Thoughts about painting

The Easter holidays means a two week break from working on my painting of my mum.  Sometimes it’s good to come back to something with fresh eyes although I would prefer to plough on with it.  I have two other paintings on the go here at home and have other work to catch up with and I have sproggies around so it’s certainly not a case of twiddling thumbs.  Anyway, yesterday whilst stuck in a queue at Lidl during the weekly trolly dash to stock up on body fuel (I’m not a foodie person), although the bonus was I did also stock up on some cheap flat paint brushes they had on offer, (brush destroyer that I am), I was giving some thought to the painting, and the last bit I’d worked on.  I remembered how I had battled with the last egg cup in the background which I seemed to spend more time focusing on and even seemed to give it a different treatment in terms of the way I painted it.  It then occurred to me that this egg cup is one of my favourites and that must be why it was slightly more pronounced even if it was a subconscious thing on my part.  This I realised is maybe what art is all about, it’s about the artist’s reality.

 

The artist is not painting a visually accurate representation but painting a part of themselves.  The painting being coloured by their associations, feelings, experiences and everything else that colours their reality.  For me this is a huge part of what art is about.  The process of painting is an attempt to express their reality, their feel in that medium.  To quote Picasso: “He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen”.  I think a lot of the time this sort of thing is quite subconscious although I have been thinking about how artists also purposely manipulate the eye around a painting.  Often for example in a portrait the focal point is in sharper focus than the surroundings which mimics the way the human eye works. 

  We really only have sharp visual focus in the central part of the eye called the fovea which is used for scrutinising detailed objects and this area has a high concentration of tightly packed cones (the colour perceiving bits) and no rods (the rods being the ones that help you see in the dark, and I don’t think I have any!).  

 

 

Surprisingly we have many millions more rods than we do cones and the area around the fovea is more designed for peripheral vision which is for seeing the broader picture and larger objects.  (I do wonder if the grainy texture that you see in the dark ,….well I do, is a result of the cones being more spaced out in amongst the rods in this area).

This play with focus in painting is referred to as lost and found edges like in these paintings for example:

Vuillard

 

Ambrose Mcevoy

Ambrose Mcevoy

 There are some interesting articles on the net of how Rembrandt used techniques for manipulating the way the eye moved over his paintings, although we don't know if this was instinctive or calculated.

http://www.livescience.com/9920-magic-rembrandt-painting-technique-revealed.html