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page 3
Stone Riley
Greybeard's Rant page 3
(my real artist's statement)
(C) 2005 by Stone Riley
And let's consider what the Modern movement did for us. You are free now to delight in all the properties of sticky colored paste. You might mix it thick to record passions in the brushstrokes like the famous dancing calligraphers of China and Japan, but more passionately. You might use it even thicker to sculpt in shallow relief. Or you might use it thin, thin as ink, so that the underlying native texture of the cloth or wood is offered for the viewer's focus as a kind of subtly flashing alternate reality intermingled with the artificial image you are offering too, perhaps in hope of conjuring up the kind of metaphysical doubt which the poet Lao Tsu recommends so heartily as a source of wisdom.
As for areas of uniform color, you will seldom take that choice. You'll much more often go for either very fine degrees of careful shading to lure the viewer's eye along some calculated gradient toward some surprise or else "lively" color, multiple shades mixed together poorly and rather randomly applied, which often helps persuade the viewer's eye to entertain some fancy you have coded in a shape or line. And there is more and more. For example, there is the fact your viewer might be either glancing from afar or peering quite intently with their nose as good as pressed on the surface you are now creating. So you can usefully, all in one picture, make shapes as large as your canvas or board will hold and others bordering on microscopic, and meanwhile also try to indicate some kind of global interaction of the parts. And multitudes and plentitudes and overflowing cornucopiae of other tricks. All because our minds have been freed by the Modern movement and paint is good.
As part of the human effort to live and love in this unsettled and horrific age, we have developed that visual language with all of its astonishing powers of communication. It was the great achievement of painters in the calamitous first half of the 20th century to explore human visual imagination much more thoroughly than ever had been done before. And the public understood and followed the pioneer investigators enthusiastically. So there are now a very numerous audience who find both intellectual and sensual delight -- occasionally even revelation, wisdom and epiphany -- through close inward attention to the responsive living substance of their visual thought. They play with their own visual imagination as if it were a fiddle and your contribution is the music jotted on a sheet.
(continued)
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