Dixon's Forum

Essential Art came to be when I was studying to be an Art Teacher, and had to use paint; I couldn’t learn the right things about artcraft from the tape on painted steel of my Industrial Art.

I was hoping to learn how to make the paint look like I want it to, which I never could before.    For reasons lost to History, I mashed a blob of paint with an ink-roller and the resulting ovoid was transparently thin, repeated lighter and lighter as the roller rolled along.

A multi-colored blob mixes into natural patterns, like blue and white mash out the sky with clouds.

Where the transparent ovoids overlap, it’s hard to tell which is upper or under, which is foreground or background.    Being half-blind in one eye and can’t hardly see out the other with the real world fuzzy and flat, I found this ambiguous ground thing appealing.

I saw this mashing multiblobs as a way to look into the essential nature of the paint, so I could either name it Natural Art or Essential Art, where the name Natural Art conjured up oil paintings of forests and ponds, wildlife and the like.

The blobs were mashed by one of this set of rollers:   

I didn’t own an artist’s palette and had formed the habit of using paper plates, and keeping them for decorations.    For this Essential Art, I decided to use a small canvas for each workpiece and display them together as diptychs.

Click here    to see the first exhibit of Essential Art:    “Wood”, and here       for its home page. 

Next Week:    the eighth installment of the true story entitled “Unentitled”.