Dock Scene Memory

Lobster Dock Memory

Dennett's Wharf

Bowdoin Memory

This is a test of your intelligence. If you can get the gist of these images you must be highly intelligent since they are messy and chaotic. You probably have a steel trap for a mind. Maybe you think a two year old could do this kind of stuff and you could do better. Well what shall I do? I painted them and now I am terribly confused and everything seems chaotic. Nothing came out right.

This reminds me of those letters on the internet where everything is misspelled but you can read it anyway. Here’s one titled, ‘If You Can Raed This, You Msut Be Raelly Sarmt’: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2009/03/31/if-can-raed-tihs-msut-be-raelly-smrat.html. The human mind can figure out stuff that we don’t even realize. In fact I think that the Impressionists figured this out back in the 1890’s. They painted the gist of the thing without much detail.The Public at first thought the Impressionists work was messy and chaotic, lazy and good for nothing. Now a days we all bow down and give proper due to the masters; if you want to buy one you better have around a hundred million kicking around. What happened? Modern man likes to participate in the art work by mentally putting things together or figuring out what is going on. Maybe that explains why some pretty crazy stuff is applauded in the art world. It’s a game to figure out, sometimes not much to do with visual imagery or mastery of old techniques.

Back in art school I had a teacher that made me use a long stick to paint with. It was to force me to loosen up the tight control and excessive detail I was previously obsessed with. I was encouraged not to try to draw accurately but to use kinetic energy, body language, and rhythm to work out my painting. I painted a lot of paintings with a stick and had some fun with it. It broke me out of tight control and I learned that the primitive scribbling of a two year old is a very powerful thing. That two year old has no preconceived notions as to what is good and proper art. He or she just responds to whatever they are feeling and they are in the moment with energy. That is not such an easy thing for an adult to do. We are conditioned, given social norms. We copy others, we usually think in the box. The two year old doesn’t know what the box is. Maybe when they start to learn about the box is when they learn the word ‘no’.

I painted these four works above with the idea of breaking up the original subject into kinetic energy. I allowed myself to scribble an impression of the subject and to avoid some preconceptions as how to paint. I experimented with simplification and complexity all at once. I am not really able to undo all my art training so I was constantly battling between random craziness and efforts to bring it all back into a unified image. In the weekly painting class that I am teaching we are working on recognizing elements of design that we appreciate in a given subject and then emphasizing them to a degree. This develops into some level of abstraction in our work.

My subjects here are all from waterfront docks. I have a fascination with the tidal zone, the activity of the people, boats, and water are endlessly variable and captivating. It is a romantic notion I know, and I decided to let that fascination run its course. We will see if it ever ends. In these works I used an older painting or photo as my subject and emphasized the repetitive lines that I saw in the docks, the energetic movement and chaos of all the stuff laying around, the patchy shapes of little shacks, and the curving boat shapes. The sketches were done in a minute just trying to capture the flavor of the thing, and the painting was very fast too. In order to shut out self-censorship I have to race ahead leaving no time or crack in which ‘the box’ could enter. This forces a sense of confidence and ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’ as they say in the theatre. I used colors very experimentally and without much reference to reality. I played with shape and color to let them coordinate or bounce off one another. That was a very intuitive process. When I filled most of the space I would step back and take a more studied approach. I would try to pull things together and coordinate harmonies.

This was a fun exercise and something I don’t do without an effort. If I don’t challenge myself with some kind of assignment like this I will revert to day one of art 101 and forget everything I have ever learned, try to copy with rigid tightness, see only little details, never the big picture. I’ve found that through this process that it is the big picture that is the most important thing. If you put in the right shapes and lines but in a different order it doesn’t seem to stop one from getting the idea. This allows a freedom in the making and allows participation with the viewer. The viewer has to put things back together somehow and that process can be more satisfying than when I spell out every detail, conform to every convention, and serve up something completely worked out. The big picture is important in every kind of art work. The big shapes must be identified; the overall coordination that we call composition must be worked out. Even in realistic work such as in Renaissance painting all the elements of design and composition are there just beneath the surface.

 Today we can remove the realistic part and keep the design and composition and be very comfortable with that. The really uncomfortable stuff is when they also throw out the design and composition. Art history has worked its way and ‘new’ ways of seeing are now accepted fairly easily. Yet sometimes we have to learn what has already been learned before us. Some ideas are so big they take more than a hundred years to assimilate maybe even millennia. Einstein discovered that matter and energy are the same thing, the Egyptians made pyramids, moved huge rocks weighing hundreds of tons, the Greeks developed geometry, bronze casting, and philosophy. Now we increase the body of knowledge at an exponential rate so I think I am getting further and further behind. But if I can recapture the mind of a two year old I will be satisfied. Dno’t yuo ageer.