Resurrection!

Last year, in preparation for a show at Cantrell Gallery, I pulled a few old paintings from the closet to rework.  I had shown these at one point but then realized they were actually failures.  I decided to start with a scene from downtown North Little Rock (aka Argenta.) It depicts 3 figures waiting at a trolley stop in front of a purple building. I chose the scene primarily because the purple building is a mainstay on Main Street in Argenta. You really can't hardly miss it. The painting was done in January of 2009 so it was 4 years old when I did this rework.  Here is my self analysis and thought process:

  Looking at it, I think it is obvious that my goal at that time was very similar to what my goal would be today if I started this painting from scratch: a loose, immediate vibe with economy of brush stroke.

This first thing I see is that light pole on the left side traversing the entire canvas HAS to go! Secondly, the foliage on the right side needs to either be eliminated or pruned back. Refer to Figure 1.

Figure 1

Before I went any further in my analysis, I went ahead and took about 20 minutes to basically re-mass everything but the figures. I knew something needed to be done about them but had not thought it through much. At this stage, I enlarged the building ever so slightly and fixed some minor perspective issues.

Now I'm confronted with the big question of what to do about the people at the trolley stop. The arrangement as it was painted in 2009 is cluttered. The purple building and the trolley stop with figures occupy almost identical amounts of surface area. The roofline of the trolley stop is perilously close to the same height as the purple building and this severely stunts any verticals in the composition. (Perhaps that was why I hamhandedly included the light pole??) So a critical decision must be made: what is the painting about? Is it about the people or the purple building? I had named it "Waiting on the Trolley" thus making it originally about the people. But if I genuinely want to make it about the people at the trolley stop then I really need to push the building back to subordinate it. However, the building is the reason I wanted to paint this corner in the first place. If I want to make it about the building then I need to subordinate the figures and the trolley stop. Ideally, I would do this by pushing them back in space and further to the right in the picture, possibly even cropping part of the trolley stop. This is the course of action I prefer but there is a critical consideration here. The trolley makes a left turn right beside this purple building so the trolley stop must be clearly indicated as existing in front of that intersection! In painting real locations, one must realize there are important details and not so important details. This falls into the important detail column I think. I could probably achieve the subordination I desire without sacrificing the reality of the location by increasing the presence of the road that cuts left to right across the scene. In effect, this pushes the viewer closer to the curb and might require a slight modification of the perspective of the both the purple building and the trolley stop.

In order to prevent having to do that, I could also shift the near corner of the purple building to the left. This would give the effect of moving the lateral street "back" relative to a diminshed size and location of the trolley stop figures without sacrificing the size of the building.

That's 3 options:

1. Push the building back and keep figures where they are, figures are the focal point
2. Increase the size of the building and street, move figures right and adjust perspective on both, building is the focal point
3. Push building slightly left and figures to the right, should require little perspective change, building or street becomes focal point

Option 1 is the easiest to execute while option 3 will require the most effort. Option 2 falls in between I think. I opt for Option 1. I pushed the building back by reducing it's size and reducing the saturation in the color. After deleting the foliage on the right hand side I realized that this made too much open space and added a crepe myrtle tree further in the distance and much smaller in size.

Waiting on the Trolley

 

Don't Trust the Camera's Lies!

Cameras do not see a scene the same way the human eye does.  The camera is an unflinching tool which sees each and every object in the field of view with the same clarity as every thing else.  It is not selective.  It does not care one whit for anything it sees.  The human eye, on the other hand, scans a scene and picks out specific things on which to focus, things it likes and things it dislikes.  It spends more time dwelling on the things it likes and passes over the things it dislikes.  As an artist working from photos or in plein air, I get to be the eye of the viewer.  It is my selection that determines which objects will be your focus in the end piece and I carefully eliminate the things I determine you will not like.  The green artist takes the photo and tries to replicate everything they see.  They fail to understand that a camera is a tool and presents no truth.  In my mind, there is more truth in the artist's carefully manicured result which selectively emphasizes some things and eliminates others.

Cameras also have a nasty habit of mangling color relative to what the human eye perceives.  I think this is particularly true of digital cameras.  While the modern camera may be able to capture a much broader gamut of colors than many humans can see, this does not capture light in anywhere close to a manner similar to human eye/brain system.  The image formed in your brain is dynamic and each rod and cone produces a response to an individual photon of the wavelength it is designed to detect.  Meanwhile, a digital camera is like a vast array of tiny buckets, with each individual bucket being a pixel in the final image.  Photons of various wavelengths from many many different directions strike the focal plane array (or bucket array) of the digital camera during the time the shutter is "open" and the energies of each photon is captured and stored in the bucket that it fell upon.  A pixel bucket that depicts part of a tree in the final image will have collected photons from many more sources than just the tree.  The camera will take all of the wavelengths and average them together to get a final color that is NOT what the eye sees when looking at the same tree.  Professional photographers know this too and that is why all of the good ones post process their results to some extent in software!  There is nothing inherent in paint that makes it capture a better image of what the mind reads from the eyes more readily than film or a focal plane array. It is the studied mind of the creator behind the process that allows pigments to be assembled into a selective construct which we will call art.  The green artist will again look at the photo and try to replicate the colors the camera made up.  As an aside, I think it's very fascinating to think the manner in which our eyes detect color and the mysterious manner in which our brain assembles those nerve impulses into an image is probably not a very good approximation of the truth of reality either!  Think of all the data we are missing because of the response time of our rods and cones or what types of data our brains may just simply make up to bridge gaps that our eyes cannot process!  How different the truth of the world may indeed be from our limited perception.

If there IS one thing that cameras tend to do well, it is to capture value information.  Value is, and I suspect few people would argue with me, the backbone of realist painting.  Without proper values relative to one another, the whole illusion of space and three-dimensionality falls apart.

Working with photographs is an excellent method, but only when one realizes that the picture can only provide so much information and the mind of the creator must make up for their limitations.