While I was up in the New England area this week I was getting a flood of thoughts, some of which involved painting, but I didn’t have time to write them down.

Thinking back to Cezanne’s Composition, Cezanne composed space by pushing things back and pulling other things forward – in fact, it was a mutual operation – when you did one thing, you affected something else – which ended up sounding like a Boolean equation (Truth Tables and all):

Source: Wikipedia

And that got me thinking – thinking of Hans Hoffman’s ideas of Push and Pull using color which was an extension of Paul Cezanne’s (it’s also the subject of a paper by Maxson J. McDowell titled – Cézanne and Hans Hofmann on Pictorial Space (see, I do know what I’m talking about here – I came up with this not even knowing about the paper).

 

What if – in looking at Art work – at least, work that proposed to be about 3 dimensions on two dimensions – flat work or nearly flat work that had a sense of dimension – if it could be looked at in this way – as a series of equations – equations that could be processed by software designed for that purpose?

What if we could create a program that would scan a painting (assuming the colors and lines were well represented) and show the areas as “push and pull” along with suggestions about opening up space in the work.

Would such an idea help? It might move people beyond where they are to another level with their work – even it it’s not the end goal itself.

 

Cezanne – Still Life with Apples

I believe technology is at a level now where this could be accomplished, probably with not that much work – though it’s hard to say as I don’t think it’s been tried before.

Just a thought on this Saturday where I really do need to stop blogging and start getting ready to go out -talking about Push and Pull – we can extract that idea into our entire life (at least I can) and I’m pulled now, to get ready – which means I’m pushed away from this post.