Sunday, December 27, 2009
White Window
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Western NY Landscape #7, #8, #9 Ceramic Relief
4 1/2" x 4 1/2"
3 1/2" x 4"
ceramic relief
I'm very happy with the painterly quality in the ceramics I've been doing. I use a combination of glazes and these underglaze chalk crayons/pastels. There is my secret. Not everyone is willing to share recipes. I heard of a couple getting divorced and fighting over the exclusive right to a special glaze recipe. I don't feel like the medium here is a special trick, though. I have my own sensibility, vision, and way of handling the material.
The top piece is very physical and seems like a setting for a fairy tale. Dusk is the time of day, late fall or late winter/early spring the season.
The central piece is spacious. A big sky with lots of transitions and a raised, dark green hill with a contrasting edge. I like the organic tilt of the all-over form.
The third piece has an array of greens; it has been tricky to get the right brighter ones. The trees have layered, interwoven color that I see in foliage. A bit of the feeling of a sky arching overhead is created by a curve.
The uniqueness of handmade things makes for memorable gifts and I found a great site to list some of my older work and for holiday shopping. Etsy is an enormous site where one can by directly from artists and craftspeople. Everything on it has to be handmade or vintage. You can find art, clothes, jewelry, household items, and many other things. It is nice to buy from an individual rather than a chain as well as things made in the U.S.A. I found half of my gifts there this year including cool etched monogrammed scotch glasses for my father-in-law and custom t-shirts.
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Blue House
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Self-Portrait With Camera #2 & #4
digital photographs
The lower self-portrait, #4, seems a little sci-fi with the metallic eye. It is representative of the artist's vision, a special lens through which to see the world. The flash of light is like the bright idea light bulb. Hands have figured prominently in past paintings and I like the way my hand holds the camera at the top; it seems more pressed to the foreground, the hand that is the physical maker, laborer, tool for the eye. The limited palette works well, turquoise background playing off the shiny camera.
The top one, #2, is direct. Intense. Looking straight at the viewer I am confident with my identity as artist; my sense of self deepened with age. I like the light most of all and didn't want to let it go by without snagging it. The magenta and turquoise reflections float on the surface like paint, pieces of colored light. They help define the composition along with the hand, round circle of the camera lens, and the angles of the neck. I'm not quite sure where the photographs are going and if the landscape ones I take as notations for paintings are art. I enjoy making them and that is usually a good sign. It's all about searching, anyway.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Painted by Matthias Grunewald between 1512 and 1516. It is his greatest and largest work and is on display at the Unterlinden Museum at Colmar, Alsace, France.
Check back soon for the answer under "comments".
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Yellow Arch
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Western NY Landscape #4, #5, #6 Ceramic Relief
Western NY Landscape 4 Ceramic Relief 2 1/2x3 1/2_2009
Western NY Landscape 6 Ceramic Relief 3 1/2x5_2009
If someone every finds my pottery shard or better yet, one of my reliefs intact, I want them to see color. Color is what I want to show someone in the future. I put color into my time capsule. Color is what gives me hope, colored light. This is the function of stained glass in churches. The pictures are my kaleidoscopes but the colors aren't randomly thrown down like pick-up sticks. They are attached to things; they infuse things. They are purposeful. They say, "I hope you find beauty around you, too. Here is some in case you don't."
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Monday, November 16, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Western NY Landscape #1, #2, #3 Ceramic Relief
Western NY Landscape 1_Ceramic Relief_3 1/2 x 5 1/2_2009
Western NY Landscape 2 Ceramic Relief 3 1/2x5 1/2_2009
Western NY Landscape 3 Ceramic Relief 3 1/2x6_2009
I'm really loving making these ceramic reliefs. The layers provide a new way for handling space that is literal as well as perceptual. The clay is physically in different points in space and the glazing and overall reading of the image work like painting. I think I'm hooked. I like the shape and edges of the clay slabs, my "canvas", to be irregular. They feel natural like a stone worn by water. I don't want a machine edge because landscape imagery is about the earth.
Ana Medieta (1948-1985) is an artist whom I greatly admire. She worked with nature in a more physical way than I. Exiled from Cuba living in America from the age of thirteen onward, she felt the loss of her homeland and had a keen sense of identity and personal connection with land. This as well as gender became the content of her art, performances and photographs in which she interacted with nature by making body prints, for example, often nude. For any of you readers who think this is silly and anyone can do it, you are missing the point. She created poignant metaphors by doing things that were physical, real, and dreamlike enough to dramatically convey her feelings. The art goes beyond a narrative to convey experiences that are powerfully wordless.
I'm involved with nature and the nonverbal and I look at her work and think that maybe I should make something like that because I intensely identify with it. The thing is that I love to paint/make things that I see around me. It doesn't matter how abstract they end up being, the impulse starts with something I see. I notice light, color, space, scale throughout the day but certain situations strike me and become the impetus for work. I might use a particular situation and go directly from that but also it is the accumulated perceptions in my visual memory that are called upon AS I work. Combine these visual memories with what is happening on the canvas/slab of clay/whatever medium, and art happens. It is kind of like cooking a favorite recipe you know by heart. The particular freshness of the ingredients on hand, the cooking utensils, and sometimes humidity like with bread, can effect the outcome. You remember the seasonings and look to create the same smell, taste, and texture you remember. There is a lot going on. This isn't Hamburger Helper I'm talking about. Then there sometimes is the frustration that the thing you are making doesn't resemble what you remember. Take the Twinkie. Stay with me here; I'm not digressing. I recently had a Twinkie for the first time since I was a kid, i.e. a LONG time ago. It was not the fluffy, fresh, amazing cream filled cake I remember. It tasted like it was from a factory, a plastic packing-peanut excuse for cake. That is like what happens on canvas when the art magic isn't happening. I can only hope I am getting a little magic into these baked paintings. I love Ana Mendieta but I also love my EASY-BAKE-Oven, my kiln. May chocolate seven-layer cakes, not Twinkies come out.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Fall #9 Gray Sky
Friday, November 06, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Fall #8 Clouds in the Middle
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Friday, October 30, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Painting Trivia! Name the painter:
"Every good painter paints what he is."
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Painting Trivia! Name the painter:
"In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature."
Monday, October 26, 2009
Painting Trivia!
Painting Trivia! Name the painter:
"Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment."
Check back tomorrow under "comments" for the answer. |
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Self-Portrait October 2009
12" x 9"
oil on panel
Hi. It is time for a new self-portrait. I don't have a time-frame in mind for how often to make them, but time is marching on so Carpe Diem.
My face is not fractured as in previous paintings. Fracture/facture. The facture of a self-portrait is often more noticeable in ones that are fractured, when pieces of paint are laid to denote the framework of a head, related to the planes of Cubism. Cezanne, who came before Cubism, studied such planes in space but was also sensitive to color as form rather than decoration, frosting on a cake. [I love making sentences with "Cubism" and "cake frosting" in them.] In Self-Portrait with Rose Background [c. 1875 (140 Kb); Oil on canvas, 66 x 55 cm (26 x 21 5/8")], he defines the facets of his head with pieces of paint and even turns one such stroke into his delicate lower eyelid, the pedestal for his piercing gaze. He is as intense as the red-rose background. It swirls, breaks into his form, defining his ear, the space between his beard and moustache, his lips, and even cuts into his neck threatening decapitation like Nearly Headless Nick from Harry Potter. He plays a similar game with the background and figure interacting in his Self-Portrait 1878-80 [(160 Kb); Oil on canvas, 60.3 x 46.9 cm (23 3/4 x 18 1/2 in); The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.] He is supposed to have been a quiet person and I've noticed his mouth is often obscured in his self-portraits while his eyes are very alert. His voice is his vision. The mouth in this gets lost in his beard of yellow ochre and greens with black marks, exactly like the background. His hairline continues in the sharp line of his collar, accentuating his vertical, solid presence. The word for his stare that keeps coming to me is "shrewd". Even a used car salesman would back down.
Now back to me. I don't want it to be all about me, but it is self-portraits we are talking about and they are reflexive in nature. I'm not looking shrewd. I can't say no to Girl Scouts selling cookies, but I am old enough to see a scam despite the clarity of my face. Landscape colors are the background with dots like my current paintings. They visually interplay with the blue circles of my collar and eye; this is what I see. A patch of purple background is the springboard for the purple turn of the collar; its blue is the mixture of the landscape yellow and green, completing the land with sky, blue hollow circles make for white cloud centers. The curl of my hair and its red highlights (not natural : ) suggest playfulness, very different than Cezanne's brewing. You can check out my blog of archives for my own brewing Self-Portrait With Gloved Hand from 1999. Both Cezanne paintings and the Degas Self-Portrait in the Getty Museum that I haven't forgotten (I saw it more than ten years ago) are in three quarter view, as is mine. Answers.com defines three-quarter view as, "A view of an object which is midway between a front and a side view." We don't disclose all but you get a good look. Speaking of museums, art museum lovers will get a laugh from this article in The Onion. Take time to play.