THEORY

Still life/ Supports/Perspective/Color/Aesthetics

Reading Painting Today: ch’s on Still Life and Life and Death; PDF: Thierry de Duve, Nahum Tevet: Works on Glass p 38-47; PDF: Sillman, Amy, “On Color (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.,”

Podcast/Video: Video recording of Thierry de Duve Links to an external site.Evergreen Art Lecture in 2015 (take notes to keep track of his argument for seminar discussion)


READINGS
In Sillman’s text on color I learned more about paint as physical material along with the kind of relationship a painter might have with paint (along with the disconnect between non-painters and paint).
Of the readings this week, the one that I resonated with most was Thierry De Duve’s essay (but I did not understand his lecture at all).  I thought he had some interesting ideas about the art and objects. This was only a small part of the essay, but I especially liked how he spoke against conclusive answers to the question of what separates art and objects at the beginning.  Simple conclusions (that may not even be true) are disengaging and kill the conversation while asking questions and exploring the unanswerable can expand people’s thinking.

I’ve personally been very picky about what theories I engage with and I’ve conclusively dismissed ones that I don’t relate to.  Now thinking about it, I see how being conclusive with theory contributes nothing. But it kind of just reminds me of when people are really into stuff that you don’t understand or care about in general.  Like if someone’s really into sports, or collecting stuff, or theatre, or fishing, or novels, or games, etc. For all of that stuff, there are worlds of theory and community to be found, but for people who don’t care or understand, all of those things can be reduced and dismissed while the people who do care continue contributing to those topics.
Not saying I’m dismissing any paint theory, I think it’s interesting so far.

STUDIO
In studio 2 Gallace paintings were due.  It was a struggle cause I hadn’t painted before.  I did 2 paintings trying to copy, but both hardly resembled the image so I tried a third time and I was finally able to make a passable copy.
We did perspective and still life painting too.  I built a wood square in woodshop for canvas stretching.  Still getting a hang of glazing and color mixing.
My new still life copies are going good so far.  I don’t know how to get detail with acrylic yet cause I don’t have enough control of my brush and understanding of paint yet.

TERMS

Chiaroscuro – High contrast light and shadow in art.  Didn’t know there was a word for that.

Jenesaisquoi – An indescribable quality!  I’ve heard this term a lot to describe art related things but now that I know what it means, I get why it’s used so much.

Nostalgic – This is a term that I hear a lot of students using to describe images.  It makes me wonder about the meaning of nostalgia. I think it may just have to do with the association between visual filters and memories/dreams/fantasies?  That’s a common way visual storytellers indicate that what is being shown to the viewer is not even “real” within the story. In my opinion, paint appears like a visual filter of reality almost all of the time, so I think more indicators are necessary before a painting should be labeled as dreamy or nostalgic.  It’s like describing every cartoon as cartoony, stylish, or childish, but within the world of cartoons, only exceptionally cartoony, stylish, or childish cartoons are described as such, because they all have those qualities to some degree (even if they try to avoid them.)

Stylized + Aesthetic – I have a lot of preconceived notions about style and aesthetics that I don’t think fit with what they mean in this program, so I think I need to hear more about these two.



SKILLS

Brush Cleaning – By far the biggest breakthrough this week.  Painting with gunky brushes is needlessly challenging.

Woodworking – I haven’t worked with wood since middle school.

Glazing – New technique.

Ekphrastic Writing – The writing workshop was productive because me and my partner took different approaches and missed areas that the other covered.  So we left knowing what we did well and what we should try next time.

Exegetical Writing- I accidentally did an exegetical essay this week too, that I have to redo now.

EXTRA LEARNING

An extra learning I had came from something my mom (a painter) said combined with something Petra said during critique.  My mom was talking to me earlier in the week about how everything is covered with many colors because the light is reflecting off everything and onto each other and mixing together.  Then the next day Petra talked in class about how she likes oil painting because the colors are in conversation with each other and blending together through their oiliness. So that gave me ideas about why oil paint is such a potent medium along with why it can resemble reality so well.  It might be because the paint is doing things that resemble the way light actually works?

GOALS
This week I just want to get better at everything: brushing, mixing colors, glazing, paint additives, etc.