The specificity of colors he so easily accessed.
[...] One thing I remember from School of Design was the importance, when replicating anything on paper/canvas, of noticing what you are actually seeing, as opposed to what you "think" you see. It's the first lesson an artist should learn independent of their medium. Three hours and several numb fingers later, I got to see what some of the students had done. I could immediately tell which ones easily saw past their eyes through to the individual colors I contained as an object, and which students just saw "brown."
This is not pointed out as an allusion to any racial undertone; I'm sure with a Caucasian model, they would have painted a foundation of light beige or a low-saturated pink. Instead, I just saw a student who was at the beginning of a understanding of color. They had just begun to conceptualize space and separate an object into shapes, but the detail of color, the subtle and many shades and values still eluded them. Others, however, were amazingly adept at translating me (and my hair) into oil. One student in particular captured the my hair in a way that sometimes doesn't even show in a photograph. She pulled out depth and volume; her painting looked as though I was wearing a crown. [...]
| We enjoyed Opera and Cookies' "New career, perhaps?"
posted in weblogs on October 14, 2004 1:33 AM
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