In Lieu of Flowers and Chocolates, Here's Art and Science

I've been on a lot of bad first dates.  I've also been on a few awful ones.  But, I'm happy to say I've had a couple great first dates in my lifetime-- the kind that I expect to always remember and use to gauge just how meh to awful all my other dates are.  What makes a first date great?  Well I'm not going to go too far into that for the fact that this is supposed to be some kind of art blog, and mostly because I'm sure dozens, nay, hundreds of potential courters are reading this for possible insight into the innermost working of my romantic being, and they'd only use such information to gain unfair advantage in the process of sweeping me off my currently poison ivy-ed feet.  Well I'm sorry, gentlemen, but you're just going to have to do your homework like countless others did (or did not) before you!

It's considered a bit old fashioned or cheesy now-a-days, but a few of my most (fondly) memorable first dates involved some kind of flowers-and-chocolates-esque courtship gesture.  I can't say I blame most guys for abandoning this one.  A cutsie/classic/corny display does not a great date make anymore than a lack of one kills your chances. There's a very fine line between sweet and creepy and so many factors that can nudge you on either side.  That said, there's never been a time when I haven't exceedingly appreciated having a single rose or simple bouquet presented to me.

Yeah, so I'm a sucker for flowers, but by far, the best courtship gift I've ever received was this:

Art Forms in Nature by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, or Art Forms of Nature if translated from the original German title, Kunstformen der Natur.

It's not hard to guess what my favorite flower is, but being surprised with this on a first date this was something else entirely.  If knowing one another's taste in books was enough to sustain a relationship alone, it's safe to say I'd no longer be pretending to play the field.  Both the artist and wanna-be biology geek in me cannot recommend this book enough.  This edition not only contains one hundred of Haeckel's full page scientific illustrations, it gives some insight into the significance of this type of art.  Here are a few of my favorite plates.  You can see a few others in better scan quality here, which includes their titles and subject details.  Of course, the best way to enjoy them is to pick up the book.

Scientific illustration holds a long time appeal and progressively fascinating quality for me.  I love a work that delights my eye as well as my thinky sponge.  It takes a skillful and often overlooked caliber of artist to create it.  The forms they create are essential teaching tools, and they were especially important prior to the days of photomicrography for numerous reasons.  In the introductory pages of the 2010 Prestel publication, contributor Olaf Breidbach discusses how Haeckel's understanding and representation of living organisms-- specifically the simultaneous similarly and diversity of their structures, reinforced Darwin's explanation of the evolution of life.  The digestible detail and beautiful complexity of Haeckel's work served to not only popularize Darwin's discovery, it strengthened its validity and eventual acceptance during a critical time in biological science.  Through this exploration of the structure of living organisms, simple and complex, there emerges a unique means of classification and lineal establishment, which makes me wonder why I've never heard of Haeckel until receiving this book.

When you ask art historians about the most significant types of art throughout history, the works of the masters of the Italian Renaissance, the Lascaux cave paintings, the political and socially ignited Neoclassical era, are the prominent responses.  That's understandable, says the former art history student in me, but looking back, I wish there was just a mention of artists/scientists like Haeckel.  I know, it's art history, not art science, but when a body of artistic work furthers the most powerful biological discovery in history, I'd venture to say that's worth a bit of lecture time.  Even in the strict realm of art, Haeckel's work is significant with regard to his influence on the 1805-1905 Art Nouveau period-- for me, the very essence of Victorian charm and curiosity.

The work of Ernst Haeckel resonates with me for the way in which it dissolves the divide between science and art, a differentiation I only wish I had the aptitude to make.  In the biographical notes of the book, it seems that Haeckel felt he had to choose between one and the other despite him bridging the gap in such a wonderful way.

There's Haeckel sitting on the left, while his assistant Nicholas Miklouh-Maclay attempts to seduce us with his gaze... and net. 

"Despite this uninterrupted uniformity, life is anything but tedious owning to nature's inexhaustible richness which, time and again, produces ever-new, beautiful and fascinating forms that provide new material to speculate and ponder over, to draw and describe. Indeed, this is just the right sort of work for me because, in addition to the scientific element, it involves artistic matters to a large degree.  At the same time, I have once again completely reconciled myself to my dear science in loyalty, which shall, throughout my entire life, take the highest priority and which I had seriously begun to doubt owning to your artistic-aesthetic influences." - Ernst Haeckel on ultimately choosing the life of a zoologist over one of a landscape painter in 1860-- a tough decision.  I greatly admire (and perhaps envy) such a choice.  

English Cottages and a French Bulldog

One of those excess of brothers I've mentioned in the Violin post (though not the one who needed braces) will occasionally come home from his library job with no-sells from book sales.  I love attending library book sales, but I also love getting library book sale rejects, meaning free books.  According to him, they just toss out the ones that fail to find a buyer-- which seems so criminal in a world of charitable donation outlets, I wonder if it's indeed true.  If so, then this is less about taking free books and more about nobly rising to the call of rescue.  That's something I make a point to do, especially when all it involves is showing up at my parents' house.

There wasn't much of a haul this most recent rescue mission, at least not in my very diverse favor.  Perhaps it's for the best since I currently have more books than I do shelf space, but there are so many books I appreciate for reasons beyond reading.  One of the best examples of this is my attraction to bargain-table, craft store checkout, generalized-to-the-point-of-impractical coffee table books.  This also includes books that pretend to be "how-tos" or "style guides" but they're really just hard-bound home and decor magazines with much higher price tags in place of page after page of advertisement.  Even though my brother talked up books on wine and fairy tale collections with color illustrations, something went amiss with those gems, and instead I received one of those craft store checkout style guides on English country cottage interiors and gardens.

It makes decent sense.  After all, I live in a cottage.  And upon paging through the book, it's confirmed that an essential part of living in a cottage is filling it with more books than shelf space, beat up ancestral kitchenware and furniture, and plentiful tchotchkes that should almost never be dusted.  Not to brag, but I'm quite adept at meeting such criteria.  In addition to confirming how very good I am at living in a cottage, this book expectedly contains many photos.  Photos that could serve as nice painting references, which is the primary reason I'm writing about it.

There is one photo the especially caught my attention-- specifically, one element in the photo.  If you've looked at the title of this post, it's not hard to guess what that element is.

Photo by Brian Harrison

There was something about that little French bulldog-- maybe it's because she's the only animal in the book.  Since I couldn't yank her out of the photo, rub her belly and toss her pieces of matzo with hummus after we'd gone for a stroll through the park, the best I could do was yank her out the photo and paint her portrait, but I wanted to be sure she was the focus.  Photoshop helps for that sort of thing. 

I used the lasso tool to drag her out of the original photo and
onto a new background.  I'm not sure if that's the best, most
efficient Photoshop method for that sort of thing, but it
worked for what I needed.

I liked the idea of isolating a rotund dog with a white coat on a plain white background, but one thing I've come to learn with painting: whites are seldom white.  To determine just how off-white this white little dog is, I decide to adjust the photo a little more.  This gives me a better understanding of shadows and texture.  It helps when trying to add dimension and depth to subjects with even the most consistent colors.

Even though I can do more extensive editing in Photoshop, I
usually do a general adjustment in iPhoto.  It's also nice to
have everything in one window while painting from my
laptop screen.

If this dog was a beagle, a rottweiler, or even an American bulldog, it probably would have been a better rendering for the fact that I'm more familiar, but here she is just the same, and purposely off-center.

      

Painting Progression One - The Tea Thief Toad

Rather than using my first post to write about the fact this is the first post and explain what I intend to do with this blog, I feel like I should post something with a bit more substance.  You know, make it really official!  I've also chosen this route because I haven't quite decided what I intend to do with this blog.  So for now, I'll talk a little bit about a frustration I experienced as a much younger artist and look at the progression of a recent watercolor painting I've completed as a relatively older artist.

If you've ever looked at finished painting and tired to figure out how it was done, as I often did as kid and still do as *shudder* an adult, it can be really hard to figure out just where and how the artist started.  If you've ever made a trip to a gallery or museum, or even something that hung in your grandmother's dinning  room and thought, I want to do that too! but couldn't quite figure out how to start, I've been right there with ya and it's a frustrating place to be.

I've found this to be especially true for really detailed or defined paintings.  Abstracts and more impressionist stuff seems to be easier to breakdown as far as technique, where as paintings that directly portray their subjects... to a younger me, those paintings seemed like they were always completed. Where did the artist start? Where do I start?

Years and years (in my rather learning-disabled case, though for others it may be more like months and months) of learning what colors, brushstrokes, brush types, paint types, paint consistencies, blending techniques, and all those other subtle aspects of painting that made me say "Screw this!" at one millionth time or another, eventually uncovered the secret of a completed painting.  I learned more or less how to make lamps glow, drapes wrinkle and water flow through the very inefficient practice of trial and error, and error, and error.

If you're artist, or you want to be one-- and you absolutely can be, I don't think there's a way around it. But, I hope that by sharing my starting point and revealing a couple steps of what led to a finished painting, the idea of getting there won't be quite so intimidating.

In other words, this will be like a seriously less comprehensive photo version of an episode of Bob Ross' Joy of Painting. (I hope to review a couple of those in the future.)

So here's the story of a watercolor, let's call it the: "Tea Thief Toad".

First, I need a reference. Sometimes that reference is my imagination, which is a decent reference for things like the idea of putting a thirsty, audacious and unapologetic toad in a tea cup, but it's not so great for stuff like light and a shadow.  Cameras are much better remembering that sort of stuff.  Unfortunately, my camera is more of a cell phone but it usually cuts mustard.

So on a sunny, light and shadow conducive day, I set up my reference photo using a few books and a tea set.

Once I get a decent enough shot that I can imagine fitting a toad in that teacup, I then decide to make life a little easier based on my current watercolor skill set.  This is done by simplifying the image in a photo editing program. What some art teachers will refer to as cheating, but I'm not trying to reproduce this photo as a painting, you can do that with a couple clicks in Photoshop (which I consider a little closer to cheating).  Remember, I'm just trying to create a reference that will make this image easier to attack (paint). I don't do much to it-- up the contrast here, reduce the sharpness there, perhaps a little nudge of the saturation to establish the light and shadow, and give me a better idea of where my lines are, where certain colors start and other colors begin.

Sometimes it's just nice to make the grass a little greener and get rid of those details that don't add so much to a painting as add years to your face...

We have tea, we have books, now we just need a toad.  I don't come by toads as often in my day to day life, so I reach for what's probably the most used book on my shelf.

And there's our starring player.

I then map the image using watercolor pencil, drawn with very basic guidelines.  It's less a self-made paint-by-number than it is layout that helps me keep lines fairly strait and gives me an idea of where certain colors begin and end.

Now, the following progression shots are few.  I didn't have this blog post in mind when I took them, so they probably aren't a particularly helpful stage-by-stage breakdown. At the very least, I hope you can get an idea of how I attack this painting in portions and eventually get to my finished piece.

The deepest shadows are filled in and the background is being taken care of, with the exception of the foreground book I must have wanted to get out of the way.

The tree bark, the texture of the teapot and most of the book detail have been established.  The background object shadows and some of the foreground greenery are in the works. Tea Thief Toad is still just a simple outline, as is the hijacked teacup.  

Just look at em. He's totally remorseless.