What Art Can Do.

Detroit Baseball 2010

Michigan Sunset

American Baseball

Top ten - Artprize 2010

Ode To Autumn

Food,Line,Refrigerator Magnet - Artprize 2010

Vote 37151
Venue Family Capital Management

Food,Line,Refrigerator Magnet - Artprize 2010

The Guess Who in Saugatuck Michigan at Rock The Felt Festival Sept. 10, 2010

Title: Just Be

Dancing days are here again,
As the summer evenings grow....
(Zeppelin)

Home

The Nightingale Project brightens up the environment

Gina's Gift

Gina Marie was diagnosed with autism just before the age of 2. She could not even speak until she was 3 years old and now at age 7 she is singing National Anthems at professional sports games and concerts across the country. Her parents sent her to a school for kids with special needs as she had trouble forming words when attempting to speak. But her teachers at the school used music to help her with her language skills. I bet they had no idea what gift Gina had in store for them.http://thehoopdoctors.com/online2/2009/05/7-year-old-gina-marie-incandelas-national-anthem-is-magic/

The Turtles

Exactly Like Breathing

Exactly Like Breathing from I science on Vimeo.

Synesthesia

The word synesthesia comes from two Greek words, syn (together) and aisthesis (perception). Therefore, synesthesia literally means "joined perception."http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/syne.html

Synesthesia

"It is imagination that first taught man the moral meaning of color, of contour, of sound, and of scent. In the beginning of the world it created analogy and metaphor." —Charles Baudelaire

Discovery - Keeps life interesting.

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.
Mark Van Doren

Painting

Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
Pablo Picasso

The Hand

Paint bears physical record to the expressions of the human hand. It conforms to the trail of the brush being driven by impulses of the psyche. In no other art medium is creation more permanently and intimately bound to the movements of the human body.
by Jonathan Lasker, artist

Rembrandt July 15 His Birthday

I wonder what Rembrandt would have thought about this video.

Working on Artprize painting.

Diane Rehm Show-Treating Soldiers with brain injuries

June 24, 2010

The military takes steps to improve care for soldiers with traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, and other complex psychological problems: The challenges of treating mental wounds among those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Guests
Dr. Gregory O'Shanick National Medical Director, Brain Injury Association of America, who specializes in neuro-rehabilitation and neuro-psychiatry and Chair-elect of the BIAA Board of Directors.
Daniel Zwerdling Correspondent with NPR’s Investigative Unit who’s been reporting on TBI in a series co-reported with T. Christian Miller, of Propublica
Dr. S. Ward Casscells John E. Tyson Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Public Health, and Vice President for External Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He is the former Assistant Secretary of Defense (Health Affairs).
Dr. Jonathan Sills a staff psychologist in the VA Palo Alto Health Care System

reference:http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-06-24/treating-soldiers-brain-injuries

Flag paintings and the creative process

Don't Worry

Blanca Gomez of Cosas Minimas

What inspires you most?

"To be sincere, I’m not too certain what inspires me. I suppose that everything that surrounds me and everything that I like inspires me inevitably. I’m a huge collector of objects and books. Picasso said something along the lines of it being best for inspiration to find you working, I happen to think that’s good way to put it." Quote from Blanca Gomez interviewed on grainedit.com. Blanca is a Graphic Designer and Illustrator based in Madrid, Spain.
Reference from grainedit.com
http://grainedit.com/2010/06/16/blanca-gomez-interview

Chardin - Lean Diet

In today's fast world you can easily overlook the subtle beauty and balance of a Chardin. You need to slow yourself down to properly appreciate one of his paintings.
Reference online article--http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/still_life/chardin/chardin.htm

Exploration

Mozart

William Cullen Bryant

Summer Wind


It is a sultry day; the sun has drank
The dew that lay upon the morning grass,
There is no rustling in the lofty elm
That canopies my dwelling, and its shade
Scarce cools me. All is silent, save the faint
And interrupted murmur of the bee,
Settling on the sick flowers, and then again
Instantly on the wing. The plants around
Feel the too potent fervors; the tall maize
Rolls up its long green leaves; the clover droops
Its tender foliage, and declines its blooms.
But far in the fierce sunshine tower the hills,
With all their growth of woods, silent and stern,
As if the scortching heat and dazzling light
Were but an element they loved. Bright clouds,
Motionless pillars of the brazen heaven;--
Their bases on the mountains--their white tops
Shining in the far ether--fire the air
With a reflected radiance, and make turn
The gazer`s eye away. For me, I lie
Languidly in the shade, where the thick turf,
Yet virgin from the kisses of the sun,
Retains some freshness, and I woo the wind
That still delays its coming. Why so slow,
Gentle and voluble spirit of the air?
Oh, come and breathe upon the fainting earth
Coolness and life. Is it that in his caves
He hears me? See, on yonder woody ridge,
The pine is bending his proud top, and now,
Among the nearer groves, chesnut and oak
Are tossing their green boughs about. He comes!
Lo, where the grassy meadow runs in wives!
The deep distressful silence of the scene
Breaks up with mingling of unnumbered sounds
And universal motion. He is come,
Shaking a shower of blossoms from the shrubs,
And bearing on the fragrance; and he brings
Music of birds, and rustling of young boughs,
And soun of swaying branches, and the voice
Of distant waterfalls. All the green herbs
Are stirring in his breath; a thousand flowers,
By the road-side and the borders of the brook,
Nod gaily to each other; glossy leaves
Are twinkling in the sun, as if the dew
Were on them yet, and silver waters break
Into small waves and sparkle as he comes.

Stand By Me

Zeitgeist, by RaNae Couture, 2010, mixed medium

This is from the springboard side of the mind. The right side.

Food, Line, Refrigerator Magnet,by RaNae Couture, mixed medium, 2010

This is an art object painting that I am still working on for Artprize 2010 - Grand Rapids
There are three other smaller paintings that go along with it. You can find the other three paintings at my website.

Charles Baudelaire
(1821—1867)


Correspondences


Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let escape sometimes confused words;
Man traverses it through forests of symbols
That observe him with familiar glances.

Like long echoes that intermingle from afar
In a dark and profound unity,
Vast like the night and like the light,
The perfumes, the colors and the sounds respond.

There are perfumes fresh like the skin of infants
Sweet like oboes, green like prairies,
—And others corrupted, rich and triumphant

That have the expanse of infinite things,
Like ambergris, musk, balsam and incense,
Which sing the ecstasies of the mind and senses.

TBI - Art

April 2010 in NYC

Frank Stella - On The Roof - 2007

Paintings

Merce Cunningham - Movement

Flag painting and the creative process

Ryman's Rainbow

I first titled this Rain for Ryman, because I thought Ryman's Rainbow was not serious enough, but once I realized you can't change what it needs to be and I kept thinking of this painting as Ryman's Rainbow, I had to go back to the orginal thought so---- Ryman's Rainbow it is.

Copyright RaNae Couture 2010

Surface Veil by Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman
American (Nashville, Tennesee, 1930)
Surface Veil

1970-1971
Painting | oil on fiberglass with waxed paper frame and masking tape

Brice Marden

Robert Ryman

Color, Surface & Seeing

ART:21: Can you talk about the way you use the color white in your paintings?

RYMAN: White has a tendency to make things visible. With white, you can see more of a nuance; you can see more. I’ve said before that if you spill coffee on a white shirt, you can see the coffee very clearly. If you spill it on a dark shirt, you don’t see it as well. So it wasn’t a matter of white, the color. I was not really interested in that. I started to cover up colors with white in the 1950s. It has only been recently, in 2004, that I did a series of white paintings in which I was actually painting the color white. Before that I’d never really thought of white as being a color in that sense.

ART:21: That’s a long time to use a color in that particular way.

RYMAN: Until then it was just that white could do things that other colors could not do. If I look at some white panels in my studio, I see the white—but I am not conscious of them being white. They react with the wood, the color, the light, and with the wall itself. They become something other than just the color white. That’s the way I think of it. It allows things to be done that ordinarily you couldn’t see.

ART:21: How?

RYMAN: If the panels were black or blue or red, they would become a different thing. You would see the color and the panels would become more object-like themselves, and more about that color. But white is such a neutral situation that when you see it, you’re not thinking white. You’re just able to see something as what it is.

ART:21: How important is surface in your work?

RYMAN: Well, since I’m not working with illusion or narrative that allows me the freedom to explore. The painting can be very thin, very close to the wall. Sometimes it can come away from the wall. I think it’s important that it stay connected to the wall. I think it needs the wall itself to be complete. But it opens up many possibilities.

ART:21: Is there any specific ideology or kind of thinking that could be connected with your work?

RYMAN: Existentialism. Years ago I read a lot of that and I liked it. I agreed with it. But I don’t know how much that has to do with my painting. It’s kind of senseless to look back. I mean, I’m always involved with tomorrow and today, not yesterday. I’m always thinking about tomorrow.

ART:21: Does that affect your painting?

RYMAN: In painting you always have a structure. You have to have that in order to go forward, to put things together. My painting is not limited at all. I have many possibilities in terms of approach. And the reason I have that is because I’m not limited by a certain narrative that I want to get across. There’s no symbolism or story that I need to tell or some kind of political project that I might want to do. I’m not limited by any of that. I don’t have any of those things to stop me from experimenting and to going forward.

ART:21: So you’re constantly finding new ways to do things.

RYMAN: I like to do something that I don’t exactly know how to do. I don’t like to do things that I know I can do. If I take a certain approach to certain paintings, when I finish the problem, I don’t have to go on with it. I’m more interested in finding what else I can do that’s more of a challenge for me.

ART:21: Do you think your viewers find your work satisfying?

RYMAN: I have to be satisfied with it before anyone else can be satisfied. It has to be of interest to me and I have to feel good about the result in order for anyone else to feel good about it. But what anyone else is going to feel—of course don’t know what’s going to happen with that. I would hope that they have a good experience, but it’s a very specialized thing. Not everyone is a connoisseur of painting. You don’t really know what people will think about it. But you hope that someone will feel good about it.

ART:21: How did you arrive at painting mostly squares?

RYMAN: The square? I began with that in the 1950s. The square has always just been an equal-sided space that I could work with. Somehow it’s become so natural to me that I just don’t think of it any other way. It doesn’t have the feeling of a landscape or some kind of window or doorway that we usually associate with rectangles. It’s just a very neutral kind of space, and it seems to feel right to me because of my approach to painting.

ART:21: Do you think your work asks for a certain type of viewing situation?

RYMAN: In a sense, the paintings move outward aesthetically. They go out into the space of the room. They’re involved in that space and certainly they involve the wall itself. So if you have something else next to the painting—if the painting were on a brick wall—that would not be good. You would have a lot of visual activity going on along the wall, and that would dilute the painting. A brightly colored wall would also change the painting, particularly some of those which are on translucent material or the ones with waxed paper or plastics. All of that changes the feeling of a painting completely. It needs to be on a neutral, smooth surface. Even though light is important, it doesn’t have to be special light. But the painting needs a certain reverent atmosphere to be complete.

The painting needs a certain reverent atmosphere to be complete. It has to be in a situation so it can reveal itself—since it is what it is on its own. It’s not representing anything else—what you’re seeing is really what it is—so it has to be in a certain visual situation because anything else will dilute or disturb it. The paintings do not signify anything other than how they work in the environment. Some people say they look like clouds, or that they look blank. But that’s because they’re looking at them as if they were pictures of something. So of course they’re going to see nothing, or they’re going to see something—something that is white. I don’t have any control over that.

ART:21: Why are your series often produced in odd numbers?

RYMAN: It has to do with the way we see things. Aesthetically we see things in a certain way. I like odd numbers because you always have a center with an odd number. With an odd number you have an expansive feeling—a feeling of things moving out from the sides. With an even number you have the wall as the center, so it’s more of an enclosed feeling. It doesn’t move outward as much as the odd number does—which is also okay. But certain things have different feelings visually. If I have something that has ten elements, it’s not so crucial, because I have enough that I don’t really need a center. A triptych is ideal because you have a center. A diptych is always a problem, they never seem to work very well. It’s just the way we see things.

ART:21: What other painters have influenced your work?

RYMAN: I was very influenced by Matisse, by his sureness. In painting something has to look easy, even though it might not be easy. Matisse looked like everything just came together easily and naturally. And I try to do that myself. Maybe I’m not always successful, but that’s an important part of painting, that it has to have that feeling. Like a Pollock for instance, it looks so easy, but it wasn’t so easy. But it has to have that feeling like it just happened.

ART:21: Any other artists?

RYMAN: There are many. Cezanne for instance, what a fantastic things he did. He was always one of my favorite painters...his structure and his paint handling. I mean, he really understood paint. He understood how it works and what it could do. The way he could put things together was phenomenal.

Rothko, was very influential for me. When I first saw Rothko I’d never seen a painting that way before. And I didn’t know what he was doing, I’d been looking at pictures all the time and here was something that had a totally different feeling to it.

ART:21: Have you ever felt any of your paintings were a complete failure?

RYMAN: No, there’s never any failure. I mean, I would never show a painting that I didn’t feel right about. I would never let it out. There have been a few paintings that I’ve destroyed through the years, but some I wish I hadn’t. At the time the paintings weren’t what I wanted at the moment, so I rejected them. But usually I don’t have any work that I would call a failure. Usually I work the paintings through so that they are okay in the end.

The artists at Spectrum Health Neuro Rehab Residential have many new paintings showing at the gallery. Take time to stop in and view their amazing works of art.
4130 Kalamazoo Ave SE. Grand Rapids, Michigan 49508
616-455-7300 ext. 388
Check out the websites listed here.
They will be having a show this summer at a local gallery in Grand Rapids.

RaNae's Current Show With Artist Brooke Wendt.

Arts Council of Greater Grand Rapids, 532 Ottawa Ave. NW (459-2787, artsggr.org) -- "If I were a rich girl," digitally manipulated photographs by Kendall College of Art and Design student Brooke Wendt, through April 9; "Dance of a Conversation," paintings by RaNae Couture, a recent Aquinas College graduate who works as nurse and art educator at Spectrum Health Neuro Rehabilitation, through April 9. Hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday. Also, RaNae is showing paintings at Spectrum Health Neuro Rehabilitation Services Gallery, a new gallery in Grand Rapids that shows works by talented artist who are deeply involved in the creative process, check it out at 4130 Kalamazoo Av. SE., 616-455-7300 ext 388. The Spectrum Health website has many of the paintings.

http://www.spectrum-health.org/body_servicetabs.cfm?id=1757

Title: Wonder....Boy, size: 28 x 46, Artist: RaNae Couture

Currently showing at Spectrum Health Neuro Rehab Services Gallery in Grand Rapids, 4130 Kalamazoo Ace. SE. 616-455-7300, ext 388
This painting was purchased by a local art collector.

James McNeill Whistler
Nocturne:Grey and Gold - Snow in Chelsea (1876). 47,2 cm x 62,5 cm. Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

"Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick and choose... that the result may be beautiful – as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony... (James Abbot McNeill Whistler)"

Scriabin

We all need a little Kandinsky.

A painting by RaNae Couture / 2009

size 30 x 40,Title P.O Box 404, Oil On Canvas, copyright RaNae Couture 2009

Drawing

"The essence of drawing is the line exploring space." (Andy Goldworthy)
"A curved line for beauty, a straight line for duty." (Violet Linton)