Alice Paintings
 

https://youtu.be/cWo8NhxnaPQ

This is a YouTube slide show I put together some years ago, forgive the lame guitar work. 'The Alice' is local slang ofr Alice Springs, the mainly aboriginial town in the center of Australia. Two of the paintings have already appeared on this forum. I'm posting this because I don't seem to be able to post newer works in a large enough size.

Ross - this is nothing but a vanity post. It's the equivalent of somebody putting up a published chapbook on the Poetry Boards and saying "Look at me, look at me, admire my work." We don't pull that in Poetry (although sometimes some try), and we shouldn't do it in Art either. If you don't have anything to post, there is no rule that says you have to post something just to be a presence.

(A second reason I make a fuss about this is that if the Art site turns into a vanity Board, we start attracting sandbox vanity posters. And it's only a matter of time before they decide, "Oh, wow, I can be a poet also" and start posting beginner's drivel on the poetry Boards. It's happened.)

Michael, you are such a control freak.

Possibly, Ross, but the reason we have these rules and guidelines is to prevent the self-involved from turning the Sphere into one more, "Thank you for posting your lovely poem/painting/recipe/essay," smooch-site. And if somebody didn't speak up occasionally (as opposed to rolling their eyes, but not saying anything) that's what would happen.

Michael, what rule or guideline makes my post inadmissable, it is my work, it has been seen by 35 people on YouTube, half of those hits would be me. It is all my own work, so what in your opinion makes it any different from any other work of art posted here. YouTube is to my knowledge the only way you can create a link to Erato for works that combine sond and image. There may be others but I don't know of them.
Many people post work that has appeared on other forums, many, yourself included, post work that was created years ago.
I am interested in criticism, I respond to all critiques of my work and I participate fully in critiqueing other people's work.
In other words I am an active member of Eratophere, if you have a problem with that then I suggest that problem is all of your own making.
Sharon is the moderator, it is her decision as to what remains posted, it is discourteous to her that you feel compelled to adopt her role as if she is incompetent or as if the whole thing is so vital, such a calamity that you have to take control. You have not said a single thing about the work in question, you just, for no clear reason, resent the fact that I have posted it and assume I am being vain by doing so. That's insulting and unjustified.

The rule that limits you to one piece of work at a time. This is the equivalent of posting about seventeen poems. If somebody did that on the poetry boards it would be bounced at once. If you had posted a single piece - or even two - I wouldn't have said anything. But you're putting up an entire show/chapbook. That's not workshopping. It's taking advantage of people, and I call it a vanity post. Do you expect somebody to go through each piece, commenting? Or only a few? Does that mean that I can post seventeen old poems (believe me, I have many that have been seen by less than 35 people) and ask people to comment on whichever they please? The purpose of these rules and guidelines is to make sure we all get equal time and opportunity.

I am expressing an opinion. I have every right to do that. It takes place regularly on all Boards.

First - I'm not going to comment because of the reasons I have already explained. Do you seriously think that I'm going to complain that you shouldn't have put up all those drawings at one time - and then take the time to comment on them? Do you think that sounds ever so slightly self-involved? Secondly - believe me - I don't believe that my comments would help our relationship.

Honestly, Gentlemen!

Michael, even though you are correct about the "one piece at a time rule" we have not really been so strict about it here due to the sleepy nature of this board. I do see your point, but it's for me to correct breaches of protocol. Give me a chance to see things before you whip out the sledgehammer, OK? If there's a problem I would prefer to speak with a person in private IM not publicly.

Ross, let's just take Michael's point into consideration for a minute. There is some validity to his point. This is a critical forum. What did you want critique on here? Not on each and every image, surely? I will be back to critique the video itself as a work and I won't be wearing kid gloves.

Now both of you - calling people "control freak" and "self-involved" is in violation of the ad hominem rule. This is entirely unacceptable and I won't stand for it.

I feel the best way to prevent the dreaded "vanity board" situation is to give brutally honest critiques. No one wants a vanity board. You can get that type of worthless feedback from your family. I ask everyone in the Art forum to give worthwhile critiques for the health of the board, please. That's how the poetry boards got to be so great and world class. This is also the best way to send the message "No smoochies here."

Cinema is an art form. Let's critique this as a single piece, a video. How are the Image, time, motion, sound, cuts, lighting, sequence, editing and composition? Is it engaging? Is it as engaging as all this fur flying?

Thanks Sharon and I'm sorry I got so upset and spoke out of line.
Of course I want it critiqued as a slide show, the music is intrinsic to the piece, it sets the mood, to pause and look at each painting seperately would defeat the whole purpose of the form.

All this controversy caused me to look at the slide show. I don't pretend to be an art critic, and I don't mean to be snarky, but in all sincerity these strike me as the sort of pictures that a child brings home from art class in the fourth grade. Some of them may be displayed on the refrigerator for a week or two, but only the most sentimental parent would preserve them much longer. Again, I'm speaking outside of my expertise here, but if I'm wrong then I'm afraid I've foolishly disposed of quite a few of my son's masterpieces. Maybe I'm missing something, but I am not trying to be funny. I'm just not seeing anything beyond colorful doodles.

Roger you might want to look at my representational works, 'imagined seascape' on page 2 of the list of works is one of my best. You might also like to read some of the comments about my work here, I have posted about 7 items. Most comments are appreciative but I don't expect to thrill everyone.

Hey Ross--

I do think it would be better if you posted two or three at a time instead of the video (but the music does seem to go with it). I'm speaking way outside of my expertise (for all I know there are tons of stuff out there just like this), but it seems you have a real voice in your work (sorry, it's the lingo I'm comfortable using). The second is by far my favorite, and I like 10 and 11 a lot too. The few that followed 11 (with the lines through-- I dunno how to say it-- digital static ??), not so much.

JB

Ross,
Intrigued by all the discussion about the validity of you posting this video, I had to look.
I was originally misled by your comment concerning Alice Spring. It led me to the expectation of paintings done by the members of the community; I have looked at artwork by the aborigines in your neck of the woods before.

These remind me very much of outsider art, and that is not a negative comment. They are very two dimensional, and there is a wonderful use of strong color.

The music, which you say is an integral part of the video, is not what I expected. Easy-going guitar when I expected something more tribal. Who knows, maybe the music is typical of the community as well? This makes me think of haiga where there is to be a juxtaposition of the visual and the written. The sometimes riotous colors could be perceived as screaming for those tribal drums while the music you chose to play is quiet; a juxtaposition of elements in the video.

I leave it to others to comment on other elements of the video.

OK, I've looked at 'imagined seascape', and in my opinion it is somewhat better than what you've posted here, but only by a hair. I don't think this is the place for me to go into detail explaining my lack of enthusiasm.

If you feel you can only benefit from "appreciative" comments, and your response to less enthusiastic comments is "I don't expect to thrill everyone," I suppose I don't understand the function of this forum. There must be a critical vocabulary available to make the case that there's more going on in these pictures (and in the imagined seascape) than I'm seeing. I do not rule out the possibility that someone who takes the time to explain what I may be missing could actually teach me something and lead me to appreciate this more. I have benefited from "art appreciation" courses in the past, and the teachers didn't just order me to like things, but instead offered insights that helped me to see what I had been overlooking.

Ross,
I looked at 'Imagined Seascapes' as well when I read your suggestion.

It also reminds me of Outsider Art, not a negative in my book. I think that in any kind of art, whether written or visual, the reader or observer wants to be able to take his own experience and relate it to that which he reads or sees. And isn't that what we, as artists, want to have happen with our audience?
'Imagined Seascapes' requires less of me in order to understand it; it is something identifiable. 'Alice' requires more of me: It requires that I look beyond the identifiable toward the use of color, shape, texture, movement. I think immediately of my great love of black and white photography that requires the same of the viewer.
'Imagined Seascapes' is nice, but I like 'Alice' better because it is more open-ended. 'Alice' allows you to look and imagine more outside the box. To some, 'Alice' will be like art made by a child; aren't all of us visual artists child-like in seeing what we see and not as our grown-up minds tell us what we're seeing?

There's a huge difference between an adult creating art that has "child-like" qualities and the art a typical child will produce. I don't agree with you that children see more accurately than adults, as a rule, or that adults are more likely than children to be fooled by their minds into seeing something that isn't there. More often than not, a child's drawing will reflect lack of artistic skill rather than a true sense of what the child is seeing. A child is not seeing more truly than an adult when he draws a house as a square with a triangle on top, or a person's neck as a single straight line. I have observed talented artists develop from childhood over the course of years, and just as with any other art (writing, music, etc.) they tend to get better, not worse. When they really have talent and drive, it's a beautiful thing to watch.

Please remember, folks, we are critiquing the video, not the individual images, because the video is one work. Let's discuss the images only in how they relate to, add to, detract from the video as a whole. The "art" is really incidental to this. What if it was a film about waste management? I'm not saying Ross' art is not lovely, just that it's not the point for this critique. Is the video well made? cohesive? is it sequenced well?

Later, if Ross wants to post images one at a time, we can go into detail about single pieces.

Michael, you said, speaking of commenting about the art..."believe me - I don't believe that my comments would help our relationship." I am assuming this means you don't like Ross' art. Ok, well, brutally honest comments are what will save this art board from being a vanity board. We NEED that.

Will you please critique this video as a single piece and use that skillful, scalpel tongue of yours to the art forum's benefit, speaking only of the video and not the videographer? Pretty please?

James, the term "voice" is used in visual art too.

Lorraine, I completely agree with you about the contrast of the images to the music. This seemed disconnected to me on my first viewing. I plan to watch it again and see if I like it or not.

The individual images are most of what comprise the video, so I don't see how commenting on the individual images isn't also commenting on the entire video. If a sonnet were offered for critique, it would certainly be valid to comment on individual lines even though they are presented together as a single poem. There's no way that the video can be successful if the pictures that it uses are not successful.

Roger, this is true, however as you can see further up the thread, we have had a spat over this, so this is why I ask that we please address the video. Yes, the art is part of the video. Is it presented well?

Lorraine, thanks for your comments. The piece is titled Alice Paintings, 'desert paintings' appeared in the YouTube but that was just the name of the uploaded file. While I was in Alice Springs, there was a lot of greenery around, the Australian desert 'blooms' occasionally with both flowers and grasses and so 'desert' is slightly misleading.
Also I did at no stage set out to 'paint the desert' so the works are simply influenced by where I was living.
The guitar work is similarly more reflective of my mood while in Alice Springs (my mother had died the year before) and despite my many aboriginal friends I was very much alone and a long way from family.
Technically the piece is rather amateurish, I have no technical expertise in this area and the music is too soft and I did not know how to edit out the several mistakes in my guitar playing. (If anyone is wondering the music is an original composition.)
Similarly the paintings are not in any one style nor do they tell a story.
I hope the piece 'hangs together', that the mood of the music does compliment the paintings and the piece overall conveys something of what I felt, both joyous and sad.
Central Australia is an extreme environment, both socially ( Alice is a 60% aboriginal town ) and environmentally no place seems more inhospitable. But it is glorious in it's grandeur and sense of freedom, you feel as little as a bull ant and yet as immense as the sky.

Roger, it is perfectly fine with me if you don't like the paintings within the piece, but as you admit you know little about modern art, so you unable to say why you don't like the paintings, to do so you would need to have the expertise, to know the history of art and where my different styles ( 5 in the piece) fit in and how they compare. Someone who knew what they were talking about would immediately see for example that some of the paintings are influenced by Rothko, some by the op art of Riley, many by impressionist techniqes developed by for example Monet. But this is the sort of expertise not found here at Erato, so I don't expect crits to be of that nature.

Thanks Sharon. Really had no idea.

I think, Roger, children's art has been studied, and some of it is genius. So, you could have thrown away a masterpiece. Who knows...

James, the ones you disliked "digital static' are the least connected to my Alice Springs expereince, I included them because technically they were a breakthrough, pushing the app to it's limits and then finding something appear in a way you can never recreate, I felt they just qualified as being true to the piece, my best friend is a real desert goer and he always impresssed me with how important electronic communication is out there, it is a life line as it is so easy to get stuck and die unless you can contact help. That feeling of depending on the lifeline of radio waves is what I felt those digital paintings conveyed. But it is a stretch and I too had misgivings about including them.
When I look at the piece, the images roll past, I imagine everyone does that, but of course all the images are familiar to me, I suppose that is why I got into such a silly spat with Michael, I just couldn't see the obvious point he was making, that of course they first and foremost are individual works. Still I hope anyone interested enough will, after they have understood each picture, be able to watch it as one experience. It is only 2.13 minutes long. Quite fleeting.. and the music is very important, it's the glue that binds it all together.

Sharon, how can I critique the video as a single piece when Ross himself states (and I agree with him on this):

The "single piece" consists of a large number of paintings that are related to each other essentially through the electronic "painting" technique used, not by any look or style - and they range from amateurish but not awful (the first few) to childish (child-like, if you want to be generous), to (the last five or six) utter messes. As Ross indicates, there is no pattern, the pieces don't relate to one another or lead anywhere. and the accompaniment is both amateurish (there's that word again) and completely unsuitable for the paintings.

There is no sense of the strong patterns and themes and rhythms one finds in aboriginal art (check the link); and when you look at the work in the link, and then Ross's efforts, it's like comparing skilled poetry, built around a formal base and containing patterns and rhythms; to a beginners clumsy piece.

Ross also indicates (to Roger):

I'll be a nice guy, Sharon, and leave it to you to ask yourself what this says about asking us to participate in the thread. I am, by the way, not exactly unfamiliar with Rothko (here's a link to a published poem of mine on his work, which I hope gets across the sense of it in words), or Monet, or op art, and none of them came to mind when I looked at Ross's work.

And I am also not unfamiliar with the artists Ross mentions. While I admitted to not having a critical vocabulary to speak as well as I'd like about the images in question, Ross has confused my modesty for a confession of blindness and ignorance. I have seen those artists' paintings many times in museums throughout the world, though mainly in New York where I lived most of my adult life, and I have taken a keen enough interest in art, and appreciation of it, not to have my opinions dismissed as those of an unschooled ignoramus for no other reason than my failure to appreciate doodles that anyone with an iPad and a free app could create in under five minutes. I am glad you have pleased yourself with what you have done, Ross, but this is not kindergarten where every student gets a gold star.

Sheesh, remind me not to moderate when I am so sleepy. I closed the thread due to misreading a post. Sorry about that.

Ross, I don't see any similarity between your work and Rothko. I don't think I have ever seen a Rothko with a hard edge in it anywhere. Rothko's work has symmetry too which yours does not. Neither does your work look impressionist in the least. There is no flat color nor hard edges in impressionist work either. They never made the final step into full abstraction. The artists that came into my mind were Calder and perhaps Klee. Yet both of these artists have much more dimension in their work than I am seeing here and this is the same problem I see with the video.

Nothing about this video has any dimension or drama. The titles are as basic as they could possibly be. Ok, lots of films have basic san-serif
fonts white on black, it's a modern style, but at least some attention has been paid to scale and placement. Quite often the background has a subtle texture, maybe even one of your pieces with the saturation and contrast knocked way back would work well.

The vid doesn't build up to anything. There is no crescendo, no focal point. Not every vid needs a narrative but it should go somewhere. Maybe it might move through in a color sequence, or large scale to small, or something. You must have something to say.

Some of the images seem like filler to me, especially the areas where you have taken the same image and simply altered the color. If you are forced to do this because you don't have enough images, shouldn't they really be spread away from each other in the sequence? If you are doing this for effect, for some dramatic interest, shouldn't you use your strongest images for that? Filler is just as big a no-no in visual art as it is in poetry. Try sticking in a few unnecessary words in a poem to fill out the meter and post in in the poetry forums. What would happen to you?

Ross there are a few of your Alice Springs pieces I like...but not the scribbles. What's up with that? Some of the stronger pieces are still exhibiting some "artifacts" which are areas, (in your pieces mainly in the outlines) where the computer has made a skip or a blop. This happens especially when selecting areas, especially when things have been laid down with anti-aliasing. The computer is a fantastic tool but you still need to take a close look and be the final artist. Trust me, when working digitally, sometimes I am looking at my work zoomed in to the single pixel level. Computers can't think.

Does your vid really need credits at the start and the finish when there is only one name? Speaking artistically, I think one would do. I also think your photo should not take as much prominence as the art images. a small one among the credits might work, hmm?

The music...er...well...you already know.

Thanks for commenting Sharon. Too jetlagged to say much, just crossed 3 time zones.
People shouldn't put too many expectations on this, it's just a slide show of paintings done at a particualr place with some guitar music to create a mood, nothing more.

Ross, your paintings are very beautiful. I am glad to have seen them. If Roger has a child who can paint like that he has a prodigy.

Am I right in supposing that Aboriginal painting comes into it somewhere?

Ross, you have some talent. Don't be lazy. Have some faith in your talent. Are you going to workshop this video? If, in the end, you had a very nice piece, would that be so horrible? As moderator of this forum I DO have expectations. I expect people to put forth work they care about. I expect people to take their work and this forum seriously.

If you do a revision, please leave the original up so we can compare.

Another suggestion - if the images and the music changed tempo at times it would add interest.

John, a lot of aboriginal art has moved away from traditional storytelling paintings into pure abstraction, using many of the techniques of mainstream modern art.
I was also influenced by the environment, but I didn't draw or paint the landscape using watercolours or acrylics, I used to do in Sydney but everything here was done on the computer. I also don't own a camera.
Some aboriginal painters also use a curvilinear style, which reflects insect trails and other natural patterns, the last painting in this series borrows from that style.
I have incorprated the dot style here and there but in aboriginal paintings it is a secret language, a code and without knowing it as an initiated tribal man or woman copying it too closely is in my opinion bound to fail.
I'm glad you liked the paintings.
kind regards
Ross

Sharon
Sorry I didn't see your final comment.
I was at one level trying to be a trail-blazer here. I know this is patchy at best.
I was trying to draw attention to the possibities these new apps provide. I would love to see work that combines visuals, music and poetry, there are some on the net but they use dead poet's work, that's OK, but it would be great if a younger generation comes along and utilizes these new technologies to their full potential.
Maybe they already are, singers, musos certainly are, if poets are too I havn't seen them, only slam poetry or simply reciting.
That was partly my motivation.

I think the most complementary soundtrack would be the more experimental didgeridoo music. As for the artwork, it is distinctive and memorable, refreshingly unpretentious decor.

Thanks Vaclav, I used my own music because I wanted the whole work to be by me, it never occurred to me to link it to aboriginal music although I do like Gurrumul's singing, if you havn't heard his songs which are sung in his own language I recommend you listen to some on YouTube.

Ross,

I thought the computer art was really interesting, and was an odd contrast to the sad guitar in the background. The simplicity of a guitar strumming along a bit lazily with the striking, bezerk (at times) very close to abstract paintings, with their near-impossible smooth textures (the tip off it was computer animated) was actually pretty great. I think I felt like a butterfly or hummingbird honing in on a flower with my ultraviolet-perceiving vision. Very cool. I've subscribed to Art in America for years, and my wife's a visual artist - this still stood out as pretty singular / unique among the many images I've spent time with over the years. I think the music contributed greatly, but several of the images were really captivating, especially some that seemed to be almost representational, less so the abstract ones (if they weren't abstract, they seemed so).

Jake

Jake

Thanks for your comment, I hope you see this reply, I have been away from the internet for some weeks so have only just seen your comment.
I'm glad you liked it.
In some of the works the medium, the Windows paint app and drawing with the mouse, dictated what could and couldn't be done and a lot of the more abstract works were the result of experimenting with the possiblities, others had more references to actual landscapes.
There are other examples of my work on various YouTubes if you are interested, all under the name Ross Hamilton Hill.

cheers
Ross