YOU TUBE VIDEO dealing with a visit to a museum and an encounter with an artists work

WILLIAM NICHOLS - SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT MY OWN WORK

Posted on 6/29/2015 4:18:08 PM
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Several months ago I was watching an ad on tv. It showed hikers in a forest on there way to a point in the forest where it reached a lookout with a view over a valley to a mountain beyond. As they hiked they bounded over a beautiful running stream and numerous trees bushes and and other interesting aspects of the land on there way to the view of that mountain. It occurred to me how much they failed to experience on the journey they were taking. They seemed to miss some very special things on the way to that lookout.

If I have attempted to do anything fresh as a landscape painter it is that experience of stopping to look at what can be just around us if we take the time to see it. Most of the images I have painted are from fairly mundane and innocent locations that are often overlooked but exist right around us. Some are off the side of a busy road or a creek that meanders through a small town. For example the painting that currently opens the website was just off the side of a small road in an inconsequential location. It was one of those moments of interesting light, and melting snow on late fall morning. The visual collision between winter, fall and extreme light created a unique moment that was very fleeting.

It is a very large painting, and this was purposeful to try to create a sense of being in, and part of that place. To enhance that experience most of the time I will push the opening of the painting that is growth at the bottom as something you have step over thus helping to make the viewer feel surrounded in the land. The amount of information included in the painting as is the case with most of my work is an attempt to involve the viewer in an exploration of that moment making it feel I hope more real.

Understanding Abstract Art An Artists Viewpoint

Posted on 6/29/2015 10:26:35 AM
By William Nichols
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The problem I think most people have in understanding abstract art comes from expectations people bring with them when viewing this kind of work. Why for example and how can an artist find making paintings this way interesting and meaningful. Are there conclusions that can be defined as something we can experience from what we are looking at, and do those conclusions necessarily mean we have to like or enjoy what they are? That answer is of course not. The liking or disliking of what we are viewing is our perogative as is any experience, however our subjective viewpoint does not necessarily render the work without merit and also maybe pleasure for others.

I started off as an artist who worked abstractly. It was a time for me in the late fifties when the energy of the art world was still encapsulated in abstract or so called non objective art. Like many young painters of the time I found it an exciting way to paint as well as a path that offered me the participation all though somewhat late to the party to feel avant garde. A little like wearing the right fashions of the moment. I became a realist painter in 1970, a painter of landscapes who still enjoys viewing some abstract art and still finds a way of weaving the positive characteristics of abstraction into his work.

Lets take on why someone would want to do this stuff, and for that purpose I have picked out three abstractionists Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Piet Mondrian. All three are abstract artists and yet each provides a different experience and identity for us to explore. Let me begin talking about these artists by apologizing first for the lack of quality of the pictures I will use, however for our purpose I think they will provide the answers I am trying to illustrate.

Dekooning had a very strong academic background, meaning he new how to draw and paint realisticly as did the other two painters. In short they were all well grounded in there craft.

Starting with De Kooning and viewing the two images of his, the first one presents a recognizable image of a figure the other a series of shapes, color, and paint on a canvas. In the first painting of the figure, De Kooning has already moved away from a highly realistic image and we can begin to see that his interest is no longer rendering a photographic like view of the figure but something else. He now points us in the direction of seeing his pleasure in the shapes he finds reapeating themselves in the very form of the figure. These he begins to heighten and exagerate leaving out details that would distract us from this infatuation with the sensual nature of these shapes. As you move to the second painting you see a complete abandonment of a recognizable images as well as a shift in the painting technique itself to a use of thicker paint application and a heightened use of color. So what can we expect as a viewer to get out of this transformation, what has he forced us to experience as a result of this? By taking away recognizability he makes us see shape, color, texture and line in a pure, direct, confrontational and unvarnished way. He becomes a kind of specialist lets say like a heart specialist giving us all of that special depth, interest and understanding of the beauty that we can find in a shape, or a line or a texture by itself. Like looking at the shape of a leaf or the edges of tree limbs we see in nature. Because of his abstracting and leaving out what he considers superfluous information we get to the point of his interest and vision quickly and more powerfully and can share in his decisions and insights.

I include Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian as comparisons that can reveal different forms of content that can be delivered in abstract works that also do not include recognizable imagery. In the case of Mark Rothko we see how something is physically painted contributes in a major way to an experience quite unlike DeKooning. Let me explain. In Dekoonings paintings the paint is heavier the brush strokes and color are aggressive. We witness what we are seeing in a dynamic way. Rothko on the other hand with subdued color emphasized by seemingly pushing the pigment into the canvas and creating soft spoken edges is contemplative in feeling, like reading a book by a fireplace on a rainy day. In Mondrian we see an opposite use of paint between that of the other two artists. The pigment is put down machine like without emotion to it. His experience is about order and balance and he forces us to consider by pitting the weight and importance color can have against one another. The lack of brushstrokes are necessary in pulling us into this story.

I find both strength and weaknesses in abstraction, strength in its ability by taking out what the artist considers superfluous making a point more directly and forcefully. Weakness in comparison to say Vermeer who has a complexity of stories that he weaves into his paintings. Stories of time, moment, shape, light, organization and color that unfolds as we view it like a novel. Is one better than another, thats a good question to ponder.