The “Right” way to make Art?

February 28, 2017February 28, 2017 | Ifat Glassman

and I think today I have made a breakthrough in finding the answer to a question that has been bugging me for a very long time.

I’ve been trying to study the “right” and the “wrong” way of making art, to find some guiding principles, something to go by in order to make “good art”.

And at the same time asking myself – those artists that lived in the past and even in ancient civilizations, did they really know some magnificent secrete that we, in modern times, have lost? Why does their art seem serious and whole, while ours, which is more informed, more realistic, lacks that sense of telling a simple, fundamental truth about the world?

For example, one step in my chain of discoveries was that good art involves storytelling. And like any verbal storytelling it has to be selective. It has to be tied to the theme.

But can that be used, like some kind of formula, to create “good art”?

That’s what I question. Surely, yes, it can, to some degree. It can help you debug your novel when it seems to go awry with too many details, for example.

But fundamentally good art comes from the artist’s genuine desire to describe something, and their focus on that thing that they want to describe.

Not their focus on how to impress, not their focus on how to please a critic, but just a focus on the thing they’re expressing.

Ancient Egyptian art lacks realism, but the confidence it has in its style and its devotion to telling its essential story are what make it beautiful. There is sincerity of a mind describing a thought there.

What have we done in modern times? We have replaced that desire with an impersonal aspiration of some kind. We ran away from realism in an attempt to find “individuality”, and then we came back to realism in an attempt to find “excellence”, and neither attempt is really fully successful, isn’t it..

Of course you could make the point that someone with no art training at all would just create a mess, and that is a very good point indeed.
But also, someone with lots of art education and excellent execution can create something stale and formulaic.

To speak beautifully – you need words, and then you need to have an idea that is Your owN.
Art that has no hesitations about the fundamental way it should be done, is possible when the artist has taken the time to learn the tools they need for that execution. And which tool they acquired was dictated by what they wanted to express. And that the tools themselves are a result of a sincere quest for expression.

A self trusting soul is earned and created by the habit of not hiding from its own questions, but trying to answer them, instead.

Emotion Vocabularies and communication in Art

June 27, 2016 | Ifat Glassman

One of the strangest things I came across which has stayed with me, was one person’s description of how they feel about Enya’s music. They said they like her music a lot, but that they feel that it lacks emotion. To me that was the strangest thing to read, because I feel the complete opposite about her music. Her music is calm and pleasant, but the heart of that quietness, the slow-ripples-in-a-pond-like style lies a very deep emotion. I think it can be easily noticed when one compares her calm music with calm “elevator type” music. But it led me to think of a more general truth: The nature of the communication of art and its objectivity.

Art can obviously be experienced differently by different people.

The same works in paintings. An artist could paint an abandoned alley in golden daylight, think they captured that feeling of solitary glow perfectly, that feeling of slow sunlight shining quietly on the world in hidden corners, but someone else looks at the same painting and sees only the alley. They might sum up the painting by saying: “Oh, isn’t this the corner of 5th and Main? I think I know this alley!”.

However, and here is the important part: A different person with the right “emotional vocabulary” will see the meaning of the piece in the same way the artist thought of it instantly. It will be as obvious to them as to the one who created it. And the clues will all be there in the piece, too; the emphasis; not on the structure or the concrete details of the street, but rather on the interaction of light with the objects in the scene.

But an artist simply cannot create anything that will automatically impose its meaning on an observer. Such a thing is unobtainable.

Art speaks a language whose meaning can only be understood by having the complete emotional vocabulary. The meaning is there, but it has to be decoded by having the right “dictionary”. To a large degree I think all people have a lot in common in terms of their “dictionaries”, but they also have huge differences depending on their personality, life experiences and associations.
I also believe these different “dictionaries” can be explained and shown, to some degree, and that eventually, through differentiation from other artworks, someone can be made to see the essence of an artwork in a more precise, nuanced way. And I realize that this also applies to me regarding artworks I don’t immediately relate to or understand.

‘Glimpse of the Desert’; Oil painting from start to finish

February 20, 2016 | Ifat Glassman

It started with a square canvas which I built from wood. One of the first panels I ever made. It was the summer vacation in my Art school in Seattle and some of the students hired a model to pose for us for a long pose. 6 hours a day for 4 days.

I brought the canvas with me not knowing what the pose will be. When I finished the painting, working from life, it had an abstract background. I placed the figure in the center and I had no idea of what environment she might belong to.

I was really inspired by the pose but I felt that an abstract background did not fit it at all. A few months later, I realized what the right background for this figure is: It needed to be the inside of a tent, overlooking the desert at sunset, because the woman reminded me of some kind of Arabian royalty. The pose was very organic, and communicated confidence and relaxation at the same time. I imagined her being on a journey of some kind, and being royalty, the tent would naturally be luxurious and private.

So I decided to take the pose from the 4 walls of an art studio into a setting closer to a fancy bedouin tent. Having been in those a few times in Israel in the Negev desert, and getting a glimpse of that very simple, slow lifestyle, I wanted to paint something with that warm, slow atmosphere, something that adjusts itself to the pace of the desert where life moves slowly at the end of the day.

That new aspiration presented a challenge, because I had to invent the background and have it match the studio light – the light under which the model was standing. At that point I started searching for references for different bedouin tent elements online. I tried to get an idea of how a fancy Bedouin tent might look like and what kind of items would be in it. I used photoshop to try to arrange them together to get an idea of an environment. After a while of doing that I realized the complexity of the scene requires a much more realistic model to paint from, if I wanted the background to match the degree of detail of the figure.
I went to a craft store, where I shopped around for a few hours, gathering items and getting ideas. When I left the store I had almost everything I needed and I sat down to build the tent.

I made a tiny little sculpture of the women to “calibrate” the light. Used a clamp-on book light to replace the studio light and used a candle for a lantern. Overall there were 3 light sources in the painting.

I sewed the little pillows from various fabrics I bought wrapped around tiny pieces of sponge. I made the tent by sticking some wooden sticks into a corkscrew board. It was like building a tiny dollhouse.

I did a small value study to try to figure out the composition.

Once I had the tent, I was ready to paint. The first step was to do a perspective drawing. The strange thing is that here, I had to decide what the eye level is rather than it being decided for me, because I had to identify the original eye level according to the rendering of the figure.

Fast forward, I finished the background.

Lastly, I decided I had to change the direction of her head because to me, the meaning of the painting and the moment was in having this woman look outside, to the last remnant of light on the desert sand. So I drew a little diagram of the new angle:

Then, because I couldn’t have the original model posing for me again with the original light (though believe me, I have dreamt of it!!), I recreated the new angle based on the colors and values of the painting combined with this drawing (which was drawn with the aid of pictures). A note to myself was to always take notes of what colors I used in my paintings so that I can easily go back to them if needed.
Here is the study for the head. It involved a lot of interpolation since I did not have a model to paint from.

Lastly I needed to seam the edges of the figure with the new background and to add hints of light to match the new environment. Add little objects, like the teapot and the carpet, a little thorn to decorate the table.

It was a difficult painting but I gave this lady the environment she belongs to, as I saw it and now the painting is complete. 🙂
‘Glimpse of the Desert’, 23”x24”, oil painting on board.

Glimpse of the Desert

Short paintings and thoughts (weekly #23)

November 12, 2012November 26, 2012 | Ifat Glassman

Here are the two studies I did this past week. The photos have some glare, but they will have to do for now.

Getting back into painting after several months of not painting proves to be challenging. A lot of times it feels like I am learning more about what NOT to do with oil paints rather than what TO do with them.

One important thing I must learn to do is to trust myself and move on once I painted an area. But I also realized that trusting myself must be earned – I cannot simply convince my subconscious to “trust”. If I am sufficiently thorough in my method of painting, trusting will happen, but if I’m not, I will not “trust”.

It is very easy, early in the morning, being tired, to be tempted to mix a paint that is “just close” and say to myself: “I will adjust it later”.
It takes a lot of discipline to slow down, consider the place of a particular area in the painting in relation to the global values and global color scheme.
It is much easier to try to mimic that particular color that you see in that particular instance and move on. But great paintings have that analysis completed before the painter starts painting. This way, every part makes sense as part of a whole color/value scheme and is not just copied.

I think a lot of modern works are more “copied” than arranged around a value/color scheme. They look more photographic, but less harmonic.

I’m afraid that if I will attempt that level of discipline I will go mad, maybe even not be able to retain the complexity, yet I think this is what I need to attempt to do. I know that over time, something that at first appears difficult becomes automatized. It’s just a matter of pushing yourself through the initial difficulty. The effort is worth it because it will make my paintings better in the long run.

During the first week of painting I felt unusual lack of control over the behavior of the paints.

It took me a week to realize that the problem was that I was using only one brush to paint and constantly cleaning it with mineral spirit, which made the paint very runny.
Oy! Everything I tried to apply would instantly get mixed with everything else and it was impossible to assert the power of a new brush stroke.
I was also reminded again how quickly a painting can fall apart when you use the existing paint on the canvas and move it around instead of adding new paint. Oy.
Then I also realized that with a palette that is too light, it is near impossible to distinguish the hues of dark colors. They all look the same – simply dark.
My thoughts dangle between “YES!! I got it! I can succeed!” to “I will never be good at painting. It’s not my thing!”.
My painting schizophrenia ends when I remind myself that I have the right motivation, that I love what I want to create, that I have already accomplished some good paintings and therefore, just to shut the hell up and keep practicing. It usually works after I use some harsh language. 🙂

Getting sleep also helps with mental stability and calmness and an overall positive approach.
On that note, I will do just that… go get some sleep.

Have a good week and glad to have you as a reader on my blog.
-Ifat

My Tuition Fundraiser

July 2, 2012December 19, 2012 | Ifat Glassman

Hello,

As part of my efforts to pay the tuition of my art school as well as related expenses next year I am offering my entire collection of student work for sale. Most of the pieces are framed.

These are all originals and will help support my efforts to make a career as an Artist.

My body of work includes drawings in graphite and pastel, monochromatic and limited-palette oil paintings. Some of these works are a result of 5 moths of work, some are shorter studies done in a week.

If you found one you would like to purchase or ask questions about, please contact me.