The Tyranny of the Seen
Getting Beyond the Source
It came last night like a bolt out of the blue. I was sleeping, minding my own business. I’ve been working on a difficult, complicated piece, and I was maybe a day away from finishing it, and I saw it in my dream. Different.
Now let’s back up and lay out that what I’ve been trying to show in this series is the uncanny in a way that looks normal.
The reason I started this series is probably due to another vision I had when half sleeping, years ago. I was thinking about how we are at in inflection point in our society, when forces of destruction of all kinds are breathing down our necks. When the little bands that start up to do something positive tend to be either blocked or delusional. I’m not seeing balance. How to paint this?
The first image that came to mind is the Sherwin Williams “Cover the Earth” advertisement, with a dripping globe. Nix that.
When I learned a few years ago about the Old Testament concept that angels are beings of light and energy, and each has one purpose, to implement a divine impetus, that sounded like a paintable device I could use to convey a complicated meaning. So a few years ago I started painting angels. I left out the wings because every time I drew them in they looked ridiculous. Besides the cliché, wings make an angel six-limbed, by definition an insect. Ridiculous. I thought of the story of the three angels who visited Abraham and Sarah to announce she would get pregnant, and I liked that they looked like ordinary men. It wasn’t hokey.
So I painted angels as women in white dresses. But people read these paintings strictly as women in white dresses. I was missing a critical indicator. This piece I’m currently working on and I’ve almost finished, it’s still a chick outside in a white dress.
Early in the year I had the idea of shining a spotlight full-frontal at the model, to blow out the form and thereby create a being of light. But I didn’t want to lose the form.
I tried painting the figure transparent, to indicate it’s a being who isn’t visible, and once again, it looked like a cliché.
So I was back to a chick in a white dress. This chick in a white dress is an angel of destruction. I like the idea that all beginnings need an end, that endings aren’t necessarily evil, that an angel of destruction is a sort of neutral entity that clears away what’s done so something new can start. So I gave my chick in a white dress a sword. A working reproduction of a Greek short sword, sharp and scary if you heft it, but at the end of the day, it’s just a picture of a chick outside in a white dress with a sword. The uncanny wasn’t there. It was a problem I couldn’t solve. That’s why it’s taking me so long to finish this painting.
I’ve been trapped in the tyranny of the visible, where the literal kills imagination.
Last night, I dreamed that painting where the woman has spectral edges. Meaning, the light refracts towards the edge of the form into its constituent colors. A being of light.
Would it work? I tested it all night in my mind. Maybe it will work. I don’t know. But it’s an idea.
They say that inspiration does occasionally strike, but it’s pretty rare, and it doesn’t strike unless it finds you working. Earlier in the evening I had been watching a demo video by Michael Klein on Patreon, in which he was working on a portrait he had started months before from life. The model wasn’t there and he hadn’t taken a photo. He was just surmising the subtleties of color and form from his head, because he had no source but wanted to pursue the piece further.
I used to paint from my head, but when I started atelier training, I stopped, because working from my head, I couldn’t get the level of realism I wanted. Still, after the experience of several years’ working solely from sources, you get to know what to expect things to look like.
When I went to grad school, I used to paint solely from black and white photographs, because I wanted to invent the colors. If I had a color photograph, I would fall into the tyranny of the seen. I would take orders from the photograph and copy the colors exactly as I saw them. Likewise, when I am in front of a model, I take orders from what I see in front of me.
A painting needs you to make decisions independent from reality. It needs you to make your decisions solely based on what it needs. So when the shapes you see are bad for composition, you change them. When the colors you see clash or go dead, you change them. The ability to edit and change reality in a believable way is the whole reason to spend years copying reality. You want to memorize the real so you can fake it. So you can free yourself from the tyranny of the visible.
When I watched this video from Klein, I noticed how he was thinking. He had a clear light direction in mind. He had a clear light color in mind, which means he also had an idea of the shadow color in mind. He knew what the form did. He knew the local colors. The exercise of working from imagination was connecting the dots.
It’s not so hard. I used to do it as a kid. You say, the light is coming from *here*. You make a decision, is the light warm or cold? You pick one, and the shadow is going to be the opposite. The form has its own local color, and it builds in saturation as it approaches the core shadow. Where the light hits, the light color melds with the local color.
But I’ve never done spectral edges. I was lying in bed half asleep, with the angel nothing but a column of light buzzing like a flurescent bulb about to blow a fuse beside me in bed. I spent all night squinting at my painting in my mind, trying out cold light, trying out warm light, and trying to see what colors were on the edges of the form, in what order. Is the light cold or warm? How do I paint the nose if the light is cold and the edges are spectral? Do the edges break out like a rainbow? If so, do we only have half the spectrum on the lit side and half on the shadow side? If the light is cold, do I make the edge green? Blue? Would it look stupid? Do I make the edge within the form or around it? I was thinking about Wayne Thibaud and Jeffrey T. Larson, whose edges definitely do not look stupid.
All night I couldn’t sleep because the buzzing of the angel was so loud and its light hurt my eyes, and I was busy, so busy, looking at the progression of high chroma at the edges, trying to figure out what I was seeing.
I woke up exhausted.
I am not going to do some wild experimenting on my painting that I’ve been working on for a month and which is almost done. This painting is not small but it’s mostly landscape, and the figure is small. I hate working small and the size of this figure is its biggest difficulty. Now I have to figure out how to do tiny weird brightly colored edges and have it look believable. So I’m going to do a study first. Most people, when they do studies, they do them small to work out issues so then they can work big. I do big studies to work out how to paint them small.
Anyway, now I have a direction. I have research to do.