Observations

The Most Fundamental Question That A Painter Must Ask Is: “What Shall I Paint?”

For some, the answer will be a landscape that strikes their imagination. For others it may be the challenge of rendering a still life or a portrait. Often, the answer to that question introduces a new question, then another, and the artist may find themselves following a muse to a place that they never expected to go.

I started painting again after a long hiatus.  Alone in a house on a remote island, I was confronted by the intensity of color  in the sunrise, sunsets, and storms as they filled the landscape. So I began to paint the landscape that I saw. In the process of painting the landscape, I began to remember my dreams and these affected how I rendered the landscape. But what about the other elements that created the landscape but were not as visible? What about the wind?  There were so many different sounds that the wind made.  What about the sound of the water, or the sound that the waves made, or the sound of rain on the water?  What about the smell of the approaching rain, or the falling rain, or the quiet after the rain stopped?  These things affected how I saw the landscape, but could they be expressed visually?  Could I paint only the emotion of what I felt viewing the landscape without painting the landscape itself?

I am not the first artist to be confronted with this question. How can I express something visually that cannot be seen?

The answer, for me, was not to paint an image that would “re-present”  a visual image or any reference to the visual landscape. Color itself became the central part of the painting. How how do different colors make you feel?  What is the conversation between two or more colors?  Does texture change the way that you feel when viewing a color? 

And what about the shape and size of a painting?  Does changing the scale of a painting affect the response to it?  Changing the shape from horizontal to vertical, from rectangular to square?  How does the color of light illuminating it affect how you feel about a painting, or the color of the room, or the size of the room that it is viewed in?

To me, if a painting or sculpture “works,” there is really nothing to see but only to feel, and the feeling that each person who views the work feels will be personal for each individual, and will be able to change continually as the mood and experiences of the viewer change.  The “ART” here is not in the artwork, but in the perceptional experience of the viewer.

An artist, or viewer, who confronts these questions will soon find themselves in a wilderness, living among wild ideas, comfortable with absurdities, and searching for answers that can never be found.