Creating a Traditional Gallery Experience for the Showcase

Capturing Lighting in Photography

In the following photographs my main goal was to observe and capture the lighting and atmosphere of the scene. The slightly orange light at dusk adds a nice colour contrast to the blue water as they are complementary colours. The glowing light effect of the main light source, the sun, creates a very soft transition of both value and colour in the sky. Pointing the camera towards the light source will result in very dark foregrounds though. These aspects taken into consideration, very dynamic and contrasty images can be created (e.g. see first image below). 

One must also watch out for the lens flare that occurs when taking photos directly at the light source. If one wants to avoid said lens flare, as it is often too bright and destroys the balance of the picture, one can choose a position from which the desired scene can be captured without the light source being in the image view. This will also enable more detail for the image as the levels (darkest colour to lightest colour) are now closer together and the camera will capture these more accurately.

Below are some compositional variations between the dark foreground and soft background to create different effects. As a rule the less contrasty, the calmer and more harmonious the photograph will turn out. 

The pictures were taken during some of the first proper spring days in Dundee this year and show how nice the "Dundee Promenade" is during good weather conditions (sadly a bit rare due to the typical rainy Scottish weather). 

Capturing Dynamics in Soft Lighting

A montage of a seagull taking off to begin its flight

 Central Message
Surround by steps leading up to the positive way of thinking.

The Tay Bridge

The two top left photographs have a high colour contrast (between the strong oranges and blues). The top right on the other hand has a strong value contrast, as does the image below.

 Infinity

Colour Contrast

between the orange and blue

Dundee Promenade - Dusk Lighting

Exhibition Layout

Resource List

• PC
• Wall space
• Pedestal or table

Visual Presentation

• Visual project
• Showcase strong visuals rather than large amount of text
• if the visitors are interested in the project they will be able to read more about the project on the PC as well as have a look through my sketchbooks (and possibly art portfolio)
• Attract the visitors attention
• Keep the wall organized and balanced
• Avoid hanging up to much to retain a clear overview and presentation
• also means only the best work will be selected for the wall

Beneath is a concept design of how I could present my artwork at the Abertay Digital Graduate Show.

Pitch Presentation Feedback

Integrating Previous Presentations' Feedback

The main feedback of earlier presentations was "to find something to make my art special" and let it stand out from the mass. Therefore my research for this presentation was to figure out other artists' ambition and aspiration to help me find my own path/solution and meaning in art. 

For the presentations main art piece "Nocturne in Blue and Gold - The Tay Bridge" I then integrated meaning and purpose in two ways. 

• Firstly, I chose a location I have been to often and know by heart to ease the painting process and add a personal, subjective influence to the digital painting. 
• Secondly, I used literature to support the artworks background story and create an original mood and atmosphere. Beneath one can have a look at the  

Feedback

Pros

• More emotive art due to the integration of a poem into "Nocturne in Blue and Gold", as well as more focus on the atmosphere of the digital painting itself, which improves the art a lot and successfully enables it to stand out from my previous digital paintings.
• Integration of abstraction into my paintings shows development progress of my aesthetic journey.
• A clear improvement of craftsmanship skills is visible.
• The portrayal of scenes in different times of the day (day and night versions) demonstrates understanding and knowledge of light and colour theory.

Cons

• The presentation was very short
• Add more content and/or research leading to the results
• Define my aesthetic criteria and explain the goals I want to achieve through my personal artwork better.
• Also summarize the aesthetic journey up to date by describing my thought process and change of aesthetic vision clearer and how I plan to further develop it in the remaining time of the honours project.

Nocturne in Blue and Gold - The Tay Train

My attempt at a more dreamlike and loose painting to capture the atmosphere and lighting of the scene. Inspired by Theodor Fontane's ballad "the Tay Bridge".

"The Tay Bridge" by Theodor Fontane

Extract:

The husband and wife, with an anxious eye,

Look out to the south and of misgivings sigh,

Keeping a lookout and praying for a light,

Which o'er the water advances bright,

Proclaiming, "In spite of night and driving rain,

I come, I, the Edinburgh train."

(The complete ballad can be found here http://johnmaynard.net/TayEnglish.pdf)

Aesthetic Vision

The style of the digital painting "Nocturne in Blue and Gold - The Tay Train" was influenced by several factors. The famous British painter J. M. W. Turner definitely had one of the strongest influences. I particularly used Turner's painting "Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway" as reference, not only in terms of style and expression, but also in terms of composition as you can see and compare beneath.

Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (Turner, 1844)

Nocturne in Blue and Gold - The Tay Train (Heisler, 2013)

The sketch for "Nocturne in Blue and Gold Valparaiso Bay" by James McNeill Whistler was also a great inspiration in terms of colour scheme, atmosphere and the gold lights Whistler used on the boats and left hand side.

Sketch for Nocturne in Blue and Gold Valparaiso Bay (Whistler, 1866)

Painting Process

Quick blocking in of shaped and overall atmosphere of the painting -> dark and cool colours.

I then started to redefine the exact composition and add in more colours to the train to make it stand out.

Between the last progress step and this final painting there has been a lot of work and time invested. The colours are now optimized (complementary colours: blues against orange) as well as the details in the reflection of the water.

Reflection

Pros

• The painting process worked out well as I kept it loose and begun with basic shapes to be more flexible and to not be afraid of making big changes. After I was happy with the design I was able to add in details in the parts of the painting that had to read. By keeping the other parts less detailed the focus on the train was further strengthened.
• Using the complementary colour orange on the train against the blue surroundings to create more dynamism and stand out more also worked out nicely.
• A further positive note is the overall feel and atmosphere as well as the the water reflections of the lights from the train that add just that bit extra to the whole scene and make it more interesting.

Cons

• I noticed that the perspective is a bit off. This is mainly because I just started painting and was guessing/estimating the about perspective. This will hopefully get more accurate with more practice.
• It would be nice to have some more textures inside the painting to create the illusion of more happening and support the dynamic story of the scene.
• In the end I spent several days remastering the picture and redrawing parts. So overall I still need  to speed up the "production" time of my painting, though it is of course good to have a look at paintings after a break/a few days later as the mistakes become visible and one is able reflect on the paintings. 

Exhibition Research - Spatial Utilisation in Art Exhibitions

The way you present your work in space can have a big impact on the viewers experience. During my research I therefore came across a large variety of different layouts and use of space. Some of the scenes were very engaging and aesthetic. Here are a few variations of scale I chose to add to this research post as each images uses space in a different way to achieve an effect on its scale.

Here a large panorama canvas for a long continuous art piece filling up the room with colours on its horizontal plane.

Now the opposite with individual "blocks" and solely one standard vertical portrait per "block". Both of these two images fill up the whole room with their art though, just in a different way.

 Following these two examples I now chose two exhibition spaces with contrasting themes. The image above shows very crowded and seemingly unorganised walls creating a very crowded feeling in the passageway. The picture below however shows a minimalist approach with small pictures on the wall leaving the room with an empty empty.

And the final image below shows large abstract paintings that first achieve their full expression in large scale.

So there are many options in terms of layout possibilities. I will just have to see which method will work out best for my project in the end. Logically the wall space will also be limited as the showcase will take place at our university, so I will have to take these restrictions into account as well.

Honours Workshop Diary 14 - Art History Research: Tonalism (Part 2)

Exhibition Preview: Whistler & His Followers, Mar 14 - Jun6, 2004, Detroit Inst. of Art
Tonalism and the "Nocturne"

Whistler's distinctive views of the river Thames in London were made from memory, in his studio, after time had softened his initial impression of the scene. To downplay the significance of subject matter, he gave the paintings a musical name: "nocturnes," after instrumental compositions with a dreamy, pensive mood. In Whistler's time, the Thames riverfront was considered an unattractive scene of industrial blight. Here, Whistler's foggy, dark veil transforms even an industrial scene into a poetic vision of London.

Raised in Detroit and having briefly pursued an art career in New York, Theodore Scott Dabo moved to France in 1905 where he painted this dreamlike view of trees clustered on a riverbank, reminiscent of Whistler's nocturnes. That autumn, in the exhibition at the Paris Salon, his tonal landscapes garnered praise from several French art critics, including one who went so far as to describe Dabo's work as "the realization of what Whistler attempted."

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, a nearly abstract painting of fireworks over London's Cremorne Gardens at night, was Whistler's most misunderstood work. He never intended for the painting to be a realistic depiction. Rather, like his other nocturnes, he wanted it to convey the atmosphere and an impression of the place. When the influential art critic John Ruskin derided the painting and its price of 200 guineas, accusing Whistler of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face," Whistler sued him for libel. Whistler used the trial as a platform in defense of his ideas about art and eventually won the suit, but was awarded the equivalent of only a few pennies in damages. He later felt redeemed when an American collector bought the painting for 800 guineas, gloating that "the pot of paint flung in the face of the British public for two hundred guineas has sold for four pots of paint, and that Ruskin has lived to see it!"

Birge Harrison's view down Fifth Avenue toward St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City captures the atmosphere of a dark, rainy night in the city, one of Whistler's favorite themes. Working primarily in a narrow range of blues, Harrison punctuates his composition with warm orange accents that suggest the glare of electric light and, like the sparkling lights of Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold, charge the scene with urban energy.

From:

http://www.dia.org/exhibitions/whistlersite/8.htm

Honours Workshop Diary 13 - Art History Research: Tonalism (Part 1)

The Poetic Vision: American Tonalism

"After Impressionism, painting went in many different directions. All kinds of "isms" sprang up - Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and Futurism, just to name a few. Realism went back to the Tonalist method of painting, and later the personalized method of Wyeth, which is a Tonalist approach." Prof. Sammy Britt (1993)

http://www.buildart.com/secret_of_tonalism.htm

Description of the Tonalist Painting Style and Technique

Tonalism is rooted in the French Barbizon movement, which emphasized atmosphere and shadow. The Tonalist style employs a distinctive technique by the use of color's middle values as opposed to stronger contrast and high chroma. Resulting in a understated and compelling overall effect. The tonalist subject matter is never entirely apparent; their is no effort to communicate a message or narrate a story.  Instead of relating a story, each sensitively chosen color, composition, and line is arranged to create an intriguing visual poem.

The interiors of tonalist paintings are generally elegant and sparsely decorated, tonally uniform, simplified and indistinct; the figures are usually presented alone in silent contemplation.  Landscapes are typically luscious and luminous with evocative atmospheric effects featuring misty backgrounds illuminated by moonlight. Tonalists painters were drawn to both the natural and spiritual realms. They sought to awaken the viewers consciousness by shrouding the subject in a misty indistinct veil of emotionalism. The palette is minimal, characterized by warm hues of brown, soft greens, gauzy yellows and muted grays. Preferred themes were evocative moonlight nights and poetic, vaporous landscapes. Tonalist painters seemed to favored unconscious states and psychological experiences over reality.

Key terms and phrase associated with the tonalist movement

obscured details, single-figure themes, the natural and spiritual domain, waking, unconscious states, sleep, dreams, death, aura, religious significance, emotionalism, emotionalists, pictorial space, compositional space, diffused light, incandescent glow, organic forms, artistic inspiration, illusionistic representation, luminous, transcendentalist, glowing, metaphysical, emotional expression, poetic, evocative

http://www.historyofpainters.com/tonalism.htm

David Adams Cleveland on Tonalism

Tonalism - a distinctive style of low-toned atmospheric landscape painting, developed a sizable following among American artists in the 1880s. This new generation of tonalist artists, most born after 1845, and many foreign trained in Paris and Munich, broke with the prevailing school of Hudson River artists and their large detailed panoramic views of the American scenes. Many streams of influences fed into the growing taste for a more intimate, poetic, and expressive style of landscape art, relying on soft-edged broadly painted tonalities to communicate emotion.

If European methodologies were important, so too were the visionary canvases of native talents like Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) and Ralph Blakelock (1947-1919), who developed idiosyncratic styles and romantic subject matter (soon to be widely imitated) without recourse to foreign training. Initially influenced by French Barbizon painting by way of American exponents George Inness (1825-1894), William Morris Hunt (1824-1879), and John La Farge (1835-1910), American Tonalist painters tended to use a neutral palette of predominantly cool colors: green, blue, mauve, violet, and a delicate range of intervening grays, carefully modulated to produce a dominant tone. Preferred subjects were scenes of dawn or dusk, rising mist and moonlight in which the enveloping atmosphere is both palpable and evocative of poetic and meditative states.

Artists like John Twachtman (1853-1902) and Henry Ward Ranger (1858-1916) employed techniques derived from European landscape art, especially artists of the Hague School the most prominent being Josef Israels and Anton Mauve), with their emphasis on domesticated landscapes bathed in silvery light. From French sources, especially Jules Bastien-LePage, American expatriates such as Birge Harrison (1854-1929), his brother the marine painter Alexander Harrison (1853-1930), and J. Alden Weir (1852-1919) developed a love for natural atmospheric effects combined with strong draftsmanship, and the use of high horizons to bring dramatic focus to foreground features.

From English sources in the Aesthetic movement, especially James Whistler (1834-1903), an entire generation of American painters, learned formal compositional techniques and decorative strategies based upon a generalized hue (achieved by using a neutral ground on the canvas), and a fundamental belief that painting should express sentiment—yet not be sentimental, didactic, or emphasize narrative.

The technique of glazing, the layering of thin layers of pigment suspended in oil or varnish, came to play an important part in the Tonalist repertoire of effects. Light penetrating these thin washes of color to an undercoat of more solid color was reflected back to the surface, producing a jewel-like quality of scintillating, bewitching hues.

The smoky quality or sfumato, also achieved by such methods, was considered part of the Tonalist tradition of craftsmanship going back to sources in the Venetian Renaissance.

Thus a certain vibrancy of contour and blurring of forms came to characterize many Tonalist landscapes. Vibration of color, achieved by using warm undertones and cool overtones, was widely used and taught by tonalists such as Birge Harrison to a generation of painters at his Art Students League classes in Woodstock, New York, where he was an instructor beginning in 1897. In his widely influential book on landscape painting, Harrison stressed the heritage of English artists John Constable and John Crome, especially their use of refraction, or the play of adjoining color masses—the “lost-edge” technique, which resulted in a general diffusion of tone and a luxurious, atmospheric quality.

Natural forms are dramatized, their edges blurred, patterns and decorative elements emphasized, enhancing the surface quality of the canvas.

A finely composed Tonalist painting reads compellingly and immediately when viewed at a distance: all parts contribute to the whole.

Harrison advised his students to strive for the “big vision—the power to see and to render the whole of a given scene, rather than to paint a still-life picture of its component parts; the power to give the essential and to suppress the unessential, the power to paint the atmosphere that surrounds the objects rather than the objects themselves; the power, in one word, to give the mood of a motive rather than the scientific statement of the trees and rocks and fields and mountains that make up the elements.”

In terms of Tonalist subject matter and vision, the landscapes of the pathbreaking indigenous artists Ralph Blakelock (1847-1919) and Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1919) were crucial in the development of a distinctly romantic, if not a spiritual or quasi-religious element. Mystery, dream, memory, and imagination are often espoused in their haunting, broadly painted canvases of dusk and moonlight.

In this regard, the works of the transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and especially Henry David Thoreau were very influential, authors familiar to many tonalist painters. George Inness (1825-1894) brought a distinctly religious enthusiasm to his late tonal works, inspired in part by the religious mysticism of the Swedish scientist-visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), and Ralph Blakelock frequented spiritualist circles where Swedenborg was esteemed.

George Inness was consumed by his exploration of the subjective mystery of nature in the everyday. He wrote eloquently of the importance to his art of the “civilized landscape,” rural scenes of human habitation that speak to memory and offer a glimpse into realms of the spirit.

Inness believed the artist’s central task was to elicit an emotion from the viewer. His late visionary landscapes encapsulate the underlying Tonalist strategy to produce an art expressive of mood, of insights into the human spirit by way of landscape—a painted transcription of the individual artist’s response to nature. These subtle and charming expressions were achieved, not by a detailed realistic rendering of a specific place—as Tonalist artists criticized both their Hudson River forbearers and Impressionist colleagues for doing—but by a synthesizing process in the studio in which the painter often worked from memory to manipulate light effects and simplify and harmonize compositional elements until obtaining an evocative whole. The goal was an overall decorative unity that was both pleasing to the eye and touched the soul.

Because Tonalist landscapes tended to be generalized places, as opposed to recognizable locations, they often lacked local associations and anecdotal subject matter, thus allowing greater scope for the imagination. As a result, these paintings resonate with aesthetic and spiritual overtones—redolent of a better time and place that appealed to patrons and critics weary of the growing clamor of urban life and the social and economic upheaval of rapid industrialization.

By the 1890s, Tonalism and Impressionism were recognized by critics and collectors, if not as competing styles, certainly as different aesthetics. Tonalism was fundamentally a landscape art: subdued, profound, and spiritual.

Impressionism also concentrated on landscape, but included more cosmopolitan and narrative subject matter—including the figure—and employed high-keyed colors and broken brushwork to capture scintillating sunlit effects.

The aesthetics of the two styles were not mutually exclusive and artists from both camps freely borrowed from one another. Thomas Dewing (1851-1938) is often included among the Impressionists because of his figurative subject matter, but is firmly in the Tonalist school, more a follower of Degas than Monet.

In 1901, the eclectic critic Sadikichi Hartmann, writing about the Tonalist artist Dwight Tryon (1849-1925) succinctly touched on the heart of the matter in terms of the artistic aspirations of the Tonalists.

"With works of art it should be very much as with human beings, they should possess a soul, an individuality, a certain something which cannot be materially grasped, but which produces in the sympathetic spectator feelings, similar to those the artist felt in his creative moments.”

By 1914, the Tonalist landscape was such an established fixture on the American art scene that the artists employing this style were referred to as a group or school, led by the landscape painter and teacher Henry Ward Ranger (1858-1916). In an introduction to a book of Ranger’s lectures on art and Tonalism, Art-Talks with Ranger (1914), arts writer Ralcy Husted Bell wrote glowingly of Ranger and the movement he espoused.

"All those who are familiar with the finest examples of the Tonal School must be impressed with their sensuous swing and play of colour, which are wedded to such delightful designs and pleasing patterns that they neither seem like designs nor yet suggest patterns. So agreeably are all the parts connected, that they are seen only together: fused in a nice relation to the whole…These noble specimens disclose a mastery of the relations which assemble and unify all the components of a picture into a single broad harmony…Better than the votaries of any other school known to me, the Tonalist catches the laughter of shimmering light, and transmutes it into pictorial joy; he speaks admirably the old mother-tongue of cloud, tree, pool, and stone; he interprets the spring; he is summer’s scribe, page to the majesty of autumn, and priest to the whole round year. With a simple palette, and as if by magic, he expresses breadth, teasing transparency, mysterious distances, the illusion of luminosity—in a word, the drama of air, light, and colour. Taken all in all, his pictures challenge, please, and convince. As a last refinement, he permeates them with his own individuality, and thus may he be called a creator."

Tonalism as a movement and school of landscape painting lasted well into the 1920s and was a critical influence on artists of the Stieglitz Circle like John Marin (1870-1953) and Marsden Hartley (1872-1943), and later inspired modernists Milton Avery (1885-1965) and even Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) who drew on the romantic abstraction of Albert Pinkham Ryder. Today, contemporary artists such as Wolf Kahn (1927- ), Russell Chatham (1939- ), and April Gornic (1953- ) look back to the heritage of American Tonalism for inspiration in their work.

Written by David Adams Cleveland and excerpted from his exhibition catalogue essay in Intimate Landscapes, Charles Warren Eaton and the Tonalist Movement in American Art 1880 –1920, De Menil Gallery at Groton School, September 26 to December 14, 2004.

References 

http://www.buildart.com/secret_of_tonalism.htm

http://www.spanierman.com/The-Poetic-Vision:-American-Tonalism/Press/top/Press-Release

http://www.spanierman.com/The-Poetic-Vision:-American-Tonalism/list

Review from Art News Magazine - February 2006: http://www.spanierman.com/The-Poetic-Vision:-American-Tonalism/essay/top/Essay

New York Sun Review: http://www.maureenmullarkey.com/essays/tonalism.html

George Inness: http://www.thecityreview.com/inness.html

Artificial Interior Lighting - Photography

Experimenting with artificial lighting

Honours Workshop Diary 12 - Reflection and Summary on Impressionism

• Discovery and implementation into art that the complementary colour is present in the colour's shadows which leads to

• more vibrant and lively paintings

• Avoiding black in shadows (not always 100% but a supported idea by the impressionists)

• Change of view on lighting: Only little contrast on objects themselves to allow more colour and atmospheric pictures

• Emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time)

• Plein-air painting

• avoid extreme 3 dimensional rendering of objects (like most studio work) 

• Common and ordinary subject matter

• High-keyed colours

• Open composition

• Inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience

• Unusual visual angles

• Relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes