The Seven Secrets of Art (and a few more...)
Philip Koch, The Roof, oil on canvas,
20 x 14 inches, Somerville Manning Gallery,
Greenville, DE
Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield are two painters who have exerted enormous helpful influence on my work. Hopper wrote almost nothing about art. Burchfield filled literally thousands of pages with his observations on painting.
I guess I fall kind of in between those two.
I am shortly going to be leaving teaching my final course at MICA and moving to being a full time painter, an exciting prospect. Below is a list of ideas I'm going to be giving my art students tomorrow. They're general advice distilled down to just bullet points. Some of them may just provoke more questions. But maybe that's the idea.
The 7 Secrets of Art (and a few more...).
#1. That there
are secrets and mystery in art.
#2.
Art is a language with its own grammar. There are in fact
rules- some to be followed, some to
be broken.
#3. Tone is often more important than color.
#4.
Shapes are almost always more important than color.
#5 Silhouettes are more important than details
#6.
Intervals of empty space can be more important than
solid forms.
solid forms.
#7.
Craftsmanship is always in style.
#8. The problem with ones work is
usually next to where you
think it is.
#9. Art is not an idea but a vision.
#10. Art is the marriage of the skeptic and the
hopeless
romantic.
#11. Art revisits the joys and terrors of
childhood.
#12. Thought we all have genuinely contemporary
experiences and emotions, an artist has to carry
forward some of the threads that were woven by
the past great masters.
#13. While creating art is usually solitary,
an artist needs
feedback from someone they
trust who has a good
eye.
#14. The art world is filled with all sorts of different
people.
You will meet examples of each of these:
genuine
insightful
exciting
confused
pretentious
downright
silly
#15 Keep your eyes open, your heart warm, and
stick to your
guns.
My easel as I worked on an oil in East Aurora,
NY while I was the Artist in Residence at the
Burchfield Penney Art Center in nearby
Buffalo.