Lab Book #25: One Third of Art is Art (Eclipse Flowers)

Finishing off the doodles in lab book #25 made for three paintings including the recent Painting the Phone Book, and last year's Words Belong Here. I will try to get better photos of the last two when the sun is shining and the wind is absent, which are rare conditions these days. These paintings are much larger than my scanner so I have to use the old digital camera. Over the many years of thinking about art it occurred to me that there are three parts to art: the personal, the social, and the art. The personal has to do with the feelings and experience of the artist themselves which they can have in complete isolation, or they can share with others, such as this blog! The social includes things like blogging, but also meeting other artists, participating in shows, taking or teaching lessons, etc. The last component is the art itself, a physically disembodied representation of time spent with the brush and paint. If you go to a thrift store and see an original painting, you are seeing the art without the personal or social aspects. Notice when you read a book on a famous artist, there are usually reams of information about how the artist felt, how they acted, what other people thought of them, what mental state they were it and other aspects that are more or less irrelevant to the art itself. Some artists like Van Gogh intermingled the concepts, placing himself in the paintings with his ear lopped off and bandaged up, or Frida Kahlo who painted herself interred in bed after a horrible accident, for example. The personal meets the art. As a young artist I never really saw anything but the art, I figured if I paint perfectly then people would come knocking on my door. But as I observed how the gallery owner worked her clients, and after I participated in a few art shows, it dawned on me that the social elements are at least as important as your personal feeling or the art itself. The person with the paintbrush stuck in their ear represents a young artist contemplating art. In the top portion of the painting, I represented a number of astrological themes, including solar eclipses fashioned as flowers, expanding universes, quasars, galaxies, planets and asteroids. One character is standing there with a moon eclipse covering their face, with the NDG train tracks in the background that was based on the solar eclipse location painting.

Lab Book #25: One Third of Art is Art (Eclipse Flowers), watercolour 22 x 30" cold press, July 2024