I recently went on a retreat to Lake Tahoe and took some photos. This is a painting based on one of the photos.
While painting it I looked at other paintings of landscapes for inspiration in my art books and at the Crocker Art Museum. It’s interesting that everyone paints the sky and water a little differently. I guess you could classify them as “more realistic” and “more expressionistic” but maybe it is just that everyone sees them a little different. You never know exactly what the world looks like through someone else’s eyes… because you aren’t them.
Category: Things I’ve Learned
The Fall
A surreal landscape using a few objects in my room and the old imagination. I think the red-violet background gives it and interesting mystical atmosphere.
Don’t strain yourself to much on the “deeper meaning”. I like what a professor of mine told us in my graphic design class “Lead people down a path but don’t make everything obvious”. I enjoy songs that I don’t know the full meaning of… so why not a painting. The title will get you started. 🙂
Cogs and Threads
A surreal still life I guess you could call it. A collage of things I found around the house and laid out on my desk. I started out with the idea of traveling. Ended up kind of thinking about destiny.
It may be common knowledge but the secret ingredients to making things metalic is.
-White
-Black
-Raw Umber
There I saved you a lot of money on buying metallic paint. 🙂
Also I began to play around with alignment in this one. As humans we like things that are grouped and aligned (e.g. reading text)…. food for thought!
Understanding Modern Art (The Basics)
Disclaimer: This is obviously a big subject and there are many opinions so I don’t plan on writing a big research paper about it in this blog. I just wanted to hopefully help someone who “doesn’t get modern art” to understand it a little bit more.
First of all art (especially painting) was greatly changed by the invention of the camera. There was no longer a high demand to make portraits of people so you could remember
what they looked like or to copy a landscape you didn’t want to forget. You could now just snap a picture. This gave artists freedom to explore putting their own inventions in their work like never before.
Art began to be more about the design and the composition. Instead of looking at the object in the painting the painting itself became a beautiful or interesting object. Also art could now be more expressive using invented colors to show emotion (e.g. Matisse, Chagal).
An example I always use is Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh. Most people have seen it. I’ll put a little link to it just in case. It is gorgeous and probably the second most well known paintings ever. And when you look at it, it doesn’t really make you think, “I would love to go to the location in the painting”. Sure it might be fun to go see the view from where Van Gogh painted it but most of us would rather go to the museum and see the painting. And that is the basic idea of modern art.
So maybe you won’t see a Cy Twombly or a Pollock painting and love it now but you can start to look closer and think about the design and the colors they used. It wasn’t an accident. If you think you can make a painting just as good ….. then go for it! ha ha … That might be the only way to open your mind to the concept.