A Deliberate Black Line

One of the things I consider most when I paint is contrast. Do I have enough light areas? Do I have enough dark areas? Without contrast, my paintings devolve into a lifeless mass of gray or muckletydun, a word I can find in neither the dictionary nor Google, but one which I’ve heard and used all my life. In art, as in life, I occasionally add a black line. 

You thought this was going to be about creating art, and it will be. Eventually. But let’s talk about life first. I had a girl friend - not a girlfriend - when I was in high school and college, whose mother had gray hair and was pale. Melva (I can’t remember her name at this point, 60+ years later) was not pale in the translucent, lively, pretty skin way. She was sallow. She wore no makeup, and no jewelry. And she dressed always in beige and gray. She got lost in the twilight or a dim room, which may have been her wish. A black line of some sort would have given her life. A jet necklace. A shirt with a black collar and cuffs. A strong, deliberate black line would have made a difference. 

I use black lines in my life all the time. My motto, when I was teaching - when I was merely a Curmudgeon in Training - was “It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.” The last year I taught my school had posters plastered in the halls that said things like Smile! You could brighten someone’s day! Or Believe! and Succeed! The poster publishers used up their lifetime supply of exclamation points on the posters. They were ostensibly to be inspirational posters. The administration was inordinately fond of them. I hated the platitudes. I painted a passage from Thoreau around the top of the walls of my classroom, a border that said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” When I saw administrators passing in the hall, I’d pull them in and show them what I’d done. They would say things like, “Great! But don’t tell anyone I said so.” Forgiveness was easier than permission. And it was my last year. What could they do?

These days I’ve changed my motto. I draw deliberate black lines. Now I smile sadly and repeat my new motto, “I’m too old for that shit.” This works effectively at my very liberal church. I refused to be on a committee when I was a member of the church board. I declined to help with the coffee hour after services. You get the idea.

In painting, the deliberate black line, or shape, or background helps to emphasize the image you want the viewer to focus on. I’m posting a couple examples, one which uses lines, and one which uses shape. I posted one of these images in my last blog without the black lines. Notice the difference. You might want to give the deliberate black line a try. It works in both life and art. 

We had this series of panels framed as if it were a window. I think the deliberate black frame and mullions emphasize the painting and gives it a completely different perspective.

Gary Cat emerges from the deliberate black background.

 

                    Explore

The last two years of COVID seclusion have been tough on many of us. My wife and I have been very isolated because we are “at risk” for this plague. When we go out, we are sure to wear our face masks, and for a long time we wore disposable gloves. We have hand sanitizer in the car, and after our few trips out, we always use it. Despite being old white people, we are both vaccinated and boosted, by the way, and we have a liberal bent despite the constant begging texts asking if I’m a Patriot. We started having our groceries delivered, we started a dinner service that sends us four DIY dinners every Monday, and we order out occasionally.  Somehow in the last two years we have gone from being “kind of old” to elderly, and that has a lot to do with lack of socialization, lack of movement, and fear, quite honestly. The first year of quarantine we put gas in the car only three times. And that was to get us to doctor appointments or the pharmacy.

In a different, earlier time we traveled. A lot. My wife had a cousin in a suburb of Nottingham (who knew England had suburbs?), her "English mum," and we visited her at least once a year. We loved cruises because someone always was available to wait on us and I could order the escargot appetizer every night even when it wasn’t on the menu. We took dancing lessons as we traveled through the Panama Canal, we bummed around Greece for a couple weeks, and we put up with the very loud, camera-in-hand tourists in the supposedly silent Sistine Chapel. It’s very small, by the way. In a couple hours we saw the weather change from sunny, to rainy, to snowy, to foggy, and back to sunny in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost point on the continent of South America. In Asia, we went to the DMZ and stood briefly in North Korea in the “Peace” building, which was never used but remains at the ready. These days I don’t want to be cooped up with a horde of people on an airplane any more, and I fear norovirus on a cruise ship as much COVID. So we don’t travel.

But we do continue to explore and that keeps our minds functioning at least a little. Back in the day - the Fifties, probably - it was called armchair exploration. I read a couple books a week, for example. I’m partial to mysteries set in England, especially ones set in Elizabethan times. And I also love author Estelle Ryan’s Genevieve Lenard series that explores the world of art theft. I always learn a lot. (Start with The Gauguin Connection.) We also watch a lot of European series with English subtitles. I’ve picked up some French and Italian, and improved my Spanish. In fact, I want to be Detective Montalbano (a great series!) when I grow up. 

After that way too long introduction, I’m getting to my point: We continue to explore, even from our armchairs. When I watch a European (An European?) series, I am always aware not only of the story and characters, but also of the way in which people apparently live, and that always includes the art on the walls, sometimes the most interesting - at least to me - part of set decoration. I frequently find that art inspiring. I don’t paint copies of artworks any more unless I have a very specific goal in mind. And I’m generally left with only an impression of the art on TV shows because I don’t stop the episode and take photos from the television. Every experience has an impact on me and changes my life forever, even if only in the most minute way. And looking - frequently at art - has become a major experience in my life.

In an earlier blog, I suggested that painters / artists choose different artists every week and focus on a couple of their works, writing down impressions not only of the techniques they use, but also of the emotional impact. This exploration provides a discipline and a method of analysis. 

As the weather improves - at least here in the Chicago burbs - we can get outside more easily. I was barely out all winter because I’ve broken both an ankle and my wrist in the past, and I’m afraid of falling. My wife takes walks and then reports to me as I’m painting in my small studio. When I go out, I look at small pieces. What does a leaf really look like? What is the bark on that tree really like? Too often we’re like kids drawing a house as a box with a triangle on the top and a round yellow circle as the sun in a corner. We don’t really look. We don’t really explore. We can change that.

My invitation with this essay is Explore. 

Explore your world, and explore the worlds of others.

This was inspired by a painting on an Australian series. 

"Red Tree"

Acrylic on 12 stretched canvas panels, each 8 x 8 inches

 Balance

   I got a haircut the other day. It was the first time since November because the lady who cut my hair last was in a car crash, and I was waiting for her to recuperate. She isn’t returning until at least May and I was getting desperate enough to chop at my hair around my ears, a bad sign. Anyway, I went to a guy who hadn’t cut my hair before. During the cut, Jordan stood back and chuckled to himself.  “About half way through I look and realize I have another side to do.” It’s a matter of balance, of course. 

We all try to find balance in our lives in one way or another. When I was in high school, about a hundred years ago (no, not really - only 59) the smart kids in my physics class talked about going to college and “working hard and playing hard.” That was, I suppose, a sort of balance. I, on the other hand, was delighted to pass physics and graduate. In college I worked hard and got very good grades, and I suppose I played hard, too, but it didn’t involve the binge drinking my high school classmates suggested.

As my life progressed, I looked for other kinds of balance: between family and work; between what I was required to do and what I wanted to do; between buying and saving; between - you get the idea. With luck, each of us creates individual, personal balance in our lives.

I’m retired now and I’m more conscious of finding balance in my life than I used to be. Lately, I work to balance painting with the things I have to do, the external, and also within my art itself, the internal.

There are all kinds of balance within a painting. I look for contrast in value as well as in color to provide balance.  I take a photo on my phone and then using the editing tools, I put the picture into gray tones. That way I can clearly see the light, the dark, and the gray values. If the painting is lopsided, the phone photo smacks me in the face with it. 

A second balance is shape. Identical shapes need not repeat, of course. And the same shapes don’t have to repeat. A rectangle-ish shape can balance a roundish shape or a triangular-ish shape. Negative space can balance positive space. A quick definition: negative space is the area around an object; positive space is the object. Giorgio Morandi is a still life artist who makes great use of positive and negative space in his work. The Tate in London has a good webpage with his works: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/giorgio-morandi-1660. Check it out.

Third, when I’m looking at color/ hue, I mentally divide the painting into a grid of nine squares - thirds both vertically and horizontally. Do colors repeat from one side of the work to the other? From the top to the bottom? They don’t have to repeat equally, and they don’t have to repeat at all. It’s just one more consideration when looking at a painting. I use this mental grid for shape and value as well. 

I work at balance in my painting, but I don’t always achieve it. Balance is just one way I consider my work. When I think I’m finished with a painting, I step back from the it and look out the window for several seconds. Then I look back at the painting and see how it affects me, whether I like it or not. Sometimes, my work is a failure. Sometimes it’s a success. Frequently it’s somewhere in the middle. 

But it all balances out in the end.

 

This has top to bottom balance-ish, and clear positive and negative spaces.