Gary Westall

The industrious help, Painting, Oil on MDF Panel

2021

Painted Plein air in the nearby Moor. The color of the grass caught my eye, it seemed to be framed by the Pine trees. :: Painting :: Impressionist :: This piece comes with an officia...

A plein air painting on the River Big Aue, Espelkamp, Germany. I love this place it always presents new subjects to paint. The little waterfall attracted my attention and I could sen...

Todd Carpenter's (US based) "Post Progress" is an oil painting that depicts a black and white vast landscape with telephone poles overrun with brush and dense foliage, and mountains in the distance Bio/artist statement: Todd Carpenter is a Los Angeles based artist who uses black and white paint to explore the perception of space and beauty. Carpenter's formal education is in science - he holds a MS in Neuroscience from UCSD and a BS in Psychobiology from UCLA - and he brings this background into service when making art. His paintings explore the mechanisms of perception and aesthetics, examining among other things how the depiction of light can impart realism and convey emotion. Like his paintings bridging art and science, Carpenter's career has similarly straddled the two fields, and he has taught subjects ranging from neuroscience and environmental science to photography and painting. Artist Statement As a painter, I am particularly interested in how the depiction of light contributes to our experience of paintings. Painting, as with any visual art, is obviously dependent on light. But painting can also have a more specific connection in that the accurate depiction of light is crucial for achieving realism. Realism in paintings largely arises from the portrayal of depth - perceiving a painting as being realistic is equivalent to seeing its subject as existing in more than just the two dimensions of the picture plane - and one of the mechanisms by which humans perceive depth is through lighting cues. Light creates features such as shading, shadow, and contrast that tell us about the three-dimensional arrangement of our surroundings, and artists often use these features to impart realism to paintings. Light also factors in to the emotional impact of paintings. The differential illumination of our surroundings can evoke different moods, as evidenced by the influence sunsets, candlelight, and darkness can have on us. Such effectssuggest that our perception of light could be tied to primitive instincts, with light signaling factors such as shelter, nightfall, and warmth, which were once crucial for survival. The depiction of light in...