Full Version: iPad Project 2011 Culmination/Film

This film runs a bit slower than a previous version I posted.  This is my preferred way for viewing the work.  It's too long for YouTube.

Dot Painting #1

14" x 13", oil on canvas

Light moves, color moves, dots swirl like blowing leaves and dust. Dot Painting #1 pulses, extends itself forward and back just as it is stabilized by left and right verticals and a horizontal mid-line. Transitions between earth tones

are close, the off-white canvas is bare, harmonizing with the lighter colors. The lower left corner is held by a pink dot while diagonally opposed by an area of red.

Painter Lois Dodd in a YouTube video says she sees things other people may not see just as musicians probably hear things she doesn't. I think this painting is an example of the unique way I see and is stronger for it. It is this same quality that may make it esoteric. I stand by what I make no matter the degree of accessibility. People like different things. My job is not to guess what they like, be part of a think tank, but to make good art whether it is liked or not. That is the luxury a fine artist has over a commercial artist. The same quality interferes with cash flow, so perhaps it is the only luxury. It is sometimes discouraging and many artists quit from the compounded factors of money and lack of appreciation of their work. I don't regret my choice. I can't rest without making the images. Here is my personal declaration, a reminder of what I am doing. It's my raison d'etre and I take it with me into 2011. It was done on the iPad. I give permission to any artist to print it out for themselves (not to reproduce). Happy New Year!

Spring Landscapes #22, #23, #24 Farms & Windmill

Spring Landscape #22 Windmill, 24" x 18", oil on panel

Spring Landscape #23 Farm, 18" x 24", oil on panel

Spring Landscape #24 Land, Cloud, Trees, 18" x 24" oil on panel

The top three images are done on an iPad with the Brushes application. I consider them art but also wanted to do the ideas in oil, which is different. The color in Spring Landscape #24 Land, Cloud, Trees isn't right but it was the best I could capture and rework in iphoto; don't know why. The bottom half should be more luminous and the top half less bright. The iPad pictures translate perfectly, as is the nature of the beast, in this case the screen. The iPad pics were done in the car while passing these views. Sketchbooks are getting very sophisticated. I find the digital images are subtly changing my painting sensibility. The iPad work is less dense, not being bound to a material form in the same way as a painting. It's color and light differs from the observable world and as well as the painted one. Some people may prefer it. I don't but I confess that I like it just as much. [audible gasp from a good percentage of painters] I feel the need to say over and over that there is nothing like painting but I really LIKE this. Maybe because it is also painting just as making marks in the sand with a stick is drawing; no artist would argue that it isn't. Look at how artist Andy Goldsworthy draws. [Looking at his stick sculpture on site with a circular opening framing the landscape I think that maybe he's better at doing what I'm trying to express. Maybe we're just on the same wavelength and he has his methods and I have mine. See similarities in last week's post.] If drawing can happen with any material then digital drawing shouldn't be inferior. The material doesn't make for greatness, however, as a stick of charcoal makes drawings in a wide range of quality depending on the person holding it.

Onto a discussion about the work. It is too much for me to talk about all three images because I need to spend more time in the studio than on this blog. I enjoy the scale and pattern and exuberance in these. I'd like to focus on Spring Landscape #22 Windmill. The hill looks like the earth/globe. The painting is a positive picture of renewable energy. The depiction shows wind energy is far-reaching, energizing the atmosphere as well as the surrounding air. A thin cloud acts as an extension of on of the windmill's blades. Space is arching. The analogous color scheme of blue/green/yellow and flowing lines help to create a feeling of harmony. Windmills aren't a source of harmonic discussion, however. A wind farm proposal for perhaps what would be the largest in the world, is on the table for Cape Cod, close to where I live in Rhode Island. The controversy involves the trade offs for clean, renewable energy including concerns for wildlife, marine life, land rights, decreased property values, and of particular interest to me, aesthetics. I LOVE how these turbines look. They are sleek and elegant like Brancusi's polished brass Bird in Space. Van Gogh loved windmills as did Rembrandt before him. They not only accepted this "modern" addition to the landscape but found poetry in its structure. Maybe people see them as vertical obstructions in a horizontal ocean view or a sign of contemporary life encroaching on nature. Nature is at stake and while I'm not qualified to lecture on the negative effects of windmills to the immediate surrounding area vs. their benefit to our environment globally, (a great site for this is the American Wind Energy Association) I have looked at both sides of the argument and firmly believe they are for the greater good. If you are on the fence and the main issue for you is aesthetics, this art chick says to get over it.