Abstract Paintings and Musings on Art
This is my first completed drawing/painting of the year, completed on 1-1-11. I’m returning to working with ink, something I’ve spent many years doing since at least high school, but this time I’m trying out some experimental techniques. I’m also exploring depicting patterns like those seen in the skin of giraffes and sea turtles.
Class notes from Poetic Non-Representational Acrylic Painting with Andrew Long, Fall 2007
The object in the painting – is it being an object vs. being a facsimile of the object? Does it have a history, a great hook, and richness, a fullness, or is it empty?
What’s the difference between this abstract piece of art and wallpaper?
Matthew Ritchie — “You mostly wait around for things to leak.” -MR, from this Boston Globe article.
Check out Guerra Paints in NY or Nova Paints in CA for a large bottle of pre-mixed binder & highly concentrated paints to mix.
To increase interest, drama, contrast, come in with a pure black, white or deeper shade of color to really pop things up in high relief. Try india ink.
Mediums – retarder will make paint work more like oils. Acrylic flow release will break apart the paint. Use GAC100 + water (50-50) to use atomizer.
Use a belt sander with 30-50 grit sandpaper to carve down into the history of your paint. Try a Dremel tool.
Jeff Koons has 80 assistants!
See and read more about the work of Mia Pearlman.
What do you think of when you think of a building? Do you think of the structure underneath? Why don’t they call it a “built”? “Building” is a verb – a process.
Maxine Price – a fellow student’s favorite artist, for layers and colors.
Just make work! Andrew made over 150 pcs. his first year; he’s now been painting 7 years.
Joan Snyder – who won a Brooklyn Museum exhibit.
Techniques:
“Between technique, vision, design, expression there is no seam; neither is one thing the cause and another the result.”
“Painterly…the subordination of individual objects to the sense of the circumambient medium, or the rendering of optical values as distinct from tactile, or as giving weight through color rather than through modeling, or as a distinction of focus through variations of brushstroke, etc.”
“Each painter’s idiosyncratic painting style is the…realization of several successive kinds of reading into the way paint symbolizes air, matter, space, light, flesh.”
“…sustaining of penetration so that the artist continually moves past a simply available solution to one which has greater depth.”
“What we take to be the same color when it has a vague edge is perceived completely differently from when it has a defined edge.”
“color modified by reflected light”
“color modification by simultaneous contrast”
“the amount of visual information which is capable of being transmitted by optical arrangements is in excess of what we require.”
“Rembrandt’s reduction creates and fortifies expression. This is because it acts out the way in which we find meaning in our living experiences.”
“Every choice, every action which decides something about each event must be taken with a view to the longest structure in time and sound which will give to the separate elements the most articulate meaning.”
Make a list of verbs and adjectives about your own work.
When struggling with a work, isolate parts of it and do lots of sketches to come up with a better composition.