Painting With Light
by Rick Doble
LINKS TO MAJOR ART MOVEMENTS AND ARTISTS
Around the year 1900, Einstein, Freud, sophisticated photography and the advent
of pervasive technology and machinery signaled a distinct change in human
civilization. These radical ideas and technology were a clear break from the past -- a
world of farming, horses and disease. This new manmade world required a new
vision - the work of modern artists.
The new expressive photography that I am proposing in this online exhibit can
learn and gain inspiration from modern art in general and the following modern
artistic movements and modern artists in particular.
Artistic Movements
Abstract Art:
Pure abstract art has more to do with design, color and sense of space rather
than emotion or expression. However, in a sense, abstract art never existed in
this pure form.
Abstract imagery has been around for some time in photography, such as the work
of Aaron Suskind. However, the new imagery I am proposing with slow shutter
speeds and blur makes for some particularly powerful abstract images.
Since there were so many branches of abstract painting, I will include links to
major early abstract painters rather than the movement itself.
Delaunay:
http://204.168.68.231/site/artist_works_39_0.html
Kandinsky:
http://204.168.68.231/site/artist_works_71_0.html
Malevich:
http://204.168.68.231/site/artist_works_94_0.html
Mondrian:
http://204.168.68.231/site/artist_works_112_0.html
Abstract Expressionism:
Founded in New York in the forties and fifties the work of Pollock, DeKooning,
Rothko, Kline, Frankenthaler, and Hofmann (just to name a few), combined the
inner feelings of the artist with an abstract image. Again photography has the
ability to add the feeling of the artist to an abstract picture. I have been
told, for example, that I was "action painting with a camera," an idea that I
agree with.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/a/abstractexpr.html
Cubism:
I believe that both cubism and futurism were deeply affected by Einstein's
Special Theory of Relativity which was published in 1905. This theory linked
time and space together as a basic foundation of physics and the world in which
we live. Cubism broke away from the three dimensional space that had controlled
art since the Renaissance. While the imagery and colors were quite limited in
cubism, the space created was a new way to see. For example, with a portrait it
was as though the viewer could see a person from the back, front and side all
at the same time or perhaps see that person from different times all at one
time.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/c/cubism.html
"Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one
and the same reality".
Albert Einstein
Expressionism:
While figurative, the expressionists wanted to express their feelings about a
scene rather than depict the scene accurately. This led to distortions, unusual
perspectives and primitive imagery.
Digital photography can now achieve these expressionist effects. Digital
photography can render subjects both realistic and also somewhat abstracted or
smeared or vibrating (however you want to think of it). It can also create
unusual perspectives.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/e/Expressionism.html
Futuristism:
I believe that both cubism and futurism were deeply affected by Einstein's
Special Theory of Relativity which was published in 1905. This theory linked
time and space together as a basic foundation of physics and the world in which
we live. The goal of the Futurists was to include motion (and therefore time) in
a painted image, much like the cubist wanted to include multidimensions in a
portrait. Many of the images created in this online exhibit are similar to
Futurist paintings.
http://www.futurism.org.uk/
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/f/futurism.html
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with
a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."
Albert Einstein
Impressionism:
Light and color were suddenly freed from their realistic chains by the
Impressionist. This came about because photography could render a realistic
image quite easily, so painting had to branch out on its own. Instead of a real
image, the artist created an impression. After years of living with these images,
many people would agree that these impressions were more "real" than the
realistic imagery they replaced. In any case, the Impressionists changed art
forever. Their movement was the beginning of Western modern art.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/ij/impressionism.html
Surrealism:
Although originally conceived as a vehicle for poetry, it was visual imagery
that gave surrealism its true voice. Andre Breton, the principle founder,
fashioned a number ideas that were to characterize surrealism such as "pure
psychic automatism," which included an acceptance of chance and accident and a "mental vantage-point (point de l'esprit) from which
life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, communicable and
incommunicable, high and low, will no longer be perceived as contradictions."
His ideas led in several directions such as the almost trance like state that
Pollock used to start his paintings and the dream imagery of Dali or Magritte.
The new photography I am proposing in the online exhibit can make use of both
ideas: 1) photography can mix a realistic image with a less sharp one and
combine this with an unusual angle to create dream like imagery and 2) the
photographer can relinquish some control and accept chance and accident to be
central at times in the creation of his/her work.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/s/surrealism.html
Truth To Materials
(not exactly a movement, but more a way of working); these
are some artists who used that approach:
Please see my full essay on this subject
Brancusi:
http://204.168.68.231/site/artist_works_22_0.html
Moore:
http://www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk/
Pollock:
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org
Artists Whose Work Has Directly Affected My Digital Photography
Bacon, Francis:
His self portraits have a power and honesty that is hard to match. Showing
himself in a very unflattering light, his smeared images are quite carefully
done. His expressionist and blurred self-portraits are similar to
what I was able to accomplish without realizing that he had done such self
-portraits.
Francis Bacon Self Portraits
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org
Calder, Alexander:
While others tried to depict motion, Calder created things that moved. From his
circus to his mobiles, his art described space and time in a new way. If you
look at a Calder mobile for a while, it appears to carve out the space in its
path and that empty space, that it can enter and leave, becomes part of the art
work.
http://www.calder.org
DeStaël, Nicolas:
As I wrote in a companion essay on this site, DeStaël's quest was to find that
point in space and artistic vision that encompassed the real and the abstract at
the same time. Since photography starts out by dealing with the real world, it
can then abstract a real image with a slower shutter speed, for example.
See the essay I wrote about DeStaël.
Unfortunately I could not find one site that concentrated on his work, only
sites with posters for sale.
http://www.globalgallery.com
http://www.barewalls.com/cgi-bin/search.exe?SEARCHSTRING=Staël
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/de_Stael_Nicolas.html
Gorky, Arshile:
Gorky is considered both a surrealist and an abstract expressionist. I often
think of Gorky's paintings when I am composing. His figures merge and blend into
each other to form more of a fabric than a figure-ground relationship. For
example, I thought of his compositions when I created the dance pictures that
are part of this online exhibit.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/gorky_arshile.html
http://www.ndoylefineart.com/gorky.html
Kandinsky, Wassily:
He was the father of abstract art and also a major expressionist. The depth and
range of his body of work is hard to classify because it kept growing and
changing. It includes a number of distinct periods that produced quite different
work and visions. Obsessed with the "spiritual in art" he
approached the visual image in a number of ways to tell his basic message - that
art was primarily concerned with the spiritual aspect of humanity.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org
Muybridge, Eadweard:
Muybridge is probably the most important little known modern artist of the last 150 years. His work in fast motion photography led to major developments in still photography and painting plus the invention of motion pictures. In addition his images of people and animals in motion forever changed the way these figures were viewed. His work led to the invention of the cinema and directly affected Marcel Duchamp and others at the turn of the century. I have studied his work carefully for over twenty years and made my own gallery of his work in a revised digital format (in the early 1990s with an 8-bit computer). You can look at my exhibit online.
---EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE
at the Kingston Museum in association with Kingston University
---Rick Doble's Woman in Motion -
Muybridge revisioned
Pollock, Jackson:
Pollock's overall compositions, sense of space and depth as well as his
incredible understanding of line and the directional force of line are all quite
appropriate for some of the new photographic images that I am proposing in this
online exhibit. Like Kandinsky, his work was concerned with a spiritual
resonance. This spirituality often gets overlooked in favor of his radical
technique of splattering paint. Yet this method was really just a means to an
end; many of his paintings, both early and late, were not painted in this style.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org
Art and Four Dimensions
To see one conception of a four dimensional supercube or hypercube in a two dimensional drawing:
Click Here
To read a discussion of how various modern artists such as Duchamp and Picasso used the fourth dimension in their work, go to:
Click Here
Or:
Click Here
Or the 4D Web Page with lots of links:
Click Here
On a personal note:
I, Rick Doble, have been wrestling with the notion of four dimensions most of my life, ever since I read George Gamow's book One Two Three...Infinity at the age of 13. These drawings are from a notebook that I made at that age and were essentially copied from Gamow's book.
The drawing in the middle is a four dimensional supercube: the small cube in the middle of that drawing represents the beginning of the cube at its creation, the lines represent the time the cube existed, and the large cube represents the cube at the end of its life