Tasks To Do, So Art Can Be

The cave painters of Altamira and Lascaux needed to know all the lore and crafts which held body and soul together in Stone Age times.

Here and now the division of labor lets us choose the skills and studies able to give close help in visual art, leaving the remoter tasks to other hands.
We learn about drawing, sculpture and painting. Some artists more than others value keen observation, lettering skills, anatomy, structure and geometry, or print making techniques.
 
When I was still a quite small boy, not all those studies did then yet occupy my mind. But the skill of blending colors seemed most desirably miraculous.

Artists will simulate blending through altering the frequency of markings by the brush or pen. These can be individually seen because they are separately and deliberately set in place.

“A Land of Fire and Ice”

 My painting offers an extended graduation from white to blue, and several narrow passages of blending to render in blurring boundaries some of the adjoining color fields.

The blendings belong in visual art because they are visible within a work to our naked eye. Yet they are also a product of an intrusion into a microscopic world.

On Loan from the Invisible

However nimble the work of our pigment-laden brush, we cannot tell exactly where the microscopic particles of colors will fall in place.
The pattern is likely similar – though not identical to – that of my sample of the small black squares. For, whatever our finger-tip sensibility that moves the brush, the colored particles remain largely self-arranging and self-sorting.

Out of sources in nature and from disciplines of endeavor beyond art we use what can be made visible in our pictorial work.
Derived from shaded modeling seen all around us, graduated blending is a most often practiced craft in visual art.
 
More than 75 years ago it seemed a miracle to me, and still I name it “wonderful” that – wielded with dexterity and due diligence – the brush will cause tiniest particles of colored dust to do my bidding.
So far the occurrence is unexplained and likely to remain that way – gift of a benign Providence.