thoughts, works and occasional videos

The title sounds tough, but it’s really simple…here is the key

(This is part 1 of a 2 part blog.  Part two is: “Making Tracks" or "Visual Music")

“I love your colors”,  “I wish I could do more abstracting” are frequent responses to my work.  Well, this post explains the premise upon which I stand.  The next post (part two) will provide more detail about the process.

Had I been allowed as a young adult to ‘stay home and paint’, as I wished, in lieu of attending college, I would still be painting traditionally and with luck honed those skills, painting beautiful works by classical standards.  For I have a sincerely deep appreciation of traditional representational art, as I believe most people do (unless they are trained out of it, by the likes of the New York school, so to speak).  There is nothing like a beautiful view, a moment in time caught. I do not believe there is a soul on earth who is not moved by such imagery, for it really is what Ellen Dissanayake refers to as the ‘Biobehavioral’ (soon to be explained) response in the human psyche.

But, lo, I am working on different yet parallel track.  My father, the only one of the 5 children in his family to attend college would not hear of my desire to just ‘paint’.  Rather, he thought I was ‘nuts’ (those who know me now may still think I am nuts,  lol).  Anyway, a full ride to college (sight unseen) from the National Scholastic Art Competition, easily settled the issue.

While in college I was trained to the world of NYC art, in which both the ‘Color Field’ (ie: painting  just color not based on any object/subject) and Conceptual (ie: a presented ‘idea’, not an image) Movements were in high gear. I discovered the world of shapes and movement and let go of representation.  NYC art does not exactly reflect mainstream tastes.'

This exposure coupled with impact of our surroundings on our work sent me on a new path. It may well be that, like writers, our best work grows out of our environment and life experience.  As such, it may be that my artistic vision grew out of the travel that I did each day to work.  Yes, I can embellish and layer it with intellectual jargon (art-speak), but the simple truth is that I drove to work 45 min each way 5/wk while still in college and my art grew to reflect that passage of time and color.  Movement fascinated me, not like the artists whose work bounced off of the industrial revolution or ideas about the future, but in my own way, unable to escape the mobility of our times.

Now I will digress to introduce Ellen Dissanayake’s theory on ‘biobehavior”  (Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why) and how it comes into play.  Simply put, since the beginning of human time, we have stood tall in search of food, thus being bipeds.  With that comes the horizon and it’s line, often the first gesture painted when starting an image.  That line that delineates land and sky in landscape painting or the separation of land/water masses.  This familiar and comforting line provides us a frame of reference.  We have seen it ever since the beginning of human kind and perhaps even unwittingly, have an affinity for it.  In art, we cannot help but like the landscape that we have for so long related to. It is intrinsic to our physical being,..’bio behavioral’.
.

Expounding on Dissanayake’s theory brings us to the concept of a common visual language. We recognize the circle as the sun or face, depending on whether there are rays of light or two eyes in it. Ask any child for whom the parents face is key.  Our brain reads a rectangle as a doorway, window or building; but if there is a circle on top of it can be a person. Just as, a rectangle with a circle at the end can be a person lying down or a triangle with a circle tucked into the top of it can read as a person sitting.  A triangle alone easily acts as an arrow, and what do we do with arrows, but let our eyes follow the way they direct us.  Yes, symbolically we can call a circle ‘wholeness’, an egg (beginning), the earth, etc. but it has it’s own visual properties.  In the landscape it can be an island or a pond.

In other words, through ages of human existence there has evolved a common visual language (extending to colors as well, example: green=growth, yellow=light, blue=sky/water, etc).  It is to that which I paint. But unlike many painters I apply it to the landscape and play with it in an attempt to express the life inherent in what I am seeing.  It is an attempt to let the landscape breathe so to speak since it is an ever-changing entity.  It is of a jumping off place in an attempt to portray that essence of it.

Part two will describe how I create the image itself and it’s relationship to music.   My directing people’s eyes through movement of color and shapes.