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I'm fascinated with the form of God's house.
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I apologize about the digital picture quality. Rather dark.
Several people associated with the Gallery. Clockwise: Cervantes, the other gallery employee; Maiben, the last intern; Brett, the currently displayed artist.
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Ever since my realization from Great Aunt Mary's portrait, I have had a goal. The realization maybe be summarized as:
Color harmony is more primary than the instances of individual colors. This is evident because the physical proximity of color influences each other's appearance.
In other words, the whites and yellows in these paintings aren't really white or yellow, but appear to be so in the greater context of the painting.
My goal is simple. It is to be able to naively paint a picture using color and brushwork that has as much depth and realism as one with a layered approach.
The first aspect of the goal involved color. I would like to achieve an emotive realism through simple color ratio rather than through color matching. With a glazing method, one looks at a form's color and parses it into its constituents. You take it apart with your eyes and put those pieces on the panel and you know that they will go together to make a whole because you took them from life. Color harmony is then subservient to the individual instances of color in life. It is achieved by eye and by the fact of a limited palette. My goal is to convey more information and feeling by taking the color whole from life. The instance of the color remains in the soul and is set in relation to the other colors of the paintings. When it is place on the canvas and the painting is finished, a new color harmony is created from a physical color theory (which determines relative appearance) and the emotive power of the scene, insofar that their is an infinity of color relations that must be culled by the soul.
The second aspect involves brushwork, but uses the first aspect. It is the naive use of color that interests me. To be able to suggest form and depth with a single brushstroke. That way, each encounter with the canvas is significant. None of the canvas's potential will be lost in the photographic endeavor to convince the eye it is seeing objects in three dimensions. My goal is to learn to make the colors themselves declare form and depth.
The composition of glass with tree blossom and shadow is especially fitted for the task. I bet you can tell which is my first painting of this type. The light is modulated in many ways, refraction, shadow, and reflection. Also, the shadows of a flower blossom have been the most difficult phenomenon I have ever approached. They are so soft but so deep, so different from the lighted parts but so continuous with it. Look at a white blossom with shadows, see if you can identify the ratio between its tones can colors and see if you can correlate those ratios with the ratio of colors (with white but without black). Each time I try, I become in awe of nature and light.
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Over spring break, I visited my family in lower Michigan and decided to take portrait reference photos of them. Aunt Mary is from this series. These are my cousins, children of my first cousin. Well, young kids are hard to photograph than adults. They move and smile and I don't think they know exactly how to make to photo face, so their are some odd contortions. After a dozen or so photos like this, I realized it would be a lot better to capture their energy, rather than impose a portrait expression on them. However, they moved to fast for the camera. Asking them to do their silliest face solved these problems. They'd stop long enough for a photo, but would have a natural and energetic expression.
As I looked through my photos, I identified a developmental progression in their Silly Face expression, that I've tried to capture. Obviously, the baby didn't do a silly face, but he did pose. I chose to show him with the pacifier because the next two oldest children will play with their mouths. You see the next youngest with gum, stretching his mouth, but not looking at the camera. The next, stretches his mouth without an object in it and looks at the camera. You can see the expression move from external object in mouth, incorporating the eyes and not using an object. Finally, the oldest child does not stretch his mouth at all, but mimics an emotion, or jumbles the emotions, showing the extremes of their physical manifestions. You can see the dilated nostrils, the wide eyes the gaping mouth, and raised eyebrows. It is no longer a strictly physical expression of silliness, rather it its embodies emotion, thought, and distinct self-consciousness.
Each painting was began with an underpainting, had two glazes of color, and a final wet in wet working of a semi-opaque layer. I tried to make it appear that each face was radiating light and color. The colors was set in different harmonies for each child. As such, the photos don't do the colors justice because the light is reflecting on several different layers.
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Here is a very successful portrait of my Great Aunt Mary. The goals were to capture a likeness of the feeling of her eye contact and her face, explore color relations, explore portrait technique, and explore the peripheral drift illusion.
The technique began with a toned canvas and drawing, then a thin layer from light to dark, then a thick layer from dark to light, and finally emphasis of shadow and highlights. I think that this is the best technique for me. The first step, from light to dark, establishes a pure color harmony and then its modulation to shadow. The second step allows for an indefinite complication of the harmony. This step allows for great freedom in establishing the face, in its solid form and its details. By the techniques very nature, the beauty of the paint is showcased and many aspects of abstract visual space is invoked. You see colors blending into one another, out of one another, limited by one another.
An interesting development in this painting's color harmony occurred as I was putting in the highlights. Before adding the background, I tried to highlight her face with a yellowish highlight. That didn't look right, so I did a reddish highlight, a bluish, and some of the secondaries. It looked right having multi-colored highlights, but didn't make sense based on the initial color harmony. I decided to leave it until after the background. I started making the PDI (the circular illusion of rotating motion). It relies on a circular displacement of a pattern of different tones. I selected colors from her foundational color harmony for their tonal values. You can see these emanating in the circle from her shoulders. Then I realized it looked too much like the poison patterns of a snake and would have to be changed. Its colors became a modulation of the highlight colors. As a result, the entire canvas achieved a unified harmony through two distinct sets of relations. This allowed all of the colors too appear different from as they are. Its a realization that I've been exploring ever since.
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