Details in painting are always a varied preference to the artist-when is it too much, when is the painting overworked or left unfinished? They can often be overwhelming and cause the eye to lose its focus. With teaching painting I have recently learned several ways to help a student get over the hurdle of details without wanting to discard painting all together.

The simplest option is finding shapes in the painting and isolating the areas. The student creates shapes and fills in the detail of each shape and the focus can be on the shape and its content instead of the whole image with all of its detail at once. The good thing about this technique is that the shapes create interest and the creation of the detail is more deliberate and distance and changes in value can be easily formed through the creation and separation of the individual shapes. When I first started painting, I used to get a technique of texture down and would overuse it, losing depth and interest, this technique helps to avoid this obstacle.

Another option is to cut a circle out of a cardboard piece and cover the picture that you are using for reference. This technique allows the student to concentrate on a smaller image of details and the work is faster and less intense. When the student finishes a small area of the painting the mask is moved to another area.

Details can be an overwhelming part of painting and often we lose focus of the overall painting when we concentrate too much on a small area of texture or extreme detail. It is challenge enough deciphering details for the artist in their own work but when you need to help a student get past handling detail it’s good to have some techniques that can help the process.

This is a rant I guess you would say. My first question is when did we as a society become young helpless children that are feed what we need to know, told what to eat, told what we should be afraid of and how we should feed our kids and talk to our kids-there is this unknown adult that is always in our homes and on our  computers that talk to us much like the old teacher in the charlie brown cartoons. We are talked down to, treated like we are stupid, third class citizens all with a smile from beautiful people that assume we wish we were them.

The media, some celebrities and the government seem to have created this overblown image of themselves that seem to think their job is to help us make good decisions. We are told how we should feed our kids and what food is bad for them-who would have thought eating Mcdonalds all the time would be harmful to our children or ourselves for that matter-do we need to be protected from them? The government seems to think they are our stewards, they can’t take care of their own lives and keep themselves on the straight and narrow but they need to talk to us about how we live. Somehow we have inadvertently created a ruling class, a cancer that keeps itself in charge of us children.

I heard a radio commercial about drugs the other day-the other option was ridiculous even though it explained what the government has been saying for years-just say no but than it said go to the website to find out how to talk to your kids about drugs. Do we not have any common sense, do we not have friends or family that know us better and can give us options better than some government entity. We are advertised to and steered in the right direction, this week the stock market is a no-brainer next week-don’t waste your time with the stock market all under the guise of this company really caring. Buy gold-buy it now-what do they expect to be paid for that gold the same dollar that they are saying is history-they care that much about us that they will take our bad money so we can have gold-I’m a little skeptical.

The media, I guess it would be considered our big brother or sister-it tells us that all the things we thought might be safe are now dangerous. We shouldn’t leave our kids in cars in the summer? Wow, I am so glad they are here to help us with raising our kids, of course you never hear about their kids or their daily family traumas. I think we are shown too much bad news, we constantly have a neighbor looking out the window or over our shoulder and the news is never good-we are moths to the flame-interested and yet the flame burns us. Somewhere along the way all of these entities have grown to a level of a royalty that tends to make us little people pale in comparison-or so they would have us think.

The last entity is the celebrity-granted not all celebrities but definitely a large cross section act like they are Gods and the media treats them as such. Did you hear what Madonna said, did you see Kim’s new dress? We shouldn’t care but I guess we do because the television shows keep coming so we can see a family spend their daily lives. So here is the problem and it makes me wonder-maybe it is us, maybe they didn’t assume we were these needy children, maybe we’ve become the needy children after all. We are curios about car wrecks, some of us wan to know what the celebrities are wearing and some of us don’t realize it’s not good to eat too much fast food and we get a lawyer to blame another entity because it couldn’t possibly be our lack of judgement.

So enough of this rant-what is missing in our society that would replace these entities that treat us like children-I believe it’s one word-community. A self contained group of people that live together, learn together and share eachothers’ experiences, make stupid mistakes, feed our children questionable food choices and don’t do everything well-it’s the community, the people we care about and have grown up with that should help us with making good decisions and help us to learn how to be better people and better parents-not the overbearing government, the condescending media or the self involved celebrity-
we’re the only ones that can change our choice of role models and mentors-until we do, there’ll be television to teach our children and the media to tell us how to eat.

Art by Gordon: Tonight’s questions- For fellow creatives-what ins…: Tonight’s questions – For fellow creatives-what inspires you to create and do words often come from pictures or do pictures follow words? Fo…

Tonight’s questions– For fellow creatives-what inspires you to create and do words often come from pictures or do pictures follow words? For the non-creatives-what about art attracts or interests you and again do you think of images while reading a story or do images tell more of a story than words? I hope to have lots of comments and insights on both sides of the creative spectrum-maybe we’ll all learn something about what inspires us and where true inspiration originates from.

In this blog I will include a painting and than the words behind them-normally that would be poetry but in this case it is more of a prose description of a time and place.

At the beginning of football season-my son was ten I think, I sat on the ground watching storms pass through the sky over the field as all the parents wondered if they would call the practice but it continued. Later we even sat on slick bleachers and ignored the fact that we were all soaked, that’s parenting I guess and I can tell you not one seemed put out-okay we hide it well-another parent thing.

This first painting was inspired after the storms had subsided and a swarm of dragonflies stormed in the sky around the great burst of light that broke through the clouds. The light was amazing and the break in the rain was a welcome spectacle for us drenched parents at the beginning of another football season.

The wonderful thing about that space and time of
watching my son practice is I actually get to sit and spend time observing, the time is his not mine, we actually act like a community-If I wanted to be hoaky I would say the light coming through the clouds was hope for a winning season or maybe just a spark of hope through the storm, but I won’t be hoaky-no really, I won’t. The inspiration for it was the beginning of the season, my son and I enjoying a time that was precious and unable to be duplicated. It was a moment in time-the dragonflies, the end of summer and time to notice the simple things-my life stopped for that moment and even when it was a burden to go at times, even sitting in the pouring rain, it was somehow worth it and the relationships my son         and I developed were wonderful.

The bottom picture is another pastel of the same place, different time- he was more like five and the sport was soccer, another group of people to know, another great moment in our lives captured. These images were all sketched out for several years before I ever actually finished them, it’s almost like they have to ferment for a while.

Now we are in football again, different group of people, again moments captured that create images that become pastel sketches and always remind me of those moments. I’ll always remember the dragonflies, the light of the evening and the light of the storms that would pass-all of these feelings and moments become the colors in my paintings.

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