Today’s watercolor experiment: I decided to let watercolors be watercolors today. I also listened to the paper. I use a fairly heavy (140 pound) watercolor paper that comes in a block. This is a stack of paper glued to a thick cardboard backing on all four sides. This makes it impossible for the paper to curl […]
I see Mike very infrequently. Mike is my older brother. He is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. The last time I saw him was a couple of years ago, with my mother and Dave, my younger brother.We went to see him at his geriatric group home for his 64th birthday. I should have known better than to have any expectations. […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: My pen point did a bit of walking* for this experiment. Unlike yesterday’s doodle, my peripatetic pen created a completely closed form today. I did lift the pen tip from the paper a couple of times to draw a couple of circular forms. I don’t remember the thought process that led me to do this, but I […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: Two factors influenced my artwork today. First, one of my favorite artists, Paul Klee, described a way to ‘make visible’ one’s inner state was to take a pencil point ‘for a walk’. Although I’m not clear about how to translate my inner state to the paper, I believe the practice of ‘taking a point for […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I began by wetting the lower right portion of my paper with an arced sweep of a 3″ brush. Next, I used a 1/2″ brush to drag carmine pigment into this pool after a couple of zig-zags on the dry paper. I love the dividing line between wet and dry. I imagined that cadmium yellow […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I did a bit of sketching prior to painting today’s study. I have been obsessed with the passage of time, time lines, the color yellow and shapes lately. My sketch consisted “time’s arrow” between two flat planes. The far plane reflects the yellow time line in a faint purple hue. The blue pane […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I began today’s study simply: I applied several yellowish pigments to a completely wet watercolor paper. In Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he equates forms with colors. Yellow, to use today’s example, is one of the ‘keen’ colors that is consonant with a sharp, or triangular shape. I wanted to see what would happen […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: Again, I had to stop reading Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art to try out some of his hypotheses. I’m fairly certain that to Kandinsky, his view of the spiritual nature of form and color was not hypothetical. For example, he says that ‘keen’ colors such as yellows are naturally suited to sharp […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I sidetracked myself from reading Kandinsky. I am a slow but thorough reader and Kandinsky requires slow going. I was itching to actually paint something, so I revisited my effort to depict reading of a contact sheet. After attaching watercolor paper to my drawing board, I drew a 6×6 grid of rectangles […]
Kandinsky describes a ‘spiritual triangle’ as one which is divided into unequal horizontal segments. The bottom segment is the widest and, as one approaches the apex, they get more and more narrow, with spirituality increasing with successively higher levels. Within the triangle is the world’s population. “Because the inhabitants of this great [lower] segment of […]
