Blog

There is something beautiful about the process of forming of ideas, thoughts, and art.  At a gallery or museum one can sometimes see the development of a series by viewing its parts, but this process is still fairly opaque with only a showing of the final work. Thankfully artist blogs are full of studies showing their process.  Below I have a series of images showing a glimpse of my process as I created three of my recent butterfly paintings.

Inspiration in Munich

About a year ago, in the Alte Pinakothek, in Munich, Germany,I saw a series of paint sketches by Rubens.  They were quick unfinished swirls of color full of energy.  I began thinking about how some walk by the sketches and see nothing but mere studies, while others eagerly take in how they visually represent the artist working out issues of form and narrative.

Images of my process

Like so many things, my painting process changes. The process of how I paint is in constant transition and the next three in the series have been painted in a slightly different way, although the result will be similar.

Images of the stages of painting #4-6 of my Butterfly series:

These three paintings are inspired by the painted lady butterfly.  I have entitled them temporarily (left to right): After Thistles, Fluttering Cosmopolitan, and Cynthesis.  These titles have their roots in scientific classification, common association, and/or metaphors.  Ideas and intellectual direction for the entire butterfly series are still taking shape.

What do you think? Please offer me feedback and take a look at the first three paintings in this series.  At present their potential titles are Flight of the Painted Lady, Vanessa Made Up, and Seeing Past by Present.

I remember more then one science video that I watched as a child having a scene where something that took months to occur would be shown in a minute’s time.  Technology allowed us to see changes that occurred slowly, quickly.  For example, a plant would grow out of the ground, bud, a flower would open up and die all in the same minute.  It was fascinating because it was something that one could not experience in nature.
How do my paintings treat speed?  Well, in Foreshadowing, paintings of flowers, time travels faster then the speed of nature.  In Patterns in Flight, butterfly wing paintings,  and in Action, Unification, paintings of joints of bones, I am slowing down time.  There are beautiful things that happen so fast that our naked eye can not capture them.  These objects have a rhythm that is too fast for us to normally comprehend.

I also try to take the stages, freeze them in time, and layer them.  We easily forget where we have been before.  One can see the different stages of the flower, butterfly wings, or joint of bones in the same painting.

I am posting three new eggshell paintings in series, Morning Promise.  Although the majority of the painting was done last fall I have recently added the final layers to three new eggshell paintings.  These paintings are similar to the eggshell painting that was posted in November.  They create a mini series where I investigated the beauty of contrived patterns of broken shells.

This is an interesting time to introduce this mini-series as the time corresponds to the Easter season.  However, instead of intricate designs upon eggs, I have placed brown eggshells in a pattern with an emphasis on their present emptiness.  They are the remnants or shells of what was once there.  The eggshell is broken. To me the shell is something that has been overcome.  Think about times when you have grown and developed and broken out of a shell and left the pieces leading up to the empty shell.  The shell has been conquered and lies overcome.  The pieces point to the emptiness and defeat of what the shell stood for.

While in The Hague, Netherlands last autumn, I took a few hours to look into the Escher Museum (Escher in het Paleis or Escher in the Palace).  In the past I have not regarded M.C. Escher too highly, consequently I was surprised at how much I enjoyed seeing the work.  I discovered how the following things that fascinated Escher also interest me: cylindrical reflections, patterns, and objects transitioning or changing within an image.

Reflections often catch my attention and distract me from what I am doing.  I find myself thinking how the reflection is not real but an image of something else that is “real.”  I trace how the reflection is different or distorted from the object that it represents.  This distortion is particularly emphasized when the reflected surface is not flat.  Spoons, metal dippers, and faucets reflect exceptionally interesting cylindrical reflections.  I have contemplated trying to capture that distortion through a camera lens or drawing.  Escher experimented with drawing cylindrical reflections (Hand with reflecting Sphere 1935).

Patterns are of interest to me, although not man made patterns.  I am more interested in patterns that are found in nature.  Patterns that are found in nature are made of similar but not exact shapes. Escher used objects to create patterns that had a purpose.  The pattern changed with perspective or slowly morphed into something else.  Sometimes, he used patterns in nature.  In Three Worlds, 1955 Escher portrays this love of pattern and reflection.  The patterns are natural and created with trees and leaves.  The three worlds are the reflected world, the actual leaves that are floating on the lake, and the fish underneath the water.  I have an image that I took with my camera over a year ago (before I saw Escher’s picture).  It is of a lake where you can see the real trees and a covered bridge, the reflection, and leaves that had fallen beneath the water level. I took a number of pictures that varied slightly from this theme.  Escher and I are both engrossed with the different “worlds” (as Escher puts it) that these objects find themselves in, and how their location affects the way in which we perceive them.

Escher would often include transitions in his work, thus if you looked at part of a picture and let your eyes slowly travel over to another section of the image you will see a completely different scene, however you will not quite notice where the change took place.  In my work, I take a different approach to showing this change in time.  In the past, I have attempted to show the transition plainly for the viewer. Recently, I have been trying to find ways to add subtlety to the transitions.  More importantly, the difference is that while the transitions in my work can be taken in as a whole, often times Escher’s can only be understood when looking at the parts.  In many of his works, Escher tries to confuse the viewer.  This confusion is what draws a lot of people to Escher.  They like the way his work is interwoven in itself.  For example, if you look at “Drawing Hands” 1948, one cannot figure out which hand is doing the drawing and which hand is being drawn.  It is intriguing, a pictorial form of the chicken and egg dilemma.

Escher examines reality and makes statements about it through his art. I try to use similar tools to express what I think concerning reality and perspective.  It was a rewarding experience to see so many works by an artist who has such similar interests as me.

Images, photographs, visual advertisements, logos, and even “fine art”.  We are bombarded with pieces of visual communication.  In each image, there is a message.  However, there are so many images that we become numb to them.  We soak up the message without either realizing it or taking the time to diagnose the meaning and agree or disagree with it.  It is not possible to individually interact with all of these messages.  Should we sift through and find images that have a more lasting impact?

A student of images may learn to categorize the images upon first impression and then engage the ones that for some reason draw the viewer’s attention.  However, the problem with this is that these images may tend to be “journalistic” in nature.  When this is the focus of the work, then it will often, like the newspaper, drop away from importance soon after.  Another person may be drawn to particular subject matter and averse to other subjects.  This is dangerous because it immediately cancels out possible works that are significant in or beyond their first impressions.

The average person is not a student of images.  Due to the immediacy of our culture, this individual wants to get no more then a phrase out of it.  Someone has made the point that in our culture language has broken down over the past hundred years.  No longer do we find long and elaborate sentences in books or long elaborate sentences in letters.  Our culture texts.  I have heard that the average sentence has become shorter.  This same effect has also occurred with the visual image.  Often times instead of a thousand words, it seems to shout a phrase or idea.

Does this shortness of thought in communication reflect shortness in the depth of our minds?  Length of words does not equal impact or profoundness.  (Often times it is the opposite.)  Still, length of time engaged in thought may affect how thoroughly we understand ideas.

Take a moment today and search for a meaningful image.  Discern what you are looking at.  Search for the meaning and look for the intention of the person putting the image in front of you.