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Ostwald’s Wheel

7/1/2017

If you study Ostwald’s Color Primer you will find every fact I have reported here presented much more thoroughly. The only worthwhile additions my articles provide are the discoveries of an artist in the application of those facts, suggesting for example that the painter spend some time learning to mix colors with just hue, black and white, for the purpose of later mastery of any color-mixing method. I did that, and I recommend the practice for anyone who finds color challenging.

In the mid-seventies I saw an illustration in a magazine that featured outlines and two or three pure hues. I had been emulating Matisse for a while and that simple painting suggested my next step. I began painting large bold outlines in burnt umber darkened with black, then filling in the shapes with nearly pure hue. I was exploring.

Little Blackie, oil

There are many discussions of how to break up the color wheel to achieve balance in a painting so I don’t need to belabor that here, but there is one important difference between Ostwald’s color wheel and everyone else’s. Ostwald stretches out the green arc to the point that green is treated like a fourth primary. The four “fundamental” colors are red, blue, yellow and sea green. Blue and yellow are complementaries, as are red and sea green.

Why? I believe it is because Ostwald did his mixing by spinning.

We all learn early in school that mixing blue and yellow gives green.

But when blue and yellow are spun together, the result is gray, and since no clarification appears in the Primer, I offer one here.

The pigment, or subtractive primaries are blue, red and yellow; or, more professionally, cyan, magenta and yellow. These behave as we were taught in school.

The light, or addition primaries are red, green and blue. A pigment mixture of all three subtractive primaries in the appropriate ratio is a very dark gray. A mixture of light beams of all three light primaries is white.

In Burnham Park, oil. This features a simple additive triad.

When colors are mixed by spinning, the hue is determined by addition, but unlike a mixture of light beams a spun mixture is darkened by the fact that the color swatches are not light beams, but pigment, which is subtractive. I will deal with all this subtractive business in a future article.

Waiting for Jesse, oil. (Back when it was an insult, a visitor to my gallery accused me of working from a photograph. Nope!) According to the theory, this is a very yellow painting! That horizontal stripe, though, was white. All I have is an aged slide.

The upshot is that, since red and green add to make yellow, an additive mixture of blue and yellow is actually a mixture of red, green and blue, with the potential of producing a neutral gray. Perhaps because of reluctance to demote yellow as a primary, Ostwald combines both sets of primaries, and winds up with four.

It seems reasonable to consider an additive combination from Ostwald’s wheel for a painting’s color balance. A composition of red, blue and green might feel quite right, such as a red barn, green trees and blue sky. Of course that employs just the simplest triad. (See In Burnham Park above.)

I am suggesting practice with divisions of Ostwald’s wheel for an experimental possibility. The Color Primer is a pretty good guide for building your own circle.

The paintings I have presented in this post were, in fact, such experiments.

I don’t know how many are keeping up with this series. I know it is pretty technical, but I also know that every subject in the world, studied to any depth, involves technical material. In a while I will show how even the Impressionists, those wild non-conformists, approached color from a surprisingly technical point of view—more even than most people think they know!

But first I am going to get even more technical about balance.

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Consulting the Color Stars

6/23/2017

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Other color harmonies suggested by Ostwald’s color system hold the hue constant and vary the white or black content or both. Before I describe these, though, I would like to take the reader aside for a disclaimer:

My intention is not to teach this stuff academically (I am leaving a lot of that out) , nor even to advocate its use. I am presenting it because I have found it very helpful; it has rescued me from many jams where I knew a painting needed something regarding color but could not figure out what. BUT, if you like what you see so far, or like the idea of having a way to accurately analyze and solve a color problem, you will have to spend some time practicing.

You could make a bunch of color charts, maybe even make your own Ostwald-inspired color book, but as for me I am grateful that in my youth I was so taken by this system that I used it for my first two or three hundred paintings. I no longer mix my colors using just hue, black and white. In fact I practically never use black—not because of some silly impressionist’s phobia, but because I can get to my target color faster now that I know my way around. More on that in a future article.

To begin, I have selected a blue page and pulled a series of colors from a diagonal that runs down and to the right. The colors to the upper left have an increasing ratio of white to hue.

Here is that whites group. Can you identify from where each chip came on the full-page chart? (You really should make your own series. The computer, in its certainty that it knows what we want better than we do, has hopelessly brightened my blue shade. This is the second row down.)

This next group comes from a diagonal that runs upward to the right. Each color features the same ratio of hue to white; only the amount of black relative to hue changes.

Finally, consider the colors taken from a vertical column. These colors all have the same saturation. In other words each color has the same ratio of hue to gray; the grays differ in their darkness.

Take a moment to enjoy these groups. They are not aggressively harmonious, but try this: mix a series for yourself and then include a color from elsewhere on the page and see if it “fits.” I remember going to a show of William Baziotes at the Guggenheim and being horrified to see him place saturated colors among the muted. I was more dogmatic then, but the combinations were unsettling.

When a saturation series, a whites series and a blacks series are chosen to converge at a single color we have what is called a star, all of whose colors harmonize as a cluster. When colors are jarring and I don’t want them to be, I consult the stars. We can build a painting’s color scheme (or troubleshoot a bad one) on a framework of stars from different hues, making sure that the centers of the stars match up like the combinations I demonstrated in the previous post.

Below are three groups of harmonies made with chrome green. You can do this with any color, and it doesn’t have to be pure hue. In fact the pure hue doesn’t generate a star, as you can figure.

Here a green shade is mixed with varying amounts of white.

These greens started with a tint, to which was added black.

The vertical column of colors is accomplished by mixing a tint and a shade of equal saturation—to the best of my ability.

Now you try! Make a few still lifes using colors derived from hue, black and white, just to get the feel of it.

A final word in closing, to address the issue of value. You may have noticed that value is not one of the specified dimensions of this system, but you’ll also notice that value varies in every one of the harmony groups shown. Value may be the preeminent concern among many—or most—artists, but here are four ways to vary light and dark harmoniously, not randomly.

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Color Harmonies, Variable Hues

6/5/2017

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These are pure hues, but I was unable to avoid some glare, especially on the purple.

I received my first set of oils when I was eleven, so by the time I was studying Walter Koch’s binder of the Ostwald color system I had experienced mixing colors—but I had had no idea of how very little I knew. The book did not instruct the reader in mixing, but the notion that one could mix any color with a hue and black and white called to me to put it to work.

The book did have things to say about color harmonies, a subject of which I had never been directly aware. Now I discovered a thrill, a real thrill, when contemplating the simple combinations of colors suggested in Walter’s book.

These are pure hues, pretty much straight out of the tube. I hope they come across as if I had lifted them from a standard color wheel.

Below are more samples of harmonious combinations all of the same type. All the colors in each set have the same percentage of white and the same percentage of black mixed with a pure hue—as best I can approximate a book I haven’t seen in decades. These are not perfect but you get the general idea.

Do these excite you too? So fulfilling to incorporate this principle into painting!

I have used one premixed gray to blend with each of the hues, so that the only challenge now is to mix equal amounts (visually speaking) of this gray to each hue. Because my homemade book of colors is non-archival and over 40 years old, I’ve had to eyeball my mixes. I am seeking to match colors that would appear on the same location on each of the respective hue triangles. (See the previous blog post “Discovering Color.”) Try it for yourself! Be aware that different pigments behave differently in mixes; I will have to compensate.

Each of these harmony groups begins with the same six hues above.

How did Ostwald manage all of this, without a book to work from? He made a wheel, and covered varying sizes of pie sections with hue, white and black—hence his percentages—and spun it.

There are a lot of technical issues I am leaving out of this account, such as the coordinates used to place a tonal color precisely. Without a ready-made reference, I don’t see how descriptions of these technicalities would help the reader; and though I sometimes use them myself, they are not absolutely necessary. For my friends who were hoping to get some suggestions about harmony, this account should at least give a direction for their own experiments.

One of the unexpected consequences of learning about tonal color harmonies was that I became much more sensitive. I had had trouble enjoying the work of Henri Matisse, and could not understand the hoopla about his color, which seemed to me muted, even washed out.

Each set of six colors has its own percentage of white and black.

The percentage of hue is quite low here.

But now! What a knockout! I began using more and more subtle tonal combinations in my own painting because, well, I loved them. Bright colors are striking and appealing to many, I know, but I am a quiet person and relationships of colors excite me more than singletons.

Future color topics
Hue Balance: Simple and Complex
Color Harmonies: Holding Hue Constant
Two more dimensions: value and temperature; Munsell
Navigating across the Quiller wheel, and through the color solid
Chevreul, Itten et al.
Dyes and flakes

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Practicing With Color

6/1/2017

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At the beginning of my color studies it amazed me to think that any color I could see had a well-defined place in Ostwald’s color solid. Could it be true that every color had no more than three coordinates? No color could slip out of the double cone and defy the system? No two different colors could have the same address?

Eventually I had to accept this non-intuitive truth: a color’s triplet of coordinates would nail it down. (I know now that there are several such systems, but I still prefer Ostwald’s.) What that signified to me, then, was almost miraculous: Each color has just three ingredients. According to Ostwald these were hue, white and black.

(Note: Color—anything that comes in a giant box of crayons, and more: white, gray, brown, bright blue, black. If you can see it, it is a color.
Hue—a color on the standard color wheel, or on Playskool blocks (do they still make those?). If a crayon says red, or yellow, that’s a hue.)

Since I had trained myself to distinguish the hue of any color, I decided I would begin the pursuit of a color mix with its hue, acquired by combining the paint-tube hues nearest the desired hue on the color wheel. For example if I wanted to match a brown whose hue I had discerned was red-orange, I mixed red and orange to attain the hue I saw in the brown.

The Three Graces, Oil, 38 x 24", 1967

I knew to mix nearby hues, because two hues that were far apart on the wheel combined to an impure color. I first noticed this when I attempted to create an orange from red and yellow. No matter how careful I was, my orange never attained the purity of cadmium orange straight from the tube. I had been taught that red and yellow made orange and that was that. Perhaps study of the color chips had enhanced my perception, but more likely I had just never had occasion to notice that mixed orange was not quite brilliant.

I’ll have more to say about this phenomenon later. For now I’ll just relate that I had more success starting mixes with pure hues, rather than making green out of blue and yellow, or purple out of blue and red. And I used pure hues: permanent green rather than viridian or Hooker’s green. Then if necessary I corrected the hue of the green with blue or yellow.

Now, with a pure hue on my palette, I guesstimated how much black to add, and then how much white. You have to understand what a crucial difference this made for me. Instead of adding a little rose and a little ochre or green and spiraling out of control with a great expanding wad of goo on my palette, all I had to worry about were black and white. If I went hopelessly astray all I had to do was go back to the pure hue and start again.

In my work at Rowe, I had many opportunities to practice with colors. Our studio was in a little building on a hill above the plant. After choosing or matching a color I made a trip down the hill to the paint line or the silkscreen line, past great machines by which men cut and bent huge sheets of steel into shapes that other men then placed into large spot welders to make several attachments at once. The wrists of each worker were connected to his machine by cables, and every time the upper part of his machine came crashing down the cables yanked his hands out of the way. It was a loud place of pounding and sparks and the smell of oil and hot metal.

After approving or reconsidering the colors at the paint line I passed again among the shapers and assemblers to our quiet little studio. I found it very upsetting to think of those men tied to their behemoths all day.

I returned to Princeton, under some duress. While there and after graduation I painted a lot of still lifes. I took immense pleasure in holding my palette knife up before the color I was targeting and seeing a perfect match. And I learned a lot that way, too. Within shadows was the shift along the color wheel, as pointed out by the Impressionists. This meant that to mix the color of a shadow I had to begin afresh with the appropriate hue.

I noticed that shadows are quite saturated, not accomplished by simply adding black. That practice will certainly deaden the color of the shadow, because it drastically reduces the percentage of hue. This is the deadening that teachers talk about, though they do not explain it.

Leaves and Glass, Oil, 1975

Measured use of black for a color match doesn’t deaden it any more than any other method of mixing a color; mixing with hue, black and white and holding up the palette knife to check taught me to keep shadows saturated, and to respect any hue shift.

(Saturation—also called intensity or colorfulness—is, under this system, very simply the percentage of hue in a color. In the triangle of colors of a given hue, all the colors that are aligned vertically have the same saturation; some have more black, others more white. Colors to the right are more saturated. Toward the left, approaching the gray scale, colors are less intense.)

Today I almost never mix colors using only hue, black and white, but thanks to many years of careful practice I am quite familiar with the color solid and can bounce around in it and still keep my bearings, confidently mixing any color I want to. If I get lost I can always go back to Ostwald. I may change my mind about what color I want, but can find whichever one I choose.

Next installment: Color Harmonies

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Discovering Color

5/31/2017

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Walter's Window, ink on decaying paper, 24 x 18

In February and March of 1964 I suffered a life-changing emotional upheaval, brought on by a severe case of culture shock in Sweden the previous summer, the assassination of President Kennedy the previous November, the worst math professor of all time, and, most significant, the powerful re-emergence of my drive to create art. I dropped out of Princeton University.

Through the luckiest chain of events, despite my poor father’s efforts to shoehorn me back into mathematics, I found myself—no, I wriggled myself into the design department of a local company, Rowe AC Manufacturing, the second largest maker of vending machines in the country, perhaps the world. And best of all, I fell under the mentorship of the best boss any fragile young person could hope for, Walter Koch.

I had had no formal training in art, despite requests for lessons I had made growing up, but Walter took me on—I have no idea why except for a remarkable charity. I just read in an old journal recently that he had told me he discerned my need for a father figure.

At some point during my first year at Rowe, Walter handed me a heavy zipper folder which contained two dozen pages of plastic color chips inserted into slots. Walter asked me to read the explanation pages of the chips and report to him, because he had not found time for it, and I eagerly got started. Soon he appointed me the eighteen-year-old color expert for the second largest vending machine company in the country. It was a very great honor and I studied and practiced even more.

The book of color chips was a complete model of the color system of Wilhelm Ostwald. If you have seen a depiction of a color solid it was most likely that of Professor Albert H. Munsell. I had learned in a psychology class that color had three dimensions: hue, saturation and brightness. Those are Munsell’s dimensions. This, Ostwald’s, is not the same. Lucky for me.

Ostwald’s color solid is much neater than Munsell’s asymmetric color tree. Ostwald’s solid consists of two shallow cones, joined at their bases. Around the equator, or bases of this solid, are pure hues, twenty four of them. This equator is the color wheel with which we are all familiar. The axis of the solid is the gray scale.

In the years after leaving Rowe I was unable to find another copy of Walter’s book and I had to build my own out of paint company color chips and the pages of a sketch pad. I placed the chips as best I could according to a book, not as good as Walter’s, that I found in 1976 on the fifth floor of the Los Angeles Public Library. A maniac has since burned that floor. I present a photo of one of my pages. As you can see, I was unable to find swatches for two of the colors. I meant to go back one day with my paints and create the missing colors on my pallete, but the firebug got there first.

Imagine that I have cut a section out of the two-cone color solid. The vertex to the right, which would have come from the equator, is pure hue number 3. To the left of the triangle would be the axis of the solid, a vertical gray scale, but we don’t put it in because it is the same for each page.

Along the upper edge are colors acquired by mixing the pure hue with set percentages of white. These are the tints. (Please overlook the fact that these chips, coming from various sources, have not aged equivalently. One of them I cut from a paper bag!)

Along the lower edge are the shades, mixtures of the pure hue with black.

In the interior of the triangle are organized the tones: mixtures of hue, white and black. Along any descending (left to right) diagonal all the colors have the same percentage of black but decreasing percentages of white. Along the ascending diagonals, the percentage of white is kept constant. You should be able to see this for yourself.

Ostwald, you see, designates color according to hue, percentage of white, and percentage of black. Every color can be uniquely specified with just these three measures.

That’s enough technicalities for one day and I will end with just this: Using Walter’s book I trained myself to identify the exact hue of any color. I discovered that browns are red-orange in hue, skin is yellow-orange to orange regardless of race, and many colors we call olive green are just yellow. I wish I could assign you to look those up for yourself, but you have no book.

The best I can suggest is Ostwald: The Color Primer, edited by Faber Birren.

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On Painting from Photographs

12/25/2016

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Last Day on the Suwannee, acrylic, 24 x 30"

Today I’ve been pondering the value of painting from photographs and my feelings about the process.

I do prefer to paint from life. I cherish the connection between me and my subject, but I paint from photographs when it becomes necessary: sometimes when it is the only way I can capture the subject in motion or in a difficult position, sometimes when I am in a location for a short time only, and sometimes when I review my photographs from past activities and decide one of them would make a good painting.

If I have the luxury of time, a painting from life can attain the same level of detail and finish as one I might create from a photograph. Several of my paintings done from life could easily have originated from photographs; but that is never my intention, it just reflects the fact that I paint the same way regardless of my source. Does that undermine the significance of those pieces? Or of the paintings that did originate in the camera? I feel just as warmly toward those works as any of my others.

When enjoying the work of another artist I naturally assume that it was done from life, and will be disappointed if I learn that it was generated instead from a photograph. And yet I respond to those paintings almost as favorably.

That makes me wonder. Why not just always paint from photos? I think some artists do. Or, more extreme, why not just take photographs and look at them? But more on that later.

It’s important to recognize that enjoying the creation of a painting is a completely different concern from enjoying looking at a painting. I treasure the experience of connection that the act of painting provides me, and that determines my work preference.

But even though I aspire to paint only according to my own best vision, still I am interested to know why works of art are received and appreciated as they are. My current best guess follows.

When we look at a simple line drawing of a figure, we perceive the image of a figure. We don’t stop to think what a piece of brain magic this is, but let’s do so now.

There are no lines around figures or faces in the world. A plain curving line provides no retinal similarity to the view of a person, and yet such a drawing can take on gesture, solid form, even emotion. This is an amazing leap, and it is the brain that accomplishes it. In fact, the brain rather enjoys the exercise. Line drawings, lost edges, loose painting strokes—we love those, but why? It is the ambiguity that allows—no, requires—the brain to make an interpretation and convince itself, on some level, that it is viewing solid reality, and in the course of this exercise it douses itself with endorphins. There need be no concern for us at this point as to why this happens; it just does.

Further, we can enjoy paintings and drawings even when they are not loose, even when they accurately mimic the image projected onto the retina from a live scene—or from a photograph. Could it be that a highly realistic painting or drawing provides endorphin-inducing uncertainty as well? It would seem so.

Might even a photograph provide similar ambiguity? But a photograph leaves no effective room for dual interpretations. We cannot revel in the physical method of production of a photo because it is mechanical, even when the artist alters the image given her by the camera, because that alteration does not reveal her hand. We enjoy photography in other ways (not under discussion here). But when I recognize that an apparently photographic image is actually the production of a human hand, something changes in my appreciation. Beyond the admiration or envy I may feel, I can like the work, sometimes in spite of myself.

True, photorealism fails to excite me the way a less defined piece can. The brain work is not the same, yet the knowledge that I am looking at the work of a person does allow for an ambiguous interpretation of the image in the way a photograph cannot. I can view the work as paint or as image, and that ambiguity does appeal to me.

A question I cannot answer is why highly illusionistic artwork is so widely favored, because I myself much prefer the ambiguity—or even polyguity*—of a work that shows the artist’s hand.

*I made that word up, to signify more than two possible interpretations. I then found the word online in a discussion of Joyce’s Ulysses, used just as I have here. My great big fat dictionary does not list “polyguity,” but it defines “ambiguity” as allowing two or more interpretations, so there was no need for the new word. But I think it’s cool so I’m keeping it. Besides, the prefix “ambi” is commonly understood to mean just two.

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The Muse Does Not Motivate

10/10/2016

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I am bothered by the admonition coming from multiple sources: Work! Work every day! Work a lot! Work whether you want to or not!

Here comes my resistance. I’ve been told to do yoga every day, to play the piano every day, to write every day, to meditate every day, to exercise every day, and, yes, to paint every day.

View from the Crosswalk Cafe, Acrylic on Canvas, 18 x 24". I was inspired by these shapes and colors right across the street. I am motivated to explore the interrelation of architectural and organic forms, partly because I am both artist and mathematician.

Why does it matter to so many people that every artist work every day? Of course it matters to the art material manufacturers and vendors, and the magazines, and the art workshop leaders, and the contest sponsors and the writers about art who need to urge others to do something, maybe because they themselves need urging. But come on.

I am not convinced that forcing oneself to do something—just do something, anything—is going to spur ones evolution. I see plenty of evidence to the contrary. I would not want to start churning out poorly thought out multiple versions of a stale inspiration just because I haven’t taken the time to generate a fresh original vision. I dig my heels in at the notion of painting just anything I see or think of, like the tourist who shoots hundreds of snapshots but composes none of them. Nothing against artists who copy themselves just to keep busy, nor against tourists who photograph everything—or the painters who resemble them.

I’m just not made that way.

I have more ideas than I know what to do with. But I suspect that maybe everybody does, they just don’t notice them or act on them.

A while ago I wrote about “just doing stuff.” I am not talking about that now. This is different. Taking on a project, and musing ones way through it is not the same as forcing oneself to take up a daily discipline. Picasso talked about starting a drawing and not knowing where it would go. That’s “just doing stuff.” I don’t recall him suggesting that anyone has to force herself into it.

There are many artists who work every day, and I am sure that on many days they are less than eager but they do it anyway. That’s fine. They don’t have to be forced to work against their will by some essayist. They are compelled by something else, and I think I know what that is.

You’re hot on the trail of something and you don’t want to stop. Sure, some mornings it is hard to get started, but what gets you going is a larger, internal purpose.

Look at live art, art that has stood the test of time, and you can feel it. It’s a powerful experience. You can sense that artist exploring, pushing ahead, and fully engaged. (And sometimes I don’t get that feeling, and those works leave me cold.) Those artists kept at it because they were almost there. They were on the verge of “getting it” and couldn’t let loose.

It’s the impossibility of actually “getting it” that keeps us going forever. If we ever got it and kept on getting it, things would become boring, because that could happen only if the task was too easy or we were deluding ourselves. Get bored, and we will have to force ourselves to continue—but we won’t get any better. More practiced, maybe, but not better.

Think of Monet and his haystacks or his Rouen Cathedrals. I get the sense that Monet said to himself something like, “I’d like to try that haystack backlit, or on a foggy day,” except he probably said it in French. I find it hard to believe that he forced himself out there to perform a drudgery. Maybe he did, but I don’t see it. Not in him and not in many dozens of other artists. Instead I can feel them swept along by a great purpose.

That, in fact, is what I believe makes a great artist great. A mission. Artists who have stood the test of time were in pursuit of a large idea, and were motivated by it. El Greco wanted to portray spirituality, Cezanne to signify solid form, Matisse to interlock great shapes of color. You can disagree with any of these interpretations if you like, but if I have incorrectly named their large goals, still my point remains that they had such goals.

It is purpose that motivates the artist to work steadily—not a magazine essay or quips about inspiration.

Picasso said “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” I disagree. Inspiration can occur at any time.

I just read in one of Robert Genn’s newsletters that Grant Wood said “All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.”

Authors on creativity commonly cite the shower as the birthplace of many of our finest epiphanies.

And, finally, consider the still-relevant 17th century French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes. This prolific thinker received his best inspirations while lying in bed, which he undertook prodigiously. It was while flat on his back, watching a fly on the ceiling—or so the story goes—that he conceived the profound mathematical invention that linked geometry and algebra: Cartesian coordinates.

Inspiration is everywhere.

But “they” are right; inspiration is over-rated. And the muse does not motivate. That’s the other half of why it is pointless to sit around waiting for her—it’s too easy to just keep sitting and chatting with her!

So this is what it comes down to:
The casual artists, the hobbyists, paint for the pleasure of it. There is no point to forcing themselves to work because then it would not be pleasure. Leave those good people alone!

The more serious artist has a meta-purpose, a purpose behind the immediate purpose. If an artist feels that forcing herself to work is a good idea, then she must believe that her art has significance and value. She has to discover the meaning of her work—its mission—which will motivate production, and she will be compelled to report for duty regardless of her mood or level of inspiration.

Read, think, discuss, experiment, practice—but don’t let anyone tell you what to do every day. Learn how to stimulate your own inspiration and find your purpose; then action will come.

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Just Doing Stuff

9/11/2016

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I had to ignore several internal admonitions in order to execute this work, and more still to show it here.

Tamed; 18 x 24", acrylic on canvas

My friend Denis Longhi and I stopped in at the Dallas Museum of Art early this past spring and wandered somewhat aimlessly. I found myself in a small gallery of ancient American art, regarding a figurine of a man in a sort of skirt.

While I stood contemplating this little sculpture, I imagined myself in the moccasins of its creator, and suddenly I understood something that the primitive artist enjoyed and that I seek.

The carver of that little statue was “just doing stuff”.

“Just doing stuff”! It was a charming piece, not at all an accurate representation of the proportions of the human figure. I imagined its creator bowed to no canons, no rules, no concerns for how others have done it. Nobody saying that’s not what a knee looks like, or why did you carve those little U’s at the bottom of the skirt, or I don’t get the sense of this person breathing. The sculptor was “just doing stuff,” following the impulses or ideas that inspired the work.

It may well be that in fact the artist was abiding by strict rules and had had to endure many critiques in the course of learning how to make those figurines, keeping to a process that sucked the originality from the work, but I don’t want to believe it and I don’t care. My insight was that it is possible to make art by “just doing stuff”, and that I aspire to working in that frame of mind.

My challenge is a bit more complicated than that of my imagined primitive stonecarver; it is complicated by the presence in my brain of all those canons and dictums and art history and rules and suggestions that I have learned over the past fifty-some years. The ancient American artist may well have been aware of which sort of stone made the best carving tool and how the material would take to that tool and even how this figure would be viewed, but still my intuition was powerful. That artist was “just doing stuff.”

Stop for a moment. Please, reader, I want to be very careful to convey exactly what I mean by “just doing stuff.” I do not mean working carelessly or casually, but I do mean the relaxation of those bossy censors, internal and external, that talk us out of every little deviation from their dictated path.

I want that feeling of “just doing stuff,” and I want my viewer to get that sense of my work, but I also want my art to be educated by what I cannot pretend not to know. (That’s a necessarily convoluted way of saying I want my art to be educated by what I know.) Is that possible? I believe it is. But to keep that feeling of freedom requires a bit of juggling. Some “knowledge” has to be ignored, while other knowledge similar to it has to be kept steadily in mind.

Let me think about this a little more.

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Going Tonal

7/31/2016

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Round Hedges: Acrylic on Canvasboard, 12 x 9. The computer does not replicate colors accurately.

Two of the more celebrated Plein Air guidelines (I won’t say rules), are:
                Clearly indicate the direction of the sun’s light, and
                Indicate atmospheric and time-of-day conditions.

One logical consequence of these two—well—rules, is this corollary:
                Never paint on a cloudy day. (And many do follow this proscription.)

Here is a little painting that violates the first and third of these three, because of its adherence to the second. In spite of its wrong-headedness (and I have been informed of its shortcomings vis-a-vis these criteria), I find myself more and more pleased with it as time goes on.

No, it is not dramatic. And, lacking bright walls and dark shadows, this painting does not feature the illusion of a clear day.

There is more to painting than illusionism—not a new idea. To be beautiful or exciting a work does not have to be a visual copy of a retinal impression made by light bouncing around in the world; or, worse, of a chemical or electronic reaction to said light beams. One can paint that, and I sometimes do, but when I do I have other concerns than photorealism.

(The word “illusionistic” is preferable to the word “realistic.” Realism in art has connoted down-to-earth subject matter rather than visual style. Gustave Courbet’s The Stonebreakers, for example, is realistic in that it depicts the harsh reality of labor, rather than by aspiring to be a photographic rendering.)

I enjoy the challenge of painting representationally, while choosing patterns, colors, and textures that work “abstractly.” Most Western representational artists would likely say the same; I favor the abstract more than average.

Gustave Courbet: The Stonebreakers

For me, the appeal of Round Hedges lies not so much in its representation of a house and yard than in its relations of colors and shapes. These days color schemes like this one are called tonal, and I couldn’t be happier to see these beautiful colors recognized and legitimized. There is something just gorgeous about interactions among muted colors.

Our Rocks, 1976; Oil on canvas, 22 x 22. "Not colorful."

I have been relishing tonal colors for many years. Forty years ago I took a couple of my plein air landscapes into a gallery on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles. (I knew better than to try a gallery in downtown LA, where vacuous abstract pourings enjoyed high favor.) The colors interrelated to my satisfaction—tonally, to use the word I’ve learned only recently.

The lady took one glance at my paintings.

“These aren’t colorful at all!”

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Artists (and others) as Critics

7/28/2016

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My friend Nancy writes:
Artists, I’ve found, never seem to like a critique by another artist; and if that's true, does an artist like it from anyone...if unsolicited?

Ego, Id, Superego Acrylic on canvas 30 x 30" The immensity of the locomotive, emphasized by showing only a part of it and contrasting it with the men who operate it, fascinates me. I also especially enjoy the compartmentalized composition.

My opinion:
As a youth (I am talking about high school here) I noticed that many of my contemporaries used negative criticism in order to appear intelligent when discussing art and literature. Sometimes that criticism came across as a declaration of their own superiority. Those critics must certainly have been more intelligent than I, because I usually missed the weaknesses my peers found, and often enough continued to fail to see them even after they were pointed out.

I received a full share of unsolicited criticism myself, at home and from my less studious classmates, so it was only natural that I should develop a suspicion of the activity. In college I was a little leery when I undertook a course in the Philosophy of Aesthetics; would I founder in a sea of negative judgments that were invisible to me?

What a relief to read the opinion of a philosopher that the purpose of criticism is to explicate features of a work in order to increase the reader’s or viewer’s understanding and appreciation!

Judgment is not helpful criticism. It has, more than once, damaged my own artistic progress—my fault, I suppose, as the host of a sensitive nature. By extension I am convinced judgment is destructive to the creative functioning of many artists. And even if not—as would be the case for an artist who was finished with his career by virtue of his being, for example, dead—still, judgment posing as criticism robs the reader or viewer of insight the sophisticated critic could have provided, and of the opportunity to make up her own mind.

Two minor points to forestall confusion:
When an artist enters a competition or asks to be juried into a show or association, judgment is exactly what is called for, and the reasonable artist expects it. If the artist feels unwilling or incapable of tolerating a judgment, or has no confidence in the judge, she has the option to decline participation.

Second, both positive and negative judgment can be harmful. This is why, ever aiming to please, I chose for a while to work in seclusion while I attempted to coax out a delicate authenticity. (Ego, Id, Superego is one of the sheltered paintings.) It is too easy for praise of one or another aspect of my work to turn my head away from my purpose. And I am doing a good enough job, even now, of second guessing and judging these secret pieces.

You can see why, then, I might be reluctant to call one competent artist “better” than another; and maybe also why artists can be so negative about the work of others. In fact artists, even famous well-established ones, are often the first and most vehement assailants of new movements, when you would expect us to celebrate innovation. We should be in the best position to spotlight subtleties in an artwork, and in a way that helps viewers more fully appreciate it. So I try to do that.

All of that said, it is only fair now to disclose what I personally enjoy in a painting. I enjoy beauty: lush color relationships, graceful line, exquisite forms. I marvel at impressive paintings that show advanced technique or astounding patience. Most of all, though, I am drawn to works that excite me; (Ego, Id, Superego is a success for me in that regard) and usually I cannot tell you right away just what quality of the artwork is doing that, though I do lean toward clear and compelling design. It requires study on my part to comprehend what is turning me on. This is a classic case of “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.”

Being a visual and rather abstract person, I am not stirred by messages in paintings, narratives in paintings, politics in paintings, or expressionism in paintings. I may like such canvases, and appreciate their messages et al., but if an image electrifies me, it will be for its visual qualities. Messages, narratives, politics and the expression of feelings best reach me in verbal form.

There is a role for judgment, however. We need to decide which painting to buy, which I wish every reader of this blog will do today. (Mine or somebody’s!)

My criterion is very simple: the better painting (for you) is the one with staying power. If a canvas turns invisible on your wall or begins to annoy you, then it no longer serves its purpose and should be replaced. Nothing wrong with that, by the way. In another blogpost I will advocate a change in the significance we accord the visual arts.

What does it mean to say a painting has staying power? First of all, to buy a painting for any reason other than enjoyment is stupid—but more on that another time. You want to enjoy your purchase for as long as possible, and that means that you should see new things in it as time goes on. Your own knowledge of the image will expand, either through education or familiarity, in which case the art must be able to stand up to your more evolved scrutiny. How can you be assured that it will? Your level of study helps, but fashions change and even the experts disagree. Just be aware that the more a work stimulates your thoughtful contemplation, the more likely it will satisfy your aesthetic appetite for years to come.

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Artists (and others) as Critics

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