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of the artist.
Any reproduction, use, downloading or storage requires the consent of
the artist. © Copyright 2020 Ron
Gianola
1.
“From Techne to Psyche” A Creative Autobiography
2019
2.
“Romancing the Automobile"
3.
A Short Biography
4.
A Casual Biography
5.
Art and Painting Notes
6. Art and Painting Notes of Others
1. “From Techne to Psyche” A
Creative Autobiography
2019
hot
rods - rock and roll - automotive beginnings…
I
evolved esthetically from the Detroit culture
of rock and soul music, building hot rod models and custom models for
the
Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild. I grew up listening to my father’s large
collection of big band swing music. I started playing drums at the age
of
thirteen in neighborhood garage bands. My dad took me to Baker’s
Keyboard
Lounge at the age of thirteen to hear the master drummer Gene Krupa
Quartet, a
powerful creative experience. Concept car design was my first artistic
passion.
I always had a talent for drawing, initially in the automotive realm
and
leading to figure drawing and beyond. I eventually read the humanism of
generalist Lewis Mumford at the Art School of the Detroit Society of
Arts and
Crafts library. The school is located in downtown Detroit’s cultural
center,
next door to the Detroit Institute of Arts, and was part of the rich
cultural
mix of the time. Mumford was the first of many deep thinkers I was to
read. His
ideas on the city, the machine, progress, power, profit, property,
productivity
helped me to evolve beyond the corporate automotive domain, coming to
view it
as an obsolete measure of personal success.
I
grew up in the working class manufacturing
cyclone of 1950's Detroit, “The high church of American capitalism” -
Tom
Brokaw.
As
a male honor student, excelling in
math, who could also draw, I had the
drafting/engineering/manufacturing/corporate culture pretty much handed
to me,
possibly forced on me. Fortunately, I eventually found a way into the
rich
creative culture of the time and place to explore the creative,
personal,
humanist side of life and the mind. Painting called me as a
mythic
vocation embodying the essential mystery and spiritual beauty of nature
and the
human psyche.
My paintings are the result of my over fifty year long experience with the Art Spirit, pursuing the possibilities of a personal transformative vision, engaging emotion, expression, and the poetry of visual music.
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Concept
Car 1969 Prismacolor on Canson paper |
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Concept
Car 1969 Prismacolor on Canson paper |
Concept
Drawings from
2.
“Romancing
the
Automobile"
Dennos
Museum Center September 2007
It
was
a time of great optimism and excitement in the automotive world of
Detroit.
That world in the 1960’s was enjoying the automotive styling and
engineering
design renaissance created earlier by Harly Earl and other creative and
passionate artists, designers, and engineers at General Motors that
continued
for a generation and made Detroit famous world wide for its cool,
sleek, and
sexy concept and production cars.
Automotive
styling or car designing was the dream job of many a young man from
Detroit and
I was in love with all of it.
These
early drawings were done when I was at Cass Technical High School in
1967-68 in
the Body Styling Program and the Art School of the Detroit Society of
Arts and
Crafts, now the College of Creative Studies, both in Detroit, and in
1968-69 at
General Motors Styling at the Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, while a
co-op engineering and design student at General Motors Institute in
Flint,
Michigan.
While
based on fantasy with impossible, exaggerated proportions, the drawings
were
meant to convey a fundamental design concept with great aesthetic
excitement
eventually leading to a production vehicle with its own personality.
Whether
luxury cars or small, economy vehicles, they had to be cool.
The
GM
studio I was in as a design apprentice was an initial concept studio.
The
tracing type drawings were done rapidly as a predominantly side or end
view in
about 30 minutes. Then another variation traced over it on a new sheet
for a
new drawing. Rapidly they become a style of design, as would the
designs from
other designers. Executives would choose designs and new drawings would
develop
from these. Soon there would be many drawings focused on an evolving
automobile. From these small scale clay models would be started in the
design
studio and the process would evolve between two and three dimensions.
Next came
a larger scale model. At this point the project went to another studio
for
gradual production refinement. Contrary to popular belief, the final,
meticulous
pre-production design work was considered more demanding than the
initial
concept designing as it was closer to the final car.
The
drawings on black Canson paper are Prismacolor pencil. The others on
translucent layout paper are pencil alone or pastel with marker on the
front
and back.
I
gradually moved on to the less glamorous field of automotive tooling
design,
(still very creative but not nearly as romantic!), and to my own
painting.
Ron Gianola
Honor, Michigan 2007
Concept Car 1969
Prismacolor on Canson paper |
|
Concept Car 1969
Pastel,
Colored Pencil, and Markers on Vellum Tracing Paper |
Concept Car 1969
Pastel,
Colored Pencil, and Markers on Vellum Tracing Paper |
|
Concept Car 1969
Pastel,
Colored Pencil, and Markers on Vellum Tracing Paper |
the
human figure, realism, music…
While attending “Arts and Crafts” in four phases over a twenty year period, 1969 through 1989, I met an incredible group of instructors in all departments. Industrial Design; architect Marco Nobili, designer and jazz royalty composer Keith Vreeland, Detroit Institute of Arts curator art historian Nicholas Snow, fine artist in egg tempera and fresco Bill Girard, master sculptor Jay Holland, ceramists Gordon Orear and Max Davis, painters without compare Richard Jerzy, Anthony Williams, Russell Keeter. They were trained in realism, some from the master Sarkis Sarkisian, and most importantly taught me to see and think.
Keith
Vreeland opened the door for me to the rich world of creative jazz in
Detroit, with concerts at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and various
downtown clubs. Life changing for me was the Strata Concert Gallery, an
“underground” creative music performance space, community organization,
and record label. Led by composer / pianist and Contemporary Jazz
Quintet leader Kenny Cox, Strata brought in Charles Mingus, Herbie
Hancock's Mwandishi, Stanley Cowell, Tribe, the original Weather
Report, Elvin
Jones, The Art Ensemble, Cecil Taylor, Chick Corea, etc. Strata, along
with ECM, formed my musical taste and outlook to this day.
During a three year period I studied the Indian tabla drums and played with a sitar master. I was later to study contemporary jazz drumming with Detroit studio drummer Gene Stewart.
Industrial
Design involved a broad training in
the fine and applied arts. The incredible Syd Mead was teaching advanced rendering at this
time.
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I was exposed to figure drawing, art history, esthetics, and design. Transferring to Fine Arts, I spent many hours in figure drawing and painting. From this I learned to not just look but "see" in the sense so beautifully depicted by Frederick Franck in his "Zen of Seeing" books. Betty Edwards' "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" led me to the deep, life changing "The Transformative Vision: Reflections on the Nature and History of Human Expression" by Jose Arguelles. My introduction to the split consciousness of techne and psyche from the Pleistocene to today, and it's relation to art. A huge influence on me, the twenty page bibliography kept me busy in the Detroit Main Library literally for years. Another deep influence was the writing of Joseph Campbell, relating creative work and one's life as an artist, across the ages, to the Hero With a Thousand Faces.
Figure work, my second large artistic passion, in pastels was my
introduction
to color. A classicist in his belief that the mission of the artist is
to
create beauty and to represent the inner life of the spirit, Sarkis
endowed his
paintings with gravity and grace. He embodied classical humanism,
representing
the inner life of the spirit as well as the outward form of the body,
beauty,
and honesty.
Portrait of Sean Ruff
Pastel
1982 |
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Figure
Pastel
1984 |
Figure
Charcoal
1970 |
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Figure
Pastel
1999 |
Figure
|
the
grand landscape…
After
realistic figurative drawing and
painting, my great love and inspiration became landscape painting.
While
in school I spent many hours in the
magnificent Detroit Institute of Arts. I was attracted to the work of
Canaletto, Brueghel, Rivera, Monet, Whistler, Jasper Cropsey, and
American
Impressionists, particularly George Inness and John Twachtman. George
Inness
was largely self-taught and had little patience for the detail and
labor of
drawing and engraving. He loved, instead, the richness of paint and
color,
which he called the soul of painting, and believed that one painted,
"not
to imitate a fixed material condition, but to represent a living
motion."
The Detroit Institute of Arts has some astounding Inness landscapes
that always
caught me. A huge influence, he showed me representational
painting could
be emotional, personal, and poetically evocative of an inner source.
“Alluding
to subjects, avoiding mimetic
representation. …detail did not gain me meaning…” – George Inness
“indirectly
represent objects, directly
represent or convey, atmospheric, subjective mystery of nature...not of
an
outer fact, but an inner life."
My
large passion in 1985 for landscape work
became my first subject to deeply develop in color. As I worked to find
my way
with expressive color, my dear wife Pam and I visited Hawaii in 1992. I
met the
Chinese impressionist color master Lau Chun at his gallery in the Royal
Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki. Due to Lau Chun’s huge influence on my
approach to
color in Hawaii I tried to paint like Lau for 10 years. I did not learn
to
paint like Lau, but much better, to paint like me.
I
painted hundreds of landscapes based on the
northern Michigan area around our home in Honor, near Sleeping Bear
Dunes, and
waterscapes of the Platte River and Lake Michigan, in a semi abstract
approach.
I eventually titled them in a numbered “Retreat” series.
At this point I’m working from life or observation, and beginning to merge it with memory and imagination.
![]() Tranquility
40 x 40 oil 1995 |
![]() Iris
Dream
40 x 48 oil 1996 |
Retreat #5
40 x 48 oil 1995 |
Summer Serenade
20 x 20 oil 2000 |
Retreat #5
40
x 48 oil 1995 |
Reflections 24 x 30 oil 2000 |
![]() Flow 24 x 60 oil 1995 |
interlude…
In 1996 I painted a large acrylic piece in four attached canvases, “You’ll Know When You Get There”. Please view on Home page. It was at the request of jazz musician and concert promoter Jeff Haas. The painting was to compliment the creative improvisational jazz music of the Marcus Belgrave Quintet, displayed above the band at Milliken Auditorium at the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City. Starting a fifteen foot piece with no pre-conceived intention, I reached down deep to create this, not knowing I would return to this source more than twenty years later.
windows,
inside/outs…
In
2001 I began to be influenced by a very
different group of visual ideas. I needed to move on from my landscape
based
subjects and color. Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series of
abstractions,
originally from the landscape and cityscape, attracted me in their
geometric
compositional lyricism, and their beautiful color stories. The late
Hans
Hofmann primary geometric abstractions also moved me, particularly “The
Golden
Wall” in Chicago.
A
vision of abstracted interior scenes
developed; one a view from our living room in shadow into the sunny
bedroom,
with an angular shadow. Another my studio entry door with window and
corner of
my studio. This subject became my next three numbered series;
“Interior”,
“Windows”, and many “Inside Out”.
The
interiors evoked geometry, the Golden
Rectangle, mathematic relations, my draftsman based sense of order,
even, I now
see, music ...
These
ideas evolved to works with a combination
of interior and landscape elements evoking contrasts;
inside/outside,
man-made/natural, linear/gestural, ordered/fractal,
garden/architecture, and
techne/psyche.
Later
additional realistic elements were
incorporated into the abstract;
-still
life; studio, cans, and brushes
relating to the artists life, home elements reflecting a vision of
marital
domestic home life and stability.
-florals;
Ikebana, Hawaiian Lei, Japanese
Gardens.
-female Psyche figure, representing the Greek goddess of the soul, heart, and breath. Also signifying the deep creative “daimon” source, described from Socrates to deep psychologist James Hillman. Also of course representing my dear sweet wife of 33 years, Pam Yee. My writing abilities limit my expression of my wonderful life with her, without whom I cannot imagine any of this would have happened.
![]() Timeless 11 x 14 oil 2007 |
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Passage 38 x 32 acrylic 2001 |
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![]() Windows #2 20 x 16 2005 |
Inside Out 11 x 14 2007 |
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Inside Out #27 24 x 14 oil 2010 |
Inside
Out #1
30 x 24 oil 2003 |
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Kailua
#3 16 x 20 2007 |
Kailua
#1 11 x 14 acrylic 2007 |
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Sandy Beach #4 16 x 28 2007 |
Sandy Beach #1 11 x 14 2007 |
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Psyche #12 28 x 46 acrylic 2009 |
Pali Retreat 20 24 acrylic 2009 |
passages…
A
further development from my inside out series was the triune visual
concept of
the great “Passage” series. These were a symmetrical composition of a
window or
doorway, the literal passage, leading to an open bright landscape
beyond. This
was a strong image for me. I came to realize it was based on my many
symmetrical landscape paintings of years before; a stand of trees in
shadow on
the left and right, with an open sunny passage in the middle leading to
an
inviting field or path. I started to add
a cool turquoise “river” element to these passage paintings,
overlapping the
strict linear elements. My visual concept became ever more abstract,
using a
cool horizontal on top of a vertical triune composition. This passage
idea was
transformational for me and led to a much more relaxed, open,
completely
abstract series. To me it signified a passage to future possibilities
and
realities. The great Robert Hughes described this passage symbolically;
“No painting is wholly abstract.
All art, in some way or another, is situated
in the world, hoping to act as a transformer between the self and the
non-self. The great project of
modernism
was to propagate more ways in which this could be done.
But any view of art that insists on locating
art’s meaning in its power to do what had not been done before tends to
reject
the benefits of the modernist spirit: it exchanges ideological cramp
and
historicist narrowness for the anxious and open discourse our cultural
parents
bequeathed us.
The signs of that constriction are everywhere today-in the small ambitions of art, in its lack of any effort towards spirituality, in its sense of career rather than vocation, in its frequently bland occupation with semantics at the expense of the deeper passions of the creative self. Perhaps the great energies of modernism are still latent in our culture, like Ulysses’ bow in the house of Penelope; but nobody seems able to string and draw it. Yet the work still speaks to us, in all its voices, and will continue to do so. Art discovers its true social use, not on the ideological plane, but by opening the passage from feeling to meaning - not for everyone, since that would be impossible, but for those who want to try. This impulse seems to be immortal. Certainly it has existed from the origins of human society, and despite the appalling commercialization of the art world, its flight into corporate ethics and strategies, and its gradual evacuation of spirit, it exists today.” - Robert Hughes, "The Shock of the New".
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Passage #25 36 x 28 oil 2006 |
Passage #47 36 x 28 oil 2008 |
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Passage #15 36 x 12 oil 2005 |
Passage #16 40 x 14 oil 2005 |
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Passage #91 38 x 14 oil 2015 |
Passage #100 48 x 16 oil 2015 |
music,
ECM, cells…
My
current series of color composition
paintings are based on my long time listening, and playing, to jazz and
instrumental improvisational music.
These
color compositions involve harmony,
dissonance, rhythm, ostinato, counterpoint, calm, tension, motion,
rest, and
balance, using improvisation over an intended or discovered structure.
Technically
my painting embodies the freedom of gestural abstraction with the care
and considered
nuance of classical realism.
The
music on the 1100 albums of the European
creative music label ECM and ECM New Series has been an inspiration to
me for
all of this since 1969, featuring Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland, Tomasz
Stanko,
Simple Acoustic Trio, Nik Bartsch, Chick Corea, Anja Lechner, Arild
Anderson,
and many more. Another long time influence is the Bitches Brew fusion
esthetic
of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Weather Report, and John McLaughlin. I
originally started my jazz listening in 1969 with Bitches Brew and
forward from
there as well as backward into Bebop of the 60’s and 50’s.
I
have also been focusing on a “cell” like
form that kept recurring while I was painting and it just always felt
right to
me, with their meaning some kind of mystery.
As
of 2019 I am producing a series of small
colored drawings of the musical and cell ideas. I feel they are
beautiful,
playful, fun, reflecting ideas of a cosmic musical harmony, with
some
necessary dissonance, as well as life on the cellular through
galactic
level.
They are done on Canson Mi-Tientes paper with Prismacolor pencils, the same materials I used in the automotive renderings done in the eleventh grade at Cass Technical High School. So there is a bit of a return involved.
![]() Passage #126 42 x 34 oil 2017 |
![]() Passage #140 12 x 30 oil 2017 ![]() Passage #69 24 x 30 oil 2012 |
![]() Passage #108 40 x 14 oil 2016 |
![]() Passage #157 28 x 11 oil 2018 | ![]() Passage #150 24 x 30 oil 2018 | ![]() Passage #159 30 x 34 oil 2019 |
Passage #179 10 x 14 oil |
![]() Passage #177 11 x 14 oil
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![]() Passage #176 20 x 20 oil |
![]() Passage #175 6 x 8 oil |
![]() Passage #173 20 x 20 oil |
![]() Passage #180 11 x 14 oil | ![]() Passage #178 11 x 14 oil |
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Prismacolor Pencil on Canson Mi-tientes Paper 7 x 10 2019 |
Prismacolor Pencil on Canson Mi-tientes Paper 7 x 10 2019 |
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Prismacolor Pencil on Canson Mi-tientes Paper 7 x 10 2019 |
Prismacolor Pencil on Canson Mi-tientes Paper 7 x 10 2019 |
![]() 6 x 6 1/4 Ink & Prismacolor Pencil on Canson Mi-tientes Paper |
![]() 8 x 10 Charcoal |
![]() 9 x 9 Charcoal
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![]() 8 x 9 Charcoal
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![]() 8 x 8 Ink & Prismacolor Pencil |
![]() 8 x 9 Charcoal & Prismacolor Pencil |
3.
A Short Biography
Ron
was born in Detroit
in 1950, drew from an early age, attended Detroit’s premier magnet Cass
Technical High School and the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts
and
Crafts, later known as Center for Creative Studies, during its
legendary early
period, studying Industrial Design, Drawing, and Painting, and worked
throughout the state of Michigan as an artist and designer.
He
has had 24 one-man
exhibits and has been in 104 group shows, including many juried shows
at the
Traverse Area Arts Council where he won several awards. Ron was awarded
an
Honorable Mention in the First Northwest Michigan Regional Juried
Exhibition,
Viewers Choice Award in the Second Northwest Michigan Regional Juried
Exhibition
at the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, First Place in Crystal
Lake Art
Center Annual Juried All Media Show in Frankfort, Michigan.
Ron
has done commissions
for private individuals, the Empire Bank, and St Joseph’s Hospital. One
of his
paintings is in the Dennos Museum Permanent Collection.
His
work is a unique
artistic vision in a contemporary style, sensitive to the effects of
light
expressed through color.
“I
grew up in the working
class manufacturing cyclone of 1950's Detroit, “The high church of
American
capitalism” - Tom Brokaw.
As
a male honor
student, excelling in math, who could also draw, I had the
drafting/engineering/manufacturing/corporate culture pretty much handed
to me,
possibly forced on me. Fortunately, I eventually found a way into the
rich
creative culture of the time and place to explore the other, creative,
personal, humanist side of life and the mind. Painting called me
as a
mythic vocation embodying the essential mystery and spiritual beauty of
nature
and the human psyche.
These
paintings are the
result of my over fifty year long experience with the Art Spirit,
pursuing the
possibilities of a personal transformative vision, engaging emotion,
expression, and the poetry of visual music.
Prior
to 1990 my art revolved around the human figure.
After relocating from a major urban area to a wooded rural
setting on a
river, my work of 1990 through 2002 was mainly landscape.
In
2002 my work focused
on views of my studio and various interiors, at times combined with
landscape
elements balancing realism with abstraction. The series titles
“Inside
Out” and “Windows “became the numbered “Passage” series, as they are a
passage
from the exterior to the interior, in the painting, but also the sense
of the
creative interior of the artist and passage to future unknown creations.
I
feel it to be a passage
from Techne to Psyche. Techne representing the logical, linear,
thinking life
experience. The interiors of my studio are an obvious reference to the
interior
creative life of the artist, as are the various female figures, all
called
Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul, heart, or spirit. The
various
still life subjects in the interiors are a symbol to me of the
countless
classic paintings of the past and another symbol of the artist’s
life.
The interior/landscape motif also is a symbol to me of the natural
versus
man-made worlds, inside versus outside, etc.
Since
2010 my work
has become even more abstracted, exploring the possibilities of the
Psyche
realm of experience.
A
composition
inspires me by the combination of colors, almost like a musical chord,
as well
as the larger shapes or masses and their relation. It's basically the
natural
world as the start of a composition. Nature is the source, but the art
is
Nature seen through the artist's temperament or psyche.
My
technique generally is
to work in acrylic, then oil, with brushes and painting knives to apply
veils
of color. I use the infinite varieties of natural color and tone in my
paintings in several ways. I vary a large area of color in a subtle
gradation
from side to side or top to bottom. I also layer a veil of color
over
another dry area or into a wet area. These colors can be
sympathetic in
hue or value or saturation, depending on the effect. This
results
in a classic, flickering oil surface. Other times I use several colors
in the
brush and vary the pressure just so to get unique, expressive passages.
I also
do a lot of scraping with the palette knife for effects and paint
application.
I balance realism with abstraction, using a classic oil painted
surface. Technically my painting embodies the freedom of gestural
abstraction with the care and considered nuance of classical realism.
As
I also have been
a drummer for 50 years, my art is greatly influenced by
instrumental
creative music, originally fusion jazz and now the music beyond
category on the
European ECM label.
Twenty
years ago I met
Lau Chun, the Chinese Impressionist color master in Honolulu. My color
developed from what I learned from him and the masters at the Detroit
Institute
of Art.”
“Both
light and color
evoking the inherent mystery and spiritual qualities of nature.” Mary
McNichols
Ph.D. Professor of Art History at the College for Creative Studies,
Detroit,
MI.
“.
. . color that is
reaching down and scraping the human soul” Tony Suhy, musician
"Rather
than depict the specific, I work in a more personal, poetic manner
using a
harmony of forms from observed, created, and remembered sources in
their own
beautiful color universe. I paint with enough content that the
mind and
imagination are pleased and with enough literal image that the eye is
also satisfied.
Hopefully, my art conveys a sense of balance and beauty”.
4. A Casual Biography
…drew from an early age…at 13 started playing drums influenced by Father’s incessant listening to swing & big band music and to Elvis’ appearance on the music scene …began playing in R & B, Rock & Soul bands...attended Detroit’s premier magnet Cass Technical High School as a Design & Drafting student…met future wife, Pam Yee, in high school (took 20 years to marry her)….11th grade started working in Detroit drafting community… sponsored by Chevrolet Gear & Axle in Hamtramck to General Motors Institute in Flint as a Mechanical Engineering & Management major…switched to GM Styling Staff at GM Technical Center as a styling apprentice… worked as a combination Engineering/Industrial Design student…corporate life revealed him to be “not a team player”…left GM program to attend the Art School of the Society of Arts & Crafts (later known as Center for Creative Studies) during its legendary early period, in Detroit’s Cultural Center, as an Industrial Design major…first experience of the art spirit...switched yearly to virtually every department in the college (Advertising, Illustration, Photography, Ceramics) while on US government tuition grant…exposed to a life long interest in contemporary improvisational instrumental Jazz in 1969…worked throughout as a machine tool & automation draftsman and later, designer… at 27 plunged into self-employment as an Engineering Contractor…returned to CCS in Fine Arts studies (drawing, painting, mainly figures) part-time for 15 years. [with Anthony Williams, Bill Girard, Richard Jerzy, Russ Keeter, Jay Holland, Dan Keller, realists all]…married at 35…became instant stepfather, home owner, home improvement guy…bought 2nd home in Honor (after vacationing in the general Traverse City area for 20 years)…started landscape series & showing in area venues…Pam retired from Wayne County Circuit Court…1995 we relocate to Honor………had 24 one-man exhibits and has been in 104 group shows, including many juried shows at the Traverse Area Arts Council where he won several awards… awarded an Honorable Mention in the First Northwest Michigan Regional Juried Exhibition, Viewers Choice Award in the Second Northwest Michigan Regional Juried Exhibition at the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, First Place in Crystal Lake Art Center Annual Juried All Media Show in Frankfort, Michigan…part of the ceiling mural restoration project at the City Opera House in Traverse City…teaches drawing and painting locally…in the collection of the Dennos Museum Center Permanent Collection, Empire National Bank, St. Joseph Hospital…
5. Art and Painting Notes
From
Techne to Psyche,
autotelic affinity towards the creative Flow state, leads to the search
to find
meaning in life, to art, truth, and beauty.
Unconcerned
with the
opinions of others, working deeply, for all the right reasons of
meaning,
beauty, and possibility, I eventually found my own imagery and passage
to
future possibilities.
Aesthetic-
appreciation
of beauty. Beauty “A delightful quality associated with harmony
of form
or color, excellence of craftsmanship, truthfulness, originality, or
another
property.”
To
voluntarily isolate
and go deep, and report from the depths on what is found.
Get
something you can’t
“paint” on. ..structural qualities of oil paint…flickering oil surface.
Insights,
not techniques.
Technique to be in the service of vision.
The
love and allure of
beauty of sensual surfaces, materials, forms, colors, and proportions
of art
refreshes the soul.
Art
is beginning before
you know the end.
Discover
something one
could not imagine beforehand.
All
subjects as a means
of color and drawing as the true subject of a luscious beauty and
transformative vision. …to uncover the energy and life within my
subject matter
rather than just taking original beauty and marring it with a technique
based
only on making a statement and not on revealing something worthwhile.
Serene,
tranquil, smooth,
elegant, yet powerful painting ideas in the service of a refined
esthetic to
express mystery and essential meaning; through order, form, discipline,
emotion, music, and hope through balance, composition, rhythm, and
color.
Sensibility- Refined awareness & appreciation in matters of feeling.
6. Art and Painting Notes of Others
To
see far is one thing,
going there is another. ~ Constantin Brancusi
That
which they call
abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the
exterior but
the idea, the essence of things. ~ Brancusi
"The
aim of art is
to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward
significance, and this, and not the external manner and detail, is true
reality." - Aristotle
…how
the highest
communion with the Divine can be found right at our fingertips in the
simplest
expressions of human creativity.
…the
most prayerful, most
spiritually powerful act a person can undertake is to create, at his or
her own
level, with a consciousness of the place from which that gift arises. –
Matthew
Fox “Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet”.
What was the artist trying to achieve? Did it succeed? Was it worth doing? Sometimes no challenge in the first place. Little reward in an easy perfection quickly reached by many. Artists who need ongoing reassurances seek out challenges offering clear goals & measurable feedback. Easier to reach an already defined goal than to discover it within you. Some problems more interesting, relevant, meaningful. Technical challenges secondary. It’s not that they’re hard, it’s that they’re easy.
All from “Art and Fear” David Bayles Ted Orland
There
seem to be moments
of revelation, moments when we see in the transition of one part to
another the
unification of the whole. There is a sense of comprehension and of
great
happiness. We have entered into a great order and have been carried
into
greater knowledge by it. This sometimes in a passing face, a landscape,
a
growing thing. We may call it a passage into another dimension than our
ordinary. If one could but record the vision of these moments by some
sort of
sign! It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Signposts on the
way to
what may be. Signposts towards greater knowledge.
“It
would be easy to
divide artists into two classes: those who grow so much within
themselves as to
master technique by the force of their need, and those who are mastered
by
technique and become stylists.” - Robert Henri “The Art
Spirit”
“Divinely
superfluous
beauty”…“Esthetic arrest
“Inner
motion of Nature
and inner life of the artist parallel and serve as the subject…to
awaken the
emotion . . . engagement of your sense of self.”
“Essence
of art to show
the radiance shining through the forms of space and time. The whole as
it
manifests in everyday details of individual life.” - Joseph Campbell
Aesthetic
beauty
attributes: Integras - wholeness, consonantia - harmony, claritas -
radiance-
from “A Campbell Companion” from Joyce from Aquinas.
“Making
a painting rather
than just painting a picture of something” Rufino Tamayo
“Eugene
Fromentin on
Rubens: highest human values are involved in a patch of color, the bend
of a
line.” - Meyer Schapiro:
“The
happiest of all
lives is a busy solitude.” Voltaire
“…essential
dimension of
art as a vocation practiced for its own sake or to satisfy spiritual
pretensions.. two professions… one directed toward public taste, the
other
toward forms of experience embodied only in art and to which creations
from all
times stand witness. In relating himself and his work to this extended
dimension of art, the contemporary artist engages in a mythic vocation,
in
which, beyond current fashions and social and political problems, he
seeks the
approval of the masters. In the thirties, this second, “inner”
profession,
founded on art’s values, was centered not in the project [WPA]…but in a
handful
of young artists-Gorky, de Kooning, Pollack, Gottlieb, Rothko-sensitive
to
social demands, and confused by them, and in the school of Hans
Hofmann, which
propagated principles of form and feeling derived from the advanced
European
art movements. Once opportunities for art as employment ended, art for
its own
sake, and for the sake of the inner development of the artist came to
the fore
as a pioneering collective phenomenon. Out of a job, American art
forgot its
mirage of a respectable social status and dedicated itself to
greatness.” “The
Profession of Art: The W.P.A. Art Projects” in “Art on the Edge” Harold
Rosenberg
“No
painting is wholly
abstract. All art, in some way or another, is situated in the
world,
hoping to act as a transformer between the self and the
non-self.
The great project of modernism was to propagate more ways in which this
could
be done. But any view of art that insists on locating art’s
meaning in
its power to do what had not been done before tends to reject the
benefits of
the modernist spirit: it exchanges ideological cramp and historicist
narrowness
for the anxious and open discourse our cultural parents bequeathed us.
The
signs of that
constriction are everywhere today-in the small ambitions of art, in its
lack of
any effort towards spirituality, in its sense of career rather than
vocation,
in its frequently bland occupation with semantics at the expense of the
deeper
passions of the creative self. Perhaps the great energies
of
modernism are still latent in our culture, like Ulysses’ bow in the
house of
Penelope; but nobody seems able to string and draw it. Yet the
work still
speaks to us, in all its voices, and will continue to do so. Art
discovers its true social use, not on the ideological plane, but by
opening the
passage from feeling to meaning - not for everyone, since that would be
impossible, but for those who want to try. This impulse seems to
be
immortal. Certainly it has existed from the origins of human
society, and
despite the appalling commercialization of the art world, its flight
into
corporate ethics and strategies, and its gradual evacuation of spirit,
it
exists today.” “sensuous communion with worldly delights” “great
inherited
themes of Romanticism”- Robert Hughes “The Shock of the New” 1980
“Passion
over
Convenience” - Gil Evans
“Art
is not truth but the
illusion of truth. Great paintings are not photographs but doorways
into
another world. If the painting has too little content, or none at all,
only the
eye will be pleased. Nor will the mind and the imagination be engaged
in it if
the content is too literal…, stating everything but implying nothing.”
Timothy
Foote - Time Life: The Life of Brueghel.
“Art
generated by
spiritual forces, art history properly understood is a ‘history of the
human
psyche and it’s forms of expression’ - Wilhelm Worringer” Jose
Arguelles in
“The Transformative Vision”
Aesthetics
is not an
academic subject, and beauty is not decoration.
…aesthetic,
Beauty, art,
[Aphrodite, Venus, Psyche], is sensory, survival of the soul, to
refresh the
soul, lure us back, sensual seduction. Tactile quality, sensuality of
materials, surfaces, forms, proportions, but not in and of themselves.
Allure,
charming, attractive. Awaken the senses. Give in to what already is,
imagining,
enchantment, re-enchantment, en souling, re animate.
“
daimon, counselor,
guardian angel, guide, genius, character, image, fate, soul, destiny,
psyche.
Socrates followed inner daimon. “Tendance of the soul” - from
James
Hillman
"Entertainment
gives
you a predictable pleasure. Art leads to transformation. It awakens
you, rather
than just satisfying a craving." Makoto Fujimura
“The
mechanic arts are
those which we have occasion for in a young country as yet simple and
not far
advanced in luxury. I must study politics and war so that my sons may
have
liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural
history,
navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their sons the
right to
study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and
porcelain.” John Adams 1776 from a CCS catalog
“George Inness was largely self-taught and had little patience for the detail and labor of drawing and engraving. He loved, instead, the richness of paint and color, which he called the soul of painting, and believed that one painted, ‘not to imitate a fixed material condition, but to represent a living motion.’ Alluding to subjects, avoiding mimetic representation . . . detail did not gain me meaning . . .
indirectly represent objects, directly represent or convey, atmospheric, subjective mystery of nature...not of an outer fact, but an inner life.
. . . structure his landscapes around geometric forms, a development that may have reflected the Swedenborgian idea that the natural world corresponds to the spiritual world and that geometric forms possess spiritual identities. Through these and other compositional devices, Inness created paintings to inspire an almost "religious experience" in his viewers.
. . . anticipated many of the most important tenets of modernism, an
achievement that continues to inspire contemporary audiences.” All from
“George
Inness and the Visionary Landscape” Adrienne Baxter Bell
“.
. . a perfect
description for Inness' transcendent landscapes--gorgeous and radiant
scenes
that embody life's interconnectivity, mystery, timeless beauty, and
untarnished
hope.” Donna Seamen from Booklist
“...For
the most part, we
are losing authentic art in the marketplace, although not in the
privacy of
many studios around the world.” Roger Lipsey “An Art of Our Own: The
Spiritual
in Twentieth-century Art”
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