[On Painting] On A-Painting-a-Day (Part 3)
7 views
Skip to first unread message
Duane
Mar 1, 2007, 3:56:01 PM3/1/07
to Keiser-on...@googlegroups.com
As I watch the PAD movement grow into the hundreds (thousands?) I thought it might be an appropriate time to look more deeply into what, exactly, the PAD idea is. In each of the next few posts I’d like to talk about one aspect of the practice of making a painting each day (as opposed to the business side of it.)
I’ve been struck by how many emails I have received from non-artists wanting to learn how to paint and start their own PAD projects. They typically aren’t interested in selling or even showing their work publicly. They often have full-time jobs and kids. It finally occurred to me there is something going on here that goes beyond wanting to learn how to paint a pretty picture, and I think it taps into an underlying attraction to the idea of making a painting a day:
We go through our lives with a perpetual cursory glance. We see but we don’t notice. It is like when we are on a long car trip and get so lost in thought that we suddenly can’t remember the last 30 minutes of the trip… the landscape, the road signs, nothing. We didn’t crash, so we were seeing, but we weren’t noticing. I had an experience once when I was visiting California several years ago. A crowd had gathered on the beach to watch the sunset. As I joined them, I overheard someone talking about a green flash. I asked what she meant and she explained that the moment the sun disappears behind the horizon there will be a green flash. I had lived in California as a child and had seen many ocean sunsets and not once did I see a green flash. I was skeptical. But sure enough, there was a green flash. I watched for it again the next day, just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. It was there. I did some research and found that the green flash it is a well-known natural phenomenon. This, in and of itself, is not too unusual in the big scheme of things. What amazed me, however, was that I had never seen it before even though I had been looking right at it during dozens and dozens of sunsets. I later read a book, Robert Pirsig’s “Lila,” where in one chapter he wrote of a similar experience. He led me to wonder about what else I might be missing. If I can look at dozens of sunsets and not see something so obvious and beautiful as that green flash, what is going on around me, right now, that I am missing simply because I am not prepared to notice it? What image is hitting my retina that my brain is not allowing to get through to me? Add to this the fact that we live in a hyper-visual world. We are bombarded with imagery-TV, video, cameras, camera phones, movies, computers etc. All of this information forms the visual equivalent of white noise. It is hard to see and appreciate the colors in a candle flame when it is seen against a fireworks display-- and if we are only looking for fireworks in the first place, we will not only not see the subtleties of that single flame, we won’t notice the flame at all. In effect, the flame ceases to exist to us.
In some sense we are using our eyes more than ever before, but this seeing is often relegated to fourth-hand imagery—images that are produced by someone else, edited, filtered and then translated into 0s and 1s for our quick and easy consumption. Direct observation and the patience it requires has become less natural to us. When you go to any art museum, look how much time the average person spends in front of even the greatest painting... not much. Or look what happens when somebody is on vacation and discovers some amazing vista… out comes the camera for a snapshot and then it’s time to move on. We simply aren’t used to observing things firsthand, of investigating them, and I think we sense this—that we’re missing something; that we have, to some degree, become spectators of our own lives. I think this is one aspect of the PAD idea that draws artists and non-artists alike to the idea of making a painting a day. Even to the uninitiated, there is the notion that painting makes us participants again. The idea of bringing painting into our life holds the promise of experiencing a moment each day when we can be still. We turn off the TV and the cell phone, and we paint
The very act of carrying a cigar box easel around activates our eyes because we know we have to do a painting that day. The daily deadline intensifies the process of looking. You have to find a subject (soon… always soon) and so you are constantly searching-- in the supermarket, in class, in your backyard, wherever you are. Your mind wakes up as you prepare yourself to paint. Indeed, if you practice it long enough you begin to paint even when you aren’t painting. That cigar box holds more than paint—it holds the potential for us to have a quiet moment alone with ourselves and to savor something that we find to be interesting or beautiful. On the one hand it is a brief respite from the electric hum of modern life but on the other it is the opposite—a way to face and thus reenter our visual world. Annie Dillard wrote, “ Admire the world for never ending on you as you would admire an opponent, without taking your eyes off him, or walking away.”
--
Posted By Duane to On Painting at 3/01/2007 12:34:00 PM
I’ve been struck by how many emails I have received from non-artists wanting to learn how to paint and start their own PAD projects. They typically aren’t interested in selling or even showing their work publicly. They often have full-time jobs and kids. It finally occurred to me there is something going on here that goes beyond wanting to learn how to paint a pretty picture, and I think it taps into an underlying attraction to the idea of making a painting a day:
We go through our lives with a perpetual cursory glance. We see but we don’t notice. It is like when we are on a long car trip and get so lost in thought that we suddenly can’t remember the last 30 minutes of the trip… the landscape, the road signs, nothing. We didn’t crash, so we were seeing, but we weren’t noticing. I had an experience once when I was visiting California several years ago. A crowd had gathered on the beach to watch the sunset. As I joined them, I overheard someone talking about a green flash. I asked what she meant and she explained that the moment the sun disappears behind the horizon there will be a green flash. I had lived in California as a child and had seen many ocean sunsets and not once did I see a green flash. I was skeptical. But sure enough, there was a green flash. I watched for it again the next day, just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. It was there. I did some research and found that the green flash it is a well-known natural phenomenon. This, in and of itself, is not too unusual in the big scheme of things. What amazed me, however, was that I had never seen it before even though I had been looking right at it during dozens and dozens of sunsets. I later read a book, Robert Pirsig’s “Lila,” where in one chapter he wrote of a similar experience. He led me to wonder about what else I might be missing. If I can look at dozens of sunsets and not see something so obvious and beautiful as that green flash, what is going on around me, right now, that I am missing simply because I am not prepared to notice it? What image is hitting my retina that my brain is not allowing to get through to me? Add to this the fact that we live in a hyper-visual world. We are bombarded with imagery-TV, video, cameras, camera phones, movies, computers etc. All of this information forms the visual equivalent of white noise. It is hard to see and appreciate the colors in a candle flame when it is seen against a fireworks display-- and if we are only looking for fireworks in the first place, we will not only not see the subtleties of that single flame, we won’t notice the flame at all. In effect, the flame ceases to exist to us.
In some sense we are using our eyes more than ever before, but this seeing is often relegated to fourth-hand imagery—images that are produced by someone else, edited, filtered and then translated into 0s and 1s for our quick and easy consumption. Direct observation and the patience it requires has become less natural to us. When you go to any art museum, look how much time the average person spends in front of even the greatest painting... not much. Or look what happens when somebody is on vacation and discovers some amazing vista… out comes the camera for a snapshot and then it’s time to move on. We simply aren’t used to observing things firsthand, of investigating them, and I think we sense this—that we’re missing something; that we have, to some degree, become spectators of our own lives. I think this is one aspect of the PAD idea that draws artists and non-artists alike to the idea of making a painting a day. Even to the uninitiated, there is the notion that painting makes us participants again. The idea of bringing painting into our life holds the promise of experiencing a moment each day when we can be still. We turn off the TV and the cell phone, and we paint
The very act of carrying a cigar box easel around activates our eyes because we know we have to do a painting that day. The daily deadline intensifies the process of looking. You have to find a subject (soon… always soon) and so you are constantly searching-- in the supermarket, in class, in your backyard, wherever you are. Your mind wakes up as you prepare yourself to paint. Indeed, if you practice it long enough you begin to paint even when you aren’t painting. That cigar box holds more than paint—it holds the potential for us to have a quiet moment alone with ourselves and to savor something that we find to be interesting or beautiful. On the one hand it is a brief respite from the electric hum of modern life but on the other it is the opposite—a way to face and thus reenter our visual world. Annie Dillard wrote, “ Admire the world for never ending on you as you would admire an opponent, without taking your eyes off him, or walking away.”
--
Posted By Duane to On Painting at 3/01/2007 12:34:00 PM
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages