Sunday, January 31, 2016

Grateful Notices: Trees in Half Shade Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches


Trees in Half Shade  Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
Private collection

I was thrilled that this work was quickly purchased by collectors this weekend. They told me it looks striking in the space and we are both very happy with the outcome.


Here is some information about this piece from a previous post, January 11, 2016:


This was a demo from a recent workshop. The entire idea was to make a good start and that was the case here. When I came back to the canvas about a month later, I could clearly see a number of options and I wasn't bogged down in trying to undo too many problems.


Problems are welcomed since they create opportunities and new directions, but in this case, that good start gave me the clarity to proceed. Once I decide to keep it loose, the more color was added very directly, with open strokes.


I thought the oil was finished, but realized that there wasn't enough contrast and the painting looked a bit weak. The painting was on an easel across the studio when I saw the problem, so i grabbed a dark blue-green that was on the palette and started adding it to the foliage and where the shapes made contact to the ground.


The painting came alive with the new darks and now it required some stronger colors to keep up. Adding the brighter color was pure fun and I was a bit disappointed with the oil declared itself done.


I'm very happy with the way this oil evolved and turned out and I'm looking forward to using this as a study for a much bigger one!

Monday, January 18, 2016

Workshops: Boulder, CO March 19-20, 2016

Ken Elliott's Boulder Workshop attendees in Jacque Michelle's studio, Feb 2016

We just completed the Making it Fine Art Workshops in Boulder, CO for Jan and Feb.  It was great fun, informative and Very Inspirational! 

The March 19 - 20th Workshop in Boulder has one opening left. (updated 3-13-16)

Workshop page
Flyer and complete info

Sponsored by Jacque Michelle at her private Studio,
3060 5th St, Boulder, CO 80304

Open to artists at all skill levels and media
An indoor, two-day workshop Limited to 8 participants.
$390 per person payable to Ken Elliott or register online below.


A new 2 day workshop in my Castle Rock, CO studio (Denver metro) will be announced soon.



Next scheduled workshops:

Massachusetts
Marshfield, Sept 9-11 and Falmouth, Sept 16-18
Making it Fine Art 3-Day Workshops with Ken Elliott
Sponsored by the North River Arts Society and the Falmouth Art Guild

Open to artists at all skill levels and media
An indoor, two-day workshop Limited to 8 participants.
$425. per person
Flyers with complete information and registration info:
Marshfield
Falmouth

I hope to see you there!
Ken



Ken Elliott's Boulder Workshop attendees in Jacque Michelle's studio, Jan 2016






















From the Boulder Workshop attendees:
"Just a quick note to let you know how much I learned, enjoyed and benefited from your art workshop at Jacque Michele’s studio Jan. 16-17. It was a groundbreaking eye opener for me in so many respects. At the end of the two days I felt like you had given me the tools to truly free up my art work and go wild with color and strokes. A very liberating experience indeed. It was such a pleasure to meet you and study under you. Hope we will be seeing more of you in Boulder."
A.R.

"I can't thank you enough for coming to Boulder! Thank you for your clear eye, your hard work, your
beautiful color and your careful feedback. I'm now a different Painter...maybe a different person? I loved the weekend. And I can't wait until we get to soak up your love for the work, for Wolf Kahn, for COLOR -- yet again (note that I'm greedy).

"You are an amazing addition to our lives."
M.


When Beauty Strikes By David Brooks
New York Times , January 15, 2016

Across the street from my apartment building in Washington there’s a gigantic supermarket and a CVS. Above the supermarket there had been a large empty space with floor-to-ceiling windows. The space was recently taken by a ballet school, so now when I step outside in the evenings I see dozens of dancers framed against the windows, doing their exercises — gracefully and often in unison.

It can be arrestingly beautiful. The unexpected beauty exposes the limitations of the normal, banal streetscape I take for granted every day. But it also reminds me of a worldview, which was more common in eras more romantic than our own.

This is the view that beauty is a big, transformational thing, the proper goal of art and maybe civilization itself. This humanistic worldview holds that beauty conquers the deadening aspects of routine; it educates the emotions and connects us to the eternal.

Vincent Van Gogh  Pollard Willows at Sunset (Saules au coucher du soleil)
By arousing the senses, beauty arouses thought and spirit. A person who has appreciated physical grace may have a finer sense of how to move with graciousness through the tribulations of life. A person who has appreciated the Pietà has a greater capacity for empathy, a more refined sense of the different forms of sadness and a wider awareness of the repertoire of emotions.

John O’Donohue, a modern proponent of this humanistic viewpoint, writes in his book “Beauty: The Invisible Embrace”: “Some of our most wonderful memories are beautiful places where we felt immediately at home. We feel most alive in the presence of the beautiful for it meets the needs of our soul. … Without beauty the search for truth, the desire for goodness and the love of order and unity would be sterile exploits. Beauty brings warmth, elegance and grandeur.”

The art critic Frederick Turner wrote that beauty “is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action. It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency or theme of the universe.”

By this philosophy, beauty incites spiritual longing.

Today the word eros refers to sex, but to the Greeks it meant the fervent desire to reach excellence and deepen the voyage of life. This eros is a powerful longing. Whenever you see people doing art, whether they are amateurs at a swing dance class or a professional painter, you invariably see them trying to get better. “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart,” Vincent van Gogh wrote.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George, 1922
Some people call eros the fierce longing for truth. “Making your unknown known is the important thing,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote. Mathematicians talk about their solutions in aesthetic terms, as beautiful or elegant. 

Paul Klee  Houses by the Bridge

Others describe eros as a more spiritual or religious longing. They note that beauty is numinous and fleeting, a passing experience that enlarges the soul and gives us a glimpse of the sacred. As the painter Paul Klee put it, “Color links us with cosmic regions.”

These days we all like beautiful things. Everybody approves of art. But the culture does not attach as much emotional, intellectual or spiritual weight to beauty. We live, as Leon Wieseltier wrote in an essay for The Times Book Review, in a post-humanist moment. That which can be measured with data is valorized. Economists are experts on happiness. The world is understood primarily as the product of impersonal forces; the nonmaterial dimensions of life explained by the material ones.

Over the past century, artists have had suspicious and varied attitudes toward beauty. Some regard all that aesthetics-can-save-your-soul mumbo jumbo as sentimental claptrap. They want something grittier and more confrontational. In the academy, theory washed like an avalanche over the celebration of sheer beauty — at least for a time.

For some reason many artists prefer to descend to the level of us pundits. Abandoning their natural turf, the depths of emotion, symbol, myth and the inner life, they decided that relevance meant naked partisan stance-taking in the outer world (often in ignorance of the complexity of the evidence). Meanwhile, how many times have you heard advocates lobby for arts funding on the grounds that it’s good for economic development?

In fact, artists have their biggest social impact when they achieve it obliquely. If true racial reconciliation is achieved in this country, it will be through the kind of deep spiritual and emotional understanding that art can foster. You change the world by changing peoples’ hearts and imaginations.

The shift to post-humanism has left the world beauty-poor and meaning-deprived. It’s not so much that we need more artists and bigger audiences, though that would be nice. It’s that we accidentally abandoned a worldview that showed how art can be used to cultivate the fullest inner life. We left behind an ethos that reminded people of the links between the beautiful, the true and the good — the way pleasure and love can lead to nobility.

Friday, January 15, 2016

Grateful Notices:


Forest Light
Oil on canvas 40 X 30 inches
Steamboat Springs Center for Visual Arts

A big thank you to the Steamboat Springs CVA!

I had blogged about this oil last year and discussed how it took awhile to bring it to completion. Here's the first part of that blog:

Over the years I have attempted a lot of oils and not all of them ended up as finished works. This piece was begun about three years ago and put aside.

Had I made a better start at the time, this painting might have essentially finished itself By offering a clearer path to resolution. Instead, the canvas was a muddy muddle without clear areas of focus. It was unappealing and I didn't have any ready solutions to take it forward.

This oil was in a stack of orphan canvases that needed help. My plan was to add three things the canvas lacked: contrast, drama and clarity. Thanks and gratitude to my teacher Wolf Kahn for those insightful tools.

Monday, January 11, 2016

In the Studio: Jan 1, 2016


Here's what was in the studio at the first of the year. The 36 x 36 oil on the easel, Trees in Half Shade, was finished shortly after this photo was taken.

On the left top is a 4 x 5 ft work in progress (a lot of work and progress going on there) along with
3 x 5 and 20 x 60 oils also in play.

It's never dull here since I keep a lot of oils going at one time. I am also currently working on 3 commissions, so it's back into the studio to make things happen.

Happy New Year and let's make 2016 a Great Success!
Ken

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

New Work: Trees in Half Shade, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches

Trees in Half Shade
Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches

This was a demo from a recent workshop. The entire idea was to make a good start and that was the case here. When I came back to the canvas about a month later, I could clearly see a number of options and I wasn't bogged down in trying to undo too many problems.

Problems are welcomed since they create opportunities and new directions, but in this case, that good start gave me the clarity to proceed. Once I decide to keep it loose, the more color was added very directly, with open strokes.

I thought the oil was finished, but realized that there wasn't enough contrast and the painting looked a bit weak. The painting was on an easel across the studio when I saw the problem, so i grabbed a dark blue-green that was on the palette and started adding it to the foliage and where the shapes made contact to the ground.

The painting came alive with the new darks and now it required some stronger colors to keep up. Adding the brighter color was pure fun and I was a bit disappointed with the oil declared itself done.

I'm very happy with the way this oil evolved and turned out and I'm looking forward to using this as a study for a much bigger one!

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Workshops: Boulder CO March 19-20, 2016


March 19-20, Boulder, CO

Making it Fine Art Weekend Workshops with Ken Elliott


Open to artists at all skill levels and media
An indoor, two-day workshop
Limited to 8 participants

We just completed the Making it Fine Art Workshops in Boulder, CO for Jan and Feb.  It was great fun, informative and Very Inspirational! 

The March 19 - 20th Workshop in Boulder has one opening left.

Workshop page
Flyer and complete info

Sponsored by Jacque Michelle at her private Studio,
3060 5th St, Boulder, CO 80304




Open to artists at all skill levels and media
An indoor, two-day workshop Limited to 8 participants.
$390 per person payable to Ken Elliott or register online below.


Next scheduled workshops:

Massachusetts
Marshfield, Sept 9-11 and Falmouth, Sept 16-18
Making it Fine Art 3-Day Workshops with Ken Elliott
Sponsored by the North River Arts Society and the Falmouth Art Guild

Open to artists at all skill levels and media
An indoor, two-day workshop Limited to 8 participants.
$425. per person
Flyers with complete information and registration info:
Marshfield
Falmouth 


I hope to see you there!
Ken



Making it Fine Art Workshop in Boulder, CO at Jacque Michelle's studio

Workshop in Ken's studio, Castle Rock, CO

Workshop sponsored by the Glynn Art Association, St. Simons Island, GA

Register by paying via Paypal on the Workshops page or by contacting/emailing
Jacque Michelle: jacksonjackson@comcast.net
or by phone
303-444-9304 (leave message)

Private lessons by appointment.
Please inquire Complete workshop info on the Workshops page


From a Boulder Workshop attendee:
Just a quick note to let you know how much I learned, enjoyed and benefited from your art workshop at Jacque Michele’s studio Jan. 16-17. It was a groundbreaking eye opener for me in so many respects. At the end of the two days I felt like you had given me the tools to truly free up my art work and go wild with color and strokes. A very liberating experience indeed. It was such a pleasure to meet you and study under you. Hope we will be seeing more of you in Boulder.
A.R.



Article: How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity

A good article with some interesting 'string' in it.  Ken


Illustration by Brendan Monroe
By Pagan Kennedy
New York Times, Jan. 2, 2016

Do some people have a special talent for serendipity? And if so, why?


In 2008, an inventor named Steve Hollinger lobbed a digital camera across his studio toward a pile of pillows. “I wasn’t trying to make an invention,” he said. “I was just playing.” As his camera flew, it recorded what most of us would call a bad photo. But when Mr. Hollinger peered at that blurry image, he saw new possibilities. Soon, he was building a throwable videocamera in the shape of a baseball, equipped with gyroscopes and sensors. The Squito (as he named it) could be rolled into a crawlspace or thrown across a river — providing a record of the world from all kinds of “nonhuman” perspectives. Today, Mr. Hollinger holds six patents related to throwable cameras.

A surprising number of the conveniences of modern life were invented when someone stumbled upon a discovery or capitalized on an accident: the microwave oven, safety glass, smoke detectors, artificial sweeteners, X-ray imaging. Many blockbuster drugs of the 20th century emerged because a lab worker picked up on the “wrong” information.

While researching breakthroughs like these, I began to wonder whether we can train ourselves to become more serendipitous. How do we cultivate the art of finding what we’re not seeking?

For decades, a University of Missouri information scientist named Sanda Erdelez has been asking that question. Growing up in Croatia, she developed a passion for losing herself in piles of books and yellowed manuscripts, hoping to be surprised. Dr. Erdelez told me that Croatian has no word to capture the thrill of the unexpected discovery, so she was delighted when — after moving to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship in the 1980s — she learned the English word “serendipity.”

Today we think of serendipity as something like dumb luck. But its original meaning was very different.

In 1754, a belle-lettrist named Horace Walpole retreated to a desk in his gaudy castle in Twickenham, in southwest London, and penned a letter. Walpole had been entranced by a Persian fairy tale about three princes from the Isle of Serendip who possess superpowers of observation. In his letter, Walpole suggested that this old tale contained a crucial idea about human genius: “As their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” And he proposed a new word — “serendipity” — to describe this princely talent for detective work. At its birth, serendipity meant a skill rather than a random stroke of good fortune.

Dr. Erdelez agrees with that definition. She sees serendipity as something people do. In the mid-1990s, she began a study of about 100 people to find out how they created their own serendipity, or failed to do so.

Her qualitative data — from surveys and interviews — showed that the subjects fell into three distinct groups. Some she called “non-encounterers”; they saw through a tight focus, a kind of chink hole, and they tended to stick to their to-do lists when searching for information rather than wandering off into the margins. Other people were “occasional encounterers,” who stumbled into moments of serendipity now and then. Most interesting were the “super-encounterers,” who reported that happy surprises popped up wherever they looked. The super-encounterers loved to spend an afternoon hunting through, say, a Victorian journal on cattle breeding, in part, because they counted on finding treasures in the oddest places. In fact, they were so addicted to prospecting that they would find information for friends and colleagues.

You become a super-encounterer, according to Dr. Erdelez, in part because you believe that you are one — it helps to assume that you possess special powers of perception, like an invisible set of antennas, that will lead you to clues.

A few months ago, I was having a drink in Cambridge, Mass., with a friend, a talented journalist who was piecing together a portrait of a secretive Wall Street wizard. “But I haven’t found the real story yet; I’m still gathering string,” my friend told me, invoking an old newsroom term to describe the first stage of reporting, when you’re looking for something that you can’t yet name. Later that night, as I walked home from the bar, I realized “gathering string” is just another way of talking about super-encountering. After all, “string” is the stuff that accumulates in a journalist’s pocket. It’s the note you jot down in your car after the interview, the knickknack you notice on someone’s shelf, or the anomaly that jumps out at you in Appendix B of an otherwise boring research study.

As I navigated the brick sidewalk, passing under the pinkish glow of a streetlight, I thought about how string was probably hiding all around me. A major story might lurk behind the Harvard zoology museum ahead or in the plane soaring above. String is everywhere for the taking, if you have the talent to take it.

In the 1960s, Gay Talese, then a young reporter, declared that “New York is a city of things unnoticed” and delegated himself to be the one who noticed. Thus, he transformed the Isle of Manhattan into the Isle of Serendip: He traced the perambulations of feral cats, cataloged shoeshine purveyors, tracked down statistics related to the bathrooms at Yankee Stadium and discovered a colony of ants at the top of the Empire State Building. He published his findings in a little book titled “New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey.”

The term “serendipiter” breathed new life into Walpole’s word, turning serendipity into a protagonist and a practitioner. After all, those ants at the top of the Empire State Building didn’t find themselves; Mr. Talese had to notice them, which was no easy matter. Similarly, Dr. Erdelez came up with the term super-encounterer to give us a way to talk about the people rather than just the discoveries. Without such words, we tend to become dazzled by the happy accident itself, to think of it as something that exists independent of an observer.

We can slip into a twisted logic in which we half-believe the penicillin picked Alexander Fleming to be its emissary, or that the moons of Jupiter wanted to be seen by Galileo. But discoveries are products of the human mind.


As people dredge the unknown, they are engaging in a highly creative act. What an inventor “finds” is always an expression of him- or herself. Martin Chalfie, who won a Nobel Prize for his work connected with green fluorescent protein — the stuff that makes jellyfish glow green — told me that he and several other Nobel Prize winners benefited from a chain of accidents and chance encounters on the way to their revelations. Some scientists even embrace a kind of “free jazz” method, he said, improvising as they go along: “I’ve heard of people getting good results after accidentally dropping their experimental preparations on the floor, picking them up, and working on them nonetheless,” he added.

So how many big ideas emerge from spills, crashes, failed experiments and blind stabs? One survey of patent holders (the PatVal study of European inventors, published in 2005) found that an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process. Thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project — and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything. This is why we need to know far more about the habits that transform a mistake into a breakthrough.

"It happens a lot more often when you're stoned," said the greatest artist I know.

Unfortunately, serendipity is effectively suppressed by the way Government currently funds science and technology.. It’s like a Zen koan. Dwell on an illogical statement and your mind looks for an explanation that isn’t there…until it is.

In the late 1980s, Dr. John Eng, an endocrinologist, became curious about certain animal poisons that damaged the pancreas, so he ordered lizard venom through the mail and began to play around with it. As a result of this curious exercise, he discovered a new compound in the saliva of a Gila monster, and that in turn led to a treatment for diabetes. One of Dr. Eng’s associates (quoted in a 2005 newspaper article) remarked that he was capable of seeing “patterns that others don’t see.”

Is this pattern-finding ability similar to the artistic skill of a painter like Georgia O’Keeffe? Is it related to the string-gathering prowess of Gay Talese? We still know so little about creative observation that it’s impossible to answer such questions.

That’s why we need to develop a new, interdisciplinary field — call it serendipity studies — that can help us create a taxonomy of discoveries in the chemistry lab, the newsroom, the forest, the classroom, the particle accelerator and the hospital. By observing and documenting the many different “species” of super-encounterers, we might begin to understand their minds.

A number of pioneering scholars have already begun this work, but they seem to be doing so in their own silos and without much cross-talk. In a 2005 paper (“Serendipitous Insights Involving Nonhuman Primates”), two experts from the Washington National Primate Research Center in Seattle cataloged the chance encounters that yielded new insights from creatures like the pigtail macaque. Meanwhile, the authors of a paper titled “On the Exploitation of Serendipity in Drug Discovery” puzzled over the reasons the 1950s and ’60s saw a bonanza of breakthroughs in psychiatric medication, and why that run of serendipity ended. And in yet another field of study, a few information scientists are trying to understand the effects of being bombarded on social media sites with countless tantalizing pieces of “string.”

What could these researchers discover if they came together for one big conversation?

Of course, even if we do organize the study of serendipity, it will always be a whimsical undertaking, given that the phenomenon is difficult to define, amazingly variable and hard to capture in data. The clues will no doubt emerge where we least expect them, perhaps in the fungi clinging to the walls of parking garages or the mating habits of bird-watchers. The journey will be maddening, but the potential insights could be profound: One day we might be able to stumble upon new and better ways of getting lost.

Pagan Kennedy is the author of the forthcoming book “Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change The World.”