"Paintings With Personality"

I drew this picture of my great nephew, Nathan. I have painted Nathan before and really liked his pose in this drawing. Most artists who paint figures have their favorite models and use them over and over. Nathan is one of my favorites. He seems able to strike up the most interesting poses.

Poor Honey was sick this past week. Monday he came down with a stomach virus that “knocked him for a loop.” He just about moaned and groaned the whole week. Poor Honey.

I wonder if the art we create is sick, or if it knocks our viewers for a loop? As for myself, I want to make amazing, knock my viewers for a loop art.

In The Art Spirit, Robert Henri said, “There are many craftsmen who paint pleasantly the surface appearances and are clever at it.” There are always a few who get at and feel the undercurrent, and these simply use the surface appearances selecting them and using them as tools to express the undercurrent, the real life. It is this sense of the persistent life force back of things which make the eye see and the hand move in ways that result in true masterpieces. Techniques are thus created as a need."

Artists of today no longer try to recreate reality, instead they want to express themselves. There are so many experiences that can’t be described in words and, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” There are several reasons for creating emotional art, I have listed 4 of them below.

1. Viewers relate to art emotionally and intellectually. The art that shows skill and no emotion quickly becomes boring and is soon forgotten. On the other hand, art that expresses emotion but has no skill can be messy and unattractive. Art that expresses both skill and emotion is more interesting, thought provoking and is never forgotten.
2. The most beautiful art today has an intellectual and emotional connection between the artist and the viewers. The emotion can be very intense and different from what anyone else experiences. It can even be contradictory to what the artist felt because each viewer’s relationship with the art depends on their own experiences.
3. Artists communicate with their viewers as if they were talking to them. The language of art improves the viewer’s life with a deeper understanding of the life around them. They might react with anger, sorrow, glee, and etc. Whatever the emotion, the viewer has understood, felt, heard and grown from the experience.
4. Wonderful, amazing, emotional and intellectual art can be experienced with all five senses. We can smell it, feel it, taste it, hear it and see it. The artist does the work and the viewer opens their imaginations to involve all of themselves in the experience.

Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said, “Our unconscious, deep-seated responses are what bring us back to the arts for more and more, nourishing and renewing us just as food and air and water do. At the same time, we're carried away from our sensory and analytical selves, lifted or plunged into a web of emotion and association, a fretwork of glinting filaments radiating out in so many directions.”

As for Honey, it was Saturday before he emerged a little pale, and thinner, but feeling better. The good news is … he didn’t share it with me.

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Later, Judy

www.judyballance.com