Paintings
PAINTING – My paintings in a room?
Last modified on 2008-02-25 12:31:09 GMT. 1 comment. Top.
010607 by ~hanswendland on deviantART
“What silliness…” or does it really help?
A number of friends, both artists and technologist, have recently sent me links and references to images on the web of paintings being showcased in photos of actual living spaces. Each lauding the trend of showing paintings in this way, which gives viewers a perspective of how a canvas or photo may look in a “living room” setting.
I have to say that for my amusement I tried “stuffing” some of my canvases in these photos with Photoshop, as I found a large number of these “rooms” on the web. This was kind of fun for minute or two, I realized that most of these Photoshop constructions on the web are rarely accurate in size and proportions and the “room” image never matches the lighting of the painting…
At the end, this way of showing art is great for selecting decorative art that must conform to a space or a “room”, and of course no way to consider the art itself.
Yes everyone has a room, yes everyone has a space they need to fill, but is this really any way to consider the art?
The couches look great…
PAINTING – Black as ice
Last modified on 2008-02-25 12:33:18 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
010607 by ~hanswendland on deviantART
Black as ice, is an exercise of black on black. In this work I created a scenario where black exists in many forms on several layers. I also wanted the blacks in this painting to bleed into “life” or “opposite”. I used white to create the illusion of “life”, and red as opposite of both black and white. Between the opposites, I painted a forest.
For a number of years I painted with single colors, and black & white. This experience was very challenging, and led to work of single tone paintings and studies, where I explored painting with different medias, simultaneously, in the wet. In this painting starting with a base of different black tones, I created an inverted image of the forest with white and red. I then hid the forest behind layers of mixed black, so the different tonalities of black layers dominate the scene giving it a sense of calm… while in the background, you can still clearly see the red, raging in flames.
With this painting I wanted to portray the “fire inside” that some times exists in the strangest of places.
I worked at length on this piece, as the underlying layers are as important in the construction of the work as the details above. Getting the media to work together and maintain focus on the two main elements of this painting, was the biggest challenge. I put a lot of emotion in this painting, which I like very much and it was quite difficult to let it go, fortunately, the collector that acquired this painting is also a good friend, which means I still get to see it from time to time.
This painting is 1m x 1.5m in size, mixed media, on stretched canvas and was part of the collection of paintings I featured at the Wendland Gallery in Ascona, Switzerland in 2006. It was sold to a private collector.
PAINTING – Inside looking out
Last modified on 2007-10-09 22:02:33 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
010907a by ~hanswendland on deviantART
These two paintings are 1m x 1.5m in size, mixed media, on stretched canvas and were part of the collection of paintings I featured at the Wendland Gallery in Ascona, Switzerland in 2006. They are both available. Price 2,000.00 Euro each.
One of the perspectives that is uncomfortable to to me is when one is on the inside looking out. This is typically a very common perspective as it is very safe, confronting and warm. There is very little risk involved, as there is the perception of a protective shield between the voyeur and the subject. Many go through life never deviating from this position and many distort reality because of it. Some choose this perspective out of laziness, some out of fear and prison inmates are limited to this perspective by force. Being a chronic extrovert, I have never appreciated this perspective (even when it might have been the best choice) as I tend to want to be in the middle of what I see, I want to touch it, smell it and feel it right up close. To me this perspective comes only at great effort and I have to admit I tend to get a little claustrophobic doing so… never the less “change” sometimes only comes about when you address and face your fears, creativity, for me, sometimes works the same way.
010907b by ~hanswendland on deviantART
I created two paintings from this perspective, pictured in this post. The first is looking at a forest in the heat of summer, and in the second you see the forest in the dead of winter. The segmentation was quite challenging as I did not want it to take focus, but I did want to be clear that there are two distinct sides to this story. As we have become a voyeuristic society, the metaphor of “a window onto the world” has become a cliché, with this work I also wanted to create the illusion that the world might be looking in, seeing the emptiness that one is left with when one chooses to watch life pass by, instead of contributing to its richness.
PAINTING – Three steps forward and two steps back
Last modified on 2007-10-19 19:57:18 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
010407 by ~hanswendland on deviantART
My son Hansi and I worked on this painting together, this is the first “serious” painting my son contributed to and we both had a fantastic time producing it! We wanted to create a painting of a forest fire, with all the raging flames, heat and danger you can possibly imagine. This is another instance where all the pencil work is not clearly evident in the final pice, but was a guiding factor in the creative process. This is one of my favorite new works of an old familiar subject, I specifically like the flames and the black smoke around the fire. This painting was produced with many layers, starting with oils, then acrylic, then wall paint, then oils again and highlights of acrylic on top.
This painting is 1m x 1m in size, mixed media, on stretched canvas and was part of the collection of paintings I featured at the Wendland Gallery in Ascona, Switzerland in 2006. It was sold to a private collector.
PAINTING – Two steps forward and one step back
Last modified on 2007-10-09 12:04:04 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
010307 by ~hanswendland on deviantART
This painting is 1m x 1.5m in size, mixed media, on stretched canvas and was part of the collection of paintings I featured at the Wendland Gallery in Ascona, Switzerland in 2006. It is available. Price 2,000.00 Euro.
For the last 5 years I have interpreted subjects based on nature, woods and forests are my favorite subjects, as I find it also to be the most complex subject to capture. Nature for me is the mother of all complexity, from the majesty of the whole to the minute details on a flowers pistil, the symmetry, the preciseness, the exact rhythm, the network tying each living and dead being together…. the mathematics behind it all are astonishing. One of the most attractive components of forest is the chaos, everything seems to be random, the trees grow where they may the flowers sprout where the wind hazardously lays them to rest, everything growing by chance. Yet when you step away, (as all artist do when working on a large painting, to see what it looks like as a whole) it all seems perfectly cohesive.
These are some of the realities and emotions I have spent years trying to capture on canvas. The beauty of it all is that no one interpretation is either wright or wrong, like the forest, it just is, and when you step back from it, it all comes together and feels right.
These are also some of the driving factors to the technique I have evolved and have practiced for the last 15 years. I decided a long time ago that I did not want to work just with oils, or water color, with acrylic, or tempera, or with just pencil, or ink – “just” seemed too easy to simple and very limiting… I wanted to work with all of them… at the same time. As it turns out this is much easier said than done.
At the end, the technique I use involves mixing oil based paint with water based paint and working totally in the wet – when the paint is dry, the painting process stops. Some times on the first go the painting is finished, however most of the time it’s just the beginning, usually my work is created by working with many layers, where each layer adds more attributes or covers them. Once a gallerist told me I could sell my work by the kilo and do better than selling them at a fixed price… he may have been right.
The trickiest part of working with both oil and water based paint in the wet, is learning how to control what happens and leading it to what you want it to produce. When it works I can create paintings with incredible minute details, in a sea of chaos, that from a helicopter perspective seems right.
A recent example of this work is illustrated in the painting above. This painting represents a forest during a heavy sumer rain.
To evolve the “change” I spoke of in the previous two blog entries I sometime force myself to “go back”. Going back to painting something you are comfortable with gives you the strength to be daring with new elements, and in this case the pencil and crayon work in first, the wet paint, and then on the dry, was a step in evolving my “change”. Usually the finished painting does not disclose everything that went in to it, such as in this case, where I started by covering the canvas in white paint and then while it was wet filling it with striations of pencil and crayon. Over this base I loaded the layers, and finalized it with more highlights of colored pencils.
PAINTING – Change (Part 2)
Last modified on 2007-10-19 20:00:38 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
010207 by ~hanswendland on deviantART
The painting above is the sister painting to the one in my previous post. This painting, like the other, features figures (which I spoke about earlier) and has the same canvas division, but in this instance the treatment I applied is different. This painting is much softer, more fluid, where “bleed” is evident. I wanted the colors to be fiery, the shadows more pronounced so that the figures appear to be rounder, approachable and alive… Both paintings are about the people I have met and the stories we shared in common, however one is about “hot stories” and the other is about “cold stories” and both have figures that represent both “hot” and “cold” people that in some fashion were inspiring to me.
So what about the divisions? Clockwise from the top, the division represent friends, lovers, strangers and family.
Since I have last published or shown my work in 2006 I have completed over 30 painting which have never been seen. I will start showing this work on www.deviantArt.com and write about it in this blog.
This painting is 1m x 1.5m in size, mixed media, on stretched canvas and was part of the collection of paintings I featured at the Wendland Gallery in Ascona, Switzerland in 2006. It was also sold to a private collector.
PAINTING – Change (Part 1)
Last modified on 2007-10-19 20:00:14 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
010107 by ~hanswendland on deviantART
So here it is, at long last, the rebirth of an artist… painful, inspiring, public and shameless!
Change must happen, and for me change has been a staple of my evolution as an artist, as a designer and as a person. Change has become critical to how I interpret life around me and is reflected on my canvases and in my work. To me change has become addictive, and the biggest challenge I face is balancing new directions driven by change with a consistent style, approach and method of evolving my art. With this blog I will document this change, I want to record what I see and feel, that drives me to create my art and my designs.
Change in my paintings does not happen over-night, occasionally it’s voluntary but often its a slow, steady progression of internal conflict, which is rarely voluntary, and as such my most recent change, that is now blooming into a major direction (these directions usually last between 5-8 years), started about one year ago and was punctuated by the painting illustrated above (to see my last direction, look at my Portfolio 2006).
Human figures have not appeared in my paintings for over 20 years, I believe my brother owns the last work where I featured abstract figures. My current figures are simple but daunting, complex in construction and many in numbers. These figures have been haunting me for quite some time, and not until recently have I dared approach them, as I have been hiding behind subjects based on nature for may years. There are two major drivers that have pushed these figures “out of the closet” 1) memories of the people I have met traveling around the world and 2) my new passion in digital photography which has led me for the past two years to take hundreds of photographs of strangers on the streets.
The figures have no detailed facial features because, having met so many people in so many countries, I wanted a way to see all of them, or none of them in my work… I can stare at the figures and see the people I met, and the people I see change each time I look at this work. I see friends, I see wives, I see children, I see colleges and strangers.
The division of the canvas is also a change, one I am carrying across on may of my current paintings. This has come from an appreciation of Swiss Design (I have been living in Switzerland now for almost 10 years, after spending 25 years in the US) which I find very comforting both in my interactive design work (web user interfaces) and now on canvas. This new organization is my interpretation of organizing the chaos around me, which also seems to be a constant factor I have learned to harness and try to use it to my advantage. In this painting, unlike most, I consciously defined this division to represent groups of people I have met… but I will leave this part of the story for my next blog entry: Change – Part 2.
Since I have last published or shown my work in 2006 I have completed over 30 painting which have never been seen. I will start showing this work on www.deviantArt.com and write about it in this blog.
This painting is 1m x 1.5m in size, mixed media, on stretched canvas and was part of the collection of paintings I featured at the Wendland Gallery in Ascona, Switzerland in 2006. It was sold to a private collector.
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