Arts Institute Blog

While looking at the Tintoretto painting on the right I realized that the story is told through the fluid shiffting of the viewers eye level.   At one moment the viewer can look across the sea and be about eye level with the middle of the sinking ship and as your eye shifts down through the figures and to the bottom right corner, the perspective is changing gradually creating a feeling of rising.  Your eye is eventually guided up to somewhere around st. marks eye level and this completes the ascencion.  It is hard to get all of that from this little image but the actual painting is huge, the figures are about life size.  On that scale the shifty perspective is much more apparent.  Noticing this in the Tintoretto painting made me think of Cezanne.  If you look at the blueish vase in the left center and start at the top and let your eye move around and down the side you will realize that you started looking above the vase and you end up eye level with the little white pot to the left.  This goes on all over the picture.  Cezanne is painting a seamless flow of time around forms in the same way that Tintoretto was doing hundreds of years before.  Cezanne must have been influinced by his work.  It seems like they both wanted to create a very specific type of experience for the viewer and the innovative design is a product of that. 

So there is the time spent making a painting (or film, novel, ballet etc) and the time the viewer spends with the work and in reflection.  I think there is also time that is the substance, something mallable that can be sculpted.  The pace of form can be altered for example in film, a long slow panoramic landcape to a violent or fast scene .  Three movies that come to mind are Days of Heaven Andre Rubilev and Thin Red Line (the most recent one). Some music this makes me think of is a late Beethoven quartet, Quartet in D major, op. 18 No. 3. and I also think of the Parthenon Frieze.  I can’t speculate about the music but in film and in the frieze the juxtapostition of the two speeds seems to give greater meaning to both qualities. 

I have been working on three large scale paintings (about 5×7 feet) for several months now.  About a month ago I became frustrated with the work because I was unable to move forward.  There was nothing stopping me I just could not figure out how to do what I had in mind.  Eventually I took the paintings down and turned them against the wall and began something new.  Last week I took another look and the problem seemed ridiculous.  In a matter of an hour or so I had most of the trouble worked out.