Advanced Composition Discussion

[Chris Bennett]

I’ve started this thread in order to continue a discussion that myself and Kev Ferrara were having over on the ALCHEMY still life thread in the ‘It’s finally finished’ section.
It concerns the idea of what takes place in our imagination when we describe space into the flat surface of the picture plane. The activity can be thought of as a ‘modelling’ of forms whereby things are built up out of a formless matter that is ‘put there’ into the empty space of the picture plane, gradually filling it up. This I refer to as ‘Modelling conception’.
However there is another imaginative fantasy involving the way the business of making an image is practiced in the mind of the artist. This is where the forms are felt to be ‘uncovered’ or ‘carved’ as if they were forms waiting to be released from the cube of white in a way analogous to the carver wresting the forms hidden in the block of stone. This I refer to as a ‘Carving conception’.

Below is the discussion so far between myself and Kev. I hope others will join in as it is a little understood principle since most analysis of pictures is thought of from a ‘modelling’ viewpoint which is inadequate to explain what is happening in works that have been produced with a ‘carving’ proclivity.

Chris Bennett:

I think what everyone has been saying here is essentially right. But something else occurred to me:
When looking at composition we can think of it as falling into what can be imagined as 'modelling conception' on one hand and 'carving conception' in the other. Modelling conception is an additive, building up of forms. Carving conception is an 'uncovering', a taking away to reveal the forms.
Problems arrive when a modelling conception is used to try and produce a composition that would be the natural outcome of carving.
Below are some extremely 'static' compositions but are alive and 'hum' with presence because they are conceived by a carving state of mind.
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Kev Farrara replies:


Chris... I'm not quite sure what you mean be carving versus adding...

but rather than looking at anything too specifically, I think the graphics and vectors in two of these compositions do all the required explaining about what is causing their compositional dynamism.
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Chris Bennett replies:

Kev, there are carving and modeling elements in all paintings but it is a question of degree. For instance Piero Della Francesca, Bruegel, Morandi, Cezanne and Picasso were mainly 'carvers'. Van Eyck, Rubens, Rembrandt, Constable, Matisse were more 'modelers'. Of the 'illustrators' Frazetta and Rockwell are modelers, John Jude Palencar and Mark English are carvers with Jeff Jones being somewhere in the middle of the two.
The vector analysis you made of the Morandi and the Cardin explains what is happening with the modeling component in these works, but in my view this is not their main method of realisation. They are essentially 'carving' paintings. To take a musical analogy; what you are pointing out is the melody (which is there, but not the thing that is taking the real strain of what these paintings are about) whereas these are 'harmonic' paintings - they are read 'all at once' more than experienced as a series of movements around the surface. The forms are rather to be explained as a series of pressures both of colour, tone and volume that steady each other, scratch each other's back if you will. The eye is invited to take in everything together and enjoy a stable solution of balance, involving a measured scanning movement, whereas in the modeling conception the eye is encouraged to move about and derive satisfaction from an eventful journey.
Colour can be though of in the same way: Modeling colour is a tug of war whereas carving colour stresses their ultimate union in white.


Kev Ferrara replies:

Chris... we may be hijacking the thread but this is a very interesting topic to me so...

I guess I have trouble grasping what you mean by "carving". I think I would say the distinction you are drawing is between "shapes and area" (eastern) versus "form and vector" (western).

But, from my perspective shapes often have a vector components, and have edges that are vectors, or arms that are vectors... and shapes also comprise forms, so to me, an artist such as Jones or N.C. Wyeth is simply falling in the very middle of the circle with its compass points at vector, area, shape, and form.

There are many Frazetta and Rockwell pieces that also fall in the middle (usually the best ones), though almost no Ruebens, who was a true "modeller". Meanwhile Diebekorn is all shape and area.

The still life with water glass and kettle can also be analyzed in terms of shape and area.... as all good compositions should be able to. That is, a good composition should work as shapes and areas, but also as vectors and forms, simultaneously. In this case, though, the simplicity of the shape/area analysis seemed so calm, whereas the vector analysis was so obviously dynamic, that I thought I could better judge the cause of its dynamism by way of vectors.

Does my understanding dovetail with what you mean?
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[jt4470]

So, from what I gather from this conversation, the carving technique has more to do with negative space drawing (something I could never do correctly unless I'm having an "artistic" day).
And the modeling technique is the opposite...that is building forms by "feeling them out"

Is that right?

[Chris Bennett]

So, from what I gather from this conversation, the carving technique has more to do with negative space drawing (something I could never do correctly unless I'm having an "artistic" day).
And the modeling technique is the opposite...that is building forms by "feeling them out"

Is that right?

Yes, you are certainly on the right track except that negative space drawing is a by-product of the approach rather than its cause. What I talked about in the post above replying to Kev regarding the respect for the surface as the main principle behind the carving conception related to painting, applies to this.
If you are thinking of maintaining the sense of the surface when painting or drawing, then any 'holes' appearing will be anathema to you. The holes in the space created by a modelling conception are to do with an almost exclusive regard for the form one is making and leaving the other areas as a 'non event'. If you are trying to maintain the integrity of the surface then you will have automatic regard for all the surface and the 'negative shapes' will not be experienced as such at all. Everything will have equal favour even though there will be a hierarchy of forms.
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[Chris Bennett]

It seems enormously difficult to get away from edges as outlines of objects and how that naturally separates space and violates the sanctity of the flat picture plane. The question is the degree of violation. And then there is the question of how a work can have, simultaneously, a very obvious surface design, yet have enormous depth.


I know what you mean, but the examples below show how it can be done.
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As I mentioned earlier, the negative shape idea is really just an outcome of the carving approach, not the cause.
To realise a landscape, for example, by seeing the white canvas or paper as snow that slowly melts to reveal the land, to see colour as that that resides in white's stable womb, the way one sees a dark blackcurrent against white skin - a series of affinities. It is a fundamentally different approach to the flourish of modelling.
This is why I find Palencar interesting - it is not really his subject matter that gives his images their power but rather the subject matter realised through a conception that is essentially a carving one and gives them their particular mystery.

[Flake]

Kev, the artist is Euan Uglow, British 1932-2000.

[VeSeljak]

love your analitical eyes man,thank you...how about these....

[Grief]

kev in regards to your analysis of the Uglow image you questioned the purpose of the component field's design, and stated that there was no real directionality to it. however seeing your vector shape breakdown (post 10) of the figure it seems hard for me personally to remove the vectors from the planning of the component field (post 11).

such breakdowns shouldnt be analyzed independant of each other. to paraphrase gestalt's theory of unified design which i'm sure is old news to all of us "the sum of a composition is greater than any individual part"

it almost seems to me that there is a directionality to the rhythmic structure of the component field. if the viewers eyes gets thrown off the windmill, so to speak it will likely be into the more vast area of the painting which the viewer has not yet 'explored'. the vertical tree serves to prevent the eye from roaming off of the picture plane. it is when the viewer reaches this point that i feel the underlying shapes of the background help to drive the viewer back to the complexity of the figure.

so basically i'm proposing that the component field is a horizontal segway to transit the attention where the artist intends. it has a directionality in a pervese sublte way of trying to be unnoticed.

anyway i hope that wasn't read with eyes rolling and saying "yes grief thanks for pointing out the bluntly obvious, go shut up". chris and kev good conversation, its given me a few new methods to approach the interest of pictoral 'flatness' that i've been seeking.

[dose]

Chris-I still don't understand what you mean by the "carving conception" in the context of composition. Can you try another way of explaining it? I'm getting stuck on the words so far.

I can understand what carving would mean in the context of building up form (clay vs. marble), but not in the context of composition.

[Chris Bennett]

Chris-I still don't understand what you mean by the "carving conception" in the context of composition. Can you try another way of explaining it? I'm getting stuck on the words so far.

I can understand what carving would mean in the context of building up form (clay vs. marble), but not in the context of composition.

Sorry dose, you were obviously posting while I was replying to Kev. The amazing thing is that I have answered your question in that post! In a profound sense there is no separation between composing and what you are doing at any time on the canvas in the 'carving' mode. Everything is in relation to the rectangle, or respect to the surface in its entirety. When working in the carving mode the work is at all times in balance, in harmony with itself and the material that is its mother. The Michelangelo I posted above demonstrates this pretty well, as does the following image:
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[Chris Bennett]

Here's the thing I am having problems with... and maybe I have this wrong...

When one divides up pictorial space, there is no abrading of space... there is simply a division. The component units still add back up to the original unit.


Yes, that is absolutely true and I like the examples you gave together with your analysis. This is tricky, but the answer lies in the metaphor rather than the letter. Obviously the picture plane is not really being carved. It is undegoing a deliberate process of being respected for what it is. The first basic divisions upon it are quite literally a 'mark' of this respect. If each and every subsequent compositional subdivision is in respect of the one that preceeded it then even the tiniest bit of last minute blending will have a fundamental and profound literal relationship with its great, great, great grandparents - the beautiful, unsullied rectangle.
A carving always retains the inference of the block from which it came and in this sense it is always there and has never gone away- the abraiding has taken material away certainly, but the carving's great ancestor, the block from which it came, is still 'present'. Modelling in clay does not infer such a state. It is a primal mud from which all things are possible. It can be whipped by the will. The marble block demands communion with it. It must be taken into account for what it is in order not to diminish its poetry, its very meaning.
It is this point that is the touchstone to thinking of carving as applied to two dimensional image making. Maintaining the wholeness of the rectangle, the very image upon its surface must do this in order to draw its inherent vitality from it.
In fact if the composing process were to diminish the rectangle in any way it would not be carving as I understand it. The making of doors or holes, as you have so neatly pointed out diminish the rectangle, 'invite you in' away from the perimeter. It is in the sense of maintaining the integrity of the rectangle that 'dividing' it, in all the stages it undergoes, is the parallel or metaphor for the abraiding of the marble block.

Lucien Freud's painting is the opposite. It is modelling at its finest and Kev goes to the principles of what makes it work straight away. The paint is the flesh and our interest is kept up as our eye chases around the forms like a dog following a scent. It is heady, delerious and intoxicating. It is romantic. The Uglow invites acceptence, all forms stand steady and in mutual respect of each other, defining their neighbour and they doing the same by return. It is calm, reasonable and trascendental. Perhaps we could call it classic?

I'm a big fan of Dean Cornwell by the way - I'll have to have a think about how much of a 'carver' he is. The same goes for Leyendecker.

[dose]

OK, I get what you are talking about.

My old teacher used to say quite frequently "Drawing is division."

Nice discussion- it's made some fuzzy understanding from before much more clear. Thanks.

[Chris Bennett]

It seems to me, the only "marble lost" from a painting as it is composed is possibility. But it is replaced with purpose.... the trade off known as "art".

That is beautifully put. It works with the metaphor - the modelling clay never looses its 'possibility', it remains infinely mallable at all stages. The marble block is 'cornered' into being 'what is left' when the image is done.

Those images you posted Kev, demonstrate your point very well. The modelling pictures use imagined volume to articulate their meaning almost exclusively and to maximise this effect the plane of the rectangle must be denied:
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This has a profound effect on the way colour behaves in the two approaches. Notice how even the restricted colour of the Dean Cornwell and Leyendecker is given an active value made manifest by its affiliation with the other colours it shares the surface with. The modelling pictures use colour as a tinting or tonal mud to describe the local colour in space. The carving pictures present the 'face' of the colours because they are experienced 'for themselves' on the surface of the picture.

[Chris Bennett]

You are probably right about the word carving....I'm going to have to think about it. I rather like this thing of 'composing by dividing', perhaps its modelling equivalent could be composing by adding.
More thought needed - I've gotten rather used to that particular toy in my basket!

Brangwyn's market stall sure is a marvelous painting - I have not seen it before. Anyway, here is my breakdown as to how I read it.
First the volume, which seems to be this sort of serpent shape on the left, balanced by this sort of bowed post on the right:
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I certainly seems a composing by fields sort of conception, which is given away by the colour as much as anything. There are vectors but they don't seem to be controling the 'feel' of this piece as much as the 'lying togetherness' of it.
Everything seems to revolve around those bright apples, watched over by the man's face. The colours (I've laid out the main red, yellow, blue and white) seem to orbit them like planets around a sun but kept in place by a gravity of field pressure rather than vector forces of their own.
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I'll get back on the Walter Everett.
Meanwhile, it would be good to hear your thoughts regarding how this particular form of composing/building images relates to sequence artwork and more broadly, 'applied art' in general.

[Craig D]

It's maybe based upon a fibronacci sequence?

[Chris Bennett]

Interesting takes on the Brangwyn Kev - the opposing spirals is very interesting. Here is one more on the Brangwyn and a couple of thoughts I had about the Everett:
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[Flake]

To my untrained eye, those last few look a lot like the examples in Loomis of what he calls "informal subdivision"

Or do I just need sleep/education?

btw I see the fib spiral Craig D alludes to.

Good reading either way, do carry on and I'll read it in the morning with some strong coffee.

[Chris Bennett]

I sorta wish we could move off the word "carving" because it seems more likely to confuse than clarify the issue. With "carving", dimensionality is the first thing that comes to mind... the blade tool removing a chunk of depth from a block of wood. And since we seem to agree that subdivisions don't actual abrade canvas, there is no lost material (except for the loss of "possibility" by manifest choices, which is a common trade-off in all composing activity). Carving, colloquially, implies lost material, no? So I just do not see how the word works. You seem to have a pit bullish fondness for it though! :) So can I wrest that pull toy from your jaws?

Alternates: Composing as; Tapestry, Quilt, Pattern, Visual Fields, Mural, Surface Divisions, Shapes and Areas, Stained Glass, Graphic Units, etc...

Any of these phrases might be more efficacious. All of them fulfill the requirement that the "original marble block" of the empty canvas is respected and acknowledged in process and in final.


OK, I've had a wonderful sleepless night thinking this over:

The building of things in the world can be done in two ways it seems to me,
Modelling - building up, an essentially additive process. Manufacture.
Carving - stripping away, a discovery of a possibility within something. Recycling.
They are the two philisophical sides to the 'shaping' coin in whatever field, be it music, literature, even the way one leads one's life.

If one looks at the term 'modelling' applied to picture making then we have to also acknowledge that no real modelling takes place either. Just as the metaphorical term 'carving' does not (as you rightly say) involve the actual abraiding of the canvas, even compositionally, so also does the metaphorical term 'modelling does not mean that the canvas is being 'built up' in any way. In both cases marks are being added. But the concerns in the mark maker's mind can take on the metaphorical implications of either of the two approaches to 'shaping' as this is being carried out.

[Chris Bennett]

Right, my turn.
Guthrie's 'A Hind's Daughter'. It has always been a big, big favourite of mine. I'll let other's go first then I'll pitch in.
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[Chris Bennett]

Nice take on that inverted shape in the Guthrie Kev and the naturalness echos are there too.
The cabbage she holds which as been harvested is an upside down volume of the tree. It is green and nourishing whilst the tree is grey and dormant. Her good husbandary has saved the goodness from the earth: Her knife literally cuts the Golden section - as her human reason cuts the earth to yeald its sustenence.
The roof of her cottage is the warmest note in the entire painting and its parent colours 'crop up' on the rest of its surface - taking the life and warmth of its interior contemplation and spreading it, best it can, amongst the grey land. The cabbage, symbol of her industry, is the colour complement of the cottage roof -the sky grey knife cleaving the earth grey, Solomon like, into its well ordered opposites.
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[Chris Bennett]

Yes, up to a point. (Lovely interpretation of the Everett by the way - I could feel that parrot was important!)
If a narrative painting implies direction or vector then what is the mechanism that holds you when you have arrived at the end of where the vector is pointing? I agree with your distinction between narrative and decorative and the way in which the design serves these ends - harmonising the surface to the vector of the story is an inspired way of putting it.
I guess a vector, by its very nature, is a direction rather than a journey so that there isn't really any 'arrival' as such. Therefore, in a sense, the 'narrative' in a narrative painting may not really be a story in the usual sense at all. It is a species of story but not what we normally think of as story - not even a very short one. It is certainly not a symbol though. Something related to the eastern poetry form; the 'koan' pehaps?
Mmmm, I'm going to have to sleep on this one.
Would you agree with what I'm driving at?

[Craig D]

I'm guessing you two aren't big proponents of Occam's razor?

[dose]

Subdividing for the sake of subdividing as opposed to subdividing for the sake of the integrity of the rectangle and its surface is another way of distinguishing modelling from carving.

Can you talk a bit more about what you mean by "the integrity of the rectangle?". I think this goes along with something my teacher used to say a lot. I had brief glimpses of what he was talking about, but it would come and go. It seems you are talking about something along similar lines of what he was talking about, but his English was not good enough to explain it very directly...

[m@.]

very interresting discussion guys!

[Chris Bennett]

I think that song analogy of yours Kev is very good. I've been wondering about it all day, trying to find a loophole but it stands up extremely well. Even the fact that a song you like on first hearing gets better the fifth or sixth time around. You end up hearing it all at once - the first couple of bars you connect and relate to all the parts to come, all the way through to the last couple of bars. An icecube floating on it's own melting, as I am fond of saying. It allows also for songs that are evocations rather than little stories or accounts of a yearning or its process.
I like your breakdown of the Frazetta too.

Thinking of the song as evocation: Maybe that's not a 'vector' as it would be with a narrative subject. A cloud perhaps, an 'area' or 'field'. (We are back to carving and modelling as applied to subject, in this case 'evocation' and 'narrative'. I'm sure you are pleased about that!)
Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott is good example to use since everyone knows this painting:
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When I first saw this as a very young lad I knew nothing of painting and not even of the existence of Tennyson or his poems. I did not know what the picture was 'about'. But it touched something in me straight away - it probably even made me into a painter for all I know. Yet I seemed to 'understand' what it was about - as if the painting was made just for me alone and had been waiting for me. Of course it was not, but such was my complete feeling of empathy that I can describe it in no other way. It had made concrete a state of mind. It had, by the miracle of marks on a canvas, somehow pinned down an etherial notion of something I could not put a name to but now had seen a picture of.
Of course, knowing the story we can explain why all the various elements are there - the willows, the river the tapestry etc. But these things don't really enhance the thing at all for me. The picture always returns to the experience of this slightly strange young woman in a boat where something is amiss because the tapestry is drooping in the water.
Yet it must be working so strongly because the plastic elements are working so beautifully together. Is it possible to take this apart and see how this is being achieved in terms of delivering this 'evocation'?
I'm going to have a think about it and have a go at doing this.
What do think Kev?
Or anybody else - don't be shy!

[DIMAGYAN]

really good discussion so far kev and chris.
im enjoying your takes on every composition.

chris, when you say evoction, you mean the conjunction of elements in relation with the whole but in the plastic and space composition, not in the meaning?

[Chris Bennett]

really good discussion so far kev and chris.
im enjoying your takes on every composition.

chris, when you say evoction, you mean the conjunction of elements in relation with the whole but in the plastic and space composition, not in the meaning?

That's a good distinction to make and I'm glad you picked me up on it. I guess I mean that the deep motivation behind every decision on the canvas is governed by wanting the image to 'evoke' something. Now, this is different to 'saying' something in my view, because 'evocation' means to give form to something that refers to something formless.
So I am refering to the plastic means that come together to act as a sort of signpost to this intangable yet 'real to the psychological touch' meaning that the painting has.
The Frazetta 'says' 'guardian that blocks your way' and Kev has pointed up all the plastic elements that do this to us on a purely visual level.
The Waterhouse 'evokes' a state of mind. The Frazetta does too, but it is not its primary objective I think. The Waterhouse, although showing a moment from a narrative poem is really using it as stepping stone to conveying a state of mind, which I feel is its primary concern.
Thus the plastic elements of the Waterhouse end up evoking something as opposed to saying something.
So, to use Kev's analogy.
The Frazetta uses the surface to harmonise with the 'vector' of the story - the song is 'said'.
The Waterhouse uses the surface to harmonise with the 'field' of the story - the song is 'evoked'.
Kev may disagree with this but I reasonably sure I've got it right.

[Flake]

When I first saw this as a very young lad I knew nothing of painting and not even of the existence of Tennyson or his poems. I did not know what the picture was 'about'. But it touched something in me straight away - it probably even made me into a painter for all I know. Yet I seemed to 'understand' what it was about - as if the painting was made just for me alone and had been waiting for me. Of course it was not, but such was my complete feeling of empathy that I can describe it in no other way. It had made concrete a state of mind. It had, by the miracle of marks on a canvas, somehow pinned down an etherial notion of something I could not put a name to but now had seen a picture of.

If I'd never seen Waterhouse or Sargent I'd probably be a really apathetic but reasonably well off programmer by now.

I'm still not sure if that would have been a good or bad thing, I'll know more in 5 years I suppose.

[steve kim]

this thread has helped me immensely in unraveling the da vinci code thank you gentlemen

[Jasonwclark]

I've been following this thread since it grew out of the Alchemy one, but haven't contributed anything, mainly because I don't know how to parse compositions as well as you two. But I do love words, and Chris picked a good one, so here's a brief etymological aside while we wait for Waterhouse to show up and explain himself. :)

Evocation
1574, from L. evocationem (nom. evocatio), from evocare "call out, rouse, summon," from ex- "out" + vocare "to call" (see voice). Evoke is from 1623, often more or less with a sense of "calling spirits," or being called by them. Evocation was used of the Roman custom of petitioning the gods of an enemy city to abandon it and come to Rome; it was also used to translate the Platonic Gk. anamnesis "a calling up of knowledge acquired in a previous state of existence."

Good stuff here guys, thanks for posting.

[rpace]

Great discussion.

I can't get over how much you analysis studies look like what I push my design and compositions students toward in their design journals.

~Richard

[Earendil]

Great great thread here.

I was noticing the downward trends in the figure, but never noticed those patterns in the background and foreground. Amazing breakdown!

[Chris Bennett]

Regarding the colour in this piece, it is the tapestry that gives us the clue. We are so used to seeing the faded remains in stately homes and museums. Here it is disturbingly reversed: It is the landscape that has faded and the tapestry that is new. This is so strong a conceit that I cannot overemphasise it enough. Our sense of unease about this is amplified by the fact that it dangles into the water and its colour will soon to be leeched by the black water. To confound this one is struck by the eroticism of what is happening - the white sanity of her dress will finally succumb.
But not yet. Not ever, for such is the sublime beauty of this business of static images, of paintings in whatever form, that we shall forever remain in this melting moment.

[Chris Bennett]

A couple of other things that have occured to me:
The cavity of her mouth is an inversion of her belt and the boat both in shape and colour, and her hair (with full acceptance of Kev's tears metaphor) sits beside her face as do the trees sit beside her body. It is as if her physical parts are being transmogrified into the environment or that the lonely, forlorn, still day has taken human/spirit form in this heartbreaking young woman.
For a demonstration of how much this is working on behalf of the picture's meaning, and that it should in no way to be regarded as subjective 'wool gathering' I refer you to this horrible image:
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[Chris Bennett]

I'm wondering if the enclosure/blocking polarity is the axis of all the secondary metophor grammer in pictures. Certainly in 'carving' pictures other things are operating since the central metaphor is release from the womb yet respect for the mother.
So we are largely talking about modelling paintings, yes?
Off the cuff, I can think of a third archetype - 'the portal' which can be the metaphor for transcendence or arrival. You could, however, argue that the portal is built out of a spieces of modified enclosure. If we help ourselves to a device from the Mathematics storeroom, we can think of the enlosure and the block as the sphere and the torus. The sphere can be morphed into cylinders, cubes, tree trunks or Norman Rockwell suitcases (as long as you take the handle off - if you don't its a torus!) The torus can become walled gardens, coats or doorways.
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This is not to be taken too literally since a harbour is really a magnet shape morphed out of a sphere and forms a sort of open ended enclosure - but I hope you get the general idea.
It may be more practical to simply think of 'the portal' as the third component of this pictorial grammer we are discussing.
Things also get a little complicated when combination of these elements are used:
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David Inshaw's The Badmington Game. Here we see a combination of enclosures both in metaphoric and and literal form. We also see 'the block' being used as an obstruction and as an enclosure. The largest and most dominant block is also the one that is almost literally empathic with the left hand girl in the most tender way - a beautiful example of the brutality of the block being balanced by an equal volume of delicacy within the same form. The badmington net works the other way around - a delicate form acting as a barrier. In a subtle way the 'portal' is the moon whose transcendent gateway is pointed to by the quiet brother of the main 'blocking' tree. These two trees 'play' with the portal moon in the same way the girls play with the shuttlecock - itself a portal symbol of their effervescent spirits in flight.
I'll say more about this beautiful painting later but I've tried to keep my thoughts focused on Kev's previous post.
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Notice too the latticed cloud formations drifting near the portal moon - they threaten to be a barrier to our view of it and its view of the playing girls. A badmington net in the sky.
There is another watcher of this scene. We see the evidence of their presence in the long shadows. It is the sinking or perhaps rising sun.
Is this a morning picture?
The sun gives its light to this picture and thereby the explanatory shadows - just as our witnessing of the painting gives it its meaning. We must decide. The transcendental moon will not help here; only our mortal, compassionate sensibility.

[Chris Bennett]

One more thing that floated into my head whilst painting this afternoon:
We witness this painting as if it is impossible to get any nearer. The original painting is a large one, something like 5ft high yet we see everything 'sight size' now matter how near we get to it. As in a dream it forever receeds from us. It is 'over there', like the voices from a distant school playground. We watch as if at the gates of a place from which we are forbidden. The whole painting seems to act as a block and an invitation to the enclosure at the same time.

[Medieve]

Just wanted to pipe in to say that this is an epic discussion; and that I laughed very hard at the stop-sign interpretation of Frazetta's work.

[Chris Bennett]

I think this tells us that color is the metaphoric province of the flat world.


This is why pictures with a stronger carving proclivity are able to use colour more profoundly and metaphorically than pictures with a strong modelling procivity. What is sacrificed in terms of vector (tensions, dynamics and so forth) and its powerful narrative metaphor is made up for by colour metaphor (as opposed to decoration) and 'field' or 'area' metaphor.
It is the world of affinities that the subtle fruits of the carving elements of a picture come into their own.
Affinities are not really possible with vectors, not directly anyway.
However, an affinity is a sort of story, which puts it in the field of narrative grammer in pictures.
It depends on what your main aim is regarding any given 'song' you want to sing as an image and you use the appropriate tools accordingly. The Badmington Game as is the Frazetta are largely modelling pictures so colour and surface shape affinities have a small part to play metaphorically. I'll agree that the modelling vector grammer is the more widely and more often used tool in the artist's narrative grammer box, but there are some things it cannot do.
Breugel's picture demonstrates what I mean: The cream white is alive and dances amongst retinue almost unsullied, guiltless. The red weighs down - an intensification of the brown soup they have been eating, turning deep red with appetite sated (notice the red cap on the little girl licking her fingers). The sage green mediates and the light blue, seen only on the jacket of the servant stands apart. Like a question.
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[VeSeljak]

I just want to thank you guys for sharing your thoughts whit us, this thread is loaded with ideas:).....respect.....and if I understood this discussion so far, I think cezanne was carver and modeller.....he was modelling with color:)

[Chris Bennett]

Kev: Just spotted your Rockwell and iconic colour thoughts. I'm just off but I am looking forward to sorting Mr Rockwell's picture out with regard to my thoughts on the Breugel. Must go now....see ya later.

[Rabid]

The Breugel re-metaphorized more directly to the narrative vector of "jealousy"... with apologies...

Or maybe Breugel wanted to paint a large group of townsfolk having a feast?
Iv'e had countless tales pass my ears about this piece in both acedemics and standard BSing...I think it is read into far too much...

BTW great stuff here Kev!

[Rabid]

Thanks, Rabid. I love that other people are tuning into this effort.

I would agree that Breugel wasn't doing much here but having some fun. But natural storytellers are instinctually crafty about what they do. And they are naturally drawn to drama, or dramatically draw, (or something like that).

So, did Breugel make that table of people as solid as a brick by accident or intentionally? Doesn't matter to me, because it works perfectly as a metaphoric unit, so there it is... a metaphoric unit.

I would guess he was indeed conscious about the "brick of chaotic peeps" because we have evidence that he was playing with the formal elements elsewhere... especially evident is his very conscious decision to use the Red Clothing on the Red Guys to tell the story... and to have that Pie Thief Guy right in between them reaching for his treat... that's pretty darn clear narrative to me.

Oh I agree Kev, he definetly had some concious ideas of what he was doing. The people we are supposed to extract a story from obviously have the unique poses and the brick crowd are meant to simply set the scene. Very good observations here, I hope everyone is listening :)

[Rabid]

Good thoughts good thoughts agree!

From a scientific standpoint everything that has a temperature above abosolute zero glows, even if our eye sight is unable to recognize it. Infrared is used because of this glow effect that heat generates. Our eyes can only begin to see a glow with a temperature close to flame such as a lit cigar or a hot peice of metal. Infrared enhances the spectrum to pick up glowing object at body temperature wavelengths....however reflected glow cuts off at about 186 degrees from what the human eye can preceive....

[Chris Bennett]

VeSeljak: In the process of answering your post I'm going to take the opportunity to contest something that Kev just said about carving pictures not expressing the void (or tapestry pictures as he likes to call them, but I will wear him down and get him to see the error of his ways!).
The pictures you posted are all early mid-period Cezanne and it is easier to talk about what I mean regarding his 'carving' with colour as opposed to modelling with colour if I take a late painting of Mont St Victoire:
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The planes we think we see and seem specific to facets of form reflecting light are in fact nothing of the sort. In physical terms they specify nothing. They are not landing on a surface as in, say, a Rembrandt (a supreme modelling painter) or describing the colour of a plane. And this is very, very important.
What these coloured marks appear to be are 'armatures' of energy and direction - they are little forces. They are articulated, chromatic vectors. (This will set the cat amongst the pigeons!) They buckle the surface at the same time as reaffirming it. They create torsions, twists, couplings etc - strings of them form 'plastic sentences' and groups of these sentences form plastic paragraphs. The entire painting is of course the complete book.
Now, we read this book by reading BETWEEN THE LINES. We read the image of the painting as a painting 'of something' by the inferences generated by the way these articulations buckle the surface.

Notice how this process is at work in an unfinished painting of his:

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Notice how the painting is still 'complete' though 'unfinished'. Each articulation added to the next is affecting the surface in a way that sees the whole rectangle as sort force being given formal 'direction' by virtue of buckling it. At no point can it be ignored and the 'image' (or what the picture will be of) be given first preference. If the image is given preference then the grammar of the means is completely lost. To maintain a grip on this grammar the surface is paramount at all times, since it is what is being used to 'speak' by virtue of these little articulations that activate its plane.

Kev: Not addressing the void? The white noise of the canvas is the void. It is made to speak by the modulation, the carrier 'wave of the brush' (sorry about that...). By no means does it hide it, but in the most profound sense does it embrace it. Modelling can only allude to it.

[deliciouspeter]

What a lovely read. I've printed this out to read again at home. Just wonderful.

[Chris Bennett]

Quick note... on deadline again...

Since painting isn't "real"... it is all "alluding." The question seems to be one of profundity. Is the experience of infinite space through perspective a more profound allusion to the profundity of the void, or is the shattering of space and form (or whatever it is that Cezanne is doing) a more profound allusion to the presence of the void.

I can't answer that question... so I offer a draw :)

A draw it is! - And gratitude, without you putting forward the idea, I would never have thought of my particular take on it in the first place!

Here is my take on The Rockwell iconic colour thing:
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I agree with what you say about the way we experience the 'red' in the Rockwell. But although it reads somewhat as an heraldic colour property it has no real 'plastic presence'. It is little more than a tinting of a tonal painting. The Holbien is chromatic in the fullest sense. Not because colours other than the 'Rockwell red' figure but because of its 'affinity' with those other colours. In the Rockwell the beige colours and the cool grey and cool greens and hottish browns are really only a 'backdrop' to the dull red, which is why it appears heraldic - had the other colours been pulled up in saturation then, because of the way Rockwell thought as a modeller, the red would have lost its heraldic presence. The dull red in the Holbien is also heraldic even against the more saturated colours - which in turn are also heraldic. Such is the way colour works quite naturally when painting in the 'carving state of mind' as was Holbien's strong proclivity.

[Chris Bennett]

On the chromatic vectors in Cezanne... Mont St Victoire... we are in agreement. Marks are vectors, generally.

If the marks don't coalesce to form a plane, they remain marks. This keeps them in a state of dynamism... not quite forming into "matter" by mapping a surface proper.

I've discussed earlier that the more vector quality a thing has, the less presence quality it has. So I would agree that Cezanne is filling the surface with vectors that are more vectors than surfaces.

You can see the progression to that idea from the more "trick" like busting up of volume in the picture I explicated earlier of the peaches. That picture was more spotty. Whereas he developed a more wholistic philosophy of applying this aesthetic.

Yet, there is the illusion, somewhat of depth in the St. Victoire picture. What he does with the perspective lines is similar to Syd Mead. He goes toward infinity then veers off. The most "perspective" comes from the atmosphere.

kev

This may well be the bridge by which the carving and modelling approaches to image making commune with each other. It may, may even be their common parent - the mark or shape (if the painting's handwriting is not explicit) as vector/gesture. I'm going to have to get into some deep thought over that.
Regarding the atmospheric colour in the Cezanne giving it depth I think this is a very minor and secondary component. It is the 'plastic sentence gestures' that are tacking the real strain (and implied metaphor) of the reading of space here, as the desaturated image shows I think.
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[Chris Bennett]

Right now, at this very moment that I type, is an example of 'carving colour' (all over iconic/heraldic) over on the 'It's finally Finished' forum - it's someone posting a thread called 'new website'. Now, the interesting thing is to not go into the thread but scroll down the various thumbs in the forum comparing the thumbnail of this thread with the others. Most of the other pictures are modelling conception, but this one is definitely carving. The thing to notice about this is the way in which the carving image seems 'broader' and can be read 'all at once', seeming to 'give' itself' to you with no effoort, whereas most of the others you have to peer into. The same takes place comparing the Rockwell and the Holbien. They are both the same size but the Holbien seems bigger whilst the Rockwell 'caves in'. I do not mean this as a criticism since there are things that the carving state of mind has to forgo and yeald to advantages in the modelling approach which Kev has extremely well outlined. It is simply an illustration of a particular advantage of carving sensiblity.
The best demonstration of the allover iconic colour characteristic of carving paintings that I can think of right at this moment.
Here is the post to look for:
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[Chris Bennett]

:)
Well, this fox is being told by Mrs Fox to 'join in with things' so I'll have to go and drink some Mead with the rest of Court in Ye Olde Merrie Blighty.
See ya later.

[Chris Bennett]

So I'm trying to figure out what pictorial depth the silhouette (image) naturally arrives at when placed on canvas.


Because you are dealing with silhouttes it means that they are giving clues to the brain and how the space should be read based on association. They are 'illustrating' space as opposed to building it out of a much more primary language. Sure, the elemental Mark/shape vector is a symbol of sorts, but it is a primary, indivisible one from which more complex things can be built. The silhouettes you give as examples are probably built out of 5 or 6 elemental vectors. However, they do not sit in a space described by any vectors, they just stand self contained - the only thing suggesting 'where they are' in space is their figurative association.

[sicko]

I've been skimming through this and will definitely have to do some heavier reading when I have time.

Going back to Waterhouse's "Lady of Shallot" the thing that caught my eye right away but I didn't see mentioned, is how the tapestry acts as more than just a key, it's almost a full duplication of the entire composition with colors and shapes
http://satanclauz.com/sicko/post/los.jpg

sorry if someone made this obvious before (I do mostly look at pictures ;))

[Earendil]

Kev, regarding the silhouettes do you think that some context is actually required to read the ground in this instance? What if hypothetically, the person viewing had never seen are horse, a rider, or a rider on a horse? Or a tree for that matter? It seems to me the ground plane is being established because we know that horses need to stand on something, trees grow out of something...then depth is established.

EDIT: Oop, I think that's just what Chris said above. :bashful:

This reminds me of a story I read, where a man who had lived his whole life in the jungle was shown the plains. It confused him. He saw people on the horizon but interpeted them as just "shrunken". Distance/perspective was lost on him, and as things came nearer they just appeared to be growing in size the relationship wasn't understood yet.

There's a book that I'm going to try and find again, because I think it could provide insight on how we see/construct our vision.

[Earendil]

I'm pretty sure it was a scientifically documented case.

The book is called "Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See"
http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Intelligence-How-Create-What/dp/0393319679

[Chris Bennett]

I've been skimming through this and will definitely have to do some heavier reading when I have time.

Going back to Waterhouse's "Lady of Shallot" the thing that caught my eye right away but I didn't see mentioned, is how the tapestry acts as more than just a key, it's almost a full duplication of the entire composition with colors and shapes
http://satanclauz.com/sicko/post/los.jpg


That's a nice observation - it adds drama to my idea about the tapestry being the reverse situation in the picture to the way we normally expeience them: faded, in a world of colour. Here it is a coloured version of the faded landscape. The indoors in the outdoors.

[kingshaj]

fascinating thread---carving space. i don't think i've seen all this theory in one place before. nice

[Chris Bennett]

This painting of Dean's is a marvelous image - a lesson to us all to keep the 'what' before the 'how' when you actually sit down to work. If he ever saw this again later in life it must have broken his heart.
That hat on the floor is such a beautiful surprise and from the moment of noticing it the whole painting takes it's poise.
Thanks Kev.

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[Jasonwclark]

tomorrow I will expand on that Waterhouse 'Ulysses and the Sirens'

Ulysses and the Sirens is one of my favorites, can't wait to hear your thoughts on the composition.

Curious fact about the Sirens -they have become increasingly sexualized as time goes on. Originally they were depicted on vases as simple birds/cranes, later as 'woman headed' birds, but now they are almost always presented as beautiful nudes (in paintings and films for example). In Homer the lure of the Sirens' call is perfect knowledge, rather than sex, and Odysseus refuses to wax his ears because of his curiosity. I think Waterhouse captured this idea better than anyone.

Anyhow, don't let me interupt the train of thought on the vectors.
Just wanted to share some pictures I had saved :)

[Earendil]

Interesting observations of the sirens over time.

kev, who painted the blue/green painting of the embracing couple in water? My friend has that painting hanging in her house, and it always drew my eye. The use of small bits of red == effective.

[Chris Bennett]

OK, here is the Waterhouse seen in terms of the primary Mark/Shape vector.
I've tried to demonstrate that in all good paintings the fundamental building block is there at all times. The big vector properties that dominate the painting are built of smaller chains of vectors which in turn are built by still smaller chains.
First the picture and the dominating vectors:
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Next, a part of the painting seen again in terms of its dominating vectors for this particular part:

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Now a smaller part of the above segment and again seen it terms of its main vectors within this particular detail:

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Finally, I put the three examples together on the same image to demonstrate how the process works:

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In making the painting this process is happening all over the surface and is of course taken further than my final example - the process goes on right down to the stucture of the smallest detail so that even the eyelashes will belong to the whole. This is why we feel we can almost taste the spray as we are surrounded by the sirens who all breath the same damp air. I hope this helps people to understand what I mean.
Also to attempt to 'walk the walk' as well as 'talk the talk'.

[Chris Bennett]

I'm either not understanding you Kev or I am in complete disagreement.
The two 'Waterhouses' are roughly the same silhouette yet are completely different in their ability to move us. The same goes for the Michelangelo 'David' and poor copies one sees in people's gardens.
As far as I am concerned its to do with the thing being self contained within itself - a music of forms that creates its own questions, own rules and answers them in terms of itself. My 'Icecube floating on its own melting'.

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[Chris Bennett]

So here's two "instant classic" NC Wyeths... and 1 non-classic from the same period.

What's the difference?

I'm going to put my sword through the last one regarding what I think I understand regarding your 'branding' idea along with your analogy to song structure. It doesn't quite possess the 'all elements in consort' ideal to approach what you describe as iconic. In my terminology it doesn't quite have all the parts belonging to the whole in plastic or narrative terms. Those birds in the bottom left, to take one example are weak on both counts. They seem hoplessly inadequate to balance the bird studded sky.
My head turns upwards and squints across the sunlit arena to see if the figure sitting high up, above the crowd, will hold his thumb skyward while the helmet burns against my face and what I have done lies exhausted at my feet.

[dbclemons]

Personally, I would say from those Wyeth paintings that the giant is the least dramatic of the 3, if that's your meaning of "instant classic." Rather straightforward in terms of presentation and a stable triangle composition, which is something Frazetta uses almost all the time. Rework it from the POV of the children or closer to how Goya made it and it could be more dramatic.

I'd also say your rework of the cliff climber needs more cowbell, uh, birds. That activity in Wyeth's painting is what sells it for me. In yours I hear waves that really isn't that agressive, instead of screaming gulls.

[dbclemons]

Action is only one element of drama, kev. By pulling back the camera and reducing the number of birds, you've reduced the action.

All your red lines have taken a very simple basic design and made it busier than it really is. Most of those tangents are just supporting elements to the larger structure. The background clouds are a simple arch over the figure, the dark clouds emphasize the direction of his stride as do the gulls, and you've neglected the significance of the row of children all gazing up at him. Just see it simply. When your marking up an image, consider shades of gray instead of everything screaming red.

[Chris Bennett]

That's a wonderful post Kev. The engine to inpiration's petrol is how I think of what you are saying. (sorry, 'gas' as you call it!)
Stanley Kubrick springs to mind here. He never really thought of 'art' as such, more as problem solving. But since every single 'problem' he solved had to do with giving greater realisation to the narrative in the widest ranging and deepest expression possible then so 'art' was formed as a sort of by-product.
In fact, I think this is why the abstract experiment in painting has failed. It was a frontal assault on this idea of 'art', believing it could be mined directly. It is interesting that there are no really 'memorable' images produced in abstraction; only styles, ways of doing it.
The great problem today for 'picture makers' (for that is what we all are) is to have a 'purpose' that drives what we do. The old masters had one. Today, 'gallery art' is little more than interior decor - even when the artists are extremely earnst and true, the function they serve is to hang in a shop an hope someone wants what they do hanging in their homes.
The deep, deep paradox is that it is in 'commercial art' that the kind of purpose that was given to the old masters can be found once again.
I wonder if you believe this too?

[darkwolfb87]

This is what I've garnered so far. Please correct me if I'm mistaken: it is good to respect the edges of the canvas (X and Y axes) and compose within its physical constraints, but creating illusionistic sculptural form (along the Z-axis) using paint is only good in so much as it conforms to the pictorial design of the painting, which occurs only along the X and Y axes. So, the job of the illustrative painter is not to create an illusion of sculpture on a 2D surface (I think this is the only purpose of realism/tromp l'oeil whether still life or portrait, which are technical studies that occasionally hide behind beautiful technique and strong gestural lines), but to create a strong [narrative] design that is at the core of the painting's unity as a 2D canvas. So for example, the narrative commissions of Caravaggio are weakened by their emphasis on sculptural realism at the expense of the 2D design.

Thanks for this thread guys. I hope to join in on the conversation when I finish reading!

Kev, I was wondering where I could find the full notes from Howard Pyle. Are there other primary sources like that from other illustrators? It would be great to have them all listed in one place.

[Flake]

Kev, I was wondering where I could find the full notes from Howard Pyle. Are there other primary sources like that from other illustrators? It would be great to have them all listed in one place.

Page 136 of Creative Illustration has some of Pyles notes.

[Chris Bennett]

This is what I've garnered so far. Please correct me if I'm mistaken: it is good to respect the edges of the canvas (X and Y axes) and compose within its physical constraints, but creating illusionistic sculptural form (along the Z-axis) using paint is only good in so much as it conforms to the pictorial design of the painting, which occurs only along the X and Y axes. So, the job of the illustrative painter is not to create an illusion of sculpture on a 2D surface (I think this is the only purpose of realism/tromp l'oeil whether still life or portrait, which are technical studies that occasionally hide behind beautiful technique and strong gestural lines), but to create a strong [narrative] design that is at the core of the painting's unity as a 2D canvas. So for example, the narrative commissions of Caravaggio are weakened by their emphasis on sculptural realism at the expense of the 2D design.

Thanks for this thread guys. I hope to join in on the conversation when I finish reading!


You put it very nicely Darkwolf.
The way that the 3D world is 'realised' on a 2D surface is the very activity that allows metaphor to take place. Imagine a scupltor that had buckets of magical 'stuff' in which they could put together completely 'real' human beings: There would be no poetry because there would be no metaphor - the scuplture and what it was 'representing' would be indistinguishable from each other. So it is with flat images: If there was no mataphor due to a 3D world realised as a 2D 'equivalent' then it would be like looking through a window. The 2D poetry (the flat shapes upon its surface and the process by which they create an implied space)) is the way the maker of the image wants us to 'read' the 'world' they have created.

Looking forward to you joining in!

[darkwolfb87]

Here are a couple Old Master compositions that are particularly effective:

[Chris Bennett]

The Geisha painting seems to be about occlusion, non-disclosure. The shapes support this idea by turning around each other, protecting a dark stillness - the little dark petrol blue square of the unknowable. Just as the Japanese culture was beckoning and occluding the young Scotsman who painted her.
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[Chris Bennett]

Darkwolf; it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the Velazquez that you posted.

[alesoun]

Kev, how much of that do you think was planned, and how much was left to the viewer?

I'm just wondering how much of composition is planned, and how much is subjective interpretation, and where is the line drawn, and by whom?

Forgive me, but composition is my bugbear.....

[Earendil]

Those Pyle notes are great. Thanks for posting them up!

One thing I noticed on your "down down down" image, is that the sides of the plane seemed to be sweeping towards me.

Couldn't a form have a presence type vector and a presence type gesture at the same time? Maybe not in equal parts, but with one being more dominant than the other. Kind of like those optical illusions where two people have two different experiences from the same image.

Incidentally, are all these lecture notes online? I only found Dunn's through your earlier post.

[DIMAGYAN]

very interesting.

one question on this:

"quote removed"


why you exclude life understanding from others "kinds" of art?

or better put: is there no understanding in the representation of an emotion or idea related with human nature(because after all we make images for humans) expressed without metaphor?

iconics elements appear also in colours for instance.
in the creation of an image colours have a narrative role. so the question i make to myself is: the colours alone can be a narration? or only a description?
and there is an emotional response to that colours.

so there is a life experience. however i know that "a life experience" cannot be put as an example of art(at least in a strict sense).and that type of experience don't mean a narration per se.

the boundaries between a story with characters and paths that help to understand what happen inside that universe, to convey the reality in that situation, and a "story" produced only with symbols or icons are clear in the formal sense....

but

there is not a life representation in both?

just some thoughts, sorry for the theme change.

really good reading so far...continue

[Earendil]

Yes, absolutely. Many forms do. On that "down down down" plane, the forward motion is very prominent. I should have used a hovering square instead, because it would have less "forward momentum".

If you look back a few pages you'll see a did this transform from a cube to a "gestural" pointing type form. So all the middle shapes in the morph would all be simultaneously having "presence" and vector but in varying combinations.

Oop, think I missed that. Gotta try and keep up!

Are the lecture notes online? I've got Dunn's...

[DIMAGYAN]

ok i see what you mean. however you can relate with icons. so i guess is in the representation of things.

so:
one thing is the experience of be in front of an image, and the emotional response without the content(as a"personal" inner travel) . and another thing is the response in front of an image with content that "talk" to us about something specific in life(death, love,betrayl,etc) that relate us with the others.

the pyle notes are very good, a pdf would be a nice idea.

-------------------------------------------------------

is very interesting what you say about the importance of elements besides the characters .in a more practical sense every element tell a story, and if one think about that for a moment...is exactly what happens in real life.

even the piece of paper you trow in the floor: were was before? why you discard that paper? and how that paper show the charcter of the subject:there is order in his/her life, or not? he or she is temperamental?, etc

i know that don't have a direct relation with the gesture idea of yours,but was something i think reading that.

[Earendil]

As soon as I get off work, I'll look into making a PDF of these. If that's ok?

[Chris Bennett]

Kev, like others have said; those Pyle notes are wonderful and I can't thank you enough for taking the trouble to type them up fo us all. Sometimes one thinks that the problems with making pictures are entirely one's own and nobody elses - as if the difficulties are peculiar to one's own mental nonsense. Pyle tell us of the same things happening to him over a century ago. What a strange, strange business this making of pictures is.
I haven't joined in much these last couple of days since I've just landed a big portrait commission, but I'm following things very closely and digesting your thoughts on 'attempt gesture' and how they translate to my own notions that are parallel to yours but not so crystaline in their formulation.

[yoitisi]

This is one of those threads that, when reading it with the right mindset, just goes 'click'. I'm currently going through the first page while I should be sleeping, but I find it fascinating. Thanks so much for putting it up, I'm going to read more tomorrow for sure :)

[Earendil]

Kev, the tree seems to either be flipping them them off, or giving the "brick wall/talk to the hand" sign. :) The other "arm" almost seems like a "hand on hip" sort of gesture, but that may be pushing it...

Great Frazetta pic! Holy crap! I couldn't figure out where the inner oval shapes were coming from until I looked into the picture further.

[DIMAGYAN]

i don't know if the trees are judging, but theiy work as a scale element.
trees are a demonstration of nature power and "wisdom"(age, "wrinkles", amount of life inside and outside of the tree), so thoese knights are almost like children in a "war game"...humans wacthed by (like you said) elders...

thoese humans bring an alteration in the tree's "domains".
trees like towers or mountains are gravity defying elements, there is an attemp to reach the highs.meanwille humans are playing on the ground.

just some ideas.

the frazetta painting is a good example.

i think that composition and narration are essential,every part of the image have a purpose.
so this is a great exercise and read

[DIMAGYAN]

i was thinking about the knights paint and the judging trees. it make sense what you said about the non-passive posture of the tree. seeing again the background it brings some sort of harmony and balance...but in the foreground we see the main action (the fight) adding chaos...the tree as you said divide the composition, not only in the formal aspect but also in the inner time of the situation(what you said about past an present in the action)... and i think posible in the consecuences:the death horse is the satart of the fight (probably), and also the first result of the "crime against tree domain"(nature)

so the tree in the present is watching from the begin of the action...and the future is the colision with the men from the rigthside of the frame.thus an strange element added to the woods.

also reading again your notes and the ones from Earendil, the "arms" of the tree seem very active in the gesture.

i want to make a small comment on this:

quote removed


i think that every element work in comparison because everything is related(cloud-tree-sky-etc) the scale,shape,color etc.yet can be in harmonize(colors, divisions,etc)

it colud be a matter of taste...a contrast,etc.

somehow the idea of "if you have the figures fight in the foreground, have the trees or the clouds fight in the background" to me could be related also as a composition factor, not strictly a "narrative gesture"...i mean, even in a figth scene the characters have variation on their lines and areas...violent curves, straight lines(repetition, silence) dynamism and areas with contact with the ground...so maybe the rythms in the background can share that action not only as an echo of characters but also as an opposite, generating tension(as you wrote above) and in the construction itself.

...anyway just some echo from your words, and some impudent interpretation of Howard Pyle quote from my part...

[Chris Bennett]

That last post of Kev's is rather timely since I'm going to throw another way of approaching this into the ring. Kev's ideas definitely 'work' and I'm not about to refute anything. I guess I'm going to attempt to approach this business with a different model in my mind.

Lets not think about 'carving' but rather building an image by seeing it in terms of distances. If I'm looking at a head then everything is seen as a series of experiences of things that are different distances from my eye.
Whistler is a perfect example of this way of seeing as is someone like Brad Holland:
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The forms are not 'made' so much as 'bumped into' by the paint. The paint seems to 'make way' for the forms and in so doing seems to make palpable the space between you and a form as if it were a sort of transparent fudge or plasticine.
The 'meaning' or 'gesture' of the forms are there by virtue of being arrived at in this particular way - announcing themselves to the approaching paint and stopping it. The fact that something is 'there' in the picture has a mysterious power since it doesn't feel like it was put there (as in modelling) but rather discovered.
Thus it is a composing by 'presences'.
That's all for today, but I would be interested in people's thoughts before I start to amplify on this.

[Jasonwclark]

Hey Kev, I caught that post you made about the relationship between "metaphor" and art, and dug up a couple Nietzsche selections that I thought you might enjoy. Many people don't bother reading the notebooks from the 1870's, since they’re so fragmentary, but I think they contain some of the more interesting insights into his broader aesthetic theory. Anyhow, I really enjoyed all those Pyle notes you posted, so I figured I owed you.

What then is truth? A moveable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost there embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins [...] At bottom what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation. Similar to the way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man’s service and connected with his happiness and sorrow, such an investigator considers the entire universe in connection with man: the entire universe as an infinitely fractured echo of one original sound—man; the entire universe as one infinitely multiplied copy of one original picture—man. His method is to treat man as the measure of all things, but in doing so he again proceeds from the error of believing that he has these things [which he intends to measure] immediately before him as mere objects. He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things in themselves.

-On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense


There exists within us a power which permits the major features of the mirror image to be perceived with greater intensity, and again there is a power which emphasizes rhythmic similarity beyond the actual inexactitude. This must be an artistic power, because it is creative. Its chief creative means are omitting, overlooking, and ignoring. It is therefore an anti-scientific power, because it does not have the same degree of interest in everything that is perceived.
The word contains nothing but an image, and from this comes the concept. Thinking thus calculates with artistic magnitudes.
All categorization is an attempt to arrive at images.
We relate superficially to every true being; we speak the language of symbol and image. Then we artistically add something to this by reinforcing the main features and forgetting the secondary ones.

-Philosophy and Truth

Again, really great thread guys. I look forward to seeing more.

[Earendil]

I still need to catch up with the last few pages, but here is a PDF of "Howard Pyle's Lecture Notes".

Let's see if this link works. EDIT: Yay it works.
http://www.box.net/shared/eccglstgkk

[Grief]

hey kev and chris, if you guys have a moment i'd appreciate a compositional dissection of mary cassatt's The Bath (1891-1892).

ive found the shape of the pitcher repeating in the form of the child, but i'm a bit stuck on understanding much else of the environment in its relation to the painting.

[Grief]

this is all ive been able to extract so far.

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[Chris Bennett]

That first panel with the discs in 3D space is a really interesting take on it Grief.
To me this is mostly composed with cross rhythms - the stripes of the dress against the limbs of the child. The dark shape peeping from under the bowl is crucial to holding the balance of the darks in check (see second panel) put your finger over it to see what happens when it is removed.There is another thought that occurs to me which is the way in which the shared activity and focus of the mother and child finds itself realised in the echos of each other's pose with its opposition of gesture vectors against 'gaze vectors' (see third panel):
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[Grief]

yeah i was trying to establish the viewer's direction of gaze and thought it was a 'S' shape, but quickly adjusted it to a figure 8 because of the childs limb and the shape mirrored by the contour of the bath on the opposite side.

but as with the first 'circular' paintover the two 'S' shapes converge at the point where the two heads meet.

im beginning to think that the child is not on the mother's lap, but is actually the pitcher. the gaze of the mother looks at the pitcher, and most of the lines of the composition seem to radiate from that corner.

[squidmonk3j]

just wanted to say how much i am enjoying this conversation:)

[Chris Bennett]

Kev, that is beautifully put! I now understand you very clearly - not your fault I was a little hazy earlier, just that these ideas are new to me and its taking time to digest them properly.
Verve Vectors! that's great - I take it that it refers to those surface forces made by the shape/mark gestures in the Volleyball painting.
OK, so here is a question that is taking better shape in my mind thanks to what you have been talking about:

The visceral authority that is given off by pictures that are heavy on verve vectors is at a price. That price is the 'pyschological effect of specifics', more commonly thought of as 'detail' but really a misleading term for our purposes. It is impossible to imagine the Waterhouse having the effect it has if it was built of verve vectors. In fact you can see what happens by looking at the 'rough' photoshop paintings I did to illustrate a point regarding Waterhouse's Ulysses and the Sirens.
However.
The difference we saw with the real Waterhouse Lady of Shalott and the computer modelled knock-off told us that something else is going on with the real one independent of just 'psychology of specifics'. You explained it as the chorus and verse set up by the music of the vectors - if I could call it that.
Now the question.

Is this music of the vectors that is written 'amongst' the illustrative specifics of a picture giving off the same thing (having the same effect) as the verve vectors (lthe language of mark/shapes) I have been talking about?


I ask this because the real Waterhouse has a visceral 'presence' that the knock-off does not and it feels very similar to the kind of 'kick' one gets from looking at verve vector paintings (Fechin, late Monet, Sargent watercolours, some Jeff Jones, Jackson Pollock, Charles Reid, late Cezanne and.....erm...my volleyball pictures).
I also ask this because conciously using the principles you have been outlining has given me a certain 'contact' with the 'guts' of a picture that feels curiously similar to making verve vector paintings.

I think this is a very important question and lies right at the heart of all sorts of people's problems with 'finish', 'looseness' and questions of style.

[Chris Bennett]

That is so well put it makes my eyes water!
It explains why any wholesale investment into just a part of what you have described sooner or later leads to artistic unfulfillment - it leads to the 'isms' we see in 20th century modern art. In individual terms, the artist who makes a conscious decision to adopt a couple of these mechanisms experiences an initial 'flaring' as their resources conduit into the one engine, seemingly taking them further. But this is an illusion, a quick victory made possible by a pinpoint attack and resultant localised breakthrough. But the emotional supply lines are short and the battle is by no means won.
This is the the malady that explains the symptom behind abrupt occilations of style in sertain individuals work, and the accompaning sense of unease about what they do.
I had never realised this before.
(Sorry about the mixed metaphors. It always happens to me when I get excited!)

[Azospin]

Hello, I am new on CA, hence still caught up in getting a general idea of what`s going on in here. Now I just spent about an hour in this thread and will come back for sure, cause I am impressed and, please don`t get me wrong, surprised by the grade of quality of the discussion itself and the variety of paintings deconstructed, concerning periods as well as styles. As far as I remember correct (I am not good in keeping things like that in mind) there is even a painting by Martin Kippenberger (the nude man with the beard) amongst those VeSeljak (post #15) did bring along.

However, this thread is very informative and deep going. I am sorry, that I am not able to contribute something more relevant than this here. Even if I could in regard to the topic I would fail, so my english is still quite akward and flat... but I try to improve, not least by reading great threads like this.

Keep it up!!!

joseph

[Chris Bennett]

That's good Kev - it nicely puts together what I was spluttering on about with the verve vector painting I posted. I'm interested in how this relates to the 'higher function' elements in the painting's construction. For example, go close into the legs of the young girl in the Cassat and they are built of these marvelous, close toned strokes that tell so beautifully of how Cassat 'sees' and chooses to translate them into a 2D experience and thereby convey her wordless metaphor for their physical presence. This is the guesture at first hand. But when viewed as a whole we become aware of them as part of a larger whole and their contribution to the higher functions of compositional vectors not built of a mark or moment gesture but built of something more willfull. These bigger compositional vectors can still can be seen as a gesture in their effect on us, but the word is a little misleading when applied to these more deliberate systems of thought.

Perhaps the best way I can explain myself is to say:
To leap across a stream is a gesture.
To build a bridge across a river is the same gesture but really a metaphor of that gesture.
Thus we have a painting made of 'gesture' marks that build forms that are metaphors of gesture marks.
And if the gesture mark itself is a metaphor.....then things are getting interesting.....

[Chris Bennett]

To leap across a stream is a gesture.
To build a bridge across a river is the same gesture but really a metaphor of that gesture.
Thus we have a painting made of 'gesture' marks that build forms that are metaphors of gesture marks.
And if the gesture mark itself is a metaphor.....then things are getting interesting.....

Thinking some more on this:
The leaping across the stream in itself is not a metaphor for anything, whereas the bridge is - even though its primary cause is functional, it does what the elemental leaping across the stream does in a different way and is therefore in some sense metaphorical.
A painting's big compositional elements (vectors as we like to call them, gestures to make things a little more direct) can be seen as equivalent to the bridge of my analogy. But the 'marks on canvas', the primary 'making' gestures; the brushstokes cannot be seen as analogous to the leaping across the stream. Brushmarks are metaphors (as Kev has stated), they are the other side of an equation involving the real world on the other. (the 'equals' sign is the flat canvas if you will).
The stream leaper is not.
Hmmmmm.

[Chris Bennett]

It just struck me... it is often said that we go from the general to the particular, but in art, the particular is general as well. A brushstroke in isolation is just a mark. A compositional breakdown, of forms, colors, line, etc.... all generalizations.

Only the finished work is actual specific.

Yeah, that's right. I guess it could be compared to defining somewhere by co-ordinates which are in themselves general but when combined, nail something specific. Music and its twelve notes has the same thing happening. Notes can be played expressively of coarse but it is often said of someone like Bach that the 'straighter' you play him, the better, certainly Glenn Gould thought so. If I think of someone like Hopper or Magritte they have a very deadpan 'delivery' that worked simply because it did not get in the way of what was being compositionally 'said'. Sargent on the other hand relied heavily on his syntax to convey his meaning and when you took it out of his hands, as was the case with the Boston murals, the results were little short of laughable.
This poses a bit of a problem because we have the following situation:
The nearer you are to the syntax, the primal marks, primal gestures, 'words' or 'notes' and their shaping or gesturing for your meaning then the nearer you are to the general (If I understand you Kev). The nearer you are to the ' bigger constructional elements' for your meaning then the more specic you become.
This doesn't seem quite right when I think of actual examples - so something is wrong somewhere in my logic....

[Chris Bennett]

Hmmm... Actually they are variants of the same thing.


Not so sure.....the finished picture, if it is successfull is more than the sum of its parts - which would imply it is something different surely?
This is where I got caught out with the complete painting being a metaphor built of marks that were in themselves metaphors.
There is something missing in all this since what Cezanne said is true:
"When I have the leaf, I have the twig and thus have the branch. And if I have the branch, I have the trunk and thereby I have the tree...."

[Chris Bennett]

I'd go along with all that. It is just that the picture being more than the sum of the parts throws up a difficulty if we think of the mark gesture/vectors being a variant of the entirety. I'm not argueing for anything mystical here, as in the idea that the atoms make the brain but not the 'soul'.
There is no 'queen ant' making the decisions, just the results of the combined activities of all the ants interacting.
Could be true for ant's nests, maybe, maybe not.
However, it seems to me that you can never really make something that is any more than 'competent' by relying on method however much it is heartfelt and 'believed in' - i.e. if you commit to the brushmarks then they will yeald commitment to the forms they build and so on to the completed painting. I tried this for many years (the reductionist in me again, with a pinch of British puritanism!) and nothing really 'happened' until something else was allowed in: The 'what' was put in front of the 'how'.
The curious thing is that when things are 'right' the 'what' and the 'how' are indivisible. But this need not make them the same thing.
Its a kind of alchemy of intention and means that fuses the two together.
Do you see what I'm driving at?

[Chris Bennett]

I guess one could say that in the profoundest sense the 'what' is always a story when talking of art. To make those first gestures on the canvas without the 'what' or 'story' in your mind is what we call doodling. The story quite literally guides us. Of course, what we mean by story is very broad.
Thinking of your skriptwriter/director/designer reference I am again reminded of Kubrick:

Shortly after seeing Eyes Wide Shut for the sixth or seventh time I read the Arthur Schnitzler book from which it was adapted; 'Dream Story'. I was immensly struck by how close Kubrick had kept not only to the structure and 'beats' of the novella but how close to the mood and atmosphere of the original, even though he took it from 19th century Vienna and set it in contemporary New York. The 'story' in all its implied complexities is never lost sight of for a moment - it is the apple of his eye at all times. Every single particle of the film is there to resonate the source material, the 'story', the original 'gesture'. I am not talking about verbatum ticking of boxes but a necessary artistic reinvention in order to speak more clearly and authentically of the emotional truth of the story. He said something once about always struggling to keep the first emotional impact of the source material intact and at the forefront of his mind right to the very last edit.

Another thing I like about Kubrick is his deliberate 'coolness' - if the film is too visceral it apes 'life' and destroys the very purpose of what you are doing in the first place; to see meaning in experience. Respect for the surface of the canvas or board is a direct outcome of this along with its inbuilt metaphor insurance - 3D seen by way of 2D.
Some very simple explanations for troubling times in ones painting career can be accounted for with the undersatnding of 'story' as the prime mover, the gesture. If I find myself worrying about technique over much things are always going badly - I am literally off track. When I am thinking about problems of realising the story, however difficult they are to resolve I feel wholesome, feel I'm 'doin' it right', protected. The story is the light.

[Chris Bennett]

Yes that's right - whether hot or cool it is a special type of detachment that is required: How often the tears that one sees on stage are uncomfortably close to a real experience the actor is drawing on; it is the same unease one feels about having a dog on stage.
This is the interesting dilemma of portaits since they are chosen over a photograph because of their very 'detachment', their 'once removed' from reality that photography does not possess. Yet photography's innocence from metaphor is the very thing that makes them the first thing to be touched by the pining lover.

[Chris Bennett]

One of the big problems with 'conceptual art', as opposed to concept art, i.e. that practiced by Damien Hirst, Geoff Koons or Joseph Beuys is oddly enough to do with the 'literary idea': Something you would have thought would ensure the story or gesture as the prime mover along with its metaphorical recasting. This rarely happens. What you get is literary ideas made concrete - which is quite different to what we have been talking about. Damien Hirst has just exhibited a skull entirely encrusted with real diamonds. Now, the reading is immediately apparent: "Oooh, you can't take your money with you, diamonds are forever, the nature of cosmetics, beauty is skin deep ya-deya-deya-deya......" But these ideas are coming from the illustrative signpost of the object, not its 'realisation', not its communication by a frozen music of forms. As you say Kev, these ideas would occur to you after seeing the dead young girl in the street or watching an autopsy.

The ideas promted by conceptual art are still born, they do not try to unite in the 'narrative tension' you spoke of earlier because they are not shaped and given direction by being realised in the flux of a 'formal making' which propels them to an ulmost, but not quite, resolution in tension.
A 'stone man' is how the conceptual artist would read the Michelangelo David - it is how they would concieve of such a commision. Yet the Power of this work lies within the fantasies of weight and balance, harmonies of matter as following the gestures of the carved stone make it possible for us to read the business of being in a body made good, nay, made transcendental.

[Olof]

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This thread interests me, though I haven't been able o read through it properly yet (lot's of pages, lot's of knowledge, lot's of text...)

I have to interrupt for a second and ask who the author of this painting is. Any idea? Posted on the first page, and just beatiful :)

[Chris Bennett]

This thread interests me, though I haven't been able o read through it properly yet (lot's of pages, lot's of knowledge, lot's of text...)

I have to interrupt for a second and ask who the author of this painting is. Any idea? Posted on the first page, and just beatiful :)

It is by a wonderful artist called Alex Kanevsky. His website is here
http://www.somepaintings.net/Alex.html
Prepare to be amazed and bent in half by what you will see here - it may fuck you up for a couple of months before you finish assimilating what he has done......

[Chris Bennett]

The question: How important is the "live theater" aspect of painting?

Maybe this masterpiece could help us with a couple of things, even though it is a sculpture, thereby a sort of bridge to theatre:
It is set in a sort of theatre (the Medici chapel).
It is a metaphor of night and thereby has one of the most elemental stories.
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[Chris Bennett]

Wow Kev, you must be reading my mind!
You have nailed something that has been at the back of my mind for a long, long time. And you have put it very beautifully.

First Cezanne - I guess what he was painting about, what his 'story' was, in every picture, was the anxiety about what he was looking at. He had this one story, the business of making sense of what he had before him, and so his syntax and the 'face' of his paintings were all of a piece. Alex Kavensky is kind of doing the same thing but with a narrative component as well in a kind of dance with the other. More of him later when I have done a bit more thinking.

So, the silhouette. Interestingly, Cezanne hated the dark line trapping forms in Van Gogh and the Symbolists - the silhouette allowed him to 'make his mind up', and that was something that seemed to threaten his whole creative soul.
But this is just the fantastic power of the silhouette - something that has 'made its mind up'. The charisma of authority. Such a powerfull tool in the painter's box but, like wonderful truths that are poisoned into dogma by incomplete understanding, so the silhouette can be just as dangerous.
The silhouette can give immediate impact to the work almost like waving a magic wand and that is why it is so often misused by inexperienced artists in who's hands it can only spell the 'painting by numbers' look of painting sets.

Yet in those Andy Virgil pictures we see it used to bewitching effect. How else could those little black cupboard hinges in the 'kitchen sink bath' be so marvelously intense and poignant without this masterful use of silhoutte at the service of someone with 'something to say'.

We really must discuss further this business of silhouette and the mechanics of how it can be used. Would it be useful to discuss this in the context of what Alex Kavensky is doing, since he both seems to violate it and establish it in alternate sequence? I would say that the 'battle' between the two is the engine that drives the expression in his work among some other things.

[Chris Bennett]

Before moving on to Mr Kavensky I've got some thoughts about the pictures Kev has posted. Here's the first.
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[Chris Bennett]

Here's the next:
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[Chris Bennett]

And yet, I feel that a composition should work when you squint at it. Which would mean that the eye direction, gaze vectors and narrative associations would dissappear from the table.
This means that the purely abstract, non-associative forces on a 2D surface are distinct from the associative, figurative and thereby dramatic forces. However it is crucial that they must become fused when the work is done or all is lost.
It is this very fusion of the two domains is what gives off the special energy unique to flat, still pictures.

[Chris Bennett]

You may want to balance the composition for aesthetic reasons. But I can certainly imagine some situations where aesthetic balance will go against the theme of the picture. The core must rule the entirety.


What you said before this Kev, I'm in agreement with and the two things are bound closer together than I thought - we even read a random ink spodge as some sort of figurative gesture, it may perhaps seem to 'reach fo something' because of its unconscious resemblance to a figure doing the reaching and so, of course, the principle can work backwards.

However, the quoted sentence needs clarifying. Surely an 'out of balance' theme must still be 'in balance' aesthetically in order to deliver its message as a 'whole' self contained unit - the very definition of a successful piece.

[tensai]

nice little discussion.. chris, i saw this one (http://www.conceptart.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=316097&d=1204494181) before but for the life of me can't remember where. care to scratch my itch and tell me who's it is?
cheers.

[James Kei]

Fascinating thread.

[Chris Bennett]

nice little discussion.. chris, i saw this one (http://www.conceptart.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=316097&d=1204494181) before but for the life of me can't remember where. care to scratch my itch and tell me who's it is?
cheers.

Sorry tensai, I meant to answer your question during a response to Kev and then got so involved that it slipped my mind.

Anyway....

The artist is Raimonds Staprands, living on the west coast of America in the region that Richard Diebenkorn made famous with the Ocean Park paintings. He is also a playwrite.
He also painted the oranges picture below the chair picture. Kev's take on the oranges picture is an interesting assessment of Stapran's character based on an honest, direct response to what was before his eyes - as far as I can tell he is not too far off the mark. There is a pretty good monograph of his work called 'Art of Tranquility and Turbulence' which you can still get hold of through Amazon.

I'm glad you are enjoying the discussion. Here are some more of his works for you:
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[Chris Bennett]

Ah, perfect timing for my more 'scientific' explanation concerning my ideas on area/field and vector imbalance combining to form equilibriums that Kev requested.......
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[Chris Bennett]

Kanevsky's process shots show a lot of random draws that get shuffled back into the deck. He seems to be doing what Orson Welles said he did as a movie director "Presiding over accidents."


I like that first sentence A LOT! Terrific insight expressed with the suavest of suave analogies!

I guess what I'm thinking about here is the distinction between those elements of the compositional construction that as you discover them and put them together you 'learn by heart' so to speak and those things that are 'unconscious' and unrepeatable. I suppose you could see it as the distinction between the composition and its 'performance' - the energising 'look of suprise' that a discovery made on the wing can only have.

The difference between a professional and an amateur is that the former will not let chance be there unless it is challenged. If it passes the test of 'does this ally itself with my intent?' then it stays. The amateur is always seduced by chance since it appears to flatter their limitations. (Hence the tired old mantra of the adult education pupils "I don't want it to loose it's freshness" - nothing makes me want to kick them up the arse (that's 'ass' to Kev!) more than this lame, half baked lack of enquiry.

Anyway, we can move over to the Kanevsky or would you like us to stay with the Staprans a bit?

[Chris Bennett]

Kev, those little diagrams illustrating various compositional tatics you are doing ought to go into a little pocket book and be numbered - "Got a job here about a jealous wife pushing her husband off a clifftop, I think I'll give 3, and 12 combined with 28b a go, could get me over the first hurdle or give me something to bite on at the very least!".

Oh, by the way, I'm very flattered that you thought the little guy with the bowler hat was painted by me - it was painted by my teacher, Euan Uglow, whose work we discussed earlier in this thread. The picture is entitled 'Flower Man' since it is a plastic promotional item produced by a maker of flower in England called 'Home Pride' - there were cartoon commercials involving these little men in black suits getting covered in flower etc etc. Anyway, the pun in the title of course refers to the little buisness guy with bowler hat being the polar opposite to a hippie. Interesting how you picked up on the smile - the original is very haunting in this regard with the abstract curve reading as a flat event on the surface of the canvas, then a black smilie painted on the flower man himself seen in space and then as something alluding to a real smile, all seen as passing successions on a carousel. Also reminds me of 'the grin without the cat' described in 'Alice in Wonderland'.

OK, I think I'll start digging into Alex Kanevsky's Adventures in Serendipity....

[Chris Bennett]

do you have a challenge to "every silhouette is a character in the drama, and all silhouettes that are not should be muted?" or are you still pondering that?

That is, I think largely true for most pictures but off the cuff I can think of some notable exceptions. Turner springs to mind, all those vortexes buffeting the silhouettes of sails. A more extreme example, Constable - the dewy air seems such a strong presence without having a classic 'identity' as an element of design. Dewing seemed to be drawing his figures out of a 'ghost world' that seems to be an equal character, just as 'present' as the figures. I guess the cube of tinted steam they exist in could be thought of as the silhouette of the canvas itself....but that is not quite it somehow....maybe...
One thought, there is presumably a distintion between the tension pin and the silhouette as achievers of narrative interest points.
It certainly needs a little more going into since I think the Turner example needs to be addressed.
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[Chris Bennett]

Marvelous takes on the Guthrie and Palencar Kev. I understand everything you are saying about them but I still not getting the 'mechanics' of how the tension pin works. I am reading them as very insightful observations on how things are working much in the same way we have been doing right at the start with the Waterhouse and Brangwyn and everything from then on.

Fascinating photographs of the Frazetta show. You are right; those Baroque swept frames are bloody awful!

[Chris Bennett]

The subtlest distinction possible is the one right next door to generality. So the subtler we become the more we approach the universal and the further we move away from the particular - and the more possibilities are contained in our distinctions to the point of complete universality containing all things. On the other hand, the tightest distinction is right next door to dogma.

Drawing the subtlest distinction:
In the visual arts this expresses itself as the generalising, hazy, formless cloud typified by late Turner, Rothko. Pollock, late Monet, Whistler's extreme nocturnes, De Kooning and areas of the Dewing paintings and Burnie Fuchs. Interestingly the first three artists were associated with deep concerns for the transcendental.

Drawing the tightest distinction:
Again, the visual arts gives us 'The Diagram' and nearest to this region is much of what we think of as cartoon. The artists that come nearest to this would be people like Euan Uglow, Paul Klee, Bridget Riley, Walt Disney, Roy Lichtenstien and those painters nearest to photorealism and of course photography itself. Most of them very pragmatic souls, I think you would agree.

The extremes - the formless universal cloud and the diagram - is where the fertile forest of metaphor peters out and and opens out to the two deserts of generality and dogma.

So what guides us when we back off from these two extremes and walk about the forest? Where do we find the trees that yeald the best fruits for our particular digestion, the point on the line between generality on one hand and Dogma on the other?

You need a 'what' compass.
It can be given to you (the commission). or,
you have to find it yourself (sitting in the studio wondering what to paint).
When you know which way 'what' points, then you will come to the right place in the forest and the fruits that grow there are called 'how'. And if you are really true to your nose as well, you will find no one else there before you.

[chaosrocks]

I dont know how many others have followed this discussion, but it is currently my favorite bed time reading.

i some time wonder though if the minut analysis takes some of the joy out of "doing" it is fascinating to see these things deconstructed, but I often think the analysis goes way beyond what the artist ever intended or thought
How many artists subject their work to this kind of scrutiny. I think the turners are the way they partly for the joy of moving the paint around and trying to capture a moment.

oh and chris... the front valkyrie has a funny nose
:P

anyway... its a bit like "My dinner with andre"..... nothing happens but Im riveted none the less
thankyou both fo rhaving this discussion out where we can all learn from it

chaosrocks

[Chris Bennett]

I dont know how many others have followed this discussion, but it is currently my favorite bed time reading.

i some time wonder though if the minut analysis takes some of the joy out of "doing" it is fascinating to see these things deconstructed, but I often think the analysis goes way beyond what the artist ever intended or thought
How many artists subject their work to this kind of scrutiny. I think the turners are the way they partly for the joy of moving the paint around and trying to capture a moment.

oh and chris... the front valkyrie has a funny nose
:P

anyway... its a bit like "My dinner with andre"..... nothing happens but Im riveted none the less
thankyou both fo rhaving this discussion out where we can all learn from it

chaosrocks

You can sit down and join us if you like - we are only just finishing the starters.:yum:
I'm pretty sure Kev would agree with this but the analysis is there in oder to clear the decks so that the intoxication of messing about with paints can happen fluently and unfettered. Its a bit like making sure you have enough money to go shopping. It's because the intellect can get in the way of the intuitive painting process (the performance) that it needs to be satisfied elsewhere, made confident that things are sensible so that the child in us can play safely and unfettered and therefore fruitfully. I painted this last night with the whole business of brushmarks thought of in terms of vector/gesture narrative and the sheer joy of letting the greyhound out of the trap once he had been trained was exhilarating - I had complete confidence in what I was doing because my intellect was satisfied by the 'why'.....

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As for the funny nose, Chaos, you are such a tease! - I blame my wife Sarah. I realised quite late in the painting that I had been painting her nose profile all along without realising it. And when I realised this I also realised that the composition was coming from an unconscious memory of a photograph I had taken of her jumping off a plinth in the park near where we live.
Analysis doesn't explain mystery, it deepens it and what could be more fun than that!

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[chaosrocks]

the reference to "My dinner with Andre" was teasing too Kev. no need to take me seriously.

Im wondering though, is the point to make the intellectualization second nature, in other words so that when you go to paint its all there, with out you having to consciously install it. Im I draw the parrelel to perspective basic uncomplicated perspective. I struggle with it every day be cause I dive in and paint and then have to go backl and fix it. Is it your contention that you should know it so well that you dont really need to pursue the intellectual process each time.
IM applying this to compsition as well
i mean I can look at these things a and analyze how they work retrospectively but it feels like a very different place in my brain patterns than that place I paint from. especially in a plein air or life drawing situation rather than a composed piece such as Chris's valkyrie one.

[chaosrocks]

and kev

you've obviously never worn a gown with a train
they un balance you when you are in motion and anchor you when you are at rest and people step on them

[Chris Bennett]

I think the idea of conclusion is fine with regard to the dynamics of the narrative forces being played out and an arbitrator of how they are played out. In other words 'seen from the context of the narrative graphic forces'.

But it is also the starting point of the onlooker's experience of it. And since the onlooker puts meaning into the (framed) gestures they see on the real surface before them, the relationship of those gestures in their actual 2D physical form to the things they are alluding to is of vital importance. (it is, in a real sense the vitality of the metaphors being made)

The way in which the shapes upon the surface conjure up the forms and their gestures is the mechanism that finally 'sells' the narrative metaphor. Consider a painting you admire, lets take the boy in the kitchen sink one: If you built that kitchen as exactly as you could, posed a child and lit it very carefully and took a photograph, it still would have no power to evoke the metaphor that the painting does. The surface of the photgraph is incidental. The surface of the painting is intensional. That is the cruchingly important difference. And if it the intensionality of the surface is so fundamentally important then so it follows that our experience of it, the way our attention is brought to it, its relationship between what it portrays and what it is should be included alongside the very DNA of the mechanics of the narrative forces themselves.

[kingshaj]

i'm on th fence a bit myself as to the frame and its relationship to action or narrative. ..or the "carved space" it contains (or cant contain as the case may be...:)

i'm just grateful for this dialogue and have thoroughly enjoyed "lurking" in this thread.

i've always been a champion of the idea "carved space" and hated the flat compositions safely adhering to the calm waters of portraiture or pin-up compositions of many digital "masters" (commercial character designs aside) . I shudder when i see my own older flat work.... and think of things in terms of "3 dimensional gesture" , "carved space" and "negative gesture" ( the gesture of negative space)

but i never made the connection of their relationship to the narrative ....which seems so obvious in hindsight..lol
(so im sooper grateful)

this line of thinking should be taught at CA as it outlines all the pitfalls that clearly most ca members are mired in ...even some of our faves and heroes.

just a long winded thanks for the thread,:)


-

[Sharkcellar]

What a great heady discussion. This is the kind of stuff that gets my heart racing!

Please excuse my presumptuousness, I've only managed to get to page two of this thread, but instead of the word "carving" might we be able to think of the division of the plane space in a painting as a sort of bricolage? The point was made that carving implies that material is discarded to reduce a primitive form to a more sophisticated one. Whereas a bricolage can be simply reordering a state to attain a new state. I know traditionally bricolage is used in a sculptural vein, but I think it works as a good analog to painting in that the application of additional tones unto an unbroken tonal surface ultimately creates a potentiality that must be shepherded into something we can call art. Not unlike the process of building a sculpture from found objects.

[Chris Bennett]

What a great heady discussion. This is the kind of stuff that gets my heart racing!

Please excuse my presumptuousness, I've only managed to get to page two of this thread, but instead of the word "carving" might we be able to think of the division of the plane space in a painting as a sort of bricolage? The point was made that carving implies that material is discarded to reduce a primitive form to a more sophisticated one. Whereas a bricolage can be simply reordering a state to attain a new state. I know traditionally bricolage is used in a sculptural vein, but I think it works as a good analog to painting in that the application of additional tones unto an unbroken tonal surface ultimately creates a potentiality that must be shepherded into something we can call art. Not unlike the process of building a sculpture from found objects.

That's extremely perceptive Sharkcellar. You have understood the principle at its deepest level. Picasso's 'Bull's Head' made out of a bicycle saddle and handlebars is absolutely 'carving'. Carving, as defined by 'seeing the possibility with the elements and disclosing it'. This is why the term can be applied to painting when there is maximum respect for the rectangle (frame/area) in so much that the rectangle and surface is seen for what it is as a real fact and the images seen within it are related to this condition. Just as the bicycle saddle and handlebars achieve vitality in the metaphor by osscillating between those objects as themselves and then becoming a bull's head, which returns to being the bicycle objects and then hops back to the bull's head and so on.... So the gestures upon the surface attain vital poignancy by the process of seeing them as shapes and the things the shapes represent simultaneously.

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We really look foward to you catching up in this thread and hearing your thoughts!

PS. the same applies to Kingshaj whom Kev has already welcomed.

[kingshaj]

personally i often engage (temporarily) in the idea that there is no surface
nor frame....at least at the outset of compositional strategy

i prefer to think in terms of pure carving/sculpting of 3 dimensional gestures

perhaps the following analogy makes this clearer:

imagine a white snake and a black snake intertwined in dynamic way.

one snake represents the negative space ....the other the, flow of the positive space created by all the objects in the composition acting in concert gesturally. (multiple characters or inanimate objects or landscape components are all linked by contributing to the larger gesture.)

i take this image of the "snakes", to continue the metaphor,
and rotate it in my mind ..over and over. finding the angle that best suites the narrative.

this is why i often lean on flowing fabrics or other tricks to tie the positive space gesture together. (a trick im growing tired of..lol)


here's an example of this idea in use from my SB... While it is clearly flawed in certain ways, i'm hoping it adds clarity to what ive written above.

please don't think it arrogant to post my personal piece amongst these masterworks.

[kingshaj]

thanks bro,

it has its pitfalls as i'm learning this "snake approach" can lead one to lean on helixes as gestures

Having read this thread, im inspired to experiment with
thumbnails of pos/neg space gesture (the snakes..lol) ..like small architectural thumbnails of the directions and volumes of objects or force...to help me imagine more interesting or diverse flows.

[kingshaj]

Chris:
i dont pretend to know if this is good or not, its a "theory in progress"....
so bare with me...lol

but currently i try to ignore the idea of flatness or surface as much as is possible. to try to give myself over to the illusionistic space completely and imagine a painting as sculpture, accounting for the negative space that is obscured behind an object for example. That is to say, that in my un-tested hypothesis, 2d design concerns are often addressed inherently by focusing on the 3d design (snakes). A good 3d compostion should provide all the ingriedients for a good 2d image.

...avoiding 2d design prinicples or notions of surface, only returning to them to "check my work" if you will. Thus relegating 2d thought to an important but clearly subservient method of construction.

and as you say look through the windowpane out on to my sculpture.
the way TV or FILM do...i take more inspiration from cinematographers than 2d designers for this reason...just a personal pref.


--

KEV:
i to have decided to avoid cloth, capes etc. as an indicator of gesture.
and as we often discuss... furiously study anatomy in its extremes (extreme perspectives, contortions, torsions, and the ensuing anatomical distortions of the body in motion...countervailing motion and my fave, Plasmoid dynamics (swingy mushy bits..lol)
as well as props and lanscapes as the vehicles of gesture.

no easy task, hard as frig....but nothing easy is fun. and im just gettin' started:)

[Flake]

Good reading chaps.

If there's a lack of other participants it's likely because it's a "more coffee, read that back, then drink more coffee" kinda subject.

Please do carry on, some of us are reading.

[chaosrocks]

*pours more coffee*
crx

[Chris Bennett]

Kingshaj: Please don't think I take modelling to be bad! - the Ingres painting of Mrs Rothschild above is very strongly modelling conception. But it still takes account of its surface in order to have power over us. The copy that is along side of it shows how the surface has been ignored and the results are plain to see.
You describe your working methods extremely well and you are clear about the surface's relationship (or irrelevence) to what you are doing - a window onto a sort of sculpture of the mind. There is only one problem with this as far as I see it (and it is only my view remember, and I may ultimately be wrong in some way): Painting should not be poor man's film, just as film should not be poor man's painting - witness all those beautifull, pretty images on screen which mean nothing in their relationship to the drama going on. What happens when one medium tries to ally itself to another is that its communicative power is weakened. In painting's case this is because the surface of the picture is the forge whereby the imaginary three dimensional narrative is hammered flat into 'how we should read it' by virtue of it being reinvented as two dimensions.

You make an interesting point about this happening by default if you get the 'sculpture' right. I'm not too sure about this - superfically, it relates to my questions to Kev about the relationship between balance of the narrative tension and pure graphic balance, which we agreed did not really exist. What I am talking about is the language whereby narrative metaphors are passed over to the onlooker. Each medium has its own intrinsic language that is unique to it and that is not borrowed from another medium. With film it is 'time' - all the other things that appear within it; acting, story, music, pictures etc belong to other mediums. But time, its manipulation, whether sculpted or modelled is unique to cinema (time in music is different and is really to do with 'applied time' such as tempo, pulse and rhytym). With painting it is a 3D world seen by way of a 2D surface. My belief is that you have to be conscious of this distinction to maintain a grip of the language that speaks most powerfully for that medium. A filmaker that 'looses track of time' not in terms of cronology but in terms of imaginative grip sends the audience to sleep. A painter who forgets the surface can only make allusions.

None of this takes away from your paintings kingshaj which I have expressed my admiration for in posts to your sketchbook and elsewhere. I am really discussing our understanding of the mechanics of what we do.

------

Flake: glad you are enjoying it!
Chaos: I assume you are taking it black.....

[kingshaj]

Chris:



CB)
Painting should not be poor man's film, just as film should not be poor man's painting

true but one should attempt to integrate lessons from all the arts into any given medium (opinion) for isntance photo-shop primarily was designed to mimic a darkroom and camera technology ...and users have to our collective delight morphed it into more of a painting tool.

CB)
- witness all those beautifull, pretty images on screen which mean nothing in their relationship to the drama going on.

this would be poor photography or cinematography indeed, as it is beholden to painting's compositional criteria in my opinion ...and every frame ideally should stand alone as a great composition ( Sergio Leone , Kubrik, and there respective cinematographers for instance )

CB)
What happens when one medium tries to ally itself to another is that its communicative power is weakened.

i believe they are strengthened by cross pollination,
i take most of my drawing cues from my tenure as an animator or my stint
as a sculpture student...

these 2 disciplines have been far more central to my
development as an artist than line or surface. Even informing my life drawing, in that the ol' "heroic gesture pose", a model holds for an hour, can be kinda static....

For me, animation experience helped/inspired me to think about the positions before and after the given pose. this is just one example of how the commicative power can be enhanced by "allying" or mixing media/mindsets.

but i do concede that there is a danger in fostering homogeny. and i think thats what you were getting at.

CB)
In painting's case this is because the surface of the picture is the forge whereby the imaginary three dimensional narrative is hammered flat into 'how we should read it' by virtue of it being reinvented as two dimensions.

this is the crux perhaps of our difference in aproach.

this step of hammering flat ...as much as possible i try to never concede to the fact that the art is physically 2 dimensional...

no object in the world i'm drawing is 2d because no real world object is 2d , no flow of engery is either, nor is any negative space...all have volume.


CB)
Each medium has its own intrinsic language that is unique to it and that is not borrowed from another medium.

With film it is 'time' -

i see time (in the way you mean ) as the domain of painting as well.
thats the animator in me ... the clear evocation of motion and direction
imply a previous and subsequent frame, if you will. narrative also implies a future inherently, as we see a bucket of confetti tipping on the verge of falling...we want to yell "look out! behind you!" to the protagonist, as we know all to well what the "next frame" will bring.



CB) With painting it is a 3D world seen by way of a 2D surface.

as is a FILM

CB) My belief is that you have to be conscious of this distinction to maintain a grip of the language that speaks most powerfully for that medium.

this is what i referred to as "checking ones work" quick visits to the world of the 2d... flipping the canvas around etc. looking for 2d design flaws or unpleasing flows ... distractions.... furthermore i can usually attribute and error to an error in the 3d phase.


CB) A painter who forgets the surface can only make allusions.

more accurately illusions
as more often the acknowledgment of the surface is to temporarily dismantle or deconstruct the illusion of the 'windowpane view'

this is why the word "decorative" keeps rearing its ugly head,
the elemtents that deal with surface or draw the viewers attention
to the 2 dimensionality do not serve the narrative.

i dont mean decorative in an derogatory sense,
quite the contrary as a big fan of modern art the tension
between these to realities can be quite exciting...

SEE Kev's ol pal FECHIN ( attached)
For him, the tension comes from the illusion of space
and the inescapable fact that the surface exists.

actually i think he was playing out this very debate in each of his paintings!


also, as many of us work a great deal in the digital media, where the surface is a screen, these distinctions are blurred even further


As a side note: the irony that we, myself included, add the illusion of surface texture. impasto or "painterly" decorative borders ..or scanned paper textures. is worth pointing out here.

or the film 300 (whatever our opinions may be of it as a piece of art-or not)
it clearly did attempt to evoke the "painterly" (the debate on the degree to which it succeeded is a non sequitur)


------

[Chris Bennett]

CB)
Each medium has its own intrinsic language that is unique to it and that is not borrowed from another medium.

With film it is 'time' -

i see time (in the way you mean ) as the domain of painting as well.
thats the animator in me ... the clear evocation of motion and direction
imply a previous and subsequent frame, if you will. narrative also implies a future inherently, as we see a bucket of confetti tipping on the verge of falling...we want to yell "look out! behind you!" to the protagonist, as we know all to well what the "next frame" will bring.


Well, we don't see eye to eye on a lot of points kingshaj, but to debate them at length will take us outside what this thread is about. However, I will bat the ball back on the one concerning 'time' since it relates to what Kev has just introduced into the composition discussion:

Time in painting is implied time or metaphoric time. It is in no way something that is actually manipulated. In film, the camera and sound recorder imprint time onto the medium (once celluloid, now increasingly a digital store base) in a completely direct and literal way. When that film is edited it is carved by 'cutting' and modelled by selecting what scene preceeds and follows it. In this way the cinematographer quite literally handles time itself, indulging in a 'sculpting in time' as the great Andrei Tarkovsky put it.

[Chris Bennett]

OK, picking up from Kev's post 410 just above on the question of deep work resonating through time:

Because a picture is static it can be metaphorical about time. Whereas film, using time literally, cannot. It can stretch our awarenes of time or the chronology of time (through flashbacks etc) but it cannot be metaphorical about it because it is it. Just as an actor cannot be metaphorical about character because they are the character.

A couple of years ago I was caught in a rainstorm in London. I sheltered under a shop awning and watched the rain in the emptied streets when I was struck by the sight of a woman running across the steet who clearly had something more important to do than stay dry. What was so important I wondered? For all I knew it could be anything from not wanting to miss her favourite TV show to chasing a call about her dying father. I just seemed the most extrodinary thing and most ordinary thing. But I realised I could not make a direct transcription of the scene so I waited for something to hit me, knowing nothing of narrative composition at the time. Finally it came to me. So I made a picture of it. It is not about rain. It is about being chased. By what, we do not know, but I now realise that it is built out of metaphors for time.

Taking it apart according to Kev's notes about the dynamics of shadow and implied time:

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[kingshaj]

Just to prevent this from getting way off track...

....Thus Chris was not inaccurate, he was merely one step ahead of you.

Come on Kingshaj, I know you like to kick down doors, but if a door in this thread seems "wrong" to you, look at it more closely. It may be a window.

sorry pals, didn't mean to derail here. just took issue to some fundamental assumptions being stated...but fully recognize how that could be annoying joining the class so late...lol

and i will continue to look at it more closley, as you say... listening is always more educational.

lol...i do like to kick in doors..lol i don't know what thats about, its a bad habit.
i hope i havent come off as a random nay-sayer....just had alot of bottled up theories about the nature of 3d/2d composition as it relates to the work i see on CA.....and they all blurted out at the first opportunity. i guess i suffer form "pre-mature extrapolation".

for the record chris we agree on most points
as do kev and i ....while i stand by what ive said, my points of contention are far smaller than my appreciation of your work...and ultimately dependent on intent.

and ive enjoyed the exchange...
for now i'll listen a bit more, while the track is re-established.

i can promise not to kick in a window...but may kick in a surface..:)


:yayca:

[kingshaj]

Just to prevent this from getting way off track...

....Thus Chris was not inaccurate, he was merely one step ahead of you.

Come on Kingshaj, I know you like to kick down doors, but if a door in this thread seems "wrong" to you, look at it more closely. It may be a window.

sorry pals, didn't mean to derail here. only took issue to some fundamental assumptions being stated...but fully recognize how that could be annoying joining the class so late...lol

and i will continue to look at it more closley, as you say...as i can learn more by listening.

lol...i do like to kick in doors..lol i don't know what thats about,
its a bad habbit. i hope i havent come off as a random nay-sayer....just had alot of bottled up theories about the nature of 2d/3d compostion and they all blurted out at the first opportunity. i guess i suffer form "pre-mature extrapolation".

for the record chris we agree on most points
as do kev and i ....while i stand by what ive said, my points of contention are far smaller than my appreciation of your work.

and ive enjoyed the exchange...
for now i'll lay back a bit listen a bit more while the track is re-established.
"whistle while you lurk"

i can promise not to kick in a window...but may kick in a surrface:)


:yayca:

[Chris Bennett]

Kingshaj: You may have misunderstood a couple of the things being said here through not reading too closely - a vice we all have at times - but you possess strength of mind and and a dose of humility and that makes you fully belong here. Kev's mention of the sculpture being whacked by the chisel of the counter argument requires strength of mind by the chisel holder, but without humility it is just vandalism. There is a metaphor for this I think I prefer over Kev's because of this point. We are in a garden and in its varying weathers and moods we build our statues, our images of what we think the god of the garden looks like. I am always interested by what the person next to me is sculpting and if it is a truer model of the garden god than mine I have no hesitation in dropping mine for theirs. The garden god is the important thing, not the person who got closest to its likeness. Getting a better idea of the truth is the important thing, not the author of that idea.
You clearly know this already, Kingshaj - I merely state it for neatness.

PS. I too will be using your term 'pre-mature extrapolation' :rendered:


Kev: I kinda knew that I was getting a little mixed up with my use of the diminished surface - thanks for clearing that up - I guess I was trying to find a way of saying how the ground plane upon which the girl stands/runs/jumps/crouches is being diminished by the vectoring subtle shadow at the top.
Thinking about that off the cuff, could that be a way of thinking of these shadow dynamics - time as implied by the diminishing of planes?

Your take on 'Running Woman' and the type of picture it is, ideas about the 'open metaphor' and the 'non-specific gesture' have quite simply taken my breath away.
It's early morning here and I'm going to need a few more cups of coffee to really get to grips with all this!

[Chris Bennett]

Just that metaphoric depth is only required when the canvas is flat.

So it is with depth then so it is with volume. With sculpture volume is a fact. With painting we are given it by proxy of the 2D handwriting which buckles the page and thereby shapes our following of its folds.
Going back to your 'sculpture in the room' Kev, - what if the Rembrandt Lucretia was a manifestation in bronze? We are back to things equivocal with this one.

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Sculpture cannot use this dislocation metaphor for 'experiential time' since the forms are facts. If they don't 'join up' as we are led to expect them to then they simply state that they are not joining up. This is why cubist sculpture doesn't really work properly compared to cubist painting for instance.

[kingshaj]

i have a quick question to both ....

to clarify: are you saying that Ambivalent metaphor could be said to be the opposite end of the spectrum of the definitive concrete narrative?

in that it is open to multiple or compound interpretations?

is that a fair paraphrasing?

[kingshaj]

hmmm...this is a tuffy....very cool,:)

>i took ambiguity in this case to mean open to mulitple narrative interpretations ... facilitated by its loose abstractness.

as to the issue of lucrita in bronze

i think the intentional ambiguity could be more focused in a 3d medium. Thus more poignantly narrative, evoking the mixed emotions and complex drama of the character more effectively (humble opinion)

where as ( rembrant's genius aside, for the moment)

this iteration apears unsure of itself, due to this ambiguity, rather than enriched by it in the way some of the earlier examples are. (Kanevsky)

its flatness diminishes the drama, that the ambiguity could offer, by removing the idea of motion or time,
she is a frozen cut-out.

is she hesitant? peacefully resigned to her fate? ... vacillating between the 2?, frozen by the gravity of her decision? or just checking the time on her watch for the right moment to snuff it?

i ask these questions as the artist indented us to...and are meant to an extent to be open ended. this piece is clearly meant to make us feel and ponder a narrative. but its flatness really hinders these agendas. ( i think...)

admittedly my impression of it, is very colored by my immersion in my 20-1st century culture...and i do not begrudge the piece its subtlety. as well as amazing palette and texture. hey its rembrant:)

[kingshaj]

me too
i the think the short version of what i was saying, is that the flatness
generates this boredom, by not alowing enough metaphor of any kind
ambigious or not...its static nature lends one to think "seen it, next!"
(and i directly connect this static quality to its flatness )

i agree that clarity can be a yawn..man do i agree there.
but also feel that my ambiguities should be strategically placed
in order to generate tension....or direct tension.

to hopfully illicit the following from the viewer:

"is it A or B...or even C?...woa i wonder."
and hold their attention in that way.

[kingshaj]

well, i stop harping on the point...i just felt that the "The lines that make the rhythms recede into space from the hand to the head" don't

and those that "obviously, sit on the surface of the work." were not interacting as you suggest creating the "classic graphic tension/unity between the depth and the surface" for that very reason.

but ill let it go if im the only one that finds that point relevant. ("i got it sheesh, josh"...shaj backwards)

plus i coulda just said the above and saved alot of typin'..lol:)


but of course i also got your point , well illustrated by your updated version. its hilarious btw!

[Chris Bennett]

I agree with you two that the Rembrandt Lucretia, narrative wise, is pretty pat - almost looks like a stage play going on etc. But that is not the point as far as I see it. Cezanne's 'Mont Saint Victoire', posted earlier in the thread is pretty boring as narrative in the literary sense. What that is 'about' is the activity of looking. What the 'chair' Kanevsky is 'about' is the ambivalent realisation of an extrodinary volume presence. The Lucretia is 'about' a sort of suspension in time. All these paintings and their theme - what they are 'about' - use the delivery system of ambivalent mark making.

Ambivalent mark making is not just a mode of putting marks on a surface. It tells 'stories' in its own right. These are not stories in the literary sense of the term but they are 'abouts' - 'About' this mobel as she poses in an extrodinary, ambivalent way. 'About' looking at a particular mountain and 'about' realising suspense as vulnerable form.
The handwriting, if ambivalent tells us 'about' the formal reading of an object in a certain way, just as the handwriting, if unequivocal, tells of that reading in a different way yet again.
But ambivalence must be deliberate, it must be about something, must be at the survice of our plastic thoughts of the matter in hand.
The following comparison makes this extremely clear and points up how the surface is a conscious mechanism and the tool whereby we make our intensions manifest.

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[Chris Bennett]

This may demonstrate my own bad taste, but can you explain to me why the Red Faced man is not legitimate painting of a face, but the Hals is? I mean, the doodling of values doesn't seem to have affected the meaning of the face... in fact I think the expression synthesizes quite well. Only the lack of subtlety in the color bothers me.


In the Hals the paint marks all 'do' something with their gesture which is to do with what they are making.

In Red Face Harry, all the marks 'do' is draw attention to themselves in a way that has nothing to do with what they are describing - as if the face were covered in bits of wriggling paper. Why?

To take up your point about not being self conscious about the brush marks - this is precisely what the painter of Red Faced Harry is doing. They say "look at me, I want to look painterly! aren't I clever!". The hieght of bad taste, I think you would agree. Yes, they synthesize when you squint your eyes, but then so does a face made out of thousands of tiny worms.

[Chris Bennett]

This all has to do with insight... An artist must be insightful to see the relationship between method and content or function. (That is to say, the content of the wedding dress is the girl)


Yes, that's a good way a putting it Kev.

A thought has just occured to me regarding this question of balance in a composition that is built upon an open metaphor:

The awareness of balance in a finished work is the trophy of synthesis on all the levels we have been discussing. Accepting there is no such thing as 'graphic balance' since we read metaphor into all that we see, how does one go about composing when the elements are ambiguous as part of the metaphor?
A portrait for instance, is not generally, primarily decorative. If narrative is imposed on it, however subtle, it weakens its primary function - to evoke the 'presence' of a particular person. To do this it must defy any one reading and thus it falls, I would say, into a special catagory of an 'open metaphor' type of painting.

If the practical mechanics, in a conscious form, of composing an 'Open Metaphor' painting are unclear (at least to me, although it is the type of picture I find myself making over and over again) then they seem even more problematic concerning portrait composition. For instance, the group portrait I am working on at the moment involves three figures and my chief decision making process concerned a composition that did not favour any one individual over the others - oh, and they wanted the topiery garden to figure. Do you see any way of hauling over the ideas we have been discussing in terms of narrative composition over to portraiture, (which is not primarily decorative) via, and by way of the 'Open Metaphor' picture?

[chaosrocks]

i wanted to say some thig about the lucretia
but I guess that train has passed

the knife is not acrtually pointing at anythng vital, she really looks quite calm. its funny how. you can interpret according to the emotion and direction you think SHOULD be there....

[Flake]

Slight derail, but am I the only person reading this thread that can't see Kevs posts at all?
I've cleared my cache twice, checked that I haven't accidently put him on the ignore list and his posts show up in other threads just fine.

Some random forum oddness?

[DIMAGYAN]

no Flake, it happen the same to me...kev's post don't appear in my browser

[chaosrocks]

thres a whole cropload of deleted posts here some of chris's too

Kev! what are you doing?
Please don't even if you've changed your position
please leave the discussion whole

what the hell is going on
your messing with my morning reading time

and I was about to launch into a set of questions concerning painting and theater in a multi disciplinary sense...cause its what I do

By the way
film is a 2 dimensional medium
just thought Id point that out

[Cavematty]

Kev - understandable. Is it a book you are planning to get published?
Found this thread most stimulating, and have been checking in on it every day.

Apologies for not adding my gratitude during proceedings, but I didn't want to dilute the amazing discussion with an asspat. It can be frustrating when content is outweighed 10-1 by simple praise, though I don't want to rob you of due credit :) I was saving my gratitude for when the thread began to peter out.

Thanks for making me think of composition differently, while firing up my broader conceptual mind! Kudos.

[chaosrocks]

kev im sorry you feel that way
it seems to me that you miss judge your audience. I would pose that anyone who is willing to wade through all this academic language and long winded, albeit facinating response, is not going to be stealing your disssertation... adn they might actually stimulate your own thinking on these ideasin ways you haven't expected
more harm than good
Ive always wondered about the dichotomy between secrecy and sharing of ideas... never seemn much point in maintaining sevrecy.and its not that I don't understand the publish or perish world of academia
grew up there live there now. But it saddens me to see the huge holes in thiis discussion essentially rendering it useless. when it was useful and fascinating before.
the theater comment was aimed a chris

[Chris Bennett]

I hope everyone understands that I can't make any comment on Kev's actions other than I deleted some of my posts in respect of his wishes.
The carving and modeling stuff still holds up quite well and a couple of isolated breakdowns of some pictures are able to stand alone as do some replies to other members who joined where the all important subject of surface was discussed. But picking up on what Chaos just said, the thread does look like a horse without its hind legs.....or hind legs without the rest of the horse, I don't mind which metaphor it is since both are equally true.

Soooo, Chaos and her theatre, cross disiplinary thing: I'm not too sure what point you are making Chaos but here is my take on things regarding this:

The reason various mediums of artistic expression are distinct is because each, although it can share features of another discipline, possesses a component that if removed renders it no longer distinct from the other disciplines. In other words, you could remove all the things it shares with another art form yet if this one thing remained it would reveal itself as the prime organ of that particular art form. Removed, that discipline would vanish, remove the same organ from another disciple and it would not matter.

Hence, the prime organ of theatre is characterisation by actors. You can take away the story, the stage, the music and you would still have theatre. - You may have the sets, the stage, a script and music....but you would have no theatre. A story without actors is a novel.

However, take away characterisation, story and music from cinema and you still have cinema. It doesn't even depend on two dimensions, since it would work perfectly well in a sort of 3D holographic mode. The prime component is time. It is sculpting in time. If you remove it it is no longer film. Toy story has no human actors and no real world photography on celluloid yet is time literally modelled, sculpted from the computer program.

Computer games are also distinct yet share many qualities with other disciplines. However, there is one element that must be left in place in order to define it - qualified interaction with an environment. Time can be there or it can't, it will not stop the core definition of a computer game. For the purposes of 'art' you could even remove the game element and you would still have something that distinguished it from other forms. Qualified interaction with a 'virtual' environment. Many people trying to see the possibilites of 'art' with the medium are hindering and confusing themselves because they do not realise the importance of the seemingly 'academic' distinction in this regard. If you don't understand how a car works you can still drive it, but if you confuse it with a horse you are going to spend a long time figuring out how to get from A to B with it.

And so to painting. This is why I keep coming back to the primary importance of surface. Take away the subject, the implied narrative, implied time, even the illusion of 3D and even colours and you still have painting. But take away the surface and you have every other discipline it isn't.
Hence:
The surface of the picture is the forge whereby the imaginary three dimensional and all that it infers is hammered flat into 'how the viewer should experience it' by virtue of it being reinvented as two dimensions.

Just as the actor is the forge by which our human foibles are 'cast' by virtue of a tacit agreement of convention between them and us, the audience.

[chaosrocks]

gotta think about this Chris
in the light of the interdisciplinary direction i am going. but its tech week and I have to put costumes on actors in a more practical sense

but im pretty sure I disagree with you on several points...I just have to figure out why. :)

[chaosrocks]

i was trying to make a point in a humerous fashion. I dont worry much about style and eloquence here.
I have never taken you for granted. and I actually read what you say.

[kingshaj]

great, now i have to publish a rebuttal?.....damn-it ....to get an edge , mine will have to have a lot of sex.

and for the record ive copy-written the terms "negative gesture" and Carved space" this morning.

in all seriousness though, keep us posted
please, ill buy 2 if only support of this type of endeavor in general.

not enough books like that are being written these days it seems.

-

[Serpian]

Kev - what you did is understandable, if the book is half as good as this thread, I'll definately buy it! I loved your thoughts on the one with the marketplace, for example, so please do tell us when the book's coming out...

Thanks for the 'preview of the book', so to speak..:)

[chaosrocks]

actually what made this discussion great was the interaction between the two , and the exploration of the topic. beyond they're own points. watching the two of them grow and become comfortable with each other's metaphors, was part of the fascination, the way they were exploring the language of compositon. I think the book is likely to lack the spice and levening of the discussion. Although I will certainly have to read it to find out :P

[The Pariano]

ive been coming and having a look see in this thread for quite a while, and saw kev's post so I just wanted to say"
this thread has made the gears in my mind work harder than most anything else ive had the pleasure to read. Thankyou to Chris and Kev and anybody else who has contributed.

[Chris Bennett]

I have just been asked by my publisher to supply some thoughts on a painting they have just sold since they are a big client. Here is what I wrote for them and I have included it here since it gives some insight to how composition works as narrative in my pictures. The painting described is reproduced below:

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The basic feeling behind these ‘blue car’ paintings is of something happening around 9.30am on a very fresh sunny morning. In this particular case we may perhaps ask “what is so special for this woman to be fixing her makeup so early in the day?” In a profounder sense, this woman is that beautiful morning – the sunny morning when the day is ‘putting on its face’.

All the elements in the picture echo her form – the car roof shares her shape and the colours are an upside-down variant of those she is wearing with the windows/eyes of the car sharing the colour of her head/soul. The door handles (the ‘hands’ of the car) echo the gesture of the woman’s own hands. All this is echoed again by the blue sky and deep car-shaped bushes. Finally the mirror she holds – is it the woman we see in that reflection, or ourselves coming towards her? Is she in fact watching us under the pretext of fixing her makeup?

Thus everything revolves around that delicate gesture of the white gloved little finger about to touch the corner of some red painted lips – a metaphor for the clean, fresh morning approaching the heat of the afternoon of red experience – the one colour that is only ‘implied’ in the painting.

This is not some bullshit I have made up by-the-way. This is precisely what goes through my mind when building paintings and they all have little back stories like this. Otherwise it’s just pretty pictures…….

[TASmith]

Wow. The last time I checked here, I was taking notes on everything said, and I figured it would always be on page one to chug through later. Now it's buried on page two, and I still have so many questions.

Kev, let us know when that book's published, I'd like to buy it.

I'm dredging up this post again to ask any interested artists just what exactly the Golden Section/Mean is and how you're traditionally supposed to use it in art. I've seen some grids, and an article by Myron Barnstone. I've run it by some of the artists I respect the most, with most of them disregarding the concept. But what is the main idea of this concept? Is it all just about placement on the canvas? You move something around so it fits in the most exciting place? You tweak an angle so it points to a certain point in the frame? Is this the detailed solution to the 15th Century dilemma Gombrich mentioned in joining the symmetrical celtic art with Greco/Roman realism? Which artists used it and how?

Any info would be appreciated. And, oh, in general, try not to say anything that you'll want to delete later, as it hurts the thread.

[Chris Bennett]

TASmith: Sorry not to have replied sooner, I've just had a look in here today. Anyway here is an answer to your question.

The 'golden section' is a name given to a ratio that has a very particular property: It is the ratio produced when a line is cut/divided such that the relationship of the shorter length to the longer length is the same as the longer length's relationship to the whole line before it was divided.
It is known that the Egyptians were using it to define modules for their buildings and it has been used thus ever since. In tests, where people have been asked to divide a line 'by eye' in order that it gives the most pleasing proportions it has been shown that the number of people hitting the line close to 'the golden section' or 'golden mean' as it is sometimes called, was statistically highly significant.

Piero Della Francesca and Masacio used the golden section extensively and deliberately in their paintings. Euan Uglow, my teacher, also used it occasionaly along with massive use of other mathematical relationships of the rectangle he was using. However, he always insisted he used these relationships so that he could 'believe in' the divisions he was setting up.

Although I was taught for 4 years by Euan and had many discussions with him he never encouraged or discouraged its use. I have never used it since my student days and then only on occasion to 'learn'. Painting is such a nerve centred thing for me that such deliberate dividing of the rectangle in accordance with ancient geometry would be pointless. However, people who's painting is highly controlled, as was Euan's, rather than 'wristy' or 'retinal' find that the observing of pricise mathematical divisions of the rectangle are indeed 'firm ground' in which they can 'believe in' the placement of divisions.

After all, believing in your work, while you are making the marks is the most important thing of all the most important things......so if it helps you to do that then do it. If it doesn't, don't.

[TASmith]

Thank you Chris! I had just about given up on this great thread. It'd be great to see an example piece showing all these principals. Here's a work by Massaccio. It'd be great to see it analyzed along these means.

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/m/masaccio/trinity.jpg

[dbclemons]

Here's a graphic for making a golden rectangle.

Start with a square and divide it in half. Use that point (1) as the center for a circle radius that touches the two opposite corners of the square (2). Extend the square into a rectangle that touches the circle arc (3). The length of B is roughly .618 units of A, or slightly more than half. For every section you want to divide up, you make a new square, divide in half, make an arc, etc...

[TASmith]

So it's similar to the rule of thirds for placement of interest, except one of the "thirds" is slightly larger than the other too.

[dbclemons]

It's not thirds, but twos; a square and a smaller rectangle. The square is just divided on one side to get the center of the arc.

[TASmith]

Yeah, but you end up with a rectangle. And the most important line (2, in the diagram) is very close to the 2/3's mark. It's just a bit nudged toward the center.

Just playing around, I think this is the golden line in the Masaccio?

[Chris Bennett]

That's amazing that you chose that Massacio! It was one of Euan Uglow's favourite paintings - when he was dying of cancer he went on a final pilgrimage to Italy with a friend in order to see it for the last time.
It is absolutely full of geometry and the way this 'geometric music of the spheres' relates to spiritual matters as percieved by the italians at that time. It is also full of intuitive elements as well. I'll have a look to see if I can find some stuff I have about this painting along with some notes of Euan's and post them up.

[Chris Bennett]

I'm afraid I have not been able to find those notes I spoke of regarding Massaccio's Trinity. However, I can tell you that there is an extremely good essay by H.W.Hanson that includes diagrams and speculations on the numerical relationships. I do know that the barrel vault and the square area below had to be remeasured to make the geometry work in relation to the architecture, so that the image seemed to be as real as the space it was in - the Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

Oh, and you may know this already, but the inscription above the skeleton reads something like:
"As you are now, so I once was,
As I am now, so you will become."

Or something pretty close....

[Chris Bennett]

I just came across this and thought it might be of some interest.
Detail from the fresco, "Creation of Adam," by Michelangelo. The contour of the same image is reminiscent of a midline saggital section of the brain and includes the hypothalamus, pituitary and brainstem.

Leonardo was doing drawings of the brain's anatomy so informed knowledge of the cross section of the brain was prevalent amongst artists at the time. I've a hunch that this compositional metaphor was quite deliberate.

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[Jasonwclark]

The reason various mediums of artistic expression are distinct is because each, although it can share features of another discipline, possesses a component that if removed renders it no longer distinct from the other disciplines. In other words, you could remove all the things it shares with another art form yet if this one thing remained it would reveal itself as the prime organ of that particular art form. Removed, that discipline would vanish, remove the same organ from another disciple and it would not matter.

I think its also interesting to recall that the seven liberal arts were originally conceived of as wholly seperate and distinct from one another; each with their own attendant muses, traditions and spheres of operation. The attempt to bridge them for the purposes of critical analysis is always interesting to watch. The most common comparisons seem to be between poetry/writing and the plastics arts (painting, sculpture etc.) but to a lesser extent between say painting and music, or painting and drama. Plato, Aristotle and Lessing all do this, (with an emphasis on poetry, drama, and sculpture respectively) where they appropriate ideas from the other arts and incorporate them into their own. Or sometimes they'll project certain concepts from the literary arts onto the musical or plastic arts, as a way of drawing out some new insight or connection. Sometimes these seem brilliant, other times they fall short, or feel a bit prejudiced, as when you catch a thinker trying subsume one branch of the arts into another, or to place them into a certain hierarchy. Nietzsche is totally guilty of that for example, in his earliest writings, when he privileges opera as the total or supreme artwork. Though much of what he says about the ‘rebirth’ of tragedy is rather prescient if you just substitute film for opera. I think any painter or visual arts enthusiast who’s had enough conversations with musician friends, or actor friends, or writer friends, will appreciate the benefits and limitations of this sort of discourse. Its really a 50/50 sort of thing, and depends a lot on whether everyone is ‘vibing’ off each other.

On the other hand though, we also have a fairly long tradition of artists consciously blending the mediums together; the way a composer will take a line from Ovid for the title of his symphony, or just a general synthesis of two or more art forms, like we see with modern illustration, or opera, or film. So it seems that, at least for certain works, you really do need to open up the analysis to allow for these different approaches and points of connection/overlap.

I think for example, that Chris’ painting above is beautiful as a stand alone work. I don't need to know anything else about it to find the painting aesthetically pleasing. Hearing the explanation does lend new insights into the piece though, the same way that hearing a title would, or understanding a certain myth or story related to that title. I think the problem you run into (and the reason why people sometimes have this negative attitude towards explanation, as BS, or reading into things too much) has to do with the way that many artworks and art movements from the 20th century over-intellectualized the process of aesthetic appreciation. If the artwork fails in its own arena, as a painting, or opera, or whatever, then no amount of background information, philosophy, or cross disciplinary finesse will save it.

I do like to read this stuff though. Its fun to try to puzzle through what motivates people, or makes certain things work, even if the conversations sometimes trend towards the esoteric, or downright confusing. Still worth the effort I think :)

[Flake]

**(I've always had a dream of creating a piano that, if you pressed really hard on the keys, could bend the strings like a guitar. Possibly a glove would have to be worn on each hand with magnets on the fingertips, and the keys would be made of an oppositely charged magnetic material as well, very light and loose, maybe hovering. And one could, with a finger, attach to a key via magnetic attraction and, with a finger wiggle, vibrato a note, or, with a push or pull, bend a string up or down. I'd love to make it happen, but what a challenge to engineer though!)

That's gotta be do-able with existing technology, some bizarre digital combo of touch screen and wacom tech?
Seems feasible..

[Chris Bennett]

That's gotta be do-able with existing technology, some bizarre digital combo of touch screen and wacom tech?
Seems feasible..

There is such a thing in the form of the clavicord. You don't need to play Baroque music on it either, Keith Jarret plays his improvisations on it - its on the 2 cd box set 'Book of Ways' and he uses its inherent note bending capacity to varied expressive and emotional effect.

KEV: "At first it would seem that the only instrument with more artistic range than the brush is the human voice in concert with the face and body of an actor. But then film comes to mind and I think maybe everything else combines into it... the master art form, until the next one comes along."

My post to Chaosrocks a dozen or so posts back dealt with this pretty deeply I thought - I basically disagree with this notion in its fundamental principle. Taken to its logical conclusion you simply arrive at real life - a version of the sculpter with a bucket of magic stuff with which he can make real humans etc.
Limitations breed the metaphor and are its spiritual oxygen.

To be specific on one of the points: The nib pen has less range than the brush and the Rotoring pen has less range than the nib. Yet Robert Crumb's Rotoring pen drawings would loose much of their meaning and even appear absurd if they had been produced in the manner in which he draws yet with a more 'expressive' tool.

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This next image by Guerin obtains its effect precisely because of its dead pan, dry, 'inexpressive' and 'limited' technique.

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[Chris Bennett]

If the artwork fails in its own arena, as a painting, or opera, or whatever, then no amount of background information, philosophy, or cross disciplinary finesse will save it.



I wholeheartedly agree with this Jason. I guess I see the background stuff as a way of getting something to bite on. It seems to me that the more metaphors that occur to you as you work and develop the piece the more you are able to 'believe in it' and it stops feeling like one is just doodling. The winning post of a painting is never, ever clearly marked and it is really only much later that you realise you passed it or, as is more often the case, you ended up getting lost from the race entirely. The stuff going on in your head that acts as a sort of accompanyment to the work is really a way of firing the starting gun and keeping you in the relevant race.
And as you say, most of us are intrested in winners, not how the race was won.......unless you are a fellow runner of course!

[chaosrocks]

kev
I think you have just described a pedal steel. does exactly that. not fond of the sound of them though.

i think any art is shaped by the instruments and the physics of playing it (the the case os the aforementiond pen the physucs of liquid on paper and the dexterity of the artist), this applies to visual arts, music, dance...... and part of the glory of any medium is the ability to transcend the limitations of that medium. oddly I find this more compelling the simpler the medium is. that may just be my personal take on it though.

[Chris Bennett]

Textual codification really is one of the great double edged pieces of technology every invented.


If we are thinking in analogies between disciplines then figuring out a composition in pictorial art and composing a structured tune share this problem of codification's expressive paucity and its relationship to the living realisation of that codification in performance or pictorial execution.

The composition in painting, like the chords and note markings of a song are really a blueprint for the artistic performance that is made from it.
A pictorial composition in and of itself is only 'expressive' in a sort of diagramatic way. To see the truth of this one only has to look at even a reasonably competent copy of a masterwork to see that although all the compositional elements are in place the thing generally looks horrible: Witness all those god-awful facimilies of Michelangeo's David or garden 'greek sculpture' copies. The modelling, time and time again, is a listless following of the general masses with no sense of the underling drama that informed the chisel of the original sculptor.

[Chris Bennett]

Right... the notes, but not the music. Like the waterhouse cyber copy.

So let's challenge:

If one were able to hit every note, voice and piano, just as written in a good score of Gershwin's Summertime... wouldn't it still be great? Don't Glen Gould's attempts to play Bach almost mechanically demonstrate that the compositions themselves house the expression? (I am trying to establish here that you are giving short shrift to composition as expression in and of itself.)

The copied sculpted figures you cite... much of the missteps are not in missing the music for the notes... but missing the structural relationships between the notes, (which are melody shapes and chords/keys... notes themselves) which subconsciously tell the audience the why of the melodies, which transmits the emotions of the music. The copy sculptor has simply not read all the notes, and thus has not reproduced them. A good master score of a composition would, without the player knowing it, contain the proper structural relationships between the notes from which the music arises.

kev

Bach's music is interesting in that the 'emotion' is largely in the note structures themselves - witness of course how ugly it sounds when the interpretation is too romantic, worse still when the chamber pieces are played by a heavy duty orchestra complete with vibrato brass!
The 'piano' music was, as you are aware, written for a harpsicord which has even more limitations than the piano with only microscopic shifts of note timings to yeald the expression. However, this is still needed to make the music sing. If nothing is put into the music in this regard the harpsicord sounds like a sewing machine.

Anyway, your main point is crucial and something that has puzzled me for a long, long time: The relationship between composition and execution. Or to put it more specifically: The quantitive relationship between composition and execution.

For instance, someone like Suerat was 90% composition, his 'dot' was there in order to not distract him from the thing that really concerned his expressive sensibilities. When people like Signac used his method they largely failed because they had not the compositional poetry that was Seurat's birthright. Pissaro adopted the meagre dot for a while but found it choked off his real passion in painting.
Someone like Sargent or Monet are 90% about execution, their painting 'meaningful' by the nature of their touch. We read Sargent by 'passages' of paint description rather than compositional harmonics.

Then Cezanne comes along and does something very special:
He divines a way of painting that deliberately and quite consciously both composes and executes at the same time. His brushmark 'touch' both composes and expresses with the same gesture. Alex Kanevsky is doing very much the same thing.
He is a sort of jazz musician of painting: The 'motif', say a still life, is like a standard from the American Songbook which he then improvises a composition 'on the fly', i.e. in the process of painting.

Anyone looking at Alex Kanevsky's process shots of his own paintings sees this edgy building of a picture as composition and gesture trying to find the same DNA.

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[Chris Bennett]

Well, the Kanevsky is a work in progress and I quoted it to illustrate my point. But I agree, he's still breaking the eggs with this one trying to find his omlette. Don't forget, when execution and composition are seen as both exhalation and inhalation rather than one begetting the other, 'meaning' is wooed and courted rather than persuaded.

On Sargent: surely those flatulent Boston murals demonstrate my point? At the risk of rubbing you up the wrong way Kev, I'll site Fechin as an even better example of what I mean by the 'sense' of his painting coming from the execution rather than the harmonics. The harmonics are there but that is not what is leading the charge - the composition is really a cloths horse to hang his beautiful paintwork on. Nothing wrong with that, it's just the way he sees the business in my view. Other painters will see the paintwork as the handmaiden to putting the composition up before you - Ingres for instance. No-one does all one thing or all the other, its about the emphasis on one approach over the other.
Fechin sees his markmaking as beautiful cloths for which the composition serves as a shop window. Cezanne sees the markmaking as a series of gestural bricks by which the resulting house is the composition.

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[Chris Bennett]

I think you are right about Kanevsky being a product of our age and I would really be interested in taking this further since it is a problem that concerns us all as makers of images whatever our particular fields.

However, just to tidy up what I mean about the Fechin here it is upsidedown:

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Now, the main thing I notice is that the head simply dislocates itself from the rest of the drawing, ths hand gesture (marvelous as it is) makes no meaningful connection with the arm which in turn does not relate to the lap. I am aware of an abstract gesture design with a head pasted on the top. The painting (which is a fair example of his work I feel) is not, to my mind, a consistent whole at all, but rather two completely different realisations sitting on the same surface.

Here is a Cassat and a Turner upside down. See how they read as a self consistent whole throughout with everything belonging to the same realisation of that world in paint:

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[Chris Bennett]

We see pictures all at once or not at all. Walk into any gallery, open any book and the image that grabs you is the one you can read all in one go - in an instant it registers as 'complete', 'at one with itself'. Anything I have to work out, unentangle, grope for I'm not interested in. The paradox is that if it reads as complete in an instant it continues to be of interest as we go on looking at it, marveling at how something can be so self contained, 'answering itself' wherever we choose to look.

Question:

Where does this business of 'composition' end and the unity by execution start? Is there really any distinction? I'm not playing with words here, I really wonder if the two things are not in fact one thing, something our 'codification' has trouble nailing down.

I'm going to try and root out some examples to make my question a little clearer.

[Chris Bennett]

Same thing happening in each. Which is to say, I am not sure why you require the image to take in the whole of a figure as in the Cassatt. It is perfectly legitimate that only a portion of the figure be the "image silhouette" that imprints itself onto our imaginations.



Yes, its true that there is a popping forward in the Cassat in terms of the group, but it is anchored to the rectangle and has a meaningful graphic relationship to it as a sihouette within that rectangle and its relaining compositional elements. The Fechin head just seems to float to me. OK, its in roughly the right place to sit on the shorthand for a body but that seems to be the only reason it is there. I have no problem with the contrast between fully rendered and roughly indicated forms and as you say, it is a perfectly legitimate concern. However, if you think of Michelangelo's unfinished sculptures, the fully rendered in the context of the roughly cut stone is far more metaphorically powerful. The polished forms grow out of the stone rather than float amongst it. This is not because it is sculpture either - the photographs of the work make just as much sense. In fact Mersad Berber's painting below achieves this 'non floating' context for a highly rendered 'popping' form much better than the Fechin though without the magnificent profundity of Michelangelo......

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[chaosrocks]

ive always wondered about those michelangelo "unfinished" sculptures, and our tendency to leap to the conclusion that they are "finished" and interpretate them metaphorically. its always seemed to me that we are perhaps laying on unintended inter;pretation. just wondering.

it really isn't fair to use the commisioned Sargents as an example. Those are his bread and butter. not he work of his heart. He said so. or as a very wise and sadly deceased french Etcher once told me... Those are the "daily soup" please come look at my real work. (he said it i french but I would dream of trying to spel lit)

but again the point being we look at work in the terms of our current knowledge and aesthetic and Im not sure that applying post modern analysis to these works is legitimate. I do like that you both are using modern examples often of artist Im not familiar with (greatly appreciated when you post the image) .

Seurat claims in his own writing that his concern and use of the dot matrices had more to do with color interaction and light. HIs compositions are beautiful but tend to be rather static. adn "cold" By his own explanation he was prismatically separating the ligth into its components to be reunited by the eye of the viewer. might be the first instance of interactive visual art. I don't know.

and on the music... have you ever listened to various players. playing the same piece of Bach? In particular the Bach unaccompanied cello suites.? I have 6 different versions of them, I have attempted to play the pieces my self (way beyond my capibilities) which gave me a certain familiarity with the notes. But every interpretation is different. althoguh technically perfect each one carries into it something of them selves. sometimes its the timbre of the instrument, or the tempi. but unlike either of the examples where the structure is displaying the brush work or the brush work is building the structure, allows that there are interpretive factors beyond either brushwork or composition that flavour (to mix a metaphor) the resulting Art work.
In a sense what Im getting at is Im not sure that it can be broken down into such a sinple dichotomy , and of course these things are a continuum rather than black and white. just ike you can't simply divide the music into Pitch and Metre .

on an irrelevant note my personal preference of the Cello suites is edgar Meyers he finds a personality and humor in thtem that I find lacking in some of the others (casals, starker, rostpovich, yoyo ma....and Im forgetting one). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cello_Suites_(Bach)

thanksyou for thinking out loud gentlemen, it makes fascinating reading over my morning coffee
<goes to get moar coffee

crx

[Anid Maro]

Chris Bennett, Kev Ferrara, and others... I haven't anything to contribute to this discussion except to say thank you all for providing it. Haven't read all of it and understanding it will take multiple passes on top of that, but it's clear that there is a gold mine of information here for me to learn from (particularly from Chris and Kev).

So again I thank you for sharing your discussion with the rest of the forum and when you publish your book Kev, it'll be right at the top of my list for purchase.

P.S.: About that political thread Kev... I generally view the Lounge as the sewers of CA.org. They can be amusing to explore and maybe you'll find a flushed diamond, but ultimately the point of it is to be a storehouse of all our shit so it doesn't get left strewn in the streets. :)

I wouldn't worry too much about a bout in the Lounge, though I certainly understand your sentiment.

[Chris Bennett]

Chaos: I'm glad you brought up the point about the unfinished Michelangelos - you are right that they were almost certainly not to be delivered to their places on the commissioned tomb in the state that we see them. However, the metaphor of the body found in the stone is there in the highly finished works as well. I'll demonstrate my point with an example in a minute.

For me, Michelangelo's works are fantasies of weight and matter and momentum. His central figure at the end of the Sistine fresco (the day of Judgement) looks like he has been made of material from the centre of a neutron star. Anyway, for these fantasies to take metaphorical form he had to have a profound sympathy with the very matter that he carved and the nature of the way that he had to fashion it by carving. The material he used was of course marble, which contains within it the duel characteristc of being both heavy and hard yet light absorbing when polished. And that is profoundly metaphorical for this reason: Polishing is the final act of carving in its most subtle abraiding form. Thus, all the stages from the intial whacking away with the heavy point chisel down through the scutch and the flats and finally to the files and eventualy the carburundum powder of the final polish, are a transforming process of rough, opaque brute matter to a transcendental transluscent shape. However, for this metaphor to be at its most profound the final result must carry the memory of its parent; the original block. This, I posit, is going through Michelangelo's mind (be it consciously or unconsciously) from the very start and is at the heart of his creative meaning.

The Madonna and Child in the Medici tomb shown below I'll use to try and illustrate my point.
The slow, so slow corkscrew movement of the forms as they spiral up from the foot, through the crossed legs and the turning infant almost conjures up the ghost of Michelangelo as he orbited the block with his abraiding chisel. The marble forms seem to turn in on themselves, restating the integrity of the block (note the preserved vertical on the left side) whilst releasing the figures in the articulations of its form. They are made of this world, the very rock, the mantle, of this world. And yet this earthly stone is seen to become a song of light disclosed by a chisel spotted with the sweat of its own making.
The unfinished foot shows the creeping chisel as it feels for the forms, and as we glance up a moment from it to look at the rest of the sculpture we are aware that the rest of the figure is a shining, complete, resolved manifestaton of what is going on in the foot. From the first blow with the heavy point to the polishing of the end of the nose all is one and the same activity. The metaphor is as stong at the begining as it is at the end. In the end one sees the begining if you will.

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In a sense what Im getting at is Im not sure that it can be broken down into such a sinple dichotomy , and of course these things are a continuum rather than black and white.

I have a feeling you are having the same thoughts I was about the problem of defining where 'composition' starts and 'execution' begins and whether it is arising out of what Kev was talking about regarding the problems of codification. I'm having a deep think about this.

Nice coffee by the way......

[chaosrocks]

kev I think anyone who plays a No-tempered instrument, does this all the time. shaping the note duration and the pitch to the intent of the phrase. It is intentional if not intelectualized. you "make music"

I think you are getting in to a weird area where. Percieved in intent by the viewer may not be paired with conscious intent by the artist. the artist/musician does it because it feels like the right thing to do
not nessisarily because they have analysed their intent .

In some cases. like the Michelangelo slaves, i think we apply the metaphor afterward. its like in a relationship when you are all Pissed off about something and your partner keeps attributing it to some thing else (ie PMS). when point and simple you are actually pissed about the dirty dishes...or what ever.
Some times the artist clobberes you on th e head with the Metaphor... (ie the scream). but have you seen some of the freudien interpretations of say carravaggio's Bacchus? it's hilarious. I m not saying its an invalid way to look at it. But I seriously doubt Mike thoguht about all that when he was painting his model. (I always thought he was thinking about jumping his bones...but what do I know).

on the other hand, awareness of multiple meaning and simultaneaous multiple ways of interpreting a piece of artwork is a well documented ancient practice. at least in eastern culture. I had a professor once who, wrote a haiku on the board. he then proceeded to translate those three lines. in 21 different ways. using puns and metaphors. He claimed that ALL the translated meanings were intended simultaneaously, and thatthat was the complex wonder of the simplicity of the haiku.

of course when Im paintng.. if I think too much about intent..... and interpretation and anlysis i tend to go into a tailspin and stop painting. sometimes you gotta just do it and let the chips fall where they may. I guess thats why I prefer to think of what im workig on as u=illustration ..FOr some thing . and the difference then between illustration and fine art painting woutl be who gets to decide the intent.....


I would ask. kev and chris both, do you ever look at a work of art and just go WOW! without having to think about why it wows you?

[waranghira]

awww, and i was thinking of a topic something like this for my thesis.


The Scream is a pretty weak piece, IMHO, and one of the most overrated artworks of all time, IMHO. The "expressionism" has completely subsumed the little integrity there was, and the expression was barely worth stating. So it just sorta functions as a distorted symbol of a face... like a warped smiley. Yeah, there is a graphic metaphor involved in the distortion of the face and the warp of the strokes, something about existential horror or drifting out of existence, blah blah. Rule 3000: Anything that can be done in photoshop in two minutes with a filter is probably not worth exhibiting.


well, it has no effect to us because we've seen it everywhere since we were kids 8D
so it has lost its power on us.

[chaosrocks]

have you actually seen it?
not a picture of it... the actualy piece...

its different, it has qualities that dont reproduce well

[Chris Bennett]

I think it is better to see art as having a fractal character... or self-similarity (Analogie) between the small and the large, the technique and the content, the metaphor and the drama... and a harmony of any of the other types of purely visual effects one may tone a painting with.

And this returns us to vectors as the key.



Kev, that, and what followed in your post is absolutely on the money and beautifully put.

The materials that are used to build a work of art are indelibly caught up with it, but what is more, there should be no attempt to transcend them in the ordinary sense of religating them to 'the means that get you there'. This goes to the heart of the seeing art in terms of fractal characteristics. All metaphors infer degrees of connectivity and the most elemental one I can imagine is at the very heart of matter itself on the smallest scale. Seeing each element of the building of a work from the gesture of the smallest mark, throught to the small module forms, up to the form clusters, then the objects they describe finally to the relationship of these to other objects and the dramas they infer is the way that the work is given a reality in the deepest sense of the word. When this happens in a work it is seen to be self contained, whole. A little self contained universe within itself where the largest relates directly to the smallest as a total unity of means - the cells that make the body that is a host for its cells.

The deep problem with 'abstract' art is that this perfect little universe remains seperate from us. There is no explicit invitation other than what we might subjectively put there for ourselves. The figurative painting shows us our world within it, but made of a self supporting system that is the 'means' of the painting. We may be looking at a painting of a murder, yet if it is a great painting, we are witness to the act redeemed in a perfect universe. Even if that universe is only made of paint.

[Chris Bennett]

I would ask. kev and chris both, do you ever look at a work of art and just go WOW! without having to think about why it wows you?

I don't think so, or rather, not very often. The WOW always comes first of course, but by temperament I always find it intriguing to try and figure out what were the conditions that made it manifest. This is quite different to trying to 'solve' it or 'explain' it, which is a waste of time since all works of art are immune from this by definition. Rather, I'm interested in what were the conditions that led to its birth. It's like the difference between taking a boat to a lake and actually sailing on the lake. They are quite different things. It's not like work doing this, I find it very enjoyable.

It's a professional interest - the WOW works are like looking through the keyhole into a room where the artist seems to be dancing about with confidence and fluency. I'm not interested in the room because it is thier room and only they belong there. What I really want to know is how they got in there - because that may help me find the key to my own room a little easier.

I guess you have the impression that I have this stuff going through my head while I'm making my own pictures. Not really. You play the cello, right? Well, the cellist sits on stage and you hear them give a performance where they are swaying about and delerious with being carried away by the music they are playing. There seems to be no hint of scales or 'interpretation theory', fingering problems, bridge set-ups, the history of music, harmony theory, keeping time, rubarto playing, keeping physically and mentally fit, arpeggio excersises or even getting to the damned gig. Yet if none of this stuff had not been done a thousand times and thought and pondered over, we would be sitting there getting bored stiff watching an ernest child, red-faced scratching away their incompetence. Great if you are the parent thinking how proud you are of them - but that's a different thing.

So, when actually painting I am concerned with the job in hand. In fact the whole reason I think all this stuff through is so that I'm free to work fluently when the time comes to paint. We are back to that room again, or the boat and the lake; - the 'thinking' has given me the key to the room of fluency and confidence, free to indulge my enchantment. My intellect stands guard outside, ready to challenge the doubts that wait prowl in the gleaming towers beyond.

[BANNED_For_POOPY_PANTS]

It's amazing how much explanation, thought, imagination, interpretation goes into some of the works posted here. More than the artist put into the actual piece.

Don't get me wrong, most of the examples posted here are exquisite.

I just don't get how you can stare at a dirty canvas and see all the beautiful things you claim to 'see' which you describe so eloquently.

Some of the pieces here are a pure anarchistic mess. And I don't mean that in a cool, intriguing way. Literally, someone took a proverbial shit on a canvas, and people are drooling over it.

Why? Please enlighten me.

It seems that metaphorical subtexts and grandiose themes are often applied to paintings posthumously, especially if the artist has a few stunners under his/her belt.

Finding beauty in the ugliest of things doesn't reflect on good art, it reflects on the observer's imagination.

[Black Spot]

We may be looking at a painting of a murder, yet if it is a great painting, we are witness to the act redeemed in a perfect universe. Even if that universe is only made of paint.

So true, and what a great composition it can make.

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[BANNED_For_POOPY_PANTS]

Lol Kev. :)

Examples:

Post: #43, #114 (except for the last pic), #118 (first pic), #183 (holy shit, this is a "classic" example of visual diarrhea).

I want someone to prove me wrong. Why would such an abstract piece of art have such a profound impact on you?

What am I missing?

[Chris Bennett]

I think I mean the clothes of physicality must be worn lightly for a metaphoric image to function optimally.

If one shoots for the physical illusion too strongly, fidelity becomes the issue, the "capture of reality" becomes the cause, rather than the capturing of the metaphoric idea. The more the brushstrokes blend together, the less vector character they have, the less imagination-directed force they have, the more a circuit of "realism" is complete on canvas and that becomes the end point. On the other hand, the illusion of depth necessary to peel the mind away from the surface (defining the new symbol) is also created by vectors (hierarchies of tension - not sure if we got into this stuff earlier), so, for maximum effect, the brushstrokes should not be so wild that form and depth are not established. There's a similar tightrope to walk with toning... if a series of shapes are too similar, they become a field rather than a progression (vector). If they are too disparate, they don't connect and no vector is established between them in terms of shape. If one tones with color, one can easily make everything too blue, where it becomes unnatural and illusion disappears, or too monotone and boring. Or the colors can be too unharmonized, and they annoy, or break apart into a dazzling quilt effect that destroys the reality of the moment depicted.

Overall, I am postulating that the more aspects of a picture are vectoring toward the metaphor, the richer the metaphoric power of the picture because the more the picture will make purchase on the imagination of the viewer.

I think this brings us close to perhaps understanding the boundry between where composition stops and execution starts.
Where the mark gesture is effaced, as we see to some extent with Rockwell, we see the composition taking the strain of the meaning. Leyendecker it is a little less in that the energy comes from the building if the staccato form melodies. With George Bellows it is a little further still, where the meaning is given much more by the paint=flesh equation yet still given wonderful context for this to take place in the overall architecture of the painting:

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This is probably the reason people generally find it easier to express themselves through drawing since it is by its very nature 'abstracting' and thus encourages greater use of the 'gesture abstractions' that make for a vital work.
The James Flagg below is a lousey composition yet it is saved by the beautifully observed gesture of the couple that informs the very DNA of the pen gestures that produce them:

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[Chris Bennett]

About the Flagg... I love how every single stroke of the pen leads you through their gesture, up the legs in harmony with the surface of the paper, then they veer, taking a turn into depth at the bend in the hips, (taking our imaginations with them) and then over their backs to their heads and then they point us directly at the object of the couple's superficial attention. (Which is curiously slapdash for Flagg, marring an otherwise classic pic by him.) I don't see the composition as bad, but only that one aspect of it. I rather like its daring.

You're right, I was being a bit lazy just saying the composition was lousy - it's just been let down by failure to do what we have been talking about: The 'cells that build the body that is host to them' is the very reason the couple are so marvelously formed (your obsevations about what is happening in them are a delight by the way). But this fails to continue into the world they are looking at and thus there is a fracture. The scene is rendered merely as a sign for what it represents and oblivious of its context.
Interestingly it demonstrates very neatly this junction between composition and execution: The composition doesn't 'seem' to work because the execution suffers from loosing its metaphoric vitality outside of the figure field. (Something that rarely happens with a Rockwell for the reasons you stated above). Had Flagg been able to maintain his stamina into the 'background' this would not have happened.

I wonder if:
a). What one thinks of as 'composition' generally means 'harmonic' composing i.e. things take their meaning by how they stand together.
b). What one thinks of as 'execution' generally means 'melodic' composing i.e. things take their meaning from how they are read as 'passages' in sequence.

Flagg is a melodic artist to my eyes and composes as such. Thus when his melodic line runs out (as it is extremely easy to do as one moves from the primary silhouette) so does his composition falter.
Rockwell is somewhat more harmonic (Someone like Brad Holland is extremely harmonic as is Mark English) therefore rarely runs into this difficulty. His weakness occasionally is in his 'passages'. For example, drapery, the melodic artist's delight, looks sometimes a little ponderous under his hand - something that is almost physically impossible for Flagg or Leyendecker.

Would you agree?

[Chris Bennett]

Lol Kev. :)

Examples:

Post: #43, #114 (except for the last pic), #118 (first pic), #183 (holy shit, this is a "classic" example of visual diarrhea).

I want someone to prove me wrong. Why would such an abstract piece of art have such a profound impact on you?

What am I missing?

In my defence (although Kev is a fabulously worthy champion!) I give you a comparison with another painting of mine; Not to say 'I can do better, honest' but to try and show that both works are really about the same thing. I regard them with almost equal merit, though favouring my 'Woman with a Black Hat', not because it is more 'realistic' (it isn't, as I hope I demonstrate below) but because it abstracts at a deeper level and is thus far more intriguing to me:

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[Chris Bennett]

Yes, that's true - everything must serve as the context and be in the context for things to have any meaning whatsoever - as I said, the cells that build the body which is in turn host to the cells.

I think the distinction is how it is 'read'. Harmony, to be harmony must be simultaneous and melody, to be melody must, by definition, be sequencial. Now, we may hear a melody and infer harmony as we do in, say, Bach's solo cello partitas that Chaos mentioned. But it is only after we have heard the sequence of the phrase. And that is somewhat subjective anyway: We can hear the notes C, Eflat and G one after the other and think it means a minor chord but it could of course be the top end of an F dominant ninth chord without the root and the third. It could also be an E flat 6 chord or part of an Aflat major seventh etc etc.

It seems to me that we look at pictures this way, or for that matter anything: The whole is taken in all at once and then the details or 'passages' are read. We then relate the passages to the whole and see how the passages build the whole which is in its turn home to the passages that built it. Back an forth we go, delighting in how the whole thing seems to be constantly scratching its own back.

So I agree with you, but do not see the distinction as a simplification. These two, distinct activities form an ever complex dance with each other that is the combustion in the engine of all that follows regarding forms, drama and metaphor.

My observation is that different artists by temperament build their work with a bias - either one way or the other. Some, like Flagg by temperament sees things most enthusiastically as passages and builds in this way. Of course, if successful, the finished thing reads as a whole, all together and at once. If not, as in the Flagg where the figures stop and the 'background' begins there is a disruption in the continuum and the result means we have trouble 'reading' the thing as a whole, all at once. A wonderful melody has a sense of being a whole and 'standing together' once it has finished its sequence. And I see no reason why a painting built in this way, if all the 'links', the 'passages' all follow on from each other beautifully like good carpenter's joints should not come together as an 'all at one totality'.

But some artists do not tend to build with 'links' so much as sets of things standing together. Of course there are 'links or 'passages' in their work but the bias is toward a means that uses surface pressures. These are the 'carvers' I refered to so very, very long ago!

[Chris Bennett]

EDIT 2: On reharmonizing core chord notes... this leads to the point that an edge shape can recur on any object in a picture and will act as a "restatement" of the theme. Just the same way that passage-shape can repeat. It would seem important that a repeated "theme" have metaphoric meaning that informs the symbol-image (song) being defined. A non-repeated theme might simply act as an escort vector, like a pick-up to a measure... just notes that lead us into a theme. It would be interesting to test this thought on some good images to see if it holds true. Alternately, I wonder if the more unique vector paths (verses) that lead through the chorus image, the more the graphic design of it is considered to "repeat". So the main image can be a one-off, yet still "repeat" temporally to a sufficiently dominant degree. Wheras other minor themes might have to actually echo across the canvas in order to build up sufficient canvas presence to affect the viewer. That is, image size plays a factor... a huge image that fills the canvas will not require restatement in order to generate attention, whereas a small image area with respect to canvas size, might require much echoing to power the piece properly.

I wonder if this image helps us:
It can be read as both simultaneous (harmonic) accords and as passages (melodic). The movement of the legs I see as a reharmonisation of the two statements of the 'arms melody'. The grouped feet are the breasts in a different key. The diagramatic 'V' of the distant mountain valley is the same tune inverted that occurs between the breast mounds.....

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I could expand much more, but I wonder if I'm understanding your meaning before I push the levers to full.

[Chris Bennett]

It's by a marvelous painter who I've had some correspondence with, he is the Irish artist Mark Shields. I first came across his work in the British National Portrait competition. There was the usual bloated, gimmicky, attention seeking rubbish (you should have seen the sloppy pile of crap that won it!) and then I came upon his painting of an old lady........I stood there for something like an hour completely overwhelmed - it made everything else look like it had been done by people with the emotional maturity of 12 year olds. This man is a great, great painter in the fullest sense of the word.

Here's my definition about 'passages' Kev.....

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[Chris Bennett]

So, there is a lot to say about this in terms of music. Let's leave aside melody for just a second and concentrate on harmony or tonality. How are you seeing chords/keys/harmonic tonality manifesting here?

I'll have a think about how to represent this diagramatically and post it tomorrow. Your 'silence' vector is interesting since I was posting my explanation of what I meant by 'passages' when you posted yours. Intersting that my examples of passage melodies never wandered into your silence vectors!........

[chaosrocks]

don't confuse tempo with note duration
whether you are playing whole notes or hemidemisemiQuaver's the toctuse remains th same. unles you actively change the meter soyou have an underlieing pulse, often implied and not overtly dilineated. and then you have the fluidly changin note durations within that meter. and of course many many composers find ways to vary and change the way the notes are laid within the meter... even to the point of violating the toctuse. then there's John cages 4'13 where you are suppose to try to find the metre of the world with out .

dunno if any of this can be applied to art. but in a sense the huge difference in this music to art comparison is that music is 4th dimentional (time based)

where as in the 2 dimentional art were are mostly discussing . 3 dimension and 4 dimention can only be described.... not truly made or occupied

[chaosrocks]

the division is in measured increments though not a smooth sliding continuum. the relationship between art and music is metaphorical as is discussing sshape ain terms of rthym and tempi. it is a very good metaphor when you are comunicating with some one who can and does understand the technical aspects of music

but you space and distance=time and tempo is a little hard to grasp when you start talking about rythmic progression, because the increased rhythm a gradual continuos thing wheras in music it is a geometric progression

unles syou are actually talking about a sliding tempo increase...
I see what you are saying though
and its very interesting to think of it in those terms
as well as the Silent passages what Ive always thought of as negative space, or even Empty space. adn you can have active or passive empty space.. as a old scholl print media graphic designer I had to become very aware of silent passages.

on another note. (pours a glass of wine) thank you gentlemen for continuig this fascinating discussion.


in music theres nothing metaphorical about it.... although when working on a piece we do "shape" phrases.

[Chris Bennett]

I'm sorry I have not been around for a couple of days guys - there was a big banjax with a client and my gallery and it needed 100% attention to sort it out with things getting dangerously hairy. However, things have sorted themselves out and I can turn my attention elsewhere.......

Interesting developments on the music/painting equivalents above.
Kev's arguments about silence in painting and the examples given are really interesting. My ideas on this come at a more primary level - Kev's views of how it behaves in pictures is the 'applied' method according to my understanding of things. Let me explain:

Silence is very strongly related to carving for me. For instance, certain music and performances seem to be built out of a fundamental regard for sound 'occuring within silence'. This music understands silence as its context and the notes are understood in their relationship to it. This has nothing to do with 'quiet' music or necessarily 'spacy' music although this is a distinct feature of this realisation. Miles Davis' music always relates to silence, even when things were electronically rampted up and 'busy' in the later recordings. John Coltrane with his 'sheets of sound' is also anchored in silence - it is like a massive thunderstorm, an anvil cloud pressed in by a (silent) blue sky.

Both these musicians are 'carvers' of sound as opposed to 'modellers'. Their notes are always respectful of the block from which they are carved, the silence cleaved by their notes.
A 'modeller' in music does not regard silence so much as his spiritual ally - silence is only the absence of sound for this temprement. Rachmananov is a modeller, as are most 'romantic' artists, though by no means all. The singer Bjork is a 'carver' whereas Elvis Presley is a 'modeller.
Steve Reich and Philip Glass are 'modellers' even though they are 'minimalists'. Their music is its own context - silence happens to be the thing that remains when it stops.

Carvers and modellers have a different approach to time:
The carving musician sees time as the duration of the silence between notes - the amount of pressure that silence is allowed to build up. Fast tempos in carving involve higher 'time pressure'. With Coltrane the time barometer pressure is intense. Slow tempos involve less pressure and a Rubato, open pulse, has the time pressure almost equal to the pulse pressure.

The Modelling musician sees time as 'tempo'. A sense of movement to do with the construction of notes in relation to each other. There is not the sense of 'pressure from silence', more a tension within the elasticity of the music itself.

How these two things relate to Kev's understanding of time expressed in pictures by relation to the 'start' of the frame and his observations on tempo toward the centre is intriguing.

[BANNED_For_POOPY_PANTS]

Thanks for the reply Kev. I read the entire thread this afternoon, and took the time to study each and every one of the paintings in this thread with a fresh pair of eyes.

Ok, I'm starting to realize what you guys are talking about, but I must admit, I still feel out of my league here and I probably am.

Chris B', 'Woman with a black hat' is enchanting. Great mood, great colors. I like it not only because of the realism, but because a noob like me has familiar shapes to relate to. Regarding the other works you posted (I didn't know that one was yours btw) I guess appreciating art at its most abstract form requires a knowledge and appreciation for art history that I have yet to possess.

It's ironic because I'm no artist myself, but I am extremely shallow when it comes to fine art.

Bottom line, whether a specific piece grabs my attention or not, i support freedom of speech and self expression so i need to learn to accept and embrace all forms of artistic expression. hell, i might even learn something.

I'm going to bookmark this thread and keep following it.

[Jasonwclark]

The direction this conversation has taken in the last few posts is really interesting. Do you guys think that the marriage of art with music (in film say, or just in the general historical presentation) reinforces these connections/parallels between carving and modelling and such, or detracts from them? For example, when I hear something by Danny Elfman, it invariably recalls the look of a Tim Burton painting to me, but I'm not sure if its anything intrinsic to individual works, or just that fact of common association. It’s the same way Paganini makes me think of Ingres, or Jimi Hendrix makes me think of low brow acid art. Not necessarily because of the underlying design of any two individual works, or tendencies of the artist, but more because I’m just so used to seeing the one follow the other. I suppose it’s probably more to do with first encounters and the employment of the familiar visual tropes, rather than any understanding of the specific compositional elements at work, but it seems somewhat related to the current discussion, because I can imagine instances where these associations might confuse the compositional parallels (or lack thereof.)

I’m curious, if you had to hunt down paintings to parallel these songs, what might they be?
I'm just throwing some out off the top of my head, trying to ballpark it. Feel free to supply others if these ones don’t wring a bell. With the exception of the first few on the list, all these involve lyrics as well, which probably complicates things somewhat, but I’d still be curious to hear any thoughts. Tried to chose songs that would be recognizable and somewhat diverse.

Chopin: The Funeral March
Schoenberg: (anything from the 12 tone)
Copland: Hoe-Down
Gustavo Santaolalla: Iguazu
Blind Willie Johnson: Dark was the Night
Louis Armstrong: Kiss to Build a Dream On
Miles: So What or Blue in Green
Dave Brubeck Quartet: Take Five
Otis Redding: Lover’s Prayer
Sinatra: My Way
Roy Orbison: Mystery Girl
Bowie: Life on Mars
Zeppelin: When the Levee Breaks
The Cars: Since You're Gone
Sex Pistols: Holiday in the Sun
Wu Tang Clan: Liquid Swords, 4th Chamber (or any rap music really, Beastie Boys, NWA, A Tribe Called Quest, whatever works)

If there are better examples that come to mind, go with those. They don't need to be analytically dead on, I'm just curious to see how this train of thought might play out with general comparisons. Thanks again for this thread :)

[Jasonwclark]

Yeah, lyrics do present a problem. To avoid crossing over into poetry, you'd have to analyze them just in terms of the general sounds and metric patterns, which would probably be pretty hard to do for a song in our own language. There's also the issue of multiple creators participating in a single work of music compared to the solo visual artist, that would probably complicate the analysis. Don't let me distract :)

These ideas about silence and the shape of suspense are interesting. I like where you guys are going with the thought.

[dusty imp]

apologies for jumping in since I didn't participate in this lengthy discussion up till now, but it seems to me you are comparing apples to oranges by trying to
bootstrap the basic mechanics of music to painting (or visual arts in general).
music is a dynamic medium, that linearly guides the viewer through the experience. fundamental differences between visual and aural (probably wrong term) aside, an image is a static frame, which can attempt to guide the viewer similarly, but can't possibly hope to do it the way sound does, unless you literally grab the viewers face and point him to the parts of the painting you want him to see, in a determined sequence and preset amount of time. a film or animation could be compared to music, but hardly a single static image. music does not provide you with any choice as to what parts you can experience, for how long, or in what order.

[Jasonwclark]

Even if you can't map the one onto the other directly it can still be a fruitful approach. The reason I like what Chris and Kev are doing here, is that they are working with actual paintings instead of analyzing in a vacuum.

In case the Fuseli isn't doing it, here is another that came to mind:

"open sesame"

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This one is from the wiki commons. Maybe someone has a cleaner shot?

[dusty imp]

this is quite interesting, I am currently reading Gombrich's Art and Illusion, and he's touching on some of those things, have to finish the book though...
I am not disagreeing that an artists can have a lot of control over directing the viewer through the image, but it seems to me that the amount of that control is inversely proportional to image's "realism". In a case of abstract painting, you can operate basic shapes and colors freely. Putting a dot in the center of a blank canvas will definitely grab the attention of the viewer first and foremost, which may or may not be the desired effect. But as you start using the schemata of "real-world" representation, you gradually begin losing the ability to control the viewer as you are strapped down with rules for representing these objects - light, value, perspective, anatomy, scale, proportion, all of these impose their own restrictions. Not to mention the emotional, symbolic, and personal context any of these elements as they become less abstract bring into the viewer's experience when viewed through the prism of their personal world. If anything, I think the beauty of pictorial representation is in the numerous ways any image can be experienced and interpreted by different viewers.

Kev, it occured to me that I'm not clear on what type of control you are referring to. over viewer's emotions, thoughts, or the way they visually travel through the pictorial space?

[dusty imp]

kev, thanks for taking the time to answer my ramblings, I think I'll have to carefully re-read the whole thread a couple times. this is quite a bit more complicated that I thought initially.

[Chris Bennett]

Lovely analysis on the Jason's Parrish picture Kev!

One more thought that occured to me regarding silence in the carving/modelling idea and is related to the Parrish picture:

Silence is not a commodity, but to the carver, neither is the sound (or block/surface to be shaped). The sound, or pictorial gesture, calls into being its opposite in the act of becoming. Rather like those particles quantum mechanics talks about. We are in a 'which came first; the chicken or the egg' situation. To the carver, respect for the surface (or silence) is to understand that the 'surface' can be seen to come first rather than the gesture (or sound) upon it. Seen this way, the very act of mark making (or sound making) takes on the profoundest consequence in terms of its philisophical implications.

In the Parrish, the light defines the dark, the procession of geometric events Kev pointed out bear forth their opposite; movement. Thinking 'off-the-cuff' this is perhaps harmonic movement rather than melodic. The movement is structural rather than specific. (Dm7 to G7 to C is a structural blueprint upon which many specific melody endings will fit). The sword, implying a counter movement from right to left in its crossbow like shape implications is perhaps a melodic 'answer' to counterweight the harmonic movement in the opposite direction.
Melody evoked by harmony evoked by melody......?

[Chris Bennett]

Sorry Kev, I had forgotten that you had made this point in a different way!
I guess my main theme in my last post was, if one is thinking in terms of vectors for instance, the carver thinks in terms of the 'implied vectors' being 'there already' and in some profound sense to have created the vector that was 'initially' put there.

[Serpian]

Wow! I'm glad this discussion got going again! Your advanced philosophical metaphors are so interesting to read, even if they often go over my head (or rather, understanding of english..:)).

This comparison between music and art is very interesting, and one I have many times thought of myself, but you of course do it at such a higher level...

Some art music for inspiation...

The Bad Plus - Giant
y3GlKz3oEsM

Yes - Close to the edge (ignore the cheesy costumes and just listen)
pt.1
KNJJPEN-bp0
pt.2
49IH0kl-Nxo

LYRICS (http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=88484)

This monstrous 18-minute all out prog rock masterpiece is Art to me. There's an interesting thing in this song that relates a bit to what Kev has said about repetition. There are different themes in this song that we hear many times, some as verses, some as choruses or bridges. Even the single 'calm' part of the song is composed of several similar verses.
But there's one part that we hear once, and only once. It's in part four of the song, after the calm part, and after the wild solos, and after the song starts again, at 7:28 in pt.2.
They sing 'ooh, ooh'. This single moment only lasts a couple of seconds, but because if it's difference from the surrounding themes (that comes before and after it), and the fact that it's alone in the whole 18-minute monster that is this song, it's made extremely important to me. It's as if that moment makes the whole song.

Could one draw parallels between this kind of composition in music and in painting?

[Chris Bennett]

I think you're Zenning out on me a little. :lens: Outside of the shape of a song, the silence isn't aesthetic. Once it is contained by the borders of the work, then we can talk about it as existing. Which is one way of saying, I simply disagree that silence is shaped before it happens.
kev

LOL! There is no painter, only painting......
You have it fine Kev, I do mean of course within the borders of the work.
It's a question really of 'will' and its part in all this. The modeller obeys the moment of his or her whim, they are omnipresent. Hence the prevelence of 'effects' in the modeller's works: Constable, Monet, Turner, El Greco, Rembrandt. The carver is more servant of the moment.
Neither is better than the other, the balance between is all: If everything is 'will' nothing is learned. If everything is 'submission' there is nothing to learn.

[Chris Bennett]

Serpian: Allowing for the fact that is a terrible recording of The Bad Plus - if you hear them in concert or on a decent recording (as I'm sure you are aware) it is astoundingly powerful, muscular music going well beyond what you might expect from the usual jazz piano trio, a bit like the Swedish group E.S.T - I would see this particular piece in these pictorial terms:

The bass is like a linking colour tonality that crops up everywhere in the painting. The rim shot drum accents are like verticals dividing up the procession of forms built by the piano which in turn forms clusters of intensely vigurous forms or drops away leaving the tonal 'silence' of the bass and marshalled by the vertical rim shots.

[Chris Bennett]

Chris, is your distinction just between those who pay more attention to the design of the form they create with the brushstrokes and those who are paying more attention to the design of the brushstrokes as they render the form? Are you talking about whether structural design happens before or during rendering?

I'm really not clear on your idea.

Hmmmm....OK:

Let's think of the brushstrokes as bricks.
Each painter uses different bricks according to their temperament - some big, some small, some wiggly, some use mostly straight long ones etc etc. They may vary the bricks they use but each artist has their handwriting which is basically their favourite bricks found inside their toolbox.
OK so far.
Now, consider a masterpiece of architecture; lets say the Parthenon. What if this was built with fibre glass? It would make nonsense of the 'idea' of the structure - a forest of petrified trees. Lets think of the Flat Iron in New York - it would be meaningless built of wood, just as the beautiful lines of a Viking long ship would seem absurd expressed in stone (apart from the practical consequences of this for the Norse sailors!)

There is a way in which the large forms take their shape from the means used to express them. The 'slowness' of Egyptian sculpture with its gradually turning, silent, forms is an outcome of sensibilities attuned to the great lengths of time it took to carve granite without carbon steel tools - just pounding it with other rocks. It is not that this is all they could come up with without the 'aid' of a pnumatic hammer. The process 'meant' something and was bound up with the forms they created: You believe in gods, you are making something you believe will last for eternity out of a substance provided by 'the divine maker' for you to slowly fashion into its permanent image. To fling something up with clay, even if it looked like the stone carvings would be meaningless. Touch the black granite knee of a godess in the British museum - cool and hard and forever and only yours for a moment. Now touch the same form made of wood.

Yet african wood carvings have extrordinary 'suddeness' which is an outcome of the quickness of carving wood. They would make no 'sense' carved in stone or cast with plastic. The forms arise from the suprise as the adze clefts into the living grain of the temperamental timber. Boo!

So, the forms that arise have an intimate relationship with the means that realised them. They cannot be thought of independent of the means used to make them. Otherwise it is just manufacture....

[kikindaface]

Hey guys, I know that it'san advances composition thread, but I just wanna know if there is any book which learn the fundamentals of composition ? I'm a beginner in this field, so if anybody can help me ?

[Chris Bennett]

It's this I don't understand:
To create "effects" on a whim seems to me to make one a servant of the moment. I don't understand the distinction.


Yes, that's a confusing choice of words I have used there. I'm making a distinction between servant and master of the moment. Maybe this will make things a little clearer:

What is the modeller's main choice of material? Clay, wax or plaster are the usual ones: A formless mud that can be shaped dexterously by the 'will' of the modeller. In a second it can undergo a major change which makes it the perfect instrument for temperaments that require expression through impulse.

The carver chooses material that resists them. It has the effect of 'averaging out' the various creative impulses that occur and lessening their individual, momentary effects on the work yet in so doing allowing the effects to accrue and thereby gain power by accumilation of creative incident that becomes 'one' gesture redolent of the whole psyche.

The modeller trusts in the immediate gesture as a complete a statement as possible. This is why, for example, atmospheric effects of a tempestious nature attract the modellers, Constable, Turner, El Greco to name obvious examples. More gestured poses appeal to the modeller's sensibility as do discords of colour. Rodin's sculpture is all nevous twitches, his surface broken with possibilities. Malliol, the carver, is all compression, all containment.

Walid Dala: I'm afraid I do not know of any good books on composition at all - just the usual simplistic stuff you find poked in the odd chapter of 'how to' books about the stability of triangles etc etc. However, Charles Ried's books have some useful little pointers in terms of decorative figurative painting, but there is nothing on narrative composition. Kev will be a lot more help on this I'm sure.

[Serpian]

Kev: I see what you mean, Yes has even by their own fans been criticised for being too overblown and pretentious. But maybe if one does not take the comparison too literally, only picking important/interesting bits, one can come to some kind of a paralell between this song and a picture.
Just because a song has seventeen verses, a picture representation of that song does not have to have seventeen ways to get to the focal point of the picture.

The violent cacaphony of the first and last movements of Close to The Edge is the silence you speak of, the background to the focal point, the singing or the images the lyrics create.
The first two movements are pretty much the same, with variations. The third movement is a different song altogether. The fourth and final Repeats the first two, but again leads to the climax of the 'oh, oh' part. I think this song is really a triptych.

Chris: Yes, of course that is an extremely bad example of their work, but it was the best of that song I could find on youtube. I like to listen to this song in a dark room, eyes closed, slowly rocking my head to the beat... The bass is amazing. Giant is definately one of my favourite songs, all categories.

[Chris Bennett]

The distinction here seems to be between energetic volumes and ideal volumes.

Yes that is right...in a way. Ultimtely this carving modelling business is a state of mind, an attitude and not really tied up with chisels or oil paint in its ultimate form. The ideal is a sort of 'averaging' after all......And what was it I said about the carver? The energetic is of the moment.....And what was it I said of the modeller and their impulse?

[Serpian]

On clay vs. marble... Remember that the 19th century sculptors first worked in clay, then had the clay model cast in plaster, to finally carve in marble, using the plaster version as model. And to my understanding, the tedious work of stone carving was often left to the assistants...

If the luxury of music is that you can make really, really, really long songs (I guess you could still just make a really, really, really large canvas ;)), is perhaps the luxury of a picture the amount of information you can put in that frozen moment? Because music goes on in time, built up by infinately small moments, and a painting can only ever be one of those moments. A given infinately small moment of music can only contain so much information, but because the painted moment is frozen in time, you can get all the information that is needed at once. Is this the differing luxuries? Or am I just desperately trying to play with the big boys here?

EDIT: Here (http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/01/eye-magnets.html) is a very interesting entry from James Gurney's excellent blog. (http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/) The eye movement maps show that the eyes does to necessarily follow the lines and contours, but rather jump from face to face in the picture by Repin.

[drd]

I know next to nothing about composition, but on the surface it looks to me, vaguely, that you guys are sort of reading stuff into these pieces; I'm probably wrong, but for how complex you guys make these diagrams and such, did these artists really think their work through to that extent?

I could never do that =(

[Chris Bennett]

On clay vs. marble... Remember that the 19th century sculptors first worked in clay, then had the clay model cast in plaster, to finally carve in marble, using the plaster version as model. And to my understanding, the tedious work of stone carving was often left to the assistants...

If the luxury of music is that you can make really, really, really long songs (I guess you could still just make a really, really, really large canvas ;)), is perhaps the luxury of a picture the amount of information you can put in that frozen moment? Because music goes on in time, built up by infinately small moments, and a painting can only ever be one of those moments. A given infinately small moment of music can only contain so much information, but because the painted moment is frozen in time, you can get all the information that is needed at once. Is this the differing luxuries? Or am I just desperately trying to play with the big boys here?

EDIT: Here (http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/01/eye-magnets.html) is a very interesting entry from James Gurney's excellent blog. (http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/) The eye movement maps show that the eyes does to necessarily follow the lines and contours, but rather jump from face to face in the picture by Repin.

That's true about the 19th century sculptors Serpian and even Michelangelo was said to have immersed his wax studies in oil and gradually drained it in tandem with his working on the main stone carving in order that it acted as a guide to his journey into the stone. So I'm really glad you brought this up!
As I said in my reply to Kev, this is really about an attitude of mind rather than being solely bound up with process. Thus a carver would work clay with an attitude essentially different from the 'natural modeller'. Likewise the modeller would work stone with a different attitude to its substance. The carver goads, caresses, stalks and slowly discloses, patiently uncovering. The modeller affirms, takes hold of, possesses, insists. Carving is the feminine to the modelling masculine.

Good point too about the instantious nature of painting and how the defining differences can be seen as their inherent luxuries.
The great beauty of painting is it is the most wonderful way of making your mind up. The success of the image is all about how well you have done this. Music on the other hand is the most wonderful way of allowing you to keep changing your mind.

[Flake]

I'm probably wrong, but for how complex you guys make these diagrams and such, did these artists really think their work through to that extent?


I think some of them probably did, some of them obviously did, others were more winging it on instinct.

There's a good section at the end of Harry Speeds drawing book where he analyses old master paintings and drawings and it turns out loads of them conform to strict compositional ratios, deliberate or instinctive? dunno.
It's free on Gutenberg so have a look and decide for yourself.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14264

Also have a look at the section in Loomis "Creative Illustration" on what he calls "informal subdivision", vaguely related.*

*nowhere near the level these guys are playing with but it'll get you thinking along those lines I hope.

[Serpian]

In the spirit of resurrecting old but interesting threads...

You posted these pictures in the Drapery thread.. Do you know how Layendecker used all those guide lines?

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=399693&stc=1&d=1214504814
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=399698&stc=1&d=1214504890

[Opilione]

I find this thread fascinating. Thank you for discussing the issue in such an accessible form.

I only have one question though: How much do the concepts discussed within this thread apply to heavily abstracted or symbolic art? It seems mostly relevant to realist or semi-realist art forms.

[curiousmoth]

Hello

Just a note to say thank you for writing up this thread! I read it a while before but did not have an account here to respond. It has helped me a lot in communicating my messages through my artworks, and in understanding why certain drawings resonate with people.

Thank u again!

[Opilione]

Realist pictures are like songs. Abstract pictures are like songs where you can't understand the lyrics.
I disagree. There's plenty of music in the world where there are people who can understand the lyrics, even if I can't. I think perhaps the metaphor would be "Abstract pictures are like songs where you're not meant to have definite, understandable lyrics".

A pop song says something different about the world than a thrash song, whether you can understand the lyrics or not.
I also disagree. One of the glories of music is pop music being covered by unconventional genre bands, and vice versa. I love covers because of this.

Nitpicking aside, you've lost me with the music metaphors in relation to the thread. I was generally meaning as a comment on the discussion of space, shape and composition for the carved/built models, rather than the very subjective music metaphors.

[Opilione]

If you can't understand the lyrics, they become abstract to you. Foreign lyrics are like scat. They might as well have been "sung" by a guitar or a chimp.
Not understandable =/= abstract. Abstract art can still have discernable meaning and purpose, as you stated in your comments regarding Pollock. It's simply abstracted by the medium, thus the very definition of the style. Lyrics in languages other than those you understand are not abstracted by they're medium. They're simply non-understandable because of the limited knowledge of the listener.

A better metaphor for foreign language music would be showing an alien a picture of something they haven't seen or have no knowledge of. That could be similar to listening to music in a foreign language.

Lastly, implicit in what I wrote was the answer to your question. To make it more plain, realism and abstraction are much closer than people realize; Only a lyric apart, in fact.
That's cute and pithy and sounds smart and I'm sure you were very proud of yourself after you typed it, but you still haven't answered my original question: How does the discussion of carved and modelled space relate to the abstracted forms of art created by human beings? You have spoken at length about meaning and purposiveness (which can be seperated from the medium), but I would like to bring it back to the original topic of space and shape, since the abstraction of these is the very fundamental point of abstract (and often surreal) art. If you could take some time to drop the flawed music metaphors to address this, it would be appreciated.

[Opilione]

You seem enamored of distinctions without differences. There is a continuum from wholly unrelatable abstraction to scat to clear lyric. It isn't a binary situation.
But a continuum would still denote differences, would it not? I'm sorry, I guess I'm just being too pedantic in asking for some clarification in regards to spatially distorted art.

The music analogy is a very fruitful one and has led to much offline discussion and insight.
That's good. But I'm asking questions online, and am not part of the group who discuss this offline. The problem with this thread is that there is huge gaps of your perspective on the issue missing because you have chosen to delete things. I am trying to get a feel for your opinion on the less musical side of things by asking direct questions. I am not a musician, and one of the things I enjoyed about the bits of this thread that still exist is that the artistic discussion is still on a level accessible to someone with a vague understanding of academic discourse. I was simply hoping to be able to continue that dialogue out of an interest of some of the topics raised. Which was why I asked such a general, leading, open question originally.

First of all, it did make sense.
I never said it didn't.

But the answer, nevertheless is, it would take a book to answer your question.
Or a pithy metaphor, it seems. I am not asking for you to tell me how to apply the theories, or to educate me, and I'm sorry I didn't make my original statement more obvious. I thought it would be enough of a leading question to garner some of the opinions on the topic I was hoping would be provided in as much of a clear and accessible manner as they were in the previous pages of this post, before it diverged. Again, my mistake, and I won't make it again in the future, since it's obviously too much of a hassel.

That wasn't your original question.
Again, sorry, my mistake. I will next time be more pedantic and make sure I refer to all of the thread, rather than just the parts regarding the offline music discourses the readers online are not privvy or psychic enough to access.

The carving/modelling metaphors are Chris'.
Sorry, again, from a reading of the earlier pages and Chris's replies to your deleted posts on them, I was under the impression you were a part of the discourse on the topic and thus would have something to say about it in the original context. My mistake.

[Serpian]

Original question:

How much do the concepts discussed within this thread apply to heavily abstracted or symbolic art? It seems mostly relevant to realist or semi-realist art forms.

I think that when we talk about composition in terms of spaces, forms and vectors, it applies very directly to abstract art. This is because abstract art is just that - shapes and spaces (and colors). When we talk about things like the picture metaphor, or the different shapes and spaces adding to the story if the picture, it applies more to realistic art, because they often include storytelling, which purely abstract art doesn't.

I think what Kev meant his first reply to your first post, is that in a song where you can understand the lyrics there is a story, whether it be epic or poetic, and in one where you don't, you just hear the melody, or the shapes and spaces of the picture, if you will. I think that in a metaphor like that, you can't start thinking about every aspect of music, or you will find a fallacy in it. You just have to try to understand what the message of that metaphor was, and if you don't, ask for clarification.

That being said, it is of course not prohibited to come with your own opinions, and here is mine:

I think an instrumental song is more alike to a song with lyrics than a piece of abstract art is to a piece of representative art.

EDIT: and a song where there is lyrics that you don't understand is like a piece of representative art where you don't know the back story.

[Opilione]

Kev, some of us aren't so sure of our thoughts on a topic. Which is why we might start with an open-ended question and perhaps not give our firm opinion on a topic until the conversation has gone around a bit and we've had a chance to mull it over long and good.

Anyway...

I think that when we talk about composition in terms of spaces, forms and vectors, it applies very directly to abstract art. This is because abstract art is just that - shapes and spaces (and colors). When we talk about things like the picture metaphor, or the different shapes and spaces adding to the story if the picture, it applies more to realistic art, because they often include storytelling, which purely abstract art doesn't.
Just to be nitpicky - do you include "primitive" art in your definition of abstract art? It's just that a large part of the pre-modern forms of art - abstracted and otherwise - were used to tell stories which were significant to the cultures they were produced in. But I guess that kind of nitpicking is only relevant if you don't take a purely modern view of the definition of artistic genres.

For example, one of the reasons I took issue with kev's music metaphor is that Indigenous Australian art - which I have a strong interest in - is incredibly abstracted, but has a very powerful storytelling component. These stories may be completely alien and non-understandable to someone not from an indigenous background or from the particular group they originated from, but that doesn't make them completely unable to be understood by those who know the "language" of the symbols and art. Perhaps on this I agree with kev, if I am understanding his discussion above of the permanent nature of narrative in human art. Perhaps this sense of a narrative is similar to the concept of all human art being defined by its sense of purpose which is able to be sensed by the viewer even if the purpose itself is not clear. But I'm not sure of this, since I can't be certain whether I've understood his post clearly or not.

In regards to the issue of carved and modelled space, there was an abstract work posted in the first post here but then all the following examples were based around very realist works, which is why I still am having problems grasping the basic composition issues here as they apply to abstract art, since so much of the composition issues discussed seemed to be focused around perspective, which is often not present at all in abstract art. The clearer philosophical issues - when not bogged down in musical terminology - are much easier to grasp.

[Opilione]

I never said music didn't have perspective, and I have no idea where you pulled that from as "one of my beliefs". I think through your obsession with the music metaphor you've led it to colour all your interpretations of my comments on this thread. Please don't put words into my mouth, since you have no idea of what I do or do not think about music anywhere outside of the genre and language issue we have briefly covered here.

As for questions, I've asked some, I could even point out the question marks in my above posts, if you really want, but I don't think you do, since you're very good at finding them yourself though you pontificate otherwise. You don't have to answer them if you don't want to - nobody's holding a gun to your head - but I highly doubt that, given as you are to such strong opinions. In fact, my previous question was directed towards Serpian since I didn't really care for your opinion on it anymore, but you did a good job of giving your two cents on that anyway without being asked specifically. Funny that.

But just for you, if you want, here's a question I would find your answer to very interesting: Can you please illustrate Chris's previous discussion of carved and modelled space in regards to well-known abstract artists or, ideally, the work of an Indigenous Australian artist, without using music metaphors anywhere in the post? It would be most appreciated.

[Zaxser]

While I've enjoyed your insight throughout the thread, I think there are area where the whole lyrics = realism metaphor breaks down...

[Chris Bennett]

I with Kev on this lyrics = naturalism thing. It's an extremely useful metaphor. It's why paintings are like songs regarding the relationship to the 'lyrics' of their component realism - and why movies are like novellas in relation to their component drama.

There is not much you can do with story in a painting just as there is limitations on how much the lyrics of a song can describe - the function of text in both cases is to give an emotional cue to how the abstract architecture is to be 'read' or rather 'felt'. Witness how weak painting always puts an emphasis on the text, resulting in a feeble list of disconected signs for reality. Bad portraiture is recognised because it only says 'eyes', 'nose' and 'mouth'. The words are there but they do not sing - the melody of the face is only contained within the unamed connections. The 'soul' of the painted head is embodied in the pure abstraction of its surface geometry - to give it lyrics is when it has become a portrait.

The Turner above, before the details were added, is a melody of pure matter. After the details or 'cues' have been added it has become a portrait of the ocean, a song about the sea.

[kilz]

this thread is awesome...

thank you Chris for putting this together

[Chris Bennett]

Can you please illustrate Chris's previous discussion of carved and modelled space in regards to well-known abstract artists .


Here you go. Ivon Hitchens is well known in the UK - however, any Pollock or De Kooning will demonstrate a modelling conception at work.
Please note that this does not have anything to do with hard edges; although my examples show two carving conceptions that use this it is not the use of hard edge that defines carving. Roy lichtenstein uses hard edges but is manifestly a modeller through and through.
Neither is it to do with rectangles; hence my inclusion of Rothko. The reason Rothko is a modeller is because he wants you to look through the surface of the painting, whereas Diebenkorn and Nicholson insist your eye stays aware of the surface at all times.

Notice how taught the surface appears to be in the carvers, Diebenkorn and Nicholson and how the Modellers Rothko and Hitchens see it as a window, inviting you in.

617948

[drd]

Chris:

In the beginning, I didn't really understand the carving/modeling metaphor you were using. I think by now I have a vague understanding; it is still pretty nebulous. I can see what you mean in an abstract sense that I can't really put into words, however, with this last batch of pieces I am pretty lost in the differences (or perhaps in how to explain it) between them.

I'll take a stab at it anyways: Is the difference that the carved pieces attempt to lock you into the picture plane? I can see that the rectangles of the borders are important to the composition, whereas with the modeled pieces, the plane doesn't matter as much. This is my very primitive understanding, and if it is correct, I haven't a clue as to why.

Am I on the right track?

[Chris Bennett]

drd: Yes, you are completely on the right track. Carving, as applied paintings means that the attention is held on the surface, even as we read the 3D illusion. As Kev mentioned to someone way back in this thread, carving, when talking about paintings, is paradoxically to do with flatness.

Of course there is more to all this that follows on from what you are saying but this is the fundamental starting point from which all the the other elements follow: carving to do with colour (Breugel and Piero and Nicholson are perfect examples), carving to do with truth to materials, carving to do with procedures of picture making, carving as an attitude to creativity.....

To give an example of how 'flatness' or rather more accurately, 'respect for the picture plane or surface' is not about denying the 3D illusion effect but rather an awareness of the surface simultaneously with the experience of 3D illusionism. The following pictures are examples of this:

636966

636970

636971

636973

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[kelly x]

Hi Chris and Kev, I was wondering if you would think this tool was useful:
http://www.feng-gui.com/default.aspx
I loaded some work into it and found it to be similar to what you are talking about... The premise is finding out the focal point or hot spots. It's new tech and at least fun to play with. I gave it to several artist's and he was all over it. Just tell me what you think. I have learned so much from this thread, great job!

[kelly x]

hi gave more *'s:sungod:

[kelly x]

Tanks Kev, Just wanted to know, kinda thought the same... nube tech! It also seems to pick up really low level "hot spots" Just wanted an opinion on this... Thankfully just gave it to a couple friends and we thought it was a bit tweaked out too.

[Chris Bennett]

Hi Chris and Kev, I was wondering if you would think this tool was useful:
http://www.feng-gui.com/default.aspx
I loaded some work into it and found it to be similar to what you are talking about... The premise is finding out the focal point or hot spots. It's new tech and at least fun to play with. I gave it to several artist's and he was all over it. Just tell me what you think. I have learned so much from this thread, great job!

Thanks for posting this link Kelly, but I've gotta agree with Kev on this.
To show how dumb this hotspot reader is I've put one of my own paintings through the system and shown the results it came up with. All Kev's points come into play here - it has completely ignored the subject of the girl's gaze (the cloud), the very thing we would jump to look at a fraction after looking at her head!
I reckon this device to be hoplessly inadequate. In fact I would say it is worse than useless in that it is highly misleading! (However, it possibly works a little more reliably for text based graphics with no 'human interest' images, but that is still a guess and I'm doubtful, frankly.)
Anyway, Judge for yourself:

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[kelly x]

I have to concur guys and Chris your example is clutch, I see that it is picking up the glaze work. I'm glad machine's have not taken over the human brain anyway. Even if they come up with something perfect someday don't you think it's better to train your own eyes and brain... ?
The first time I tried it I loaded the Mona Lisa and it did a perfect trillion both eyes and her mouth, which may seem good as a focal point for a portrait... I just loaded the painting again and it gave a completely different read altogether... This engine is neither good or consistent. I'll keep reading here and my books and thanks for taking the time!!

[kelly x]

I reckon this device to be hoplessly inadequate. In fact I would say it is worse than useless in that it is highly misleading! (However, it possibly works a little more reliably for text based graphics with no 'human interest' images, but that is still a guess and I'm doubtful, frankly.)
Anyway, Judge for yourself:

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I don't even think it's good for graphic's people, it gives different reads every time. The machine is not good at all... Get back to these good lessons and was not trying to derail your thread. THX!

[Chris Bennett]

I don't even think it's good for graphic's people, it gives different reads every time. The machine is not good at all... Get back to these good lessons and was not trying to derail your thread. THX!

On the contrary Kelly, the deficiency of the machine served as a an excellent way of pointing up the value of intelligently getting to grips with how pictures 'work'. It also, by inference, points up how simplistic tricks are of no real help either - only a holistic understanding of the principles is capable of providing anything remotely useful to the user.
So in this way it's a useful contribution!

[kelly x]

Thanks Chris, I am so glad that I could add so much to this thread by pointing out the bad cheats offered in this crack pot technology!! And to inadvertently add to the proof that there is no cheating. Just as you said = only a holistic understanding of the principles is capable of providing anything remotely useful to the user. Well put!! ;)

[Chris Bennett]

OKaaaay.
If anyone wants to ask me anything feel free to post it here.
It doesn't have to be about composition.
Just stuff about the bedrock principles.
I'll do my best to answer as much as I can for the benefit off all those interested.

[Slothboy3000]

Awesome thread - thanks very much for this!
I'm not too used to reading the plastic meaning of an image, but just to see if I'm on the right track and using the Fuchs as an example...

Are the yellow shapes of the windows that echo her dress a way of reaffirming her link to the outside in a palstic sense rather than the literal (which would be the narrative fact that they're windows rather than yellow shapes)?

[Chris Bennett]

Absolutely!
It's why her dress seems to so full of sunshine - positively radiates it!
This is an effect of association and causes the yellow (which is quite dull in real terms) to feel luminous.

Remember though, that the two things (literary and plastic) are working together, mutualy supporting each other.

We are in a world where the paint IS the thing and the thing IS the paint. They mutually feed each other. So that all those painterly marks exude a response to what they represent and are not limited to decoration.

The sequence of yellows from window, to dress, to office and back out to window behind the man are a colour chord that speaks of the mood in plastic terms. Think of the way light on a yellow book behaves as clouds pass across the sun - and think of how that creates a sequence of moods in you as you watch it.

[Slothboy3000]

Thanks very much! This has all provided me with a far more appreciative stance on the stuff (love that Fuch's painting now I'm starting to notice those things).

Would there be any examples where the plastic meaning is contradictory to the literary meaning to provide some sort of irony? I'd assume based on what you said about them mutually feeding each other that the result would be kind of messy/nonsensical, although if irony is the intent then I would suppose that would be a form of 'marrying' the two?

[Chris Bennett]

You've kinda answered your own question there Mr 3000.

In the Varichev just below, the plastic expression, the marks/shapes are in accord with the nature of the subject producing a deep empathy:

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In the Freud of the sleeping girl, which is a similar subject in mood, the marks are deliberately antagonistic to the nature of the subject, producing a unsettling sense of contradiction with plastic expression and subject expression. Yet somehow the account is settled because neither win out right and produce a strange dynamic balance:

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[Slothboy3000]

Great stuff, thanks for the examples. :)