Ken Goshen en Atelier Mesones, día 3: Teoría del color.

What we have here, of course, when we paint a person, it's somewhat psychologically important to us to include all these bits of information because we are people and we are people before we learn to become artists and as people when we think what's important when I look at a person I want to see their face I want to see their eyes I want to see their nose but art history is full of great paintings that don't focus on those things fantastic paintings now the question becomes can what do you mean not focus on those things you're a portrait painter they pay you to do these things and they do and I'm very pro portraiture but if you want to focus on those things your design needs to be the design of a portrait like Sebastian's right that is designed like a portrait right like this is designed like a portrait if I had this and I didn't see anything here this painting would be fairly disappointing so this is justified by the design in this design is this justified do I want to put my focus here is this the most design wise interesting location is this the most pictorially high potential moment and I would say no when I think what's most interesting about this design it's not the portrait there's so much potential here for example I love how this triangle plays with this stuff and this stuff all these dark moments in a sea of light and the triangle that they create if this were mine this would be what I'm so interested in and then I ask myself how am I going to reinforce it how am I going to make sure that the attention of my viewer travels correctly across this design idea I could use something like sharp edges sharp edge sharp edge sharp edge and then I have ting ting ting ting and you notice that when I put this on moments of high contrast you can't look away from that and what's hurting me in this instance to be able to enjoy this is that my eye is constantly going here constantly going here why is my eye constantly going here because I'm a limited monkey right we are monkeys we are biologically designed to focus on faces because our survival depends on it if we don't see somebody's face we don't know how they're feeling we don't know if they're dangerous we don't know a lot of things about them so we have millions of years of evolution embedded in our brain that when we see a face that's where we look right and if the design idea is not about the face like here if the design of the of the design of the frame is not about the face then the face might be that's better or it'd be better if this was white right but whatever just to have it a little bit go into the background and then when you can make your your um design active and keep the viewer bouncing between that and that and that they are going to there's going to be um tension there's going to be tension between what the eye wants to do because the eye focuses on areas of high contrast and resolution and what the brain wants to do which is look at the face and that adds viewing time that means people are stuck looking at your painting for longer because they're trying to decipher what's going on here and it's mysterious but they can't look away because their eye is going here and you're playing a magic trick on them you don't want to make a painting that when it's up in the gallery and everybody's drinking champagne everybody just looks at it and says nice job and moves on no no in an opening of the group show the winning painter is the one that everybody's looking at his piece and trust me people go around and spend more time with pieces that offer you this kind of stuff okay i told marco he's not here sponsored by national geographic to tell us about what kind of features this animal had this isn't interesting let me tell you about uh the subset of homo sapiens called humans right they have two eyes one nose one mouth we know this we know this there's greater things that we could be doing here and if the interest is on a portrait which is legitimate the design should be about the portrait if the design is not about the portrait think about whether or not the portrait is getting in the way of your design okay and i'm pro portraits here i wouldn't say the same thing okay it's very important to understand that everything we choose to put in should support the design not support some psychological obsessions that we are born with on the account of us being monkeys the whole idea of making art is and to be slick about it and know that these animal instincts are there and know how to manipulate them in others okay we have a very sophisticated job to do and this sophisticated job cannot end on something that could be summarized in a list of items composition and design is something that constantly evolves throughout the painting because every mark you make changes the balance and that's why we need to come at the painting while we draw while we originally composed and come up with some ideas and marco and i were talking about what are the interesting moments of the design and he put them in and he worked on this but putting them in at the beginning doesn't mean that you can't go later and step all over them and ruin them right it's not enough to come at the painting and say here's a great design idea and now i'm gonna go and totally paint it in a different way right so if your idea was those interesting moments of very puncturing dark shadows in a sea of relatively light values you need to paint it in a way that keeps that idea going hopefully every additional mark you make makes that idea stronger not weaker right i could totally ruin my design still every mark i make from now on could ruin it or could strengthen it and so when i pick a paint from my palette and put it on the painting and do what step back to judge what i'm judging is does it help my design does it harm my design right if it harms my design something's gotta change i don't want to be making marks that are harming my design and the most um common way in which i can harm my design is to get confused about what i'm here to do if i'm if i suddenly think that i'm here to illustrate an anatomy textbook and i'm not thinking anymore about what's going to make a beautiful picture then trust me all of you have the strength and the ability to ruin your painting in the next 10 minutes believe that you do nothing you've done here guarantees anything you have to constantly until the last brushwork think how can i make my design better and better and better especially when all that we've done in the design so far is monochromatic there's so much about color that has to do with design and so if i come over here and i just you know paint this whole thing blue i don't know you know what i mean like this stuff doesn't guarantee anything doesn't guarantee confidence right the thing is this you approach a painting you get to know the painting and you understand that the painting is not the content of the painting right it's not the figure painted it's the painting with a figure but first of all and when i ask myself how do i proceed what is going to be my next stage i need to listen i don't need to have my it's not my ego i'm the architect of this thing and the painting here is going to receive all my ego and i'm going to force it into like do stuff no the good artist understands where the painting naturally wants to go you need to step back and understand ask the question what do you need you ask the painting what would you need from me and if you if you really listen the painting is going to tell you and that painting was just speaking to me later i was like coming back and i was like no we have to take it possibly possibly that painting is is telling us that it wants to be something else and and this is also true with like you see this with songs right sometimes you you hear a song and it's like going well and you get it and then suddenly like the song takes a turn and you're like what like where does this song go and so this is not just a matter of visual arts this is a matter of you need to remember and understand what is the natural progression that your artwork is trying to travel in and you need to just support it you know the painting is a train it's moving along and you just need to be like i'm putting coal i'm putting the gas i'm cleaning the wheels i'm letting it go not i'm going in a different direction you know that stuff is how car crashes happen where we want to be right this graph we never meet it how do you call this uh exponential graph right exponential curve we have where we want to be we have sorry we have where we are we have where we want to be we will never get there because we're going to die and it's going to be impossible to get there and i'm just a little farther ahead that's it that's it and i don't it's good for us yep and i don't take credit for any of this as well like i don't know where my ideas came from but they must have come from my environment and from stuff that i read and stuff that i've chosen to adopt i don't take credit for nothing thanks for sharing of course thanks for listening i think what's important to point out at this point what's important to point out at this point in the game is that there is no one way to paint a painting if i do something here today that works or doesn't work looks good looks bad don't look necessarily at what i'm doing on this painting but rather how i'm thinking okay that's more important because let me tell you i'm gonna be back in the studio on monday and i'm gonna paint differently in the week after i'm gonna paint differently in the week after i'm gonna paint differently because i constantly want to learn new ways of doing things and choose the best path for myself so this is just a suggestion in this time and place so please don't take my selection of brushes or my selection of strategies as my prescription to you what i suggest that you take is the inquisitive mind to ask yourself is this brush doing what i want it to do and not and if not what is missing about it and how can i change it it's just too soft it's too hard it's too big it's too small that's what you should think don't land on my solutions land on my questions and what i do when i approach a painting at any stage but especially at this stage when i'm just starting out is what we spoke about with with talking about sebastian's work and marco's work i want to ask the painting what do you need from me how can i help you come with a mindset of service to the painting what can i do to help you be who you want to be and so the first thing that i'm that this painting is telling me now that i've asked the painting these questions is uh the painting is requesting that i put some attention on the lights because i focused on the shadows that's that's the stuff that i had available to me i was working with umbers umbers are dark i was able to uh work on these shadows and say a few things about them but i didn't have the ability to do that with the lights and so i'm gonna start trying to say something about that additionally what i have um to say about all the colors that i mixed yesterday is we don't know if they're right yet we're only going to know if they're on the painting and so it's very important not to assume we finished something called a stage this we just increased we did two things we increased our chances that we're going to have good colors but we're not for sure about it increased our chances and two i put you in an uncomfortable situation where you had to work on mixing without touching the work that's what we did but there's no guarantee and you can still adjust on the fly and probably should so when i discover that the not exactly what i want i can dip into the other paints and adjust on the go now the painting is already i can already hear the painting saying to me something very interesting i have colors on that strike me as potentially good potentially bad but that it's not so easy to judge whether or not they are good or bad without some context of the background so the painting is calling me this specific painting is calling me to try to get to a point where i can see some color here pretty fast because when i put these colors down they look like the chroma is very very low it looks pretty gray yeah but but chroma is relative so it's possible that it looks gray because we don't have the context necessary next to it uh to experience it for what it actually is so we're going to put that to the test very very very soon but i just want to make sure that i have enough here to work with before i add another spot because the background needs more gray because the background is even more gray and because the background is going to provide context for the rest of the the rest of the marks and so if it's not quote unquote colorful enough which is the more the more correct way to say it is chromatic enough it's possible that it's because it feels this way because it's in a universe of higher chroma the underpainting is higher is that chroma of the underpainting is higher than than the chroma of my actual marks because when you put the the first number so transparently it becomes uh it becomes uh orange right it becomes orange and what i have on my painting right now is more grayish so this is part of why as soon as i started working with the burnt umber what did i tell you guys maybe raw umber would be a better choice right that's what i said and now you understand why because i know that the colors in front of me are pretty gray and it's very hard for me to uh estimate judge whether or not they work for me before i have something else next to them to compare them to so i'm going to try to put a few hints down next to it and see if i can create a feeling of light that'll be nice and if not we're gonna have to adjust some okay once i put that gray next to it i already feel much better now it starts to feel alive did you notice that very very interesting how colors work are all relative right this whole thing looked super great but it looked super great in the context of an orange universe right once we cancel out this orange we can start to breathe do you feel it yeah okay so this is helpful because it's telling me this is what will tell me if i'm on the right track or wrong track and i was i was questioning whether these colors are working okay but now i feel more confident that i am in the right direction and so it's important to ask yourself if i don't know if this is right or wrong and what could help me figure it out here i am i'm stuck in some kind of conundrum in this moment what's a dilemma because i don't want to focus too much on this now but it's so in my face so i'm going to try to squint very very hard to see it in a more abstract way let's see hopefully whenever this kind of problems presents itself to you be thankful because if you resolve that you will have achieved something very big my dilemma is that i don't think this is good for my design so that's what i'm seeing right and i don't want to focus on it in high resolution because then all everybody's going to be able to see is that so i have to find a way to look at it how it looks when i look here and when i look here this stuff is really not as clear and that's better for me if my story was a different crop like here maybe it would help my design but that's not my crop so this thing hurts me so i'm going to try to solve this problem see if i can remember what we said about nature nature is not static right so it's not that this looks that way in nature always it looks that way in nature if i focus directly on it but if everybody take a look at the forehead focus on this highlight and tell me if you can see anything here while you're observing the forehead you can't it becomes totally invisible but if i stare here i see everything so by painting this how it appears when i look at the forehead that's where i'm going to draw the attention of my viewer my viewer is going to look at the forehead because this is going to look as it does when the gaze is focused here you understand if i keep focusing my gaze here and here and here and here my viewer does not know where to look and my painting suffers light erases when you step out of the museum and the light hits you in the face you can't see anything if you want your painting to feel like light some information has to be erased by the light the light coming out of here erases some stuff if you don't erase it's not going to glow it's going to feel like uh you know it's going to feel it's going to feel three-dimensional it might feel like a sculpture and everything and it's going to be convincing and it's going to have weight and it's going to look like it's occupying space but it's not going to glow it will not glow if you don't erase that's just how vision works like think about a high scan by nasa of the moon where they show you every little creak on the moon it doesn't glow i'm resisting the temptation to work on this area with a straight line that's not how it looks like there's a shimmer there i want that shimmer so i'm going to paint it like a shimmer paint it let your hand react to what your eye perceives not what your brain knows your eye perceives your hand should do right the rhythm of the visual field should activate your hand the example i want you to think about is us limited monkeys have rare events when we feel like we are superheroes for example sometimes the cup falls off the table and we catch it in midair and at that moment we are like does anybody see this i'm superman did you see this did you see this look at what i did but what you did there has nothing to do with your brain this is a moment where your brain was too slow to react and the superpower of your eye and hand took over your eye saw your body reacted we have deep deep mechanisms inside us deep reflexes that express profoundly who we are as animals the connection between the eye and the hand i sees hand response is faster than the speed of thought so try to be open to these possibilities your eye sees your hand reacts don't let your brain discipline you put a straight line no this is the separation between the body and the back of boo boo okay and see i sees hand reacts and if it's weird great if it already looks beautiful on the palette what are the chances that when i put this on the painting it's going to look bad and if it looks bad on the painting what is it that we did to make it look bad if without any story it already looks good this is a very serious psychological philosophical question right so there's two options either when we put this on the painting it looks bad because the arrangement is bad this is design because without any arrangements they look good together as a collection or the way you applied the color change the color and now i'm going to show that to you if i take this paint and i put it down like this that's the color i mixed if i take this paint and put it down like this this is not the same color okay you understand the way that we apply the paint if we don't respect the original mixture and we try to change the color on the painting in order to make it more correct then we no longer have this context to rely on right because what's it's possible to have a beautiful collection on the palette and in the way that it's applied to the painting have none of the colors look anything like what we actually mixed another attempt this is the color as we mixed it how different is that okay so if the color when you touch the painting doesn't look right mix adjust on the palette don't rub it haphazardly because what you end up with is not what you mixed okay so when we look at this collection over here there's a lot to be proud of you should be proud of yourself all the hard work that you've done it's really demonstrated in each and every one of those studies that you're not only concerned with explaining to us what you saw on the other side each and every one of these expresses some kind of design idea the colors are good the shapes are good this is you know i uh i feel like i've spoken so much about all this stuff for the past three days and now i'm just seeing the results and as a teacher it makes me really really proud and i think all of you should be proud of yourselves as well and i don't have a speech i don't have a speech i was i'm gonna open the floor for questions we don't even feel that there is an application it looks almost digital but what we see here is not only that it feels more three-dimensional it feels more like there's a respect for the material called paint and what it can do right what can paint give us why are we doing this in paint that is one way to express a love of the material itself right the respect of the material itself beautiful comment yeah and what we can see from that is that as we expect we want the painting to do two things when we're too far away from it we need it to be attractive so that we want to come close then once we already are close it needs to offer us additional experiences so that we don't feel disappointed that we came all this way and that's what you're saying is happening you're attracted for the larger design and then you get more candy once you're up close because you get to feel the fingerprint of the artist itself so it offers us a lot when we're far and it offers us even more when we're close beautiful comments transparency does in this case two different things right the transparency plays into this idea that we understand now that light and shadow are not equal elements light and shadow represent visibility and lack of visibility shadow is not so i think what you're saying when you're talking about the three-dimensionality that is expressed through this transparency is you're pointing out the fact that the opacity communicates to us visibility the transparency communicates to us mystery low visibility so that is how it contributes in terms of the illusionistic property it also contributes on an aesthetic level for the same reason that we appreciate the difference between thick paint and thick paint because paint can do a lot of stuff and as practitioners of paints and people who appreciate and love and use this material it is an act of honor on our part to show all the different ways in which paint can look beautiful paint can look beautiful opaque paint can look beautiful transparent paint can look beautiful with texture paint can look beautiful smooth and if we manage to take all these different effects and put them together in one painting and make them feel not like they're in contradiction but like they're in harmony that's symphony right you take all the different instruments and they're playing together in rhythm the same song so it helps us illusionistically that's the impressive and it helps us aesthetically that's the experiential the artist is making a beautiful use not only of paint but of her understanding of how our mind works our mind is hunting for patterns whenever we can hunting for patterns and the pattern that we are most interested in hunting is faces if we see something that looks like a face on the ground it's a face if we see something that looks like a cloud in the sky it's a face and the artist is mature enough and understands that that she knows she doesn't have to paint every tiny little bit of information to explain to us that it's a face it respects you as a viewer by giving you just enough hints so that you can paint that lip in your mind she doesn't need to spoon feed you she leaves room for you to be a participant in the artwork completing it in your own imagination we are observing the model and we expect lower resolutions which demonstrates to us restraint and maturity right restraint to pull back you don't always have to say everything here everything here everything here you're leaving us with this room to breathe and room to participate and room to ask questions because when i'm far away i have to come close to see what's in there and when i'm here i totally get it i feel exactly what you're describing when i'm standing there looking at the model all this stuff is like background activity that is happening next to me and everybody who's ever stood in a model classroom can relate to this and there's something really you know there's something really cinematic and epic about something like this but there's something really humanizing about that right because we understand the fuller context of where this figure exists and also we understand it not at the expense of our own imagination and the room he leads us to interpret the scene right so a lot of mystery a lot of specificity a lot of design as well so thanks so it is a function of hierarchy right if this is where the light is pointing to all the other elements are darker not because the color of this easel itself or of this board itself as a color if we just take this color it's probably lighter right but we're not looking at the local color we're looking at a value as it appears as a visual phenomenon and as a visual phenomena all these relatively light objects recede into a middle value because they are not the recipients of direct light so you're pointing to a very beautiful arrangement of values not an obsession with the local color of the things in themselves yeah absolutely beautiful beautiful comment and i also you know for me what i really like about this painting you said history to me what's right at the tip of my tongue is that this is a painting with a um with a love of the legacy of art right it's not sometimes you see paintings today and they're like i paint abstract expressionism so all i care about is the 50s i paint uh neo-realist so all i care about is french 19th century academism you look at this and you can't say that because you have stuff that reminds us of baroque and then we have stuff that reminds us of fubism what is this is this vermeer or voyard it's both and if you can do both together this suggests that you're living today right this is a painting that feels like it was done today with all the respect to the skills of the masters to the revolutions of the post masters it's contemporary it's classical it is encompassing of art history as a broader spectrum with respect and endurance which is a huge accomplishment yeah thanks