August 29, 2009 in Art, Teaching, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The best creative advice I've read this week comes from a computer scientist, Ivan Sutherland, in his extraordinary essay, Technology and Courage. He says:
I'm rolling those lovely words around on my tongue, and chasing them down with this observation by painter Chuck Close, from an interview with Anna Deavere Smith at the Aspen Institute. The hour-long interview is available on FORA.tv, a pleasure I stumbled across by accident and bookmarked immediately.
And back to courage, which is the subtext of all creativity... Wil Wheaton told this story on his blog recently.
August 22, 2009 in Art, Hero worship, Quotations, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Someone emailed me recently asking if it's really possible to paint using a Cyan/Magenta/Yellow (CMY), or "process colour" model. He's run into skepticism from working artists, and I'm not surprised. So, let's start with the most important thing. The late great
Douglas Adams once said
"Anything that’s invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things."
Artists couldn't paint with CMY until we had a stable, lightfast M to work with. I didn't see one on the market until the 1990s. So there aren't many practising painters who trained with M paint. We're practical people, artists, and when it comes to making work, we're surprisingly conservative. We use the materials we know. We want our paintings to last for centuries and we generally use only the tried and true materials with which we trained. Hey, we're experts at how to use two different reds, one for orange and one for purple, so that's what we do. As the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. My father drives stick instead of automatic, and I send email instead of text messages. We'd both argue we've chosen the superior technology but you know it's also because we got good at it before we turned 35 and don't see any reason to change.
If you want to persuade a painter, you'll have the most luck with
watercolourists, who are fond of a colour called Opera from Holbein,
which is a very useful magenta that some people would call pink. It's
not quite lightfast but it's still a favourite.
As for me, I trained in the classic RYB model and my thinking is still rooted there, but I have enough science education to be pretty comfortable talking about the relationship between additive and subtractive colour, the RYB model, the CMY model, and the RGB model we need to describe light.
The CMY colour model is about light, but paint relies on pigment. Pigments don't arise on the planet in optically pure colours conveniently corresponding to wavelengths of visible light. There are single-pigment paints that are close to being optically pure primaries (for magentas, you'll want to look at colours with quinacridone), but nothing perfect. There are manufactured paints that are damned close, usually gouache meant for (ephemeral) use in graphic design, but they won't be single pigment.
Here's a kickass web page that assesses a whack of magenta pigments for lightfastness. It's not a casual read (but then, upon reflection, neither is this blog entry) but it looks rock solid and matches all of my own experience with pigments like quinacridone. Looking around the site, Bruce Macavoy does an outstanding job on colour theory. Not for beginners, perhaps, but check it out.
If you want to learn to paint in a CMY model, I recommend the System 3 line of acrylics from Daler Rowney, which includes CM and Y (and sells a handy five-colour Process Set for just this purpose). It's a student grade rather than high end. It's reasonably but not thoroughly permanent. But the colours are very good primaries.
For your first exercise, take a small amount of Y and mix dabs of M into it, very gradually, painting samples onto a clean page, until you get to red. It's a mind-blowing experience and you'll want to make everyone you know try the same experiment. Especially the painters.
July 07, 2009 in Art, Quotations, Science, Teaching | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I can't express how charming I find Maira Kalman's work. You just have to try it on for size yourself.
Maira Kalman, "May it please the court" in the New York Times
Her blog, And The Pursuit of Happiness,
Maira Kalman, Moleskine sketchbook, on YouTube
She's as quirky and freewheeling in speech as she is on the page, which I find additionally charming in a creative-mystic-guru sort of way, although I concede that some listeners will find her odd. But she won me over early with her observation that "Good things come out of incomprehension." Check her out at at TED on YouTube.
July 03, 2009 in Art, Hero worship, Quotations | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
This month I attended a memorial for two beloved people and it's left me tender in spots. What I'm noticing a lot while I read isn't necessarily about art but about friendship. I could argue for a relationship between the two, but if you can't do that for yourself, you don't have the right friends. Here's what I heard lately.
From an episode of the lamented Sports Night, mostly written by Aaron Sorkin:
And from an episode of the great West Wing, also mostly written by Aaron Sorkin:
I'm also hearing about that particular sort of friend, the ally. Here's an anecdote from the remarkable writer, Nalo Hopkinson, about the legendary writer, Samuel "Chip" Delaney:
June 28, 2009 in Quotations, Teaching, What I'm reading | Permalink | Comments (0)
The deliciously readable Swiss Miss asked her readers for teaching advice this week and art/design teachers are chiming in from all over. I joined them, of course:
I’m a big believer in foregrounding your teaching objectives. Tell ‘em what you’re trying to teach. Enlist the students as a collaborators in their own educations.
We all know the weaknesses of critiques. Chatty self-congratulation and mutual admiration. Instructor monologues delivering a public grading. Student self-defense over-explaining what they tried to do at the expense of hearing what they actually did. Other students chirping up carelessly (or cruelly) to demonstrate Participation.
But the tone changes noticeably when we remember what critiques teach us. We’re not there to become critics, although some of us will. We’re there to practise observing work and assessing its strengths and weaknesses. This is the most important skill of a creative practitioner: the ability to judge the progress and accomplishment of a piece of work for ourselves. Because, kids, once you leave the classroom and the shared studio, it’s lonely out there and I’m not in charge, any more, of telling you when it’s good and when it’s bad and when it’s fresh and when it’s done. You are.
Critiques look like they’re about external validation but they’re really about the gradual transfer of authority from the instructor to the artist. I like to tell ‘em so.