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| One of My Favorite Spots on van Gogh's Starry Night |
Here is one of my latest paintings in a somewhat low resolution image. It is hanging in our Faculty exhibit that will be up in the Plunkett Gallery of Hardman Hall until sometime in mid-September. I call it a P'Art Object, because it's a part of a work of art. As the title lets you know, this is to be found on van Gogh's Starry Night. It's a tiny spot blown up big (original about an inch across; painting five feet). I won't say where it is in case you would like to try to spot it. The photo works like a distant view; depending on your eyes several feet away or more you see what appears to be big gigantic gobs of impasto brushstrokes made by huge brushes with spots of bare canvas catching paint where the weave lifts the crossings of huge threads. You walk up close and find it is pretty much flat and covered with thousands of brush strokes, layers of glaze peeking out from around and under them and enlivened with streaks of scumbling. (Darned autocorrect doesn't believe scumbling is a real word.) Of course the low resolution of the image causes the subtleties of surface texture, color, and details to disappear when you zoom in. So here is a close-up. We can call it "One of my favorite spots on one of my favorite spots on van Gogh's Starry Night".
So you can see how painterly the whole is. It works in a similar way as the painting in an earlier post called Buddha of the Ten-Thousand Colors. I like to play with people's perceptions. And I like what paint can do. Just trompe l'oeil (fooling the eye) isn't enough. It's more interesting when it is obviously paint and then turns into something else. Or rather the other way around. The viewers become very aware of the shift in their perceptions as they approach the painting. When I did old-fashioned trompe l'oeil paintings they tended to get poked and kicked as people tested their suspicions that the object wasn't what they were seeing, and some got angry when they realized they'd been fooled. When you get to looking at the real brush strokes in this you can see the real canvas weave made visible by the glazes pooling in the spaces between the threads. The scumbling resembles the gaps in van Gogh's giant strokes. What tickles my fancy about this painting most is that it is a painted representation of paint.
