What Color is Light?

Snow Shadows



Stats: 12x12x1.5" oil on canvas
Beverage: Coastal Estates Cabernet Sauvignon
Playlist: Olympic Men's Figure Skating Free Skate

Yesterday my friend took me to see the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit entitled "Abstractions" at the Phillips. I had seen an exhibit of hers before at the Calatrava in Milwaukee, but that one was more comprehensive and PC. While it did show her landscapes from Lake George, NY and Santa Fe, NM, it rather glossed over her relationship with famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

The Phillips did not disappoint. While this exhibit focused nearly entirely on her prolific abstract art, it also displayed some of the art photos Stieglitz took of her. These mostly naked photos contributed to her reputation as expressing abject sexuality in her abstract paintings, when in fact they are meant to represent the emotional interpretations of what O'Keeffe saw in the natural world around her. Much like the eye gathers and refracts light, sends it upside down into our brain, and somehow our brain re-interprets the information right side up, O'Keeffe's abstract art takes what she sees refracted on her soul, and re-displays it as what she feels when she sees things.

I like this interpretation of abstract art because I often see things, or imagine I would like to see things, in a more colorful, vibrant way than they exist to most people. That is why I will always tell you that the Schultz's house is blue. It really is.

That is also why when I explored around in the snow after our blizzards last week I did not expect the photographs I took of the play of vibrant light and deep blue snow shadows to do justice to what I saw. Did you know that all white light that we see is white because it is a combination of every single color that exists? Did you know that all black is the opposite - the utter lack of light and color?

My friend and I both left the O'Keeffe exhibit with our hands over our eyes, as though viewing any other art would tarnish the feeling we had, as though we had just drank a refreshing glass of water on a hot day. I went home, turned on the Olympics, and interpreted my own colors of the snow, per the composition of a photo I had taken, onto canvas. Voila!

Blizzication, Cont.

My entire city has been shut down since mid-day last Friday. It's Wednesday. We just got our second blizzard in one week and have officially surpassed the previous (1899) record for snowiest winter ever.

25 plus mph winds and a cold ruined my plans to cross country ski down my as-yet-unplowed street today, so I stayed in and tackled a new project. I'm doing a series of antique tile designs from Barcelona, and here is the first one that I completed:



I'm calling it the Carmenere Series, after the bottle of wine I've been slowly but surely making a dent in while painting. The reason is simple. I love old tiles, and have fond memories of picking up shattered pieces of glazed tiles on a beach in Spain. I picked up a book that categorized antique tile designs from Barcelona, and thought, "I can bring these back to life, put them together on a wall, and make art!"

I've started with four. Contrary to what you might expect, I am not recreating the full tiled design, but rather am painting one tile out of several different tiles series, and hanging them together as if the whole original design were up-ended. I'm almost done with two more, and stay tuned for the first four. Ideally I'd like to do 12 (3x4), but of course that's expensive and a lot of work. Let me know what you think about this design as it unfolds so that I have inspiration to continue (or know when to stop).

Tomorrow, if the city is again shut down, I will have another new painting - an abstract painting based on the play of shadow and light in the snow.

Blizzication

There are at least 23 inches of snow outside of my apartment and it's still coming. It will be a productive weekend - probably a very long weekend - so stay tuned for more frequent posts as I paint away between snowshoeing trips!

I've recently finished another abstract commission called Hogue. It is a 36x24 inch vertical oil on canvas designed for someone's bedroom, and I came up with the design while laying awake in bed. I wanted it to be something calm but inspiring, like a good dream. In some ways the pastel colors are comforting, but in other ways the insistent use of complementary colors is energy-inducing. I first designed the purple background to be light blue, with purple shadows to give dimension to the orange spheres. However, my client said that she preferred a purple background and I'm glad she does. I think a light blue background would have been too overwhelming a contrast to the orange spheres.

When I first painted the purple background I painted it much darker, and had to go back over it with a lighter layer. It gives depth to the end result, but took a lot of paint!

Some lessons learned:

1.) Be careful of the color saturation that you mix at night, without the benefit of natural lighting. I tend to mix too dark, as I did with the initial dark purple background layer.

2.) Pay attention to your materials. If you need to "mix in" green and yellow highlights remember that paint dries and you can't do it next week. Do it right away.

3.) Symmetry. Liberally ground the colors by using warms and cools, and complementary colors, in a geometrically consistent way so that the color creates the composition and ground the painting. You can see in the details how I mixed in yellows and blues - the colors in the orange section - strategically in certain places to balance the background geometrically with the foreground. Vice versa, I also liberally added purple into an orange corner to ground the composition.







Painting: Hogue
Playlist: French Music and the Grammy's
Beverage: Hogue Riesling (very, very sweet)