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Old 03-09-2002, 02:49 PM   #24
Douglas Drenkow Douglas Drenkow is offline
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Location: Arcadia (a suburb of Los Angeles), CA
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Painting consists of five basic considerations: Line, form, space, color, and composition -- the last comprised of the first four.

The first three are primarily, as you have so vividly described, considerations of "spatial relations" -- the province of the right brain.

Painting, as the non-objective artists have demonstrated, is at its most basic the application of color -- which as we've discussed elsewhere (as in the "Primary Colors" thread) is a matter of physics, physiology, and psychology and, I would assert, more the province of the logical and linguistic left brain (as well as the more basic, emotional, "subconscious" realm of the mind).

Ideally, as in the works of Da Vinci, both halves of the brain work together, in art, science, and life; nonetheless, the tradition of "painterliness", as beginning with Titian, does by definition stress the coloring of surfaces over the draughtsmanship of line (although as a practical matter, anything that we can do to render our subjects as accurately as possible is, of course, most respectful and profitable).

As for spider webs, I can tell you as something of an entomologist (another hat I wear) that each strand of silk does indeed have a measurable thickness -- as opposed to a true line (a geometric construct of the mind) -- and, thus, like any other object in nature is bounded at its edge by a row of atoms, whose electron clouds, the scientists tell us, are dispersed to infinity.

Any line we draw -- like any art we create -- is truly in the eye of the beholder. I admire it all (That's my "line" and I'm sticking to it)!
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