Clarifying Expectations... Openness About What A Piece of Art Is Intended to Achieve

"Gnome, Gnome, Gnome"


So I hate abstract art. What I hate about it is its lack of humanity. A bunch of scribbles, square shapes on a canvas, an american flag done 3 times...Claims are made - by the artists, by their promoters, by gallery and auction houses, by a lot of people with something to gain - about the meaning and depth of these kinds of works. But in the end they fail to communicate and inspire the vast swath of humanity. And in the end, these promoters claim that it is the "ignorance" of people that is the fault in this giant gap between the intent of the work done and its inability to communicate that intent. Bullshit.

Failure is failure. Art has worked for millennia because the result matched the intent. It is not an act of genius to make most people scratch their heads in confusion when they look at something that someone claims is "art". Genius is as rare in art as every place else. And what is promoted as genius, just like everywhere else, rarely is actual genius.
The lack of humanity shows in lack of appeal, lack of understandable, common, layered, robust and moving imagery.

So with that in mind, I started my most recent work with the intent that I would put out there, before I even began painting, the intent of every aspect of the work that I could think of.

This isn't a difficult or even radical idea, But I'm very surprised that it isn't something that's been "out there" for a while. Why wouldn't an artist publish their intent for the world to think about, instead of leaving it up to galleries, promoters, managers and the general public to conjecture, spin and BS about? So here goes...

This painting was intended as a portfolio piece, to show that I can do children's book illustrations. But I can't be happy with a straight-up children's book picture, all happy and 2 dimensional. I also thought it'd be a good idea to come up with a story. To show that I can make images that go with a story (even though I do that every day, and have for the last 15 years.)

So I had to come up with a story, and give it a bit of a twist.

Dragons, because it's a whole fricking genre now, and they're fun to make. And Gnomes, because what goes with dragons but fairies, elves, trolls, gnomes, wizards, etc. 

So the story takes place in a suburban yard, because the target market is parents who read to their kids. And parents who value reading, and have money to buy children's books often have enough money to own a home. Just identifying with my target market, folks.

And instead of just gnomes, garden gnomes, because they fit into the target market preferred setting, the home garden.

Fish out of water, real dragon with garden gnomes fits my requirement for creating an additional dimension to the story with a situation ripe for conflict.

Obviously, the fun comes in when you consider what might actually happen when a dragon comes in contact with delicious gnomes. But it is intended for kids, so you can barely see the gnome parts sticking out of the dragon's mouth, with just a little smidge of blood around the dragon's mouth.

MY GOAL: Make a children's book illustration that has a bit of reality in the scenario (mayhem and murder) without proving to a potential publisher that I can't make a happy fun picture for little kids. Did I succeed?

So that was the concept portion.
The more attention, more effort and layers of intent are integrated into it, the more attention the art warrants from the viewer. After the concept comes the composition.

This idea seemed to come with a composition already in my head. But there were plenty of requirements that dictated this composition:

1) I wanted it to be a sunny morning, because the humans would wake up to the mayhem.

2) It had to be horizontal to fit in the dragon

3) This allowed for the gnomes to be spread out through the scene, and gain the attention from the viewer that their different attitudes towards the event would show in their poses.

4) Dragon head on the right because we read left to right.

I'm happy to admit that there is a little bit of emulation in there as well...

This work, by one of my favorite artists, Berni Wrightson, is called "Ssshhh". The hump-shape of the dragon is the main thing, but also the way his tail seems abnormally long, to the extent that you don't know where it's coming from. That said, I definitely did not directly reference "Ssshhh" while composing or drawing my picture.

DRAWING

This is separate from the big aspects of COMPOSITION because it deals with decisions made BASED UPON the overall composition. Once the larger decisions are made, I can move on to these smaller ones. 

While some of these ideas have to do with object shape and placement, some are based on intended value and color ideas, and I include them here because I made them at this point, and I used the drawing as a way to firm them up, get them down on paper. 

But again, the reason for this blog is to be clear about what I tried to do, and let you decide whether I succeeded or not.

1) The pickets in the front, in blue shadow, create a deeper space by defining the area much closer to the viewer than all of the action. The majority of activity is happening at roughly the same distance from the viewer, in front of the house. If I have nothing happening, and nothing even defined near the viewer, it will be almost impossible for the viewer to engage in scene in any way other than something distant and separate. Defining the near space invites the viewer in.

2) The Dragon:

     His tail appears and disappears behind, over and around the house. This allows the viewer to imagine and complete this fun shape in their mind (a gestalt idea in action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology). 

The end of the tail points back to the focal point, the dragon's face. His one visible eye is large and cartoonish, and he wears a mischievous grin. Those are the the cute, children's book  aspects. 

3) Eye contact between the front gnome and the dragon, and their obviously opposing emotional attitudes, creates clarity and resonance of the story.

4) Overall, even in the tree tops, I emphasized a repeating pattern of curvy, bumped-up shapes as the overall rhythm. I believe this is a pleasant, unthreatening and common shape, and helps make the picture more appealing to younger viewers.

PAINTING/COLOR

1) All of the action happens in a warm color space. Everything else is in cool color space, including the viewer's position, safe from the mayhem. This is to draw the viewer to the action and define depth in the picture plane.

2) The dragon's orange color is simply meant to contrast with the overall greens and blues, as are his purple spines, with the added benefit of being bright and cheery, again, children's book colors.

3) While unrealistic, the grass value gradates gradually from lighter on the left to darker on the right. Since the sun is millions of miles away, the light strength would not fall off over this short distance. But this device helps to make the light source location more dramatic.

4) Like the grass, the dragon is much lighter on the left side than the right side.

5) First time I've done translucency, in the purple spines on the dragon.

6) The obvious lighting direction makes clear the time-of-day implication.

THINGS I CHANGED IN-PROCESS

1) The pickets interfered with the near gnome, so I shortened the pickets

2) The trees were too simplified/cartooney and similarly sized and shaped. So I created more variation in the trunk width, but did not add natural detail in branches, etc., which would have helped.

3) The dark, shadowed edge of the house on the right created a strong, straight vertical contrast tangent with the curly cues of the black smoke. So I continued the house right into the smoke, making a clear contrast difference between light house and black smoke (Thanks Allison Westbrook).

4) The gnome on the right was originally intended to be part in and part out of light. But putting him all in shadow, like the pickets, helps invites the viewer back into the picture, as does his direction, running from right to left.

AREAS OF FAILURE
1) The dragon's 4 feet seem to merge into each other, so it's difficult to separate them from each other visually.
2) There is a tangent that occurs with his snout, the flame, and the edge of the house... too many object's edges coming together in one place. It makes a compositional mess.
3) Because I made neither a value nor color studies, I ended up floundering in many mid-ground areas where there is a variety of values. The negative result is that the dragon has a variety of colors and values ascribed to shadow areas. Notably, the difference between the cheek shadow area and the hind limb shadow.
4) Tangent between gnome with hands covering face and edge of smoke. Should have moved him to the right.

5) Scales on the dragon would have been just too much work, so I skipped them

In the end, because I felt the idea was so strong, I didn't think that I needed a value study or a color study. Not doing these made the painting take 50% longer, and resulted in less cohesive color and value structures in the painting.

That's it. I had to rush the picture to a show, currently on at Hot Pop on Water St. (Milwaukee). So please go see it!

How do you give your art more value?

Say you're bored with your art.

Or say you can't find a way to put more into it. You can only knock out small works. You get bored with them, your inspiration only lasts for a day or two. You know that your viewers are getting the same experience: Bam! Nice. On to the next. You'd like to make people more invested in your work, but you can't find a way to get yourself more involved. Energy in... energy out.

How do you increase the value of your work. For you, and for your viewers?

If you're an artist that's happy with your work, then you approach it with your inspiration first. You approach your canvas with your idea, and you work that idea. You don't work around the idea, doing preliminary sketches of ancillary aspects. You don't let your inspiration leak away while you do studies, test out a new brand of paint, or do a "warm-up" painting. You get right down to it and work on your idea. You work in the medium you're comfortable with, at the time you usually work, in the space you're comfortable in. You do everything you need to in order to get the idea down.

This is a sure-fire way to get work done. But by itself, it doesn't leave room for growth. And growth is the way to increase the value of your work. But what is value?

Value is LAYERING. Value is combining as many creative aspects as possible into a single work. You do it now, and you probably know you do it.
You combine background and foreground. You combine knowledge of figurative expression with pattern. You combine a love of composition with painterly technique. You combine natural forms with stylized line work. You combine texture with lighting. You combine careful dimensional modeling with impressionistic color work.

Where you are probably stuck is at the things you think you're NOT good at.

Are you a painter, but don't think your draftsmanship is worth considering? If you have a unique painting style, then of course your draftsmanship is latent in how you paint.

Are you an excellent draftsman, but have no painting chops? You're already defining shape and composition just in line. It's just prioritizing line over shape that makes painting seem difficult.

Are you inspired by composition, but think you can't draw detail? Your ability to analyze composition is all that's needed to dissect the structure of a face, figure, lighting, texture and color.

Talents that we haven't expressed yet in our work are latent in our love of that kind of work.

Do you love M.C. Escher's precision, but you have a painterly technique? There is probably a way to combine them that no one has before.

Is your work based strictly in carefully constructed line work, like that of comic book artists, but you also love the dynamism and fluidity of John Singer Sargent? Who else has combined those two things?

Who else can express your vision of how those two things should fit together to make an amazing whole?

Originality comes from the courage to combine ALL of the aesthetic loves that we have.

I know, it feels like no one is asking for it. Cute with threatening? Droll with precise? Home-spun with vampires? Organic with Furniture? Satanic with food recipes?

All of your heroes combined things in a way that nobody was looking for. Why? Because those were the things that they loved.

Why is a drawing of a photograph more fun to look at than the photograph itself?

So what's the difference between a photograph and art? Why does a drawing of a photograph excite us more than the photograph itself?

I was trying to describe why this works with my student, Klaudia Rixman, an extremely talented 14 year old artist. My point was that when we draw something, we distill it. And when the steps, processes, layers and DECISIONS we make are visible, it is the interplay and layering of those decisions that are exciting.

I recently found a drawing demo video by artist Erik Gist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwQdOgAD_Bc

What excited me and made me want to click on it was the image of his drawing on the link:

Beautiful, right?

Here is the photo he used:

Great range of tone value. Very clear and dynamic.

So why is the drawing so much more fun to look at? 

Because the DRAWN image is broken down into CLEARY visible value areas.

Here is the most obvious example of what I'm talking about. Take a look at a comparison between these two areas of the photo and the drawing:

Hone in on the FLATLY DRAWN value areas of the drawing, especially the lower bicep muscle (the one in the middle of the arm). 

You can clearly see the shaded shape of that area as a GRAPHIC ELEMENT, rather than a smoothly shaded, precise copy of the graduated value in the photograph. He has INTERPRETED that area of the photograph with a single, flat tonal swatch. Elegant.

You can SEE the decision that was made. You can absolutely empathize with the shape of that drawn bicep value area, and because we can see the INTERPRETATION, it is the interpretation that we ENJOY. We can see how this whole image has been broken down with a number of drawing techniques, and those techniques were used to interpret shape, light and space.

What is enjoyable about art? It is our ability to see how another mind has INTERPRETED something we visually understand. We all share visual experiences, and we all have a commonality of visual anatomy and brain function that allows us to interpret someone else's interpretation. The same way that we can understand shared language, we can - even more easily and universally - understand shared visual interpretation.

Tapping into this shared ability to interpret our shared reality is where the joy and the value of art comes from.