CommentiPhone Brushes and the Cowboy Musician
I've been messing around with the Brushes app on my iPhone, getting to know it while riding the bus. It's a powerful tool, challenging and fiddly to use, but changing rapidly and capable of astonishingly detailed work. You have only to search YouTube for "brushes iPhone" to find a trove of impressive examples.
Unlike many of the YouTube pieces, which start with a very clear, pre-planned idea and efficiently build it layer by layer, mine is more of an ad hoc exploration in which I "find" the image, revising till I arrive at a stopping point. Which is more like how I draw, or used to until drawing got absorbed into my painting.
This is one of two early attempts. This dude came out of my head. I guess he's a bit like an old boyfriend I used to draw a lot, only different. As I was doodling, I thought of him as a musician observed listening to music. Then he morphed into a cowboy extra in a western bar scene.
The cherry on top of this application is that if you have a Mac, you can download a viewing module that allows you to replay your creation, stroke by stroke, fast or slow, and make a little video of it. I've made two of these now, of my earliest Brushes drawings. It's a curious sensation to revisit decisions and revisions you never thought you'd see again as they unfold in fast motion.
There's a lot going on here, digitally, conceptually, technologically, and already sides are being taken as to digital vs. "real" materials, such as good old pencil and paper.
To me it's another medium, and like any medium, it has properties which in their limitations are conducive to creative solutions. What can YOU do with it? Is the question. It's one that's being answered excitingly, by artists from David Hockney, who fires off a Brushes painting or two a day to his friends, or Jorgé Columbo, who now makes regular Brushes paintings for the New Yorker, to talented young artists posting elaborate cartoon characters on YouTube.
I'm yet to find out whether the app has relevance for me as a serious tool in my studio art practice. For now, it's got me playing around, drawing, "painting", and thinking in ways I don't usually. At the very least, it's made my bus rides a lot more fun.
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Jorgé Colombo's first New Yorker cover created using Brushes, New Yorker video and short article
David Hockney paints on his iPhone, New York Review of books video and short article
Harpo's Bumblebee Autobot, YouTube video of a precise style of painting with Brushes
Telling not asking: The Shaggs
Looking for the Stantons on YouTube I stumbled onto the Shaggs, the trio of sisters from the 60's who wrote and recorded some of the strangest songs in the history of modern popular music.
Listening to "My Pal Foot Foot" and "Philosophy of the World":
Once you get past unlistenable; once you get past surreal and rhythmically dysfunctional; once you try to make sense of the rhythms (and melody) anyway and decide they are brilliant; once you get past brilliant, vapid, earnest, bizarre, sweet, sad, inane, incredible, and how did this happen? and give in to the weirdness and follow along, something opens up in the mind, the chest, almost, that has to do with telling, not asking.
They don't ask to be liked or understood. They simply tell it.
Whatever "it" is doesn't matter, it's theirs.
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Watch My Pal Foot Foot on YouTube with a sweet and apt animation by D. Sticker. The visual incarnation of the mysterious Foot Foot is right on.
Up for more? Listen to Better Than the Beatles: A Tribute To The Shaggs
All art is found art
65th & Roosevelt; Gouache Collage on Bristol Board; 12" x 9"; 2006
Art is an idea made visible
Intuition; Gouache and Acrylic Collage on Drawing Paper; 48" x 42"; 2008
To make art is to notice
The central act of making art is to notice.
The thing noticed by the artist in a certain way becomes an idea.
The artist makes the idea visible.
Vegas at Night; Oil on Masonite; 4 1/4" x 24"; 2004
Montalcino Spring Rain
Montalcino Spring Rain, 44" x 34"; Oil on Canvas; 2002
"Can we call it the Tuscany Series?" The eyes of the gallerist glowed when I mentioned I was working on some ideas from my recent trip to Italy.
I felt faintly ill...I had no intention of painting the kind of romantic Tuscan scenes her enthusiasm suggested she hoped I would. Rather, I wanted to find out whether there was a way I could turn my gritty industrial American sensibility, strongly flavored with Diebenkorn at the time, to this chestnut of a subject and draw out of it a personal perspective - one based in a sense of movement and design rather than a desire to pay homage to the famous light and pretty landscape.
At the same time, the power of that landscape was inescapable. The very age of the stones and the buildings, the peculiarity of towns perched on the tops of bumps in the land, that intoxicating earthy atmosphere and the rough beauty of its ancient plaster walls, had worked their way into me on my recent trip there to visit my brother-in-law and ride my bike on one of his tours. There was no doubt I was visually affected - even smitten.
The "series" became an exploration in layering overlapping shapes, a bravura painting technique involving wild brush strokes that ran abruptly into straight edges, and slashing charcoal through the oil paint.
The most ambitious of the series was Montalcino Spring Rain - the final painting in a number of acrylic on Bristol board studies, and executed on a fairly large scale in oil.
We had left our bikes near the van and walked up the cobbled entry to the fortress. Inside, I gazed up at tourists like me who had paid to tour the ramparts, protected by a rickety-looking handrail that would have caused a lawsuit in the US just for existing. Rounding a corner, I came out on a view over the tiny hilltop town with the main road winging round a corner pinned with a stone tower, and the wall of the fortress curving the other way, embracing a small tree . Beyond, the town, a gas station, red tile roofs rising up toward a cathedral on a low hill. I took a couple of shots, and I knew I had to paint it.
In the studio, several acrylic studies focused on the splash of red provided by the roofs of the houses. But as I worked, I found the red one color too many and removed it. Limited now to a palette of green, gray, black and white, the motif suddenly found the surprise I had been looking for, and I made several more studies. Then in the final oil version, I spread pink enamel underneath and painted over it, leaving the pink to barely show through in places. My version of Tuscan olive green became the pulsing acid green next to shades of gray - the colors the way I felt the landscape, rather than how I literally saw it.
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Several of my Montalcino studies are currently available in my Holiday Sale
14th & Leary
14th &; Leary; Gouache Collage on Bristol Board; 14" x 11"; 2006
One early fall day some years ago I stopped by the Ballard Book Co at 14th and Leary to pick up shelves for my ever-expanding art book collection. I'd been by the used car lot across the way many times with its ancient signs and piles of junkers rising high above the fence, but that day it was as if I was noticing it for the first time.
I stared at the grid of roads and white lines and phone poles and the sky blue fence slipping through the surrounding grays and neutrals and took some pictures.
In the first few studies I made I stuck to the palette in the photograph, with that blue I was so sure I wanted.
It took several sketches and two collage studies to realize that the picture wanted something different. After hours of staring and trying out different color schemes in my head I realized it was the blue that had to go, along with the bit of red I had got from a sign on the fence. I took them out and centered on the remaining strictly neutral, gray & brown palette.
The violet was a late-comer I allowed in cautiously till it integrated into the overall idea.
In other ways, as in all my Squarescapes, I stuck closely to the details in my photograph, selecting and simplifying. To me these are highly realistic paintings. They represent the scene as I see it. Yet in the end the painting is a place in my head - or in the head of whoever's looking at them.
Having settled on a palette, I wanted to see how the same tightly worked composition would play out in two entirely different mediums.
The clarity and simplicity of the collage piece is important to me; I've never worked in such a hard-edged way before. But in the oil version, the continuous areas of painted and cut Bristol board break into dabs of paint and many more color modulations.
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14th & Leary, the collage version, is available.
A world in a box
The Black Island by Hergé
I used to stare and stare at the two Degas reproductions in my parents' bedroom - the Blue Dancers matted in dull orange cloth, colors that perplexed and thrilled me with their contrast - and the green one, the pretty Milliner with the hat floating mysteriously over her head. I never realized it was on a hat stand.
There were other pictures - three small watercolor landscapes of the veldt by an old family friend that felt like a warm winter day to me, and a spiky black painting of ships in the living room by an artist who's name I'll never know, that entranced me with its graphic moodiness.
I would gaze at, sink into, move around in, and puzzle over these images, soaking them up without knowing or even wondering whether or not they were any good.
A college professor told me that as an artist, everything you see influences you. While I think he meant this in an even broader sense, when I think about my earliest impressions of visual art, specifically, and the hours I spent looking at certain pictures, I think of everything on the walls in my parents' house, picture books, and cartoons.
At first it was Richie Rich and Superman. Then I discovered Asterix and Tintin.
My brothers and I spent hours and hours lying around engrossed in Goscinny & Uderzo's pun-filled, history-based, brilliantly drawn tales of a Gaulish village holding out against the Romans.
We also spent hours with Hergé's serious yet slapstick adventure tales of boy journalist, Tintin, filled with anatomically correct automobiles and planes (and an imaginative rocket ship, circa 1959).
There was something I found reassuring about these cartoons. I could return again and again to the clear, hard-edged, black-lined drawings and to the surreal dangers the main characters navigated with the comfort of knowing it would all turn out in the end, with a jolly scene and a joke to wrap it up.
Italian version of Asterix in Corsica by Goscinny & Uderzo, scan of lower half of page 23. I can now say "VLABADABAOUM!" in Italian.What fascinated me visually was the way an entire scene of Gauls battling Romans, or Tintin boarding a steamer, could fit into a tiny rectangle - a world in a box. And that box could fit with others on a page to tell a story that felt like it was moving as you read from one frame to the next. That was a neat trick.
To have all of one's imagination to draw from and to choose a very specific time and place, then imagine all sorts of detailed stories inside that constraint - it's still a brilliant plan for a work of art.
Of course at the time I didn't think in those terms, I simply read and looked, and looked. I never stopped looking. I still pull out an Asterix from time to time. Aside from the fact that I always get a kick out of pompous Romans getting pummeled, flying up through their suits of armor with their sandals left behind, I still like to study Albert Uderzo's use of color and space and line - all the abstract qualities, as well as the narrative - and marvel at how all those details fit into those little boxes.
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More cartoons I soaked in as a kid:
A Century of Punch - My mother's album of Punch magazine cartoons going back to the 1800's, published in 1955 and handed down to her from her father. I couldn't get enough of it.
Beano - A British rag for kids. My best friend had piles of them we used to (needlessly) climb into the closet with and read by flashlight. Minnie the Minx, Rodger the Dodger, Face-Ache, and Val's Vanishing Cream were some of my favorites
Mad Magazine - especially Don Martin, the first artist I tried to channel (into drawings of ballerinas) and the gleefully vicious Spy vs Spy
It's the 50th anniversary of Asterix (with video of French Air Force team, La Patrouille, paying tribute)
Self-Portrait, Back Bay
Self-Portrait, Back Bay; Oil on Board; 10" x 8"; 2004
Last night at a cd release party for the band Library Science, I watched transfixed as pink, yellow and white stripes zipped and unzipped mountain roads, a man ran and ran impossible distances to a Nike-esque slogan of "DO IT TO IT", and pacman-like digital critters swirled and bumped in fluorescent colors behind the band's infectious beats.
One of the repeating themes was a little man who waved his arms. He was rendered in nothing but a few large, white squares, so that his arms moved up and down as a series of blocks arranged in steps. I couldn't help thinking it looked familiar.
I made this self-portrait after a trip to Boston. I asked my husband to take a picture of me standing in front of Star Market, round the corner from 84 The Fenway, where I lived for a year while going to Boston University. Star Market (pronounced locally of course as "Stah Mahket") was in the lower half of a building surmounted by a spiraling parking garage my roommate and I dubbed the Guggenheim Shopping Museum.
I wanted the picture so I could send it to my roommate, if I could find her. It was pre-Facebook.
Around that time, I had recently developed my language of verticals and horizontals, and I was playing with the possibilities suggested by the constraints of the idea. How far could I take it? Could it be applied to people??
I thought it best to experiment on myself.
On a cold and gleeful January day during a residency in Port Townsend, Washington, I turned my eye to that goofily stiff photograph. The result was this little tin soldier portrait, holding a shopping bag and wearing my then-favorite red hooded jacket. I painted it directly, with no underpainting (I had Morandi's brushy strokes over white canvas in mind) and very little modulation of the paint.
Several of my other Squarescapes contain small figures as part of the scene, but this picture remains the only one I ever did featuring a person. It hangs in the home of dear friends in California.