Tag Archives: birds

May Birds

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Dear Reader,

Birds have always been one of my favorite subjects. There’s a tremendous variety if you want to copy them, and infinite inspiration when abstracting or making up your own versions. Every aspect of the study of color is available in their world. There are seven contrasts of color in the Bauhaus system: contrast of hue (the colors), light-dark contrast (value), cold-warm contrast, complementary contrast (opposites), contrast of saturation (purity), contrast of extension (proportion), and simultaneous contrast (afterimage).

I find the simultaneous contrast the most challenging and interesting of all seven contrasts. If you take a large shape of any color and overlay a small dot or square of a complement, and if you stare at it intensely, you will begin to see a halo of color around the small amount. The eye searches to see the step between, or transition, from one hue to another. As an example, the after image of green on red is yellow. If two similar amounts are laid side by side, a glow will appear where they meet. This effect in color is between two precise complements (opposites). Many birds glow with this effect.

Next time you’re in traffic, stare at the red light and when you look away, you will see an afterimage, and a traffic cop wondering what in hell you’re doing and why you aren’t moving. He might ask if you also see bats and bees whirling around in your head, and ask you to please put your hands behind your back and spread your legs. “Do you have any guns, knives, or hand grenades in your pockets, sir?” I know about this stuff because I went to the academy, became a full-fledged LA county deputy sheriff, and worked patrol and other assignments as a reserve deputy for a dollar a year, for 25 years. Perhaps I arrested you in West Hollywood?

Toucans

The Toucans are an example of almost every contrast possible. The colors are pure, dark and light, warm and cool; they are used in varying proportions.

The bodies are large amounts of pure color; the upper, lower, and interior of the beaks are complements of the body colors. The shapes around the eyes, small as they are, make up a color wheel. Everything, except afterimage.

May-birds

Soft breeze, leaves tremble
Like a million hands waving
Anxious birds flutter.

These birds are my fantasy versions of songbirds in an art-nouveau tree limb setting. The colors of the top bird are soft variations of tinted blue green. The bird on the right is a contrast of pure deep blue, red, and red brown. The bottom bird is painted in dark neutrals of greens and reds made by mixing in the complements or adjacent (near) complements. All of them have white breasts that relate to the soft, textured beige of the background. The varying colors of the limbs harmonize with the colors of the birds.

Round and round pell mell
A cat on a carousel
Free rides for songbirds.

That is an after-the-fact analysis of the piece. I did this intuitively and depended on serendipity for my effects. I don’t consciously think about this stuff as I work. I put things in and take things out until it seems to have some element of finish to it. In other words, I abandon it at some point.

Rising Swan

This “Rising Swan” is an early piece that has been owned by an old friend in Las Vegas for nearly 30 years. It was done as a cover for a book on paper sculpture. The swan and grasses are cut from 2-ply Strathmore and mounted on heavy watercolor paper. The texture is roughly sponged-on watercolor paint, making the grasses and the water cool, the swan neutral grey, and the background warm.

The thunder at dawn
Rising swan wakes up the world.
Air, water, and flight. 

When, in the late 80s, I decided to make fine art, this friend was, in large part, responsible for the direction I finally took. After completing three large, very decorative, white-on-white sculptures, I took them to him and asked for a critique. Although not an artist himself, he was attuned to quality work after years as an advertising agency executive, and I trusted his opinion.

He looked at them for a long time. While acknowledging that all three were beautiful examples of the art, he asked, “Where are you in this?” I looked at them for a long time and answered, “I’m not in this. They’re just pretty pieces of decorative crap that have no meaning; it’s just me showing off.” I know how to do pretty, and they were pretty damn shallow. I didn’t want to have them around, so I gave them to him as a gift of nice pieces of decorative art.

I thought about this for about six months, and settled on my childhood in the Black Hills as the only images for which I had strong emotions. I don’t remember if I gave him the swan or if he bought it, but I’m glad it’s his.

So many years have gone by. I’m not sure that I could do the purely decorative stuff as well now.

Design is still there
Brilliant flashes as before.
But my hand is gone.

Thanks for visiting me…

leo

None of the art shown is available.
There is one piece, Birds Over Autumn (not shown), which is now available as a signed giclee at the Cut, Bend, Fold, ColorColorColor exhibit at the Grovewood Gallery. Edition size of 100. $250.

I am in the Weaverville Art Safari open studios tour May 12-13.
Go to the website for information. www.weavervilleartsafari.com

Antlers & Shamans

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Dear Reader,

Opening day of deer season in the Black Hills of South Dakota meant that most of the miners didn’t show up for work and high school was pretty much all female that day. If you weren’t hunting, you were with your dad, hiking over the hills, sitting on hunting stands or working in the camp.

In the 30s and 40s the Depression meant that deer and elk were a main source of protein for most Black Hills families, as it was for ours. In those days you had to actually hunt for deer, elk, ducks and pheasant because they were heavily poached to provide food. Now, animals and birds are in great numbers. The last time I was in Custer, deer were all over the yards eating anything that you didn’t want them to eat: flowers, succulents, vegetables, etc. They called them rats with antlers, plant predators, and venison.

Occasionally, a buffalo was poached.  One night my brother-in-law, Chuck, and some friends were driving on the outskirts of Hill City and saw a gigantic buffalo in a field, just off the road. They drove into Custer, got their guns, and went back and filled a fiberglass buffalo advertising sign with bullets. The last words spoken by some young cowboys were “Hold my beer and watch this.” I love those wild people.

Many times I have been asked if I always knew I was an artist. I answer, hell no! Art was not an option. Miners, ranchers, farmers, loggers, post peelers, and logging truck drivers were what I knew as work. I have written haiku poetry for 40 years, and this says it for me:

When I was a kid
Men had jobs that could kill them.
By luck, art chose me.

Skulls with Antlers

I cut these deer skulls with antlers not knowing what I was going to do with them.
I commonly cut dozens of different leaves, feathers and other elements for inventory.
I make piles of paper that I’ve soaked first with water, then acrylic colors, rusts, coppers and anything to get the textures I might want to use, then dry them out and store them. When I start a project, I don’t want to cut or paint anything. I pull from a large selection of those things that I’ve put away. I like to work intuitively, and I never do a plan drawing before starting. The Bauhaus and the Chouinard Art Institute system was “intuition with method.”

The skulls are the six primary and secondary colors, slightly tinted with white to contrast with the other hues I used as textures. The colors are applied with a sponge, brush or splatter techniques. The antlers, which turned out unexpectedly like lace, are rusted into a neutral color wheel.

Some elements just seem to fall into a circular arrangement; an antlered skull is a good example. Many of my color wheels have sometimes been easy to design but hard to paint, because I have to focus on the correct hues and avoid the urge to rush through the process. I am slightly manic and produce a lot of work that isn’t right the first time, but is usually right the second time.

Sun Shaman

Growing up in the Black Hills, I was in an environment of antlers, cow horns, buffalo horns, pine needles, bark, animals, birds, minerals and the detritus of prospectors and miners tools and leavings. There was also the history of the gold rush, the Holy Terror gold mine and the Sioux. The image above has many of those things as the major design elements. Feathers are a cultural symbol of the Indian nations, and I use them in many projects and remember the long time friend of my childhood, Ben Black Elk.

Ben Black Elk

Ben was the son of the mystic and medicine man, Black Elk, subject of the famous book, Black Elk Speaks. In the summer, Ben and his wife lived in a house behind ours while he was representing the Sioux nation at Mount Rushmore. He was a great mentor to me, and the other boys.

The color system in this piece is predominantly warm with cool accents of blue and green in the background structure. The feathers make up a textured mass and are accompanied by a couple of delicate horn shapes and simple paper weaving. These elements thrust upward to the primary dark and light (value) contrast of the rusted antlers against the deep red hue (color) of the sun and the black square behind them. The analysis and use of natural elements, especially the logical structure of plants, is part of the Bauhaus philosophy.

People who collect my work want the pieces named. For me, this work is simple basic design and color choices, put together from all the things that I had drawn with a knife, painted and stored for uses such as this. I struggled to name the piece I call “Shaman Shield,” because it truly doesn’t represent anything tangible, just something that happened over the course of a few days, nothing deeply serious or mystical, only memories of that place and those boys, mostly gone now.

Thanks for visiting. More of the same next time…

leo

“Deer Antlers Color Wheel” is available for $1000 at the Cut, Bend, Fold, ColorColorColor exhibit at the Grovewood Gallery.  20×20”
“Shaman Shield” is available for $4000 at the Cut, Bend, Fold, ColorColorColor exhibit at the Grovewood Gallery.   26×38”