Amy Tan on Creativity

Amy_Tan_on_creativity

I found this an interesting view on creativity

The Process of painting:Connected themes.

Some paintings are just one incarnation of one idea. There can be more.

Like these circle trees. The earlier one is quite small(40/50cms) and mostly blue, green and umber. After a while an idea grew to make a larger circle combined with the planetary view as it occurred in another composition. The idea of a circle of trees coinciding(or not) with other circular forms seemed inevitable. So the latest project is this larger painting showing red planets and trees.

Sometimes an idea comes up while painting another one. For instance when I was painting the small astronaut(40/50cm) the urge to paint a larger space themed painting became rather strong, so before the portrait was finished I had to paint the spaced rock arch(100/80cm). So really this shows how one painting can be the start of the next.

Norman rockwell photo’s

Listening to NPR I heard this program about Norman Rockwell. I like his work a lot and knew he used photographs, but this is the story of the photographers. He was criticised for using photographs, while today many painters use them to produce rather bland paintings, a few well known masters like Degas, Delacroix, used photography as an additional tool to create great works of art. According to Answers.com,Delacroix even wrote in his journal that ‘if a man of genius should use the Daguerreotype as it ought to be used, he will raise himself to heights unknown to us’.

Read the article and listen to the interview here

Is it about art, or about the artist?

Sometimes this question worries me. Especially when I see or read items like this video clip of Andy Warhol eating a hamburger. I know Warhol often had a camera around to film his life, much like all those people now recording and showing their lives on youtube and twitter. Sometimes I get the impression it’s really more of a statement towards those who follow every move a certain artis makes and sometimes I get the feeling it’s considered a serious expression of art.

Or maybe I’m wrong and it is a real art. Or is there a genuine need for artists to  enhance the importance of their own person and life in order to create relevance to their art? This seems really shallow to me. Almost as cynical as “Marketing the artist”.  Or just entertaining like the Artist in a Chocolate commercial. I realise there is always the necessity for artists to “go to market”, but surely the basis of an artists career should be his work, not narcissism.

Robert Hughes and the art business, the Mona Lisa Curse.

I saw an interesting item on tv yesterday. It was called: ” The Mona Lisa curse”. Though it sounds like the a sequel to “the Davinci code” it is actually a documentary about Robert Hughes and his view on the current relationship between money and art and how this came to be in the past thirty years.

This documentary made me think again about the relationship between money and art and off course my own position towards this. It seems many people and artists consider art a business and it is very difficult to deny that there is a definite connection between the freedom to make art and the need to feed a family(for instance). I don’t know how a hungry artist can concentrate on creating meaningful art, but history shows that it is possible.

I supose the bottom line is that an artist needs income to be free to create, but needs to avoid the greedy business attitude that brings us the ugly and populist art-business that Robert Hughes shows us.

Maybe it’s not so complicated really: just concentrate on making your art and cherish the people, who by buying your work enable you to create more good stuff. Make good art, to a fair price and it’ll be a fair business too. for all parties.

See part of the documentary here

And: Gustav Klimt and Mona Lisa

Warhol art factory

The Guardian article

The Mona Lisa curse on Culture most wanted

The process of painting: Plein air painting? Doesn’t work for me!

The weather improves and the urge to be outdoors becomes very strong. So why not go out with the easel and box of paints and brushes? The colours and subjects are there right before you! No lack of inspiration to the “plein air” painter. Well maybe, but I’m not one of those. I see the colours and landscape, the sky and streaming sunlight, but to me they are not subjects for painting. They are elements for painting, but actually looking at a landscape and jotting them on a canvas ruins my view. I do want to go out with a camera and capture the moment, but in my paintings I need that other moment that is never actually there except in my mind or on my canvas. I can paint outside, but  several elements form my landscape: a sky I saw yesterday, a building I encountered somewhere. Painting what I see makes me restless and impatient. To use the camera suits me at such moments.  When I paint outside it is never the landscape before me. I can draw as I would draw schematics to remember the landscape or a composition, but later I might draw or paint my true impression of the landscape I saw. I will use the sky I saw yesterday, move the mountain to the centre, grow a rock or two and add an animal I know could be there somewhere. Meanwhile the outdoors is just another well lit studio.

Painting outdoors, but not the actual landcape.

What is this Twitter thing?

I gave up on Twitter.I really like the way blogsites work. It’s a wonderful way to show your work, adventures and opinions without the hassle of code for a website. A few people suggested it would be a good idea to try Twitter too. I tried it for a few days, but got utterly bored with the sad content and the impossibility to add more than an sms-like message. And then I heard Brian Unger’s report about Twitter. I completely agree: hear his report on NPR

I'm sure you don't want to know what this guy does all day!

The process of painting: How to decide a painting is finished

While painting you could always technically improve your picture until at some time it might be “perfect”.

But sometimes a “flaw” makes a painting more interesting, so it is hard to decide to change something after a long time. Usually, I make small changes within the first few months. So when to finish?
I suppose this coincides with the stage where any improvement I try doesn’t really work. There’s this self portrait for instance where the rear of the room is slightly askew because I drew it like that in the sketch. Working on the painting I was on my way to correct this as I realised the “wrong” perspective worked better than the intended straight “horizon”. Perspective can be measured an any viewer who knows how to do that can find the flaws, so it is tempting to try and fix them all. It’s the same with wayward brushstrokes that I made while setting up the painting or smudges that are supposed to grow into an object. Sometimes leaving the brushstrokes or even blurring earlier details make a much stronger effect than completely working it. Joseph Turner was someone who did this extremely well. Just look at the drama of his sky and the haunting shimmering of the old warship being towed to her final destination.

Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her Last Berth to be broken up, 1838

Just think how it would have been if the artist had fixed all the details and had finished that painting as so many of his colleagues would. I suppose it would still be a great painting, but I’m sure it would lack the dramatic impact. I’m sure most of these dramatic brushstrokes were intentional and took a lot of thought or at least show a great talent!

I’ve heard someone say every artist should have somebody who takes a painting away before he works on it too long.

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The process of painting: the growing canvas

The start of a 17/12cm

Starting a large canvas is a daunting thing. There are huge surfaces of emptiness to fill with tiny brushstrokes. Starting a small painting is the reverse: the small surface seems to small to give a good look into a whole landscape. The urge is to fill it with something small, like one bird or a far away view of a tree or building.  It is hard to realise the small canvas is suitable for the same principles of composition as the large one.

50/40cm seems large enough

When the composition has been decided and while the painting progresses, something interesting happens: The canvas grows! The surface that at first seemed too small to even show a sparrow in some detail, turns into the window to a wide landscape. Obviously the small canvas has less room for small brushstrokes compared to the large one, but on a large canvas it is not common to use the same “resolution” anyway.  We really shouldn’t be surprised by this growing canvas, because that’s really what happens when you print your holidaysnapshots on a fifteen centimeter wide paper. This size would be  a miniature for a painting.

The last supper: 460 × 880 cm

The average computer screen is smaller than most paintings and we are used to view large paintings as Da Vinci’s “last supper” on our laptops, while really it’s size is closer to the screen we see in a small cinema.  This only shows how the human brain and cultural conditioning translates the elements of a picture of any size into a window into the artists world. It is even possible to make a large painting look small by using the appropriate elements. That is how we can accept a “budget print” landscape and a portrait of our beloved dictator spanning a stadium wall as a creditable rendition of reality.

I’d say the difference between a large painting or a small one only amounts to the difference between looking through a hole in the fence or over it.

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The process of painting: Must an artist disconnect from modern life?

Imagine an artist working in his quiet studio, a slightly dark room with only one source of light on his painting. An easel, a small table with paints and one chair are the main objects in the room. Maybe there’s not even a chair because the painter works standing up. Maybe there’s his subject: a person or a slowly decomposing still life.  But not much else, the painter works in silent solitude. This is what many people see when they think of an artist at work.

Francisco de Goya painting in his studio

But in reality there will be few painters who still work like that. There will at least be modern lighting. A few good daylight lamps and more often a whole battery of fluorescent tubes turn the romantic studio into the modern workshop it really is.  Some painters will work in silence, but others have a good array of audio equipment softly playing classical music or blaring loud rocktunes. I use daylight from my window, a few fluorescent tubes and at least one light bulb, so I can see how the painting works in common “livingroom” conditions.  Up to this point it’s all at least forty year old technology.  There might even be a telephone.

In my studio there’s also a computer and I bet there are quite a few computers in painter’s studios. I use it to store photographs. Digital Photography is great for subjects that don’t like to sit still or to show people all over the world what my paintings look like. Oh, but for that you’ll need internet and a website too.  I also like to show people how the latest painting is going. There comes the weblog.  When I forget to update that log I get emails asking if I’ve gone on holiday.  So the modern painter can use email.  When I finish a painting I upload a picture to my website and if it’s for sale it goes in my webstore.

I must say it is a strange contrast when I think about it. All those digitools don’t make a painting, but they are part of the world.  Some would say a painter should move it out of the studio as painting is a purely manual occupation.  The painter should climb his ivory tower, shut the door, grind up his pigments and oils and paint some esotherical images. Well if you’d like to do that I’m sure that will make for beautiful paintings, but my preference is to link up with the world. I find it is interesting how this digital technology has entered our world and the world of most people. I’m still convinced internet is a road to showing art to a larger public. I’m so happy to read comments  from people far away or to see work from colleagues in places I had never heard of.  I know people suffer from information overload, but I’m convinced that is just one of the teething troubles. People will learn how to filter the information they need or want. Off course we run the risk that information and products will be smoothed down to ugly mediocrity by syndication or advertising, so we need to make sure Internet will remain the free platform it is now, by supporting open source applications and creative communities.

I have no idea what the future of  modern communications will bring us, but I am convinced I’ll be using them for a long time. In my studio, next to the ancient brushes and slowly drying oils.

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