Sculpture

I’ve been away from the act of creation for some long time now, fault of many things. My house is not in order and without that, I find it impossible to tackle new works of art creatively.

An invitation arrived in my e-mail this morning from a fellow blogger who, it seems, is having an exhibition of his work.

Now, I haven’t been blogging nor reading blogs either, so I thought I would stroll through his posts and refresh my acquaintance with his work. I found this lively one on sculpture where a professor has taken his students out onto a farm area and had the students create installation type work within the landscape using materials from the landscape or inspired by it. The sheer inventiveness of the art is stunning.

It always amazes me that, given the same instructions and limited by the same parameters of materials and  site, each individual will come up with astoundingly different imagery. “Bravo!” I say. This is what art is meant to be.

Here’s the site address:

http://renedesor.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/german-artists-settle-on-an-austrian-hill

Enjoy.

This lovely flower is called Astrantia. It flowers early summer and continues to bloom until September. The flowers are pinkish and become whiter as they mature. It’s tall, airy and graceful as it sways in the wind. You might expect fairies to live underneath its broad leaves, it’s that delicate and pretty.

Happy accidents

In photography as in drawing and painting, there are happy accidents. This photograph, above, was one of my photographic happy accidents. I must have taken about sixty photos of my white rhododendron. Many were on cloudy days and I was not happy with the contrast of light and shadow. The forms were alright but there was no “oomph” to the photos, nothing that made them sing.

I finally got a sunny day while the blooms were still fresh and crisp, but all the photos that resulted were blaring with light. Yes, I was getting light, but the overexposure did not allow the shadows to delineate themselves as I wanted. The camera didn’t seem to handle looking directly into the sun, even if there was a rhododendron bloom in the way. I managed to find a shady angle to shoot from and the camera seemed to like that better. Anyway, I liked the results better. The resulting photo (above) has less white, less clarity but somehow the gentle blueness of the overall effect is moody and there are subtleties of a warm yellow colour and some lime green lurking behind the pale-blue-or-is-it-green of the shadow side of the flowers. It works!

With happy accidents, if we can figure out what happened, we have the likelihood of being able to reproduce the effect again and to use it to our advantage.

In drawing and painting, learning from our happy accidents can be a real blessing. It can take us on a journey of exploration and even give a new direction to our work.

In another medium, this time digital, I was scanning some drawings that I made at the theatre while listening to the symphony. My seat was close to the front giving me a very good view of the orchestra, but over to one side where the bass fiddlers were directly in front of me. I like the form of the instrument very much, and it being large, it was easy for me to see the detail of it. I’d come with the intention of listening, not drawing, but the desire to set down what I saw grew and grew. I just had to make a note of it. Of course, I hadn’t come prepared with any paper to draw on, but I had the program in my hand.

I flipped to a page that did not refer to the evening’s entertainment and began to sketch the fiddlers’ forms. Being close to the stage gave me sufficient light to draw with. When I came home I had a few primary drawings of a certain directness and liveliness. They certainly were far away from being finished drawings. I didn’t want to lose them; however, I didn’t want to hold onto the whole program in order to keep one page of drawings, either; so I decided to scan them and throw away the program. I knew I couldn’t ever make a finished drawing with the original. The paper was acidic. It was also glossy and unlikely to take any colour medium.

I liked the drawing as it was, but I also wanted to see what it might be like if I added some colour. What better opportunity than to take the scanned image and try some variations with the program Paint or Adobe Photo? And so, on a copy of the image, I filled the face with a skin tone colour. If you’ve ever worked images with this medium, you will know that if your shape is not entirely closed off, the colour will “escape” out into the surrounding area, even filling the entire page if there are not any completely enclosed, shapes.

I know this now because, when I filled the face with skin tone colour, the whole drawing became skin toned. The paint acts somewhat like a water leak. It spreads out the easiest way it can and unless it is dammed up, it floods everything.

Now, the digital drawing medium is somewhat forgiving. When you make a move that results in something you didn’t intend and you don’t like it, then you can hit Edit, Undo and you go back to the previous stage. You can then fix your image so that it will do what you want (in this drawing, like closing off the head shape by adding a line where the “leak” occurs). Then you can proceed to re-fill the shape and hopefully it will be contained in the manner that you wished for.

When I filled this drawing, I found that I really liked the texture that arose from filling the printed portions of the page with colour. The enclosed shapes of the letters did not allow the colour to invade, leaving tiny islets of black-rimmed white peppering the background colour.

This discovery led me to experimenting with several more drawings and I ended up making a whole series of Symphony and Theatre drawings. It was lots of fun experimenting with the medium. It makes me feel as happy as a child in a sandbox, mucking around, trying this, squashing that, watching beetles trundle across the ragged sand over valleys and moats that one has created. And that, my friends, is what I think drawing is all about. The excitement of finding an image you just have to record; the decision to take an image and develop it; the experimental messing around with the image in a free and childlike spirit until one finds a spot where you say to yourself “This is it. I’m stopping here. It’s fine as it is. I don’t want to spoil what I’ve done and I don’t want to add anything to it.”

This happy accident - the filling of an shape within an image that spilled out into the text instead of staying within its own borders - led me to a whole new way of working. The first drawing was no prize winner, but the technique served me for many more drawings and a whole new type of imagery.

I could go on, but I’m sure you know what I mean. If ever you have spilled ink on a drawing and then found, in trying to mop it up, that you have found something you didn’t intend but that you like, and you add to it, or disguise it. Then, next thing you know, you are spilling ink on purpose and getting backgrounds you like. Or a piece of plastic food wrap or of facial tissue falls on your painting and when you pick it up you have accidentally created a random texture you like; and next time you do it on purpose, in a more controlled manner. Or your painting has dribbles because the paint is too liquid for what you wanted to do and then you find that the dribbles add a dimension you hadn’t expected - but quite like…. Or, in figure drawing class, you don’t like your first charcoal sketch and you rub it all out; but since you don’t have more paper with you, you draw right over top of the first try; and you find that the rubbed in “ground” you have created actually assists your drawing; and next time, you start your drawing with a sketch that you intentionally rub out and then refine because the method gives your drawing more depth, more substance.

If you are an avid sketcher, painter, drawer; If you are an impassioned photographer, you know these moments. You’ve been there before. You’ve had these epiphanies, these discoveries that you like and then start to use as a method or device.

So, my friends, in a spirit of discovery, go play with your pencils, your paints, your cameras, or your computers and enjoy!

Spring

Where raindrops hung

suspended

all winter long, with

diamonds on every branch,

garnets now sprout

tiny new leaves

On bare cherry branches

snow flakes have descended,

exploded and turn to pink.

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Composition and early photographers

In a recent post, I was looking at whether early photographers were using the Golden Section/Divine Proportions/The Golden Ration in their work and whether or not they might have been introduced to geometrically based composition through their attendance at either Architectural school or Art School.

One comment I received suggested the following photographers

Irving Penn:

Les Bouchers (The butchers)

Irving Penn was born in 1917 and studied at the Philadelphia Museum School. He had a decidedly traditional visual education. That is not to say that he stayed with it his entire career. Some of his work fits the Golden Ratio quite well, but he obviously experimented with other means of composition that are quite interesting. There’s a good biography on Wikipedia and some of the references at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry give sites to visit to see his work.

Edward Steichen

The Pond, Moonlight

Edward Steichen was born in 1879 was an American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator, born in Bivange, Luxembourg - I’ve taken this info from Wikipedia also. He most certainly would have known about the Golden Ration and he uses it. Of the few pieces I was able to view on the Internet, all showed a strong use of this compositional device.

Albert Steiglitz

Alfred Stieglitz, born 1864, died 1946 was an American photographer and promoter of the arts. He had a gallery in New York City in which he showed avant garde work. He was determined to raise photography to Art status and his success in this has been a boon to all photographers ever since. Again, more information about him can be seen in Wikipedia. Nothing indicates that he went to art school, but he had studies in Mechanical Engineering and he would have been aware of the Golden Rectangle and the Golden Ratio from that training. His early pictures demonstrate a strong use of this compositional device.

Edward Weston

Edward Weston, born 1886 and died 1958, was an American Photographer from Illinois. From Wikipedia, it seems that he was truly self-taught and/or mentored. While his early photographs demonstrate affinity with the pictorialism of photography and image making in art of the time, he rejected it and opted for straight photography which emphasized realism without any manipulation of the object being photographed neither by artificially setting up composition nor by technical manipulation. His subject matter focused on images of natural forms - the human figure, seashells, plants, vegetables, and landscapes and with exception of his early work, does not try whatsoever to use the Golden Ratio as a compositional means.

On his web-site maintained by his family, at www. edward-weston.com I found these two images that illustrate work that appear to not have used the Golden Ratio.

Ansel Easton Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was born in 1902 near San Franscisco. He died in 1984. He is best known for his nature photography in the West of the United States. He was home schooled for much of his education and originally worked towards a career in music. His abilities in photography developed through mentoring, self study of photography publications of his time and a diligent documentation of everything he was doing in the production of photographs.

I’m not including photographs of his since I couldn’t quite tell if it would be transgressing copyright to reproduce his work here. The Ansel Easton Adams web-site provides lots of images, if you are interested, at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Adams_The_Tetons_and_the_Snake_River.jpg

Despite his lack of formal education in the arts, whether consciously or not, his photographic images carry the stamp of 19th Century emphasis on Divine Proportions, the Golden Ratio and geometric composition.

Installation Art - again

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I’ve been exceedingly happy as my garden reveals itself for the first time to me. I took possession of the house in July last year. The spring flowering was over. Much of the summer flowering was gone too!.

I knew that the family that had it previously had cared for the garden to the extent their time allowed, but it was overgrown and I had no idea what kind of perennials were lurking just below the soil waiting for the sun and rain to nourish them into exuberant plants in spring.

Well here we are, and already I have a profusion of colours, shapes and forms.

For the past three weeks, this lovely Camellia shown above has been producing exquisite flowers. The tree is rather messy - it deposits flowers on the ground without hesitation. They don’t seem to have an attachment to the stem that works. I was out cleaning up the resulting mess two days ago, gathering up these brilliant blooms and discovered that it wasn’t just the ones that were tired, weak and brown edged from relative old age that were falling. Some perfectly good , flawless blooms were falling too. I hated to waste them.

Since no one is here to tell me that my playfulness is silly or stupid, I started to play with them on the lawn, racking them up in a grid on the fresh and lusty grass; and eventually I tried out some changes in the grid; and then I made a face with them.

It’s impermanent. The only thing that will last is the photo recording my half hour of playing with the fresh blooms. The next day there was a whole new crop of fresh and exquisite blooms delivered to the asphalt driveway. Each day, I’ve been picking them up and adding them to my grid of flowers. I figure, I might as well enjoy them as long as I can. There’s no use in packaging up this soft pink fragile beauty in a clear plastic garbage bag for disposal. They haven’t had their time yet.

And so I’ve laid them out on the lawn for a second go at enjoyment of the. I’ve also taken a hint from Fiji where I vacationed lately. There’s no need for a vase. The weather is cool enough and very wet. They’ll last without further coddling. And when they are done, well, they are done. Then I will rake them up and put them in the compost. Do you think my worms would like the festival of flowers?
Here are some of the things I’ve done with them:

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This is day 3 and they are still and I place the fallen ones each day. Wouldn’t it be something to cover the entire lawn with this expanded grid?

More on Edward Abbey - on seeing the beauty around us

As I pedal my way to slendericity on the recumbent bike in the gym, I’m slowly reading through Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, a beautifully written autobiography, you might say, about his stay in the desert Arches wilderness of Utah.

It’s slow going on this book because I only read it when at the gym rotating the pedals, normally three times a week; but this past two weeks for a couple of reasons, I didn’t go. So it was with great pleasure that I took back up this book to read his very sensual description of a trip by raft down the Colorado River.

Throughout his text, he discusses the need for pristine wilderness for the nurturing of our souls. He likens it to a Cathedral, a better one than the stone and glass varieties that Man has built through the ages. Traveling with a companion, he has braved a number of falls along the way; and explored some of the tributary canyons. They have some difficulty in paddling against the current to go up the Escalante River. Here he finds a dripping spring two hundred feet above, cascading down not only water but a rare panoply of ferns, moss, columbine and monkey flower. His wonder at the beauty of it all leads him to say:

“Is this at last the locus Dei? There are enough cathedrals and altars here for a Hindu pantheon of divinities. Each time I look up one of the secretive little side canyons I half expect to see not only the cottonwood tree rising over its tiny spring - the leafy god, the desert’s liquid eye - but also a r ainbow-colored corona of blazing light, pure spirit, pure being, pure diesmbodied intelligence, about so speak my name.

If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dreams.”

The place of God.

I remember in my Twenties visiting my father’s church minister. It was mid-Nineteen Seventies and I had been disaffected from the Church. I didn’t feel the Spirit was there and I found the repetitive nature of the services did not reach me nor nourish me. I had no trouble with the rules of conduct, but I rather felt the Spirit was more manifest in Nature around us. I drew my wonder and belief in God from contemplating the incredible biodiversity and the forces of Nature here on Earth and in the firmament.

The Reverend was surprisingly understanding and left me with a blessing, encouraging me to ensure that if that were so, I should immerse myself in my meditations of these things one day a week, so that I maintained and enriched my spiritual health.

I’ve not regularly maintained my communing with Nature on a weekly basis, but I have maintained a deep love for it. If driving through a beautiful landscape, my eyes are full of it, absorbing it. Ditto, when I take the time to wonder at the incredible specificity and variation of form in my garden. Beauty may be in the strangest of places. When the ability to see beauty seems to be “out of luck” because of the paucity of one’s surroundings (such as in urban back lanes or in concrete jungles), you have to go looking for beauty. It’s there.

When I am drawing a form, a flower, a leaf, an animal, a landscape, it is my meditation. It is my way of penetrating into the size and shape and of the object, its texture and pattern, its subtlety of color, the light and dark of it, the warm and cool of it. The wondrous object is the temple and the drawing is the song of praise.
Of course, mankind knows how to mess up his surroundings and make them ugly; so how do I account for that? I’m just not going to go there right now. I haven’t thought it through.

It’s just that, when I read Edward Abbey’s very visual descriptions, it was as if I were standing in the same place that he had trod. I could imagine the beauty he was seeing and be thankful for it and be thankful that he paints in words. I thought to share it with you and encourage you, if you also got pleasure from contemplating his idea, to find his book and read it.

Edward Abbey died in 1989 but his writing lives on and has as much impact for me as if he had written it yesterday, not in 1968.

Ars longa; Vita brevis

Art is eternal; life is short.

Drawing, Bristol Life drawing site and Coldstream

I checked into this post today and found a lot of good writing on art. I recommend it to you

bristollifedrawing.wordpress.com and

bristollifedrawing.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/william-coldstream/ specifically about Sir William Coldstream. I made this comment on the essay concerning him:

The obsessions of artists are fascinating. I can’t fault Coldstream (who measures everything and spends a huge amount of time on the mathematical aspects of his work) for his desire to get the proportions correctly, but it seems he has gone further than that.

• It must have been crippling for (his) students learning to draw, feeling that everything had to be measured and “correct”. Yet, I found that when I was learning and frustrated in my own drawings with “getting it right” I took a ruler and measured until it was “right”.
• Later when I was teaching, I preferred to use a wide variety of examples for teaching students to draw figures. I emphasized the drawings of masters where “mistakes” could be seen underneath the final result so that students could see that even the masters didn’t just automatically “get it right”.
• There is value in the struggle to observe, to coordinate hand and eye in placing marks upon the support for the drawing by use of the eye alone (without thumb or ruler). Working directly gives the students a more forgiving start in their explorations and helps them build their confidence. If masters could make mistakes, then their own could not be so dire.
  In looking on Coldstream’s works that you have provided (in the blog), there is a curious mix of rigidity and stillness that bespeaks his meditation on measured form. On the other hand, his manner of applying paint is much more freely applied than one might think for a painter whose basic precept is careful and studious measurement. I would rather have thought he might be looking for that licked quality of Dominique Ingres, the French Pompiers or the Classicists.

An artist needs countless hours of figure drawing from a model and countless hours of drawing from observation of landscape and still life. Drawing, in my opinion, is the most important aspect of art - the basis from which we branch out into other aspects of art like painting, pastel, watercolour and other image making. Or one might look at it as if painting is simply drawing with pigments; pastel, drawing with chalks. Cartooning is heavily based in drawing; Ceramics with imagery glazed on its surface requires good drawing.

It is the art of observation that shines through, that provides the grounding for the work of art and makes a work either sing with beauty or fall on its head.

It makes me think of Don Hutchinson, one of British Columbia’s finest potters and educators in ceramics. He has often used the blue heron or the frog as his imagery on his beautifully formed pots.

He told me once that he had drawn the frog hundreds of times before he could draw it without thinking and it was only then that he dared apply the image to his pottery.

Each and every ceramic piece of his carrying either of these symbols looks as if he painted them without hesitation. They are fresh and lively and beautiful - and all because he did so much groundwork in drawing to be able to effortlessly reproduce the image with a few sure flicks of his glaze laden brush.

Even thinking of it makes me want to get out my materials and get to work!

Fiji clouds

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Late afternoon the clouds would cover the sky bringing the landscape to a grey and green combination that seemed quite constant, the most prevalent leitmotif of Fiji colour, for the time of year that we were there. Then the clouds would build into deep, dark menacing shapes that scudded across the sky, dumping water in tropical proportions, like God dousing the land with a giant bucket, slopping it all at once and then being done with it.

Everyone runs for cover. There are ample overhangs and huts to shelter under.

The rain flattened all the colours, making sihouette shapes of all the trees. Like cut-outs. Then the rains would stop, not exactly suddenly, but the transition from super-dump of rain to dry - no more rain at all only took about five minutes once the storm was over. The clouds gather themselves back into high piles of fluffiness and move their way out across the bay, taking center stage, and blocking out the setting sun.

People come right back out again and resume whatever they were doing. It’s lucky when the rain dumps just after you’ve arrived a happy hour. You can sit with your preprandial drink watching the clouds transform before your very eyes.

I took this photo of clouds because something rather curious was going on up there in the post-rain clouds. See how the dark mass of clouds is backlit by the sun - and then there is another dark mass flaring behind it? Here’s a close up of the flare.

So here’s what baffles me about this flare:
The dark one in the foreground is backlit, presumably by the sun. So then, is that second dark shape behind it a cloud? If so, why isn’t it backlit also? While several of us watched this phenomenon, no one could come up with an explanation of how it was lit.

How could the sun get in behind one cloud and not the other one? If it did it would be the cloud most in the background that was backlit, but that is not what is occurring here.

It’s curiouser and curiouser.

White rock photo

I took this photo in White Rock. The sun was glaring and I could hardly see the screen display to know what I was getting. When finally I got it home, it was one that I felt really quite thrilled with for a number of reasons. A happy accident. I didn’t even have to crop it.

First of all, I love subtlety and for that reason, I rather like the reduced palette of greys with only small amounts of subdued blues to heighten it. The balance between light and dark is sufficient to make the picture work. And then, despite many of the compositional rules that I generally go by, this one defies them or plays with them in an elliptical way (in the sense of omitting parts while still providing the meaning - I hope that Elliptical is the adverbial form of elide - to abridge, to omit ).

If you use the rule of thirds, the vertical left hand third and the vertical right hand third have activity going on in them but the center one has none. Already that trangresses the geometric compositional rule of putting something in the critical centre square.

Horizontally, the top two bands form a third; the middle, the major sandbar, forms the second and is enhanced by the small sandbar the two right hand figures are standing on. The bottom third is composed of the pool of water broken up by reflections echoing the figures.

If you follow the compositional rule of reading the picture like you would read a book, there is a strong entry point on the left hand side that is just, and only very minutely so, interrupted by the camera man’s head so that the eye can connect to the downward force to take its journey into the picture and thence again to the right. All the other horizontal lines are interrupted with vertical images, helping the viewer stay in the picture. Even if the directional force is strongly moving to the right, it’s always comfortable to shift down into the image and work your eye around the various figures.

Each of the figures acts as a vertical force that stops the eye from going out of the picture, and yet, because the reflection elides the figure shape, there is no continuous line, just one that is constructed by the eye of the viewer; and yet it reads as a continuous vertical “stopper” in the picture. That is, the viewer has to do some work to connect things together and this is a good thing - the image becomes interactive.

The small sandbar on the right edge acts as an arrow that is a strong counterweight to all the horizontal lines driving rightwards. It volleys the eye back to the left of the image. So, although there is nothing going on in the center, the eye comfortably can undertake a tennis match in the image, going back and forth, back and forth.

There are good contrasts - light and dark; texture and smooth; and activity and stasis. That being said, this might not be as captivating a photo without the adult form on the left who is taking photographs. His posture with the camera and his flapping coat make him the most interesting figure and his activity assists in pushing your eye to the right; and yet, your eye wants to keep going back to him. In this way he is perfectly positioned as a counterweight.

II superimposed a geometric grid on the picture plane and discovered it is not a Golden Rectangle. To my surprise, I realized that digital cameras have a new standard - it’s the 8.5 x 11 inch format that is standard to computer office paper. It’s not the 4 x 6 inches of standard non-digital photography. If it were, the closest would be 8 x12. It’s not far off, but it makes a difference. Of course, with the programs we have now for modifying digital photos, it would be very easy to stretch out or squish the picture to fit a Golden Rectangle proportion and hardly anyone would ever notice the difference

Using the geometric principle of composition, I drew a square on the left using the smaller side as the length of the square and then did the same on the other; then proceeded to make some critical center lines, major diagonals and then connected intersecting points. I came with this:

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It’s a photo not a drawing. You get what you get, although when you zoom, when you frame things up before taking the photo, you have some control over composition of your image. So was it by hazard that I got a good approximation of a geometric composition? I think not. I think that the amount of time I’ve spent analyzing this kind of composition helps me to select and frame up images that are already approximately fitting the Geometric composition grid.

There is some good correspondence with the grid to the image - water meeting sand lines in the horizontal direction. a good diagonal on the right side; the figures hovering around a principal vertical on the left side and the figures on the right contained in a major right hand rectangle. The reflections are pretty close to being in the lower third. If I were to plan a painting using the geometric method of composition, it would take very little to adapt this picture to the grid to reinforce its geometric harmony.

Now look at this image again from the Spatial Relationship theory of composition:

The figures act as focal points. I’ve simplified the picture to show how they draw your eye around the image. I’ve traded the denim, (the mid-tone blue) for orange for illustration purposes only; and black as the dark tone. If you cover over the left hand figures you will see that your eye no longer is interested in travelling back and forth over the image. Or vice versa, cover over the right hand figures, the same thing happens. The picture becomes boring and ill-balanced. Also note here that when I modified the picture to make the principal focal points stand out, I lost the horizontal lines of the sea meeting the sand. This modified version of the photo now lacks any horizontal driving force except those lines from the grid itself!

Mostly only artists and photographers are interested in the underpinnings of the picture. They are like the compulsory figures of the figure skater. When they are doing their long skate, you’d never know they spent hours on the compulsories, practicing, practicing, practicing. If I were doing a painting from this picture, I would be searching out the harmonies and balances all the time, at the same time as I was painting the figures with some degree of representational form. Both need to be there - the form and the composition. I would move figures over a bit to make the composition work even better. I might even cut out a shape of one of the figures in paper of approximately the right colour or tone, then move it around the picture and consider where it would best be placed in order to give harmony to the whole.

Good artists understand these rules and regs. They are conscious of what’s going on in their drawings and how they are keeping the eye of the viewer engaged, seemingly effortlessly.

My last comment on this picture has nothing to do with composition. It has to do with subject.

I like this picture because it caught people doing what they like to do, not posed, not stiff. They are enjoying themselves. It’s idyllic.

I hope you’ve enjoyed it too.

If some of this seems esoteric to you and it’s the first time you’ve visited the site, then go back through some of my recent posts. I’ve been writing about composition.

Happy painting!