed oil. A slight improvement on Cennini’s method is to have the hair of the brush in oil, while the handle remains oil free.

The advantage of storing brushes in linseed oil is that it is easier and faster to clean them. The painter does not need to remove the oil, only the pigment.

How do you clean your brushes?

Well, it’s very difficult to post today. I’ve been too busy drawing to write very much; furthermore, I can certainly not manage handling any comments. I’ve hardly had time to comment on anyone else’s post for the past 48 hours. For example, Leslie wrote an excellent post on artistic changes of opinion, and I’d love to chat on that most interesting topic, but it’s no use. When it comes to a choice between the talking, whether on the internet or in person, or art, the talk goes.

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I decided to start drawing again on a serious basis and I today I wanted to try to capture the texture of these pears. I wanted to see if I could make come out in the drawing the complicated texture these pears have. I think got some of the feeling of these slightly shrunken and beaten up pears. The challenge is to capture that without paint. I wanted to see if something that I could paint I could also do it in pencil.