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Botella al mar

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:52:17 +0100

Mario Benedetti
Botella al mar

Pongo estos seis versos en mi botella al mar
con el secreto designio de que algún día
llegue a una playa casi desierta
y un niño la encuentre y la destape
y en lugar de versos extraiga piedritas
y socorros y alertas y caracoles.

Gonzalo Ruiz. "Botella al mar". Óleo sobre lienzo, 22" x 28"

Este cuadro forma parte de la serie "Más Que Palabras" basada en la obra de varios poetas españoles e hispanoamericanos. No pretenden ser ilustraciones de los poemas. Algunos quizás reflejen más o menos el impacto que causaron en mi cuando los leí, pero de otros simplemente tomé una frase o un par de palabras que me sugirieron una imagen con entidad propia.

This painting is part of the series "More Than Words" based on the work of several Spanish and Latin American poets. Not intended as illustrations of the poems, some may reflect more or less the impact they caused in me when I read them, but from others I simply took a phrase or a word or two that suggested an image of its own.

País de azules árboles

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:57:19 +0100

Julio Cortázar
Happy New Year

Mira, no pido mucho,
solamente tu mano, tenerla
como un sapito que duerme así contento.
Necesito esa puerta que me dabas
para entrar a tu mundo, ese trocito
de azúcar verde, de redondo alegre.
¿No me prestas tu mano en esta noche
de fin de año de lechuzas roncas?
No puedes, por razones técnicas.
Entonces la tramo en el aire, urdiendo cada dedo,
el durazno sedoso de la palma
y el dorso, ese país de azules árboles.
Así la tomo y la sostengo,
como si de ello dependiera
muchísimo del mundo,
la sucesión de las cuatro estaciones,
el canto de los gallos, el amor de los hombres.

Gonzalo Ruiz. País de azules árboles. Óleo sobre lienzo, 16" x 20"

Este cuadro forma parte de la serie "Más Que Palabras" basada en la obra de varios poetas españoles e hispanoamericanos. No pretenden ser ilustraciones de los poemas. Algunos quizás reflejen más o menos el impacto que causaron en mi cuando los leí, pero de otros simplemente tomé una frase o un par de palabras que me sugirieron una imagen con entidad propia.

This painting is part of the series "More Than Words" based on the work of several Spanish and Latin American poets. Not intended as illustrations of the poems, some may reflect more or less the impact they caused in me when I read them, but from others I simply took a phrase or a word or two that suggested an image of its own.

Me gustas cuando callas

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:00:22 +0100

Pablo Neruda
Me gustas cuando callas

Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente,
y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te toca.
Parece que los ojos se te hubieran volado
y parece que un beso te cerrara la boca.

Como todas las cosas están llenas de mi alma
emerges de las cosas, llena del alma mía.
Mariposa de sueño, te pareces a mi alma,
y te pareces a la palabra melancolía.

Me gustas cuando callas y estás como distante.
Y estás como quejándote, mariposa en arrullo.
Y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te alcanza:
Déjame que me calle con el silencio tuyo.

Déjame que te hable también con tu silencio
claro como una lámpara, simple como un anillo.
Eres como la noche, callada y constelada.
Tu silencio es de estrella, tan lejano y sencillo.

Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente.
Distante y dolorosa como si hubieras muerto.
Una palabra entonces, una sonrisa bastan.
Y estoy alegre, alegre de que no sea cierto.

Gonzalo Ruiz. Me gustas cuando callas. Óleo sobre lienzo, 22" x 28"

Este cuadro forma parte de la serie "Más Que Palabras" basada en la obra de varios poetas españoles e hispanoamericanos. No pretenden ser ilustraciones de los poemas. Algunos quizás reflejen más o menos el impacto que causaron en mi cuando los leí, pero de otros simplemente tomé una frase o un par de palabras que me sugirieron una imagen con entidad propia.

This painting is part of the series "More Than Words" based on the work of several Spanish and Latin American poets. Not intended as illustrations of the poems, some may reflect more or less the impact they caused in me when I read them, but from others I simply took a phrase or a word or two that suggested an image of its own.

Aquellas pequeñas cosas

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:56:54 +0100

Joan Manuel Serrat
Aquellas pequeñas cosas

Uno se cree
que las mató
el tiempo y la ausencia.
Pero su tren
vendió boleto
de ida y vuelta.

Son aquellas pequeñas cosas,
que nos dejó un tiempo de rosas
en un rincón,
en un papel
o en un cajón.

Como un ladrón
te acechan detrás
de la puerta.
Te tienen tan
a su merced
como hojas muertas

que el viento arrastra allá o aquí,
que te sonríen tristes y
nos hacen que
lloremos cuando
nadie nos ve.

Gonzalo Ruiz. Aquellas pequeñas cosas. Óleo sobre lienzo, 22" x 28"

Este cuadro forma parte de la serie "Más Que Palabras" basada en la obra de varios poetas españoles e hispanoamericanos. No pretenden ser ilustraciones de los poemas. Algunos quizás reflejen más o menos el impacto que causaron en mi cuando los leí, pero de otros simplemente tomé una frase o un par de palabras que me sugirieron una imagen con entidad propia.

This painting is part of the series "More Than Words" based on the work of several Spanish and Latin American poets. Not intended as illustrations of the poems, some may reflect more or less the impact they caused in me when I read them, but from others I simply took a phrase or a word or two that suggested an image of its own.

Como pompas de jabón

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:58:29 +0100

Antonio Machado
Proverbios y cantares

Nunca perseguí la gloria
ni dejar en la memoria
de los hombres mi canción;
yo amo los mundos sutiles,
ingrávidos y gentiles
como pompas de jabón.
Me gusta verlos pintarse
de sol y grana, volar
bajo el cielo azul, temblar
súbitamente y quebrarse.

Gonzalo Ruiz. Como pompas de jabón. Óleo sobre lienzo, 16" x 20"

Este cuadro forma parte de la serie "Más Que Palabras" basada en la obra de varios poetas españoles e hispanoamericanos. No pretenden ser ilustraciones de los poemas. Algunos quizás reflejen más o menos el impacto que causaron en mi cuando los leí, pero de otros simplemente tomé una frase o un par de palabras que me sugirieron una imagen con entidad propia.

This painting is part of the series "More Than Words" based on the work of several Spanish and Latin American poets. Not intended as illustrations of the poems, some may reflect more or less the impact they caused in me when I read them, but from others I simply took a phrase or a word or two that suggested an image of its own.

Varsha Ramani on "Wind from the Sea"

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 01:59:57 +0100

I am pleased to present in this post an article by Varsha Ramani who attended my last workshop in the National Gallery of Art and prepared this beautiful written piece about Andrew Wyeth's "Wind from the Sea". Thank you very much Varsha for sharing this.

Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917-2009), Wind from the Sea, 1947. Tempera on hardboard, 47 x 70 cm (18 1/2 x 27 9/16 in.)

This painting is called ‘Wind from the Sea’ by the American artist, Andrew Wyeth. He was known for painting lonely rural landscapes, closely observed portraits and crisp interior still lifes in a realistic and detailed manner. His close friends and neighbors were usually the subjects of his paintings.

This painting is a scene from a room on the top floor of his friend’s house in coastal Maine and captures a moment on a hot summer day, when the tattered and transparent curtains are blown into the room by wind coming from the sea. The window almost serves as a frame and places the viewer inside the room. The sense of movement is evident in the painting and one of the main reasons I chose it was that it reminded me of the dry and sultry summers back home in India.

Andrew Wyeth had said that ‘… its all in how you arrange the thing… the careful balance of design is motion.’ And in this picture, the motion of the wind and the delicate movement of the curtains was the first thing that struck me.
In terms of color, this painting is not very adventurous. The hues used are mainly white, yellow-orange, green and some black. Though only warm colours have been used, the sense of motion in the painting and the black used for the trees in the distance gives the painting some cool spots. The colours are analogous with a basic analogous scheme of yellow and yellow-orange.

In terms of lightness, at the first instance the painting could be classified as being on the lighter side. However, this is because there is a lot of unsaturation. The tones are medium to dark (b/w image) except for the sky which is much lighter in tone. The dark window pane and the relatively darker interiors of the room emphasize the lighter landscape outside. Chiaroscuro is the contrast between light and dark. Hence in this picture, we can say that the contrast is provided by the lightness and not by colour or saturation.

What strikes me the most in terms of use of colour is the use of pure white in the edges of the curtain. Though the curtain in itself is a dull shade of yellow-orange, its edges are painted in bright white which makes me feel as though the wind is giving the curtain a new life! The tracks on the meadow in front of the window show that there are people in this lonely landscape yet in this moment, one enjoys the thought of being alone.

This is an article by Varsha Ramani

Guidelines to analyze the use of color in a painting

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:20:52 +0100

To analyze the color in the painting you can use some of the following questions, choosing the ones which seem most relevant to you. With this exercise we don't pretend to reach irrefutable conclusions or to classify the pictures in one way or another but to describe what we see. If you are not familiar with some of the concepts exposed here you can read my previous posts where I have a detailed explanation about them.

What kind of hues predominate in the painting, yellow, red, blue, green ...?
What colors are more important, warm or cool colors?
Is it a analogous or complementary color scheme? in general, the complementary color scheme is when at least two pairs of complementary colors of similar saturation occupy large areas of similar extension. When most of the colors are similar but there are small areas of complementary color, remains a similar color scheme. Sometimes it is difficult to determine because there are many variables (brightness, saturation, extension ...) But this is not about labeling the painting but talking about it and see if it suggests more of a color contrast or harmony.
Do dark colors predominate, or light colors?
Is there much contrast of light and shadow (chiaroscuro) or is it within an small range of lightness?
Is the contrast of light and shade more important than the contrast of color?
Are the colors saturated or neutral? We may find modern paintings where most of the tones are saturated, such as the Fauves whereas classic paintings are usually dominated by dark and neutral colors but have clear areas of saturated colors.
What impressions do you get with the painting in general, and how do you relate that to the use of color?

EXAMPLE:

This is a painting by André Derain, one of the painters of the group Les Fauves (French for The Wild Beasts) a group of early 20th century artists who emphasized the use of strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. The painting is dated in 1906 and titled Pont de Charing Cross.

The first thing that strikes me in this picture is that basically uses the primary colors yellow, blue and red, as well as some secondary green and orange to a lesser extent, and employs a high degree of saturation almost as a child would do using colors as they leave the tube with little mixing.

There is a large presence of both warm and cold colors but personally I think the feeling is warm because yellow occupies a large part of the picture and because saturated colors suggest feelings closer to movement, warmth and action whereas more faded colors would speak of calm, tranquility and freshness. I also believe that to paint the sea and sky of yellow enhances the sense of warmth of these elements which are normally cold tones. I note that most of the cool hues (green and blue) are grouped in the area of the earth to create a clear composition shaped curve.

The color scheme is complementary and we can see that specially in the use of large areas of red vs. green and also blue vs. orange which create a very high contrast of color. The color is applied in large areas of flat color but also has some small touches of almost complementary colors that interact in small areas such as the tree where you see blue and red-orange maybe representing light and shadow and creating an optical vibration.

As for lightness, my first impression is that this painting have lots of light but this is given by the saturation and not for the use of light tones. In fact tones are rather medium as far as light is concerned, as seen in black and white version. Curiously some background blue buildings appear darker than the yellow sky but they are not. Therefore we can consider that this is a clear example of contrast of hue rather than contrast of light.

In general I think this is an attractive and vital painting. Other paintings of the Fauves suggest me more aggressiveness and chaos but this suggests me movement and vitality within an order, perhaps because the composition is quite simple and clear.

Analysis of paintings from the standpoint of color

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:50:55 +0100

In this post I will analyze three paintings taking into account the three properties of color.

In the following picture of Paul Klee, red and red-violet are predominantly marking the role of the painting. To a lesser extent we find a red-orange and a neutral green.This is therefore a paiting based on creating a harmony of analogous colors around the red-violet.

Although red is a warm color in this case has a slight tendency to coldness by the abundance of violets that are displayed on a high degree of saturation.

As for the light, there are a variety of values, dark, light and media. Klee also plays with different types of saturation.
The variety of shades of chiaroscuro and saturation adds variation to the painting and a sense of movement or space, where lighter and more saturated tones look forward and darker and neutrals tones seem to regress.

The use of small patches of green that is the complement of red adds a touch of contrasting color that animates the composition without removing it from its harmonic effect.

While responding to a classical scheme of color harmony, in my opinion is a bold composition because it is in the border area of warm and cold colors creating tension between the red-violet and red-orange.

Unlike in the previous example, color variations in the Monet painting below are much more subtle. In encountering the most colors in a middle zone of saturation there is not a color marking a clear pattern. Most hues used are around green and yellow orange. The chromatic tension is created by extending this line to the orange and blue-green ends that are close to the pair of complementary colors orange and blue. As in the painting of Derain, this paint is on the border between warm and cold but in my opinion tends more to the warm zone.

On the chiaroscuro, I note the absence of light colors, placing most of the colors in the middle and lower-middle zone of lightness, thus giving a greater role to color.

The Impressionists were interested in the effects of natural light and color as they occur in nature outside the studio of the painter where light can be controlled. When painting outside you realize the transience of light and color. This picture of changing colors where green, blue and yellow are mixed in small touches, speak to us about transient atmospheric effects so important to Monet.

The following painting by Derain shows a clear pattern as the pair of complementary colors blue and orange occupy large areas and do so in a high degree of saturation. Actually the palette ranges from orange red to blue, through yellow and green. All these colors are together on the color wheel, but they extend up to the complementary colors and have such a high degree of saturation that we can say that this is a complementary scheme rather than a harmony of analogous colors.

As in the Monet painting chiaroscuro is limited to medium and medium-low, with no light tones. But here the colors are much more saturated making the game much more direct and less subtle than in the Monet painting. The blue and green darker shades are grouped in a very concrete area in terms of composition.

In short, we see on these three examples like the idea of using color is different:

Klee makes greater use of chiaroscuro that Monet and Derain.
Monet plays with subtle color whereas Derain make it more directly.
Klee and Monet are based on analogous colors while looking Derain we see a clear contrast of complementary.

Ostwald double cone

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:04:13 +0100

Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald was a chemist, university professor and philosopher, Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909. Ostwald developed a new theory of color, defending the standardization of colors and creating a laboratory in Dresden for its study in 1920. The Ostwald double cone model represents the three properties of color: hue, lightness and saturation. The following image shows that model with one section to observe part of its interior.

In the middle of the cone is the color wheel with saturated colors on the outside and less saturated colors on the inside. The vertical axis represents the gray scale from black to white down above.

Starting with a color, eg red, you can set three different types of variations depending on the direction we move into the cone.

Notice that adding white or black to a pure red not only change its lightness but also decrease its saturation because it gets closer to the vertical axis. That is why a more saturated color has a medium value rather than a light value as one might think wrongly. This is a typical error when we are painting and trying to represent a form of bright color that we tend to add white to the color in our palette because it reminds us to light but we are actually removing saturation and the result is a dull and lifeless color.

This model can help us to better understand the properties of color and to analyze a painting bearing in mind all of them at a time as I will explain in the next post.

Saturation

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:12:24 +0100

Saturation is the third property of color. I will begin to explain it from the following examples.

Andre Derain

Claude Monet

Which of the above paintings seem brighter? In my opinion the Derain. Indeed, one definition of bright would be "emitting or reflecting light readily or in large amounts; shining" which in scientific terms would not be very appropriate for my example. Other feelings that I have looking at the picture of Derain is that color is more direct and vibrant. The real difference between the two paintings is not so much that one use lighter colors than the other but that one uses more saturated colors than the other. Saturation is the vividness of a color's hue. Saturation measures the degree to which a color differs from a grey of the same darkness or lightness. In the image below looks like the two pictures are pretty similar in terms of chiaroscuro. The Derain has a wider range of values but generally move in a very limited gray area, like the Monet painting.

Below is the color wheel with the original colors on the outside and those same values, but less saturated as they approach the center of the circle. Observe how the colors are losing their identity as they approach the center and become a faded color close to gray.

There are basically three ways to reduce the saturation of a color:

    Mixed with white or black. In this case also would change their brightness.
    Mixed with gray.
    Mixed with its complement: Yellow + Purple = gray; Red + green = gray ; Blue + Orange = gray

Gray colors can have a dominant hue but it is more subtle. The obtained gray with yellow + violet will be different to that obtained with blue + orange. Likewise if in such mixtures one of the two complementary is predominant, gray will be more hot or cold and have a dominant color, eg 2 parts of orange + 1 part blue will result in a warm gray with orange dominance.

Returning to our examples, in the following image we can see how Derain painting moves in the area outside the circle while Monet does in the infield.

We have seen what the three properties of color are: hue, brightness and saturation. In the next post I will talk about how we view these properties in a model that takes the color wheel as a reference but to supplement it by adding other properties: the Ostwald's double cone.