Western NY Landscape #7, #8, #9 Ceramic Relief

3 1/2" x 5"

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!

Primary Window (Early Spring)

oil on panel

24" x 18"

I love Matisse's Window at Tangier painted in Morocco in 1912. It is the type of window that opens in, which becomes the side panel of the painting. The painting deals with this rectangle of pink, the pinks and oranges in the view to the red-orange vase with flowers on the sill, and the blues including the large rectangle at the top. Paint is dappled in areas to reflect light. The title is due to its primary color composition of blue, red, and yellow (three central bands). It's what your eye wants to see, after all.

Primary Window (Early Spring) is frontal. Whites and grays frame it from bright on the left to dark on the sill. The colors aren't very exaggerated; it is a day of bright blue sky, bleached grass uncovered from snow, and bare trees more pink than brown. Vertical ripples of the curtains bracket the woods, drawn like the colors shimmer. The lightness of the colors and the paint handling make it airy. Vital are the space between the trees, their rhythm, as does the way the treetops mingle with sky.

Landscape consists of objects: rocks, trees, whatever, the place in the space they inhabit, and that space, coexistence, interdependence. I like seeing the connection between these named things and their context (colors isolated and interacting is the same idea). It is difficult to see oneself that way, maybe impossible. We try to see ourselves, our connections to each other and the world through photographs, Facebook, Google Earth. I think they are all good tools for trying to grasp this thing that can't be held. Sticking one's hand in dirt is another way, a relief to feel something real. Reverend Scott Taylor of the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Rochester describes the mystery between people almost as a force, as God if you are a believer in God. He seems to stick more to just the idea of mystery and something that's there but you don't know what it is; he has a hand gesture to describe it. I think this mystery or energy between people is the same as what I see in the landscape. Lots of people "see it", feel it; I'm just trying to paint it. For that matter, lots of people have tried and continue to try to make art about it. It is what makes painting so difficult, almost daunting at times, but draws one back over and over to engage in the impossible obsession of trying to nail it. Plenty of painters wouldn't have this agenda and would say that they are just trying to make a good picture, Pop Artists, for example. Western Modern Art from the beginning of the twentieth century through today reflects the ideas of Western Society, including religion. Artists ranged in their beliefs from a singular, all-powerful Creator as defined by Christianity and Judaism, to Atheism and everything in between. Painting is a spiritual/religious practice for me. As an undergrad I read Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art which also delved into his ideas about color theory. I don't think there are many great books written since on the subject (let me know if you know of any!) because it is such an intangible area. I'll just keep making tangible things about the intangible and shut up like most painters do.

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.

Winter Landscape #10 (My Backyard)

This photo of the woods in my yard is to show an example of what I'm looking at; I'm not painting from the photograph. I took the photo on a different day than I did the painting, but the two share similarities in color, air, and format.

oil on panel

24" x 18"

Colors jump out at me, dots bringing them to the front. When looking at nature, one often sees colors that stand out as well as many neutrals too plentiful to name. The dots isolate some of these colors, like a sample of the painter’s palette, perhaps like the theme of a musical composition. [The ring of hand bells, singular and brief, are part of a song just as the dots are to the painting. Check out Sonos Handbell Ensemble in this music sample of the Hallelujah Chorus by Handel.] Color theory is in play with a range of tints (white added to a color) creating unity and subtle contrast. The pale rose tone of the woods functions as a red contrasting with the high-key green, its complement

I think some of my landscapes are in similar to Claude Monet but with a twist. When first learning about Impressionism, many people marvel at the way a Monet landscape looks like the subject matter but on closer inspection the same picture reveals evidence of its making. Pieces of paint stand on their own. The artist’s thought and hand is in its construction is laid before us, unlike the classical painting tradition in which there were steps to making a painting that are invisible in the final layer (grisaille, then color; broader brushes to small, soft ones which even things out; varnish for a glossy surface, example: Claude Lorraine, Landschaft mit Apollo und Merkur, 1645). Sometimes the circles function like the brushstrokes of a Monet: the landscape is seen as a whole at a distance and some circles are visible, but not as well until observed close up. Others are composed of such large dots/circles that their geometry is up front, announcing straight off that they are not about realism, such as Winter Landscape #8 (Blue Dots) in a previous post. In other paintings I paint the whole picture in dots while at other times I only place a few or none at all. A note relating to a comment on that painting: the term "pixel" is short for picture element (thank you Webopedia.com). Despite these nineteenth and twentieth century painterly sources I believe pixels also feed into my work. Pixels have changed the way we think about images: what they are made of or the way they can be reduced to a basic structure. Discontent with the mechanical aspect of pixelization, my work brings the human touch to this design element.

Painter, critic, and former Professor at Yale University, Andrew Forge is an inspiration. In the back of my mind I think of him, as he focused on paintings made of dots about nature and other subjects. He co-wrote a book on Monet with Robert Gordon. His friend, poet John Hollander wrote a poem "Effet de Neige" about Monet's painting La Route de la ferme Saint-Siméon dedicating it to Andrew Forge (in The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art). It is very moving speaks to the mystery in the space of landscape, life, and painting.

Winter Landscape #9 (Fog) and Homage to 19th Century Painters

24" x 18"

oil on panel

8" x 10"

oil on canvas

These paintings comment on nineteenth century landscape painting like the Hudson River School. Painters like Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand set out to depict the American landscape as new territory, untouched, close to God, and unique. Their outlook was optimistic, like Obama's vision for America in the face of crisis es including environmental.

Dark trees often contrast with luminous sky in these works. Foliage is very textural and heavy while the skies are smooth and light. The second painting is a smaller jpeg of the third to show the naturalistic illusion of the painting which can't be seen except by stepping back. Close up the texture reads that this is painting and illusion is secondary. A band of black defines the right edge while the left is allowed to be atmospheric, a tension that makes the eye scan back and forth.

Charles Darwin was active at about the time as the Hudson River School. The subject of Darwin, art and evolution was the focus of a recent Brian Lehrer Show. The book: The Art Instinct – Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton , editor of http://artsandlettersdaily.com was the impetus for the discussion and Dutton was the guest. The book's premise is that evolution, not culture, determine’s taste through natural selection. It is a Darwinian take on aesthetics. Dutton thinks that our early ancestors were imprinted with certain landscape views in their travels and that is what makes us respond to such views in art. It takes Joseph Cambell's ideas on art and Jung's collective unconscious further by connecting it with evolution. As a painter I find this fascinating but I don't plan on making any art deliberately tailored to exemplify it.

The Yale Center for British Art is featuring an exhibit on Darwin's influence on the visual arts titled "Endless Forms': Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts" which closes May 3, 2009.

Window (Late Fall)

oil on panel

24" x 18"


I recently commented on Vermeer's View of Delft. Another thing, among many, I like about his paintings are the way he treated windows and light. He painted many domestic interiors including solitary women. The window is secondary to the figure, but it is the source of the beautiful light that tenderly illuminates the woman. Unlike Renoir who portrays women as ornamental (basically the only thing I like of his are the peaches which are as boobilicious as his nudes but not offensive to the feminist), it seems that Vermeer respected women. It is the difference between the derogatory term "soccer mom" and mentioning Michelle Obama's name.

This issue concerns me as a mother who is very domestic, shuffling between the studio and kitchen. I love both and don't like my mother/wife role to be dismissed as lesser than my husband's as breadwinner. In this context my vocation as an artist sometimes is perceived as a hobby, especially if the conversation turns to sales and other marketplace-based evaluation. Luckily it doesn't seem to happen as often as it used. Enough venting, I'll leave the rest to Whitney Chadwick who addresses gender roles and societal views in her book, Women, Art, and Society. To be fair, I've heard a musician say that people equate his profession with unemployment and an actor in New York City with waiting tables.

On the male experience of the home and workplace, I found out about an early telecommuter before the "tele". 2009 is the bicentennial of the birthday of Charles Darwin. A recent BBC program, In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, focused on Darwin's domesticity. He lived in the country with his wife and children in a home where he based his laboratory and garden used for his experiments. Apparently this quiet setting and family support fostered his studies.

Domesticity is the back story to Window (Late Fall), another view from my bathroom window. The landscape, this rectangle, glows. It is like stained glass when fully illuminated by the brightest day. The landscape is far, based on its scale, but then it overtakes you as it presses forward into your space before receding again. The landscape is burned into my retina, seen in quiet moments between the laundry.