Anton

 I have spent the last year in my countryside studio with Anton, a young peacock who just wandered in one day.

A rolling stone

"Sisyphus" marble 2010 Michael Pionteki Kehrlein


The absurd hero, the rolling stone....

Going beyond

"The Rape of Proserpina" (detail)1621-1622, Bernin

The subject, rape, is not not my interest( in fact the title is often "rapt" which in history is not quite the same as it is used today). In any case the sculpture itself is sublime. Sublime? It's often difficult to separate the aesthetic value in art from the subject. In this case, I want to look at this image and I get immense pleasure doing so.



"Self Portrait" Lucien Freud


I am not sure what pleasure I get from this painting, but I get a lot of it. Again I go beyond the subject, maybe. I am drawn into the painters world, evidently a little tortured( I can relate to that), it's the painting's sensuous quality which captivates me.

Life of feeling

"Ancient Silence", Beverly Pepper,2009 ©Beverly Pepper


"The abstract language of form that I have chosen has become a way to explore an interior life of feeling...I wish to make an object that has a powerful presence,but is at the same time inwardly turned,seeming capable of intense self-absorption" Beverly Pepper. This quote keeps ringing in my ears, as it is essentially what Malevich was painting in "Composition White on White", and what I am expressing in "Hero".




"Hero" Pionteki Kehrlein




This morning when I saw "Ancient Silence" for the first time, my heart gave a huge leap, AND the sculptor is 88 years old!
Here I was thinking that nothing was happening outside the "ART MARKET", that we had all sold out to "THE MAN", but no, this lady is keeping the flame lit. By the way for you New Yorkers she is showing right now at Marborough.






"One Pixel" Yana Kehrlein


Yana isolated one pixel from a photograph of a Valasquez painting and printed it out 34.3cm x 34.3cm. Yana is "moderate suprematist".

Moderate Suprematism

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition White on White. 1918,




"If one insists on judging an art work on the basis of the virtuosity of the objective representation, the verisimilitude of the illusion, and thinks he sees in the objective representation itself a symbol of the inducing emotion, he will never partake of the gladdening content of a work of art.
Our life is a theater piece, in which nonobjective feeling is portrayed by objective imagery. the Suprematist does not observe and does not touch - he feels." Kazimir Malevich





Challange vs. skill Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi



In his seminal work, 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience', Csíkszentmihályi outlines his theory that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow— a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. The idea of flow is identical to the feeling of being in the zone or in the groove. The flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. This is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by a feeling of great absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and skill—and during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored.

Concentrating on the center of the Challange vs. Skill illustration I see white. We might say then that being in harmony with the "highs" and "lows" would be a white space. In his 1918 Suprematist Composition, White on White, Malevich attempted to eliminate all superfluous elements, including the color.




Additive color model


An additive color model involves light emitted directly from a source(It should be noted that additive color is a result of the way the eye detects color, and is not a property of light). Additive color systems start without light (black). Additive colors are often counterintuitive for people accustomed to the more everyday subtractive color system of pigments, dyes, inks and other substances which present color to the eye by reflection rather than emission.






Subtractive color model

Subtractive color systems start with light, white light. Oil painting is a substractive system, if we add the three primary colors we obtain black. White paint absorbs the primary colors and reflects white. Malevich eliminated color with color, using white he absorbed all the "feelings" and reflecting none.

So where are we today? Is our color reference a substractive or an additive system of preception? Do we see more images on the computer or in art galleries? And in the art gallery, are the images created by a subtractive or additive system? Digitally created images, which are very much "a la une", have a particular color system,(computer monitors and televisions use a system called optical mixing and cannot be considered additive light because the colors do not overlap. The red green and blue pixels are side-by-side. When a green color appears, only the green pixels light up. When a cyan color appears, both green and blue pixels light up. When white appears all the pixels light up. Because the pixels are so small and close together our eyes blend them together, having a similar effect as additive light), and are printed out using an additive system, or projected, as in video installations using computer monitors. In contemporary painting I see the artist using pigments, organic or inorganic, to create an illusion of the "modern reality" I'm not so sure we know where we are at today, it's a little too close to the situation to have a "clear" perspective, time will tell. One thing we could say is that to completely "feel" we must find a "harmony" within these different systems.

Color revisited

Cave painting Lascaux,France

In the begining man used iron oxide and charcoal as pigments.




Tiziano Vecellio, Assunta, 1516-1518, Santa Maria gloriosa dei Frari, Venezia

Titien used Vermillon(mercury sulfide mineral,cinnabar,very toxic)




"The Milkmaid" Johannes Vermeer 1660

Vermeer used Indian yellow(from the urine of cattle fed only mango leaves),lapis lazuli and carmine(dried cochineal beetle).






Death of Sardanapalus Delacroix, 1828

I don't want to give a history of color, I'm just skimming over time to illustrate a little how our aesthetics have changed. In the need to express themselves the artist has used the means at hand. The caveman used iron oxide(red earth) and charcoal from his fire. As time went on we became more travelled so the artist's palette became more complexe. Unfortunately many of the pigments were found to be toxic(cinnabar), inhumane(indian yellow) or simply to expensive(lapis lazuli), so we synthesized color and the modern era began. In 1841 the first paint tubes came into being and art changed even more, now the artist could paint "en plein aire". Artists started using photography(Delacroix) as an aid. In general morals were loosening, content and form adapted to the new aesthetic.





"The Great Wave off Kanagawa" by Hokusai 1832

Hokusai used prussian blue, the first synthetic color to be produced(1706).






Venice Twilight Monet 1908




Black Square,Kazimir Malevich, c. 1915






BLAM, Roy Lichtenstein, 1962. oil



Ralph's Diner (1982),Ralph Goings, Oil on canvas.

Photorealist painters like Goings relied totally on photographs, but still used oil paint as a medium









Maui Kelley Walker 2001 CD Rom and Poster on canvas 7 x 9 ft


Today many artist's depend on digital photo reproductions and acrylic paint.

The work presented here gives a quick look at the changes in art through color and the changing subject matter. Today the artist doesn't really have to know how to paint, it is of secondary importance, he wants to get across his idea and uses the materials at hand, like we always have!

Color

Man with a Blue Sleeve Titien





I was invited to join a online art magazine today(Art et Peinture), on opening up it's "homepage" I saw a little box at the bottom intitled "le petit dico arstistique" it read: "Couleur primaire : couleur ne pouvant être obtenue par le mélange d'autres couleurs, ce sont le
cyan, le magenta, et le jaune"
I understood something very important to understand art today; we don't know what we are talking about! or at least by ignorance we are mixing everything up.
Cyan is certainly NOT a primary color in painting! Cyan is a printers color and a computer color and in painting the closest we come to Cyan would be Turquoise or Azurite(both being green/blue). Magenta likewise is a printing and computer color (#FF00FF), halfway between red and blue. Both Cyan and Magenta are synthetic.

Since the invention of color printing, and the reproduction of original oil painting by this process, our visual perception has been polluted, now we have the computer to make things even worse! If our perception of form(form refers to the visible elements of a piece of art, independent of their meaning) is polluted, as suggested, then an integral part of the "ouevre" is distorted which could mean that access to the "whole" meaning of said "ouevre" is impossible. I often wonder if this hypothese applies to music and poetry(recorded music or poetry read on the computer). Maybe I am being a purist and should let the end justify the means. I love poetry books, I even smell them, caress them, besides reading them!
It's always with a certain restraint that I look at a Titien painting on the computer, I keep in mind that what I am looking at is a distortion, but it does bring up memories and using these memories I am able to elevate my appreciation a little bit.


'Spiritual America IV' featuring Brooke Shields by US artist Richard Prince in the exposition "Pop Life"

All this brings us to Art today. There is show circulating around entitled " Pop Life" which takes Andy Warhol's provacative claim "Good Business is the Best Art" as it's starting point. I don't intend to discuss business and art right now, maybe, MAYBE, at a later date. What IS pertenent, at this point, is that pop art depends on the "new" color system in it's realization, becoming an intergal part of the "ouevre", and thusly we can "see" the work as a "whole" in magazines,posters even on the computer. We could say that to fully understand contemporary art we must accept new rules. If we attempt to look at art today with the perspective of old we will be lost.


"Marilyn" Andy Warhol(Image may be subject to copyright).