What is a non-motif?
That's what I call a scene from our everyday world that is familiar but rarely interpreted by artists. I wrote an article about non-motifs in the February / March issue (#149) of International Artist Magazine.
Paintings can serve to awaken us to the mystery of the world we actually inhabit, such as parking lots, supermarket interiors, gas stations or back alleys. They have a weird luminous power over my imagination. When I begin to paint them, I feel as though I have set foot on an unexplored continent.
1. Start out with an idea of the light, color or compositional effects you want to achieve, and plug the forms into that idea. For example, you might want to do a tight cropping on a colorful sign or you might want a warm, backlit scene with edge lighting.
2. Use a viewfinder, a mirror or a camera to give you a fresh eye on the scene. It’s often hard to recognize good subjects, even when you’re looking straight at them.
3. Do a thumbnail sketch in pencil or paint to visualize what choices you might need to make.
4. Try to key into an emotional reaction that you have about a place, something you love or hate about it, a juxtaposition that seems bizarre or somewhere that you enjoyed hanging out as a child.
5. Stay local. Paint the subject at different times of day, and if you can, different seasons of the year.
6. If you’re traveling, paint an ordinary street, not the Instagram spot.
3 comments:
Great post! This a subject that has always interested me. What would people 300 years in the future based on our paintings? Do we all live in open fields? Or in ANTONIO LOPEZ's empty Madrid streets at 6AM?
Thank you for the tips I will go now to my sketchbook to create my first non motif.
Hi James
My name is Alex and I'm from England. Your talent, vision, imagination and skill at explaining things are simply awesome. "Non Motifs"? What a brilliant concept! It's something I've always sort of been aware of but couldn't quite put my finger on it and you've just encapsulated it in a nutshell. And your advice on how to go about doing it is so succinct and makes so much sense. I can't wait for the weather to get better and the days longer so I can go out and paint the ordinary things around me that look so wonderful when the light hits them just right. Thanks James. I can't express how inspirational you are.
I think it’s cool that James Gurney excels in both the imaginative painting (like Dinotopia) as well as finding art in the day-to-day mundane things (like non-motif).
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