{"id":6386,"date":"2015-11-13T12:25:21","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T12:25:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6386"},"modified":"2015-11-13T12:25:21","modified_gmt":"2015-11-13T12:25:21","slug":"heart-eye-and-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6386","title":{"rendered":"Heart, Eye, and Hand"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_7910\"<\/a>I\u2019m finally back on a regular painting schedule, and it\u2019s surprising how it puts me in a better mood\u2014helped along by a few other changes in my life. Maybe this makes it odd that I\u2019m thinking hard about taking a year off from exhibiting (while continuing to contribute to local group shows at Oxford Gallery) in order to take all considerations out of the act of painting other than the quality of what I\u2019m doing, based on my own response to it. It\u2019s difficult to resist the sense that I need to refine what I do into something that will either be exhibited or will sell, or both, as a way of validating my work. It\u2019s a little silly to be consciously trying to eliminate these considerations, at this point in my life, since I didn\u2019t give them any thought at all for most the years I\u2019ve been painting\u2014when I did it as a solitary pursuit. In other words, it doesn\u2019t take much effort to quit worrying about a \u201ccareer\u201d because that\u2019s never been the motivation. Imagine Cezanne or Van Gogh scanning their CVs with a worried look. Being able to both eat and paint is the goal. Whatever creativity is, you\u2019ll kill it by putting a harness around its neck. Once you start showing and selling, as I\u2019ve been doing for seven or eight years now, those activities become a reflexive consideration\u2014you ask,\u00a0will this be anything someone will want to show or buy?<\/em>\u00a0In theory, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s wrong; in fact just the opposite. With Dave Hickey, I agree that making art people want to own ought to be a central consideration, not because it makes sense economically, but because it means an artist is trying to connect to others in a way they\u2019ll welcome. When you speak, you hope someone is listening, otherwise, you\u2019re . . . well . . . you\u2019re a blogger, right? But I\u2019m putting that aside for now. If I give myself a hiatus from questions of selling and showing, I might be able to feel free to fail in an attempt to get better results while painting in ways I ordinarily don\u2019t give myself permission to do. (Do I contradict myself? Very well . . .)<\/p>\n

So, in this frame of mind, I\u2019m finishing a small, modest still life of a bowl, using methods I\u2019ve been trying for the past year. It\u2019s the first of a series of small ornamented bowls I\u2019m going to paint between now and the end of the year. In this one, as in the last few I\u2019ve done, I\u2019m being completely transparent about my use of photography. I depict one or two commonplace things as the focal point of the image and use a shallow depth-of-field to intentionally create blurred backgrounds. What I\u2019m building is a series of still lifes that show objects in ordinary, everyday surroundings\u2014not simply a wall or undifferentiated space\u2014without rendering the background as precisely as the foreground. In other words, photo-realism, but not hyper-realism. The way I\u2019m painting these backgrounds ranges from slightly blurred but recognizable to extremely out-of-focus scenes that dissolve into softly abstract geometry. It creates a sense of depth in a way some would consider too easy, probably, because it relies on how our eyes have been conditioned to recognize the way a lens alters the view, giving distant things a gauzy aura. I suspect what I\u2019m doing would be dismissed these days by those attuned to what\u2019s currently respected and what isn\u2019t\u2014photo-realism may be commercially viable, but I don\u2019t have the sense that it\u2019s in critical or academic favor right now. Will that last? Probably not. Do I care? No. Maybe a little (see above on Dave Hickey). But that\u2019s precisely what I want to take out of the picture with my hiatus from thinking about sales and shows. With the way I\u2019m working right now, I\u2019m able to achieve pure areas of color that just wouldn\u2019t have the same character if I were to render everything in the image with the same level of painstaking, realistic detail. So far, I like the results. I also like how this approach is encouraging me to find the most efficient way to apply color without losing a sense of clarity and immediacy in the image, despite the lack of detail in most areas. It\u2019s a way of painting where I feel as if I\u2019m using the simplest possible means to get the results I like, focusing on flat areas of color, putting one simple area of color next to another, as Hawthorne said, when he talked about “spots” of color.<\/p>\n

None of this has anything to do with adhering to a theory, or some \u201cbetter\u201d way of painting, but is the result of paying attention to how the act of painting feels as I\u2019m doing it, and whether or not I want to keep looking at the results when I’ve made a mark. It\u2019s a way of savoring the tactile quality of the paint, so that I\u2019m able to spread it in thicker layers and move it around in a way that actually, to me, feels like slicing into a cake\u2014it\u2019s full of that kind of anticipation. I\u2019m sure it\u2019s how Braque felt every time he touched his canvas with his brush. If you\u2019re a painter, you\u2019ll know what I\u2019m talking about: the scale tips toward the paint and the pure color you put down, and the quality of both, while the illusion you create follows along behind, seeming to be summoned up almost as an afterthought of fitting all those shapes of color together in just the right way. I’m also finding myself achieving things with very small areas and gradations of color that undoubtedly nobody else will even notice. I do, though. Someone else, looking at one of these finished paintings might say, \u201cI don\u2019t get it. What\u2019s so different about it?\u201d And there you go: that’s exactly what I was talking about earlier, just painting with only my own eye and heart and hand as a guide, for better or worse, regardless of whether anyone notices what I\u2019m achieving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m finally back on a regular painting schedule, and it\u2019s surprising how it puts me in a better mood\u2014helped along by a few other changes in my life. Maybe this makes it odd that I\u2019m thinking hard about taking a year off from exhibiting (while continuing to contribute to local group shows at Oxford Gallery) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nHeart, Eye, and Hand - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6386\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Heart, Eye, and Hand - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I\u2019m finally back on a regular painting schedule, and it\u2019s surprising how it puts me in a better mood\u2014helped along by a few other changes in my life. 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