Paintings Are Storytelling Machines

It is with pleasure that I present to your attention my discovery of visual storytelling encrypted within many late 19th and early 20th century paintings. Museums who own masterworks by Picasso, Braque, Man Ray, Magritte and others might have the ability to reinvent the attractiveness of their assets by promoting them in a totally fresh way – promoting access to their “true content” -  through interactive and educational tech. While I am still processing through artists who used this technique, my case has been proven and now: if you have 19th Century and/or early to mid-20th Century paintings, they are storytelling machines with answers to what you never asked.

 

To prepare you, the subjectivity in the viewing relationship still exists, but as it is more collaborative with the artist, let go of what you currently believe to be the role of subjectivity in the viewer’s relationship to paintings. Also, there are themes about late 19th century and early 20th century events that are hard to recognize by sight, without context, and so information is necessary to provide in tandem to the visuals: I will show you annotated visual examples. There is also some very, very rude storytelling in the same paintings, and while I apologize in advance, I am also telling you: there is something for everyone here.

 

Part One Camera Lucida Used To Encrypt Imagery and Text

 It is well known that for many centuries, the Camera Lucida and other lenses have been available to assist artists in drawing from life via projections. Some artists used the same device to encrypt imagery into paintings, and the same device can find the imagery again, turning the works inside out and into story telling machines. The image is projected twice – once correctly and once inverted, and then these crossings are progressively layered and registered to reveal the true content as it emerges in optical illusions. Upon the first crossing, registration marks will come forward, showing optional paths towards a story. Animals, spiders, portraits and text come forward as the layers slide into place, sometimes the progression is like watching a film. Some registrations are to adjust to a new center, some are to adjust the image itself, others layer composition result into “interference fields,” where a person stands there and crosses their eyes to see many optional optical illusions come forward. This experience and the optical illusions are the true content of the paintings. Because the content is specific and empowers the viewer as a participant, albeit in a different way; this revelation will attract unlikely interest from those who never felt invited to the museum before.  

 

Part Two Tech Application For Contemporary Interaction

An app can be developed to provide a viewer this interaction through video, digital screen or projection. The app would show the image, its counter, options to center, and the result of that choice; and so forth until the end of that registration path. The app would show layering of the same image and its inversion up to 500 times. Ideally, the app would register the layers by visually sliding them against one another to show the story in between the registrations. The app might offer two modes a.) assisted selections b.) self guided. Assisted selections would be prepared registrations that could bypass rude imagery. The counter option would be the preference of PHD students and dirtballs. The organization might offer access to the app to schools, other museums, airport museums, and private individuals as part of community outreach. While this enables distance from the original work, it also reveals an entirely new magic about the “mark of the hand” and thereby makes more valuable visiting the original work through that reverence.   

 

Part Three Historical Annotations  

There appears to be an overlap between French Wars and photography and those being involved through this process with modernist and cubist paintings. I believe this is attached to Jean-Baptiste-Luis Gro, 1793-1870, French Diplomat and Senator – plus, Artist and Photographer. He was an advocate for the Second Opium War (which is a theme featured in more than one artist’s work) and in general, war illusions include explosions, portraits, architecture, landscapes, machines and caricatures. Excepting the caricatures, the allusions to the war seem suspiciously drawn from photographic reference. In fact, Braque’s original composition of Violin and Candle shares so many contours with a drawing of the sacking of the Old Summer Palace, I wonder if both used the same photo reference. Few would recognize the image source stories without information accompanying the experience of finding them. This is why the “assisted selections” method is the most robust presentation of these stories.  

In addition to the Second Opium War, I have uncovered images from the French War in Vietnam, the French War in Algeria, the Russian February Revolution, the Mexican revolt against Maximillian III, Emperor of Mexico. It might be that images are passed organically from artist to artist, or that photo sources are sold to artists through connections. It is especially the revelation of photographic-quality rendering that causes reverence from the viewer to the effort of genius in the artist.  Get ready to actually experience the genius, it is mind-blowing.

 

Part  Four A New Relationship To Classic Paintings

Refreshing the relationship to empower the viewer to interact with the imagery in search of something specific somewhat inverts what had been most recently taught as how to appreciate these masterworks. For instance, heretofore the viewer has been asked to suspend disbelief in the artist’s suspension of classical, technical mastery – which rightfully sounds suspicious to the non-art lover. While many methods of appreciation lean into the artist’s personal history, speculation about the title, and personal sensory reactions to colors and shapes; almost none of that applies as largely to this concept. Presenting the work as a storytelling machine with an accompanying technology to enable access is a far more attractive way to understand the artist’s choices than the viewer’s own sensory reactions to the original work. Being led towards beautifully rendered, even photographic imagery is an attractive cause and as such in this case, a bait to education. Through this concept, the museum’s assets are the new Netflix of schools and PhD programs – expanding beyond art, the storytelling intersects with histories of politics, revolutions, technology, machines and wars. There is also a lot of erotica.   

 

Part Five Which Artists Which Paintings

The earliest work I have tested is Titian’s Annunciation of San Salvador, which multiplies into erotica. The circular composition of the original layered against itself makes a beautifully symmetric lesson in female anatomy. Multiplied out eight times, winged phalli flirt with more anatomical close-ups, and as the layers slide together, optical illusions emerge of red phalli and of a baby being born. This feels like a straightforward storytelling machine and that a collector would pull the projection device out to discuss his painting with his buddies – or maybe admire it by himself – and I am convinced it is intentional in entirety.

 It is the turn into the 20th century that the imagery begins to feel drawn from photograph, which I consider to be a significant turn. Not all of the imagery feels this way, and plenty of themes are obviously drawn from life or inspiration.

 Part Six Picasso  

Some Picasso works have literal text that comes forward through the layers. One must believe this to be the truest message of content, from artist to viewer. However, the text might not be in a dialect known by the viewer! This is another reason for assisted selections, to help the sentences come together as intended, and then to translate them for the viewer.

An example of how Picasso used text in this illusionary process is on my video page, showing mid-story how the characters come together through the layering. Many dialects of Arabic might be represented within and between registrations. The sentence emerging as structurally viable is a strong clue to the artist’s true content and message. The text rides within an illusion of four pairs of soldiers storming a beach, their figures are reflected in water; as the layer slides, the soldiers run through explosions, then they hop onto horses and race away from a mushroom cloud in the far background. This is Picasso bringing up the French War in Algiers. Alternating with the soldiers is an illustration of a glistening spider, with many eyes. Picasso’s signature layers with the scrawl of the date and compounds into two more lines of Arabic text for us.

Part Seven My Services

I wish to analyze Museums’ masterworks and present a fresh and larger understanding about the artists’ embedded messages and the asset’s true content. The service I offer is the analysis, and the presentation of results will be in writing, still visuals, interactive visuals and video. Requirements from the client would be a high quality source image of the painting; upon receipt, a timeline projection can be assembled and delivered within two days. Remuneration would be per diem, with 10% of the projected timeline due as retainer. Start dates for processing would be scheduled.

 

I seek a partner organization to work with me and develop an application, using my process as a guide to the mode and experience and the analyses from me as assisted registration content. Classic masterworks in Museums’ collections will be debuted as storytelling activities, which will expand interest, promote the organization as something between a recreational and an educational resource beyond the walls, and potentially galvanize into a brand the application and my services as a product for other organizations to rediscover their own assets.  

 

Part Eight Outstanding Mysteries

I don’t know what the device looked like that I believe was used to create these embedded messages, so its reinvention is open. I don’t think I need it, though, the case is proven. Understanding the device would open understanding to the history of this process and insight into standards of procedure.  

 

Video editing software has been the gentlest to this process, but the depreciation is still high and the ending results (of 500 layers!) become pixilated. What combination of software will be the best and gentlest to the compounding image? Do I investigate printed images? Projection?

 

Whom do I seek more enthusiastically, the Museum or the application developer? If the Museum can afford to assign development of the app to a person already on staff, then propriety of idea must be negotiated before the start, with the application necessarily acknowledging the tie to my process and the assisted registrations I create. The developer will receive my analysis images and video to use at the owner’s discretion. The app will use the source image to follow my assisted registrations.

 

How difficult would processing be for another person? Would they use the same procedure or improve it? Would it be easier and faster to process in pairs?

Pan Pastels

In response to the toxicity of regular pastels, Pan Pastels are a low-dust alternative that apply with an applicator or brush, like paint. Just like any other medium, the most exploitation of materials happens on a colored ground. With only a few colors, a spectrum can be implied.

Intrinsically necessary is the color black, and more specifically, the interference/mediums in black. These are super sticky, rich blacks with metallic interference in a range of scales. I mean that they sparkle and the glitter size varies. If a person purchased only one Pan Pastel ever, I would suggest an interference black - I have incorporated this material into other dry media compositions with great results. The stickiness emboldens the main materials and deepens the black-point.

Even better than a toned, textured charcoal paper surface; is application to papers colored and textured by glitter. Application by brush flows just like paint, holds without fixing. The look can range from an ink-watercolor effect to any style of painting. Because of the glitter, the interference of the surface makes working very quick, our minds read the interference as what is not there, and the viewer will insert information that is not described by the artist. I would recommend this as a fun, easy way to knock out draft compositions of form.

Basic Shapes in Charcoal on Glitter Paper

X is the Artist's request for exception from The Liar's Paradox

The artist’s understanding of inertia and a body at rest or in motion within the natural world; extends into a command of storytelling within the representational world.

The story connection completes the dimensional shift between the art and its impression on the viewer. This shift helps the viewer understand the future at large, and the more impactful without being obvious in function, the more the artist’s handling of materials is Art.

For any production or processed object, its impact is owned by the composition.

Representation favors rectangular compositions in two ways: 1.) the focus within the representation is framed by rectangular architecture; and 2.) the art object will be displayed in a rectangular space.

Painting and film are especially owned by rectangles, and the favored proportions are 1x1, 2x4, 2x3, 3x4, 5x7 and 9:16.

Gravity and inertia and timing are ruled by irrational numbers, not rectangles. Shapes made by irrational numbers are parabola, Golden Spiral, circle, ellipse. This means that the shapes of storytelling [shapes of the natural world and physical geometry] come off weird in a rectangular, constructed world – instead of the inverse, which is that the rectangular world is weird, as a construction inside of the natural world.

The artist exploits that conflation of “what is weird” through The Liar’s Paradox.

The artists do not mind being called liars – when they’re lying; but not when they’re telling the truth.

Because of The Liar’s Paradox, the artists coax the viewers into stories told by pretending that something is not what it is, resulting in understanding the art object as materials handled by the artist to tell a story. We call this at its highest levels – at full expense of function - “Romantic.”

 But what if the artist is telling the truth? What does it look like? More than the sum of the parts?

X will mark the spot.

Truth can be told by navigating the path between the shapes of the natural world and the shapes of the constructed world, seeded by the square. While by itself the square asks for a centered composition; connecting the corners of 2x4 creates the first Golden shape: Golden Triangle.

Connecting both sets of corners creates the X, finds the center, creates a radius to use to find the Golden Section of those lines, finding the dimensions of Golden Rectangles, and, progressively, The Golden Spiral. Composing with these shapes enables the artist to tell truth within lies inside of only being an object pretending to be what it isn’t, inside of a larger lie inside of the consequently shrouded truth.

When you see X in the middle of a composition – the shape, an implied line, literal X, an exchange of positions, or any discordance – the artist is invoking exception to The Liar’s Paradox to tell a truth to the viewer – some story from the natural world, that if it could only be said out loud, would change everything.

Technology, news, history: how do we know, how do we find it? Art.

I have fallen into a rabbit hole connecting various forms of art employing an expanse of storytelling tropes and narratologies. Once you see them, they are hard to ignore. It appears as if their contemporary purposes are "poor man's patents," gossip, and posterity. If I had to guess why narratologies fill the airwaves and culture more than ever, I would propose that since 1945, radio broadcast of a song or story at a certain frequency strength has had a tiny creative gateway with a checklist for symbols or mentions of astronomy, dealing, and irrational numbers. Pi. Space. Funding. Etc. I'd even propose meeting the checklist is what got It's A Wonderful Life finally produced after so many re-writes.

In the US, the CIA has been a big pusher of the matters that make American Art uniquely "American." The first generation of modern artists were working not just "minimally," but inspired by irrational numbers. While many of the artists might have held personal beliefs that aligned with Communism, the work they made was so visually opposite to Social Realism, they inadvertently supported free thought only made possible by Capitalist "market conditions," which was really the CIA all along. 

Lateral movement between the agency and film for TV has a nexus at CBS, where the network was used as an arm of the agency by backing creative content that used tropes, narratologies and symbolism per some checklist for content. These follow forms in homage to irrational numbers and include allusions to chains of intelligence and economic issues since the Baroque period. Understanding how the symbolism moves and works with the plot and direction is underscored by understanding how shapes (flat-compositional shapes, story forms, sets and lighting shapes, and shaped history) move through dimensions. Film, as a fourth dimension, can show us the first, second, and third dimension; then the fourth over time/years.

Two tools have helped me find out very quickly if a production has a secret message: an animation of Jupiter's three, interior moons; and a toy called the Spirograph Animator. The first tool is great for analyzing clips, layering it against the audio to confirm Iambic Pentameter. It was with this that I found out Start Trek TNG dialogue is perfect poetry and Iambic Pentameter - they were making it easier to do with dialogue in Klingon! The second one is thrilling and better as both a visual and audio tracker because it has more texture, but it requires dark lighting and cannot be filmed without depreciation and loss of the visual and audio illusions.

Why should this be a fascination? Why should I want to know what, how and why content is being delivered to me? Who controls the present now controls the future; and who controls the future controls the past; so who controls the present now? I told you: technology, news, history. How do we know, how do we find it? I told you: Art.

The Spirograph Dance Party

Spirograph Dance Party Where Nobody Gets Up

Everyone who knows the Spirograph drawing toy, with its gears and pens and resulting rosetted drawings; also knows it’s limitations. After the drawing is made, so what?

In 2020, Spirograph updated its application of concept and expanded into several, more completely satisfying approaches to the same idea. In particular, the Spirograph animator toy delivers the most progressive impact: the rotating table and strobing lights work with the angles of the layered drawings to achieve fantastic optical illusions. Once involved into the drawings’ capture, the animation only becomes more personal – and at this point, a song can be layered into the experience to for an audio illusion – and then into a seeming interaction between the table’s “group mind” and the drawing itself. What is at work, exactly? The Fibonacci.

Battery powers only the lights. The drawing gears themselves show the obvious, tell-tale, spiral shape of the Fibonacci sequence; and the table spinning activates the strobe lights kinetically: every 137.5 turns, the strobing shifts into a different pattern. Then, as the table rotation decays, the animation of the drawing shows an evolution of its facets performing as a reaching, dancing, multidimensional body-shape. Because living people make the drawings, a margin of error is inserted as a part of the effect – if even a part of one layer can be set “a little messed up,” the satisfaction levels up.

When a team creates the layered drawing – each person with a different gear and color – watching the results can be thrilling, proving relativity on an intimate scale. When a poem or music with lyrics is introduced into the experience, audio illusion within the song can be visually exposed by the dancing drawing. The song choice of the team can be specific or random, genre and the meaning are irrelevant because the illusion is owned by the spirit of cosmic objectivity at human scale. Under the right circumstances, the five-minute experience might totally transform the trajectory of the day by driving home twin points: 1.) we all own the moment; and 2.) perceived imperfection is actually a path to discovery.

The Spirograph Dance Party Where Nobody Gets Up is an all-ages activity with an arrangement of tables and four chairs at each, and a station for the Spirograph Avatar is set in an area visible to everyone in the room. The station has a tall table and the “theater,’ within which is set an animator, whose performance in the box is captured and shared as a larger, projected version. Importantly, the lighting in the room must be dimmed as low as possible, small lamps at each table can shine focused light when necessary.

The event has three phases: first, the mechanics of the exercise are mastered and each table submits a drawing to share with the group on the projector, escalating the learning curve. Second, the tables try out drawing several different kinds of animations added to the gear-drawings. Third, each table chooses music for their work, then shares it in a round-robin MC’d by the Avatar Host. The Avatar supplies a variety of rhythms, poetry and music that specifically amplify and discover more energy within the drawings. This progression shows how to find depth, enforces learning vicariously with a soft touch, and proves that layering contributions makes some kind of “body” unique to each group. 

The less invested, drop-in experience can also be made “pop-up style,” with only one animator and the assistance of the Avatar. For this, the rolling podium is set up as an attractor and the Avatar guides the participant(s) through creating the drawing, then moves into a dimmed area for more precision to the experience. The projector is unnecessary; the rolling podium makes moving areas easy.


 

Layout of Event

A dimly lit room is set up with four chairs at each of four tables; a podium and tall table are set up at the front of the room for the Avatar. A curtain suspended from the ceiling might be necessary to eclipse light from the entrances. A disco ball is a nice touch. On each table is set a small lamp and a Spirograph Animator, which includes drawing gears, pens and Post-it notes to use in the Animator. A pre-printed scoresheet keeps track of which drawings achieved what, and a small tray keeps completed drawings after they have been tested.

The first phase of the event has the Avatar move among the teams in direct contact to show how the devices are put together and used for the activity. Then the “tables” and “crowns” of the devices are taken off to be used to create the drawings, and the groups are asked to draw as a team, with everyone taking a turn at layering a gear-drawn design in a different color. The animators are put back together and the designs are tested: the first level of illusion is introduced. The Avatar proposes that a “perfect” spirograph design is not the point and is only the cradle for the team’s unique spirit, then explains how to use the scoresheet to keep track of what is discovered. Then, each table chooses a drawing to share and the Avatar works the theater/projector to show a larger projection of the selections to the room. Ideas are shared and the Avatar is an expert in accolades towards everyone’s work.

The second phase introduces dots and shapes, showing how they punch and dance out of the designs. As the teams proceed with the exercise, the Avatar dj’s songs that work well with the illusion, occasionally singing along with the songs. This is the second phase, following the format of the first for each person to layer a contribution. The teams volunteer to share findings and successes and the Avatar projects them. For this, the designs dance to the Avatar’s music choices.

Beginning the third phase, the Avatar talks about the moons of Jupiter, decaying time, and tributing, iambic pentameter layered into discordant 4/4 musical meter, pointing out a list of suggested songs or film-clip dialogue on the scoresheets that demonstrate the audio illusion. The teams choose songs to try with drawings and then submit their drawings with music requests, which the Avatar plays in tandem to the projection. At this point, the dance party has fully unfolded: the Avatar asks the teams to consider and express what matters in the moment and what does not matter at all.

Trifold pamphlets for each participant commemorate the night, wherein drawings from the exercise are stored for posterity. Taking these home keeps the memory organized, contextualizes the drawing, and enables the participant to talk intelligently about what happened.

Copyrights and The Family Pact

Try and Catch the Detroit Judith is a video composition created in 2023. The content is an original, personal story that layers appropriated film clips, images and sounds; and references real history as a thesis supposition is built and presented. The thesis demands recognition of a pervasive subculture of storytelling that intersects with astrophysical narratology. Because the layers work together like gears to dig into deep, shrouded meaning within the copyrighted materials, eg the clip from Try and Catch Me, starring Peter Falk and screen legend Ruth Gordon, I do not consider the inclusion of these materials to be infringement or depreciation to the originals; but a keyhole through which a viewer can also learn the symbolic vocabulary so that they may also understand the world around them, as told by the sub-story. I propose that if someone objects to the layering of the copyrighted materials, it is because they believe they (the objector or the materials) do not want to expose the code, for whatever reason.

One very good reason to want the code to stay shrouded is the Family Pact instituted by Anna Maria Luisa de Medici in 1737. Through this, the last member of the Medici family formally decreed that their immense artistic and historical legacy had to remain forever in Florence. Make no mistake: The Detroit Judith is perhaps the most beautiful portrait of Mary Magdelena Medici ever painted - but to admit that might be to also admit that it belongs in Florence. But: does it? Does the narratology that structures the painting, that presents the proof that caused suppression of astronomy and physical geometry (except for war tools) belong back in the hands of those who wanted to hide it? To this, we might say “symbolism is a kind of testimony, but the duplicity belies real accusations or proof.”

Pivotal: whether time goes forwards or backwards, it all depends on whose ox is being slaughtered.

Clear Contact Paper Can Change You

One, precious, indispensable tool has been tight in my grip through all of those places and days and paintings: clear contact paper - and I know I always will have some, as long as I can afford it.

Why is this? What luxury do I see in this planning device?

Clear Contact Paper as a planning tool can make time go back and forth. It expedites - microwaves - the planning process in such a direct - and yet affordably cautious way, that it can coach what otherwise appears intuitive towards sophistication and a depth carrying a larger message.

My message as an artist to other artists is about this tool, the way it is a time machine. Better than a best friend, it is me, myself from the future and my objectivity about the present situation, whatever it is.

The overarching message of my work is attached to how, when we work through some moments of focus, the more objectively we can examine future situations, the better we can prepare. Not only “Be Careful,” but to quote Rage Against the Machine’s Testify:

“Who controls the past now controls the future
Who controls the present now controls the past
Who controls the past now controls the future
Who controls the present now?”

And I am saying I see a way of doing this with clear contact paper as a compositional planning tool for painters.

The Shape I Am In

I believe that while Art in the United States presents itself through means of heritage and/as gestalt, the west coast prioritizes super-superficial gestalt over inherited “artifactual fictions,” to the point of illiteracy of visual story telling. I see this as exploitable.

I want to talk about shapes, allusions, illusions, how to use and recognize the active shaping of heritage in popular programming. Understanding how to participate in the conversation about the past teaches how to leverage the future.

The Shape I Am In is a thesis presentation of how shapes convert ideas from one dimension into another.

Paintings in a signature style flocked all walls and set the viewer into seven separate dimensions, essentially portals into the inside of my mind.

Lighting, arrangements and textures in the atmosphere broadcast a safe space.

Activities were present to help thaw the viewer into an interaction with the thesis, asking for them to sit and stay. Talk. Tell.

Narratology prevents illiteracy and apathy

The best way to bank a culture’s accomplishments and records is in “narratology,” highly symbolic stories told between mother/parent and child. While this storytelling chain is nearly impossible to dissolve, it is possible for the depth of meaning to detach. The ultimate beauty of the method is that, if the story can stay mostly intact, the armature for a future reassembly remains.

 In 2023, narratology has never had so much exercise through popular programming, publishing and fashion. Recognizing the layers of meaning makes conspicuous new ideas – new science, or new appreciations that might as well be “poor man’s patents”- tumble forwards into a playful invitation to educate oneself on contemporary science at one’s own pace.

Training to recognize and understand hidden heritage passes the torch of our accomplishments into the future, adds depth and meaning to enjoying popular programming; and is, in short, power against ignorance and apathy.

summoning talent requires mastery of processing

There is no function instrinsic to Art that uniformly spans across cultures. Conversely, everywhere, there is elasticity allowed to all creations towards the emulence of beauty, the spectrum’s far end being at the full expense of function.

To create anything is to externalize conversations about our place in infinity. When an idea needs to be examined, art plays the role that brings the idea from the mind into this world, making it into a thing, maleable and improveable. If, through the intrinsic beauty of the thing, expectations are surpassed into an expanded understanding of our lives, then the thing is elevated to being Art, excused from other function. As soon as an attempt is made  to imitate the mode of the new form, the mode itself falls below the bar of being artful, as the functionality of imitation belies the ability to surpass expectation.

The Artist should be able to make anyone believe that anything is not what it is by opening up this extra dimension that “hinges” between a moment in our minds and a platform used to represent the idea. Representation provides the dimension to convert a personal inspiration into a shared belief.

Western Art has creative devices that permeate through discipline and form, to support our ongoing culture with remembrance of past discoveries. The devices are artifacts, they are allusion to fortify illusion, and they are gifts from our ancestors. Sacred shapes and proportions, anatomical understanding, material technology, The Ellipse, perspective, density, and symbols – they all have importance in American Art, but I propose that west of the Mississippi, nobody cares.

In the US, cultural immersion and the reciprocated understanding of encrypted allusion dilutes as the country might be studied from East to West, because of three main factors: the diaspora of western development based on the freedom to define one’s destiny; the development of photography and film as an outreach artform and advocate for found majesty; and the development of design principals first identified by Psychologist Max Wertheimer. This trifecta of simultaneous forces is so much easier, more intuitive and so much more aligned with the American Western spirit that it has practically replaced approaching Art with serious, contemplative intentions; with the evermore popular: “I don’t know anything about Art, but I know what I like.”

Design asks for the viewer’s eyes and mind to fill in gaps, to bring false memories to the image in order to make sense of its dynamics. In contrast, eons of our artistic heritage has examined representation itself and its position to another dimension where the ideals of ideas live in hologram. A lack experience with the dimensional “hinge” causes easy, unchallenged relativity to categorically slip by as a mystic truth; and elevates the individual’s authority on Art, having been able to so easily fill in the blanks brought by design. If it’s so easy, “I can do that!” 

What’s the harm? If the real role of Art is to impress upon the viewer “love in a look,” whom does it hurt?

The harm is done to the understanding of process as the artist’s converter of emotions and ideas into shapes and forms. Processing is a time machine bought with inheritance and whetted with skill into a unique and shiny, unstoppable tool. It finds greater depth, builds a secondary platform to find elasticity in the materials and therein facilitates talent. Pivotally: when summoning talent requires mastery of processing, disguising the inclusion of processing disguises the accomplishments of talent.  

Contests of Power

In a black and white episode of Perry Mason that I saw as a rerun in 2000, some fashion illustrations were featured as an important clue in a case. The designs were a kind of illustration in two colors plus a black definition line, where there was a “background color” that included everything that was not the garment, the garment was contrasted in white, and then the entire design was given form and detailed with black line. The effect of only contrasting the dress against everything else stunned me with how effortlessly it gave importance to the garment and withdrew importance from the figure, and that it communicated from this mode with no rendering and minimal suspension of disbelief. It moved into a style that was sleek, low effort/high concept and could occasionally show a controlled, reserved facility of talent.

Artistic Question

“Can simplifying a description cause a more intense narrative? Can limiting colors in an image somehow adjust perceptions of the subject’s behavior? What can a figurative subject do, under these circumstances, while still being less noticeable than their dress?” I saw these as rich questions and the three-color system to be the best tool to contrast the ideas of conformity of behavior and conformity of form against one another.

Plastikote Paint

There is a direct correlation between the availability of the Plastikote paint, my studio production and the evolution of my concepts.

 

When I started painting on wood, it was to embrace a surface that could withstand abuse and yet not be so precious that I might need help to install or transport it. The preparations to seal the surfaces would alternate between a transparent whitewash undercoat and pastel finish; and a glossy, more direct saturation of color sealed up with a coat of high gloss. On top of the prepared surface, I used a favorite paint by Plastikote, now no longer available, I’m sure because of some horrible percentage of lead or ingestible plastic within the pigments. My materials trifecta required few visits to art supply stores – I could get everything at Home Depot and Longs – and what I needed from Longs I could get 24 hours. For a single artist with a day job who is also a woman with limited storage; the nature of an all night paint supply transformed my schedule. The simple possibility of buying the perfect paint 24 hours a day bore an edict that materials purchases were to be done on “non-studio time” and that (irrationally, I now realize) if the paint supply was open all night long, there was never a reason good enough to reschedule or interrupt studio time. It was more likely for me to buy paint while out on a date than during studio time.

 

During this wonderful time in my life, from 1999 to 2007, while it may have been an almost ten year avoidance of art supply stores, it also was when I really dug my heels into a certain way of thinking about making artwork. I became very regimented about my schedule: wake up early and paint for two hours, then prepare for day job; day job; go to 24 hour Longs/go out; come home and prepare to paint the next morning. Because of the structure of my schedule, I imposed more structure into my compositions and color schemes. For example, early paintings on wood without Plastikote attempted to discuss contrast of behavior to expectations of form in three color compositions, with some variances in finish (that never could photograph anyway). The introduction of Plastikote into my work expanded my palette to include four then five colors at a time – this in turn enabled me to express implications of motivation through much more complete compositions.