Two Harry Topics

Today I am starting a new painting so I don't have anything to show you, but I do have two really nice art topics to share with you. Both topics came from talking with friends, then further discussion with Mister Harry [alias Mister Gray]

I have mentioned my new internet friend to you before. Her name is Lori and she is the one who bought Mister Black with Red Pear and a couple other paintings, too. She is an artist and she emailed me about yesterday's topic of modeling vs flatness. As I was thinking of the difference and interplay of the two, I asked Harry to expound. I can always count on Mister Gray Harry to give me some really good stuff. In fact it was so good I decided to share with you here.

From the mouth of The Gray Hare Himself:
Modeling is going into a bag of tricks to create the illusion of depth. Flatness is a truthful acceptance of the flatness of the surface. Modeling, or illusion, means deception. Renaissance painters depicted the epitome of illusion because they were the ones who developed linear perspective. Modern art was a movement against the Renaissance to reaffirm the flatness of the surface. For example The School of Athens by Rapheal shows tremendous depth by creating the illusion of space using linear perspective, aerial or atmospheric perspective, & overlapping.

When Neoclassiom came along soon after the Renaissance, artists began to create a shallower depth of field, thereby ushering in the beginning of the modern movement. An example is David's paintings such as the "Oath of the Horati" seen here.















A good example of modern flatness would be Matisse's paintings with the flat un-modeled patterns throughout. Even his un-modeled goldfish seem like a flat decorative pattern.

A lot of the modernists were influenced by the Asian cultures which never accepted linear perspective. For them, things did not recede to a vanishing point, but opened up into all of space.

Cezanne provided another example of this. His paintings used shifting vantage points. Linear perspective relies on a single vantage point. The way we actually see is by constantly shifting vantage points which when used in a painting looks very awkward and flat. That's the essence of modern art.

Remember too that Picasso along with Matisse collected African art. African art really challenged the visual depth of the Renaissance because the African cultures thought that the copying of nature, naturalism, was a creative weakness and did not belong in an art that was dedicated to appeasing the unearthly world of the dead, etc.

The second topic of conversation [are you still here? are you sleeping in class...tsk tsk... you may be graded on this you know...] came from an email exchange with Annette. She was responding to my blog where Harry was saying that painting is torture to him.

Annette said:
...But it seems that Harry needs to paint from his passion, not his compulsion....which is what I thought he did. He needs to break it wide open! But then what do I know. I need to pick his brain on this. Maybe I misunderstand but life is about being happy not torture? right? Or am I just too naive? But I don't read torture into what he paints. I thought Van gogh committed suicide because he was tortured with manic/ depression, schizophrenia, or bi-polar disease?

Harry asked me to publish his clarification/response in my blog:
It's an undeniable compulsion, an intense love-hate relationship. The studio is a battleground for control. My ideas versus their illogical demands. They summon and I resist. Finally they break me, finally I listen. They're always right. I'd rather be doing something else; fortunately they won't allow it.

If you read this far you get an A+.