This painting is by Paula O'Brian. I'm not familiar with her work, but I saw this and thought is was very good. The vibrant colors and the movement of the brush strokes are eye catching and really speak to my "technique" of painting, which is playing with the medium until something works. There's no major structure or logic controlling this piece. There's no stern observance of temperature and shades of value. There's no trying to copy someone elses art. It just happens.Friday, September 18, 2009
This painting is by Paula O'Brian. I'm not familiar with her work, but I saw this and thought is was very good. The vibrant colors and the movement of the brush strokes are eye catching and really speak to my "technique" of painting, which is playing with the medium until something works. There's no major structure or logic controlling this piece. There's no stern observance of temperature and shades of value. There's no trying to copy someone elses art. It just happens.
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Thanks for the post. I think you're confusing structure with rigidity, though. "Structure", simply put, refers to how an image is put together, and doesn't indicate whether a work is "vibrant" and full of movement or not. De Kooning and Pollock made paintings that are very active (to say the least), yet highly structured and intentional (for more on that, see here: http://www.moma.org/explore/conservation/pollock/interview1.html)
ReplyDeleteAs for the image above, I see plenty of attempts at creating structure and organization: most obviously in the vertical of the figure and the horizontal of the ground plane; the repetition of diagonals (for example, start with the upper right corner, then move to the right forearm, left forearm, then the big white diagonal on the lower left side of the image); the repetition of (essentially) verticals moving across the upper two-thirds of the image.
As for temperature, it's true the colors in the image aren't from observation, but they still stick to a classic warm light/ cool shadows approach. Also, complementary color schemes dominate the image: yellow/purple and red (or pink)/ green.
My larger point, though, is that every decision made while painting is a compositional (or structural) decision, and there's no getting around that. Even if one begins a painting working intuitively (which is how I start a painting), one still has to make decisions about its visual elements in order to arrive at, as you say, something that “works.” By studying the language of painting (color, pictorial structure, etc.), the intention isn’t to stifle intuition, but to allow one’s knowledge to better inform intuition.