Tag Archives: colors

Poetry

It’s Not About the Art

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It’s Not About the Art

It’s Not About the Art


— Read on poetscornerblog.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/its-not-about-the-art/

Posts prior to RFM

Descent

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image

40″ x 30″.  Latex and spray paint.  Created June 5, 2015.

I was trying to capture another bit of the spirit of a horror novel, which has hell as a major theme, when I created this.  I painted it on the same day as I did “De Profundis” and using the same materials.  Originally, I wanted to use only a touch of white, but when I added more than I intended, I used just a touch more to give the work some balance and a bit of action.

Posts prior to RFM

Green Flash

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Green Flash, circa 2010
Green Flash, circa 2010

I created “Green Flash” about 2010 for a show at the Corpus Christi Art Center.  A “green flash” is what occurs just as the last bit of the sun sinks below the horizon.  Because of various optic principles involving color, the bending of light, and the make-up of the Earth’s atmosphere, flash of green light occurs frequently (if not always) as last bit of the sun disappears from view.  I chose to represent this phenomenon with a minimum of representation.  I was living in south Texas at the time, which is very flat, so I chose to portray this as it might appear along the south Texas horizon.  Red, of course, is frequently the dominant color of sunsets, so both the sky and Earth are red, though in different shades and, also of course, it is great for bringing out green.  The green is the last bit of the sun and the short, black lines represent the south Texas scrub, which is mostly mesquite.    The paint is acrylic and the canvas size is 30″ x 40″.

Posts prior to RFM

Distance

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Distance by Phil Slattery
Distance
by Phil Slattery

 

This came from a photo of a mannequin in San Diego I took about 1995 with a 35mm camera.  At the time I wanted to catch a mood of distance between people, not necessarily lovers, but between people who had some connection be it relatives, lovers, friends whatever. Some years later after I bought Photoshop Elements 2.0, it was one of the first photos I toyed with when exploring Photoshop.  I wanted still to capture that feeling of distance and toyed with several features until I produced this. The various subtleties of gray and white and the odd browns and greens add to the feeling along with the mottled look (like a very grainy photo) and, of course, the vacant, hollow eyes and the neutral feeling from the lips combine to make this a quite poignant work.

Posts prior to RFM

Wave and Sun

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Wave and Sun
Wave and Sun

This has always been one of my favorites, though I am not certain why.  I painted this several years back (2009? 2010?) when I lived on the Gulf Coast at Corpus Christi, TX.  I do not recall how I came up with the idea.  Somehow it comes to mind that I was at Bob Hall Pier on North Padre Island when it occurred to me to have a wave with its crest pointing to the sun.  The sea and sky of course would be blue and the sun as a large yellow dot would draw the viewer’s attention to it along with the crest of the wave.   The sun would have to be off-center of course.  I made the texture of the wave by stringing light blue paint up and down in curves to shape the wave.  Now that I am thinking of it, it seems that a lot of the challenge in composition to me has been to draw the viewer’s eye around the canvas.  In my abstracts I try to do this by putting small spots of dabs of color against contrasting backgrounds.  For example, if I had a mostly dark blue abstract, I might put a dab of bright yellow paint in one corner and a bit of bright orange in another, and so forth, if I thought the viewer’s eye needed to go to that spot to keep the eye moving.   Anyway, that should be the subject for another post dealing with abstracts instead of something more realistic like this wave and sun.

Thoughts?  Comments?