I'm starting small. Here are 3 rocks. The reddish ones on the ends are from the mountains and the middle one is from the coast. I painted them separately and put this composition together in Photoshop.
I get these little zen moments when painting things like rocks and sticks. I realize how complicated it is, and painting a rock becomes as complex an endeavor as painting a huge landscape. In the moment I am painting I am seeing clearly with no expectations or influences...it's all just colors and shapes.
4 comments:
In a way, isn't that part of what we learn from impressionism? that rocks are not just brown, grey, or whatever? I guess I mean that the Impressionists represented stuff by emotional/reductive processes. but what I take from that is how complex a "red" rock really is. How does anyone ever paint the sky, or the sea?
James
Whenever I look at an Impressionist work of art, or even something Neo-Expressionist, like Richter, I feel that painting is one big generalization, as if the artist has to be constantly simplifying what they are trying to represent. That makes painting as a reductive or emotional process a very political thing to do because the artist is influencing how the subject is seen, and reducing it and generalizing it.
Any chance we could call what I'm doing Journalism?
Not to overstate the obvious, but doesn't an artist always influence how a subject is seen? In any of this (photos, paintings, narratives), we're not seeing the objects you've seen; we're seeing your experience of the objects.
Not only that, but the experience is again interpreted by you, the viewer. And let's not forget the medium and the presentation, in this case viewing watercolors on a monitor, and how that adds another layer.
But the main question is whether this a reductive process, and I think it is. The moment the artists takes paint to paper, the original experience is generalized, and I don't think the viewer can ever really know what the artist's intentions are.
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