I like the delicate squiggles, the spacing and the light cross hatching in this sketch. It has a coincidental resemblance of a Joan Miró composition. But Miró planned his work. I did not plan the visual look of this drawing but rather followed a manual procedure. My process was to create a uniform spacing of […]
I am inspired by the line drawings of Paul Klee, the icons of Joan Miró and lines and color patches of Vassily Kandinsky. The study below is a portrait of myself with an eye open to the dreamscape that I visit nearly every night.
In this study I continue to use the thick outlines inspired by Joan Miró (see Hand in Hand) to combine two gestures frequently exhibited by my brother Mike*. Backstory I photographed Mike for many years and tried to capture his actions with the hope of understanding his expressions. Mike’s hand is often on the side […]
I flip through pages of art books of my favorite artists in search of ideas. Carolyn Lanchner’s Joan Miró was on my desk and I turned the pages until I got to the following pieces: The Bird with a Calm Look, Its Wings in Flames; The Bird Boom-Boom Makes His Appeal to the Head Onion […]
Here is another composition in the Joan Miró mode. I have been building a library of icons throughout the years and have been experimenting with ways of arranging them. I prepared the watercolor paper with random washes of pale yellows and blues. On the lower third of the paper I placed a cone with a […]
I had fun with this composition. It started as a free-form design but instead of coloring the bounded areas, I left most of them empty. I was inspired by Joan Miró’s work, especially his constellation series. I filled in some of the smaller shapes that were formed by overlapping lines. I looked for strange creatures […]
I began coloring in the sections of my free form design for today’s study. Some of the small Venn-diagram-ish overlaps looked like flags. I abandoned the idea of coloring-in larger areas of my amorphous design in favor of using their edges as lines. I admire Joan Miró’s work, which uses such small shapes and lines […]
For the past several posts I have been revisiting my enjoyment of Joan Miró. I do this with an ulterior motive: to explore his means of creation and apply them to my own ideas. Lately I am particularly intrigued by The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers, one of his ‘Constellation’ series. I […]
I’ve always thought that to ‘abstract’ something, one condenses it into its essence. Caricaturists do this all the time when they present recognizable portraits of their subjects with prominent features exaggerated. Most artists try to tell the truth as they see it. Visual artists do so by using color and form that represent the essence of scenes or […]
One of Miró’s works that has obsessed me of late is The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers. Its title alone is fascinating. It combines line drawing with shapes, which when studied, reveal the narrative. Even without study, the arrangement of the dark shapes is appealing. The design holds together without knowing Miró’s […]
