Because your editor doesn’t have a life and has nothing better to do on a Saturday night than to go see Keanu Reeves play the alien robot saviour of the world….

…..again……………………..for like the bazillionth time, because he obviously thinks he’s jesus and why doesn’t he just remake The Last Temptation of Christ already, because we all know that he would be much more convincing macking with the deciples in the garden (because jesus was gay of course) than he was macking Trinity in the Matrix II because that was soooo convincing. And what was my point…..

Oh yeah, because your editor has no life I came home from this stupid movie and was wondering what those french theorists who hate everything fun, including Disneyland, I mean why can’t Baudrillard just go to Disneyland, go on the rides and get felt up by Mickey Goofy and Donald like everyone else and go home with a smile on his face like a good little boy?

Instead he’s got to go and say mean things about how he hates America and Americans

Like,

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation….

And,

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hperreal and of simulation.

And,

The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary…particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness…made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms.

I mean come on who hasn’t faked a phantasm before? Well, probably not that guy in the background whose about to have a phantasm in his pants, but…Why does Baudrillard hate sex and America so much?

And where was I again… oh yeah, french theorists who hate everything fun… well except for that Foucault guy, who liked to ride a pendulum and wrote about sex and pleasure and discipline and punishment…because he was like a big queen and totally into s&m

And what does this have to do with colour?¿?

Oh, yeah, so anyway I came back from the Day the Earth Stood Still and like a normal person I was like “Ok, what could Baudrillard possibly have to say about colour?” So here it is (and buy that Colours book already),

The world of colours is opposed to the world of values, and the ‘chic’ invariably implies the elimination of appearences in favour of being: black, white, grey – whatever registers zero on the colour scale – is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression and moral standing.

See I knew he hated colour, he’s like a pilgrim or something…which didn’t they get thrown out of England because they hated sex and didn’t want the king to have lots of wives and lots of sex.

…freedom and the absence of responsibilities are thus inscribed both in colours and in the transitory and insignificant character of materials and forms…

Duh, which is why the gays own the rainbow, and the wizard of oz, and why all those evil pilgrims (and the mormons too, who actually like to have sex, just unfortunately without protection, so they always have like a bazillion kids), want to punish the gays in California with their nasty Proposition 8, because they hate freedom, which makes them the same as Al Qaeda, because as George Bush tells us “Al Qaeda hates freedom.”

AND NON OF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH PAINTING! but it was fun for me anyway, because I have no life, and my partner’s on the other side of the world for five week, so i’m in front of my computer instead of in front of the teevee watching 48 Hours or Without a Trace, or whatever it is they have on CBS on Sunday nights as filler between the commercials for viagra.

We can’t really talk about colour without talking about and looking at Hans Hofmann. Here is a piece called Towering Spaciousness from the Brooklyn Museum. In this piece Hofmann uses both colour intervals and overlapping planes to create a sense of expansion and contraction in the painting. Each colour relates to every other colour in the painting, thereby determining its relative location in space within the painting. The result is that none of the planes sit in exactly same place in space. The rhythm and movement of your eye as it jumps from plane of colour to plane of colour, or we could say the expansion and contraction of the planes of colour, work to create the sense of an open towering spaciousness within the canvas. Hofmann called this idea, his “push-and-pull” theory, which he wrote about in the book Search for the Real. So, it is the movement of colour/the movement of the eye that creates the illusion of space in this painting, not scientific perspective, which is what Hofmann spent years teaching his students. For me, what’s really interesting, is that when I stand if front of a painting like this, not only do I see the towering spaciousness of the canvas but I can feel it in my body, it’s a viceral physical feeling, something I don’t feel in front of the best realist paintings with precise perspective.

Hans Hofmann (American, 1880–1966) / Towering Spaciousness / 1966. Oil on canvas / 84 1/4 x 50 in. (214 x 127 cm) / Brooklyn Museum, Gift of William Sachs, 68.51

Frank O’Cain who I studied with at the Art Students League talks about this idea of colour as light. As he likes to say,

The palette is chosen to create an effect of light, to be able to develop a spatial reality, and also to penetrate through the surface a painter’s needs and rejections. Some colors will be likeable, and others distasteful. Through this preparation, a painter has chosen to have color reflect light, light to relate to color, and energy to take form in shape. Wat it comes down to is this: every color you choose responds to another color so that it creates light for the eye. We react to both the responses of the colors to each other as well as to the surface, to light as it bounces off color. {Read More…}

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about colour lately and expecially this idea of colour as light. I don’t have any profound insights or revelations to share, but I have been thinking about how we develop our colour sense and how our experiences shapes our responses and uses of colour. In my own case I began to think about the effect of staring at boxes of light (computers and teevee screens) for hours everyday for 3 decades has had an effect on my colour sense. In particular, I have been thinking about the Chuck Jones animations I used to watch as a kid and how flat transparent colour on celluloid illuminated, filmed, projected and then transmitted and projected again through the pixels of a teevee influences my  choices of colour as a painter. I don’t have any conclusions, but it is interesting to think about. Anyway, a quick google search revealed all these great Tom & Jerry and Bugs Bunny stills, which among other things (content & composition), are full of rich colours.

Stuart Davis (American, 1894–1964) / The Mellow Pad / 1945–51 / Oil on canvas / 26 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (66.7 x 107 cm) / Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal, 1992.11.6 / www.brooklynmuseum.org

This morning I was reading Hans Hofmann’s essay, ”The Color Problem in Pure Painting-Its Creative Origin,” which I can read over and over and get something new every time I read it. But, today it got me to thinking about Stuart Davis, a pioneer of American Modernism and abstract painting, who wrote extensively about abstraction, but whose writings are not easy to come by. Davis identified what termed the “color-space” problem. While I’ve been unable to study his writings, metmuseum.org writes the following:

Davis postulated that color could be used to indicate spatial relationships through its positioning next to other colors. Some colors advance, while others recede, which suggests the illusion of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. [Read more...]

Now this theory sounds a lot like what Hofmann discusses, and while it is not important who was first, it is helpful to see that two important 20th abstract painters were thinking deeply about color and we know their ideas have had a significant impact on contemporary painters over the last 50 years. In fact, it was Stuart Davis’ paintings, more so than Picasso or Matisse, that first got me excited about the possibilities of abstraction. While I was in art school studying illustration, heavily involved in anatomy and figure drawing, I went to the Brooklyn Museum and was completely transfixed by Davis’ The Mellow Pad. I stood in front staring at the piece for about 20 or 30 min and it was all I could think about for days – the movement, the colors, the energy, the shapes and forms dancing and swinging across the surface were a revelation to me at the time.

In terms of abstract paintings that are built on flat shapes/planes of color, Davis’ work offers and interesting contrast with the work of Stanley Whitney’s or Hans Hofmann’s. While all three artists use flat planes of color to create spacial tensions and rhythmatic movements across the surface, in the examples of both Hofmann and Whitney we see color formed into geometrical shapes and planes, while Davis’ shapes are more organic (not biomorphic like Miro). The expression in each is totally different and unique.

after cecille / prismacolor / 5″ x 6″
© 2007 gordon fraser. all rights reserved. www.gordonfraserfinearts.com

I posted the above drawing to a drawing forum on artreview.com and received a number of replies from the impassioned defense, to the legitimate questioning, to the ridiculous dismissal/panning by the court jester who’s now out rummaging through his kids nursery school art projects in the hopes of getting rich. I then posted the following reply. [see the whole conversation here...]

Byron, Alaleh and Jonathan all raise some interesting questions, establishment vs. anti-establishment, abstraction vs. realism, illustration, decoration, basically the stuff we as artists (an the non-artists critics) have been tangling with for the last 150 years! I started to jot down some notes and realized I have a lot to say about all of them. At this point I will have to sidebar those discussions to a different forum so as not to take away from the art being shown here. That being said, given that this is “Show and Tell” I will offer a few comments. For the purpose of the discussion I will try to separate formal questions from questions of content, but in reality in the process of drawing, the concerns interpenetrate and cannot be separated. First, in terms of content, this painting is about desire, pretty straight forward establishment content going back hundreds/thousands of years, so to byron’s point I do not view this piece as anti-establishment. It is a question/conversation/meditation I have been engaged with for about six months and it offers one viewpoint among many. The brief history is that this project began as 5 minute poses in the studio with a clothed model, who happens to be a dancer, over a two week period back in october. The initial studio sketches were executed in watercolour and I have carried on this work in oil, watercolour, collage, and prismacolor pencils, using both the sketches and memory of some poses as inspiration. This is one example.

Now to the more formal issues:
1) Mark making – I have used gestural marks and scribbles to convey the energy and excitement of desire, which often can feel uncontrollable and overwhelming when it is being experience.

2) colour – the dominant colour of the piece is red, chosen first off because the model has red hair and there was red fabric hanging on the wall behind where the model was posing. I then pushed and changed the hue, layering different reds (which unfortunately can’t be seen so well on the computer screen) in order to develop a sense of the warmth, heat, and excitement of desire. The red moves very quickly toward the viewer and allows me to pull the background right to the surface, compressing the space of whole composition. Secondarily, the two blue planes sandwich and squeeze the red plane, creating a dynamic tension and opening up the space of the composition.

3) composition – the compositional structure is very simple, built on a tilted plane, stolen from the italian masters such as Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, etc., to provide a dynamic structure to both house and convey energy and excitement. It helps create the movement and space in the drawing.