landscapes « L. Joshua Goodman’s Art Blog

November 25, 2009

Resisting the Urge

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Aquatint, art, artists, etching, Intaglio, landscape, landscapes, Occum's Razor, pictorial, Sataf, Sataf Spring, spray paint, telling the story — Joshua @ 8:42 pm

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author and aviator (1900-1945)

The Urge to Do Something can be powerful.

But good practitioners of any discipline are skilled at stripping away frivolity. The famous dictum, Occum’s Razor says something like, “Whatever doesn’t support, detracts” (that is not an exact translation, but it is an accurate translation). In Hebrew they say, “kol mosif gorea” which means “additions diminish”.

At the risk of violating the above principles I’ll tell you what brought this to mind. I just pulled a print. It’s the second state of a small plate that I took with me to a hillside not far from where I live. It’s located above the Sataf Spring just outside of Jerusalem. I drew out the landscape, the hills cascading one behind the other and the hungry sky above. I etched and printed it last week, but I felt it needed some atmosphere, some depth, so I did a few things (involving spray paint aquatint) and today I pulled the second state.

I don’t know exactly what to do right now. The decision is to Do Something or to consider it Done. It might actually be finished, but, and this is crucial, maybe it needs more. There is more that CAN be done, but I’m uncertain if there is more that SHOULD be done.

Meanwhile, I’m resisting the Urge.

Comments (0)

October 17, 2009

Improvising and finishing

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: assigned value, Chaos, etching, Intaglio, Jerusalem Print Workshop, kitchy art, landscapes, painting — Joshua @ 10:26 pm

We had a very interesting conversation over dinner dinner last night with a very interesting gentleman, a concert pianist and composer.

Finished Painting

The first interesting thing is that during the day I had been thinking about “How do you know when you’ve finished a painting“. I’m not sure anybody knows the definitive answer to this. Of course some painters have a fixed goal in mind and they paint until they reach that goal. Like paintings on black velvet of bullfighters and puppy dogs or certain seascapes. But for most artists, the exercise of seeing is never quite totally consummated. Except when it feels good. Or when it feels that there is nothing more that one can do. Or undo.

Improvisation

So during dinner the subject of musical improvisation came up. I suppose I was trying to make the point that plastic art was superior to music in that the performance may be sublime and profound, but simply lasts for only one performance and then is lost. On the other hand a great painting can be seen again and again. My pianist friend told me several very interesting things. First he said that sometimes Bach and Mozart would indeed write down later from memory what they had improvised. He further said that all the great composers were great improvisers and found it helpful in their work.

And then he said, “Painters are improvisers too. The proof is that they never finish a painting!” I was mightily impressed by this. I know that Rouault was (in)famous for never finishing a work. He even was known to ask for a painting back after it was sold for a few finishing touches only to return a completely reworked and totally different piece! In graphic design Paul Rand changed the IBM logo (adding the stripes) two years after it was originally launched. He also reworked the UPS logo and asked the client to use his finessed mark in place of the original but was refused. The old was good enough. This is the visual equivalent of improvisation.

Improvisation is the technique by which artists (plastic artists as well as musicians) sketch; improvisation becomes a search for perfection. If not perfection, then at least improvement. Can anybody really say that they’ve done the best that can be done on any particular work of the moment?

I was criticized once in Art School for overworking my paintings. I still don’t know exactly what is meant by this. I have lost clients because I have modified the design after approval (and before final printing). To do otherwise would be personally irresponsible if not professionally derelict! Good clients know this.

It’s not overworking; it’s seeing more in the light of what has already been done.

Comments (0)

October 4, 2009

The Story of a New Project/Background

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: Arik Kilemnick, art, art students, artists, assigned value, etching, Fractal, Fractals, hammers, hands, Intaglio, Iron, Jerusalem Print Workshop, kitchy art, landscape, landscapes, Matisse, old masters, pictorial, sans serif, Sculpture, telling the story — Joshua @ 11:53 am

Where does an Idea begin.

I’ve tried to make it easy on myself. I have a running series that I am continually working with. It’s called “The Hammer and the Hand Series”. It gives me a framework to relate to.

As you can see from my website, there are several works that feature a hand (always my left hand) and a hammer. A hammer is the quintessential low tech tool. From the first time that man picked up a rock to pound a stick (perhaps a tent peg) into the ground, rather than using his bare hand, man has been using hammers.

This is, of course, an extension of the “Hand” series. This started because of two bits of information that came my way over the years. The first was when Miss Bennett (see previous post) mentioned that the best draughtsman in school has a thousand drawings of her left hand. So, since High School I have known that the way to draw well is to draw what’s close at hand. Literally.

Sketchbooks of the Old Masters

The other piece of intelligence that came my way was when I learned that the Old Masters had sketchbooks where they had drawn thousands of versions of hands in various positions. Then when they had a composition that required a right hand extended and foreshortened to the left, they just reached for their archive and pulled out the closest variant and they were good to go.

So my left hand, being close, serves as a model. And when I wanted to extend the idea, I turned to that First Tool and started the “Hand and Hammer” series.

Now it turns out that I have a plate from the old “Hand” days. Three years ago I started a new working of the old idea. Rather than print one large (it’s about 50×70 cm / 19.5×27.5 inches) print, I decided to cut the paper into tiles, each of which are about 17 cm square (6.75 inches). Then (and this is another unrealized idea from the past…like about from 1972, November) I decided to print these tiles as Ottoman or Armenian tiles where the single tile is not visually complete or even readable, but the whole coherent image comes from the joining together of multiples (and multiples is almost essentially warp and woof of printmaking).

The Hammer and the Piano

grand-piano-2021a Extending the idea of a hammer I decided that a piano had hammers and might be more visually interesting than a simple hammer. And a piano references another deep interest of mine, music.

Bartok said that the piano was a percussion instrument and the music he wrote with a piano part shows this clearly. The piano is banging and crashing. I believe he even specified that the piano should be placed in the back by the tympani. The reason the piano is so percussive of course is the hammers. Eighty-eight hammers at the tips of the fingers.

Amazing!

Like I said, this was started three years ago; I printed one printing of the “Hand” on twelve tiles each about 17 cm (6.75 inch) square. I drew, etched and printed a separate plate with a piano in the corners, but wasn’t satisfied. I put it aside to rest.

Until this week.

Comments (0)

May 31, 2009

The Fractalic Nature of the Universe

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: Benoit Mandlebrot, Chaos, families, forests, Fractals, landscapes, snowflakes, trees. — Joshua @ 11:49 am

NOTE: This is probably not for everybody. If this discussion bores you, I understand. Check back later for another post. This is just something I think about a lot, so…

About 20 years ago or so I read the book Chaos by New York Times Science writer, James Gleick. Since then I (and many other people) have been seeing many many things in terms of Fractals.

For those who don’t know what fractals are, I’ll paste a Wickipedia definition (quoting Benoit Mandlebrot):

A fractal is generally “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,”

Usual examples are snowflakes and clouds. Always similar, never the same.

I like the example of families. Some of my children are like me, some are like my wife. None are exACTly like either one of us.

Nature is FULL of fractals. Ferns, forests (and the trees in them), and feathers are all fractalic.

I am working on an etching right now (and have been working on it for a while now) that is fractalic. It’s a kind of a triptych; three panels make up one long landscape. Each panel can stand on it’s own, and together they make a whole that (might be) greater than the sum of the parts. It’s a different experience (seeing the whole, rather than just each individual part), but it’s a similar experience.

I don’t know how I am going to be able to show it online. The format is just too small to be much good. But I’ll try it. The worst that can happen is that nobody will get it.

If you see a fractal, let me know. I’m collecting them.

Be well.

Comments (0)