Economical Shape Shifting

There | oil on panel | 24 X 24” | sold

Turns out a painter’s intentional “artistic license” to manipulate shape, light and shadow is key to understanding the science of seeing.

In the MIT Press Reader, The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries shines a light on how the artist’s eye simplifies the physics of three dimensional objects on the picture plane:
The artist can take shortcuts, presenting cues more economically and arranging surfaces and lights to suit the message of the piece rather than the requirements of the physical world. In discovering these shortcuts or strategies of image compression, artists act as research neuroscientists or as visual hackers, and we can learn a great deal from tracing their discoveries. - Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh

To me, we are just visual poets! Which leads to my next musing . . .

Ada Limon is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. As I listened to Krista Tippett and Ada dissecting in conversation “where poetry comes from in us and what poetry works in us” I was replacing the implicitness of poetry in words with the unspokeness of poetry in paint. One of Ada’s lines in her poem Not the Saddest Thing in the World really spoke to me:
Between the ground and the feast is where I live now. - Ada Limon

In my own way, I work this theme into all of my paintings.
It comes from in me, and works in me.

I invite you to travel into these conversations through your own lens as a painter.
And I’d love to know your thoughts!

The MIT PRESS Reader:
The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries

On Being:
Ada Limon: To Be Made Whole