Artist's Magazine - USA (2020-05)

Build WORKSHOP

DIMENSIONALITY

Flat-Out Relief

ANDREW S. CONKLIN raises an illusion of depth and form.

Materials

SURFACE:

paperboard panel

sized with rabbit-skin

glue mixed with raw

umber powder

TRANSFER AND

DRAWING MATERIALS:

·T square

·red colored pencil

·gray pastel

PAINT APPLICATORS:

· watercolor brushes:

⅛ - to 1-inch synthetic

flats and a genuine

squirrel mop for

blending

· small Japanese

painting knife

OILS:

·black

·Cremnitz white

·raw umber

·brown ochre

· transparent earth

yellow

·caput mortuum

·Naples yellow

·ultramarine blue

One truth about the art of painting is its flatness,

its two-dimensionality. The realization that any

sense of depth or projection can only be the result

of illusions—manufactured by the painter through

overlapping shapes, simulated shadows and linear

perspective—provides evidence of the impossibility

of painting to overcome this deficit.

Renaissance masters argued the relative merits

of sculpture and painting in a debate known as the

paragone (Italian for “comparison”), in which visual

artists weighed in with clever, compelling arguments.

Among the most incisive opinions is one found in

the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, who—writing

as an expert in both media—pronounced his verdict

on the side of painting: “In the first place sculpture

requires a certain light, that is from above, a picture

carries everywhere with it its own light and shade ....

The sculptor cannot diversify his work by the various

natural colors of objects .... They cannot represent

transparent bodies, they cannot represent luminous

bodies, nor reflected lights, nor lustrous bodies ...

nor mists, nor dark skies, nor an infinite number of

things that need not be told for fear of tedium” (quo-

tation as recorded in Leonardo’s Notebooks: Writing

and Art of the Great Master, edited by Anna Suh).

Modernist painters showed us how to embrace

this limitation and simply enjoy the medium. Their

works prove that expanses of flat color can produce

pleasure—but the longing to stir the viewer’s senses

of both sight and touch remains strong. With that

in mind, I decided to paint a sculpture—an attempt

to capture, at least vicariously, the pleasure of creat-

ing solid form. I chose a bas-relief, a sculpture that

projects from its background without becoming

disengaged from it. This sculpted form, although

not merely two-dimensional, doesn’t come across

as fully three-dimensional either, but seems to lie

somewhere in between. My “model,” a bas-relief

of wrestling putti, caught my eye on my last trip

to Rome, where I saw it over a door in the Doria

Pamphilj Gallery. The work, Victory of Sacred Over

Profane Love, a marble by Flemish Baroque sculptor

François-Duquesnoy, is both beautifully rendered

and amusingly energetic.

Turn to page 36 for

a painting demonstration.

34 Artists Magazine May 2020