The Journey From Symbols to Vision and Feelings

For more than 50,000 years we have been painting what we know, making  clear, legible iconic images that represent our ideas  about  life.  We still do it.  2,600 years ago the Greeks took new look at representing images and tried to make them as they appear to us or, what we see.  We ended up with pictures as seen from a particular or single point of view.   They were still legible because we( the Greeks and us) merged the idea of depicting what we see with what we know. Outlining objects or figures is a form of this. We don’t see outlines around objects but, in order to clearly identify or categorize them we outline them.  You can see this in the Renaissance painting  of Pintoricchio (example 1) or  even Michelangelo.

example 1.  ( Pintoricchio)

example 2. (El Greco)

But, about the time of the Renaissance a few artists started to think differently about how we see and how we feel about what we see.  Da Vinci considered how we see with blurred edges, and  how we guess about the identity of something by looking into an ambiguous visual territory.  He realized that less classification (outlining) allowed for more ambiguity and a greater sense of reality because, it more closely resembled how we see.  El Greco’s paintings took a different direction again.  His paintings appear to be about how we feel about the subject (example 2). Their distorted forms evoke feelings.  By end of the 19th century  Vienna was host to the idea of paintings performing the role of a conveyor of feelings, forbidden or repressed sexual feelings as in the work of Egon Schiele or,  later in Germany with Otto Dix or Max Beckmann the paintings could convey political feelings,  or personal feelings in myriad of directions.  Meanwhile the concern for how we see was never abandoned as well.  Cezanne  pursued  paintings which reflected how we see, planes of reflected light off  a basic set of shapes ( shapes once described by Socrates as the fundamental shapes, cone, sphere, cube) inside of a traditional design format.  Throughout the 20th and into the 21st century artists continue to pursue understanding how we see and  how we feel(emotions).  In a collaborative  venture with a fellow artist, Kerry Brock, I tried to use both of these motives in my response to her work. (example 3. initial work by Kerry Brock).

example 3.

By the way, I gave her a work of mine with which she could do whatever she wished  just as I had  with her painting. It’s part of a project for artists associated with the Silvermine Guild of Artists.  I considered  that Ms. Brock had given me a work with a deliberately flat design and deliberately  without illusory space just, the grid of color and pattern on the flat 36×36 square of masonite. I thought first about using her palette ( I liked the complementary color effects) and her idea of a grid  but, I would  impose an illusory space with a strong sense of infinity.  I used   Renaissance principles of linear perspective to achieve this.  I knew that Ms. Brock was from out West, Eastern Washington State and, that she had a predilection for big spaces. I was simply laying her grid pattern down so that it could be seen from an elevated foreshortened perspective with landscape references.   How we see  and experience deep  space in motion became my interest.  Ms. Brock’s purpose had be to  design a bright, flat space. You can see how I changed  her work step-by-step  in examples 4, 5, and 6. How to make that space move by canting it and blurring the distance were additional ideas as you see in the final example.  Everything progressively fades  in the distance, colors, contrast and edges. It’s of how we see.

example 4.

example 5.

example 6.