A different perspective

For my new Miniature World series, I want to break away from photographic representation and classical perspective. Each piece aims at evoking a complete world, in an imaginary place, where civilisation has taken place and left marks on the landscape.

I don't want to be limited to a single scene but rather try to incorporate as many "mini-scenes" as possible, where characters would evolve in different sceneries or pieces of landscape.

This might sound very far from reality or realism. I find not, and quite the opposite in fact.

I had this realisation when on a trip to Lisbon we viewed the city from Castle of Sao Jorge, which is a high point dominating the city. From the terrace, you can view the whole city which lies downward at sea level and on hills that face the castle.

We spent almost an hour viewing different parts of the city from the same view point. The eyes went from one scene to another and focused to observe city and human activity in each street or square. By focusing the attention successively in different places, and without using any magnification, we got a very rich understanding of the city, it's activity, how the different places relate to each other.

This is not something you cannot experience using a photographic view, where you have to choose between the "big picture" full landscape, and zoomed detailed scenes - one at a time.

So the human visual perception is far more than a photographic image, as details can be selectively uncovered without using magnification or loosing field of view, just by focusing attention

from this view, which is only a small portion of the field of view, we cannot discern details

by focusing attention on different areas (here artificially zooming into the picture) we can "get into" different places of the city

Steal composition from picture

I am attracted by Japanese aesthetics, particularly traditional houses and Japanese garden. There's a sense of balance coming from well constructed and visible wooden structure of the houses. Inside and outside spaces are interleaved closely. Garden view from inside the house is often fascinating, with carefully framed points of views. A simple tree or branch viewed through an opening attracts the view and can suggest a whole garden.

I wanted to try to incorporate some of this in my compositions and used the old method of copying a picture that I like and stealing only some elements to make it my own.

In this case I used a picture found in a book (Living in Japan by Alex Kerr) and made a quick collage using some Air France magazines that I has around.

Original picture is rectangular, my sketchbook is square so I had to distort things slightly

I like the horizontal division of inside and outside spaces and the 2 yellow lamps

I started by creating 2 blocks of similar color for the inside and the outside. Some patterns evoque the stone and wooden textures of the inside, which has to remain quite monotone in color

I used color pencils to complete the garden greens and add some shades and light and black markers to mark the structure with straight lines.

Side by side, both pictures are quite different. Some of the composition remained.

New to blogging

I don't know where to start, but I feel like I need to get started with a blog about painting and inspiration. This is my first blog !

I don't share easily my thoughts. I like to read other artists blogs and find it quite resourceful to understand their work, discover some new inspiration and learn some techniques.

I think the format of a blog is quite appropriate and I hope people will find interest in what I'm sharing. I haven't solved yet for the visibility piece, so if you come across this post, don't hesitate to subscribe and share.

extract of a painting inspired by Seben guitar tutorial by Isaac Sariel on Youtube