Food for thought.

Just food for thought.

Color, that is what makes a painting. There is, as has been said by many, line, form, and color on a canvas. Different painters focus attention on one or two or all of these. Some, such as Ingres, think that line is the most important of the three. Not me. To me color forms the line and gives form. Concentrate on color and the lines, such as they are, appear. This method allows the viewer to use their imagination to interpret what they see. Cezanne said that “[l]ine is the means by which man accounts for the effect of light on objects, but in nature there are no lines - in nature everything is continuous and whole. … Hence, I never fix an outline; I spread a cloud of warm blond halftones over the contours - you can never put your finger right where the contours blend into the background. At close range, such labors look blurred and seem to lack precision, but at two paces everything congeals, solidifies and stands out; the body turns, the forms project, you feel the air circulating around them.”

When painting, you must paint what you see and not what your brain is telling you that you see. This is very hard to do. The brain of a living being uses its eyes to interpret what it sees. And based on experience and knowledge the brain programs shapes and forms so as to make living possible. Only children can see things without being influenced about what they are seeing. Leon Pelouse said that “[w]hen a child first begins to see, he or she is not biased by the knowledge that objects exist. The child looks for patterns of light. It takes a child some time to know what these gradations and smudges signify. As a child learns about objects, it forgets their original appearance and sees more with the mind than with its eyes.” One’s mind knows what things are and how they look. But in a general sense.

As an example of what I mean about the brain being programmed to know “things” it sees, consider this. Say you want to pick up a fork to eat a salad, instead of a knife or spoon. When you look down and see all three on the table, you will reach down and pick up the fork. Somehow, your brain knows what a fork looks like, and without any thought , you pick it up.. Now, forks come in many shapes ans sizes, but there is, in your brain, a basic idea of what a fork looks like, just as in Plato’s world of ideas.

So it is with painting. Paint what you see. When painting a tree, do not paint a tree but paint the colors that you see, without any preconceived idea of what the tree must look like.

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