“I don’t usually wear diamonds in the afternoon, but this is a special occasion.”

—Liberace, at the 1979 opening of his amazing Liberace Museum in Las Vegas

This is a special occasion for me as I launch my art blog, Ablaze with Color.  I find much inspiration in this colorful world. Color sets me on fire. Color ignites my passion. Color burns fiercely in me.  My artful quest is, and probably always will be, harnessing the power of color.

The effect of color on us and in our art is profound. Color immediately attracts attention. Colors influence and interact with each other. Color has many relationships. Color can shift visual balance, create a focal point, influence our emotions, and expand communication.

The rods and cones in our eyes allow us to see and discern color. We have 100 to 120 million rods and somewhere between 6 and 7 million cones in our retinas — each of us unalike. The rods are more sensitive than the cones. However, they are not sensitive to color, but to light. The rods are responsible for night vision, our most sensitive motion detection, and our peripheral vision. Color vision and the highest visual acuity are attributed to the cones. While we all will recognize a specific color, we may still, in actuality, see it somewhat differently.

In his book Air Guitar, art critic Dave Hickey writes about living above the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas. His apartment faced west, and at the end of every day, he would see the gorgeous sunsets from his balcony overlooking the neon signs of the Las Vegas Strip.  One evening, his brain did a flip and it occurred to him that the sunset seemed fake and garish while the glow of the neon lights seemed natural and beautiful. To him, the nightly neon lights of the Strip consistently glittering recklessly appeared real while the sunset,  performing a stunning light show different from any other, seemed unreal and just flat outright phony. 

Saving the Bright Lights of Las Vegas

Another Las Vegas legend, showman Liberace, may have been the all-time epitome of fake. He covered practically everything he owned - costumes, cars, pianos - with rhinestones. His ‘bad taste’ was real. He would stride onto stage in all of his outrageousness and give an unbelievable performance on the piano. Strangely, he appealed to all ages. It was one of our programs — we kids, our parents, and our grandparents would be mesmerized weekly by him on TV.  Underneath all that glitter was supreme talent. The art of his showmanship was most definitely bona-fide. Liberace was, as critics called him, a “genuine rhinestone.”

It is an interesting idea, and a rich one at that, to think of what is authentic and what is bogus in our art. What may be genuine for one artist might be counterfeit to another.  We all look at the world and art with different eyes.

As an artist, is your work genuine to you? Was your work more authentic when you were starting out, struggling to learn the rules and the tricks of the trade? As you learned, did your knowledge make your art less authentic and more formula driven? Do we go through a phase of inauthenticity before we find ourselves (our style) and become genuine? If we are inspired by other artists, literature, music, nature, etc., does that make our art fraudulent? If we paint what we see, does that make our art a forgery? 

It is in painting what we see that we learn to see. We learn to see through close observation of our subject. Observing closely gives us a deeper understanding and a responsiveness to what we see. It increases our awareness. Close observation gives us an exclusive kind of sensual reality that ignites memories, emotions, and that intense vibrant connection that comes from knowing something intimately.

As we learn to see, we learn to bring our own experiences into what we paint. Our experiences shade and color what we see, and therefore, what we paint. In our paintings, whether consciously or not, we place our individuality, our awareness or unawareness, our stories — our choices reflecting who we are with our own distinct expression.

I love to paint skies with bold intense colors as I see them. Sometimes when I look at my painted skies, I wonder if nature might mimic the sincerity of my paintings. Nevertheless, I know I create my own truth from the beauty I see in nature. Even though it is not exactly as nature presents it to me, I use color to capture the richness of reality. Space and movement are based on the way I have learned to use color rather than photographic representation. As I have become more masterful in my understanding of how the eye reads and responds to color, my paintings have taken on a unique vibrancy and sense of animation. They are my honest interpretation of how I see the world aglow with light, color, and emotion. 

For real.