New Paintings About to be Updated on Site

After teaching two painting classes, I have learned many things about my trade and the act of painting. I will be creating several posts about the processes of teaching, the lessons that I shared with my student and how I was able to decipher what I do subconsciously into terms that the layperson could understand. Articulating the process has really helped me in the process of my own painting.

I am planning on posting probably twelve paintings or so in the next few weeks. I have finished eight paintings already and after photographing, signing and finishing they will be posted to the www.artbygordon.com and with each painting on the site I will either include poetry to describe the place if appropriate or the mechanics of the original inspiration and how long it was on the list of paintings to be done. This I hope will give a better insight into the process of the creative experience.

I believe my paintings have really come full circle-they have gone from very dark, to ridiculously light and now back to somewhat darker but much more colorful and rich in color. More changes that are coming to the website is a page on photography and a page on writing. I will also be highlighting some upcoming stories that will be published on the site. Please check back and I will keep posting about the upcoming paintings.

Art by Gordon: Capturing Depth in a One Dimensional Frame

In rea…: Capturing Depth in a One Dimensional Frame In real life, the brain deciphers reality and the depth of a scene by visual cues but much of t…

Capturing Depth in a One Dimensional Frame

In real life, the brain deciphers reality and the depth of a scene by visual cues but much of the dimension is filled in by certain assumptions that the brain makes by experience and reason. The assumption of reality often hampers the effects that the artist tries to create, what we assume of reality is often more complicated or visually incorrect, in creating droplets of water the initial conception would attempt a complex process of capturing the depth and clarity of water when in actuality the process is very simple and basic, the less detail you can achieve especially trying to create water the more believable the end image.

In seeing images across the visual plane we use our experience and concept of depth and color to make decisions on depth and the distance we are seeing. You know that the ocean is a great distance of space, the visual cues you record only support and confirm the distance. I recently went to a cave in California, Moaning rocks cavern-the distance to the ceiling of the cavern is roughly the height of the statue of liberty but because of the lack of visual cues for the brain to decipher the distance the distance seems much less than the actual depth of the cave. The illusion of distance and space is something that the artist and the photographer must capture and relate on a one dimensional field.

Many times you see a scene and photograph the image hoping to capture that same feeling of depth and beauty and unfortunately many times we are left with a flat uninteresting image in the end. There are two processes at work here, first the camera attempts to capture everything in a gray basic tone and will make a multitude of values a close semblance of constant gray, photographers must meter their light to exaggerate lighter or darker areas of a scene to make the camera decipher a scene in a more significant range of tones therefore allowing the depth and space of an image. Another factor that is involved is the availability of visual cues that allow the viewer to decipher the distance between the back of a one dimensional plane to the front. These visual cues capture the illusion of a distance that is deciphered on a flat plane.

Painting is the same kind of visual illusion, you must adjust, exaggerate and highlight changes in light, tone, sharpness and value-this is how you allow the eye to go deep into a one dimensional scene capturing the illusion of space on a flat plane. Surrealists often bend this illusion and often the feeling of a reality that is awkward or somewhat disturbing may be achieved, cubists capture various planes of an image and flatten the each plane on the same plane-all of these techniques is how the artist manipulates how the viewer sees the space the artist creates. Art is an illusion and the more options the artist has to manipulate it, the more options and cues that are available to interest the viewer. This is the first lesson that I taught my recent student and how we approached each area of the paintings had to do with this premiss.

Finding A Finishing Line

I  have a short attention span in regards to painting, that is why I end up painting multiple works at once. There are steps in the process of creating that are all very integral but often intangible. I call the first stage of the inspiration the fermenation period of the idea. I have no interest in painting something that is just attractive, there needs to be a feeling, an emotional response that comes to the viewer, with this in mind I believe the need for the fermenation of the original concepts captures the subtle edges that turn a pretty landscape into an emotional scene.

Over the recent years, I have gotten very scattered in my painting process which has come to equal an amazing amount of works without any sign of finishing. I have worked on paintings that originated up to twenty years ago and continue to map out creations that will eventually become sketches and finally finished works. These ideas tend to stay in the fermentation point and recently I have all images stopping abruptly at that stage, this is a dilemma for an artist wanting some product to display.

The problem with my somewhat fickle approach to painting is the original idea is often so fleeting that in the middle of creation the idea and original inspiration become barely tangible. In my recent teaching experiences an observation has occurred to me-you either work forward toward the finished product or you are pushing paint around. The pushing paint around is a feeling where you tend to just move paint around and this is often when I get the feeling I am painting someone elses’ painting and I have become lost in the details, the original inspiration is gone. I have watched my recent student turn from someone that asks what next to someone that knows where the paint and stroke needs to go, almost instinctively and that is in my opinion when you are creating and not just pushing paint.

My studio is filled with so many paintings that hang on the wall in varying stages of completion, some are so far beyond the original idea I have often thought of just trashing them and often some are just never finished. I recently pulled down all the orphans of my creative inspiration and decided which needed to be finished, which needed to be trashed and the difference in the stages of their completion, in this process I was able to get closer to actually finishing paintings that before had hung on the wall waiting for the next step.

It is a very strange feeling when you pick up from a pile of paintings, each individual painting and suddenly you know what needs to be done. There are invisible cues that become real as if suddenly I  know where every stroke should go and what color goes where. There is a feeling of absence at this point just like writing poetry, suddenly you are lost in the image but your subconscious mind is completely familiar with the work and understands every nuance of the scene and what needs to be done to finish the painting. I have signed eight paintings in the last week and have started the six week process of eventually finishing them with lacquer, it is an exciting point in the creative process.

I believe one reason that it’s hard to keep momentum on the multiple paintings is when I get lost in a painting’s details I lose the subconscious understanding of the details and what needs to go where. Changing paintings and atmospheres disrupts that feeling of being overwhelmed by the details but unfortunately my short attention span takes over again and another painting begins its long process of becoming a finished product.

Finding the inner artist again

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…