A Liberating Approach to Painting

I recently came across an interview of artist Larry Poons through the Unedit my heart blog.

I find Mr Poons' understanding of painting liberating.
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Paintings are mistakes. You put a mark on a canvas, and it’s a mistake. Of course it’s a mistake, otherwise it would be wonderful, because it would be finished. But it’s not. After maybe 50 or 60,000 mistakes, you give up. Like Leonardo said, “Works of art aren’t finished, they’re abandoned.” That’s absolutely true, art is never finished.

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When you’re painting, then you’ve got nothing to paint until there’s something there, that first mistake. But once you see something – you’ll see a flow or a shape – then that’s what you’re painting, and that’s where paintings come from.

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Of course the only tool a painter has – or ever had – to make paintings is color. It’s all color. There is no drawing in painting, just like Cézanne said. What you think is drawing is just two colors coming together, and if the colors aren’t harmonious (to use Cézanne’s word) then neither is the drawing, and it’s a bad painting.

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Create Drawings based on Art from the Past or Art by other Artists

Over the Christmas holidays, I have introduced another change (besides adding erase) to my colouring book drawings. After making 1500 drawings, I need injection of new forms and shapes and composition. Hence, I have started to look at art work from the past, and art work from today's artists, and treat them as subjects for new drawings.

The first such drawings are drawings of King Tut.

The second batch are drawings based on the the work of John Baldessari.

Being Pictorial

There is a wonderful write up at Saatchi Online by Matthew Collings on the Picasso exhibit at the National Gallery in London.

It is the work of Picasso that has inspired me to draw. The following text from the essay speaks to the reasons.

... old masters are profoundly abstract but modern art is explicitly abstract.

Picasso is always a lesson about reading the past. The lesson is that some visual traditions run out and become impossible but some remain powerful and modern art isolates and emphasises them.

The word for what a painting essentially is, as opposed to what is depicted, is "pictorial," and it's the pictorial realm that Picasso is the king of, not the sex realm or free-thinking law breaker realm.

If Picasso were Chinese

After a swim, on the beach at Golfe-Juan, we are talking about Chinese characters. A Chinese friend is drawing Chinese characters in the sand. Picasso has amused himself before by drawing his own ideograms in the sand: bulls, goats, faces of peace. He is fascinated by the interplay of Chinese characters, the strengths and economy of their construction.

"If I were born Chinese" says he, "I would not be a painter but a writer. I'd write my pictures".

The above text is from the book "Picasso on Art" by Dore Ashton. The original French text came from "L'Amour de la peinture: Goya, Picasso et autres peintres" by Claude Roy.

Interrelationship of calligraphy and painting

From a page at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art web site:

To understand the lack of color in many Chinese landscape paintings, one must fully appreciate the interrelationship of calligraphy and painting.

Calligraphy and painting use the same formats and tools (brush, ink, paper, and silk). The basic methods of handling a brush and ink to create the individual strokes of a Chinese character can also be used to create descriptive lines and textures in painting.

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In this hanging scroll, entitled Woods and Valleys of Mount Yu, by the artist Ni Zan (1306–1374), the correspondence between calligraphy and painting becomes apparent.

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Ni Zan, using abstract brushstrokes to suggest three-dimensional forms, exploits the tension between surface pattern and the illusion of recession to animate his composition.

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To see the detail of this painting, follow this link and click on "Open full-size image".

Drawing A-B-C

I came across this wonderful video through Drawn.ca.

I have never thought there can be so much drama in watching a child painting the alphabets.

This video also happens to be an excellent illustration of my ideas on ...

1) Writing being a form of Drawing (illustrated by young Gradus W. Wouters on the left), and ...

2) Drawing being a form of Writing (illustrated by Job Wouters on the right).