Few days ago a brief news story by Carol Vogel about an accident involving a woman falling accidentally into “The Actor”(1905), "a rare Rose Period Picasso" and damaging it last Friday at the Metroplitan Museum of Art appeared in the NY Times. It was later followed by a longer piece explaining how the small tear will be dealt with. This somewhat sensational story was of course picked up on twitter and in the general and art news media around the world. Knowing that, I had Dick quickly read the longer story on my iphone and I asked him to tell me about his view on the accident and about his experience with torn canvases. This led us to make a short video below about art restoration. Make sure to also look at the funny, cruel, cynical and pointed comments in this original blog entry on the NYT Artsbeat.
Yesterday was supposed be our video editing day- finish another portrait- but we started late and decided to make a short pretty unedited video about the concept of "designs within the design." The idea of the designs with design define quite well, although not completely, Dick's painting process.
So, for the video, using one of his older, small, premiere coup landscapes, which he had used to create a background for a large nude of Tom Johnson- whose video portrait is coming soon- Dick illustrates how a viewer's eyes enter the painting through the edges of the painting. He flips the painting to its sides and upside down to analyze the framing, a great, simple tool in painting, photography and critical tradition, to get a better sense of space and the painting's compositional organization.
He then moves to another painting, the work in progress, the three figure piece, and reveals a stages in his color-spot process and the way he arrives at designs within the design of the picture as a whole.
If you were wondering where are our emails and blog posts, Dick and I each each took a short vacation which together added up to 3 weeks. I'm back from a trip to Japan where I visited relatives and friends, ate great New Year dishes, photographed and videoed. We tried making a post last friday, a day after my return to NYC, but we ended up just making plans for our full work day here today. So today we did some shifting around of the paintings which were blocking the way to the paintings we where shooting.
Here are some images and now back to editing. Another portrait, Tom Johnson, coming soon, followed by a video on the related subject of surrounding space.
After moving everything around and shooting a video, we placed the paintings back where they belong and then had lunch.
Before the Christmas/New Year break Dick and I rushed and filmed as much as we could for our video series on Dick's models. We had a long holiday break ahead of us, so we worked on editing yet another video. We accomplished it and the result is "Portraits: Rev. W. B. Wright" We had mentioned and linked W.B.Wright video in our most recent e-mail, but here it comes to the blog.
