CMSA: NOTES FROM LEFT FIELD ;my facebook artist friend Lori A. Escalera is presenting a paper at TRAC and asked me some questions regading pictoral space, myself, and the work of F. F Scott Hess...thanks Lori, you really got me thinking; a great topic for today's blog! see painting of mine from early 80's;( on the left) when i was gettting a bfa at tyler painting was "dead" and i was taught that the "honest " approach to traditional painting was to keep the image flat acknowleding that canvas was a flat graphic 2 dimensional plane...you can see from above i tried to paint flat and surfacy as i was taught, but still paint the illusion of depth that i have always loved...after i got out of school, like so many of my classmates, i slowly started to reject what i learned and listen to my heart; for me the most wonderous paintings are all about the magic of the illusion that a more dimentsional pictorial space produces (no wonder i love scott's paitnings!) ...over the years i became very interested in the wide angle distortions my little point and shoot was producing in my reference photos; the end result being a prctoral space that appears tipped up; almost like the parallel perspective of classical japanese images....a deep space, yes, but ii usually put a bit of visual interest at the bottom foreground of the painting as if things could indeed" fall out" (like the baby in the painting "all that glitters" has to hold onto the edge of the paintng so she doessnt'" fall out" ...i have noticed the same effect in scotts recent work messing around with the panorama function on his phone..those images are .like a party so fulll and rowdy it spills out into the hall...images and compositions that tip the contents right into the viewers lap....makes me think of some of the things scott worte about in "figural movement".
