A sortie to an interesting destination

Dr. Boo and Miso too

A slight refinement

I thought I might try to draw like I paint. That is, try to put myself in the same frame of mind but with more limitations. It wasn't as easy as it looks.

Steven LaRose, Immediately Reflective, 2010
Graphite on bristol paper, 6 x 6 inches
$60 (shipping included)

SOLD

Flashback Funday

I remember there was a time that if you wrote a sentence like "Jesus, Elvis, and Lady Gaga came up with an easy oil spill solution. . ." Google would send your blog all sorts of traffic. For awhile there, I was swamped with .gov people searching "Cut bait and run." But Google seems to have fine tuned their search engines and even enhanced their image search. But this morning, a search site naver sent many people our way. It turns out that naver "is by far the most popular search portal in South Korea, with a market share of over 70%, compared to 2% of Google."

It also turns out that people overseas are interested in the phrase "Three is a magic number." I apparently titled a post this on Thursday, August 10th, 2006. I'd forgotten about it. Here it is again, with the interesting results of a poll that concluded the post.
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According to John Canaday, "painting is a triple experience --visual, emotional, and intellectual." He wrote this in his Realism portfolio for the Metropolitan Seminars in Art.

Realistic

"Harnett's The Old Violin is the kind of realistic painting the eager but unenlightened beginner encounters with relief. He knows that Harnett must be good because, after all, museums and collectors covet his work. But at the same time it is possible to enjoy Harnett without having to wonder what his art is all about. His pictures are guaranteed to be good, yet at the same time they are enjoyable at face value. In short, they are safe"

Expressionistic

"But confronted by Dufy's expressionistic painting The Yellow Violin our hypothetical beginner may feel a little insecure. He may find the picture attractive enough in its way, but it doesn't look as if it had been hard enough to do. Still, it is not too puzzling. You can tell what the images are supposed to represent even if they are out of kilter."

Abstraction

"But Braque's abstraction is another matter altogether. It looks confused, pointless, inept, and even unfinished."

I love this Metropolitan Seminars in Art Series. You can find the books (published in 1958) at yard sales all across America this weekend. These statements are from Canaday's splash page, his introduction. He is setting his readers up for an observation that I take for granted today: ". . .the two paintings that are closest to one another as far as the artist's approach is concerned, the two that can be enjoyed on most nearly the same basis are the two that seem most unlike to the layman. The very realistic Old Violin and the highly abstract Musical Forms are first cousins."

Last of the suite

Steven LaRose, Myself When I Am Real, 2010

Oil on wood, 14.5 x 11.5 inches

Here is the blow by blow:

Louder Than Words (episode two) from Steven LaRose on Vimeo.

It is like that

Louder Than Words (episode one) from Steven LaRose on Vimeo.

Sitting down for another round of Leucovorin Calcium and Fluorouracil I decided to think about painting. Or rather, try to think about thinking with paint. I believe I copped that term from the James Elkins book, What Painting Is. It makes sense to me. We move the pigment and binder around in a pre-linguistic rush. Forming the world with haptic glee. Feeling into the plane with our eyes. However, the meaning of the work DOES NOT come first and then the work is created to represent that meaning. Like Miles Davis said, "I'll play it first and tell you what it is later." The meaning percolates up from the ground. The ground is the surface where the painter freely roams in an open world boundless of artificial constraints, and with there being no right way of pushing the paint. Painting is like divination but without asking a question first. The paint becomes symbolic of things in the world that we name. Paint takes on anthropic principles in which values are consistent with conditions for life as we know it. We don't create something new but discover with paint relationships that we appreciate from experiencing Reality. We don't see something and then reproduce it with the filter of our ego. We don't give a soulful take on Nature. Why water Nature down with our ego? We create natural relationships or like true mathematicians, painters are discoverers of naturally occurring objects. The painting emerges during the process of self-organization.

Bubbles

In this painting I cut through the jargon and the controversy to provide an up-to-date account

Steven LaRose, My Strung Theory, 2010
Oil on wood, 11.5 x 14.5 inches