Latest posts by michael wilson (see all)
- JORDAN RIVER - February 5, 2019
- Inspired Art - August 2, 2018
- Waiting for Inspiration - July 31, 2018
- The Bridge between Painting and Photography - July 31, 2018
There are some songs, some tunes that just seem to draw us in. We feel almost entranced. Some Beatle tunes are like this and we feel like hearing them over and over. Music transcends and takes us to a different state. Good music enhances our daily lives. My brother is a musician and he is constantly learning new pieces or refining ones that he learned years ago. He loves all kinds of music and plays the piano beautifully. Music of course comes to us audibly – it comes to our ears and creates a vibration that can literally affect our soul experience. The magic of color comes to us in a slightly different way.
The visual artist, specifically the painter finds entrancement in color. For the abstract artist color is often not specifically seen as a view of nature but is realized internally – color is imagined. This no doubt stems from a particular collective storehouse. It seems as if the brain, trained to discern color combinations keeps a type of record – almost like a slide show of color combinations that are constantly being inter-changed and compared. It seems to be a mental process aided by the imagination. Last week I was admiring an American Robin which has a most peculiar shade of orange fully on its chest. It is coppery, darkened apricot and not I expect, especially easy to duplicate on the pallete. The particular shade is distinctly now logged in to my memory and I think, for the time being at least, locked in. Bringing it out and manifesting that exact shade comes only with practice. I own several excellent books that describe how to inter-mix shades to get accurate results. They are carefully arranged with a certain shade of crimson running horizontal and then a shade of blue (Prussian) running down vertical and then they cross in multiple combinations of white. Then it gets complicated by adding cadmium yellow and these run down a column. There are thousands of combinations. Personally I rarely refer to them. My experience is more, shall we say, visceral and intuitive. I just start mixing small experiments and trust my eye to match what my mind has stored up.
It is helpful to be undistracted because it seems the transference is not especially an easy one. Mental elements have to be retrieved. There seems to be this intricate filing system and as I mentioned – a type or series of multiple slides carefully arranged and logged, perhaps according to my own specific preferences. This then has to be mentally interpreted, the colors at hand need to be manipulated on the pallete by the brush quite carefully and it is often the case that the established hue is just not quite it. When it is found there is a distinct excitement of discovery. Not unlike discovering a tune or song that seems to exactly represent the intended mood or feeling that we want to play it over and over. For the abstract painter there is no specific tree, no sky, no stream for color reference. This then opens up endless possibilites but also seems to demand unusual sensitivity to the stored up mental categories of color combinations. Today I keep turning in my mind a particular image…it is not actually so much an image as a combination of three hues : a dark umber, a very shaded white with a slight tint of cadmium yellow and remarkably, a grey tone with a touch of red. Through the day I can bring those exact three hues up in my mind and review them. I can mix them in various design schemes – I can manipulate them. The exact hues however just came to me unexpectedly. I did not go searching for them. They were apparently and previously logged in separately and then brought forward in my mind as partners. Those three and only those particular three were brought forward for my mental review. This of course is an interesting process to experience. It lies at the root perhaps of why an artist paints at all. I mean, after all I can either ignore the prompting which cosmically seems like a terrible waste, or I can respond to it and see what might be manifested when I do go and prepare a pallete of these shades – or try.