Reading
I’m slowly working my way through Ways of Looking1. The author produces write ups for individual art works which is tremendously helpful for me. I don’t really know how to perceive art, or rather, I’m slowly learning. Although repetitious, I’m learning.
I’m currently in the middle chapters where the author discusses different aspects of why an artist creates. Art as event, or performance, etc.
The chapter Art as Confrontation was a fascinating read, though something of a turn off. However, the text of the chapter came back to me a few days after I read it as I attended a virtual life drawing session. The models had left their microphones on, and so the audience could hear their conversation. One of the models was apparently a sex worker and he was talking through the banal aspects of running his business. It was quite surreal.
But it reminded me of the exploitative aspects in the Art as Confrontation chapter. In particular, I was thinking of Santiago Sierra’s 160cm Line Tattooed on Four People.
Here, the artist paid people to have indelible tattoos drawn onto their bodies. The payments are appalling low to my modern eyes: $30dollars a person in one case, a bag of heroine in another (according to Ways of Looking). Sex workers in one, and unemployed labourers in another. This is the definition of exploitation.
I found myself contrasting in the moment to the model in my life drawing session. Sure, I was a paying customer, but they had arranged the session and invited me. It was an interesting mirror, that I don’t quite have the words to articulate fully.
It was disquieting, and very interesting. I think I was most fascinated by the fact I was able to draw the parallel at all.
I can’t find a reference for a quote attributed to Sierra: “The tattoo is not the problem. The problem is the existence of social conditions that allow me to make this work.” The quote is, however, everywhere in relation to the artist.
If this quote is true, then it further reinforces how much I find this work reprehensible. It echoes children declaring “I’m swinging my fist, if you get hit its your fault”.
The tattoo is a problem. So are the social conditions which the artist perceives as permission. Both are problems. The fact the artist seems to consider it permission is also a problem.
Perhaps I’m just opinionated.
Chiaroscuro
Back in high school, I was taught Chiaoscuro was the use of deep shadow to create strong contrasts in a painting. Artists like Caravaggio and Rembrandt were brought forward, with their profound impenetrable black swaths.
I think, like much taught in high school, the nuance was lost. Certainly, evoking contrasts is important: the visual system is keyed to contrast, and this draws attention. But chiaroscuro seems more than simply planting a white rectangle against a black field. From a purely visual perspective, there is a depth of modelling that appears to arise; the creation of space within the plane of the image via the difference in values. The darkness of the shadows seems to thrust the lighter forms forward.
Is it therefore that the focus here is not so much on the dark, but rather instead we’re painting the light? Further, that light is perhaps best expressed in deep contrast against shadow. Impressionists are also said to be ‘painting light’ and I see little of what I’d consider comparable to chiaroscuro. Instead I see the prismatic colours of light on display, there. Painting the light vs painting with light, perhaps?
While writing this, I fell into a rabbit hole as I’m prone to do. When I was thirteen, my family went on a trip to Europe. We spent three months, camping from Paris to central Turkey and back.
Of course, we went to Rome and the Vatican, amongst many other places. The Borghese had been closed for renovation for some time, but by some miracle they were having a short period of being open while we were there. I can distinctly remember my mother exclaiming that there was no chance we would go to Rome, and not go to the Borghese if we had the opportunity. And so we went.
I can remember how few people were there. It was almost like we had the entire place to ourselves. There are a few works I remember, all sculpture.
I can remember staring dumbfounded at how Antonio Canova had sculpted cushions and fabric.
And then we entered the room of Apollo and Daphne. This sculpture is etched in mind and has been since I was thirteen.
I remember expecting them to move. The flow of skin into bark, and fingers into leaves.
A moving experience does not express the impact. I was quite literally stunned, and that sculpture has stuck with me since.
It is fascinating how memory works. Seeing this picture brings back the smell of dried grass, the heat of Italian summer.
But, back to topic. Chiaroscuro. I see that here in this sculpture and I gain a sense of what the painters are attempting. Against the dark backdrop of its room, Apollo and Daphne leap into space highlighted by focused light. Depth. Form. Life. Their story caught in a moment of brilliant time, resolved entirely on this critical moment of transformation and escape.
Tonal Studies on White Background
Perhaps I chose a more complicated set up than I needed to. I had in mind that perhaps I could leverage these same objects for my assignment, later.
I was trying to think in shapes of ‘dark’ versus just drawing everything with contour. I can’t say I succeeded at that, but it was a valuable exercise.
The sunlight was moving quickly, and eventually the shadow of the house fell across my work area and I had to stop in favour of getting to the painting.
I decided I wanted to do this exercise twice. The second attempt was awful. I had gone with Prussian blue and burnt umber as my colours producing a lot of very dead greys, and weird greens. Lesson learned.
It probably would have been smarter for me to use the upper panel for the first painting. But I never make things easy for myself. Here, I’ve blocked in my darkest colours, then got distracted with the form of the central bottle.
Here is where I stopped. I think the valve could use more work. The perspective isn’t right, and the pipe section just is “there” but isn’t really doing anything for the painting. It is interesting how there is a subtle redness to the valve handle, in contrast to the browns of the rest. The effect of using the violet earth predominately here, I think.
I think perhaps the stone could be a lower brightness.
I love how menacing the cat figurine looks here.
Better drafting of the under drawing would help. I just threw down enough to get me the locations and arrangement, but this cost me the perspective in the valve.
I could have used pigments that were strongly different. I used burnt umber and violet earth. In the second attempt I went with very different pigments and ended up with a mess. I need to practice here.
I think I was getting visually confused by the colours in the image. So I went back to my original photographs of the scene, and pulled them into a photo editor. Dropping them to black and white gave me a better understanding, I think, of the image.
The middle bottle is not nearly so dark as I was thinking. With the blue stripped out, the valve pipe is clearer. The background is darker, and only equaled by the cat figurine, and a shadow behind the valve handle. Perhaps a vertical reflected shadow, as well, on the middle bottle.
If I find time, I’ll return to this and re-paint with an eye towards:
- Improved under drawing
- Focus on shapes, not objects
Tonal Studies on Dark Background
This was a really enjoyable exercise. I’m not comfortable with colour so naturally I chose to go with a carbazole purple background. Selecting my palette, I knew that if I stayed monochrome then the purple would get really washed out by the titanium white. Instead, I decided to lighten by going towards blue. Palette I ended up with was Carbazole purple, Cobalt blue, Cobalt teal, white & black (though I ended up not using much black, due to the deep tone of carbazole purple).
Throwing some shiny objects on a dark shelf, I was able to set it up so they just barely caught the light. I was thinking of chiaroscuro here, and was seeing how I close I could get. Ahead of starting painting I watched a video by Florent Farges (noted below under videos) on chiaroscuro to see how he approached the process.
Twos areas stand out to me in the final exercise:
- The silver sherry glass on the left doesn’t appear tarnished (it is heavily tranished) but rather looks like it is physically textured. I need to think about how I’d render this in future.
- The ceramic wine glass in the back is sort of formless. It is lighter toned than the coffee mug in the middle, but painting it lighter would have interfered with the sense of space. So, instead, how I’ve painted it it looks just sort of flat.
I think, probably, I could improve the vertical highlight band on the coffee mug
I keep coming back to the finished painting. The intensity of the blue is unreal. I’ve always struggled with colour, and perhaps a big part of that struggle is really contrast. There are definitely parts of this work I don’t love (the ceramic wine glass in back) but I find myself visually exploring the whorls in the sherry glass at left. How it is sunk into the darkness of the background.
#ArtGoals
I’m reminded of Aaron Westerberg’s art.
Aaron Westerberg is primarily a figurative painter. I was initially drawn to his work through his use of colour. If I have a particular goal in painting it is to gain this level of confidence with colour.
Rivi in Red (left) is a representative piece. A meditative, perhaps melancholic piece, with amazingly soft skin tones and evocative brushwork. I’d love to learn how that jacket was done, but I can’t seem to puzzle it out.
The Ming Horse in Blue/Green study (below) is in my collection, and I often take it off the wall to look at its thick impasto, and glowing colours. It is a chameleon of a work, needing good light to really bring it forward, but it holds pride of place on my ‘gallery’ wall in my studio.
Videos Referenced
1 Ward, O. (2014) Ways of Looking: How to Experience Contemporary Art. (Illustrated edition) (s.l.): Laurence King Publishing.