and I think today I have made a breakthrough in finding the answer to a question that has been bugging me for a very long time.
I’ve been trying to study the “right” and the “wrong” way of making art, to find some guiding principles, something to go by in order to make “good art”.
And at the same time asking myself – those artists that lived in the past and even in ancient civilizations, did they really know some magnificent secrete that we, in modern times, have lost? Why does their art seem serious and whole, while ours, which is more informed, more realistic, lacks that sense of telling a simple, fundamental truth about the world?
For example, one step in my chain of discoveries was that good art involves storytelling. And like any verbal storytelling it has to be selective. It has to be tied to the theme.
But can that be used, like some kind of formula, to create “good art”?
That’s what I question. Surely, yes, it can, to some degree. It can help you debug your novel when it seems to go awry with too many details, for example.
But fundamentally good art comes from the artist’s genuine desire to describe something, and their focus on that thing that they want to describe.
Not their focus on how to impress, not their focus on how to please a critic, but just a focus on the thing they’re expressing.
Ancient Egyptian art lacks realism, but the confidence it has in its style and its devotion to telling its essential story are what make it beautiful. There is sincerity of a mind describing a thought there.
What have we done in modern times? We have replaced that desire with an impersonal aspiration of some kind. We ran away from realism in an attempt to find “individuality”, and then we came back to realism in an attempt to find “excellence”, and neither attempt is really fully successful, isn’t it..
Of course you could make the point that someone with no art training at all would just create a mess, and that is a very good point indeed. But also, someone with lots of art education and excellent execution can create something stale and formulaic.
To speak beautifully – you need words, and then you need to have an idea that is Your owN. Art that has no hesitations about the fundamental way it should be done, is possible when the artist has taken the time to learn the tools they need for that execution. And which tool they acquired was dictated by what they wanted to express. And that the tools themselves are a result of a sincere quest for expression.
A self trusting soul is earned and created by the habit of not hiding from its own questions, but trying to answer them, instead.
A thought about tools and painting: The tools we hold actually change our thinking. A tool determines what can and can’t be done, what solutions and options are open to us or not.
Our subconscious looks for solutions based on the options our tool provides. If the size or shape of your brush is not the one that matches what you envision should happen on your canvas, then you will probably get something that doesn’t exactly match your vision. Same thing for the paints you use or how the surface of the painting is like.
Like trying to do a block-in with paint on a very absorbent surface. The brush doesn’t want to move and it’s hard to draw. It can change the way you do your block-in. The drawing may come out more segmented, for example.
Or how about trying to create bright chroma with a muddy pile of paint?Trying to create large shapes with a small brush. Trying to create straight edges using a rounded brush. So my conclusion is that it’s nice to incorporate the habit of spending a minute to choose the right tool before I start working.
One of the strangest things I came across which has stayed with me, was one person’s description of how they feel about Enya’s music. They said they like her music a lot, but that they feel that it lacks emotion. To me that was the strangest thing to read, because I feel the complete opposite about her music. Her music is calm and pleasant, but the heart of that quietness, the slow-ripples-in-a-pond-like style lies a very deep emotion. I think it can be easily noticed when one compares her calm music with calm “elevator type” music. But it led me to think of a more general truth: The nature of the communication of art and its objectivity.
Art can obviously be experienced differently by different people.
The same works in paintings. An artist could paint an abandoned alley in golden daylight, think they captured that feeling of solitary glow perfectly, that feeling of slow sunlight shining quietly on the world in hidden corners, but someone else looks at the same painting and sees only the alley. They might sum up the painting by saying: “Oh, isn’t this the corner of 5th and Main? I think I know this alley!”.
However, and here is the important part: A different person with the right “emotional vocabulary” will see the meaning of the piece in the same way the artist thought of it instantly. It will be as obvious to them as to the one who created it. And the clues will all be there in the piece, too; the emphasis; not on the structure or the concrete details of the street, but rather on the interaction of light with the objects in the scene.
But an artist simply cannot create anything that will automatically impose its meaning on an observer. Such a thing is unobtainable.
Art speaks a language whose meaning can only be understood by having the complete emotional vocabulary. The meaning is there, but it has to be decoded by having the right “dictionary”. To a large degree I think all people have a lot in common in terms of their “dictionaries”, but they also have huge differences depending on their personality, life experiences and associations. I also believe these different “dictionaries” can be explained and shown, to some degree, and that eventually, through differentiation from other artworks, someone can be made to see the essence of an artwork in a more precise, nuanced way. And I realize that this also applies to me regarding artworks I don’t immediately relate to or understand.
Most works of art are presented to us, the viewers/ readers, without explanation. They ignore our existence and are yet designed to display themselves to us as if we are the center of their universe. “Here is an interesting story”, “Here is a collection of sounds”, “Here is a picture for you to look at” “It’s just here, choose if you want to get involved in this made-up story and made up universe or not”. No explanation is given as to why you should get involved and when you read it, the story is told as if you’re not really there. As if the story exists in some fifth dimension. We take all of that for granted and just enjoy the artwork, but when you stop to think about it, the idea that someone is presenting us a story without acknowledging our presence is rather peculiar, interesting and worth consideration.
What’s more is that the events in the artwork are not just presented randomly. Everything is planned and crafted around you, the viewer, to show you something interesting, beautiful or important, but without acknowledging that you are there to see it (nor is the existence of the author/ artist that created it acknowledged). This is a third person story telling, and, just like it is the most common in literature, so it is also most common in visual art.
Consider, for example, this painting:
Talk about being in the right place at the right time! We just happen to be exactly at the spot allowing us to see this exceptional moment, from a location that shows us clearly and beautifully the story that unfolds, at a crucial moment of the plot. The figures are arranged to appear most beautifully composed from this particular angle, there is nothing in our way, the composition is carefully crafted to maximize our clarity and sense of beauty of the scene, and yet the way the painting is portrayed, it is like we are not even there. The characters in the painting do not know we are observing them or seem to recognize it, even though we are given the best seat in the stadium. What’s even “funnier” is that paintings would often add random elements to make it seem like the painting is NOT intentionally trying to display itself to you, but that you rather accidentally stumbled across the scene. This is done by placing foreground objects (like the branches of plant covering the baby) and by keeping the main events off center.
But every now and then, artists also create visual art in the second or first person point of view.
The first person point of view in story telling, is when the author is describing their own experiences. Unlike the third-person pov, the existence of a creator is not taken for granted but is instead made the center of the work. In visual art, this would be represented by self portraits where the artist is portrayed in the act of painting.
A perfect example is this self portrait by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun
The portrait presents to a viewer the creator herself, while creating a painting. It’s like writing a story that describes what the author is doing at any given moment. First-person storytelling in visual art is more tricky than in literature, because in literature, an author can describe themselves doing all sorts of activities, but in visual art, if the artist just shows themselves doing an activity, it wouldn’t be immediately known that it is them, unless the title or the plaque of the painting says so. And even then, it hardly changes the meaning of what is actually displayed in the piece. So mostly, first-person story telling are paintings about the act of painting. They may or may not acknowledge the existence of a viewer.
This brings us to the last category, the second-person point of view. In this method the existence of the viewer is acknowledged and the story is told as if told to you, the viewer. It is described in this website as: “This point of view treats the reader as the main character in the story. Other characters refer to the reader as “you.” Descriptions are based on what you would see if you were in that situation. This narrative voice is generally reserved for explanatory articles and how-to books, but adventurous writers will occasionally pen a short story or novel in the second person.”
I could not think of a better example than this drawing by Jason Brady. It is more likely that many would think of this drawing as an interesting gimmick, but actually it is an example of a rare category of point of view in art. Art that interacts directly with the viewer and makes the viewer the center of the piece and the center of the story.
In this drawing, you are playing a chess game with death. I believe it is your move, and you better choose wisely because the price of losing is gonna be high. You are deliberately given a low eye level. Death is towering over you. The chess pieces are giant, bigger than you, almost, and death is staring right at you, waiting for you to make your move.
A common type of second-person pov in visual art is portraits. Especially when the person in the portrait is looking straight at you.
Angelica Kauffmann, Self Portrait 1797
Portraits are explicit about displaying someone to a viewer and they explicitly acknowledge the viewer, especially if the person in them is looking at the viewer like in this portrait. There is no narrative, though. It is a very simple, yet stylized, presentation of the character and looks of one person to another (or others, in plural).
Here is another example of a second-person pov, in this drawing by comic book artist Joe Madureira
You are definitely acknowledged as the part of the scene here. In fact, every painting in which a character deliberately makes eye contact with you, the viewer, is a second person pov.
Some paintings will make a viewer implicitly part of the scene without making eye contact or directly interacting with them. The painting can assign the viewer a role by controlling their location in the scene. The eye level and distance from the scene play a crucial role here. In third person pov there is an unexplained distance in which anything could happen. But some paintings will explain everything, all the way down to your nose. This can be achieved by rendering objects that nearly touch you or stand in your way as the viewer.
A scene could be either composed in a distance, as if you are watching a play, or it can be viewed from a point of view inside the scene. I can’t quite classify all examples, but consider this painting by Norman Rockwell, Freedom of Speech: You, the viewer, is specifically located inside the scene, sitting in with the rest of the crowd, looking back to see this young man in the row behind you standing up. you even have the man next to him partially blocking your view. The painting does not acknowledge you directly as a viewer, but it assigns you a place in the scene that is inside the scene. He chose specifically to place us in the crowd’s eye level to emphasize the monumental action of the man standing up to speak. This effect would be nearly ruined if our eye level was changed to look at the scene from above, for example. And the meaning and focus of the scene would have changed completely if we were looking at the whole courtroom from a distance, even if the same event was depicted.
The majority of visual art works are in the third person point of view and set a scene that is viewed as if in a theater. The space between the viewer and the scene is not fully explained. You could be viewing it through a window, or a few feet away, or just seeing a poster. But You are not directly assigned a role or a place in the scene. To illustrate, here are a few examples:
Frédéric Soulacroix, Spring
Frank Dicksee, Yseult
Ivan Shishkin, Gathering Storm
Thomas Couture, Romans during the Decadence
Richard Bergh Nordic, Summers evening
Maxfield Parrish, Morning
Eugen de Blaas, The Flirtation
Jean Leon Gerome, Desert Quest
William Adolphe Bouguereau, Nymphes et satyre
John Everett Millais
I hope you see that in all of these, you get a sense of a scene deliberately being displayed to you. You are separate from the scene, observing it. You are not part of it and no role is assigned to you. There is no voice of the creator, either.
Some paintings make the viewer part of the scene by changing the eye level, the distance from the picture plane, or add depth to the painting such that items in the painting extend beyond the displayed scene and reach out or encompass the location of the viewer. In all the paintings of the 3rd person pov above, there is a distance between the scene and the viewer which is not visually explained. In painting where the viewer is assigned a location or a role, that distance is explained. It is more common in game art which I included in some of the examples:
League of Legends Game art
Arsène Vigeant, John Singer Sargent
In the first, you are somewhere on the ground, the grass obstructing your view, just about to be discovered by this dangerous assassin. In the second, you are right in front of the man in the painting, who looks like he is about to step in your direction or start talking to you. In the third, there are those poles right in front of your face, while the area of the interest, the couple, is all the way in the right of the picture, suggesting you are viewing the entire scene by chance. The Degas painting suggests that you are right there in front of them, strolling around the room. there is really little distance between you and the people in the room. The gameart of Zyra, looking right at you, or the other Zyra which you catch a glimpse of from behind the plants. The size of the plants suggests that they are right in your face, which places you at a specific distance from the scene.
I find that many paintings are still difficult for me to categorize clearly. The tools of visual art are different than those of literature but I find a lot of fascinating commonalities between the two. Another thing this topic has made me realize is that the location of the viewer in your scene is a tool to communicate different messages in your artwork. Things like the eye level and perspective play a significant role, beyond just organizing objects in a scene realistically. They can serve the goal of involving a viewer in your painting to varying degrees. In many paintings, the viewer is just there to watch and appreciate and in some – to participate in different ways. Your art will have a different psychological effect and a different message depending on what you choose.
Having a grasp of general principles of balance allows an artist to draw figures better; to create a sense of stability, dynamic stability or a sense of someone about to fall over. Those are created by how the body’s position relates to the frame of balance. Poses can be classified in their relation to balance as: passive stable, active stable (holding an arabesque), dynamic unstable (mid-motion), passive and dynamic (you’ve fainted and your body is falling through Alice’s rabbit hole).
Considering different poses got me thinking about balance from a predominantly mechanical point of view rather than an artistic one and that’s the thinking that I’m detailing in this post.
The first principle to consider about active, stable poses is that our two feet (or whatever other body part touching the ground) create a stable structure, much like a table’s legs, on which the rest of the body can move and shift.
The metaphor of the table still holds true on one foot, because each of our feet is like a small tripod with three points of contact.
This is important because a table can balance weight in different distributions, like so: And a human being balances different weight distributions on top of our legs in the same way: The center of gravity of the stick figure on the right is further shifted to the right, but the two legs are able to carry the same weight just the same.
Legs can carry unequally distributed weight up to a certain point. Put the ball too far on the edge of the table and the table will fall sideways. Place your center of gravity too far extended in relation to your legs and you’ll fall. But within a certain range, a variety of poses are possible with the same leg position.
It also works while standing on one foot because each foot is like a small tripod. A small tripod can balance a small area of weight distribution over it (or a small surface on which objects can be safely placed without toppling the table over to use that metaphor).
The bigger the surface area in contact with the ground the more stability is created and more room is created for “imbalance” on the table’s surface. A more elaborate base can be created by kneeling, standing on the hands, laying, sitting etc’. The more surface is in contact with the ground the more stable the base of the table is and the more room there is for shifting weight on the surface. That means that there is no single “solution”, no single way in which the body must be positioned in order to be stable, given a certain placement of your two feet. You can balance a variety of positions with the same feet placement, similar to how you can place a heavy ball on the surface of a table in different distances from the center and it still remains steady.
To illustrate; imagine this dancer, who is leaning back, slowly straightening out her torso and then leaning it forward with her arms reaching forward. She will still stay stable, with her legs in the same position as she does this, until the point when her base will no longer be able to support the strain of the imbalanced weight. (Little note: This sculpture is decor art sold by a manufacturer called bronze dancer figurine)
So far so good, but this completely neglects to mention that dynamic, stable poses are usually comfortably balanced. Stable poses on the verge of collapse are pretty unusual in art or in life drawing sessions, even though they are physically possible.
In a more classical figure drawing approach Ballance is carefully sought. The wise reasoning Andrew Loomis provides is:
“Balance is a physical attribute each of us must possess. If a figure is drawn without balance, it irritates us subconsciously. Our instinct is to set firmly on its base anything that is wobbling and likely to fall. Watch how quickly a mother’s hand grasps the teetering child. The observer recognizes quickly that a drawing is out of balance, and his inability to do anything about it sets up a negative response. Balance is an equalized distribution of weight in the figure as in anything else. If we lean over to one side, an arm or a leg is extended on the opposite side to compensate for the unequal distribution of weight over the foot or two feet that are the central point of division for the line of balance. If we stand on one foot, the weight must be distributed much as it is in a spinning top.”
Our body will naturally seek to minimize effort and that’s why balance is usually maximized in static poses. However, one foot is not exactly like a spinning top. It is a bit more like the 3 legs of a table; not by much, but by a little, perhaps barely enough to see difference, but a difference is there which is why we can create poses that are on the verge of being unstable but can still be held statically.
You may have heard it many times before that the way a contrapposto pose is balanced is by having different body parts lean in opposite directions to balance out the center of gravity and that the resulting center of gravity is placed above the weight bearing leg. So you may ask yourself; “if our feet can balance a variety of poses is it necessary for the different body parts to move opposite to one another or for the center of gravity to be placed above the weight bearing leg/ center of stability?” In my opinion the answer is no, they don’t 100% have to, but usually they will and it will happen naturally. For example, you think of extending your arms and torso forward and immediately your pelvis and legs will move in the opposite direction over your center of stability to balance the weight. This is the case in these beautiful illustrations by George Bridgman: This allows you to extend further sideways than if your legs and pelvis remained straight, and it reduces the load on your muscles. This compensation happens naturally. That leads the discussion to the last and important piece of the puzzle; the muscles.
Our muscles kick into action whenever we wish to hold a body part against gravity. lean forward and your back muscles have to work to keep you from falling forward. Lean backwards and your abdomen muscles have to work to keep you from falling backwards.
They operate in a more complex way than that, but in basic terms, your muscles kick in when you wish to hold a pose against gravity. They are there to serve as a glue that keeps your body parts from falling over. The more unstable the pose, the harder your muscles have to work to maintain it.
Dynamic stable poses can require a lot of muscle activity. Imagine a dancer’s arabesque, for example; Lots of muscle groups work to keep different body parts mid-air against gravity. So long as the muscle are able to keep working, the pose remains stable.
So to conclude, to think of figure drawing in terms of balance is to first get a grasp of the base of stability of a pose, and try to imagine what sort of range of imbalance it can hold over it (what size of “table surface” can such a base hold). Then, figure out how far out the “ball is placed on the surface of the table” in that pose. Is it an extreme pose on the verge of imbalance? Maybe it is a classically balanced dynamic pose (which it almost always will be). Some poses are like moving a weight to the edge of the table, instead of comfortably placing it in the center of the table. It is fun to think of poses primarily in terms of their balance and thinking about it in those terms might help get the mood of a pose across.
Visual contrast is a key concept in the making of an artwork. A concept I learned from online lectures by artist Bill Perkins at NMA.
My initial concept of visual contrast was very limited. I thought that contrast consists of something visually standing out due to being darker or lighter than what’s next to it. I was aware that you could create color contrast. But his lecture really opened my eyes to the endless forms of visual contrast that take part in an artwork and shape the way we experience it. Continue reading →
Values is a term in art that describes how light or dark something is. It refers to the grayscale value of a color.
How light or dark something is is one of the primary ways our visual system analyzes the visual world around us. It’s how we recognize something as a shape or an outline and it clues us to understand it as an entity.
In visual art it is a primary tool to emphasize and de-emphasize elements in a work of art. More specifically than value, it is the contrast that is used to make something stand out or disappear. When you start paying attention to how it is used in art, some of those lovely paintings and the way they were composed starts seeming very deliberate and not so random. It is not just that an artist gets an inspiration and an idea of what they want to paint, it is also that they then spend time composing the values of the picture to make the theme or subject of their painting stand out. So much so that in some cases it can almost seem shamelessly composed, yet seem entirely coincidental, unintended and realistic. Continue reading →
As an art student you will often hear the idea that the artist must learn to ignore what “they think they see” about their subject matter in order to actually see it as it is. That in our mind, there is an abstract visual symbol of different things (such as the shape of the head) and that we need to learn to ignore it in order to observe what is actually there.
There is some truth to that, and some falsehood as well.
As humans, there is only so much information we can hold in our mind at any given point. Principles and generalization help us to quickly understand a situation rather than analyze it as if we are encountering everything about it for the very first time. Continue reading →
So I figure I’d write an update about how things are going. June 29th I graduated from a full-time 3 year program at Georgetown Atelier.
Just in time… as even though I think I have so much more to learn, I was definitely ready to be out of an atelier environment. Perhaps this particular atelier, but nonetheless, it is nice to be on my own.
I have a couple of finished pieces which I will photograph and display soon. One of the finished pieces is “Glimpse of the desert” – a painting I’ve been working on for a while from a miniature setup I built. Continue reading →
2 Years ago I painted this painting from a live model over the summer:
After the painting was done, I felt restless about the background, which I did not like at all.
I realized what this model and pose really remind me of are a solitary moment of an Arabian princess, as she’s getting dressed in private, standing in a tent, catching a glimpse of the desert sunset through a crack in the tent opening. From the moment I thought of that idea, I was sold on it. Continue reading →
An artwork must have all its elements integrated around its theme to be good. This means that every detail that is being painted has to be painted such that it helps to emphasize the meaning of the work.
A painting involves so many things to keep in mind to create it: the colors, value, brushwork, edges, colors, thickness of paint, drawing aspect and so on – that something must be used to allow the artist to maintain the cohesiveness of the work while creating its different parts.
The only way to do it, in my opinion, is to let all the artist’s skills, experience and knowledge work from the background and work primarily from their emotions and inspiration in terms of the artist’s state of mind.
When I’m immersed in the work such that I feel as if it is a real world and I am inside it – I do things right. When I find myself thinking of other, technical things and try to work that way the result is always inferior.
To illustrate: suppose you’re working on the background of a painting, the environment in which your figure would go; you can paint it while thinking things like: “A background needs to be unified, it needs to be subtle, so I’ll work my brush thinly and do this and that technical details”, OR you can think something along the lines of how the figure would feel about the background, as if it were a real place. Something like: “The sky seem distant such that the figure feels that they are inside a huge space. Nothing is pressing on them and the sky surrounds the figure as if it belongs there”.
Surprisingly, the sky would come out looking like all the technical things you wanted it to be if you think of the later, but will likely not be as nice if you try to think of it in technical terms as you’re creating it.
Now this long train of thought it actually just the introduction to a different topic which really bothers me. That is; the difficulty of getting into that state of mind.
I think that this is the most difficult challenge I am facing as an artist. I find the mood inspired upon me by my day to day life is a huge obstacle to “getting in the right mood” to make my art. My art demands the best of me, the best part of my soul, and I feel as if, either the circumstances of my life or something in me that does not allow me to delve into that. If I start working on a painting and I am at the easel every day (like when I’m at my school), I might eventually get into the right mood, if I feel it spiritually “safe”. Years ago, when I was done with my army service (at age 19), I lived alone, in a nice, isolated studio apartment with no TV or computer and a phone I barely used (by choice). I painted all day and night, every day and every night and in the rest of the time worked or took walks in the area by myself. I have never been more productive in my art in my life. It was the right environment for it. I was very happy, but also lonely (and not financially stable).
I need to find a different way to get into the mood that doesn’t involve the extreme of removing every trace of human contact from my life. I wonder what it is, and why, that having no one around has such a powerful effect on letting me allow that inside world to come out, to make it real and to immerse myself in it.
Not being able to get into the “mood”, I usually just do something else. Days and weeks go by and no painting gets done. True, I could discipline myself into being at my easel, but the clash of motivations is very strong, and unless I manage to really immerse myself in the mood of the painting, I won’t paint it well anyway.
I bet this is a big problem for a lot of artists who create work based on inspiration.
Tomorrow starts my second term of my last year at Georgetown atelier. I wonder how the routine of getting back to the easel every day and painting will affect me. I hope it will affect me for the better.
Painting the figure is complex. There are a lot of things that need to be taken under account, such as proportion, anatomy, value, color – not to mention the gesture and expression and how each part of the painting relates to the whole.
The more complexity the artist can retain at any given time, the better off the painting will be, because the more factors would be calculated into each brush stroke. However, in reality, doing all of it at once is too daunting a task. It gets easier with experience, since more and more knowledge becomes automatized, but still, a lot of complexity remains anyway.
So, the artist must come up with a method of reducing that complexity into manageable steps. Traditionally, this is usually achieved by doing a block-in (a simplified drawing of the major lines and value shapes), then painting a light, transparent, monochromatic version of the subject, to figure out the value scale of everything and then finally adding the color.
This way, every aspect of the complexity is dealt with one at a time. In what’s called Ala-Prima painting, everything has to be done at the same time more or less. The accuracy of the drawing, the values, colors and the integration of every part of the painting around its theme or focal point. However, even in doing this there are ways to reduce the complexity and dealing with it one thing at a time. Different people would prioritize what to “solve” first differently. This realization struck me clearly as I saw a picture of the following painting by Morgan Weistling in mid-stage of making it:
Look at the girl’s left hand, the one not fully painted yet. This, for me, was the giveaway. The interesting thing here is what the artist prioritized – what complexity he chose to target first. In this case, it wasn’t the structure; it was the color and value relationship. As you can see, the hand is still lacking its structure – there are no knuckles, the fingers are not yet separated and the exact outline formed by each finger is not yet accurately described. From this general paint blob, he will later carve out, or add, the structure. Another thing that was being solved there was the proportion and the general shape. The artist was able to do that because, after years of drawing experience, those things come easily and are well automatized.
With most artists, I believe, the drawing aspect is the one issue that needs to be solved first, because it holds the most complexity, and everything else is then built on top and in relation to that initial stage. (That is the case with me with most paintings, with some exceptions).
I think that there can be two approaches here: One is to first put down the easiest thing to solve, what one already has automatized, and then build the complexity and other aspects on top of that. Or the other approach is to first start with the most complex part, get it out the way and then build the other things on top. It is much easier, in my opinion, to use the second method, because without it, an artist can get a sense of being overwhelmed with the complexity, which isn’t made a lot better simply because something like the value or colors have been figured out. However, I think it makes for a better painting or drawing when the value is prioritized first, and the structure emerges from it rather than the other way around.
Velasquez is an excellent example of this. He has the structure well automatized that he is able to put it last, not first, and since his primary focus is value and color, he can imply the structure in a subtle yet accurate way, just enough to get the idea across, without describing everything in detail. It gives the viewer a sense of epistemological power; a sense of being able to mentally hold complexity in a simplified form; a sense of control over complexity.
Value, in a work of art, is the primary tool for unification and differentiation. It can be used to sharpen differences between objects of to unify them and send them to the background. Both are important in a work of art, because art described things in a selective way – it enhances the central aspects of a painting and de-emphasizes the ones that serve merely as context or setting for the main focus.
Incidentally, while I admire the painting style of the first artist I shared here by Morgan Weistling, I think he utilizes the same style all over the painting non-selectively. A lot of artists do that, with different styles (it can also be done with photo realism). Compare that to this painting by Ilya Repin, a Russian painter from the 1850’s – notice how the ships in the background are mushed together in value and lack detail to de-emphasize them and send them to the background, while the men are described much more and appear to emerge. I think this selectivity of rendering makes for a superior art work. Therefore, I think it is wise to start a painting with the values figured out, and then have the structure emerge out of that, slowly and in a controlled way, creating the emphasis only where the artist needs it to be. The problem here is that it is more difficult to describe (or what I call “solve” or “figure out”) the structure rather than the value, and so if all your canvas has is the general values, the entire complexity of the drawing needs to be solved as you go. Ouch! I think a solution to that is the wipe-out process, which retains some information of the drawing while still unifying the values across the entire painting.
Anyhow, I don’t feel like I’ve reached a definite conclusion, but rather made some interesting observations about how an artist approaches a painting and deals with its complexity.
I think in most cases, the artist will first solve what is most difficult and what takes up most of their mental space. This changes over time once some aspects become more automatized compared to others (these are usually what the artist is most fascinated with).
I’ll have to continue this line of thinking some other time!
Long time no see, Blog. Don’t ask, I’ve been sick for a week and had a lot of other stuff going on, but I’m back, ready to provide you with some fresh content.
First is the painting I did at my Atelier last week, working from a live model for 5 days. This was done in 4 colors: Redish brown, Yellow, Black and White.
I would get cool tones from mixing black and white to make a gray, or from mixing black and yellow to create a green, warming it up with red as necessary. I was able to achieve a peach-brown by mixing my brown with white, or leaning more toward an orange by mixing it with the yellow, neutralizing it as necessary with the black and white. Wooha!
I also started working with a new palette which I absolutely love. It’s a glass palette. The neat thing about it is that I can control the background color against which I mix my colors, which allows me to see what I’m mixing so much better.
I decided that from now on I will start using a paper color that matches the average color of the skin tone of the model in the light. It really helps.
Here is the painting, done over 5 sittings of 3 hours each.
One of the things I learned here was how to solve the problem of cropping a figure against an abstract background. In this case, for example, I wanted to emphasize the triangle shape his arms created and end the painting there without painting the lower body part. The reason for this is that I felt that the core of the pose for me was the strength created by the two joined arms and that it was framing the body nicely. I liked the strength of it.
But then the problem was how to get rid of the rest of the body mass without making it looked chopped off. At first I simply didn’t paint it, which gave it a lovely Cheshire cat look, where one sees only the head of the cat. As lovely as that was, I decided against it. And painting carelessly and mostly using my subconscious the idea came to me to paint the beginning of the other parts in the right value, but with the background color instead of the flesh tones. This allowed me to then dissolve it at will into the background without making it feel like a strange operation was involved.
If you’re not an artist, this might bore you to death. And it might still bore you to death even if you are an artist, I don’t know. But it doesn’t bore me! Which is why I keep talking about it. 🙂 But anyway, indeed, it’s time to move on.
I also painted a few still life paintings. I am painting them quickly, one every day or two, with the purpose to practice and learn paint handling. Here is the result:
My next project is going to be a group of glass objects. It’s going to be longer than these studies – a 2 week project or so.
My next figurative project is going to be 2 weeks long, working from a live model again – a male model. I don’t know what the pose will be because I have no control over it. I will choose the angle and how I render it, but that’s about it. I hope it will be something I like.
I actually have a lot of thoughts about art and about my art, but they have not grown deep enough roots yet in my mind to articulate or write about.
I find that usually when I have an idea, it is not isolated – it is part of a generalization which relates to other areas of my life, and the process of forming the generalization and making the connections takes time and thinking which spans over years sometimes.
I was thinking about what art IS. I believe if you ask someone who has been through art school they will tell you that everything can be made into art. If you asked what a spoon is and someone told you that a spoon could be anything and everything you would think they are nuts. Why? Because a spoon is a specific object, with a specific shape-family and function. But the same does not apply to art. Why? Because the identity of art involves a high level abstraction. Forming the concept of what art IS involves identifying a lot of abstract qualities about art. In our modern age where people are taught not to trust their own mind, performing this level of abstraction on our own is extremely difficult, borderline impossible.
Similarly, the question “what is a spoon” is much easier than “what is justice?”. The later involves a chain of abstract concepts which need to be retained and which have no immediate physical manifestation. You don’t “see” justice in the street the way you might see a spoon. The essence of “justice” is hidden in actions, in seeing similarity and relating them to one’s existing spiritual values. It’s harder to do.
In the last decade there has been a resurgence of classical realism. In the last 10 years over a dozen ateliers have opened across the United States and Europe where none existed earlier on. The only option for artists seeking training was an art degree, which was a pile of wishy washy intellectual crap without a single course offered as a saving grace to develop actual rendering skills. Pretty much, that was it. The leading premise was that to teach an artist anything concrete would be to destroy their artistic freedom and identity – to make them into a mold. But actually, what this idea mean is that to have an identity means to lose freedom. In fact, if something has no identity, it does not exist.
We are conceptual beings, but to form those concepts and concretize them we need a visualization of them. Something like “Pride” may only be understood when seen on a human face or through some action (like soldiers, going to war). There is an inseparable connection between the tangible and the abstract. Take away the tangible and you “art” is a pile of materials. It is no longer ART. It’s a piece of no good junk. (OK, I may be going overboard here, but I couldn’t resist. I just love calling things a piece of no good junk, especially in a southern accent for added emphasis). It’s true of most of them anyway, if not all. I wouldn’t know because I find them too boring to pay attention to.
Believe it or not, I got my share of hate for my belief. As if that’s gonna stop me. If you want someone who supports modern art you only have the rest of the world to talk to. Don’t take your insecurities in your opinion out on me. You don’t see me torturing you because of what you believe, right? That’s because I am confident I am right.
Anyway now that this issue has been settled, I’d like to talk some more about something else on my mind.
As my “About” page mentions, I model in order to pay my tuition and living expenses. (By the way, buying any small piece of art off my hands would be SO appreciated). I’ve had some thoughts about modeling. I absolutely love doing it. It involves standing still in a pose or several poses while a room full of people creates art based off of you. I realized that what I enjoy about it resembles very much my motivation in making art. When I am motivated to draw, paint or sculpt, the subconscious, underlying motivation is being able to communicate something to someone. Something which I feel very intensely about and which is unique to me. It’s as if a voice in my mind looks at the subject I want to paint and says to the future viewer: “Look how wonderful it is. See what I mean? See?” and then I am able to show what I mean by emphasizing all the things I see about it through rendering it. The way I would render an expression, or contort or stretch the body, or emphasize a certain light. All those things come together to show a vision, and the satisfaction is from having that vision understood and admired.
Modeling is the same in some regards. Through the way I hold my body I am able to communicate a vision. It is then up to others to interpret it or capture it as they like, but I do my part in describing something. The difference is that in this case the model’s body becomes the medium and he or she are a flesh and blood sculpture of their own vision (in case they decide on the pose). I enjoy this part of the job, which is otherwise physically demanding.
I’m all out of things to say tonight and so I’d like to end the post here.
Lastly, I’m happy to announce that I will be giving an interview about my art to The Objective Standard magazine. My deep thanks to Craig Biddle.
Wishing you a happy, productive week, and a fun holiday season,
One of the quotes by Loomis that were on display at my atelier grabbed my attention and I wanted to post it here:
I think those lines are even better when the form connections in a way that enhances the meaning of an artwork – in a way that enhances its story or mood.
Here are a couple of examples I posted about way back:
Weekly #8 and Weekly #6 (skip to the second picture in that post and start reading from there).
It is exactly like in music, only in visual form, as Loomis said. I find it somewhat amusing… when I first heard the idea of rhythm lines I told my teacher it reminds me of different parts of an orchestra coming together to form a symphony by playing variations on the theme at the same time. Then I saw that Loomis wrote something very similar way back. I felt so proud to have said something that Loomis had said, I had to boast. 😀
An artist friend once old me that if what you want to create has already been done, there is no point in creating it.
I couldn’t disagree more. This painting above, “Yseult”, by Frank Francis Bernard Dicksee (1853-1928), is a painting of a woman at sunset and could be easily seen as a cliche. The subject matter is certainly not un-repeating. But looking at it, one can experience a profound and unique moment. One can feel the vastness of the sea, the isolation and sorrow of this moment as the world is in its utmost beauty, laid open before her, at her fingertips.
So long as one is not blind to her face and the content of the painting, one is being carried away into a powerful emotional experience. To that moment all of us know, of feeling truly alone (not lonely; alone) in a vast universe, no commotion around us to distract us and no cheery conversation that occupies our mind. A moment of facing one’s own life, the reality of one’s own existence in the world and perhaps of one’s mortality. It is a moment of looking at one’s existence in a metaphysical sense.
This painting is grand, yet more paintings with a beautiful woman at sunset, at sea can be powerful. It is not the subject matter that matters – it is how strongly an artist believes in their message – how strongly they are inspired by it and are devoted to that and that alone.
An artist should stay true to their passion and disregard all other considerations in choosing what to create. Nothing one creates in that state of mind can ever be a replica, no matter what physical things one draws upon to paint or how many times they have been painted in the past.
I consider drawing from my head to be a very important part of my art training. This stage of sketching out an idea is the most critical to the creation of art. I am essentially building the backbone for what might later become a finished work. This gives me the idea of what I want to see and achieve when I look at a real model. It might turn out that the pose in the sketch cannot be achieved quite the way I drew it in real life, or the model might not look the same and so on. The sketch serves as a blueprint and guide and can be combined with a real model to selectively create this vision in a realistic way (I should say, selectively real way).
On a different subject, I am officially on my summer vacation now. I return to school in mid September for my final year at Georgetown Atelier.
This summer will be dedicated to making and saving money for next year, some teaching, studying anatomy and perspective as well as moving out to a new apartment. I am trying to sort some things out for myself, some personal and some relating to my profession. One interesting article I read today, was recommended to me by an acquainted who have had Atelier training himself: “Working on two tracks” by Steven Pressfield. I find the article very interesting. I find that the topic requires a lot of analysis and deserves serious consideration in depth.
The article discusses two possible paths of motivation as an artist: external vs. internal validation. Granted, this IS indeed something to tackle and think about. Obviously, the right way to go is the path of objective internal validation. On the other hand, External validation is very valuable when other people are a good judge. This, however, brings up some heavy heavy philosophical questions, one of which is the objectivity of art. I do believe that external validation is important when it comes from the right source. When it comes from people whose opinion you respect for reasons for which you would judge your own art to be successful or unsuccessful. Since it’s 1:30am now, I will postpone the continuation of the discussion to another time.
During the summer I will be taking a break from my weekly posts since I won’t have as much content to post. I will post occasionally when I have new things to share.
Last note; I am selling my student work from the past 2 years. Some are 1 week paintings and others 5 months drawings. Sifting through it could be a bit like a treasure hunt. If you find one you like, contact me about buying it. This will help me pay my tuition and related expenses next year and will be much appreciated. Here is the LINK to the list of works and prices.
My core motivation in making art is a process of self discovery and contemplation.
Drawing or painting an image from my head allows me to look at it as a concrete and better understand what it is I had in mind. It is a process of translation from something abstract in my mind to a physical representation of it.
As I’m creating the drawing, I would feel compelled to move some parts, increase certain aspects of the gesture or minimize them, have the head turn a certain way, have the character look a certain direction or have a certain expression – I don’t always know all the parts beforehand – sometimes they become clear after I put down some core part of the idea I had in mind.
The best examples to illustrate this can be found in my old drawings (about 10 years ago) when I was drawing from my head. These drawings are anatomically bad, but they have something good. The stuff that makes art – art. That spice that cannot be mistaken for any other – authentic introspection (or inspiration). They show a process of discovering the physical representation of something I found interesting and appealing, the process of finding that translation.
For example, in the drawing above, I had in mind a certain character, which was best expressed in a moment of fleeting attention to something. Usually, no one would give this drawing a second or a first look because it is technically poor, but, wait one minute longer, see if you can find something interesting about it that would make you want to see this woman as a well-developed painting. What I see, is a face and an expression one rarely encounters. She seems cold and mildly interested in what she is looking at, but at the same time she seems like a person who is not easily interested in things because she knows so much already (not because she is shallow or not curious as a person). For me, the drawing started from a similar feeling to how this woman seem, and the motivation to draw it was a compelling urge to make it real so I can look at it, move some lines, change things, move her eyebrows up or down, decide if her mouth should be open or closed until I know it’s captures “that thing” just right. I don’t know what “that thing” is as I put it, nor why it is better if she has her mouth open and not closed – those questions are answered later, maybe, say, 10 years later as I’m looking at it, or ideally, after the first sketch and before I move on to working on making it a final, well developed piece.
I go through a similar process in drawing the whole figure from imagination, or while describing a certain situation. In the next drawing , for example, I actually had the dragon in mind, and the lady with it was a derivative.
The dragon is upset – it has to go through a long journey chained and shackled. It’s sitting in a corner, looking at its chains and crying, while its captive is care free. The funny thing about it is that the dragon is 50 times stronger than the woman – the chain is not secured to the ground, but loosely tied to a thin, brittle stick which the girl is holding. The dragon can escape at any time, yet it doesn’t know it because it is busy looking at its shackles and crying. Too busy following its captor obediently to realize how easily he can be free. The idea doesn’t start with a dragon, in this case I couldn’t tell you what the idea started as, it somehow just was in my mind but then I still had that need to see how it would look like, to go through the process of figuring this idea out.
I had a similar moment to that as I was working on the background for the current painting I’m working on at my school. This one, however is different because I have limited choice in the subject matter. I did, however, choose the background:
I was struggling with the background for a while, trying different things that didn’t work until finally, I gave my self permission to just put things down boldly, to put down what I really want to see. So I started by making the curvy line and darkening the area bellow it, then, I knew I wanted bright sky behind her, I put the ocean line and the sky, then I realized this could be the edge of a large round window on a ship.
This is how groping for ideas for the background looked like at the beginning:
One last thing I want to talk about relates to the content with which I started this post. In the past I would draw, not knowing what my technical drawbacks were. Being unaware of any flaws, I felt free to put down whatever was on my mind. I had total freedom to explore my ideas and I produced a lot of such fast drawings and paintings too. After a while I realized the drawbacks and I was not satisfied with the technical side of my art anymore. I refrained from drawing because I was afraid to disappoint myself. Today I realize, it doesn’t matter at all. You can always have room to improve the technical side of your work, as an artist, but what is equally valuable or of greater value, perhaps, is to be able to express your ideas; to have open communication with your subconscious and to be able to put down lines to create a drawing like the first one I shared here, of a woman’s face. Today, equipped with better knowledge and experience I can improve the anatomy of that face, but I could never get back that moment and expression had I not put them down. If all I focused on was getting the anatomy right, all I would have now is one more anatomically accurate face. Boy, am I glad I didn’t worry about all that stuff!
The realization I had was that as an artist, preserving your soul is just as hard a job as improving your technical skills. You must give yourself permission and place to screw up in technique; to be wrong; whatever it takes, but keep that “channel” to your subconscious open. Creativity is a habit, but a fragile one that needs to be nurtured and guarded. The good news is that all it really takes is your own permission.
Today I am celebrating my 31st Birthday. It is not a coincidence that today of all days I am sharing my oldest work which is also technically worst, something you would expect an artist to keep hidden in their closet. As an artist, it is THOSE paintings and not my current ones (which are technically superior) which I would celebrate primarily. Those have my soul, these have my mind (as well as some of my soul). I find both equally difficult to make and eventually I will have the combined challenge of both things.
I hope that by putting my old work here for display for all to see, I am giving courage to someone else out there to embrace their own work and cherish their inner “spark”: don’t trade it for a better technique or for compliments. It just ain’t worth it, man.
I wish myself a good birthday and a successful and happy year to come. Why, thank you, that’s very nice of you to say, Ifat. You too. 😉
Progress with my painting: 2 weeks ago I posted a drawing and the study of the painting I’m working on now at my school. Friday I took a picture of it with my cellphone. This picture is unfortunately not true to color, please take that under account when viewing.
This week’s plan: Work on the shirt and vest, finish the hat, the background, and do final touches on the face and neck. This picture shows the “sinking in” phenomenon very well. It’s a phenomenon where the oil pigments appear lighter than they are and in a different color. The vest, for example, appears black-gray even though it is brown in real life. This is why it is important to cover the painting with a thin layer of oil before working back into it to revive the color and see it correctly. This process also has its own difficulties; for example, if the paint is not thoroughly dry, the oil may lift it up, it may even get smeared into new areas and make the painting “muddy”. It’s therefore very important to be in control of the painting and know exactly what parts are wet and what parts are dry.
Abstractions.
One thing I thought of is that the skill of figure drawing involves abstracting things about the figure and then using those abstractions as a guide when drawing or painting. The abstractions can take a literal form, such as: “the eyes are located in the halfway point of the head”, or a more perceptual form, such as remembering the general shape of the eye socket. I’ve been doing a lot of this process of abstraction, which I exercise at home sometimes by sculpting or sketching from my head. Here is one small plasteline-clay sculpture I did this weekend:
I don’t know why, but I find that the pleasure in working entirely from my head is not surpassed by any other process of making art. I realize that the result is not as good as working from a reference, but I wish I knew what causes this feeling of delight and how I can replicate it when working from a reference.
I think it is really important as an artist to let your emotions run the show. I don’t quite know how to explain what I mean perfectly; I am not talking about any sort of random emotion that comes up during work (that can actually be an obstacle), but rather about the feelings relating to the artist’s subject matter. Some parts of the subject matter are bound to carry more interest than others for the artist. I think it’s OK to be bored with some aspects of the painting and let that affect how you paint. In fact this is what produces a good painting in my opinion because it replicates that feeling the artist had about what he paints in the viewer’s mind. It enhances the parts that are interesting and central about the piece and sends to the background the things that are not. It is, perhaps, the closest a person can get to experiencing something through another person’s mind.
Lastly, I’d like to share a small piece of writing by my teacher, Tenaya Sims, which I found interesting and which relates to “seeing through someone else’s eyes”. This is from the latest Newsletter of Georgetown Atelier (where I study).
The basic idea is if you approach painting your shadows in a thin/transparent manner, while building the textural qualities in the lights, it will increase the depth and three-dimensionality of your painting. Executing shadows in this way helps keep them more atmospheric and ‘shadowy’, and pushes them back into the depths of the painting. People naturally focus on one area at a time when looking at anything, and usually look first at the illuminated formsrather than those in shadow. Everything not in our focus is more hazy, or by definition is ‘out of focus’. For this reason it’s more effective to simulate the way people see in our paintings than to render each passage equally in focus. Putting in too much information in the shadows, or painting them too thickly (resulting in the surface of the painting coming forward) can negate the effect of how we naturally see. On the other hand, building up the texture and opacity in the lights, or ‘sculpting the lights with paint’ as I like to say, helps to enhance the focal areas of the painting and brings them both literally and perceptually forward to the viewer.
Simulating the ‘way that we see’ in a painting is much more difficult than it sounds. This is simply because while we’re working on any one particular area, that area is in focus for us, but may not be for the viewer taking in the whole scene of the painting on first glance. It requires us to plan out the ‘global relationships’ of our painting, and remember to stick to that global plan even while working in specific ‘micro’ areas. It requires us to be both the General and Marine, or in other tems, know how our ‘shadowy village’ fits within its country.
This method of simulating the human way of experiencing what we see in a painting is a way to further refine an experience and bring it closer to how we experience it as conceptual beings rather than raw sensations (which is closer to what a camera sees). It’s a little bit like a double filter: seeing something after someone else saw it for you first.
Back from a vacation in Florida to write a belated weekly post.
I spent my vacation with my husband and a couple of friends. We drew and painted one another and I was reminded of what art means to me and where I want to go with it.
It is best explained by showing the drawing of me that my friend did (Rina Cheah).
The drawing is simplified and stylized – it is not an exact replica of the subject and yet captures something both about me and about her that is much harder to see in real life because it is mixed with so many other things that are visible in a face (values, colors, changing facial expressions, freckles and so on). But to her, this was the most appealing and essential aspect of her subject. This, is what I think art is. Art is not camera-reproduction of what we see, nor recording of random occurrences – it is, rather, a way to make our soul take form through concretes. It is a Selective recreation of reality, according to the artist’s deepest values (to paraphrase Ayn Rand’s definition).
Her drawing has such innocent joy in putting down what was most important and appealing to her and that is what I strive to use as my motivation, especially once I finish my art education and work on projects whose subject is my choice. When inspiration is one’s motivation, combined with automatized skills – one is equipped to make great art.
People think that working from inspiration is easy and given, but I think it is rather rare. There are so many “traps” along the way: Paint to please people, paint to sell, paint to have a “name”, paint to surpass other artists in skill, paint to be considered “sophisticated” or be considered “a great artist” and so on. To paint from inspiration, to fall in love with what you paint and have that be your guide – actually takes a very selfish and individualistic approach.
To fight through all the difficulties, through seeming failure – to fall behind when some others do well instantly it seems – it takes strong and genuine motivation to disregard all of these and to devote one’s efforts to getting better – not for the sake of proving oneself, but for that passion that drives the making of great art (and is experienced by those who observe it). If I live long enough and if depression, self-doubt or other difficulties won’t get me, I believe I will become successful. Not because I have some god given ability – I don’t – I actually started from scratch – but because I love what I want to make enough to focus on that and fight for it. Lastly I want to share a painting I started over the summer of 2011. This was an uninstructed session and the model (who is also an artist) chose the pose – however, it might as well been me choosing the pose – I loved it so much when I saw it I could not believe that that was what I was going to paint. But indeed I did.
When I was done with the figure, I put an abstract background. Later I decided to make an actual background that would match the mood and narrative the pose as I saw it. Right now, the painting is at an awkward stage of having rough lines and colors indicating the objects to be painted without actually having them painted, so I will be sharing a previous version of this painting that no longer exists. For those of you interested, keep an eye out – by the end of this summer I’ll finish the background.
For the past 4 weeks I’ve been working on a painting at my school (Georgetown Atelier). Monday will be the day I finish the figure – the background would take longer. I marked white lines to draw objects and figures I wish to add later and now it’s a matter of finding a source to work from for them. Here is a picture of the upper portion of it:
Ego stroking corner: I think I did a good job using the 4 colors on my palette to the max. Earlier this year I experienced a breakthrough in how I mix colors when I freed myself up to grab any number of colors to be mixed and let my subconscious direct which paint I reach for. From initially thinking that lighting things should primarily be done with white and darkening with black, I realized that it can also be lightened with yellow, red, a mix of yellow and red and anything else so long that it is lighter. Struggles: Getting those edges to be softer, paint placement and handling, aiming for the broad first and the details later.
On a more general and philosophical topic: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the process of becoming an artist and what is required to become a good artist.
A lot of people think that talent is a given, but I think the answer is different. ‘Talent’ is a result of automatization of things related to whatever it is one does, and motivation to learn and automatize those things is the key to talent.
What it takes to draw the human form well is to really know it and love it – to have an abstract version and understanding of it in one’s head. It requires spending years just observing and taking mental notes of how certain things look and how they are arranged in space, years of studying anatomy – and the only way one would do such a thing during activities such as watching TV, reading a magazine, talking to someone, taking a shower or watching an Olympic competition is if one is truly passionate about it to the point of always having it in the back of one’s head.
A student can demand of themselves to do exercises out of a book (as I should), but the amount of time one ends up spending and the quality of learning will differ greatly depending on how enjoyable the learning process really is.
Another factor that goes into the learning quality is one’s psycho-epistemology – one’s habitual way of thinking and looking at things. When I just started out, from my childhood until my late teens, I would not spend time actively studying the form from life. I thought that getting my own abstract idea is good enough. A lot of times young people exhibit tremendous ability to draw the figure that seems to come from nowhere. Where it actually comes from is from their habitual way of closely observing things in reality over a long period of time. It is when I changed my approach to that that I started improving my drawing and familiarity with the figure and I expect this process to continue for the rest of my life.
For me, The human form is the only thing in my life I don’t find boring to memorize. (That said, I still need to do a lot more studying). I’ve been spending my weekends lately sculpting small plasteline clay figures. It is so enjoyable; it is my chance to make ART without the hassle of worrying about my technique, and that is just as important if not more for an artist: Keeping the voice of your subconscious flowing and singing is vital for making art.
Here are a couple of pictures of the sculptures I’ve been making:
The one on the left shows the sketch and the sculpture that was built based on it. I am still working on it from my head (it now has an arm and two legs). The one on the right is based on a 3D model of whom I had surround pictures.
More thoughts, this time on what I don’t know. I DON’T know what style I will eventually choose for my art. There are several styles that I find appealing and I realized I don’t actually know which one I want to have. One style I like is one that renders smoothly and clearly the areas of focus while leaving the areas that are boring for the artist and none essential to the concept of the piece rendered loosely. How loosely – I don’t know yet. I think in some cases – very loosely and in others only slightly blurred out/visually simplified. I also like, in some cases, some looseness in rendering the areas of focus and in some cases I like how the whole scene is tightly rendered. For now I put shopping for style on hold in order to focus on learning the maximum that I can in rendering things tightly.
Lastly, to conclude a very long monologue, I’d like to share a painting I did a couple of months ago that is a favorite of mine.
What is it that makes a painting good? How realistic should it be or should it be realistic at all? Why?
Observe these two images and decide which one describes the mood of the scene better:
[Here is a link to where I got the image from and the artist that created it (Username Revidescent from Concept art . org): Link]
The main thing about the scene and what makes it worth contemplating is its mood: serenity; tranquil enjoyment.
Which one of those images communicates that state of mind more clearly? To me there is no question that the digital drawing does better. It eliminates irrelevant small details such as the details of the grass, sharp transitions between light parts of the grass and dark parts, it eliminates the details of the background and instead presents the background as distant and glowing. In other words it sends it where it belongs: To the background, instead of having it take away our visual attention. It is only detailed enough to communicate the mood of the environment: a soft glowing day. Likewise the features of the woman that reinforce the mood are emphasized: her hair is pulled higher up and back, the light on her skin is brighter, small details of her skin and dress are smoothed out. These all communicate the mood much better.
However, consider what would happen if the artist further blurred away her face, or made it less human somehow (like making it into a stick figure): The mood would no longer be communicable in such a form.
This can be perfectly summarized by this quote from “The Romantic Manifesto” By Ayn Rand (Page 47, chapter “Art and Cognition”):
The visual arts do not deal with with the sensory field of awareness as such, but with the sensory field as perceived b a conceptual consciousness. The sensory-perceptual awareness of an adult does not consist of mere sense data (as it did in his infancy), but of automatized integrations that combine sense data with a vast context of conceptual knowledge. The visual arts refine and direct the sensory elements of these integrations. By means of selectivity, of emphasis and omission, these arts lead man’s sight to the conceptual context intended by the artist. They teach man to see more precisely and to find deeper meaning in the field of his vision. It is a common experience to observe that a particular painting – for example, a still life of apples – makes its subject “more real than it is in reality”. The apples seem brighter and firmer, they seem to possess an almost self-assertive character, a kind of heightened reality which neither their real-life models nor any color photograph can match. Yet if one examines tham closely, one sees that no real-life apple ever looked like that. What is it, then, that the artist has done? He has created a visual abstraction. He has performed the process of concept-formation – of isolating and integrating – but in exclusively visual terms. He has isolated the essential, distinguishing characteristics of apples, and integrated them into a single visual unit. He has brought the conceptual method of functioning
My conclusion is that realism in art serves a secondary purpose: It is a necessary tool to enhance the abstract message of a painting but does not serve the nature of our mind if we carry that realism into every detail of a painting striving to make it into a photograph.
