March 7, 2016
My quote this week came to me courtesy of Who Said That. Read more of Tobias van Schneider’s thoughts.
“What we create is who we are, and who we are is what we create.” -Tobias van Schneider
Painting
“To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail… failure is his world and to shrink from it desertion…” -Samuel Beckett
February 29, 2016
This piece is progressing. I’m currently planning to complete the drapery in the background in a less posterized fashion than the apples, but I’m not completely sure. I’m kind of just playing with this as I go and making decisions along the way. My apples may still change completely before I call this finished.
“Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labour.” – André Gide
February 22, 2016
Here’s the new painting on my easel. I had taken photos of fruit right after Christmas and had picked two images to paint early in the new year – prepping both canvases at the same time. I thought that if I had two larger paintings going at once, if I got bored or stuck working on one, I’d just move to the other. My unfinished still life with the red apple is annoying me currently, so I started looking at this one and was not as interested as painting it as I had been back in January. To make it more interesting I have decided to play a little. I am working with book paper and transparency in the background and simplifying the gradation of the images throughout. I’ve converted the image to black and white in Photoshop and then posterized it to five tones of grey plus black and white. It’s still early on and I may change it entirely before the end, but here’s the beginning of the image. Any comments are welcome.
That’s why we’re here— to make a dent in the universe. —Hugh MacLeod
February 15, 2016
A little further along on this one.
“Writing about art is only useful when it leads to the experience of art.” – Darby Bannard
February 8, 2016
Something a little different today. On December 31, my kids and I visited the Art Gallery of Alberta. One of the exhibitions was of the work of Chris Cran – my current favourite Alberta artist. After seeing some of his work with paintings of half-toned images, I thought I’d play a little. This is more of an experiment to see how the technique would work in preparation to play with these ideas more in future pieces.
I started by painting the surface of a 6″ X 6″ canvas with flourescent pink acrylic paint and the edges with black gesso. Then I taped stripes onto the surface and covered it with a layer of acrylic gloss medium.
I proceeded to paint a half-toned image over the tape in oil paint. While the paint was still wet, I removed the tape.
One of the questions that this experiment poses is, how much of an image do we have to have available to us in order to understand what we’re seeing? There is a lot of room for improvement with this. One of the biggest problems here is that my scale is all wrong. But it’s the first one. I will continue to play with this idea for a bit and see what I can come up with.
“The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question.” -Bruce Mau
February 1, 2016
“An amateur is someone who…”
January 25, 2016
“An amateur is someone who supports himself with outside jobs, which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.”
– Ben Shahn
“Sometimes there are rare golden moments, moments of bliss and dreamlike poetry … “
January 11, 2016
“Sometimes there are rare golden moments, moments of bliss and dreamlike poetry … That’s what gives me my passion and the fuel I need to continue moving paint across a fresh, waiting canvas.” – Eric Frantz
Spent another hour and a half on this on the weekend. Still a long way to go…
“Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos… “
January 4, 2016
“Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience. They are adaptive responses, just as feathers are for birds and fur is for mammals. Cultures prescribe norms, evolve goals, build beliefs that help us tackle the challenges of existence. In so doing they must rule out many alternative goals and beliefs, and thereby limit possibilities; but this channeling of attention to a limited set of goals and means is what allows effortless action with self-created boundaries.
It is in this respect that games provide a compelling analogy to cultures. Both consist of more or less arbitrary goals and rules that allow people to become involved in a process and act with a minimum of doubts and distractions. The difference is mainly one of scale. Cultures are all-embracing: they specify how a person should be born, how she should grow up, marry, have children, and die. Games fill out the interludes of the cultural script. They enhance action and concentration during “free time,” when cultural instructions offer little guidance, and a person’s attention threatens to wander into the uncharted realms of chaos.”
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
I’ve just started this large canvas and am looking forward to seeing how it evolves. The photo has a lot of reflection on the lower left. Hopefully next time I’ll find a better angle to photograph it from.
susanne semchuk 