Painting is a Process

March 18, 2011 8:38 AM

Painting of a tangerine... being peeled (SLYT) Painter Duane Keiser paints a tangerine. Then peels it. Then paints it. Then peels it. Then paints it. Fun video, I thought.
posted by cogpsychprof (25 comments total)

This was wonderful.
posted by Fizz at 8:48 AM on March 18, 2011

I really enjoyed that. Talented guy.
posted by bonobothegreat at 8:49 AM on March 18, 2011

Awesome.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 8:50 AM on March 18, 2011

oh I loooove Duane Keiser - he's been posting vids of his paintings like this for years, and I found them really enlightening when I was in art school. His work is amazing.
posted by annathea at 8:52 AM on March 18, 2011

that was lovely.
posted by anya32 at 9:00 AM on March 18, 2011

Behold the power of wet on wet. Really, that was lovely.
posted by maudlin at 9:10 AM on March 18, 2011

Always so wonderful to see form take shape from paint.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:31 AM on March 18, 2011

painting is something completely beyond my comprehension. Ball . . . spludge . . . spludge . . spludge . . . tangerine . . .spludge . . . spludge . . spludge . . . peeled tangerine. (the spudges can only be magic)
posted by rtimmel at 9:42 AM on March 18, 2011 [4 favorites]

I would have liked to see this painting go to its logical conclusion - an empty space where the tangerine used to be. The painting of the tangerine is still there, but buried underneath layers of paint and totally inaccessible to us, visually.
posted by Dmenet at 10:05 AM on March 18, 2011 [2 favorites]

This was amazing, very talented. When he was putting dotting on the white paint onto the tangerine I just wanted to reach out and smudge that little bit and blend it in.
posted by lilkeith07 at 10:23 AM on March 18, 2011

What is he doing to "erase" with his thumb? I don't know how oil paints work... would they dry enough to just smudge over with another color?
posted by zennie at 11:52 AM on March 18, 2011

You can actually pick up a layer of wet paint with your thumb - oils take a long time to dry. You can do it with acrylics, too, but the window is a lot shorter.
posted by restless_nomad at 12:02 PM on March 18, 2011

Thanks, restless_nomad!
posted by zennie at 12:39 PM on March 18, 2011

Underwhelming. I guess I was expecting more. Still, nice work on the person's part.
posted by Malice at 1:33 PM on March 18, 2011

Good day on MetaFilter. Great post.
posted by Lutoslawski at 2:35 PM on March 18, 2011

This is so cool! Thanks. Amazing artist.
posted by nickyskye at 3:13 PM on March 18, 2011

rtimmel and I had exactly the same reaction to this.
posted by not that girl at 3:25 PM on March 18, 2011

That was great. I loved the moments when he'd add a swath of paint and for a second it would just look like paint, but then the next second my perception suddenly shifted and it became "tangerine peel." Like magic!
posted by Nedroid at 5:45 PM on March 18, 2011 [1 favorite]

He'd better hurry up and finish it up, it looks a little overripe.
posted by Barry B. Palindromer at 1:57 AM on March 19, 2011

Painter Duane Keiser paints a tangerine. Then peels it. Then paints it. Then peels it. Then paints it.

Underwhelming. I guess I was expecting more.

Really?
posted by Rykey at 5:26 AM on March 19, 2011

I love Duane Keiser's art. I bought his PB&J prints, and have always dreamed of buying one of his egg paintings, which I LOVE. I can't find number 8, which was my favorite, and I can't find an index to the rest, so I'll try and link a bunch here:

9
10
11
12
13
14
16
17
18
19
20
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
posted by popechunk at 10:53 AM on March 19, 2011

That was great, thanks for posting it!
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:51 PM on March 19, 2011

Yeah, okay, I thought painting was really difficult and complicated, but I never thought it could be this impossible to understand how some seemingly random dibs and daubs and smears can suddenly turn into something like a perfectly-rendered orange-peel shine reflection. How do you do something like that so quickly without fucking up? Or is it mostly "I'll try this and the result will be how the painting looks and I'm cool with that"
posted by tehloki at 6:03 PM on March 20, 2011

I think there are subtle cuts in the video - I don't think it's a live realtime video of everything he did while painting. He'll get each stage of the painting to the "fully blocked in" stage, then there is a cut to the more polished final version of that stage. So it's not that your eyes are finally "resolving" the fully finished image of that stage, it's that the final version of a stage actually does just appear from the slightly-less-fine-tuned version without us seeing every bit of the intermediate fine-tuning.
posted by LobsterMitten at 6:27 PM on March 20, 2011

example - look at the white highlight spot from 0:34 to 0:38. It goes from "mostly there, still looks like paint" to "final version, looks like highlight on a tangerine peel" but we don't see what he has done in between.

Also 1:45 to 1:50, the top of the tangerine - goes from "mostly there, looks like paint" to "top of an unpeeled tangerine" via a cut.

(Note, his skill is totally impressive and is what makes the video enjoyable. I'm not meaning to downplay his skill at all. Just that it's not a duck-rabbit "my brain went from interpreting this as paint blobs to interpreting it as a tangerine peel" thing, it's a "there were a few fine-tuning strokes that we didn't see, so the image changed to one which my brain interprets as a tangerine peel".)
posted by LobsterMitten at 6:38 PM on March 20, 2011