Talking about a tension in a painting…. Yes, I have found that my biggest problem is that I tend to use intense color for every square inch of my paintings, with no contrasting low keyed, neutral colors. I see now that too many bright colors makes for an overall dull painting. I still tend to do it, however.
I see what you mean about Miller’s use of color being demonstrably less sophisticated than your use of color. My question is, could not Miller’s defenders turn around and say that your more limited or “neutral” use of value and contrast is similarly vulnerable to critique? I LOVE your paintings Paul, but sometimes my eyes feel starved of black to look at them. Like maybe true black is rarer in real life than we think it is, but our mind creates it in our images of reality because it defines the boundaries of things and imbues a sort of meaning to a scene and how everything relates. So maybe just as the subtle use of greens in a painted skin tone gives it a sort of realism that integrates the figure with the scene and composition of the painting, deep blacks define the elements and add to the meaning of the painting, even if a photograph of that scene would show that reality is more neutral. Perception is in the mind as much as the eye, and part of the power and appeal of paintings by Rembrandt or even Miller is in the super-real use of blacks and contrast.
dark values and Black are not the same thing. I use black, but for a real painter black is a _color_. Value dark can be made with any pigments. Its a question of intention.
NO! Use of black as a color really means something. With classical realists, as with the academic neoclassics, it's not about black per se, but making "color" function as shadow. More technically this means too much very dull and dark color. Real painters put strong (intence/bright) color in the dark. Reynolds knew how to use Black. Rembrandt never - that I have see - uses black for shadow. He uses singing browns... though many of his paintings are damaged or darkened and not good examples.
You're musings are greatly appreciated and intriguing. You sure are living that goodlife paul. Painting in the day, theorising and thinking at night. Sounds amazing Keep it up ❤
I'm glad you appreciate my musings. ...as for my life -- the apparant greatness is due to having edited out (of my videos, not, sadly, life itself) all the anxiety, conflict and disappointment. 😓 Still, I do try to look on the bright side. What about you: the great life?
“Good” is of course subjective. However, for me the definition may be this: If I had to spend the rest of my life on a deserted island, what painting would I take with me to help sustain me? What piece of music would I choose to listen to? What novel would I choose to read? What poem? That narrows the field considerably.
I’ve come to the conclusion that we really don’t know anything. However, if we append the suffix “ism” to all of our respective ignorances, it gives us the illusion that we understand them and that we are making progress.
wow this was wonderfully articulated.. such a difficult topic put into words.. i' ve always considered your work expressionistic.. and you made that clear in this ''speak" & also the other references ..Michelangelo etc.. which brings us to... what REALLY is realism? the labels drive me nuts... there is only authentic & inauthentic.. the glory & divinity of the human race .... look at that magnificent composition ....bravo !✨👌🏼💫👍🏼
@@pr44pr44 hi Paul...i'm still contemplatin' the expressionism topic ..😆...i find it interestin that certain painters interpret 'expressionism ' as something from within & not something they're observing from outside themselves ( 'model' , character, scenario) ... i'm following the latest courtroom sketches from jane rosenburg (she went to the league).. geeez the cast of characters ! ..a portrait painters' dream 👌🏼 this is a great example of what expressionism truly is ... "i just draw what i see "....brava Jane !
hope it's ok that i respond to your comment ... always draw / sketch from life no matter what it is you're doing ...learn to draw like the old masters so you will always have that strong foundation to fall back on when things get 'out there' ...
@@bebop54 yes but everytime I get into the studio I start splashing paint on massive Canvases and then 8 hours later all I have done that day is abex style paintings.
@@hyper_modern5071 yes it's a grand experiment .. it gets to a point where everything feels like experimentation/improv'.. ... but keep in mind you will always need to have the foundation to fall back on just in case the experiments are not successful ... be happy you're workin for 8 hrs splashin paint ... that's great..👌🏼💯
hey can we exchange emails or something? I want to take a look at every note you've wrote, especially the piano stuff. I can smell blood in written music.
you're way too grown to talk about "soyboys and femboys". you're a grown man. you can speak, in fact, you're well spoken but you're blinded by opinions that won't benefit me, you or any of the people around us. stop believing lies, learn nuance. think for YOURSELF, you'll find that these things are very extreme and they only make you angrier, more negative, more hateful, less understanding. it's not GOOD for you, it's just hateful. please. look beyond the surface. i wouldn't waste my time typing this if i wasn't genuinely concerned for your brain. things are a lot brighter when you think with nuance.
but is it Pauls responsibility to "benefit" you or anyone else for that matter? or abide by your version of what 'truth' is ? by your comment it appears that you are dictating to others what their truth must be ...do you know him well enuf to be so familiar ? ...no need imho to be concerned for Pauls brain 🧐😆😂🧠🤣🧠 that's high-larious...🤣
please, please. i beg you. don't hold misinformation as "your" truth. what a concerning and hurtful worldview. i wish you and people like you woulod stop getting ALL information online (some is okay but make it unbiased, you use very skewed language) and read literature written by these same people that you stereotype and blame. they write too, paul. we are not stupid. we have dreams too.
"society is falling apart" im following "art was gone decades ago" okay... uh, subjective. it's okay to think that. "and now, science is gone" yeah, lots of people misuse science with malicious intent. it's terrible. "don't know what a woman is" ah, there he goes. dammit paul. dammit. so close.
Hello paul. I think you are on the right track on prescribing many of the effects here but are finding wrong root causes and solutions. Paul i urge you to read Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Or Ted Kaczynski's Industrial society and its future Hell Read Spengler's The Decline of the West Paul your idea of racial purity is an entirely arbitrary modernist concept, not that it didn't exist before mind you but the lines you set are completely arbitrary i am a greek paul, if you ask an american today they will say we are white. if you ask an American of 60 years back they would probably consider us Swarthy. If you ask a greek what a greek is they would come up with all sorts of definitions that would not include all people born here or whoe's lineage is from here. If you travel with a time machine back to ancient greece and dare to compare racially a Spartan to an Athenian to a Thebean to a Minoan despite all of them hating each other and considering each other different races they will all agree to stone you to death paul. The dividing lines or race are completely arbitrary and have changed over time to include or exclude people however the powers at be at the time decide is fitting for the social order to be maintained. I too believe that society is failing. You mention the fall of science but its doing better then ever we can do things we couldn't have ever imagined before, but thats is not always a good thing and most of the time Its just not working for you. Production and GDP is up but who gets to use that money is not you paul. People are less compassionate cause most people have to work more and more unfathomably wrong hours under bad conditions with little to no time for them selfs thus are alienated, From their friends from their family their spouse the very objects they use and from knowledge the little time they do have they use to relax to something not very mentally challenging. Our commodities are all cheap mass produced meaningless plastics that come from slavery we don't indirectly see yet inherently we know they do and its keeping us up at night. The people don't want to reproduce cause they are smart enough to know their lives are meaningless and don't want to expand the suffering, we are incapable of filling that gap with something giving them hope. We are poisoning our very planet and building towers of babel so we can crowd in like mice. We killed god paul we the have committed the sin of all sins and we still haven't found a sufficient source of meaning. We used to live in the garden of eden but human society started devolving ever since we committed the sin of slavery and forced labor, No good self maintaining society can keep going indefinitely after the sin of forcing people to be the grinding gears of its operation. You can't build godly society based on a sin, it propagates and eats out at the very foundations festering and causing corrosion, all were all created equal under god and the more we reject the Hard and Simple but fulfilling life of community and survival, We opted in for comforts we didn't earn, through the suffering of others the more we are making life hard for our selfs slavery benefits neither the slave nor the owner. Any sufficiently "Advanced" society is reliant of slavery in some form or an other and you are trying to maintain a society built on a sin a rotten foundation thus you require your politics of racial purity to have an under class to subjugate and or point to as the enemy. Rome was a globalist empire subjugating millions deserved fall, The barbarians were right. The Monarchies Colonized and subjugated and thus deserved to fall, and it was good the Peasants were right. And there will come the turn of our civilization. and i welcome the day it crumbles The way to a meaningful existence is not race war paul. Its not subjugation or slavery paul. Its live and let live. A hard existence of survival against the elements where we don't force our selfs onto any other human nor allow them to force them selfs on us, where we leave behind easy solutions that bring more trouble then they solve like science economy production and efficiency and focus on things of meaning like art or culture and community. The black man or the Queer is not our enemy paul, the people in power and our own decadent ways of life are.
@@melkerart1793 I feel like he is trying to figure out a romanticized way out of his internal struggles and society. And wile fascism is very romanticized fascism is not a good way out nor has true virtue. Its just the colonial forward era version of todays nihilistic ideology that brought the world to this mess in the first place.
although i don't agree with your philosophy, you're correct about the fact that minorities aren't the enemy (please for the love of God will people stop blaming us for everything) and that the race war is meaningless. paul needs to let go of others' identities and become his own man.
Some of the migrants have virtues that some of the citizens no longer have. Question: what on earth do you know about the values that most Afghan migrants tend to hold - honestly? Isn’t this a question you might like to ask yourself even before considering which of these values you would consider virtuous?
Well, I happen to know a few of them, recent and not recent, and have had occasion to observe several personally, beyond those made famous by crime or otherwise. (I am in France).
That’s cool. Still the question stands. Let’s for example that the English are known globally to hold the value of “the rule of law” or “freedom of expression”…could you name values held by any of the immigrant cohorts that you are pondering (let’s say the Afghans)? I’ll guess not. And it’s not to attack you. More to raise the question of: how can we discuss the value (both virtuous and vice) when we don’t really have much of an understand of what values these people hold? Let me give you an example. In Pashtun culture - which most afghans have baked in let’s say - there is the following. Pashtunwali (Pashto: پښتونوالی), also known as Pakhtunwali and Afghaniyat,[1] is the traditional lifestyle or a code of honour and tribal code of the Pashtun people, from Afghanistan and Pakistan, by which they live. Many scholars widely have interpreted it as being "the way of the Pashtuns" or "the code of life".[2]
he doesn't know anything about their values, this whole thing generalizes way too much and plays on things that aren't even close to universal and he seems to have no understanding of nuance or the issues that lead uo to "degeneracy" as he and many alt-right conservatives call it.
Your discussion with @potvinmax reminds me of a spat I had once with a Painter with a Degree in Arts. We were a gang who were out in a village painting plein air, and I felt like changing and exaggerating the colors. "Look", I said, "I've done something in German expressionist style". This guy practically exploded, called me ignorant and said I didn't have any idea of what I was doing or what expressionism was, and he just kept on going about it. I said I'd just made a playful experiment and had taken inspiration from some painting by Emil Nolde that I'd whipped up on my phone. In fact to this day I like to do color switching and if someone asks why, I'll still say I'm inspired by German expressionism. I don't pretend to be educated about it but I feel an emotional connection to that movement. So call me a fool, I don't care.
Color swapping or exaggerating, in the case of a guy doing regular plien aire painting, would get no grief from me. And if he used the word "expressionism" I'd probably leave him alone. So: apples and oranges. Like I said in the video, I've been following Potvin for years, and as I showed in the twitter threads, he did not say "expressionism". Its just that I can read a painting like other people read letters, particularly when I'm familiar with a guy's work.
@pr44pr44 So bear with me: in a sense then, you're even _worse_ than that arrogant guy I spoke about because even if I wouldn't _call_ my painting "expressionist" you'd still judge it like you did with Potvin. You seem to say it's a dead end to use the same devices that expressionists used, without somehow first magically reliving the historical movement and its struggles. But why can't artists today walk some of the same paths again and explore? Wasn't for example the neoclassical movement rehash and recycling?
hi Paul.. this is such a great topic ..I've given much thought over the years.. the label "expressionism" leads to misunderstandings first of all... I can't stand this label.. really it's about experimentation when the painter is authentic... a spontaneous burst of improvisation... the problem comes when the painter is either inauthentic or doesn't have the necessary strong foundation of skill & draughtsmanship to fall back on.. to carry one through, so to speak.. one can't just decide "I'm an expressionist".. it's like comparing thelonious monk with chopin.... the excitement of the unknown & the freedom to venture into the unknown involves some kind of courage.. BUT that can only be done AFTER the painter has acquired so many years of experience that skill , draughtsmanship has already been embedded into the subconcious .. inexperienced painters are using their own self expression as the definition of "expressionism...".. the word itself is very misleading.. bottom line ? one must learn to draw like the old masters before improv' & spontaneity can happen authentically.....
So: As Rome burns in The Year Of Our Lord 2024, “expressionism” has now become just another euphemism for the “I express myself; therefore I am an artist; and because I express myself, I am an expressionist” School Of Thought. Roger that. Over and out.
Lol, I am the painter. I didn't use the word 'expressionism' to label myself or the painting. It's entirely Paul's interpretation that led him to see it that way. However, in my defense, the term 'expressionism' literally means 'expressing what’s inside,' which aligns with the intentions of the artists from that movement. My comment on individualism isn’t naive or uninformed. it's simply reflective of the times we live in.
@@MagicEraserInkit is indeed reflective of the times we live in. What do you think of these "times"? How much a part of them do you want to be? I know exactly how much _I_ want to be part of them.
You mention Poussin’s definition of painting in your book… “lines and colors on a flat surface, and the subject being everything under the sun.” So, according to Poussin, any subject is fair game because every subject has the potential for being handled poetically. So much for agonizing over “the right content” or “the right message.” It’s not what you see but how you see it; it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
14:32 “urbanized” aaaannddd that is the benefit of being from and returning to rural SDakota Prarrie space, and yet you still don’t escape the urban entirely because Amazon delivers here to, even to a fence post in the breaks.
... it's interesting - or not - content. The byzantine style, which is more or less refined and systematized form of post imperial decadence. Why? What do you think about it?
As a painter iconography has been very refreshing for me, not necessarily because of the style or the form but more in the differences to be found in the role of an iconographer vs an ‘artist’ (as we’ve come to understand it in Europe). There are many more things to say, especially on this topic of modernism vs postmodernism, pre-enlightenment vs post etc etc… I have come to believe that the real dividing moment was the schism between the eastern churches (Orthodox) and the west (Latin). Perhaps we should talk more. I’ve been following your videos since 2016/2017 when I was just 19 years old.
I have composed many, many pictures of figures in landscapes. For me, the first thing is the composition of the figures, or single figure. That is my focus. This is what I want to communicate most. From there, I place the landscape elements around the figure or figures in such a way as to highlight them best. By that I mean, dispose the landscape elements in such a way as to accent their geometries, enhance their arrangement in space, or emphasize or mirror a narrative element. Craggy mountains pleasant palm trees, a shaded lake, a wild-waved shoreline - all tell a very different story. If you look at the work of William Blake you can get a very straightforward idea, graphically, of how this works. I imagine there are those who think of the landscape first, and set their figures within that, but I suspect they are in the minority.
Exactly, in layman's terms, how, according to what criteria, do you _place_ a thing in such a way that it enhances something. Exactly, by which means, is a "narrative" "mirrored"?
@@pr44pr44If you have figures with peaceful undulating forms and gestures, you mirror that with peaceful undulating foliage, or hills, or billowy clouds. If your figure is agonizing before God, you have dark skies, jagged lightning, craggy landscape that is like a visual "soundtrack" for the figure.
@@robertstephson2721 ... so wavy forms, like Thomas Hart Benton, El Greco or Parmiagino are peaceful... and jagged forms like Picasso, Malavitch and Beckmann are violent? ... and forms that are not particularly wavy, or jagged are .. what?
"It's always a matter of development. Even if you can't draw very well, you can still make a shape that roughly represents what you want to do...." That's encouraging for someone like me.
@thenakedbooktuber-gg4uw : I would dare say that not having academic knowledge of drawing can be an advantage and a special freedom, as long as you know what you'd like to express. It's (usually) always possible to see the difference between a child's and an adult's uneducated drawing.
@@melkerart1793 what is "accademic knowedge"? The old so called academic teaching was mostly excellent and freeing. Today's fake academy teaches a narrow reproductive, optical method which is not freeing.
Creatives can be divided into two camps: One group are professionals. They see 'art'' as a career, just like any other. They may become creatives for certain goals, fame, sex, money, etc. It is a broad church... but they're mostly nine-to-fivers - They're the creative realists. Many people lump all creatives into the same single category. This is a mistake. For there's another camp.... Who use 'Art' or 'being creative' as a therapy. They use it as a form of self-medication. There're many forms of maladies that all require 'artistic expression' as an outlet. The one element that does glue them altogether, is that they're all idealists looking for, their own version or vision... of a personal utopia. An escape from some sort of inner torment. Which means their creativity is without any boundary - They're the creative fantasists.
... I think this is a highly theoretical and unrealistic simplification. First of all, therr are no "creatives". There are people, all kinds of people who become, or want to become, painters, sculptors and so on. The categories used in art schools are destructive nonesence.
@@pr44pr44 The realist and the idealist both want to find creative outlets in their lives. But for vastly different reasons. The 'artist' in Western society is romanticised as the weird, outsider eccentric. This elevates the idealisation of 'art' as something special. A gift. Rather than what it truly is...a craft. A craft that involves practice and effort. Something that requires an intrinsic understanding of the history, or accepted canon of art. The romantic idealisation of art... sells more product. Products which are made, mostly by the realists. Not by the hordes of self-medicating idealists.
@@pr44pr44 Art was always a product. This is what any realist will tell you. From the very beginnings of Western art... it always had a purpose. In the image conscious, heavy visual proliferation of modern society. The product of art has moved on. Film, TV, music and computer games, are the new art forms. The new products that are revered as art. Traditional art is obsolete. It is purely nostalgia for the elderly. New art (the new products) has grabbed the attention of the young. The only remnants of traditional art are (High Art) products for the acquisition, of societal elites and institutions. Within modern Western neoliberal Capitalism, the 'cult of personality' is the only intrinsic value to any piece of 'high Art'. The artist's name will always be more important than the art they create or 'created'. Every modern 'artist' is/was ...also a capitalist entrepreneur themselves. They were/are all realists. There is now a long history of 'product' and 'commercialised artistry', being sold. Because this is all high art can be. An esoteric taste that makes wealth. All artists in this new world must be 'branded' as if a ‘commercial product’… Warhol, Pollock and Basquiat. The art they actually produce is always secondary, to their overall branding. As the owner, if you're able to raise awareness of the brand., the originals rise in value. It's a complete fiscal circle. Because their 'brand' tells you their products worth, in purely 'Capitalist' monetary terms. And that's the only reason why they exist at all. As a commodity. A commodity that was purchased cheaply and then advertised, in order for its monetary value to be increased exponentially. You know exactly when a piece of high 'art' is purely 'a brand' and a high status acquisition. For it has to be 'artificially' displayed in a white walled space. Without it, it is unrecognisable. This is what capitalism does... it produces luxury goods and modern artist 'brands', that are no different than a high fashion brand or a luxury perfumery. The Art sold to the masses... is now Film, TV, music and computer games. That's what inspires them, That's what makes them cry, it's what makes them feel joy. No traditional artwork can compete with it. For it was only ever wall decoration.
@@pr44pr44 yeah that get all emotional and think too much and stress themselves out and start getting to many thoughts and makes you what to suicide and depressed
... an Italian Curren! ...that's "contemporary art", my dude! optical and concept driven... sure, its impressive if you know nothing about painting. But Giovanni is going to have to reorient himself if he wants to be of help.
