Ed's thread (1 Viewer)

hello all

back to the Barn Owl project for a little bit this weekend

its going alright, but I've covered up a bit too much of the underpainting and settled into a slightly comfy and predictable colour scheme

so I'm tempted to rough it up a little before finishing off the owl

as an aside, photo attached of a perfect puddle to match a flying Barn Owl: the real owl never quite strayed into line with it as it worked along the ditch, so I digi'd it in to record the possibility, if not the true moment

Great work Ed, you're on a roll here, son. Love the inverted barnie shadow.

Perhaps 'slightly comfy' but rich and full, and it still packs all of your trademark 'order out of chaos' brushwork. You know I can't resist a barnie anyway so I'm really looking forward to this one getting finished.

Mike

for me it`s a wonder to see the begin and when it`s finished

greetings Gaby

Woody said:

Perhaps 'slightly comfy' but rich and full, and it still packs all of your trademark 'order out of chaos' brushwork. You know I can't resist a barnie anyway so I'm really looking forward to this one getting finished.

Mike

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rain rain rain today, so I've taken the opportunity to have another shot at the owl- scraped some background off with a knife under hot water, to make it all a bit more scratchy spare and connected

maybe will paint a bit of detail back in, to tie the bird into its immediate background

great to see this develop, just wondering if maybe shading the water so it lays down more on the perspective plane and moves our eye down to the bird. its reading rather vertical right now, or it may be the photo.

I'm liking it. I wonder if the water stopping sharply behind the bird's wing doesn't jar just a tad? Maybe break the connection with more herbage, or continue it past a squeak, perhaps? It's another fine piece.

timwootton said:

I'm liking it. I wonder if the water stopping sharply behind the bird's wing doesn't jar just a tad? Maybe break the connection with more herbage, or continue it past a squeak, perhaps? It's another fine piece.

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That's exactly what hit me, though maybe Colleen was responding to something similar. As it is I think that the lightness of bird and water combine to make a big light shape that flattens out and dominates everything else.

A little break between bird and water and maybe some shading in water as Colleen suggests and I think it will be another strong one. And I have no doubt that you'll pull it off!

10 out of 10 for the comments and 6 out of 10 for the painting I think..

so rather than start a fire with it, I've given it one more kick to take it back to where I started, hopefully something a bit more misty and fragile

onward!

worth doing again for sure....IMO have the brightest whites on the bird and subdue the water , otherwise you are telling the eye of the view that both are equally important....

I'm reading a stunning book called Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, where a neurophysiologist in plain and fascinating language explains how the eye and brain process information for us to see and relates it all to art. If we as artists can learn a bit more of how images are understood and processed by the brain, we have a great tool to make art that helps the viewer receive the knowledge and pleasure we wanted to pass on about the experience we had that made us want to make a painting.

So in this one if the luminance of both the whites are the same, the brain will try and put them together as part of each other....if you don't want that then subduing the water luminance will let the eye see the bird as the subject and the water second

ed keeble said:

10 out of 10 for the comments and 6 out of 10 for the painting I think..

so rather than start a fire with it, I've given it one more kick to take it back to where I started, hopefully something a bit more misty and fragile

onward!

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Yes - there's a wonderful quality to this new image.

colleenc said:

....if you don't want that then subduing the water luminance will let the eye see the bird as the subject and the water second

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that's right into the heart of it alright

I've never been quite happy with bird-as-subject, everything bowing and deferring to the bird- I do like to see the bird balanced and tied up with some of the kicks and features of the background

so that's the question- how strong can the background be when adding strength and echoes to the bird, at what point is it competing and introducing unresolved ambiguities

the plan here was for the switchbacks in the water edge to track the wing kinks in the owl

here's a variant, water toned down a bit

well this is working better now, and has more space...so I have a new question what exactly is it that you want the water to do for the painting...ie why is it there?

I must say that it's a real joy to watch this owl painting of yours develop Ed...!

The balancing act of color and composition is fascinating...it reminds me of watching a shoreline and with each wave of water a change occurs upon the beach....[ie..canvas]..!

Marvelous....:t:

ed keeble said:

that's right into the heart of it alright

I've never been quite happy with bird-as-subject, everything bowing and deferring to the bird- I do like to see the bird balanced and tied up with some of the kicks and features of the background

so that's the question- how strong can the background be when adding strength and echoes to the bird, at what point is it competing and introducing unresolved ambiguities

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Interesting to see this develop Ed and to hear your thought processes. I've liked it at various times along the way, though I was also a bit bothered at one point as I mentioned above.

But I think what you say about not wanting everything bowing and deferring to the bird explains why it's hard for me to know what to say. I'm very sympathetic to that view. But at the same time it's pretty idiosyncratic and individual. So that only you know I think when you've reached that balance that you want.

All of which is to say I'm confident that eventually you'll reach the state that you're happy with. And when you do I think the rest of us will be happy as well. As I said for me I've think there have been about three different times now where I would have said finished, or nearly so!

solitaryVSong said:

Interesting to see this develop Ed and to hear your thought processes. I've liked it at various times along the way, though I was also a bit bothered at one point as I mentioned above.

But I think what you say about not wanting everything bowing and deferring to the bird explains why it's hard for me to know what to say. I'm very sympathetic to that view. But at the same time it's pretty idiosyncratic and individual. So that only you know I think when you've reached that balance that you want.

All of which is to say I'm confident that eventually you'll reach the state that you're happy with. And when you do I think the rest of us will be happy as well. As I said for me I've think there have been about three different times now where I would have said finished, or nearly so!

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That's well-put, I would say.

Below you will see a painting by a Russian artist, A. L Yarbus. and below that is the track of the eyes of a viewer who looked at it for 10 min....there were sensors on contacts in the eyes of the viewer.

I'm totally engrossed in book I found at a book sale that is IMO a must read. Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing I promise you will be completely amazed if you can get through it, written by a neurobiologist and a post doc who's an artist, it has, in plain language, some fascinating science of vision that pertains to art and artists painting. You can get one for under $10 used ....

Besides explaining the reason the Mona Lisa's smile is so mysterious(REALLY interesting) page 78 has this

Quote:
"Yarbus found that the subjects tended to look most at those parts of the picture that contained high-contrast and fine detail as well as items of biological significance (like humans), It must be that our peripheral vision picks out those areas of the visual scene with high detail and contrast or potential interest and sends a messae to the eye-movement system to plan the next eye movement so that the fovea lands on a part of the visual scene that is rich in information"/Quote

I found it so interesting that the eye never went into the edges of the painting a place that most good painters leave out detail and contrast.... which the artist had kept quiet but still it has some things to see, notice that the left to right scan went a bit to the right side...What do you suppose was a cue to keep going back to the dark places behind the trees, looking for tiger maybe.....no it is the contrast there. all of this is programed in to how the eye and vision work, not necessarily a conscious process, but one as artists we can use...which is the point of the book.

what do you think the tracks would look like on your painting? I've been playing with this on mine lately, you actually can catch some of it. Of course we will keep coming back to the owl like we do the human in the forest as the owl is "biologically" significant, but how will we go from there?

these barnies have been very very exciting indeed. Colleen - that's fascinating, I think I'll be looking for a copy of that book.

colleenc said:

Below you will see a painting by a Russian artist, A. L Yarbus. and below that is the track of the eyes of a viewer who looked at it for 10 min....there were sensors on contacts in the eyes of the viewer.

...

what do you think the tracks would look like on your painting? I've been playing with this on mine lately, you actually can catch some of it. Of course we will keep coming back to the owl like we do the human in the forest as the owl is "biologically" significant, but how will we go from there?

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there's some mighty thinking in there: especially about guiding or tempting the eye back into the picture once you have led it to the subject

I need to muse some more on that- and how you can do it with dark space, doesn't have to be bright and busy

meantimes its time to move on from owl, here rendered in one very quick final splasho which does actually capture the [flawed] composition I started out with in mind

a fine abstract, it reads fine on a flat plane as a 2-d but opens up some of what may be the challenge since you want it to read as more 3-d space

notice we start at the top and go down, the white ribbon leads us to the M of the owl form, so the white ribbon is a pointer down and due to the shape of the owl, those wings point our eye out of the painting and it's hard to get back in again, we don't circulate around the work, the only real path is down and out then you have to start at the top again,( in the West we read things left to right and top to bottom, but in the East it might be different)

just thinking out loud here, but if we do down and out several times we may be done looking, how to make a path for the eye around the work and different paths, and interesting surfaces to see(you are the master of that) is the challenge....you could cut out your shapes and move them around various ways to try out compositions. or maybe change the wing shape to stop our eyes and bring us into the work, tho that would not be in keeping with the shape thing you were doing.

Doing art on this level one begins to see how difficult it is, beyond technical skill, into the more mysterious realms, but at least the artist can begin to understand what makes a really satisfying work, and why some are better than others, and maybe what to do about the slightly unsatisfied feeling.