Artistic Process

no - sorry never heard of him! so the cool warmth missed the boat ...

vivien, i think he meant Morris Louis, and,bTW he died in the 60s(I think).louis was a groupy of the color field artists like Baziotes and (maybe) Merganthaler.
Hes the one that did the drippy multi colored stripes like flags. He called many of his pieces "unfurled' (NUMBER------)
ill stick to your find with prentice's work. His stuff is great and Im looking for more on the web.Thanks for the introduction to that artist

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I agree with what you say, Farmer, about high-winded talk about art. Art Speak and political Double Speak are great offenses to the ear. They are both ways of pompously appearing to be saying something without doing so.
Vivien, I too love to see the history of a painting's creation in its traces, one of the wonderful features of Matisse, Kitaj and Diebenkorn--and perhaps Rivers, whose work never rings my bell.

vivien, could you post that link to the Prentice paintings for JL and others? I dont know if everyone caught those the last time.
Prentice is an Irish (?) painter who just loads his canvases with passing light on villages and mountains. His work is bold and you can almost start shivering from his way of presenting a cold cloudy day with a few spots of fleeting sunlight. Its an image building that I really like. I was surprised that , when vivien posted the work a month ago, there was some negative reaction in that some people thought the viewer was being manipulated. I guess , in painting as in management , the old adage of'
'Never get caught in the act of manipulating peoiple" , still holds

jl and farmer - I'm glad you agree. Mmm love Diebenkorn, sadly i don't know the others you mention but will try to look them up.

the link to to the link on a2k is :

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7514

another artist whose work i like is Kurt Jackson - if you put his name in on google you should come up with a few sites.

David Prentice is English and lives in the Malvern hills nearish to the border with Wales. He paints there throughout the year and so his paintings have a deep knowledge of the area in all its moods.

ps I don't know Merganthaler but my work was indirectly influence by Frankethaler - I love to paint in thin washes of acrylic on unprimed canvas - it gets the most beautiful watercolour like effects.

oops-see, I meant Frankenthaler. Merganthaler is a geologist colleague. I think I just had a senior moment

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Farmerman, I spend the days in a series of senior moments. I'm only concerned, however, to avoid junior moments.
BYW, last year I tried the Frankenthaler approach (fluid acrylics on unprimed canvas). The glowing colors were delightful, but for some reason I ended up covering the canvas with black gesso and doing a quasi-cubist painting in thick acrylics (called "falling cubes"). The colors were nowhere as brilliant but the composition was the point of the exercise.

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Vivien, I absolutely LOVE his "Elgar's Spectrum." It is both clearly representational and abstract at the same time. Its painterly effect (as in all his work) is very sensous. Frankly, the only reason I do not try to do "scapes" like these is a fear of inability to do so. I find abstract work much more comfortable, even though most of them do in the end SUGGEST things in nature. One is called "Nocturnal Mindscape". It is purely an expression of imagination (and accident, of course). Prentice's work is not just a REPRESENTATION of experience; it is also a PRESENTATION of a personal reality to be shared by others.

One of my favorite paintings of my own, aw shucks, was done on raw canvas, title: Nude Resting by Her Bicycle with its Seat in Flames. Done in one of my last advanced painting classes back in the seventies, in one of those 45 minute pose situations. Hadn't heard of Frankenthaler then. (I had waaaaay more studio classes than art history classes.) It wasn't that I was so venturesome, it was that I was late in gessoing.

Still love that one.

To tell you the truth, I only like a few works of Frankenthaler. I dont consider painting on unprimed canvas a "breakthrough". I do like her studies of compliments, especially one that (I have no idea about the title) displays a smokelike play of intense orange next to a flat area of cerulian. I love that one
Her stained unprimed canvases, to me, look like sandwich wrappers from a hoagie shop.They leave me unsatisfied
Maybe thats my working class reference coming through.
I wish I could find that orange and blue work . Id post it. OK Ill go look for it
see ya later, Im off to artcyclopedia.com

I take a long time to finish my paintings, and it's difficult for me to keep the same mood throughout a painting. So, to have the same feel throughout the piece, I make a cd of music of the same mood for each piece, and listen to that cd on repeat. It really helps me create a cohesive feel.

As for coming up with ideas, I am always thinking about what to paint, and ofen frustrated that I am not thinking of somthing good enough. I take lots of digital pictures for photo reference, and I look through the internet for image ideas. My expriences, emotions, and thoughts lead me to pick certain images over others, and I use those to spark painting ideas.

Here's a fun engine for that, btw:
100 Random Pictures:
http://www.ga2so.com/random2.php

portal. I keep a journal to give me a time reference to my subject ideas. This helps me remember my feelings and my inspiration at the time I had the first ideas of a work. Then, if need be, i take pix and file them with the idea pages. My notebook /journal is mighty thick and im probably 3 years behind.

...

Hmm... I do somthing kind of like that, I keep them in folders on my computer. The computer arranges them in order created, so I know the approximate period they are from.

I used to use a dream journal for inspiration, but I got tired of that. Ah, the plight of a creator...

jl - yes you sum the paintings up well. For me they are really satisfying sustaining images.

I am not a great fan of Frankenthalers paintings - i just loved the way that the paint worked on the unprimed canvas! that is why i only said 'indirectly' influenced by her. I am not very interested in process painting for its own sake.

I love that edge between representation and abstraction.

I regularly sketch and paint in the landscape and this,for me, informs my paintings far better than a photograph can. The eye sees fleting colour changes and more subtle colours than a camera can catch, it can also adjust to see detail in highlights and shadows in a more natural way I am not suggesting that shadows shouldn't be mysterious and 'lost' - just that they shouldn't be mere darks as can occur with photos - this is getting garbled so i hope you all understand what i am waffling on about!

Sketching in the landscape/or your subject matter whatever it is, fixes information in your visual memory.

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Portal Star. Thanks for the random photos. The one I found most provocative (or evocative) is in the seventh row, second from the right column. I'd like to know which are the favorites of others.

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If I am a painter at all, I am a process painter. The process is clearly a collaboration between me and the painting (and two secret partners: duende and accident). Vivien, regarding the "edge between representation and abstraction", I am usually drawn, as the abstract process proceeds, to representational "suggestions" in the abstract forms and composition. I don't work for them, but once they present themselves I often "go along" with them, but always without becoming too representational. Right now I'm working on an abstract that suggests people. I don't mind (it's what the picture suggests, not me), but I resist putting eyes, ears, belts, etc. on them. They must remain mere suggestions (for dramatic effect) while priority is given to the overall abstract aesthetic image.

Re: art


It's 100 new pictures every time, chosen randomly from the internet, from both sites that once did and still exist. So no one else will see what you saw unless you post the pic! alas...
Oh BTW I forgot to warn you, some of the images are not work safe.