Yellow Walls, Landscape

24" x 36"

oil on panel

A concern of painters and a downfall of students is the problem of white. Too much white mixed in colors can bleach out a picture, leaving the appearance pasty. It is difficult to keep the tints (white added to a color) clear and purposeful, not faded and dull. White can bring light into a picture or it can drain it. I made plenty of pasty student paintings. Then students often overcompensate by making paintings almost completely out of bright colors. This painting problem is a part of Yellow Walls, Landscape. The bright yellow interior contrasts with the very pale outside which is bathed in a cool light. If I made the blue and green darker or more saturated the effect would be lost. I think I pulled it off. The left yellow rectangle is slightly darker and greener than the right, adding a hint of dimension.

I have a feeling that sometimes people see the wavy lines in my pictures as an ineptitude, evidence of not being able to draw a straight line. Over and over people say they disposes this ability as concrete evidence of their lack of creativity. Drawing straight is something that can be learned like good handwriting and is not a reflection of an artistic mind. For the record, if my line is wobbly it is intentional. It is because I deliberately want to convey something organic or flexible, in this case something of a curtain, or if it is window moulding then it is there as a transition from the crisp yellow to the natural outside.

Ruth Miller is a painter whose work shows an excellent color sensibility. Her work is sophisticated in its relationships of color and its role in composition. Images are sensitively created embedding time in the paint. She is represented by the Lohin Geduld Gallery in New York city.

Painting as practiced by Ms. Miller is described well by art critic Peter Schjeldahl in an April 6th interview in The New Yorker Out Loud. The focus of the talk was the emotional power of painting in relation to the exhibit Master Pieces of European Painting from the Norton Simon Museum at the Frick Collection in New York City. He spoke for all painting in saying, "Paint is made of the same stuff as we are". He explained the importance of seeing art in person because paintings are made of paint while reproductions are made of ink (I will assert pixels as well). In reproductions we just get the image, what we want to see/believe. Seeing the original poses a more challenging experience. He emphasized the term "hand-made" which is often downplayed in the current trend of appropriation. Schjeldahl gives Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbaran's Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose, 1633, as an example.
The exhibition will be open until May 10th, 2009. Go, go, go!!!

Across From Cobblestone

26" x 20"

oil on canvas

The color structure of this one is very ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple = full spectrum - rainbow). Such a color scheme often can be too sweet, too child-like for my purposes, but the balance of colors and their tonality evade the trap. There is playfulness, however, as in many of my paintings. While painting the branches of the gray tree running in front of the pine I thought of an earlier blog comment about dots, resolution, and the appearance of Christmas tree lights while one's glasses are off. That is a relaxing, dream-like moment based in vision. The activity of making the dots is an indulgence in that kind of state of mind. It is a form of meditation. Although we all get busy, often out of necessity, I think there is some wisdom in a quote of Socrates: "Beware the barrenness of a busy life". It is easy to miss things if we can't stand still.

Back to the formal aspects of painting. Color Theory was one of the classes I taught while a professor of fine arts. Some exercises I gave to students were invented by painter, teacher, and color theorist Joseph Albers. He had his students find color swatches from magazines, which takes forever. Color Aid paper is standard now.

Our color perception is effected by the surroundings of a color, their context.The first exercise is called "3=4" The coral colored square on the right is the color that is going to change its appearance based on the ground it is on. Thus three colors: left ground, right, ground, and swatch will now equal four perceptually. It seems like magic. So those little strips hugging the edges of the rectangles are both the same color, this coralish thing. To do the exercise one needs to flip through a variety of colors on the left and the right in order to change the appearance of the swatch. Backgrounds can vary in intensity, saturation, tone, and hue. It is much more difficult if the swatch is cut larger than those strips and is not recommended for this exercise. As you can see, the strip on the left is lighter and more yellow than the one on the right. Students are first able to see the difference of light and dark and then the difference in hue. Subtle changes aren't perceived initially and there is often a bit of disbelief that the professor is seeing something that they can't.

3 = 4

The second exercise is similar. The search for grounds this time will be focused on making two different colors look the same. Two grounds plus two swatches = 4 then made to look like 3 total. The more different the colors are, the more difficult the exercise. In such cases the two may be brought closer together, but an exact replication may be all but impossible. The study below has a bright middle-of-the-road green and a lighter, muted yellow-green. Differences in the exercise are fairly perceptible, but they look much more like the same color than when they are isolated.








4 = 3

This theory gets put into practice in my work as a dot of a particular hue in one area of a painting looks different when placed somewhere else. A harmony is created as the colors seem to relate, to have something in common that makes them easy on the eye.

Trees and Green, Winter Landscape #11 Blue-Gray White

18" x 24" each
oil on panel


This week snow fell yet again in Rochester. There were many whining voices on Facebook. At first charmed in November by the snow scenes in Calvin and Hobbes, the effect wore off my son as he out the window before school remarking, "Curse snow." So I thought I'd pair this winter landscape with a spring one as we skirt the border between the two.


My husband described Trees and Green as being "fairy" as in the land of. I think there is something lush and unreal about it, although I thought of the image after going past a pair of tree trunks and seeing the grass in between. It was green for a few days! Space is created by the transition of green to yellow-green and the tactile quality of the foreground gradually moving toward a smoother top. The green almost seems hot in comparison with the cool tranquility of the winter landscape. The trees of the latter delicately reach into the winter air, less assertive that the trees in the former.


I enjoy the concentration and exactitude of the process of making the dot paintings but I also enjoy painting these expansive, fluid, more immediate pieces. In both cases, as in all my painting, paint is used as light. While on a visit to the MFA Boston during art school, artist Marcia LLoyd asked us in advance to select a piece or two from the collection that we connect with. I chose an enamel bracelet from the Indian Corridor. She saw that I was attracted to the luminous color (like my love of stained glass) and explained that there is a piece of metal inside the bracelet and light passes through the enamel, bouncing off the metal and returning to our eyes. This is the same way paintings often operate in which light passes through the paint to the white ground and back.

The nineteenth century landscape painter Boudin often made small paintings of the ocean with tiny figures in the dress of the times setting the scale and standing on the shore. They are vivid like how one sees in full sun. A quote of his seems to refer to this vibrancy, "To steep oneself in the sky. To capture the tenderness of the clouds. To let the cloud masses float in the background, far off in the gray mist, and then make the blue blaze forth." I am looking forward to dazzling spring and summer light.

March

36" x 42"

oil on canvas

March is windy! The dots are blowing, springing out into space; invisible vectors seem to pull the eye back in. The center strip of landscape substitutes for a vertical person, the white the outside world. The dots' flow is symbolic of a personal connection with the life. Like an individual, the landscape is rich, layered, complete within itself as it sends out positive energy and receives it in turn. The circle is known to be a symbol of the self. As such, the dots can additionally be seen as a collection of individuals also radiating their uniqueness and place in the universe. [Do I sound New Age-y or what?] It is a picture of harmony but also fluctuation and change. We don't always know which way the wind will blow. Lyrics from one of my favorite songs, U2's Kite, "Who's to say where the wind will take you Who's to say what it is will break you I don't know Where the wind will blow".

A reoccurring theme is still there: a window looking out into the landscape. Pinpoints of the view appear through sheer curtains. As far as curtains go, I thought of those white ones with stitches forming tiny dots.

There is a good article describing the symbolism of the circle by two mathematicians: Reza Sarhangi and Bruce D. Martin.

A landscape I responded to as a kid that I think relates to this painting is the poppy scene in The Wizard of Oz. The plentiful poppies cause the journeying characters to become hallucinogenic. The sudden snow shower pinches them awake and they continue, not knowing if their destination will fulfill their longing. The grass, a neutral light ochre with variation, is newly uncovered from snow. The painting is the moment of awakening. There is more certainty in my painting than the movie scene, but I think the color and movement of the dots dazzle, kaleidoscopic, like the bright red of an expansive poppy field. In high school I painted a copy of Monet's Poppy Field in a Hollow Near Giverny at the request of a friend. I had forgotten until now.