On Friday I finished a 5 day watercolour course, painting from life, that has profoundly reshaped my idea of what art is to me. A short ramble on my views about the process of painting: Prior to this, my work has been based on photographic references, which I have always suspected to not to be as good as working directly from life, but I never really understood why. I've now realized that although working from a photograph is stable and secure way of doing things, they're hollow and stale. To work from a photograph, you have to create a figure of reality with information that is contained within the dimensions of your reference material. To do this, you have to make distinctions between foreground and background, what to focus on and what to ignore. This is preventing the right brain from fully enveloping the creative process, because the left brain is having to engage in technical interpretations to come to logical conclusions. From life, however, the left brain functions are naturally reduced as you settle into the experience. Names and distinctions re-manifest as shapes of form, value and colour. Your mind is left to drift in a playground of infinite possibilities and interpretations; the true essence of creativity and the nature of the universe. Mistakes are inevitable, because everything's changing. As long as you can honestly say that you have given everything you have to the task, failure then becomes a beautiful result of giving more than you actually have to give, a leap of faith into uncertainty and the unknown.. submitting to the fact that you're flirting with something much greater than yourself, but being able to trust in the fact that everything will find it's own equilibrium.. I'm pretty high, so I really got into that towards the end But yeah, basically.. I'm interested in how people see art and how they relate to it. My views have changed so much, literally overnight, and I've realised the true ambiguity of Perception.. the concept of which was something I had taken to be fairly constant, even with the obvious differences. For me, a painting is a now profound expression of unity, a pocket of consciousness left for other minds to play in in whatever way they see fit.. and what "good" art is to me, is a lovingly profound expression of the recognition of unity. Go as wild and far out as you like.. this'll be really interesting methinks.
MM, Having dabbled in various artistic endeavors in the past and judging by the work you display here at the site, you are a very gifted artist, I always enjoy your work and am envious of your talent. In regards to the process of art. You may find the book Art & Physics, Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light, by Leonard Shlain to be interesting. I never quite understood abstract art. For example, according to Shlain, in Jasper Johns' work 0 through 9, below: he destroys the linear concept of time by placing the normally sequential cardinal numbers on top of one another, in no particular order. This introduces the concept of simultaneous existence, such as can only be experienced when traveling at the speed of light; as per Einstein. A really interesting read.
There's some on my profile, billy. And cool, I'll check it out. Wanna say something about abstract, but I find myself disagreeing with everything I try to say. 0 through 9: Cool concept, but it leaves me emotionally limp..
art is everything we do with creative intent. it might not be good art. whatever that is. but it is the only observable distinction between sapience and sentience. if there is one. i'm not interested in representing what is there. that's what camera's are for. i'm interested in representing what could be there, as if it were a photograph, containing elements which exist only in the imagination. to this end, my preferred media, is 3d modeling and compositing, inside the computer. http://www.furaffinity.net/user/themnax/
themnax, Checked out your stuff. Very nice 3D. I see you're using Blender, an old colleague of mine, before I retired, wrote one of the internet manuals for that back when it first came out. I messed with NewTek's LightWave on an Amiga VideoToaster way back when. Furthest I ever got was modeling a running transparent single cylinder two stroke engine on my lunch hour. Never had the time to do more as it was a company machine. Rendering took hours. Tried Blender, but I always fought with the interface, it was so counter intuitive after using LightWave. I see you also mess with train simulators, ever get Win2000 Trainz to run on Win7? Also, don't tell me that live steam engine is yours????
