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Ames Room, Progress
Oct 31, 2008 — 2 comments
I thought there was something strange about this hallway, so I took a picture of it. I can’t tell if something about it reminds me of one of those Ames Rooms, or if it just looks like a dead end, or if there’s some sort of spectral gathering in the passages on either side. Maybe because it’s so nondescript, it becomes a little bothersome. Maybe it’s just me. Usually is.
This is the current state of the landscape painting I’ve been working on. I’m reworking the sky, and trying to make the mist look like mist. Not the easiest thing I’ve ever tried to do. If you look at the tree on the right, you can (hopefully) see that I’m trying to make it look like the trunk is going through the mist, and projecting a shadow on the mist as well as the ground. If I can get it to work, I think it will be a cool effect. If not, I doubt most people will notice as they casually glance over the piece. This photo is terrible, so I apologize. Pretend it’s terrible because I am withholding something brilliant, and giving too much detail would ruin the surprise at the end.
Now everyone go drink adult beverages, but don’t dress like the Joker, because that’s just embarrassing.
Drawing and Painting: All About the Light
Oct 29, 2008
To me, the most important thing about learning and advancing in painting or drawing is learning how to see. By that I mean seeing and understanding exactly the way in which something is defined as a physical object by reflected light (which is what makes it visible to us in the first place). Most people look at a bridge and see a bridge, all the parts and visual information filtered out by the brain so that it appears as a simplified single unit, a noun: bridge. Anyone can draw a bridge, you can outline all the shapes and parts that fit together, and it will look like a bridge. But this is focusing on the physical properties of the object itself, instead of the light that it reflects and absorbs.
Look at how the light interacts with the series of surfaces that define the object, not the outlines of its parts. Does it reflect it directly, partially, does it glow with refracted light, and at what angle is all this happening, in relation to the light source(s), and the angles of the forms around it? Observations like this make it make it much easier to feel exactly what is going on, to break it down, so that your mind can process and then translate it onto a 2-dimensional plane. It’s all about the light, where it’s coming from and where it’s going. Many times, when someone first sees one of my drawings or paintings, they will say something along the lines of “I could never do that.” I always disagree, and try to convince them otherwise, because anyone can learn to see light and dark in a way that makes sense to them. Technical ability (there are a lot of painters with very little technical ability, but a fantastic ability to understand light and how to use it) whether you are born with it or not, can be fine tuned, and, like anything else, will benefit from practice. From that point, it’s just a matter of editing your work, fixing things that look wrong to try to make them look right.
It’s a slightly different way to look at the world. This is why I love shadows.
Atmospherics
Oct 20, 2008 — 4 comments
So I take a lot of pictures of the sky. It’s amazing to me what refracted light can do in an atmosphere. I took all of these pictures with a regular digital camera, all of the colors are almost exactly as I saw them that day, there was no photoshop work or digital altering of any kind.
Most of my landscape paintings have an obvious emphasis on the sky, for a few reasons. The most important being that it can be visually interesting, and can very effectively create a mood, a feeling, can rouse something powerful and evolutionarily primeval in a person when they see it. The sky’s been around a lot longer than we have, and as long as we have been around, we’ve been looking up at it.
I’m generally drawn to a sky that is sort of nonspecific, where you can’t really tell if it’s late afternoon, early morning, if the sun is rising or setting. If you’re standing in your yard looking up, you’re aware of your existence in a very specific concrete physical setting, into which you project your own feelings/thoughts about time; you naturally and automatically know what time of day it is and what is going on. A painting, on the other hand, is its own self-contained physical setting, which is narrow, and can be infinitely interpreted. The only information you get is what is in between the edges, and unless you name your painting “Thursday, 12:47pm,” (or 4:16 ), the viewer has to decide for him/herself what time of day they think it is. Which is why I generally go for transitional-looking sky scenes like sunrise and sunset. If you give the viewer too much information, the painting can be quickly dismissed. I like to try to give just enough to catch their eye, then to maybe stir something in them that makes them want to think about it a little more deeply. Some people want to “figure it out,” to somehow find the “answer,” to determine exactly what is going on, what time of day it is and what it all means, like a puzzle. Others enjoy identifying the feeling or mood the image evokes, which is a very personal thing, a reflexive thing, and through which they then contemplate their personal relationship to that image.
The more ambiguous the visual information, the more varied the response, which is my ultimate goal. Images that you see and say “that’s a pony,” then move on without another thought don’t really do much for me. Although I like pictures of ponies.
DeLillo, Bruegel, Hoover, Plutonium
Oct 15, 2008 — 2 comments
I recently finished Underworld, by Don DeLillo. It’s 830 pages, dense, filled with numerous interrelated characters, and was a Finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; it’s not exactly an leisurely read I can push on people (I try anyway). But above all, I think it is a work of genius.
The Prologue, called The Triumph of Death, it’s a fictionalized account of the 1951 game between the Dodgers and the Giants, which ended on Bobby Thomson’s so-called Shot Heard Around the World (capitalizing that phrase annoys me to no end, but I guess it’s necessary. Baseball is stupid). Anyway, this opening section is technically about baseball, and considering my complete distaste for the game you would think would bore me to death, but it doesn’t, and it’s not really about baseball. In extremely general terms, it’s about the human species’ inherent tendency toward chaos and conflict.
The 60-or-so page section is a brilliant juxtaposition of images. As the game builds toward its dramatic finish, J Edgar Hoover, who is in the stands with Frank Sinatra, is informed that the Russians have tested a nuclear bomb. Thomson hits the famous home run, the crowd goes insane, running frenzied and tangled onto the field. Torn magazine fragments fall from the stands, with an image of the painting The Triumph of Death, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (shown above) lands on J Edgar Hoover, who almost immediately becomes obsessed with it.
There’s way too much going on in this book to adequately describe here; one character, a waste management official, believes that the central factor defining and driving human evolution is our relationship with and struggle against the waste that we create. Another, with whom the aforementioned waste manager had an affair at the age of 18, is working to repaint huge warplanes with bright colorful designs, hundreds of planes left in a field in the middle of nowhere. This character’s husband was the waste manager’s brother’s chess teacher at the time that his wife was having the affair. The Zapruder film, Lenny Bruce, the Rolling Stones, chess, buried nuclear waste, adultery, nuns, the mafia, graffiti artists, murdered orphans, Lucky Strike cigarettes, everything and everyone relates to everyone else in some way. Nuclear war and all related paranoia sort of Saran Wraps the whole book. It’s all very concise and clearly described, but becomes a sort of jumbled mass of metaphors and symbolic language, writhing like the figures in the Bruegel painting.
Anyway, I either just pushed you beyond boredom, or, much more likely, I have you hooked, have ignited in you a desperate lust for the devouring of this book. Read it and email me so we can talk about it.
I made the above flash videos using still frames from this film, which is terrifying and amazing (the sequence I took the images from is at around 20 seconds). The more I watch these repeat, the less I can tell if one has a different effect than the other running forwards then backwards (above), instead of just repeating from the beginning (top of the page). Ooooohh, see, it’s all cyclical, you know? Like everything repeats and goes back, like history, human nature and existentialsomething and all? Finnegan’s Wake!! Yeaahh that’s deep man.
I had a giant poster of this image hanging in my room throughout college. It made people a little uncomfortable.
New Work In Progress
Oct 14, 2008 — 1 comment
Here is the current state of progress of the two new pieces that I’m working on. Again, don’t cast too severe a judgment on them yet. Or at least store whatever you’re thinking silently inside your head until I’ve finished them, at which point you can hurl whatever praise/vitriol you feel necessary, to whomever will listen.
The cabin is still in the skeletal stage, trying to get everything in proportion, all the lines aligned, etc. Once you have it pretty well organized, whatever areas you screwed up on early in the process will usually work themselves out when you go into more detail work, which is where I’m about to go.
The landscape below is sort of an experiment. While a lot of my paintings have a sort of “fuzziness” to them, as my professor in college used to say, I’ve never actually painted any mist or fog. Not intentionally at least. We’ll see how it turns out. There’s going to be another tree in there.
I took this picture as I turned into my parent’s neighborhood the other day. Look how straight that cloud is. Another Nerdrum moment.
Magnus
Oct 06, 2008 — 4 comments
Last Friday this little dude became the newest addition to the Ebeling family. He’s 8 weeks old, and comes in at about 14 lbs., but something tells me that he’s going to get a little bigger. Could be the gigantic paws and powerlifter forearms. 
I don’t throw the word “cute” around that often…
