Symbol Bird

A couple of months ago I finished this bird, holding on to two colors above the water. I got a couple things working here which I'm happy about: 1) the color sticks are symbolic, I mean there are no blue and red reeds like this in the world, but they still work as real reeds which the bird is hanging on to (actually he's kind of 'stirring' the reeds). 2) the water ringlets at the bottom of the picture serve to make a bottom or ground to the painting although the background is one entire continuous color; without the ringlets the bird and color sticks would be floating in space a bit too much. 3) the bird is realistically painted - based on a drawing I made at the Naturhistorischemuseum - and it works well enough against the plain abstract background. I want to make more paintings in this space between realism and an abstract/symbolic space.

Paradisevogel

61x46cm, oil on board

Finished my paradise bird. Not completely what I wanted, but it never is.... I learned a lot with this painting and it's my first kind of "old masterish" painting, using thin layers of paint to slowly build up the shapes, shades and colors, and careful pencil studies done in preparation of the painting. Next painting I'm going to use oil in the underlayers to add some more depth to the painting. I like my composition, the bird's pose which was made (I hope convincingly) from a couple different drawings of the real stuffed bird, and the landscape which I made up completely. I'm a little unsatisfied with the coloring of the sandstone or whatever it is. I do however like the darker cliff like part to the sandstone at the bottom of the picture. I think my bird is pretty enough, and proudly posed, and I like my pile of rocks. I especially like the rock with the squiggly white stripe which reminds me of a snake adding a little biblical quality to the picture, i.e. beautiful assumes ugly, good assumes evil, paradise assumes the imperfection of right now. The snake-in-rock wasn't planned but was a happy accident, which accidents always happen in a painting if you keep going for a certain feeling. I think the desert landscape also fits the sense of the picture, as its harsh plain beauty contrasts well with the rich luxuriant beauty of the paradise bird. Above is the full painting and closeup photographs, because although a painting is always it's whole self it is also, when you are looking at it, a collection of details (at least that is the way I look at paintings).

BTW that's a pearl next to the rock pile. I though I'd put something beautiful AND valuable in there to highlight the disconnection between beauty in it's non-tradable form (a sunset, a wild animal, a cool rock) and beauty that we can put a price on like a pearl, or a diamond, etc.

Stuffed Animals (paradisevogel)

various views of the stuffed bird

painting almost finished

side view of the bird, later flipped around for the painting

early stage of the painting

I made some detailed pencil studies of the stuffed animals in the Natural History Museum in Vienna (a wonderful museum in full on 19th century style). Somehow the birds attracted me, maybe because there is such a range or birds really - there must be almost one thousand different birds in the museum. I picked the paradise vogel, because it is really a most remarkable bird. I knew about the bird because I read to my children the Dr. Suess book about the vain bird who wants to have the longest, most pretty tail. She gets one, but then she can no longer fly. Well.... Dr. Suess apparently knew something about birds, because when you see the range of paradise birds out there, the length, elaboration, and raw ornamental quality of their feathers it makes you pause to think. As in... aren't birds meant to fly, and with this amount of superfluous feathering certainly not meant for getting into the air, is it anymore possible to fly? Isn't the point of the bird to fly? And that brought my thoughts to another point.... does everything really have to have a functional purpose? Can't a bird have elaborate feathers just to be beautiful? Doesn't beauty have a value, or does everything always come down to function, utility, survival? And then, what if we suppose beauty has a value, in and of itself, with no relation to function, just in itself, alone - beauty is beautiful because it is beautiful (not because it serves some other biological function). Well that is how I think about the paradise vogel! And she/he should be a standard to which we could aspire, no?

The painting mixes my interest in early renaissance paintings, specifically the way they depict a landscape, which is hardly visually accurate, but a kind of mixture between observation and idealization. My pretty paradise vogel is perched on a collection of real stones I've collected and for some reason unknown to me keep holding my interest. The painting technique is more old fashioned, done with thin layers of paint built up slowly (I am beginning to really like this technique!)

The pictures show a pencil sketch of the stuffed paradise vogel drawn in the museum, and an early stage, and a near finished stage of the painting. The finished painting will be posted soon.

Proud, Tired Joseph

By Francesco di Christofano (1485-1525) painted around 1515. I love this picture. I especially love the depiction of Joseph, especially because he usually gets second billing when it come to pictures of the holy family. Joseph looks tired here (see his messed up hair) but proud of his family. That's the baby Jesus to the right, playing with his hair while sitting on Mary's lap. My finger painting here isn't the whole painting - it cuts out most of Jesus and all of Mary. But then this is the part of the painting that I like. I spent almost 4 hours doing this painting.

In the same room with me was a guy painting (oil painting) a copy of Rapheal's famous triangular composed painting of Mary, the baby Jesus, and the baby John the Baptist. It's a really, really, really great painting, and in every art history textbook. The painting is like maybe one of the top ten paintings in human history!!

Below is an image of the painting I copied, and then a movie of the finger painting.

Blue Matisse

Finished a copy of a Matisse still-life/landscape (~3x4.5 ft). It was fun, and I would have never had the guts to use that much blue! I replaced his objects with mine. So, the moroccan figure hidden in the wall far left becomes Pascal's favorite stuffed dragon (I love how the composition includes the figure in the same plane as the other objects, yet at the same time the figure is 'excluded' by being embedded in the plane of the wall - is the figure there or not?), the flowers become my flowers from another painting, the African head becomes my sculpture of Ani, the Lamp becomes a jar of paint brushes together with a sand dollar, and Matisse's plate becomes a plate with my shells, which I have painted before. My version could have been painted a little bit looser, but then it's kind of hard to paint that way when you are copying. Anyways now we have a pseudo-Matisse in our living room, and I learned a lot about his painting style.

BTW although 'blue' is usually associated with a down mood, in this case blue seems to work more like the sky or ocean, giving a calm reflective feeling.

Waldsteine

Just finished a canvas (~4x3 foot). This one is new for me. It's very loosely based on reality. On one of our hikes through the Austrian woods I knew I wanted to paint a forest picture, all mysterious, trees, branches, roots, rocks all jumbled together. I thought about how in earlier times the people believed the woods were filled with strange secret things (now we've classified all the plants and animals, fenced in the wild beasts, and tagged the trees with signs and numbers).

For me a new idea was to add the shapes of letters, not to hide any secret message but because we recognize letters as special, and therefore we can see them in a jumble of lines and shades, kind of like how we see faces on certain rocks, or how some discover the image of Jesus on the bark of a tree. What actually do you "see" when you see a letter?

There are also several deliberate perceptual anomalies I was able to get away with. They were easier to work into the painting since reality (or photo's of reality) wasn't lecturing me about what I should and shouldn't paint.

The painting was a fun experiment and it gave me lots of ideas about how to paint other paintings. And that's what a satisfactory painting is supposed to do.... make you want to explore again and paint the next painting. I'm also beginning to conclude that I have a serious obsession about rocks. I really find those boring chunks of matter interesting.

I took some pictures during the painting process to see how things changed evolved. There weren't any radical changes, except that I ended up painting the rocks completely differently than I had at the beginning intended. The top photo was taken at the beginning of September, the middle from the middle, and the last photo is the completed painting (I hope) from 21 September.

Small California Paintings

I've had time to do a couple of small paintings. They remind me of California. I have a collection of rocks, shells, and one starfish we brought from CA (Anika found the starfish on a beach and I dried it out in the oven). I enjoyed painting the mussels, the starfish was a challenge, and the rocks are just pure fun. The little rocks are actually pretty interesting, there are all sorts of colors and patterns and lines in them if you look closely. How to translate the little rocks into paint is amusing, because there are so many ways to do it. You'd think rocks would be boring, but I like my little california rocks and shells.

P.S. I'm starting to collect Austrian rocks too, but so far they'll have to wait their turn.