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Technique, Language are vehicles - Intent is from Within

Fifth-Focus - digital painting / art prints - Dan Beck 1998

This is the fifth digital painting I created on the computer. I couldn’t control the mouse very well. I couldn’t control the opacity of the color or the palette for that matter.

Whatever I could grab that was already in the computer program - that is what I used.

It is both remarkable how much I have learned since then and also in some ways how little it matters.

When I finished this piece, I thought it was quite cool - I would have never dreamed of anything like that with conventional painting. But with this program this vibrant abstract somewhat three dimensional piece came to life.

No matter how big your vocabulary, you still have to say something with it.

See Also

• Color Palette Generator
  gives web colors for image with addresses you enter - put in above image - kind of cool really
• Pedram’s stream of consciousness: Vocabulary lesson
  Knowing big words and using them are different things - artistic technical skill is not sufficient or always necessary is my parallel point
• Fifth-Focus
  options for purchasing art prints of above digital painting - anyone need a fifth?

hugging the inhospitable mountains

More Warm Hills - digital painting / art prints - Dan Beck 2005

Perhaps a bit more symmetrical than I might have done in hindsight (today’s topic), but a digital painting I still really like.

I am always fascinated by landscape which I know is not hospitable, but from a distance looks incredibly inviting. In a case like the warm hills above, those hills despite being a dry mess of weeds and grasses look like you would want to go roll on them or give them a hug.

That was the quality I was looking for -

With luck having said that you might see it that way as well if you didn’t already. 

Needless to say, an actual art print brings it home more. 

See Also

• More Warm Hills
  Availability of art prints for digital painting More Warm Hills
• Bear Mountain
  Even granite from a distance can look hospitible - click on image
• Leh’s Mountain
  Another cold mountain - but from distance somewhat warm

Literal Latitude -> Feeling, Process and Intent

Enlarge - Cloud Cover - Digital Painting 2006- Dan Beck

One would never know its been raining here.  Sometimes the clouds just swallow the mountains. I look out, I look up… and see this incredible interplay of cloud and mountain - rain blending the whole scene as though the clouds were bleeding into the hills and the hill/mountains(as I like to call them) disappearing below them.

Indeed the inspiration would be obvious if you were living here too. The response I received today was "That looks familiar".

Yet the curious thing is that there are many things going on with the painting which do not accurately portray what is here. There are shadows where there shouldn’t be, groves of trees kind of hanging in space, a slightly exaggerated cloud density, and a play of light which isn’t quite right.

Recognizing these differences is interesting but the point of bringing them up is about how much latitude there is in portraying a scene. I think sometimes that which holds a piece together, which makes it feel like it should, is not found within the physical strokes;  but rather in the intent and process.

See Also

• Feeling of Rain
  A piece from somewhat similar inspiration
• Art Quotes | Art Quotations | Art Sayings | Wisdom Quotes
  Quotations about art - quick, fun, interesting reading
• The Art of Forecasting
  The art weather connection from the weather side