Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

THE ART OF SHARON WEGNER • Early Works • Recent Works • About Me

 

Understanding Art

 

My artist statement is a nice start, but the world of art is so varied and complex that I'm devoting this page to more in-depth discussion of understanding art.  I can't speak for everyone's art, so I will mainly describe the meanings, origins, and details of my own work and explore the impact of art history and other influences when appropriate.  I don't often feel the need to explain my work, as I prefer for it to speak for itself.  But, for anyone who needs a bit of a helping hand in understanding symbolist jargon, I hope this helps.  Here goes:

 

 

Color Theory and the Illusion of Space

Traditionally, paintings are/were made to imitate life.  The illusion of space in a traditional painting is created by the real-life scene and objects in correct, or at least convincing, perspective.  The resulting painting is like looking through a window into a perceivably real space occupied by humans, trees, fruit, etc. 

With the advent of modernism, the idea of the space portrayed by a painting has become increasingly multifaceted.  For example, there's the complete rejection of space, the point being to draw attention to the "truth" of a painting: that it is, in fact, a flat surface.  There's also the idea of creating space through color.  I use both of these concepts in almost every one of my paintings.

Above is a simple example in crayon of how I use color as space in my work.  Relax your eyes and stare at the drawing.  When the circle is blue surrounded by orange, it tends to appear as though you are looking through a hole in an orange wall into blue space.  When the circle is orange, it looks more like an orb floating in blue space.  In color theory, cool colors like blue and green will recede back into space while warm colors like red, orange, and yellow will advance forward toward the viewer.  This is easier for some people to see than others.

Once you understand the basics of color theory, the possibilities are endless for both the artist and viewer.  For example, the proximity of colors to each other has an effect on the warmness or coolness of the individual colors.  If a lime green is placed in a painting next to a light sky blue, the lime green will come forward as the warm color.  If you were to take the same lime green and put it with a bright red, the lime green will then become the cooler color and recede.  Any cool color can appear warm and any warm color can appear cool all depending on the colors they're placed with.

A favorite trick of many artists, including myself, is to use areas of advancing colors beneath layers of receding colors.  The bits of warmer color that show through the cooler colors come forward despite the actual layer level.

Here's a painting to use as an example.  The white and the blue are the two topmost layers on this piece,  but that's not necessarily how it appears.  The orange and yellowish colors pop forward and take center stage even though they are closest to the bottom layers and not the most recognizable shapes.  Even painting the dark blue (appears almost black in this photo) over the top of the orangish falcon doesn't push it back into space completely.  Logically, the bird should look like it's in the distance behind the dark blue painted area, but the orange brings it right back into the foreground.  It is exactly this kind of play with space that I work toward in every painting.  I want the space to be playfully illogical and challenging to the eye.  I want the viewer to recognize many levels of space in it including the flat surface.  And most of all, I want it to be interesting and fun enough to look at time and time again.

 

Mixed Media or Found Objects

All of my newest paintings make heavy use of mixed media in combination with more traditional painting techniques.  Before I even begin an underpainting, my first step is to coat the surface with junk mail, instruction manuals, candy wrappers, pills, and/or any other combination of garbage.  Which "found objects" I use is determined by what message I am attempting to convey with the finished work.  The idea of mixed media has been used by countless artists but I first began exploring it from my observations of litter.  You can't look at the ground without a disgusting reminder of human impact on the natural world.  Every spring the wasteful practices of our society are slowly exposed from beneath the disappearing snow banks.  Of course litter is the least of human crimes against nature, but it happens to be a very tangible way of expressing man's indifference and ignorance toward environmental issues.

Consumption is a recurring theme that never seems to leave my work or subconscious.  Whether it shows up as an obvious clump of garbage, written statistics, or a pie chart, it is ever-present throughout my body of work.  Even when I'm determined to create pieces on completely different subject matter, SOMEthing suggesting the notion of consumption/waste/decay results in one form or another.  I think this has a lot to do with my own struggle coming to terms with being a typical American consumer with a closet full of unneeded shoes. 

My use of garbage is certainly not limited to preaching about environmental issues, despite that being its origin in my work.  It's meant to be interpreted on different levels as a general idea of "clutter".  A good amount of the "found" paper I use for my paintings arrives right in my mailbox as junk mail.  Junk mail piling up is what first got me thinking deeper about garbage and it soon became my perfect symbol for anything considered to be clutter or junk in life - all those little things that clog up your mind and test your sanity day after day.  It's amazing any of us can think straight with all the mental clutter we deal with.  Job stress, family stress, money worries, expectations, the radio on, the TV on, the computer on, being bombarded by advertisements, and on and on...it's neverending. 

The overall visual chaos that all this printed paper, junk mail or otherwise, ends up creating is the effect I'm going for.  My goal is to bring it to a level of relatively controlled chaos by obscuring and painting over many parts of the original surface.  This is how our minds work to stay sane every day.  There are a million things going on in the background of our lives at any given moment, but we can only focus on and process so much at once.  The rest is blocked out, for the time being anyway.  As I paint over the busy surface, I make decisions about what will be left to show in the finished piece and what will ultimately be lost beneath more layers.  Many times I have to sacrifice excellent areas of work in order to make the overall composition successful.  It's never an easy process.  There are plenty of metaphors to be drawn from this, but I will leave them to you.

 

The Art of Irony

The detail above is from the painting "Statistics Never Lie", a piece that is admittedly a bit over the top as it screams darkness and destruction.  If you look close at the original, one of the soft drink lids has the "Diet" bubble pushed in.  Subtle or not, I LOVE irony and tongue-in-cheek humor in artwork.  For me, it has been one of the most difficult areas to develop.  Most people will not notice it, more yet will not understand it.  But it's these tiny interjections of humor that I most adore in art.  Artists throughout history have included all kinds of inside jokes and subtle humor in their work and it is a tradition I very much enjoy taking part in.

Much of the humor in my work comes from the mixed media and found objects, and the context with which these things fit into the overall painting.  Ads of all types are an endless supply of cheap laughs, as are random product magazines.  I've especially taken a liking to warning symbols that come with various appliances, etc.  The ironic humor I find in pairing, for example, pages from an office supply magazine of unnaturally happy people peering out of cubicles with a looming venus fly trap will speak to some people clearly, and be completely lost on others.  Most of my paintings do have a punchline like this, but I always hope I've provided enough other points of interest for viewers to still get meaning from any given painting even if they don't "get" it.

The idea of parody is similarly another postmodern idea that I've just begun to scratch the surface of.  Whether it's a parody of an artist's own work, another's work, or something else entirely, parody can be an even more challenging concept to spot and understand.  While I appreciate parody in others' work, I don't believe I've been successful at it in my own work.  The more obviously cliche elements in my work are meant as parody, but this does not come across clearly.  I can't decide yet whether I want it to or not.

 

The Sum of the Parts

Where do you start?  How do you create a composition?  How do you know when it's finished?  As an artist, one of the most challenging problems to overcome is having too much freedom.  You can create ANYthing, in ANY medium, in ANY style, in ANY color, and so on.  While it is important not to get stuck in a formulaic rut, it is also important to set up some parameters for yourself to explore within.  It is easy to get overwhelmed and unfocused otherwise.  It's not as though you have to sit down and literally come up with rules to go by - it just happens naturally as an artist develops.  I believe it's important for artists to be very aware of their own rules in order to both stay focused within and to push themselves beyond. 

How do I start?  A specific intangible idea is usually the first spark.  It's difficult to put into words - if it was something able to be described with the written word, I would write a poem or story to express it.  It's something else entirely that inspires my paintings.  More of a feeling, the "AHA!" as something clicks into place.  It is usually an external event that originally sparks it, such as an overheard snippet of conversation or the temperature and sky color of a particular day.  By the time a painting is finished, the original inspiration may only be a tiny part of the whole.  However, I still often use some aspect of the original inspiration as the title of the finished piece, as it is still important existing as the seed from which the painting grew.

How do I create a composition? 

 

<Writing In Progress>