Perspective Like A Rubber Band

In any single glance lots of photons touch our eyes but our brain makes sense out of only  relatively few of them. How we make sense; how we make our guesses is the question for artists. Tools like linear perspective  give us a way to suggest believable or sensible space.  Because we believe in the effects linear perspective we can distort those effects and sustain our viewer’s willingness to make guesses.  Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn are two artists who stretched the credibility of linear perspective and  stretched believable space in painting.

Today Photoshop and camera technology allow us to elasticize forms and principles like linear perspective ever further as we continue to stretch our ability to find new definitions for painting, particularly landscape painting. Because artists like Diebenkorn and Thiebaud were so conversant with the vocabulary of linear perspective they were able to enjoy its manipulation. My first example is from 1959 by Richard Diebenkorn. He has take color exaggeration, spacial simplification, and perspective foreshortening to greater abstract lengths than others. He is still following a tradition of exaggeration and distortion. We can see this in Van Gogh’s landscapes. 25 years later Wayne Thiebaud continues mutating linear perspective and foreshortening as you see in example 2.

example 1. Diebenkorn’s.

example 2. Thiebaud’s.

I take their examples and try exaggerating first through photography then paint. I visited a saltwater marshland in Connecticut,  Barn Island.  I returned to my computer and began to overlay and stack  imagery I found there to see if new ideas might emerge. I  recognized the parallels to Thiebaud and Diebenkorn.  Examples 1, 2 and 3 present the initial photographs. Example 4 presents the stacked and layered combination of some of those photographs. This combined image is confusing but generative of new ideas.

example 3. undistorted marshland photo before horizontal compression.

example 4. marshland photo 2.

example 5. marshland photo 3
.

Example  6. stacked merger of two photos.

Next I have three examples of how I began to merge the photographic ideas with paintings. In each example I added the distant tidal pools from example 5 to the top of a foreground of examples 1 and 2. (resulting in examples 7 and 8). Our brain’s penchant for uniting and explaining disparate visions allows us to see  elastic but, imaginatively plausible pictures. Diebenkorn’s and Thiebaud’s precedents have expanded our sense of plausibility for exaggerated for paintings.

example 7. marshland painting1.

example 8. marshland painting 2.

Finally, elasticity in my interpretation of the marshland continues in both paint and photoshop. Example 9 presents the same photo information but, seriously reconfigured and mutated courtesy of Photoshop. This completely abstracted example again offers new potentialities for painting which I intend to persue.

example 9. Further abstraction of marshland.

Again, let me extend my invitation to you to come to my next lecture at the Silvermine Art Center in New Canaan, Connecticut at 4:30 PM on Sunday Oct 19, 2014. Go to silvermineart.org or call 203 966 6668 ext 2 for more information.