You Have to Know the Rules to Break Them

In a drawing class sophomore year, our teacher had us pick a bust to portray with charcoal. I picked what I thought was the most interesting face, but it also turned out to be the hardest face to draw, especially with a foreign medium.

The end result I thought looked cubist and I told her, hey, I should just quit now and be the next Picasso. She said to me,

 "You have to know the rules to break them."

Fast forward three years and Wired publishes its third annual Design Issue. In his piece, "Why Getting it Wrong is the Future of Design," the editor in chief, Scott Dadish, recounts the moment he realized the power of selective imperfection when creating beauty. Not necessarily throwing the rulebook out the window, revolting against all conventions, but simply breaking a rule or two for maximum impact. He said, 

"Once i realized what I'd stumbled on, I started to see it everywhere, a strategy used by trained artists who make the decision to do something deliberately wrong... like Miles Davis intentionally seeking out the 'wrong notes' and then trying to work his way back, none of these artists simply ignored the rules or refused to take the time to learn them in the first place. No, you need to know the rules, really master their nuance and application, before you can break them."

Picasso knew the rules. Many founders of various movements knew the rules before they changed them. Which means that taking the time to learn what the masters knew is totally worth it, at least to me. 

Yeah. I'm pretty stoked that the CEO of Wired agrees with me.

Love \\ Christelle

Sunflowers

Van Gogh was a bit crazy, but his art... well, you've seen it.

In the third grade, my teacher Mrs. Walton brought in a print of Van Gogh's Sunflowers for us to see. She gave a little lesson on art and Van Gogh, the details of which I've lost with time. She gave us some crayons and some watercolors and encouraged us to create a masterpiece like Van Gogh's. My classmates started drawing right away, but I couldn't think of anything original to paint other than hills, a sky, the sun, maybe a stick figure. So I decided to do my own take on Van Gogh's Sunflowers. I was so enamored by the piece: how did he make it look that way? My artistic tools were obviously limited.

It came out looking like this:

3rd grade prodigy

Mrs. Walton held it up for the class to see, my mom framed it, I was very proud of it. 

Fast forward 14 years I'm sitting in Art History and my professor pulls up a slide of Van Gogh's Sunflowers. I'm feeling incredibly nostalgic and a bit giddy.

I've had my qualms with modern art. I've said time and time again I don't really understand it. 19th and 20th century modern artists were trying to dissemble the medium, trying to call attention to the art rather than using art to conceal art. Where the Old Masters saw a flat surface as a negative factor that could be only partially acknowledged, modernist painters came to regard these same limitations as positive factors meant to be acknowledged openly.

So that's where I straddle the line. Most of my peers still adhere to this modernist philosophy. I'm being trained in classical academic art. The thing is there's something about certain works of modern art i.e. impressionism and post impressionism, that touches me in ways that classical art sometimes doesn't. I'd like my art to touch people, in a way that transcends class, race, etc and reaches into the core of what makes us human. (A tall order. I may be taking myself too seriously.)

SO

How do you reconcile the personal experience of a modern piece with the power of a classically rendered painting?

Thoughts?

Love \\ Christelle

Just a Relationship

Here's what I learned this week:

• Faces don't have edges, so don't draw them that way.
• Use 3-4 values to create recessional curvature, and eliminate edges
• The reason this technique has us sketch then paint is so we can work out the problems ahead of time with a more malleable medium. 
• If your surrounding values don't look right, then whatever you're trying to depict won't look right.

 

I've been trying to come up with something different, or cool, or exciting to tell you guys. But my relationship with art right now is kind of like that point in a human relationship where you've been dating for a while and you can just sit and do your own thing and not talk. It's comfortable, and yeah you guys do cool and exciting stuff sometimes, but really the two of you have adopted a daily pattern and that's okay. 

I work on this piece when I can, but right now it's mostly on Sundays. It started snowing this week, and my little corner is right by two windows so I'll usually have a cardigan on. I'll pop open a San Pellegrino or a Fentimans and pretend I'm European. By the end of a session I'll have graphite all over my hands and sometimes on my face.

It's a simple relationship. 

Love \\ Christelle

Coming Back

One of my favorite things to do after a lesson in South Jordan is to run up to Utrecht up in Salt Lake City. It's nested in this tiny old street, all under construction, but surrounded notable neighbors including Chipotle and Barnes and Noble. Both of which I visited after picking up some pencil lead.

I finally made it up to South Jordan for a lesson. So much has changed. Darin's getting ready to move to a new home, Kelly's no longer at the Academy, and Kathy's finished her 5 foot by 3 foot painting, which she began glazing.

But there's nothing like walking into Darin's home re-experiencing that wood-y sweet smell that reminds you of how well you fit when you're just working on your art. Belonging somewhere that consistently pulls good out of you. 

Notice how worn Joseph is. His wrinkles, his posture depict the weight of the world. The angel, on the other hand, is perfect, she's idealized. Darin and I discussed the fact that maybe Mengs wanted to differentiate men from celestial beings. What do you think?

Love \\ Christelle

Take a Step Back

Sometimes you're so into what you're doing that you just need to take a step back and look at what you've done.

And sometimes it looks pretty cool.

Love \\ Christelle

The Art of Life

Google the "art of life" and you'll find pages and pages of meditative advice, religious dogma, and spiritual ideals. Those whose strivings are more secular in nature could potentially appreciate John Maynard Keynes' essay which in brief talks about how the world economy is developing so quickly that by 2028, most of life's basic tasks will be automated and humans will pretty much be out of jobs. That leaves us with hours of recreational time which can be a fearful problem for reasons I'll let him articulate. Yet we're not less busy, in fact we've fallen into this "busier than thou" mentality that cripples any enjoyment of true leisure. We grow up, we learn stuff, we teach our little humans how to be human, and the cycle continues. I'd like to argue that the art of life is really about "becoming" and that there is no limit to what we can become.

So what do we become?

My senior year of high school I signed up for an upper level math class. Calculus. Within the first week it became apparent that I did not have the proper mathematical foundation to succeed in that class. I couldn't tell you what a function was, or the difference between an independent and dependent variable, much less understand the basic structure of a derivative. So for the rest of that year my dad worked with me well past midnight on assignments, helping me understand and drill in basic concepts. There were a lot of tears, but a lot of good moments too.

Before that year I was "bad at math." Now, I'm "good at math."

That idea doesn't stop there. The summer before college, my dad, who draws better than I do, bought "Keys to Drawing" by Bert Dodson to augment his skills. It turned out to be a great beginner book too because I jumped on and soon began learning how to draw and how to see. I would draw for hours.

I received some formal training later, but before I picked up that book, I was "bad at drawing." Now I'm "good at drawing."

There's this misperception that your natural talent dictates who you are and what you can do. The problem is, you can't really know what you're "naturally talented" at until you put in some work. Ben Haggerty said, "The greats weren't great because from birth they could paint, the greats were great because they painted a lot."

What if jobs and the tasks associated with them were to disappear? We spend a lot of time classifying and defining ourselves based on our majors, our talents, our occupations. A lot of times that's derived from pursuing what we're good at, and that's cool. Sometimes what we're good at is what makes us happy. I believe, however, that the art of life means pursuing what we might not think we're good at and becoming good at it... simply because we're interested and we like it.

There are no limits. Except in calculus, but even then sometimes it doesn't exist.

Love \\ Christelle

Creativity

My roommates and I hosted a spur of the moment dessert party tonight. It was a hit. We had cake pops, cupcakes, cinnamon butter squares, brownie bites...

Cake Pops by Shelby

Brownie bites. They were just supposed to be regular brownies. My sweet roommate Abby had made them with the best intentions, but they came out really gooey (which is the best, really), and try as we might we could not make them look presentable. Then, epiphany, we scooped up the brownies, mashed them in a bowl, smushed them into spheres and rolled them in powdered sugar.

The funny thing is brownies typically only have marginal success at parties. They're widely available and always made. But rolling these brownies into spheres made all the difference. They were gone within the first thirty minutes.

That's the thing with creativity. You don't have to revolutionize anything, just make something better. Apple changed the aesthetic of the MP3, cupcake shops gave their sweets a premium look and charged a premium price, etc. You? You can roll brownies into spheres. Then everyone eats it.

Can you spot the brownie bites

The misconception is that creativity is limited to the right brained. There's another misconception that it's limited to music or drawing or fashion, but that's just not true. The opportunity is always there. It's also been proven to make you some serious dough. Get it?

Love \\ Christelle

What Do You See?

Next time you're standing in front of a painting at a museum, ask, "What do I see?"

The world makes art more and more complicated, but the only thing that really matters is what you see. It's a simple question, but an effective one. We bring our worn in lenses and consciousness that effectively communicates to us different realities about one image.

When my mentor at the Springville Museum of Art first showed me the painting above, I hated it. I thought, why on earth is this here and why on earth are we looking at this?

She turned to me and asked, "What do you see?"

And as I started naming off the farmlands and mountains, the shadow the little boy on his bike cast, I noticed the old fashioned gas station, the unpaved roads, and the peaceful setting. I realized this was a scene from the past.

She told me, "This piece is called 'The Gatekeeper', does this change anything?"

We began a discussion about boundaries our parents would set for us, like for this little boy-- he probably couldn't travel past that gas station. That was his gate. We talked about how the mountains are so large relative to the homes, we reasoned that this is a memory, and that that little boy is probably the artist. Suddenly I understood the painting.

I was touched.

There's a lot of art out there, some worth seeing, some not. Different artists create art for different reasons. I think it's worth the time to try and connect with a piece than to try and see everything.

As I've gotten more immersed in the world of art, I've picked up more and more snippets of what people think of art. Typically, people say they just don't understand it. Frankly, I agree. I don't get it. I don't "get" art. But I know how it makes me feel. I know that when looking at a piece different people see different things, and sometimes, people don't see anything at all. The artist may be trying to tell you something, but in all honesty, they have no more authority in your mind than you do. What does the painting say to you, what do you see? That's more important than what the artist is trying to say.

This applies to all paintings. It's like when you have lyrics to a song memorized, then one day you take the time to read the lyrics and realize how much thought and soul is actually in those words. With a painting, you just have to start with what you see, then you can connect.

It's simple. What do you see?

Love \\ Christelle

It's a Really Big Painting...

I've begun my final and most ambitious reproduction. I'm still working on my "Little Girl" but I've been so anxious to get started on this new piece, that I've gone ahead and started it. 

The original piece was painted by Anton Mengs, here's a portrait:

He was a career artist, never went crazy, though he did suffer from ill health at the end of his life. He's most notable as one of the pioneers of Neoclassicism. 

Now the painting is called "The Dream of St. Joseph." In the New Testament, throughout Christ's nativity story, angels visit Joseph with various messages. 

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Matthew 1:20-21

20 But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son ofDavid, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.

 21 And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his nameJESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.

Matthew 2:13

13 And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.

Matthew 2: 19-20 

19 But when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeareth in a dream to Joseph in Egypt,

 20 Saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are dead which sought the young child’s life.

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Our story revolves around that second scripture, Matthew 2:13 when an angel warns Joseph to escape into Egypt. See it in detail here. 

Progress

This process requires me to start with a sketch. I still use a grid since this project is too big and I am too inexperienced not to. I am, however, proud of how far I've come from my first painting. When I first started in January, I was completely unsure what to see, or how to proceed. Now I have a vision, and am more aware of the light interplaying with the figures in these paintings.  I'm aware of the humanity and the flesh of the beings of these figures. I've gotten more patient when drawing hair, and try really really hard to get it all right the first time because going back to fix this painting will simply be a pain. 

For context this painting is 3.74 by 2.83 feet. Cheya. It's huge. It's awesome.

Love // Christelle

Transitions

The privilege of having my own studio in the basement has been replaced with the grace of having my own spot behind the couch of my new living room.

<-- Moving from my old studio

MOVING DAY IN PROVO

To my new studio -->








Honestly, though, I'm just grateful to still have a spot of my own to paint and jam out. (Notice the cool headphones.) I'd like to say that I paint to audiobooks and TED talks. And sometimes I do. Sometimes, though, it's more fun to zone out to some good music. My friends have sent in playlists of their favorite artists, as such I've become a bit of an enthusiast. I'm seeing Ed Sheeran and Rudimental on Tuesday, Vance Joy and London Grammar in November. Do you have any suggestions? I promise I'll think of you while I listen.

I'm making good progress on the verdaccio. Darin helped me fix the angle of the eyes--since remember the eyes must be parallel to the line beneath the nose which must be parallel to the line that parts the lips. Mine were originally a bit wonky.

That hair though. It's driving me crazy. I ended up blacking out the left side, I'll start over once I get back to Provo. Darin advised me to just black out the parts I don't like, but... well... I kind of took his advice.

I've started thinking about my own work. I'm still refining my craft, but I don't plan on only doing Renaissance reproductions. My dad took a cool picture of my eye with his new full frame that might be fun to paint, and I may consider doing a blow up of this little girl's hands. Painting body parts, though, will only do for so long, haha, so we'll see what else I come up with.

Thoughts?

Love \\ Christelle

Thinking Out Loud

If you haven't heard Ed Sheeran's new album, "x" (read: multiply) press play below and listen to it while you read. If you know and love him, and loved him before I did, awesome.

 

Thursday evening, I had a lot of pent up emotions, and I felt like the only way to let it out was to have a Kevin Bacon Footloose style maniac dance marathon in one of the studios on campus. Ed's music (and Sam Smith, and Ben Howard) has been playing non-stop in my studio, and "Afire Love" has been particularly moving to me. And at one point my maniacal display of emotion, I was struck by a thought. I rushed to the chalkboard mounted nearby, and began unravelling the following idea:

Art, which is otherwise completely arbitrary, is humanity's way of immortalizing itself. Art's power lies in its capacity to evoke in another what the artist felt and chose to capture, immortalizing the fleeting passion and emotion the artist so desperately felt and loved. That's magic.

Passion and powerful emotions are fleeting. Music, writing, paintings can only capture one moment. The power in that one captured moment lies in its capacity to evoke in another human being that very emotion. And it can do so again and again.

Love \\ Christelle

I Play With Lead Paint

While our nation obsesses over gluten free, sulfite free, dairy free, etc. I spend hours in a basement with lead paint.

My verdaccio palette is made up of Chromium Oxide Green, Mars Black, and Flake White. My base value (1) is a combination of two parts chromium oxide green and one part mars black. Each value has a little bit of flake white mixed in.

Flake white is lead paint. They used to place a block of lead over vinegar, and the fumes would flake off part of the lead. They would collect these flakes, mix it with medium to make paint.

               

    

It will be touched up by next week but you can see the difference in depth already!

Love // Christelle

Thinking Through the Painting (Verdaccio)

The sketch phase of "Little Girl" is done and my paint is mixed. I'm painting in my studio with Ben Howard soothingly serenading me and a whirlwind of a weekend on my mind.

Painting requires me to paint shapes, lines, and values, but with my sketch and my reference, I really have no mapping to do, so my mind is free to evaluate or wander.

I want you to notice her hands. She's no more than five or six years old. The tendons that pull our fingers and thicken with age are but dimples on her extended hands. Extend your hands and notice how your knuckles compare to hers.

Her right shoulder is angled back, her pose is in accordance with the golden mean. The golden mean in crucial as the key ratio found in the beauty of nature.

I need to keep my edges soft. Things that are light are dark in recession, and things that are dark are light in recession. Photographs give off sharp edges, though those edges clearly don't exist. A well done softened edge will be made up of at least three different values.

I'm only just starting on the verdaccio, but just as a quality sketch will lead to quality verdaccio, quality verdaccio leads to a quality color painting. It may never be too late to ameliorate, I want to do it right the first time.

Love \\ Christelle

What is a painting?

Pioneer books is tucked between a pawn shop and a nail salon on center street in Provo, Utah. It's an absolute treasure cove. Non-fiction on the first floor, fiction upstairs. The floors are cement and cold, but the books are old, musky, and warm. I made my way upstairs and the "art" sign caught my eye. I'm obsessing, slightly, but an old friend once told me that when you're interested in something, you can't keep away from the information, resources, or ideas.

So here's this meager art section, filled with old worn books, and random nondescript covers. I pick up a couple and read for a while, until I decide I’m not interested in reading surveys of artists. So I keep looking. Soon I find, on the bottom shelf, copies of “The Metropolitan Seminars in Art,” written by the famed art critic John Canaday. 

The 1957 president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Axel G. Rosin, wrote that the aim of these series was, “to make available in the home comprehensive instruction in art appreciation for the many thousands of persons who cannot personally attend a comparable series of museum lectures or take a good art appreciation course at a university.”

I have access to an art appreciation course, and a world-class institution, but this is so much cooler. Inside the cover is a folder with high quality color prints of the paintings covered inside that lesson. There are on average 25 pages, so they don’t take very long to cover.

The first line of the first folio, “What is a painting?” is rather unromantic. “A painting is a layer of pigments applied to a surface.” Hmm.. He goes on, “It is an arrangement of shapes and colors. It is a projection of the personality of the man who painted it, a statement of the philosophy of the age that produced it, and it can have a meaning beyond anything concerned with one man or only one period of time.”

That’s it folks, that’s all a painting is: pigment, shapes, lines.

Yet a painting is nothing without emotion, feeling, and passion. There is a misconception that an artist’s creation gushes forth from his soul, and he’s carried away like a man feeling the spirit at a revival. But that simply doesn’t happen, and if it does it cannot be considered art. The romantics appeal primarily to the emotions and the classical painters appeal  primarily to the intellect. Yet both depict or evoke a truth.

What is a painting? That's up to you.

Love \\ Christelle

Trying Again

My "Little Girl" reproduction was not turning out right. The hair was off, the eyes were dark and creepy, she wasn't even really looking up the way she was supposed to. I had half a mind to erase it all and start over, until I decided to redraw my guidelines.

Students in art academies during the renaissance period couldn't pick up a paintbrush until they had completed a serious study of drawing for 7-8 years. When first starting out, students would have a frame with guidelines made of string, placed in front of their still life or model. That same guideline would be drawn on their board or canvas. Over time, the professor would cut the string, eventually leaving the student capable of drawing without a guideline.

All my strings are still intact.

I spent all of Saturday afternoon drawing, fixing what could easily have been done correctly the first time. I'd been impatient.

"If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?"

-John Wooden

It's still in progress but I think it looks much better now. Can you tell which boxes I've worked on, and which still need to be redone? I will (hopefully) be ready for verdaccio next week!

Love \\ Christelle

CHINA

I spent the last two weeks in China with my dad to visit my grandmother for her 80^th birthday. The last time I was back I was 16, still…. Young. This time around things felt different. My family’s expectations of me were different; the way they talked to me was different. I’m becoming my own person, setting my own rules, and am, more or less, an adult, capable of my own thoughts and feelingsintuition.

This intuition helped me realize how different my life in China would have been. Had my dad chosen to come back to China after getting his PhD in France, I would have been born in China. My dad would have been a professor, like his father. I would have had my incredible family around me, all the time. I would have grown up with this incredible family, and they would have molded me, and shaped me, and fed me.

There’s something about a family rooted in tradition that feeds you in a way that no one else does. And that’s the biggest difference between America and China. Tradition. While on this trip I was reading The Agony and the Ecstasy where I tasted Renaissance Italy, which even then was steeped in tradition. The citizens in the book and the citizens I saw took extreme pride in their region, their arts, and their people. That’s true in China as well. My family is from the Jilin Province- my dad from Changchun, the capital of the province, and my mom from Shenyang. Both cities are in the Northeastern part of China, making my family “Northeastern People.” Northeastern people are taller, stronger. Our food is better… in my opinion. You don’t mess with a northeasterner. But if you were to talk to someone from a different region, they would without a doubt inform you of the superiority of their region over yours.

I had a unique inside look on China during this trip. I look Chinese and I speak Chinese so people treated me like just another citizen. What made it unique was my American perspective.

I frequently ran into the opinion that economically, China parallels the US in the sixties. Growing fast with lax regulation. The streets are still under construction so some days you’ll be able to take one road home, and other days you won’t. Some regions of China are really rich while other regions are really poor.

Deception still exists, but if you're smart you can stay out of trouble. My dad told me about an experience he had with my grandpa. My dad and my grandpa were at the market buying meat. My grandpa had picked out a good piece of meat, and after the seller turned around with the meat wrapped, my grandpa asked him to open the package. Turns out the seller had replaced some of the lean meat with a huge portion of fat. Without saying a word, the seller replaced the fat with lean meat. You just have to be aware. Problems like this are rare among larger companies who have a reputation to uphold, but street sellers or taxis will never see you again, and have every reason to take as much of your money as possible. The key, though, is kindness. My dad made kind small talk with most of the sellers, taxi drivers, etc. And I noticed that they either treated him with extreme kindness right back, or tried to deceive him. Usually the former.

National parks are gaining traction, but they’re different than the national parks in the US. The ones we went to dropped us off at the head of a trail and had us trickle down the mountain or the path. The majority of the park is still inaccessible to the public, but the trails that are accessible are pretty well maintained. My dad and I weren’t used this system, so we requested a stop as they were shuttling us up the mountain. We were confused that they were confused, but they obliged. It was so quiet and it felt like we had the entire park to ourselves. About an hour later we ran into our first group and ran into NOISE. That noise never subsided. The next day, we planned it smart. We again got off the shuttle as quickly as possible and enjoyed the silence. We took paths less travelled by. My dad and I attributed our plan to American Individuality, and the desire to have the freedom to do what we wanted when we wanted.

Honestly though that mentality made a huge difference during our trip, and really differentiated us from the rest of the population, and I didn’t realize how big of a difference it made. Rather than a “me too” mentality where we want to make sure we get what everyone else had, we sought to discover what no one else would see, or taste. And we did.

The language is obviously different. The reason people struggle with languages is because they try to translate their language into another language, when really, you have to immerse yourself into that language's world and way of thinking. When you speak in another language, you think in a completely different way.

One thing that is absolutely universal, though, is the love of family. I haven't seen or talked to my family in over five years, but from beginning to end, my family showed me nothing but love. We went on a family trip, which was really fun, but my favorite memory was the last night of my our trip. My dad and I were flying out the next day so we had a family barbecue. We ate, we sang, we danced, we reveled in each other's successes, turns of phrases, talents. At one point the kids had to perform for the adults. My cousins sang, and I danced. The adults loved it. I struggled with my Chinese pretty much the entire trip, so I struggled to express how much they meant to me. How much their small acts of kindness and love really meant to me. I think they knew.

There’s this idea that you can’t paint something you don’t understand. That’s hard to do with cultures because it’s hard to leave behind biases and predispositions. I’ve learned that no culture is better, just different. To the outside world, Americans come off as arrogant, loud, and ignorant. But spend a few days in the US and you quickly learn that it's a superficial notion that the world has decided to adopt. The Chinese come off as humble, weak, and quiet. But spend a few days in China, and you quickly learn that the smallest old woman can bite your head off with sharp words, and to their peers, they are far from humble or weak.

China is rising. The government has allowed economic prosperity without political freedom. The lack of free speech feels so counterintuitive to me, but the people are happy. They will continue to be happy as long as money is coming in. Will that money flow ever stop? Is it possible to prosper economically under such rigid governance?

Everyone needs to establish their own educated opinion about China, or decide what point of view to adopt. A working relationship among nations will require a mutual understanding of the true nature of each nation's cultures.

Back to art next week...

Love // Christelle

John Hunter....Likes boys