• Special message: Put August 20, 2 pm Eastern on your calendar for our August Live Chat on YouTube. I apologize for today's letter being so late. Our mailing service had technical issues. Finally, here it is! One thing I enjoyed in graduate school was listening to and participating in informal debates. Those were the days when Marshall McLuhan published his book, Understanding Media in which he coined the concept "The medium is the message." McLuhan argues that the medium shapes the content and
carries more power than the content itself. You can see how graduate level painting students would grab on to that and chew it to smithereens. Although McLuhan was primarily focused on mass media, we saw the concept as totally relevant to the painter. Remember this was the era when abstraction was at its height, and think the process of Jackson Pollock. As many of you know, my mantra is "Enjoy the Journey." During those grad school years, I delved deeply into McLuhan's philosophy, but emerged from it realizing that we, the artists, are the medium. Painting is far more than just painting on canvas for decorating homes and offices. The act of painting is an expression of the unique human being that made it happen.
Remember that first invigorating moment when you pushed paint and felt alive just by doing it? (During the 1940's and 50's when I was a growing up, OMG if you announced you wanted to be an artist!) Social norms be damned, that journey of discovering the world of pushing paint is one of expression with skills and discoveries we accumulate one by one, and it contains potential for feeling totally alive.
Even if it gets side-tracked, it can always be reclaimed, just like any other detour in life. Paraphrasing Robert Frost, taking the road lesson traveled by makes all the difference. Keep enjoying the journey! During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual
elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
You can access the archive of all my newsletters (as well as the Quick Tips and other stuff) at any time by going HERE.
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