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jaeleslie at 04:28pm on 15/12/2002
jaeleslie at 04:28pm on 15/12/2002Frost painting is something new for me to look forward to in the winter. Some people like to see the snow coming down, some people like to ice skate or to ski or to fish through the ice. Some people like to run their snow blowers. More people don't seem to like any of those things, and curse the bad weather, and bad roads, and snow clearance, and complain, and forget all about how miserably hot they were last August. For me, winter is pretty enough at the beginning when the snow is clean and white, and it's a nice change, but it gets old here in the north long before it actually goes away.
I have a friend who used to do frost painting but waited until it got down to ten degrees or so. I tried it last year and it really works pretty well for me anywhere below twenty degrees. Unfortunately (!!!) we only had a week or so of that last January, instead of the usual several weeks when it doesn't get above freezing. And I missed the week of bitterly cold weather earlier this month! Now I'm getting set up for it.
Frost painting is a technique of using watercolors, described by Maxine Masterfield in Painting With the Spirit of Nature. Her books present a whole range of different ways of using water-based media with somewhat random results. You wet the watercolor paper, lay it outside in the cold, in a shallow pan of water with various colors and inks thrown on, and maybe layer it with some objects that will produce lines or patterns. As the water freezes the colors follow the patterns formed by the frost crystals, like those on a frosty windowpane, and when the paper is dry you have collaborated with nature in producing a unique design. If it is very cold and the water freezes quickly, the frost patterns will have very long crystals. If it warms up before the water all evaporates and it melts again, the colors puddle again and you lose the pattern. So how much water you use (how long it takes to evaporate) and what colors you use are kind of under your control. Otherwise it's all pretty experimental. You have to be ready to see what you get and then just say, Cool. And what can I do with this now? How can I respond?
I think such methods of evoking random abstract design and then using the result as the basis of paintings are interesting tactics for partially disconnecting the artist's conscious intention and control from the work produced. This one is sort of a subcategory of Masterfield's method of drying paintings in the sun, and her ways of using various plastic and sand and fibrous materials to develop texture in paintings. Many artists have developed programs to randomize their results in different media, from consulting random number generators to reading the I Ching or Tarot.
These thrown-together watercolor methods are particularly popular with calligraphers, I think because as artists we usually work very tight with great attention to minuscule details, in the area of concentration. Allowing some great big accidents into the work can make for much more exciting results. (Or maybe it is a way to corral the unpredictable: you have an accident with nib and ink, and often the only solution seems to be to start all over.) Fifteen years ago we were just putting a nicely colored background paper, or a watercolor wash, behind a lettered text. Using more textured color was a natural step. Then the "text" itself becomes another formal element.
Then too, a lot of calligraphers in the U.S. don't have academic art training, or illustration skills, and this was a quick and easy way of filling that space. Traditional line spacing and layout solutions may have allowed us to avoid the compositional problems of abstract design for years. But in my little corner of the art world, we still haven't settled whether letters are abstract forms, or whether they look like and represent themselves. If you can't read them, is that still writing?
I think I'm about to wander off into the theoretical thickets of legibility, and representation. This week I've been reading about the British artist Turner, who thought he was painting representationally, with his huge background and training in perspective and draftsmanship, while painting what now look like brilliant abstractions.
Frost looks like a pattern of lines. Like itself. It is flat and decorative. It may be made with color to vaguely resemble other natural forms. Stars, caves, forests.
I have a friend who used to do frost painting but waited until it got down to ten degrees or so. I tried it last year and it really works pretty well for me anywhere below twenty degrees. Unfortunately (!!!) we only had a week or so of that last January, instead of the usual several weeks when it doesn't get above freezing. And I missed the week of bitterly cold weather earlier this month! Now I'm getting set up for it.
Frost painting is a technique of using watercolors, described by Maxine Masterfield in Painting With the Spirit of Nature. Her books present a whole range of different ways of using water-based media with somewhat random results. You wet the watercolor paper, lay it outside in the cold, in a shallow pan of water with various colors and inks thrown on, and maybe layer it with some objects that will produce lines or patterns. As the water freezes the colors follow the patterns formed by the frost crystals, like those on a frosty windowpane, and when the paper is dry you have collaborated with nature in producing a unique design. If it is very cold and the water freezes quickly, the frost patterns will have very long crystals. If it warms up before the water all evaporates and it melts again, the colors puddle again and you lose the pattern. So how much water you use (how long it takes to evaporate) and what colors you use are kind of under your control. Otherwise it's all pretty experimental. You have to be ready to see what you get and then just say, Cool. And what can I do with this now? How can I respond?
I think such methods of evoking random abstract design and then using the result as the basis of paintings are interesting tactics for partially disconnecting the artist's conscious intention and control from the work produced. This one is sort of a subcategory of Masterfield's method of drying paintings in the sun, and her ways of using various plastic and sand and fibrous materials to develop texture in paintings. Many artists have developed programs to randomize their results in different media, from consulting random number generators to reading the I Ching or Tarot.
These thrown-together watercolor methods are particularly popular with calligraphers, I think because as artists we usually work very tight with great attention to minuscule details, in the area of concentration. Allowing some great big accidents into the work can make for much more exciting results. (Or maybe it is a way to corral the unpredictable: you have an accident with nib and ink, and often the only solution seems to be to start all over.) Fifteen years ago we were just putting a nicely colored background paper, or a watercolor wash, behind a lettered text. Using more textured color was a natural step. Then the "text" itself becomes another formal element.
Then too, a lot of calligraphers in the U.S. don't have academic art training, or illustration skills, and this was a quick and easy way of filling that space. Traditional line spacing and layout solutions may have allowed us to avoid the compositional problems of abstract design for years. But in my little corner of the art world, we still haven't settled whether letters are abstract forms, or whether they look like and represent themselves. If you can't read them, is that still writing?
I think I'm about to wander off into the theoretical thickets of legibility, and representation. This week I've been reading about the British artist Turner, who thought he was painting representationally, with his huge background and training in perspective and draftsmanship, while painting what now look like brilliant abstractions.
Frost looks like a pattern of lines. Like itself. It is flat and decorative. It may be made with color to vaguely resemble other natural forms. Stars, caves, forests.