Cubism and The Ornery Logic Of Water

Every time there is a natural disaster, water has to be one of the very first needs to be met.  With the recent earthquake in Haiti it is once again a most valuable commodity.  I was already thinking about precious water this month though, because I am participating in a rain barrel project with the NJ Dept. of Environmental Protection, Division of Water Supply.  The idea is that artists will paint recycled barrels (they once held cranberries), turning them into beautiful works of art to be auctioned off, thus encouraging people to save and reuse the valuable rainwater that would otherwise run off the roofs, out of the gutters and into the sewers.  While  relief agencies are setting up delivery systems for getting bottled water to Haiti, I am in the process of painting a design on my barrel that I hope will inspire someone here to use it to save more of the water we get from rain.  The drawing I submitted for approval was basically a combination of two

   above:  detail, THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT, acrylic on canvas, ©JoyKREVES

below:  CEDAR MOTHS, acrylic on linen, ©JoyKREVES

already completed paintings, adapted to the water theme.  It seemed like an easy adaptation.  I would paint something similar to "Cedar Moths", but the cedar cuts would be water rings - the kind you get when you throw a pebble into the lake, and the background would be sky, perhaps with butterflies flitting about in a gentle rain... (no matter that as far as I know butterflies are so delicate that even the gentlest rain would likely pummel them, wouldn't it?)

I painted the barrel with a beautiful blue clouded sky as the first step.  It looked great!  Right away, the art policeman reared his ugly face though, and I ran into difficulty with this seemingly simple project.  I had neglected to thoroughly work out just how I was going to combine an atmospheric background with a flat  design, on a round surface. After painting a few dark blue glazes of ovals over my sky for beginnings of the water rings, things weren't looking promising:  the art policeman told me that water rings only make sense on the horizontal  ground, not up in the sky, and I could see that the round barrel was quarreling with the mixture of flat patterns and illusions of space!  Logic is so ornery! Water clearly follows many traffic rules and I was already in a violation.

I decided to proceed with the flatter design route so, I painted out my entire beloved sky, ending up very close to the medium pthalo blue color that the plastic barrel had started off with!  Square One.  Today I painted water rings, this time as a linear design.  Each is at a different perspective, flying every which way over the blue like Larry Poons' ovals. The cedar cuts in my previous painting had worked well that way, I reasoned, and a vertical barrel, after all, is not the ground beneath our feet, so no need to pretend.  At this point I became insecure about my water rings, though.  Round water ring images do have a way of being more firmly tied to perspective; they are only ever oval because of our viewpoint, and so appear to us in perspective only horizontally.  I hope that I won't have to paint them all out again, to redo them as more logical elipses.  I hope they will "read" as water rings, no matter their mixed up orientations!

When painting, I often find myself having to make decisions about visual vs. mental logic.  i.e., can I get away with this shape here, and then repeat it from the same perspective over there where in the real world it really would be turned?  The art police come knocking.  You'd think I would have learned to deal with them once and for all as part of my art studies in college, and certainly in graduate school, however they continue to visit me intermittently, making all kinds of threats, and each time I have to learn all over again how to deal with them and their charges.

When Picasso decided to forgo unified perspectives within his "Cubist" paintings, what freedom he must have felt! The nose could suddenly be sideways when the painting asked for the line that shape, not when the "reality" of the face dictated it's frontal symmetry.  Why then, don't I take a hint already given?  Isn't the key here actually play?  If one is playing, one can bend and throw away rules to a joyful result.  If one is slaving towards a logical art, (and isn't that an oxymoron anyway!), then one must maintain a unified perspective;  one must present water as we know it to be.  Logistics.  Water.  It's a serious job to collect and get water to Haiti, but my project can just celebrate the freedom of art, and be a barrel of fun! It's sort of a Cubist revelation - again.