FORMAL
No, she said she had her tree bent too much--didn't you say?
I thought the object of having that tree kind of half falling over was to take you attention to the stones and rapids. Your eye would follow the tree down.
I wonder if the man thought of that when he sat at the Sports Day painting it?
But I thought your eye is supposed to lead up to something. I don't know.
It depends on what's up there.
And this one's called "stamp".
Oh that would be neat.
That would be very neat. Because we could do sandblasting of positive and negative.
That is actually very interesting.
There's definitely a positive/negative look to that isn't there.
Like all the white illuminated and the black left black.
That would be incredible.
And easy.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
That's actually quite interesting.
I like the positive/negative look there--the flip-flop that the eye does.
Because if you turn it upside down this could just as well be something there.
Yeah, yeah.
These are recursive grids. That's why I like them.
They're recursive? They weren't designed with that in mind.
No, but it'll look that way because the window will be the largest grid. The grid that's on the window. And the next grid you'll see will be these heavy black lines.
And then, of course, you have the internal grid. And then there's the suggestion of many more grids in there.
Oh, sure.
So it has a recursivity that comes right out of the computer.
I thought recursivity is going like that or implying that it curved back into itself. But this is an imploded recursivity. Is it? It goes from the window, in and in.
Yeah. I don't see recursivity as linked to any one direction.
Oh, I see.
In any instruction I ever had the teachers said, "You have to plan your painting so that your eye...so that everything takes you to the center of interest."
Yes, and that's what they...that's what I was told and that you should have some way so that if that's your center of interest your eye should follow a trail up to there. [Points to upper right]
Like an "S" shape where your finger is.
Yeah, they sort of
Well, if you...it could happen very successfully in some but if you stick to that definition of success for a movement in a painting then you're limiting yourself to the one movement. There could be a hundred ways your eye could move through it.
I'll show you something about one of the pictures I did that didn't look right to me and I had to block off a part of it so that your eye didn't go up there where there was nothing. [chuckles]
Right. So if you'd stuck with the rule...
That wouldn't have happened, I guess.
No, what I meant was that you may not have felt free to make the change. If you thought there was some rule.
I had to go by the rule in order to not lead your eye up to nothing because it didn't look right. My subjects were all there...
But it didn't look right...
No, it didn't look right to me.
So that's a good reason.
Well, I thought of the rule later. I thought I didn't follow the rule and my eye is goin' to nothing. But it didn't look right.
It didn't satisfy you.
No, and that's probably why it didn't satisfy me.
Yeah, maybe.
The eye goes to those trees instead of the center of the picture where the most...
Where the interesting part is.
Yes.
Well, the eye goes to these trees, though. In all of them it does.
Yeah It does really, doesn't it?
And it goes to here in some of them. See there's a...
I was told that when you're planning your picture your eye is supposed to follow a trail like that. [gestures in a a zig-zag motion from foreground to upper right] Is that what they aim for? Like..
No, she said she had her tree bent too much--didn't you say?
I thought the object of having that tree kind of half falling over was to take you attention to the stones and rapids. Your eye would follow the tree down.
I wonder if the man thought of that when he sat at the Sports Day painting it?
But I thought your eye is supposed to lead up to something. I don't know.
It depends on what's up there.
The teacher at school that taught art said that at the center of attention you should have something in you picture that leads to the center of attention.
Yeah, that's right. So, I was told--also by an artist that it's an ideal situation to have it go [motions to painting with finger] like this and like that again--to your centre of attention. I don't know. To lead your eye through the picture in this shape. [turns to Vera] You teach art. You... you don't teach that.
Well, if I could see the picture I might be able to say whether it worked or not. It could be the case in some but not in every picture.
That's right.
Why would you get Rosie to make this?
Because I wanted a copy of it because it was in the frame that held the picture of my grandmother and grandfather to begin with. It was an old fashioned frame--an antique frame that it was in.
This frame.
Yeah. And because it hung in Grandma's parlor when we lived with Grandma. And that was the only picture in the whole parlor that was nice, that I enjoyed.
Oh. And you also wanted to preserve this frame but didn't want to hang the cracked and broken old painting in it.
Yeah, well, of course I wanted to preserve the frame. And of course if I had a better picture to put in the frame I would put it in.
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