karen cooper - Blog: painting with emotion

Painting Scared Silly

by Cooper on 1/5/2010 5:33:27 PM1 Comment

Greetings,

Welcome to the Cooper studio, yet again, on this brittle cold Jefferson, Iowa day.

This morning I wrote about painting with emotion. Emotional painting. Painting emotions. (whichever one of those works best for you) My easel goal for the day was to connect with the emotion.

I have two exhibits ahead , April and June. The June event will be at Arnolds Park (Okoboji area) Iowa. The gallery owner and I discussed subject matter. We are leaning toward Arnolds Park, But Not The Queen. Now, for those of you who don't know, Arnolds Park/Okoboji is a great resort area in northwest Iowa. They have an iconic amusement park and a tour boat called, you guessed it, the Queen. Ok, so there's nothing wrong with the Queen. It's probably brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of people. But. It has been painted way too many times by way too many people. I refuse to send even one more painting of the Queen out into a world already overloaded with Queen paintings.

So. On the easel is a nice white 30 x 30 inch canvas, all spanky-clean and ready to go. I have a ton of great photos from Arnolds Park. (hey, sometimes even I can plan ahead) Early last summer, while we were at the park, I saw some kids riding on the "scrambler". You know, it's the amusement park ride shaped kind of like an octopus, that whirls you around, and slides you into whoever is riding with you. It's a good ride, -goes around fast, without going upside or way too high :)

Anyway, these kids were about eight years old. Young enough to be just a smidgeon of scared, and old enough to be laughing themselves silly. What a combination. Definitely a painting.

So today I started on it. Scrambled scared-silly. How on earth do you paint that emotion? I went on a hunch. Put great big silly smiles on all three faces, and let the painting take it from there. Here's what's happened so far:

It has a ways to go, and maybe I got a little more of the silly onto the canvas than the scared, but I'm ok with that. Silly is a good emotion!

Later, Cooper

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Where Do The Mad Ones Go?

by Cooper on 1/5/2010 9:52:21 AMComment on this

Greetings,

Welcome to the Cooper studio, Jefferson, Iowa, where this morning, I am contemplating informing the resident golden retriever that he will just have to hold it. We are not going back outside now. Minus 20.5 degrees is just too much. And obviously, the cold is messing with my mind---here's the evidence---the question du jour. Where do the mad ones go?

Let me explain. I am still reading in the book Conversations In Paint. (author: Charles Dunn) Under the heading of emotion, Mr Dunn states this:

"Accurate portrayal of subject matter in painting may have been important before the camera was invented, but no longer. The camera reports the way something looked more accurately than any artist ever could. More important, then, is communicating something of how the artist felt about the subject."

He continues with a few quotes on the same matter:

"A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art. Emotion is the starting point, the beginning and the end. Craftsmanship and technique are in the middle." -Paul Cezanne

"A painting is good not because it looks like something but because it feels like something." -Phil Dike

Bearing all of that in mind, what happens when a painter is crabby, vengeful, depressed, or just plain-old-mad, and they are succesful in painting said emotion that day? Don't you end up with a painting full of mad? What on earth do you do with a mad painting? Possibly if the artist is successful in landing a show they could assemble all their "mad" paintings under one mad theme and go with it. But then comes the bigger question. Does the average patron want a mad painting hanging in their living space? Wouldn't that painting make them feel mad too? Or maybe it's just a crabby painting, not a mad painting. What a way for said patron to start their day. "Rise, shine, oh darn, there's that crabby painting, and now it's got me feeling that way too."

But. There are some pretty potent mad paintings hanging around the world today. "The Scream" comes to mind. Maybe patrons don't mind hanging mad paintings in their space if the artist is famous enough, or the painting costs enough. OR: THE EMOTION IS EXPRESSED WELL ENOUGH. Ha! And that would set up the cause/effect relationship with the first two parameters as well. Surely then, Mr. Dike is a genius---"a painting is good not because it looks like something but because it feels like something."

Must be time to go paint with emotion, and see how much of it I can put on the canvas for today. Thanks for stopping by.

Later, Cooper

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