February 7, 2012

A New Painting: "Pin"

 Pin, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 5 x 5 3/4 inches.


This painting brought a couple of issues to mind as I worked on it, both related to levels of realism and abstraction: detail, and texture, which is a kind of detail. A cotter pin holds center stage in this work, becoming an animated character atop an arrangement of rectangles. Since my work has moved closer to abstraction in recent years, becoming simpler in composition, I wondered what would happen if the one element that ties the image to the real world was eliminated....




Thanks to photoshop, I can easily see the result. To my eye, the work loses its punch without the odd element of that cotter pin. When I see something like this, I feel that I'll never become a purely non-objective painter; I am too much in love with the odd tension between actual things and abstract structure.




Here is a detail of the pin, which is placed on a slightly textured ground. At one point in the process, I had more variation in the colors of that rectangle on the left, attempting to paint a closer imitation of the rusted surface, which you can see below. Then I realized that I wanted a much more subtle shifting of color to suggest texture, rather than illustrate it. One of my great fears is of making work that is sentimental, causing a romantic response as to old machinery lying about in a field. So I glazed a couple of layers of color on top of the textured surface, which allowed for some of the color shifts to show through while tying them closer together. Now I feel fairly satisfied with the balance of detail within the sense of the whole.




8 comments:

  1. You know I like this one. I am learning to like more abstract images by looking at your paintings and reading why you do this. I still want to pull the cotter pin to see what it holds.

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    1. Thanks, Lisa. As for what the pin holds, I often don't remember what machine or object my images came from; I'm just focused on the design.

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  2. I actually like it better without the pin!

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    1. You're not alone, Anna. The way my visual thinking goes now, I'm happier with the pin, but who knows where I'll head in future?

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  3. I like it better without the pin also - because the pin is so specific and has so much character it becomes the focus and the warm geometric planes lose presence - and the scale, note how specific the scale becomes with the pin - and how the piece approaches scalelessness without it...

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    1. rappel, you make a convincing case for pinlessness. I'm not ready to go there yet, but I'm sure looking forward to seeing what my eye focuses on this summer when I go out to look for subject matter. Each year I seem to get a little closer to a non-objective feeling with my representational work.

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  4. I'll weigh in for the pin! I like that tension between the object and the abstraction, but I also love the cotter pin as an abstract element in this painting, and a very interesting one.

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    1. thanks, Susan, for your vote. If I didn't get bored by repeating myself, I might do another version of this painting to have a with/without side by side.

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