Joys of Public Art!

RIVERWALL Photo Mural

I’m in the process of trying to complete a project that began a year ago, and was scheduled for installation last November! It’s a ‘quilt’ of images for an exterior wall, all images being photographs of aspects of the Hillsborough River here in Tampa. The images are all photographs I’ve made, some from over the years, some recently, and some of paintings I’ve done of the river in past years.

The composition was developed with Andrea Mosaic software, which allows composing  many separate images in conformance with an overall image. I used an overall image of some floating lily pads, and then made a great number of test images, with the software, to arrive at the final composition. The notion was that from a distance the image might seem abstract but also vaguely ‘riverlike’ and organic. On close view is has very specific and sharply focused information about aspects of the river. I began with thousands of shots… tight, wide, night, aerial,…urban and wild…photo and paintings…and composed the image. A constant struggle in the composition was balancing the exposure range of each photo in terms of how it functioned in the overall image as well as how it stood up in the close view. Some of the images, on close inspection, tend toward under or over exposure, but their overall value range was also determined by their place in the overall composition…if this makes any sense to you.

There were delays in the site preparation, and then problems with the printed plates! The printing was excellent…amazingly sharp and with very punchy contrast. They were completed and shipped to Tampa in January, and we waited for the site to be ready. When we finally uncrated all the plates…they weigh 180 lbs. each(!), we found that some edges had separated from the 3/8″ aluminum backing plates. We sent them all back to be fixed, and then when they arrived the second time the problem still existed. So…they are now back at the factory. We will have them back in a couple of weeks, and then finally be able to proceed with installation.

I will be SO delighted to finally be able to see the wh0le wall up!! It provides a real cautionary note about working with new or unfamiliar processes! I’ve done major painting projects for years, and a couple of mosaic projects, which have all been delivered on time and without any hitches. But I certainly would like to be able to feel free about proposing projects which involve other technologies…it’s just a case of having to do extreme ‘due diligence’ and research. Complicating the issue is that so many projects have short lead times. It seems they can get a building almost finished and suddenly decide they need some art…in a month…finished. The dream would be to collaborate on projects, from the git go, with all involved. I also realize that this happens if your name is  Irwin, or Serra or Koons…

When this is finished I’ll post some views here, probably in late June or early July.

Colored Light…..

White Paper

Ive been thinking of doing a post on colored light, as  it applies to representational painting in general and landscape painting in particular. It’s a powerful and also subtle tool ; it can give unexpected vitality and presence to images. The photo above, one of a series from some color exercises I did years ago, is an example.  The white paper is lit from the right by daylight coming through an open window, and is lit from the left by a flood lamp…’tungsten’…(all light bulbs with filaments are tungsten). The results on the back wall are pretty dramatic in terms of color, and have NOT been manipulated in PhotoShop!

Painters from the renaissance have used this contrast….Warm and Cool…as indoor lights have always been warm…candles, firelight, etc…. And the warm cool contrast remained a strong consideration into Abstract Expressionism….with Hans Hoffman asserting that warm colors advance and cool recede. I think it’s almost a hardwired phenom of perception…near stuff (interiors) lit with warm light, far stuff (landscape) lit with cool and also full of cool color…blues and greens of sky, plants and sea.

So….I’ll shortly add a longer post on this with some very specific information on how the painter…or image maker in any media….can consider and use this notion.

Further thoughts;

Polaroid of Colored papers, 2 light sources.....

This polaroid, from years ago, is of two pieces of paper on a white wall. The  light coming from the left is from a photoflood lamp (tungsten). The light coming from the right is from an open window, daylight. Note the color changes made by the different light sources….the bigger piece of paper is blue construction paper, the smaller piece is a piece of a brown paper bag. The blue paper becomes a very saturated (pure) blue-green on the left side, where it is lit with daylight, which is quite blue. The blue paper on the right, lit by the photoflood, a very orange light, looks like a dirty yellow green, quite unsaturated, (grayish). Orange is the complement of blue….think of orange as red + yellow….so the blue paper absorbs a lot of the orange, and it has very little blue to reflect. Thus it’s a dirty gray green. The brown paper….this brown being a low saturated red-orange, becomes a fairly rich orange on the left side, where it is lit with orange light, but on the right side, where it is lit by the blue daylight, it becomes very gray, with a tinge of pale red violet, produced by the blue of the light mixing with the red component of the brown.

Also note the “white” wall….yellowish in the center, blue at the lower right, gray at the other corners.

As I wrote this I realized how difficult this is to explain! You need to know that things ‘have’ a color simply because they reflect that color (those wave lengths of light), and they absorb the other colors. A red thing is red because it has a chemical make-up which reflects red light, and absorbs the other colors. This is termed ‘subtractive’ color. If a space is only lit by green light, a red thing will seem to be black.  If a space were lit by blue light, the red thing would look to be violet. In yellow light it would look orange.

So….the painter has the freedom to choose any light conditions…the most familiar contrast, used since the renaissance, is warm/cool….lights are warm, shadows cool. And often the near things are warm, distant things cooler…as in atmospheric perspective. BUT…interesting things can begin to happen, and unexpected qualities can pop up, if the painter chooses less conventional contrasts. I have often, deliberately, chosen to move toward cool lights and warm darks, which can seem unexpected in landscape stuff. It feels a bit like flourescent lighting…and can create an subtle note of artificiality. But one could also choose any pair of complement….violet light and yellow shadows, green light and red shadows, etc.

These contrasts could be subtle or blatant…at one extreme one could render stuff as if it were out of a punk or heavy metal music video. And..speaking of media…you might pay some attention to the use of colored light in almost all visual media….print or video or film, contrasting color of light, subtle or blatant, can be very effective in conveying ‘qualities’, in an almost subliminal fashion.

I’m sure someone is studying the effects of media on our color perception; there are such clear differences in color tastes across cultures and time. Think of a victorian parlor, and a 50′s kitchen, and Times Square. I see Matisse’s palette in womens clothes at Walmart.

Back to painting; a main concern of mine is a feeling I’m stuck in a particular palette, and that I need to push in some unfamiliar directions. This conflicts with my idea of working with a high degree of objectivity…the damned sky is blue again this afternoon!!  So maybe I need a few ochre and raw umber skies. I did do a completely negative piece, years ago, but that, of course, was definitely objective…

Lumpy Sea…

Lumpy Sea 65" X 60" Oil/Linen (in progress)

Detail

Just finishing this piece; towards the end of the process there is always the problem of letting go; calling it finished. The painting is such a pleasure at this point; the problems and drawing and decisions are behind me, and the elaboration of elements…. the  focusing and adjusting could go on endlessy. The tipping point, of course, is to find that place where a balance exists between the presence of the representation…the credibility of the light and the space and the surfaces…… and the emphatic presence of the patches of paint which constitute the actuality of the object; the painting.

In this piece, as well as the previous studio piece “Zion Wall”, I’ve preserved the grid  I use to draw the image from the photo source, and also augmented it with color, as a simple means of building a tension between the surface and the illusory space of the sea. The grid is hit and miss, and has been augmented with contrating color. It’s an extremely simple device, but for me makes a delightful and elusive interplay with the surface. It floats in and out of my attention, and seems to dance around a bit.

The paint handling has been emphatically influenced by my onsite work, where the need to work very quickly is very pressing. There’s a real progression from “Zion Wall”, done in early March , to this one in terms of the energy and scale of the marks.

When I began this I intended to also be continung on an ongoing sequence of  onsite pieces, done from the local fields. But for years I’ve had the habit of one piece at a time…I need to focus on a single piece and bring it to conclusion before beginning the next. I look forward now to continuing the onsite Ruskin landscapes; it’s always refreshing to switch the scale and the process. Years ago, from the 70′s to the 90′s, I alternated between easel pieces in the studio and watercolors; they were so contrary in process and handling. The studio oils always begin with a 3″ brush and quick washes, as the means of getting the whole image established as quickly as possible…and then I’d spend weeks  cranking the whole thing into focus, going to smaller and smaller brushes….working ‘inductively’…from the whole to the parts. In the watercolors I’d begin with a twig or a stone or a leaf, and slowly build the piece from a myriad of tiny parts….’deductively’…from the part to the whole. Here’s an image of a watercolor from 20 years ago….all the light parts made by painting the negative spaces…the darker surrounding stuff. The practice of painting negative spaces has been hugely important to my painting in general; if forces me to look at the shapes, and by painting the shapes around a leaf I always make a far more interesting leaf than if I paint it directly. I’ve found that this process has transferred wholly to my painting with oil; if I’m painting a dark I’m tracking the surrounding light shapes, and if I’m painting a lighter area, I’m tracking th dark shape. This may seem obvious and elementary, but I know it is hugely important to the nature of the images I make. I need the darks and lights to fit like a jigsaw puzzle…the image never resolves into dark things on a light field or vice versa….I hope.

"Live Oak" Watercolor, 1986, 20" X 31" painted onsite.

This post became longer than expected…and is mostly shop talk. In future posts I hope to address some questions about my motives and objectives in making the painting. What the hell is the point of these things? I do think that writing about the work and the ideas may be very useful for the progress of my work. I always have been able to hold the blindly optimistic view thet my best stuff lies ahead.

I welcome any and all comments or questions.

Evolving Images…..

This image is one of many evolved…by a genetic algorithm, over hundreds of thousand of generations, on a computer of course!

My son Adam, a professor of Marine Biology at Univ. of Delaware, has developed this project as a variation of a project he was doing with nucleotides…bits of DNA. He had read Luis Borges “Library of Babel”…about a library containing all possible books in the english language, and he realized he could do a ‘Gallery of Babel’…to contain all possible images! Both the library and the gallery would be larger than the Universe, so he scaled back his project a bit. He’s evolving ordered images of color out of random grids of tiles, which evolve toward a color order.  The code of the program which Adam has written ‘rewards’ increasing order by allowing  patterns which have more order…more uniformity of color…to reproduce. The code is flexible and allows adjustments of the rate of mutation among the component colors…the RGB of the computer monitor. Take a look at his site, where there are many examples and some q-Time movies of the patterns evolving. http://icewater.cms.udel.edu/babel/

Some thoughts on perception….

I just browsed through an amazing article…Lawrence Weschler on the Ryan Twins…artists who are doing some amazing work in exploring vision and perception. Take a quick read of this article…….

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2009/spring/weschler-double-vision/

Trevor Ryan Drawing

My first reaction is that it’s a bit irrelevant to Painting….the essence of which seems to me to be the problem of fitting/cramming our visual experience…of a spherical space…onto a flat rectangular surface.

The twins explorations, and experimental stuff dealing with vision, are simply amazing!! Most of what they point out is pretty common knowledge, but NO ONE has pursued it and demonstrated it as they have. They’ve made a concave drawing surface, which allows them to directly transcribe the information of any given field of view. Their device also has braces to hold the artist’s head still.

I’ve long held the notion that we are constantly building a very complete internal/mental model of any space/place we are in. We constantly update this, constantly glancing about to ‘update’ the model with new information. The center of focus in our eye is very small, but we never have the sense that the space around us is out of focus. We also never are aware of our blind spot, in each eye. We cannot see it, as we’ve learned to fill it in with information supplied by the other eye. We also never have any idea of the world bouncing around, as our head moves! Try watching a video made with a moving camera…impossible! But…we keep our mental model of the world stable and level, regardless of our head position. Prove this by gently moving your eyeball with a finger  beside your eye…your view of the world wiggles! Our usual very stable mental view is a result of the fact that we are constantly updating it with information from our organs of balance (semi-circular canals), which compensate for the movement of our head.

I’ve read a good deal about perception, but don’t have references at hand.

Ive always been a huge fan of both Robt. Irwin and James Turrell, who have made such interesting work, letting us see ourselves seeing. But, as intrigued as I’ve been, I’ve always stuck with painting, as opposed to the spaces the Turrell and Irwin have used for their installations. Weschler has a written extensively about Irwin and also Hockney…but I’ve just skimmed the piece about his conversations with  them. Here are links to the books:

(http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Forgetting-Name-Thing-Sees/dp/0520049209 )

(http://www.amazon.com/True-Life-Twenty-Five-Conversations-Hockney/dp/0520258797/ref=pd_sim_b_5 )

Fascinating stuff…my interest in perception is also inseparable with an interest in the nature of consciousness. Raw sensory data…nerve impulses…becoming such present, lived, and intense experience…seems nothing short of magic to me. My eyes don’t seem to be transmitting data….they are windows!! Go figure.

I originally wrote this note for a blog I’ve gotten interested in; http://artandperception.com , which hosts a number of people writing on painting, photography, and preception.

More soon

Here are two recent paintings, with details, done from photographic sources. They are somewhat typical of the current nature of my studio work. These are developed over a period of weeks, and involve a process quite different from the onsite paintings, which are done in the course of a morning, or a day at most. These are quite a bit removed from their sources, as the color and composition and emphasis/focus develops  during the process of painting. The Spring Run piece was pieced together from several photographs.

"Spring Run" Oil/Linen 72" X 144" 2008

Detail of "Spring Run"

"Zion Wall" Oil/Linen 42" X 72" 2009

Detail of "Zion Wall"

To set the context for discussing my current work I’m posting a few recent paintings below. I work both directly onsite and from photos, but these are all done onsite. There are great differences in the two approaches, but I find them mutually supportive and mutually influential, one upon the other. I hope to devote future discussions here to my interest and my hopes for both. I’ve done a good deal of painting in SE Utah over the past four years, and also paint from more mundane aspects of  Florida.

ZionView Oil/Panel, 8" X 24" 10-'08

Bryce Canyon Study Oil/Panel, 10-'08

Orange Lake w/Cars Oil/Panel 8" X 48"

TECO Plant, Apollo Beach Oil/Panel 12" X 40" 2-09

TECO Plant w/Lagoon Oil/Panel 10" X 36" 5-'08

SportsMan's Cove, McIntyre Oil/Panel 3-'08

Dudley Journal Oil/Panel 12" X 40" 3-'09

Hello!

Hello! I’m thinking about starting this blog….to blather on about painting and whatever I’m involved with and whatever might seem of passing interest. I guess it will be a public journal, and can motivate me to think out a bunch of stuff, maybe with some clarity and perhaps to touch base with others about my ideas and problems with painting.

I’ve been involved in a variety of stuff this past year, and I think the blog may be a place to put it all out there, and perhaps see it myself from a different place.  In ’08 and ’09 there has been the Big Draw, a lot of onsite painting…..Utah, Wekiva Springs, Dudley Farm, and Ruskin area, a collaboration with my son Adam on a software project in the evolution of color patterns, a bit of digital pinhole photography, and a major public art project for the City of Tampa.

I’ll discuss these and whatever else happens along to catch my interest. Just writing this I realize I have always been pulled in many directions, and know that my painting has lacked the obsessive commitment and total focus that has marked the  work of so many artists who have changed the world for us. The other side of this is that my interests have fed my painting, and have been useful breaks which kept the painting fresh for me. “I yam what I yam” Popeye, 1946.

Here’s the current painting, a 65″ X 60″ Lumpy Sea…(working title)…which I set up to do as a respite from painting onsite here. But…once started it gets all my attention…I’ve always envied friends who have three, or twelve, pieces in progress. I always have one…and push it through to whatever finish I find. No multi tasking! In this piece I’m keeping…and sometimes re-painting…the grid lines I used to establish the drawing. A very simple device to set up a quiet tension between thereceding plane of the sea and the flat canvas. I’m also attempting to be more impulsive and a bit erratic in the paint handling and the color choices; a definite result of all the onsite paintings, done quickly out of necessity. So here’s the painting, and a detail…

Lumpy Sea 65" X 60" Oil/Linen (in progress)

Detail, "Lumpy Sea"

I also have a website which is not current, but has a very wide range of my work from over the years.

So….off and running. I welcome your comments!

Adam