On Creativity, and Beyond

Vik Muniz, takes image making beyond the box of paints and brushes, his humor and quirky take on art will refresh you in this TED Talk. He uses chocolate, sugar, even dust from the floors of the Whitney Museum to make amazing representational pictures.  It is so easy as a painter or just a human being to get settled in one point of view. People like Muniz wake us up, one of the purposes of art and creativity.

 This painting is made entirely with sugar on black paper of one of the children on a plantation he visited in Saint Kitts. is "Sugar Children" series consists of photographs of drawings he made in sugar of children whose parents and grandparents have worked on the sugar plantation on the island of Saint Kitts.

The World's Most Beautiful Wave

I have a guilty pleasure,  I love surfer movies, and I have  a link on the internet that gives me the surf reports for North Salmon Creek so I know when the big waves will come. On that site is a video of the big waves at Cortes Bank off San Diego, the biggest most beautiful wave. On this vid is also some great computer modeling of wave forms so enjoy and see this primordial wave move and develop, Click on the link below the photo to see the video.

                                                           CORTES BANK WAVE 

Final Exam

I set myself a challenge of 100 paintings of waves a little over a  month ago, and as I completed it, I set myself a final exam. I did these four little paintings from memory, to test all my skills. Most of the old seascape masters I've read say you must be able to paint the sea from memory to do it well. They used sketches and studies made on the spot but all of them spent many many hours just watching and studying the water and weather.William Trost Richards son said his father spent so much time standing in a trance on the beach watching water that people thought him insane. Then in the studio( many painted before the camera was so easy) they would rely on their memory and maybe a few small sketches. We artists today do not have or use our memories so much, and even in school kids don't have to memorize poems or the Gettysburg address like  they used to. For  seascape painter memory is a must, you can't just stop the water and light.  A camera is not much use either if you want to paint like the eye sees, it is a blind mechanical thing, the human eye is attached to the heart and mind of a person with feelings, something no camera has.

So this is my exam, 4 little works about 4.5 x5 inches each...this is a great exercise to try, it tells you what you know and what you don't.  This took about an hour total

The Far Horizon

The " horizon line" in a painting is where the sea and sky meet,  at the eye level of the viewer, so if you are standing looking at the sea, it is one place, if you sit down it will shift higher. Here is the wiki definition if you want to get more technical and a picture of the horizon line from space 

The horizon line is the first thing I put down in a seascape. I have lots more to say about horzions, but placement is the basis of the painting so we'll start here. Where you draw the horizon line  dictates the point of view of the entire work, where you will stand in your own mind as you enter and enjoy the painting. It has great psychological effect and sets the tone and mood. After all it is where you are placing your viewer, so think carefully about where you put it.  Placed high you have room for a foreground and plenty of wave action, placed low the sky will start to dominate. One of the painting principals I use is; What ever is most important gets the most real estate.  So if I'm interested in the wave, it will have a big chunk of square inches in the work. I will not have room for a big wave unless I place the horizon line high.

Here are some samples of seascapes, some contemporary most from 1850-1950. Notice where the horizon line is, and how that affects the emotional state as well as you look at these. 

 Clyde Aspevig, The Headlands

Here he has put us way up in the air, on a high cliff looking down. This could be tricky except in the hands of a master like Aspevig.

 Alexander Harrison, The Wave

Here we are standing on the beach, perhaps sitting on a small sandbank, your eyes are level with the true horizon

Charles Vickery, Pacific Voyage

notice on this one the horizon is only implied, we'd have to be in a small dingy to get this view, and I would be hanging over the side getting rid of lunch. Vickery really knew his water and his ships.

Frederick Waugh, Evening Surf

We are standing on the beach or maybe some low rocks

Frederick Waugh, Glint of Sun

this is more ambiguous , we could be on a surfboard, or standing in the water or on a jetty.

                                                                                           William Trost Richards, Summer

We know exactly where we are here and not worried about storms or big waves, riptides, so we can completely relax into this tranquillity.

It is possible to paint a seascape without any horizon line at all, as in this David Curtis painting a view common if you stand overlooking the ocean from a high cliff, but here our eyes are directed down, not out as in the first Aspevig work.

When a painting goes wrong

While this painting is working ok, my eye tells me its heading downhill. First I made an error in putting the birds so close to the edge, which will become a center of interest,  even if I mute them down, as living things catch our attention.  So this close to the edge it's not going to work well, there will be a fight between the  foreground and midground. So most of the birds have to go. then there is the sort of ho hum line of the foam of the wave, too much action in the background, and the pull of the center rock with a  big empty space in front.

Here the wonders of Photoshop come to our aid. With PS I used the clone tool, and paintbrush tool to try out some possible solutions. I deleted most of the birds, raised the front rocks on the right side, added some water to marry it to the rest of the painting and changed the line of the wave, it looks better now to me anyway....so I can go ahead and alter the painting. I will make more changes as I actually paint, to create a more interesting space below the center rock.

 No artists in history have been able to try out without messing up all the real thing until now. It could be this will never really quite work, but improving it will satisfy me anyway, and I can take the learning into the next painting. Stay tuned.  See if you think these changes help.

here is the previous version

A Great Compliment

One of the biggest compliments a painter can get is when another artist buys your painting. Carolyn Wilson is a fine artist in her own right.

I was so lucky to have her gracious even tempered presence next to me at the Gravenstein Apple Fair, my first outdoor show. She is a veteran of these events, and really helped me out. It was very busy, 20,000 people go to this event now in it's 35th year. She bought not one but 3 of my seascape studies, one was a gift for a friend.  Her luminous watercolors over a delicate surface of rice paper are truly beautiful. Thank you Carolyn!

Here she is with her two paintings of waves inside the rolled up white paper, my sturdy if some what inelegant solution of how people could take home the raw canvas studies I stuck up on peg board with double sided tape. Twenty six painting sold,  the most I've ever sold in one go. I wanted to see if there would be a response to my new direction and the answer was a big YES.  Besides Carolyn 4 more artists bought works, that is something I really treasure.

On the Easel : Shoreline Delights 11x14 oil on oil primed linen

One of the best times I have out plein air painting at the sea is watching the bird life. One day at North Salmon Creek Beach, I wandered along studying the rocks. I was staring at some of them and the surface began to move. It was covered with small birds, called surfbirds, that hang out near the smaller waves...They were fascinating to watch, dodging the water and working hard for their meal. I always wanted to include them in a painting and when doing one of the 100 wave studies I just finished I came up with a sketch and this work is based on that.

The trick here is to get the birds to be one of the last things you see, just like I discovered them for the first time...so the rocks and birds must blend, as they do in nature... most of the rest of the painting is finished, and I'm working now on the bottom rocks and birds are just sketched in, I'm trying to decide if I can sneak in  a couple more.

I'm moving up in size at last this is 11x14 oil on oil primed linen