Let’s Take This One Apart

Art can be confusing. Take this painting, for example. It confused me when I was making it and continues to prompt questions. Is it made up of sections? Why would the bird not be painted in natural colors? Some tulips are cropped in the middle of a flower, why? Is this deconstruction? The bug’s wings aren’t realistic; neither is the bug. Are these 18 separate paintings?  Why stop here?

There is a question behind, ‘What is this?’ It is, ‘Why is this?’  When I look at this or any of my pieces, I remember the decisions that went into the making; I don’t see a ‘Modernist’ aesthetic. But if I have to discuss it, I think about Modernist parallels in literature, dance, architecture, and music. This piece has many points of view. It has ambiguity, dissonance, and incongruity. It provokes rather than reassures. Realism is both alluded to and negated. But cerebral considerations don’t answer the question.  They go around the issue saying this is like that, or this derives from that.

Perhaps addressing, ‘How?’ provides a more satisfying answer. To put it succinctly, here’s how: the artist sets up a problem and solves it. We don’t so much create paintings as we create problems. The paint then goes to work to solve those problems.

In this piece I decided to work with a very limited palette, allowing myself only six colors instead of 106:  Cadmium red, Cadmium green pale, Indigo blue, Antwerp blue, Titanium white and raw umber. I planned to make 16 aspects of a still life but being not very good in precise layout, somehow ended up with two extra areas, 18  blank rectangles. With the two extra areas, I wondered what would happen if the same limited palette was used on images totally unrelated to the still life. Their sole relationship would be color. If I include a bird or a bee in this palette will it look like a tulip? The problem expanded. About six different versions of the bee were drawn before settling on this one. One version had the body blue and wings transparent rose but it stood out too much. Because Antwerp Blue is so strong I eliminated it in the final bird image.

Balance comes into the process every second, like a dance step. One is always going back and forth between being in and out of balance. It’s a FAST dance. At the end you hope you’ve landed on your feet. Indigo blue for the framing format was part of that balancing act but there it was for content rather than form. I wanted a color that was not sweet, definitely not part of the tulip palette, one that could stand in contrast and emphasize the separateness of the 18 rectangles. It is like calling on a supportive supporting actor whose appearance wordlessly makes the entire play cohesive.

The brush strokes, especially in the beige/brown areas, are somewhat overdone, a bit of a riff on gestural painting. That particular color took a long time to mix since it had to work in tones with more and less white to insinuate a bit of chiaroscuro while not deadening the light of the other colors.

Finished is finished. There is a point at which things move into a final state of tension. To add one more stroke would expand the problem or create a new one. The timer rings. The artist listens. Ding.

How Cats Are Made

In 2010, I discovered digital drawing and everything changed. Anywhere and at any time, ‘paint’ was literally at my fingertips and a cat could come to life in a matter of minutes. The addition of music gives the short visual narrative accessibility inviting the viewer to relax and be seduced by an illusion, the illusion that creative acts are not a mystery.