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RichardH
07-29-2017, 01:56 PM
I recently listened to a talk by Gretchen Grant, the daughter of Richard Diebenkorn, about life with him. A lot of this talk (link at the bottom ) would only be of interest to a fan of Diebenkorn, and that moment in modern art when the non-representational vision leaped free from a long and gradual movement into abstraction. However, there is one thing she mentions, as almost an aside, that is at the heart of seeing when painting, and that is a good habit to develop counter to our usual way of seeing.
When RD made that creative leap into Non-rep painting, he had to help others see the way he could see. Gretchen describes being a teen and seeing the new work in his studio, and how he taught her not to see anything in it.

Naturally three things would be in play when she viewed the work. The first is pareidolia, selecting out visual patterns from random elements, like when you see an elephant in a cloud. The second would be looking for an abstract representation of something, and the third would be seeing symbolic meaning. In order to see the way he saw, those three habitual ways of seeing had to be dropped.

Now, our way includes all the normal ways of seeing, including the three habitual kinds just described. If you see an elephant in a cloud, you see an elephant in a cloud, no problem. Yet, sometimes we can see without projecting... where a cloud just is.

At one time I painted large landscapes from memory. The idea was to make them look "real" but "real" as they lived in memory. Pretty soon it was the skies that became the main subject, and for a few years I was able to make a living painting big pictures of clouds. I mention this because there was a particular skill that had to be developed when painting clouds that would give a certain "feel" to them. This was something myself and the gallery knew would make this work desirable. The feeling we wanted was a non-narrative "isness", or a sense of "pure" presence. Achieving this effect involved learning to paint clouds that would not trigger pareidolia. This was not easy. I remember one time while working this through, when I painted a sky that seemed truly "just this". But later, when friends came over to see it, someone pointed out the profile of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in a big cloud. Everyone said something like "Oh wow.. yeah it's Mulroney". That was that. Learning to paint clouds that do not trigger any pareidolia took time, and it came down to training the brain to do a continuous background scan with a pareidolic eye. This sounds complicated but it was a simple reflex. The point I want to make is that once the paintings were truly non-pareidolic, and no one saw anything in the clouds, we had a successful run with this style of painting. It is possible though art and design to reverse engineer a pause in the habitual way of seeing. In this case by making clouds that were not like actual clouds in a key way.


If you have anything to say on the subject of SEEING and the creative eye, I would love to hear it. Please feel free to post any experience. There is no judgement here, only friends. :)



Here is a link to the talk for any modern art geeks who are interested..


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTcgrjTVG_0




Gassho
Daizan

sat today/LAH

Jakuden
07-30-2017, 12:53 AM
Wow that's fascinating. Do you have any examples of cloud paintings that you could share as an example?
Gassho
Jakuden
SatToday/LAH


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Eishuu
07-30-2017, 10:04 AM
That's really fasinating. Thank you!

I am not able to paint at present due to temporary but long term disability but I have been reading a lot about painting so that I can start painting when I am able. I'm particularly interested in a certain balance between realism and expressive painting, and have been reading books by people like Harold Speed, Solomon and Richard Schmid. At first glance the approaches I am studying seem very old fashioned but the one thing that has stood out for me in their approach is that they talk about looking abstractly in order to paint in a realist style. Schmid says that a painting or a subject is just a jigsaw of different patches of colour (saturation, tone, hue) and shape (form) and that you need to be able to look at a subject outside of the 'meaning' of what it is in order to see it properly. So I suppose this is quite a 'Zen' way of seeing(?) You train yourself to see all the parts separate from the whole. At the same time, everything is relational. I am starting to understand that while studying colour theory - with things like simultaneous contrast (the fact that we never see colours in isolation and that all colours in an image (whether real life or painting) affect each other) (I am really enjoying Johannes Itten's work on color theory). I love the work of Josef Albers in this regard - he worked for 26 years painting different variations of his 'Homage to the Square' series. (if you google them there are hundreds!)

4399

When I look at his colour work, there is something of pure presence that I feel he is trying to express. In fact, he was very spiritual and this was a big part of his work. I have the same experience with Mark Rothko's work with colour. It's a long time since I have been able to paint but, when I have, colour has always been really important to me. When I was very ill and unable to use my brain very much it was flowers and their colours that spoke to me and that's probably why I like to paint them.

Here is one of my flower paintings from about 6 years ago. 4400

Technically it's not great and I hope to paint much better one day, but it expresses something about my experience of colour.

Gassho
Lucy
Sat today/LAH

RichardH
07-30-2017, 02:27 PM
Thank you for these responses :)

Lucy. I hope the disability is very temporary, because your painting is very beautiful. I agree that in order to paint with a "realism" or naturalism, we have to forget the name of what we see. There is only a living tapestry of colour and light and shadow.


Here are some older painting with clouds. The non-pareidolic quality is something you wouldn't notice. the viewer is just not inclined to see things. In this sense these clouds are not naturalistic.

http://imgur.com/a/B2byH


Gassho
Daizan

sat today/LAH

Jakuden
07-30-2017, 03:04 PM
Thank you Daizan, oh those are beautiful. And I have now learned something.

Lucy, your painting is amazing as well! And thank you for your teaching!
I may never be an artist, but thanks to the wonderful artists here at least I am learning to pay more attention to what is around me and the different ways it can be experienced.
Gassho
Jakuden
SatToday



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Eishuu
07-30-2017, 03:10 PM
Thank you, Daizan and Jakuden.

Beautiful cloud paintings, Daizan - really atmospheric. The black and white one in particular is very evocative.

Gassho
Lucy
Sat today/LAH

Meishin
07-30-2017, 03:16 PM
Thank you, Daizan, for posting the Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant video. Her father was a wonderful painter.

Gassho
Meishin
sat today

Cooperix
07-30-2017, 05:58 PM
hello Daizan,

I just watched the fine video you posted. Thank you, I will pass it along to my many Diebenkorn fan friends!
For some reason, not because it was maudlin, but upbeat, it would bring tears to my eyes. Maybe just looking at that survey of Diebenkorn's amazing work and seeing him through the eyes of his daughter. Very moving.

He got his MFA at UNM, here in Albuquerque, so we have a large collection of his work in the museums throughout the state. I've had the pleasure of seeing many paintings in real life. And a number of years ago attended a survey exhibition of his work at the Phillips Collection in DC.

With Diebenkorn, it's hard not to 'see' things in many of his abstractions. As much of his work was abstracted from landscapes. He had trained us to enjoy those landscape paintings as almost abstractions! So when they were pure abstractions that landscape aura was still present. But I understand the human mind's need to make 'sense' of the new, the unknown shape, the abstracted line. It is something that as artists we must learn to do and to 'see' what is, not what our mind does to make sense of our world. It really is the only way to appreciate art for itself. I've mentioned Robert Irwin's biography before in this forum, "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees" (Lawrence Weschler). That's really 'it' in a pithy line. Seeing is simply seeing without the discursive mind's intrusion. All very Buddhist.

Your cloud paintings are wonderful. Thanks for posting.

Anyway thanks for the post and its certainly something that's important to artists. And thanks for the word 'pareidolia', I didn't know there was a word for that phenomena.

bowing.
Anne

~st~