Journal
I am a painter and photography is a bane of mine. It is impossible to ignore imagery and I struggle with its inclusion in my work.
If you were to glance at my work, it seems at first that the imagery is paramount. Pretty pictures of fish and coral. However, I could certainly paint them far more realistically, photo-realistically if I wanted to.
There has been an ongoing discussion about concept vs. illustration. Many argue in favor of appearance over idea. I've argued the reverse, but they have a point. Art has been insulated for decades, becoming more personal and conceptual, but losing a great portion of the public along the way. Everyone can understand a well illustrated picture. While I both understand and love contemporary work, as an artist I want to be appreciated by as large a public as I can. Being an art teacher, I love to bring art to those who don't get it on their own. But the photo has "maimed painting" as a scholar once said, and my interest in painting's plasticity has been explored by many many artists before me.
So how to be original and not repeat someone else's work? How does an artist have a strong concept, skill at using their materials, and produce work that pleases the art community, the viewing public, and themselves?
Without talking too much about my process, I could use a critique by a person with strong analytical powers and a artistic background. I have had many many compliments from wonderful people on this board, but I crave criticism. If you have the time I would love if anyone could give me an honest critique. I realize my work shows very differently in person, but if you're not near LA that would be hard to do.
I think there will always be room for painting in the art world, maimed or not.
8/7/2010
I start every painting with a charcoal pencil and a ruler/stick to lay out compositional relationships: golden mean, center point, etc... . Then I choose a starting palette and go to work painting in an abstract style evolved from now over 20 years of serious study and work. I could stop there, and I used to, but I found I lost a large section of the public that could only understand or appreciate imagery. I want their attention. For a period of time I tried to turn the abstracts into landscapes. Some of them worked, some didn't, but what I found was I not only enjoyed working from nature or even photos, my work turned out far better. It became a neat effect to start a landscape from abstractions, nothing more.
About a decade ago, a friend encouraged me to try painting fish and coral, due to my business, long history and familiarity with them. When I tried it I found out many things about myself, painting, and art in general. I won't blog my whole philosophy here, but I have found it to be sustaining and personal. I have done almost 60 paintings and countless studies in a style that I think has continuity while it still evolves.
My paintings do look different in person, but then I believe all art does. There is a lot of subtle marking to contrast with the bold. This is often not so apparent. There are always intentional illusions as well.
8/4/2010
Some of the white on every painting is the gesso surface. When I paint, there are always some parts of a painting that I'll struggle with, in fact I only know when a painting is "done" when I look and find nothing that bugs me. When a painting has less struggle, there are parts with very little paint and parts with many layers. When I struggle more, there are more layers. The longer I paint, the more I try to get "it" done with less paint.
8/3/2010
I saw an article once calling Michelangelo the first surrealist. They had a reproduction of God touching Adam from the Sistine Chapel. They put it next to a medical illustration of a brain and the stem of the spinal cord from the same period. Upon comparison, God is reaching out to Adam from the Pineal gland in the frontal cortex. This is where mystics have traditionally located the 3rd eye and the location of the spirit in the body. Michelangelo is known to study mysticism so imagining he made the connection is not a big jump. Symbolically, the picture we all know has another secret meaning to those who can see it.
6/30/2006
Walking
the path of the Artist reminds me of a spiritual quest. Like the monk on the
mountaintop or alchemist in their lab, an Artist’s goal is to reach the
unreachable. Like a religion, Art can be the vehicle by which one tries to
better oneself. As I gain confidence on the canvas, I grow stronger
personally. As I learn to conquer
composition with each new piece, my ability to organize my life and my emotions
increases. Artists must be true to themselves, for they cannot master this
craft by shortcutting honesty.
I paint. I love other media and practice in many of them, but all my experimentation is pooled into my paintings. Of all artistic media I feel it has the most tradition for personal expression. Thousands of painters use the same colors of paint on similar four-sided canvases and have given the world an endless variety of imagery. Every great painter develops an original visual vocabulary they can add to the ever-changing art world. The reason I paint as I do is to add to this dialogue my own original contributions. The great painters that have come before me explored motifs that I love and respect, and I always keep in mind my influences and those who have come before me.
Cézanne, whom I consider my greatest influence, opened the way for modern painting. His revolutionary concept that a painting is more than the subject it portrays has given us the ability to talk about the very nature of paint and surface. He painted with attention to that quality of color to define space, and the application of paint in bold marks with little to no blending, something I consciously emulate in my painting. He always painted strictly from what he saw, however, while I choose to study reality and paint fantasy.
This is not the time of Cézanne, or I would be painting like an Impressionist or perhaps and early Expressionist. I love both periods dearly, but they are gone. With them have gone many other wonderful, but fully explored ideas like Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism. Minimalism took painting to a place it was bound to go, but I think finally lost the everyday person as an audience. Every field has its practitioners that explore and push the traditional boundaries set-up by their peers and their critics. These explorations are meaningless however, unless they can translate down to the everyday person. Art that is so obscure other artists can only appreciate it is useless to all but a few.
This is my challenge as a painter: How to be original and continue the dialogue of the “new”, and continue to attract as many people to my art as I can. It is an obvious truth that art needs to be shared to make an impact. I therefore paint for myself, but also for those who may love the qualities of painting I express.
I firmly believe you need to be physically present in front a painting to view it as the artist saw it. Reproductions don’t do them justice. Paintings are three-dimensional and have a physical quality not felt in prints. My paintings have always begun as abstracts. Imagery then develops out of the chaos. Some becomes more and more rendered in a recognizable way, while some remains only in gesture. As I work the abstract composition, certain imagery develops somewhat like looking into an ink-blot test. I find some people see images I never saw myself until they were pointed out to me. This is one way my work lives beyond me and may be enjoyed for years as one can always see new things in them.
From my birth in
The aquatic imagery serves a second purpose: It gives the everyday person a recognizable motif they can grasp upon a first viewing. With time, some of these people may start to love what I do about paint: color, texture, balance, and unlimited potential.
