Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Denis Pombriant who has been a CRM industry analyst for 20 years, spotting trends and advising clients. He has written three books including "Solve for the Customer" and "You Can't Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It." He has also turned his attention to the climate and sustainability in his newest book, "The Age of Sustainability." He recently also wrote about health and antiserums around the current crisis here. He lives and works in the Boston area and travels to California very frequently. Here he writes about how his painting takes him away from science and tech in his day job:
I was once struck by the way martial arts are practiced, especially, though not exclusively, using the Japanese idea of a “doh” or “dao” which roughly translates as a “way” connotating a philosophy or doctrine. People who know me will not find this surprising. The essence of this approach, which can be seen in martial arts like karate, judo, and taekwondo, is that you practice the art, striving for perfection, knowing you will never really achieve it. It’s the pursuit that matters.
This teaches humility and patience given the realization that perfection is not possible in this life. It’s also very liberating that, with perfection off the table, the focus can be on sustained improvement over many years. This appealed to me as I set out a few years ago to figure out visual art, specifically drawing and painting because all my life, I really sucked at it.
What appealed to me was the low-tech approach and the low cost. I’m a believer that whatever one does, a hobby should be diametrically different from what we do in our work-lives. Things haven’t changed much in painting since the invention of the collapsible tin tube to hold pre-mixed paint in the middle of the 19th century. The tin tube enabled artists to take their easels outdoors to paint “en plein air.” The result was Impressionism and the art world has never been the same. The tin tube was a disruptive innovation, another reason I like art.
Stuff I have learned
For everyone who thinks they can’t do art, there is hope. In a 1979 book, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” Betty Edwards unlocked for average people like me the secret of drawing, painting, and generally enhancing creativity. We spend most of our time in the left side of our brains where logic and language are centered. The right side of the brain is home to spatial perception and other things related to creativity and it doesn’t communicate very well. Doing art is a matter of accessing the right side of the brain and then shutting up. When I am in that “zone” I can’t speak much and time flies by. Later, I can look at my work and recognize where my brain was when I was painting a particular part.
Other stuff I learned includes the rules of perspective which are ridiculously easy to learn though surprisingly most people don’t. When I first learned perspective, it was a revelation. What I’d always thought of as three-dimensional vision only gave me about 2.5 dimensions; I’d never seen things in real 3D before though now I always do.
There’s a lot of chemistry involved in painting. For instance, the solvents you use, turpentine, or water have a profound influence on how you work and what you can achieve. Perhaps more interestingly, mixing colors is almost an art in itself. There are cool and warm versions of every color and some are transparent while others are opaque. The green you get from mixing blue and yellow is completely dependent on the blue and yellow you start with. So, a typical palette of paint might include a dozen different colors, including some that would seem redundant.
What I do
I’ve concentrated on landscape and still life painting though there are a few portraits and abstracts in the pile in my office and lately I’ve given a lot of attention to the human form (stay tuned). My wife won’t let me hang anything in the house except for the powder room on the first floor, which I have designated, somewhat ironically, the “salon de refusee” in homage to the Impressionists.
I had to learn early on that I was not creating a photograph, such realism is beyond me and if the scholarship is to be believed it was very difficult to achieve even for artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer. They allegedly used optics developed in the universities in Holland to project an image onto the canvass, which they then painted. There was a delightful documentary, “Tim’s Vermeer,” a few years ago that showed how this was done. The producer was the illusionist Penn Jillette. His partner, Raymond Teller, directed. Boy can they can spot an illusion!
How I work in layers
Most people I know develop paintings in layers. I start with a drawing that I then transfer it to the canvass and then paint in monochrome to give me a sense of the values. For instance, the sky is always brightest, the foreground next and its colors are most saturated while the background, at least in landscape paintings, pales with distance from the viewing plane. This provides a 3D effect called atmospheric perspective.
Layering also gives you a chance to play with applying translucent colors over more opaque ones. The result can provide a shimmering effect perfected by the Impressionists.
My pictures are okay, not great, kind of appropriate for my skill level (maybe I’m an Imperfectionist). I like to play around with reality in homage to the surrealists, people like Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte and one of my favorite American surrealists, Gertrude Abercrombie, a Chicago artist of the mid-twentieth century.
You can see Abercrombie’s influence in my painting “Schrodinger’s Cat” as well as a small homage to Magritte. Erwin Schrodinger was a quantum physicist and Nobel Prize winner who did foundational work in Quantum Mechanics, but you can research that one. In that painting I try to depict the quantum probability of a cat being in a picture on a wall and simultaneously sitting in a doorway overlooking a beach. Magritte was famous for that green apple and Abercrombie liked doors opening onto strange places. Hopefully, this preserves my standing as a geek.
“Blue Heron” depicts a big pond where I walk my dog; no physics involved here.
And geeking out one more time, “End of the World” is my depiction of the asteroid hitting the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago that ended the reign of the dinosaurs making way for us and other mammals.
Right now, I’m working on a piece with a horse sticking its head out of a barn door at sunset and also a beach scene from my recent vacation.
Why do I do this? I don’t know! Must be a right brain thing. But that’s my Doh and I’m sticking with it.
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