3 posts tagged “painting”

A brief list of things I like in artwork:  Bright colors, sharp lines, identifiable objects, juxtaposition, reciprocity, contrast, odd angles and perspectives, and a distorted reality.

My first realization that art could impact on one's psyche came from, of all things, a T-shirt.  I clearly remember being ten years old and in the shopping mall with my mother.  I remember pointing at a random stranger's T-shirt and telling my mom that I thought it was cool because it had melting clocks on it.  My mother told me it was a famous painting by Dali and that I should check the encyclopedia at school because she thought he had done several paintings like that.

Reading about Dali opened a door for me.  I began looking at books of famous paintings in the county library, wondering about the people who had made them and why I immediately liked some and thought of others as 'just ok'.  I realized quickly that I had little use for the realists or the bizarrely abstract.  I found myself drawn to Dali, Van Gogh, Register, Lichtenstein, and Lempicka.  Reading about them lead to other forms of art and other artists like Escher and Weston.

By the time I graduated from high school I was not thinking about art very much anymore.  I was content to take pictures and cited my influences as the photojournalists and candid street photographers from Life and National Geographic magazines.

It was not until I began painting, at almost thirty, that I really began questioning my assumptions about art and my own tastes in paintings that I started to look for influences - for artists whose work I could learn from or who had expressed something similar to what I wanted to say.

Thank God for the internet.

Searching for new things to like led me to Coop and to Kozyndan, Murakami and Frauenfelder, while reminding me of things I had liked once but forgotten: R Crumb and Dave McKean, not to mention the host of comic book artists I had loved in high school, like Dave Sim and Alex Ross.

And all of these are my influences.  They inform the colors I choose and the design of my paintings.  The diverse body of work represented by all the names listed above reminds me of what can be imagined can be painted; it frees me from every having to have a consistent, single style.

But my greatest inspiration comes from one single individual:  Charles Addams.

Addams was a cartoonist, best known for creating the Addams family, and though he did not often paint, he was capable of producing stunning watercolors when he chose to.  Addams felt that, in his cartoons, if he needed some kind of caption, or dialogue, he had somehow failed; he felt that his best cartoons are those that needed no explanation, no witty comment, but conveyed the entire story in the puzzled look on a little girls face when her string of paper dolls contained an extra leg or when a little boy was smiling triumphantly at the collection of warning signs decorating his bedroom.

Bright colors, clean lines, weird juxtapositions:  In any painting, cartoon, drawing, or doodle I do, this is the thought that stays with me - How do I tell this story?  This is my inspiration. 

Cliche
Originally uploaded by SunToad.

Sometimes quick and easy seems to be anything but. This painting, for example.

I had wanted to paint something my wife would like. Let me clarify: my wife likes my art. Especially when I draw little cartoons and make comics for her. She doesn't really care for my paintings though and I have never really managed to do one that she thought was more than just nice. And by nice, I mean, she might think it's good but just isn't her taste at all. And we have wildly different tastes in art: I like pop-art, with bright colors and odd angles and fragments of things. She likes soft, pretty art - landscapes and scenery and realistic visions.

This painting was an attempt to create something she would like without going outside the boundaries of what I enjoy painting. A compromise, if you will.

After all, isn't that how marriage works? Compromise?

Anyway. The painting started life as a photograph taken by someone whose photo was included in a backgrounds package I got with an old computer. I would credit it if I could, but it was a stock image without any accreditation built in; I had never painted a sunset, for all that they are one of the most visible and cliched images out there and decided that the time had come for me to try my hand at one.

Things started well. I laid down a thin line of each of the colors and then used a small brush to begin to blend them together, taking time and care to clean the brush between color sets so that red blended only to orange and orange blended only to yellow and so on. I gave the background a day or so to dry before laying on the black (actually all the leftover color blended together).

This particular canvas is on the small side, about five by seven inches and I was holding it in my left hand while I applied color with my right. I'm not sure what happened, or why, but I dropped it. Face down.

I was able to salvage most of the background but the palm tree had become unrecognizable. I wiped it and most of the surrounding background paint off and gave it a day or three to dry out.

Once dry, I used a small brush coated in paint thinned to loosen the dried background colors, and then another brush to drag the remaining colors to the left. When that was dry I applied a second layer of background color and eventually was able to replace the palm tree and city scape as well.

Unfortunately, the blending did not take as well the second time around, possibly because of the paint thinner I had had to use, possibly because I was too irritated to concentrate properly.

In the end, I do like the final image, and, more importantly, so does my wife. While I do think it is a cliched image, I learned a bit more about blending and layering, which, really, is the point behind all of this, so I'm calling it successful.

As for the next painting, I've already got an idea in mind, and I know, already, that my wife is going to hate it.

This entry is cross-posted to Painted Toad.