Radiant Comics

This week I thought I’d write a little about my photography. I don’t consider myself a photographer but an artist who works with photos. I like photography a lot but have never been interested in developing the type of skills I think I would need to call myself a photographer. I know my way around a camera but have always been satisfied working with what the camera will give me rather than enforcing my will on the camera as I think real photographers do. Of course real photographers also use the Law of Averages and so do I. Take a whole lot of photos and some of them are bound to be give you something you can work with. Being that I can draw and paint I can therefore make a picture out of nothing. Making some sort of art out of a photograph should be something I can do. That’s my general approach.

This photo is named “I Can’t Tell Time When It’s Midnight In My Mind”. It’s actually what I would consider a photography based print as opposed to the straight-up photos that I also make. I’ll have to write something about them another time. It’s a photo based print because there is no original (there is with my photos) and it’s been made entirely on the computer. It’s from 2005 and is one of a number of the photo-prints that I made at this time. It’s the square and the size of an old school record album. I think that’s right around twelve by twelve inches.

This photo-print starts with my street photography. At the time I made this I worked in Manhattan a few days a week and would walk around the streets in the morning and take street photos. I would also take photos in Bryant Park on summer Friday mornings when Good Morning America held its Summer Concert Series there. Some band or singer would perform a couple of songs on a big temporary stage set up in Bryant Park that would be broadcast live on GMA. A thousand or two people would show up to watch and I’d take pictures of the crowd. Sometimes the performers too but I was more interested in the regular people.

The largest image here, the women in the stripped dresses, were part of a scene I ran into one morning out in the middle of Times Square. I think they were appearing on the Today Show to promote their Broadway musical which had something to do with Elvis’s music. The stripped dresses were for “Jailhouse Rock”. They put on quite a show and I stood around and took some photos. Not only did I take photos of the performance but of the people standing around, walking by, or watching the performance. That’s what the three photos on the bottom are.

Almost all of my photos and photo-prints are multiple images like this one. I hesitate to call them collages (but I sometimes do because people know what collages are) because I don’t think that describes them well enough. Collages usually take a variety of images and make them into a single image. I’m not doing that. Though visually connected my images remain separate. Plus I take all my own photos. I’m not cutting someone else’s images out of a magazine or some such.

The top panel in this piece shows why I call this a photo-print. It is a digitally altered photo and has type on it. I use what a I call “Filter Recipes” to alter my photos. I apply a series of Photoshop filters to an image to make it into something I like. It’s not just a single filter as a lot of people might use but a process that has a lot of steps and filters. Luckily it can be automated and saved. I spent many hours working on those recipes until I got them how I like them. It’s not hard but takes a lot of trial and error.

Street photos leave me with a bit of a conundrum. I like taking them and capturing moments of real life out on the streets but don’t want to use photos of strangers without their permission. It bothers me a bit to do that. So I hide people’s identities a little with my filter recipes. They become every-men and every-women. They become hints of people. They become fleeting glimpses of strangers.

This one starts up top with a single face in the blue crowd. A woman looks off into the distance as the type crawls under her chin. A bit of blue’s complement, orange, stands up in the corners and pushes the blue back in space a little more. The cramped claustrophobia is relieved a bit as we enter the street but the deep space of the street is cut off by the four large figures and the crowd of people in front of them. Three columns of a street view open things up but not too much as they only occupy the space of the sidewalk. Lettering to balance the type on top appears in these three columns but the meaning of the words isn’t there. They look like the type on top but are different. A broken stripe of green texture nearly underlines the words.

Finally we get a glimpse of four women’s faces. We don’t get a look at the faces of the women performers but here are four passerby’s faces. They’re just as anonymous though. People passing through life and by chance passing in front of my camera. The whole piece is framed in blue and purple texture. It contains the picture. Every time my eye tries to leave the picture it bounces off this frame and bounces back inside.

It’s rare that I have a photo-print that’s this staged. I didn’t stage it myself but came across the scene. I think that makes this one interesting to me. You never know what you are going to come across and I got to tell a bit of its story. That’s what this and a lot of my photos are about. Telling a bit of the story. A lively Manhattan street, dancers, people running a TV show, spectators, passers by, and others with their own things going on. That’s the story.

Next up on my list of my artwork to write about is an oil painting. Unfortunately it’s from before the time when I was naming and dating all my artwork. Annoyingly I have no idea exactly when I painted it. The best I can do is mid to late 1990s. It doesn’t even have a name as all my paintings of the last ten years do. I’m disappointed in the me from that era (in a Calvin of “Calvin and Hobbes” sort of way) for not keeping track of things. As I now dig through my website I noticed I named it for that. I called it “Icon”. That’s a terrible name.

For the sake of this piece of writing I’m going to call the painting “Stained Glass Woman”. That’s more literal than my usual names but it turns out that if I have to name something fifteen years later literal is what I gravitate towards. Who knew? I choose to refer to stained glass in the title because that’s what I was going for here. Though it’s heavily textured oil paint with a lot of surface the imagery is influenced by stained glass pictures of saints and such.

To begin with the woman has a halo. Three halos even. Though none of them are circular. This was a curious bit of compositional cleverness that I came up with to make the space more interesting. Since her head is not up at the top of the painting where I would usually put a subject’s head there was a lot of space up there than needed to be dealt with. Therefore the top third to nearly half of the painting is about the halos. That’s more of the stained glass influence coming through.

The first halo is the one closest to her head. It may even be two halos in a way but I consider it one. We have the loop of red circles enclosing some beams of green that continue the color of her clothes onto the top of her head. I remember initially making this halo round but it didn’t seem to work. So I continued the edge of the circle down near her neck until it became the outside of a spiral. I like that much better.

The second halo is the segmented ellipse of blue that’s behind her head. It’s not even a complete ellipse as it gets cut off on the left side but the eye tends to complete such shapes. The ellipse is segmented into multiple shades of blue as it would be in a stained glass piece. I find it interesting that I didn’t segment the bottom arc of blue that comes out of her chin as I did the top arc of blue. This give the eye the largest uninterrupted piece of the ellipse to sweep across and complete the ellipse in the mind’s eye. Plus it balances out the shape of the arm below it.

The third halo is the collection of yellow triangles that are on top of the blue segmented halo. They are the most like “Rays of light” which is the description of a halo. They almost seem to be like lightning strikes to me. This is the part of the painting that is least like stained glass in my mind. They seem to have more in common with comic book motion lines to me. I like them but I also find them odd. They’re not as calm as the rest of the painting’s shapes. They add a little action to the whole thing. More action than in a stained glass piece.

The woman herself is a bit of a mystery. Who is she? I’m not sure. Her pose is one that I made up out of my head and is not based on reality but on turning the body into simple shapes. The figure itself has almost no stained glass influence in it except for maybe the design of the sleeves. Even her hair is a bit of a mystery as it’s a magenta-ish color and though she has hair coming down the back of her head the hair on top could easily be a skull cap of some kind. Plus she’s actually missing most of the top of her head. Her eyes are way too high on her head to be realistic but I did this to balance her out with the rather dense green part of the halo. Moving the eyes up high is something I don’t often do.

I remember this painting taking a long time to complete because of all the small interlocking shapes. My technique for painting in oil was to paint the black line first and then put down the color by pushing the paint up to the black line. The colored areas have much thicker paint than the black areas. The black edges are actually defined by the shape of the color and not the other way around as is usual. I find that the little blue shapes around the arms and hands do a good job of creating visual interest that can complete with the halo and keep the halo from being too dominant.

Since the shapes in this painting are so complex I played it a little safe with the color. The painting is primarily two analogous colors: green and blue. This keeps things harmonious but can also make things boring if you’re not careful. I played with some red, yellow, and violet in there to keep the eye moving and make things more interesting to look at. The red and the yellow are especially important as they, along with blue, are primary colors and therefore can have a lot of impact. They can leap forward on you so I used them where I wanted that to happen. The yellow really jumps out but I kept the red mostly on the edges and in the trim so it wouldn’t overpower things. Color is always a balancing act but one that I enjoy.

I’ve painted a lot of paintings over the years and most of them are tucked away somewhere. This is one of my favorites though so it’s been hanging on my studio wall since around the time that I made it. I made a few paintings about this size back then and used to hang them in this spot to dry. Then I put this one up and didn’t want to take it down. I liked it better than the others so there it’s stayed all these years. Yet this is the first time I’ve examined it in a while.

“Slumber On” is the name of this small acrylic painting of mine. It’s horizontal rather than my usual vertical so I guess that makes it ten by eight inches. Like all the other names of my artworks this one was named whatever popped into my head back when I first did the sketch so it doesn’t offer much insight into the intent of the painting. The painting is dated 5/28/08 but that’s the date I finished it on so it was worked on for the few days prior to that too.

This is one of my face paintings but with a twist because it’s as much about the negative space of the sky as it is about the face. It’s cropped so that we can only see part of the face, An eye, and ear, half a mouth, and the hint of a nose. I’ve done quite a few of these small paintings where you can only see one eye. More often there is something over the second eye like hair or a hand but there is only one eye nonetheless. I think it can add intensity to the face looking out at us as a single eye is not focuses on a point out in space but is always looking at the viewer. Once again my habit of making the painting look at the viewer comes through.

You can see this is one of the few times I broke my own rule about always making lips red no matter what the color of the face. I went with green for the lips. I don’t remember why I did that but it looks weird to me even all these years later. Not necessarily bad but unusual. That’s what happens when I break my own rules.

Devoting about half the space of the painting to the blue of the sky is also unusual for me but that doesn’t look weird at all. I like that part. First off I like the blue. I don’t remember which blue I made it from but it’s a tint. That means a lot of white was added to whatever blue I used. As I look around my studio I see a lot of blue that I’ve used in paintings but this is the only one with this particular tint. It gives a sense of the far away sky to the painting. A depth of field that goes on forever. Most of my painting have a more defined, modernist, “Painting as flat canvas” space. I like that I can peer into the infinite with this one. It’s more “Painting as window”.

The secondary major shapes in this painting are the three orange triangles. They work as abstract shapes of hair and also as surprise or “Spidey sense” lines coming off of the characters head. What they are is up to you but I tend towards hair even if they transform away from hair in my mind as I look at them. That’s one on the thinks I like about putting the search for meaning into my paintings is transformation. Things can be more than one thing at a time or shift between two things. From hair to surprise and back again. Either way their triangular shape server as a signpost arrow that leads the eye from the painting’s eye into the deep space of the sky. But it’s a tough sky to stare into so the eye settles back onto the figure and is drawn up to the character’s eye and the conveyer belt continues.

There is a little bit of my mystery writing in this painting. That’s when I make something that looks like it could be ancient or alien writing. It’s in orange on the characters forehead and neck. The mystery writing seems to me to be the painting trying to communicate something that is just out of reach. If only I knew the language it would be knowable. Once again the search for meaning. I find it interesting that the writing is on the neck and face as if it were tattooed on but it doesn’t follow the shape of the face but follows the edge of the canvas. That, once again, says, “This is a painting”. That’s my 20th century roots. My realism is the realism that this is a flat canvas that I am turning into a painting.

The painting is also all about stillness. The stillness of the figure and the stillness of the infinite sky. Yet there is some movement in it. The earring of three small yellow circles. It’s moving on its own as if caught in the wind. Yet because it creates an arc with the three orange triangles and the angle of the neck and shoulder the earring seems still. I’ve always found this a little odd. I hardly ever perceive the earring as anything but still even though I should see it as moving. I guess it’s because of the space it occupies.

I can remember one of my early painting critiques back in college. I was learning to paint and had no idea what I was doing. All my brush strokes were hesitant and searching except for one. I had put a stroke of color down in one bold move. My teacher, Nancy Davidson, pointed out that was the one stroke that no one would argue with. It looked like it belonged there. A brush stroke of paint put down with conviction is a pretty thing. That’s what the thin green brush strokes on the character’s shirt are. Pretty things. They look like they belong there and no matter where the search for meaning brings you in the rest of the painting you know those green strokes are supposed to be there. They anchor the search for meaning in solid reality.

There are a few other painterly flourishes, the dots of color on the face, the stripes of the shirt, and the repeated strokes of paint on the right side, but in the end “Slumber On” not about flourish. It’s about stillness. Except for those green lips. They just won’t stay still. Maybe that’s why I made them that color.

In trying to decide what individual piece of my artwork that I wanted to write about I realized that I don’t think I’ve written anything at all this year about my prints. Prints that I draw, scan in, and then compose and color on the computer. I’ve been doing them for a while that way. I pulled one out of my earliest prints to write about. It’s called “Soon the Forces of Gravity WIll Make Themselves Known To All” (15X10 inches). It’s easy to know the name of because its name is part of the print. The words are right there in large letters. By looking at the file modification date of the file on my computer I can see that I finished this one back in October of 2000. I did not realize that I had begun doing these such a long time ago. Time really does fly.

The first thing I notice about this print is that it’s really busy. That is what I was going for in these early prints because the computer can help in exploring complexity in ways that would be very hard to do without one. I tend toward simplicity which offerers its own problems but simplicity is as easy to do by hand as on a computer. No, this is an image that is woven together in a complex way that I wouldn’t have even thought of doing by hand.

Most of the prints I make these days are single drawn images. By that I mean they are on one piece of paper. I draw a picture, I scan it in, color it, and maybe I add some type. This one is not made that way. The image on the right of the woman and man on the bridge is from a series of extemporaneous ink drawings that I made a little before I started making these prints. I’d grab an eight by ten inch piece of paper, a brush, some black ink, some white ink, and just start drawing. They weren’t all winners but I liked this one.

The other parts of the drawing, the lips, the man with the cane, and the striped balls in the bowl, were all from small sketches that I had lying around. This was from right about the time I started my first inkbook and so I didn’t have the vast number of small drawings to mine for ideas that I do today so I’m not exactly sure where those other images came from. They might be in my first inkbook or they might be from loose pieces of paper that I drew on and had lying around at the time. Either way I worked them out as full drawings after they were sketches. At least for the man with the cane and the balls. The lips could be a small drawing scanned in and colored. The clock I remember making right on the computer in Adobe Illustrator. It’s modeled after the clock that’s on my shelf. I can’t remember why I wanted a clock right there but I like clocks. I probably found it interesting.

The color bars and blocks are a holdover from my painting. I’ve been mixing in blocks of color with my images since my earliest fine art paintings back in college. Geometry and color are my things. They lend themselves very easily to Adobe Illustrator too. Since this print is about complexity I have a lot of color bars and blocks here. Plus they’re organized in a way I’d never be able to do by hand. The spacing of them very much lends itself to the computer. I can nudge any individual block up or down just a tad or repeat the same box over and over making then an exact distance apart.

I can really see that I was going for complexity when I look at the type. I’ve got five different typefaces in that one sentence. I generally hate that as a design choice and it makes me wince a little here but I can see that I did it on purpose. My desire for complexity beat out my sense of good taste. I’m sure I tried it as all one typeface and decided it didn’t work that way with the complexity theme but five typefaces in one sentence still bugs me a little bit. I’m not even sure what “Known To All 7962” is supposed to mean. Probably nothing. It balances out the type on the top and adds a little mystery. I often like to add a little mystery.

Repetition is also a big part of this piece. That’s another thing that the computer makes easy. The man with the cane appears four times each time scaled down a little bit. This reinforces his appearance and makes him appear to go back in space. The green bars weave in and out of his legs and cane in a way that gets playful with the space. We also have the lips shrink down in conjunction with the cane man so that it helps define the space and lead your eye to where it stops on the clock.

To further the complexity theme I have two different spaces in this print. The bridge picture has a high horizon lined perspective that’s your standard “Picture as window” perspective while the left half of the painting has a more modernist “Picture as a flat object” perspective. I think I got the two to work in harmony. That’s not always an easy task and I can see what helped accomplish that is asymmetry. The bridge picture, which has the deeper perspective, has less width than the left side. This gives the shallower perspective of the left side a chance to compete. But it almost looks symmetrical. Asymmetrical symmetry is a handy tool.

Color-wise I added just a couple of gradients otherwise I have lots of flat cut-color. I wasn’t trying for illustrative color but was trying to use color to keep the eye moving and keep the eye looking at things. That’s what I think the complexity was all about here. I was seeing if I could keep the eye interested and keep it going round and round. I think I did that job pretty well.

I’ve been writing about my art here in terms of technique and how I go about making the different types of things that I do but now I thought I’d start writing about a specific pieces. I’ll begin with the last painting that I made because it’s still sitting on my easel and is fresh in my mind. So why not?

One of the problems with an artist writing about their own work is that they often don’t know why they do a certain thing. Sometimes you get and idea and then put a line or brush stroke down to see if it works. Then it either does or it doesn’t. At times it’s explainable and at times it’s not. It can get tricky. With things that are explainable I often have two different points of view on. The first point of view is of me, the artist, who made the painting and knows how it got from point A, nothingness, to point B, a finished painting. That’s the insider’s point of view. Because I made it I know things about the painting that others don’t.

But I also have the same outsider’s point of view just like everybody else. I’m looking at a finished painting and what does it mean? As time goes by I may even forget a lot about the making of the painting so my insider’s view gets hazy. Most artists I know find stuff they’ve forgotten they’ve even done when digging through piles of old work. Sometimes the memory of doing it comes back and sometimes it doesn’t. The insider’s view can fade but the outsider’s view is always there.

The insider/outsider point of view thing is especially at play in my work because I like to pull images out of my mind that I might not be conscious of, know where they come from, or what they mean. I might not be an outsider on how the painting is made but I can be an outsider on what it means. Of course I like the search for meaning and that’s what things are often about.

The name of this painting is “Fun in the Fall”. Don’t look for any meaning in the name since I go with whatever pops into my head after I’m done making a drawing. I need names to distinguish between drawings. I used to not name things but as the years when by it became impossible to organize, write, or talk about my work if they had no names. Now I put a name on the drawing and that is that. No mater if it becomes a painting, a print, a marker drawing, or whatever else I stick with the name I gave it as a drawing.

“Fun in the Fall” isn’t one of my more mysterious paintings since it’s all about a face and hair. Faces are one of my favorite subjects and I return to them again and again. This is also one of my eighteen by twenty four inch acrylic on canvas paintings. It sat on my easel for quite a while. I hadn’t worked on any canvases for months before I put this one on the easel and started it up. Then I hated it. I felt like I was going through the motions of making a painting and didn’t like how it was coming out. So it sat on my easel for another month. Finally I decided that I’d better go through the motions of painting or I would never finish it. So that’s what I did. I kept on painting until I finally figured out what I was doing. Sometimes going through the motions is bad and other times it’s good. How about that?

The first thing I notice about this is the composition. It’s diagonal. I like to work with geometry and grids in my compositions and occasionally have diagonals cut across all those verticals and horizontals. This is one of them. There are four major diagonals in this painting. That’s a lot. The two lines of his hair from top to left and right, the line of his cheek from left to right, and the line of his other cheek plus shoulder from right to left. The horizontal lines on the bottom create a horizon for the picture to sit on but the composition is all about diagonals.

I called this painting “He” but it could just as well be a she. The faces I draw can be quite androgynous since they slide away from reality into a place of simplified drawing. Often I’m not intentionally drawing a man of a woman but in the end I tend to assign them a gender in my mind. Sometimes people assign them the other gender in their mind when they see them. It has startled me from time to time when I hear someone say “She” when I’m thinking “He” but that’s okay. Like I said I pull drawings out of the weird recesses of my mind and often I don’t know what they are. So if this painting is of a woman to you that’s fine with me because I’m not positive of the gender.

After working on this painting for a long time and putting down brush stroke after brush stroke what finally made me like it were the eyes, the pink spiral, and the small orange brush strokes around the outside of the face. With my simplified drawing style eyes can be hard to paint. There are not a lot of ways to paint simple eyes and I was tired of all the ones I usually use. So I stumbled onto this method where I make them a bit gear-like. I think I’ve used it before but not in a while. It broke up the outline of the pupil an a way that pleased me.

Breaking up the outline of the whole face with little brush strokes of orange pulled the whole painting together for me. The brown outline around the face was too strong and obvious. I needed it to be weaker than the diagonals. I used orange bits there as they harmonize well with brown and connect with the orange shirt. Before I put those orange brush strokes down something was missing but after all was well.

The final thing that makes this painting for me is the pink spiral. I like spirals and use them often but they’re not as easy as you’d think to pull off and they don’t come together until the end of making a painting. This one works compositionally as a third point in a triangle with the two eyes. A triangle within the triangle of the hair. More diagonals. It’s also a color in isolation. With the green hair, the orange shirt, the purple fence (wall maybe?), and the brown face it’s secondary colors that dominate this painting. The blue background and the red lips are the only primary colors. The pink spiral is the only color tint (a color plus white) on the painting so it stands out and keeps the eye moving around the composition. I like to keep the eye moving.

So there you go. That’s my insider/outsider analysis of this piece. I’m not sure how much I helped anyone out but I’m going to write a few more and see what I can come up with.