Anatomy of Art

To start, a Happy New Year to those who celebrate the Lunar calendar(aka 'Chinese New Year') I spent most of the day in bed sick, and because of that I felt the need to start today productive. So my first update to this blog for 2011 was a fine place to start.

I was recently fortunate to be selected in PrintZero Studio's first publishing of their annual Print Exchange, 2010 edition.

My print, 'We Lost Ourselves' was one of 35 of nearly 300 submissions to be included in their catalog. I thank all those who sent me congratulations, which made the work even more worth it. Though also, I thank a few who honestly replied with, "Why?" Why did you draw this? Why would they chose it?

Well. Perhaps inspired by my great, wise friend Amy Scheidegger and her Artistic Rebuttal, I'm going to break down my thought process behind this art. Will those be reasons to why it was selected? maybe not. But maybe you'll find it enlightening.

The Concept: My personal work often falls in this category: figurative, theatrical, with narrative elements. In what I do, I'm interested in conveying some story relating to the Human Condition. My starting point for this was saying farewell. To bring a close to a chapter, cutting it from your life, the end. The visual is a woman, perhaps in her home, cutting up the photo of a man. We don't know their relation, but it is unimportant. She looks to be asleep, maybe because it's something she can't bring herself to do coherently.

This piece alludes to a print I did in the past, 'I Take A Little Off the Top' where cutting signifies bringing an end to something for relief.

The Elements: Every visual we see contains some combination of the elements and principles of art, but here, I'll highlight a few of the major details I included.

We're naturally drawn to the human face, so it's important to include details to pull the viewer throughout the picture plane. Here, though it is subtle, the space created by the foreground hand is in close vicinity and mimics the shape and details of the head.

In this same area, though we know the hand created depth of space, the visual repetion pulls and relates pieces together. The woman's arm completes a pattern of fingers.

Among my favorite artists, the late Paul Hartley taught me the appreciation for repeated lines. This repetition is subconscious, but visually holds the picture together.

Again, repleted lines to create repetition in the image. The blue angles serve as arrows which are an advertent choice to keep you within the image though there is a figure who is outwards and cut off. I commonly decide on cropping figures because it's visually interesting to me, so it's important to pull the viewer back into the picture with such elements.

While on the subject of the cut figure, it's safe to assume that the man's face is his, as it visually 'completes' his body. And hey, weren't we pointed directly to it?










The Execution: This is a plate etching done by carbine-tip needle, printed in Daniel Smith Standard Black ink on Rives BFK paper.

So there you have it. The thought process behind one of my pieces of art. Tune in next time!