John O'Grady

You are Everything VII, Painting, Oil on Wood Panel

2017

I've been working on this large statement piece, for a while, with many faltering steps until things started to fall into place this past week. A natural yearning for open spaces ...

I wanted to capture the essence of a peaceful hiking trail with the added emphasis on the calming presence of the clouds. :: Painting :: Impressionist :: This piece comes with an off...

original en plein air landscape oil on panel painting :: Painting :: Impressionist :: This piece comes with an official certificate of authenticity signed by the artist :: Ready to H...

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...

Todd Carpenter's (US based) "Truth as a Poetic Lie" is an oil painting that depicts a black and white landscape full of dense trees and foliage, blotted out by something reminiscent ...

Todd Carpenter's (US based) "There that yet may be" is an oil painting that depicts a black and white landscape of a city's lights nestled in a canyon between mountains, with swirlin...

Hadley Rampton's (US based) "Allonge" is an oil painting that depicts the snow dusted rolling hills, with patches of brown and orange grass peeking through the white cover. Born in...

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...