Mapping Forty

What happens when an artist turns 40? I can’t speak for others, but for me the approach of that birthday in May caused me to enter a time of self-imposed isolation and introspection. And I began to draw with ink on paper. The drawing process raised a lot of questions. Particularly, what approaches, what compositional, emotional and mark making elements are uniquely mine? And how do I uncover, focus on and strengthen them?





Answers started coming through the process of drawing. Urges and influences from ten years ago arose and I stripped away several habits that had accumulated over the years. The resulting approach is purer and more personal than before. I feel it is a more lucid expression of my artistic voice.





This series of drawings is titled “Mapping Forty”. I have completed some 20 useable pieces, and many that ended up in the trash. I am now working toward translating this approach into paintings on canvas.

Bacchanalia

Sometimes paintings just flow like water. When they do, it’s a thrill and a joy. That’s how this piece came together. The surface qualities, composition and color choices just happened, naturally and of their own accord. Quite a change from the last piece, detailed below.

This marks the tenth painting in my Striae series. I am quite pleased with the level of variety and unity within the series to date. I am also noticing another aspect of its creation. My initial under-paintings are instinctive and experimental. I push at my conception of paint application and composition, striving to expand it. Then I use the overall linear strokes to reign in the under-painting and make the piece work within the series. This process is keeping me deeply engaged with each painting as it relates to the whole.

Ceorfan

This piece proved to be a challenge in many respects. The initial under-painting came together nicely, a multi-textured, satiny blue with which I was quite enamored. However, all the marks I added tended to be too light initially. The large, all-over gray strokes had to be adjusted three times. The smaller marks of mid range blue and green took two and three adjustments respectively. The lightest blue marks were a final addition, done to lock in the composition and guide the eye. Ironically, they came out lighter than I originally planned, but their lightness worked. They strengthen the central shape, demarked by the mid-blue, red and green marks and the smaller dark gray strokes, by the fact that they are not present in that shape. In proper lighting, they seem to glow with the intensity of small halogen lights, adding an interesting energy to the piece.

The final challenge occurred in photographing the painting. The color contrasts almost proved too much for my digital camera. It wanted to make the photo much darker than it should be and the green marks still appear darker than when seen in real life. I had to play with the photo for a long time in photoshop, and even so the effect is not quite right. However, I feel that it is close enough for me to share the image on this blog.

The Gestalt

Loving books came first for me. As far back as I can remember books were there. Not merely to pass time or as an escape from daily life, but also to fuel the generators of my imagination.

As painting became my dominant activity, books helped shape the gestalt of what painting should be that I held in my mind. Most of the time there will be two books that I am currently reading. One will be a book on art to engage serious thought on what I am doing. The other will be a book of fiction to engage my playful side.

Sometimes, a focused thought encapsulated in a few words will make a connection with my painting gestalt and I will grasp it as an essential truth. I collect these “art quotes” and use them as touchstones to expand my vision. Here are some examples, gathered over the last ten years:

“To study technique means to make it, to invent it. To take the raw material each time anew and twist it into shape.” Robert Henri

“Contrast, opposition of colors, gives life to a picture. The painter is here not concerned simply with the coarser, all to common contrasts, such as green-red, blue-yellow, etc., of the various “color circles”, but with the color combinations which are his own and which have not been seen and felt by others. He can harmonize in this way seemingly impossible contrasts, and, relying on his own emotions, create new color values.” Max Doerner

“Painting is not an art of direct meanings. The presence of recognizable images no more guarantees its contact with the reality of the world than the absence of such images its loss.” John Elerfield

I am now reading Resistance and Persistence: Selected Writings by abstract painter Sean Scully and The Light Fantastic by fantasy satirist Terry Pratchett. Each book recently provided a small thought gem. Scully in writing about the artist Ian Stephenson says, “…the Romantic urge is not to articulate emotion but to provoke it.” Pratchett in describing a powerful and self-aware book of magic spells says that it is, “…a three-dimensional representation of a multi-dimensional reality.” Both of these quotes synced up with my painting gestalt and refreshed my view of abstract (or as I prefer, non-representational) painting.

For you see, it is often said of non-representational painting that its subject is the artist’s emotions. This comes mainly from critics and those who do not paint abstractly. I have never found this to be true.

You may (and I hope that you do) look at one of my paintings and feel an emotion. But that does not mean that the painting is about that emotion. The subject of the painting is the gestalt and the gestalt is everything. All that I have thought, dreamed and lived through combined with my skill and experience in handling art materials. The gestalt is an entity. It exists in my mind, a living, growing and many-layered thing. When I paint it comes forward to inspire and ultimately to control what is happening on the canvas. Under the gestalt’s influence, emotion becomes an element of expression inseparable from color, texture and composition.

In short I do not make paintings about emotions. I am creating three-dimensional representations of this multi-dimensional entity that lives inside me. Perhaps this means that I am of the romantic tradition. I have no problem with that.

To learn more about Sean Scully go here: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1917&page=1

For Ian Stephenson, here: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1995&page=1

For more on Terry Pratchett’s “Disc World” novels go here: http://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/

New Striae painting in the works, coming soon!

Mojave

The under-painting in this piece was a dominant factor right from the start. It began with a lightly textured layer of raw sienna to which I added broad strokes of heavy textured medium. I lightly dragged yellow over these heavily textured swaths. The relationship between the yellow and sienna areas dictated all the other color, shape and motion choices that I made.

The selection of “Mojave” as the title for this piece occurred near the end of the painting process. As the color scheme firmed up, I was strongly reminded of a trip my wife and I took out West in 2000. We drove through the dessert and down into Death Valley. It was a special time and I feel blessed that this painting recalled it so vividly.

Title

After quite a bit of cogitating, I have decided to name this series : Striae.

Striae (noun, plural of stria) 1. Thin, narrow grooves or channels. 2. Thin lines or bands.

I had thought to name it "striations", but when I went to the dictionary to check that I was right about what that meant, I came across this word. I never even knew that striations was the adjective form of this noun. I think the word is unusual and poetic enough yet also simple and straight forward enough to carry the intent of this body of work.

Happy New Year!

Craig

Aquaticus

An unintentional effect occurred in this painting. The green strokes that I laid down in an overall pattern were more transparent than I planned. However, I decided not to adjust them. As a result, the underlying gray lines became a dominant compositional element and I left them in their original condition. This required a darkening of the yellow lines in order to soften their effect.

Because the overall green strokes are semi-transparent, they are easy to discount when the work is seen at a distance. Viewed from far away, the gray and yellow lines along with the turquoise lozenges make an active, chaotic pattern. As one approaches the painting, the green strokes become stronger and they pull the composition into a balanced whole.