Learning to see
I’m participating (after the fact) in Tara Leaver’s 21 Days in My Art World challenge.
Today’s prompt: Favourite tool
I primarily use brushes to make my paintings, but I find a rag and spray bottle (full of water) indispensable.
I use them for many things:
Continue reading “21 Days in My Art World: Day 5”When McCahon declared, ‘I will need words,’ in a 1961 letter to poet John Caselberg, he was saying he needed them for something. He wanted his paintings to speak: to cut through, to communicate, to be clear in a new way about human fears and hopes and about how to love authentically. And he saw that painted words were a way to approach spiritual realities and urgencies that resisted conventional picturing.
—Justin Paton, McCahon Country
After saying here that words are limited, I came across this quote that I’d saved. McCahon clearly thought that a conventional visual image, at least for what he was trying do, was limited, and that words were necessary.
I’m not sure, yet, whether words will end up being a feature of my paintings, but I am working on one where they are. And given I also love words, maybe they will. We’ll see.
Clearly there’s a tension between various things in art—and in life.
I’m participating (after the fact) in Tara Leaver’s 21 Days in My Art World challenge.
I’m slowly building a collection of art books, but this is easily my favourite one. Mainly because Colin McCahon is my favourite New Zealand artist (possibly my favourite artist full stop), but also because Justin Paton is a fantastic, engaging writer.
I usually just look at the images and read a little bit of the text in big, hardcover art books, but I’ve read this one cover to cover. It also contains beautiful reproductions.
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To see my other posts in this series, use this search.
This post, by Artenquire, is a good primer on aesthetics. I suspect it gets a lot more esoteric beyond this. 🤓
Happy World Art Day! 🌏🖼️🌞 Seems like a good day to post this.
A couple of years ago, an experienced artist friend said to me, “just keep going; it’s the only way”. That’s great advice, but I’ve realised it’s important to go further. We need to know why we make art so that when challenges come—and plenty will, especially for new artists—we have the motivation to keep going.
Continue reading “Why I make art”