Painterly approach.

Wednesday June 11, 2008

“Painterly painters admit that nature is full of detail, but they also insist that the eye sees little of it. Constantly moving and changing its focus, it sees three-fourths of the world as a blur. The painterly painter is obsessed by what the eye doesn’t see. But seeing what we don’t see is a complicated problem, for life gives us knowledge and knowledge transforms our way of looking.”

“Dutch painters made grasshoppers look like grasshoppers, and you saw the veins in the legs because the artist painted them. But when the legs aren’t painted and you still sense the veins, curiosity and interest are added to simple admiration. Then industry gives way to the magic of art.”

-both quotes are from an essay by Charles Movali

I like these quotes because they explain what I find so exciting about an image that’s got the freedom of a fast approach, loose brushwork, but careful intention in how the image is painted. When a paitning doesn’t have a slavish attention to detail, it can still tell you what you need to know about a scene. The artist can still be looking very carefully, and just be choosing what the essential elements of the scene are. Sometimes when I’m painting I’ll realize that my eyes are slightly out of focus. (There’s a way to sort of open or close your pupil to blur what your looking at… knock it out of focus. It’s a similar effect to squinting.) When I’m painting I don’t want to see any of the details. I want to see the scene in terms of color, shape, tone and how each of these elements is interacting with each other. These days it’s not even a conscious decision to unfocus the scene. I just start using my eyes differently. What’s surprised me a few times this spring is noticing that I’m keeping my eyes like this as I mix colors and apply paint to canvas. It seems to be helpful when I’m working on unifying the image on the canvas, as well as when I’m trying to simplify the scene to paint it. With my painting out of focus I’m seeing it as a whole and can think about what elements in the composition need to be adjusted.

“Overlook” 16 X 20”

To the point of how this “tool” I use while painting fits into these quotes; I find that when we are walking around interacting with the world, we aren’t often catching the world in sharp clear focus. Our eyes are always picking up way more information than we can process, and our brains filter it down into small pieces that we can handle. When I’m looking at someone else’s painting, I enjoy the mystery of putting together a scene that has been suggested by the aritst. I enjoy the painting that takes subtle color differences and exagerates them, showing the viewer how much more interesting the world around us can be if we stop to notice it. As primarily a landscape painter I’ld like to think a painting can help someone find more interest in the world around them… and that a painting can capture some of the magic of our surroundings.

Lastly, one more quote from this essay.
“Do you paint to be understood, or do you paint to understand?”

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