A TINY BUT COMPLETE
PAINTING COURSE

Aristo Tacoma



2008




Note: the most important comment on what spring BI
(my painting style) is all about is in the completing
paragraphs; however it presupposes knowledge of
the foregoing paragraphs. You are at liberty to
distribute this document in an educational
setting, respectfully, without any charge, insofar
as you (1) include the reference to 
yoga6d.com/a_tiny_but_complete_painting_course.htm,
(2) do not insert or delete or modify any text or
image. This text is not only a course, but also
-- and sometimes more importantly -- a guide to
how to perceive the paintings, which are, in one
sense, much more complicated that the computer
renderings by this author of known or unknown
photos by others in these pages.



======================================================


Welcome to this informal but hopefully complete
painting course in that style which I have named
spring (green) black impressionism, or spring BI,
for short. That is not to say that the spring
green and black are its only ingredients -- it
has white and lush very light blue, and the black
might be matted towards the deep brown or grey on
occasion, and the spring green might vary towards
the yellow. The acronym BI is also used to indicate
that the beauty, in an impressionistic sense, which
makes girls want to kiss girls, must be considered
a foundational esthetical paradigm for all painters.
We don't have to call the objects of the art for
angels, muses, gods in order to have the bisexual
component -- and girls mustn't try to fool themselves
into believing that male beauty works on its own,
without resting on femaleness; whereas, in contrast,
female beauty works on its own, without resting on
maleness -- because female beauty is the greater 
that can call on masculine aspects as well. Female
beauty is the gatherer, that which makes whole.










These sketches, which I have put together by
means of a computer in this case -- for I do not
like what happens to a painting when it is 
photographed and then mimicked digitally -- it
becomes something less, something smaller; nor
do I like the idea of working out a sketch on the
computer, then starting to paint it from there --
as if the computer is going to be boss of the
process. Painting must happen from the heart,
and it must in some sense start afresh each time:
it is about having the beginner's mind.



















Some claims that it is not easy to discuss the
question of taste in any objective fashion. But
I disagree -- except that I am not going to do
a lot of discussion of taste here, nor explain
why I disagree to that particular point. I will
"justify" -- if that's the word I want -- the
notion of focussing on the spring green color
together with black, and some other tones such
as white and very light blue, by a following
postulate, and I invite the reader to experiment
first-hand with various tools, if the reader
disagrees: anything that looks gorgeous on black
and white looks gorgeous with spring green/black.
That is postulate one. Postulate two is that it
looks often even better. Postulate three is that
if you put a lot of other colors up big on your
walls the effects of these colors on your skin,
your health, and your mood may not be what you
want. Some examples: blue colors are beautiful
when they are not overly dominating -- but a
roomful of blue and bluish shapes, exclusively,
might be freezing cold. Red colors are beautiful
when the lips are ruddy and full but when red is
splashed as on an impressionistic painting unless
done with immense care, and moderately in a room, it
looks like a case of bad health. Yellow colors are
beautiful to shine up something but when dominant
they do not give rest, they do not soothe, but
create -- rather as orange -- a kind of over-
fluctuation. Black can work -- fantastically --
but it requires a whole society dedicated to
meditatation and tantrism, with depth of soul,
and it might not be too easily understood in
more common societies. Too much white and -- well,
the content comes by other colors than white and
grey but contrasts with them are right.
Too much gold everywhere in a room and it is 
all metal. Too much violet and we 
are flying across the skies but where is the 
sensuality, the meeting of beautiful young
skin against skin? But we solve it all by
understanding that the interplay between
light shining green and black is rather like 
the interplay which ANY contrast involves --
for what is more opposite to black than shining
spring rising green? Surely, in many contexts, white 
has a lot more in common with black than green. And red 
is already darker, and blue much darker still. But bright
yellow is so near white for it is not organic
except if it is the liveliness of a dancing
living being with yellow lovely hair and all
that. So on a static image, light green is the
archessential contrast to black. But some of this
contrasts exists also between very light light green
and slightly darker green: but we speak of the chemical
green which is near the computer-bright almost fluorescent
green, a dimension unto itself which is not a mere
mingling of blue and yellow -- something rather
unexplored in the past of painting, even in the
20th century, at least as an explicit phrase in history.

























When you paint, you are doing something which can learn
immensely from sketching cartoon-like line drawings.
For with the line drawings, you learn the geometry of
health.

















But painting has something about it -- unless you, for
fun, do it in the cartoon-like sense, which is also
possible, but perhaps a little bit sense of waste of
expensive paint, for cartoons we can certainly get
done extremely well on e.g. the LAB program in a
computer (cfr GJ2 programs), -- painting, anyway, has
something about it which can be said to involve an
interplay on the canvas (the area on which you paint),
-- in 2d, if you like -- the paint interacts with the
paint. And that is like a dance: but the dance adds
up to something, and what it adds up to you see if you
squeeze your eyes together and let your brain do the
inner work of piecing the mosaic together to a whole.




















The girl bowing forward, sun is shining on her, --
the shadow is not just a shadow but it is a green
like the green also around her, and in the varying
colors in her hair. And yet it is possible to see 
this as nothing but an interplay between colors which
are beside one another. So there are two forms of
music interposed on one another.














Sometimes we may, for variation, even in spring/black
impressionism, want to make it smoother. But the smoothness
of a painting is very different and more complex -- much
more complex -- than the smoothness of a cartoon. In the
cartoon, the line must be straight or curved smooth-straight.
But to get a smooth thigh, you must have, in doing spring BI,
a whole palette of tones from black to extremely light green
and also including white and white with a little bit very
light blue, and to make this palette, you will certainly
also need yellow. And then you must refrain from the
possibility of letting go of the language of the paintbrush.
The language of the canvas -- the interplay between the
color patches -- must be sustained. It mustn't suddenly
be meshed together to a fluid soup. It must be the mosaic.
The brain relishes in seeing two languages blended together
at two different levels, yet represented as one form.





















And once you have made the brain alive to see a series of
paintings, then let it work and be happy with it. It is 
like the great author or the great poet -- some words
come, and you do the rest, for the words are, though few,
just so right.




















And then there is such a thing as anatomy and anatomy which
is dramatically right and, well, RESPECT that nudity. Learn
to drink energy from it. The more pluralistic BI-beauty
focussed you are, the better your mind is. Respect the
fantastic wellshapedness which is around you and don't
get stuck on representing your own feet or whatever feature
about yourself you like the most -- or whatever feature about
one another person you like the most. Beauty is many and much
and ever-more and ever-richer. And it is ALL different. It
is but the sluggish brain that says, 'oh, that's very
common, I've seen that a million times.' One has to ask
back then, 'Oh have you? Have you seen that particular
light, that particular way of standing, in exactly that
way?' For it is the exactness of the moment that it its
meditation and those who know about that are getting to
know art and do not speak anymore of theories of art or
contemporary art or modern art or post-modern or whatever.
For art in itself is younger than contemporary art and
any adjective which qualifies the word "art".




















Have you learned about lips? Good. Now there's a lot more
to learn about lips. There is never enough learning about
lips. If you know that by heart you are a painter: and
you are also generous to the blooming young teens and
preteens who emerge into the beautiful universe of
humanity.


















And there are times in which you just have to trust 
intuition and don't ask "why". You do it: it is healthy,
but perhaps severe. By respecting the minimum patch-size
and the patch-type of paint used within a single canvas --
some elements of horisontal lines, some elements of 
very sharp roughles, you cannot suddenly go about drawing
minute and sharp lines to depict a certain organ. So
you can go beyond the cartoon criterion of drawing the
eyes with the typical light-reflection that make the
eyes alive: you can dare to portray a face in which it
is only the observing human being who will know that
this is a very healthy human being with beautiful eyes,
beautiful nose, beautiful lips: and do not go against the
concept of beauty. For beauty is the source of intelligence,
rejuvenation, luck, it is inspiration for spirituality,
for it is about the coherence of being and skin, the
coherence which makes the body the temple of spirit and
soul. Someone who speaks against life or against beauty --
and life is indeed beauty -- are in fact speaking against
art, and they need to rethink whether they are in touch
with their real feelings. It is possible to make all
sorts of anti-life sentiment into a temporary fashion
but that is not spring BI. Spring BI, being the spring
artist, involves a deep honoring of beauty and not 
try to go beyond that beauty which is about the slender
longlimbed teen girl. And if the artist is fat, she should
go without food for some days, and get lean: for the artist
must partake, at least to a fair extent, in the beauty
process, and not try to redefine beauty if she is not
herself feeling up to being beautiful one season. It is
hard, but life isn't meant to be easy at all. And art is
life.
















How can you tell that the patches which are so irregular-
looking are going to outline a beautiful slim perfect
young arm? And why shouldn't the patches be straightened
out like in a photograph? Well, the photograph represents
the beautiful girl but the painting creates the beauty and
allows various real beautiful girls to step into that
virtual space. And the patches are a tease to the brain,
and to the soul of the observer: here we are, can you go
beyond us? Do you see the perfection beyond them? Do you
see that despite they fluctuating sometimes this way,
sometimes that way, as a whole they render themselves into
sublime, utter smoothness, the kind you want to kiss?





















And so art awakens your senses: and you meet a
stranger for perhaps five seconds and her lips,
her serious eyes, the gaze -- it stirs you, long
into the small hours of the night: and this meditation
is between your legs and ears and in your fingers and
must become your art, and it is not about having a
model that you are looking at and then looking at
the canvas. You paint what you want to paint, but
you are letting yourself not be overly sensitive
but sensitive enough to elegantly open up to new
forms of sensuality among the young, being yourself
young and independent and playfully celibatic as
a vague life-attitude that yet can have orgies.
(This, then, I say: an artist is that young person
who hasn't settled into a fixed firm partnership
but those who have settled into a fixed firm
partnership of some kind honor that, and don't
try to combine that with what it cannot be combined
with. For art must more essentially have beauty
in living rather than in what you express on a
canvas.)

















There is not one way to paint a face and it is amazing
how rough one can be such as with eyebrows and yet the
mind of the observer, the heart of the observer, turns
the beautiful Spring BI painting into something whole,
fluid, organic, sensual, perfect. 





















And so there are those who think that they can control
their entry and their movements in life, they make schemes,
they try to make a list of people to be "in" with, they
try to find out what phrases to use, what sounds clever.
But art is something entirely, utterly beyond all that.
Art is to end ego.




















And having much much beauty around you allows you
to be a little bit more experimentative, to do things
that you know less about but feel are okay anywhere.
What is she holding, behind her back, and her hand
is behind it? Part of a clothing? Or is she about
to enter into the water? The navel has a radiance
for the paint-patches around it are different,
systematically yet somewhat unsystematically different,
as an aura. Dark far behind her is what -- a house?
Or the side of some kind of machine? And that little
lightness to the sky, but again it is not smooth. 
Why not get liveliness in everywhere in the picture
(in this we follow the pre-raphalists to some extent)?


















And art is the abandonment of ego, so that what is more
deep can come forth, a letting go of self, a letting go
of control, but healthily so.




















And you also want the blonde, her hair is strutting, it is
easier to paint the black or dark-haired type of course,
for the contrasts. So you must spend more time with the
blonde hair to get it to be so alive as it truly is.
Whatever you do with the nose, usually, let it be the
done lightly: but this we can also literally interpret --
it can be the lightest patch. Don't get stuck into one
type of nose, or one type of lips, or one type of slant
of eyes. 





















Hair is so rich, changing in every moment, changing from
girl to girl, changing from day to day, from second to
second, and so it is showing in a way a record of the
girl's recent dance..
















And spend good time with feet. You know nothing of anything
before you know feet. That slight little touch that indicates
that you know about how the arch should be in the paint
object, but you don't overdo it, you let it be felt that
you know it. This is not about looking like somebody, a
good painting looks only like itself. And that is its
fractal finesse: you see a lot of some kind of lines, or
some kind of angles, or some kinds of circles, or some kinds
of squares, or some kinds of rhythms, and they are here and
they are there and like music, you don't know why it works
perhaps but it works, and that's the point. 



















Why is she smiling? What is it that allows the patches to
indicate the smile? You see you must have so many nuances
of green and you are not looking at anybody, you are 
squeezing your eyes a little bit (the gentle way of
squeezing, which is to nearly close them, so that you
retain smoothness of skin). Her backhead is queenly, her
hair has the shine. Is she nude? Is it a bed or bath or
spaceship or whatever behind her? Is she inviting somebody
to come with her? Unlike the series of photos, the standing
painting speaks of all-possibility.























What is action when it has no ego, no fixed attachment or
desire, but there is passion without greed or hatred,
there is awareness, attention, dance, flow, smoothness
which is not based on clutching, but in awe over beauty?
You are going beyond the dogma of the past associating
all that is joyous with mere ego-desire. Does not spirit
have joy and true free lust? And so Spinoza had one thing
right, but one thing: that mind and matter never interacted
at all, but they are unfoldments, apparently in interaction
perhaps but rather synchronically unfolding from God. 
















So the background can be white to emphasize the girl,
white with a tiny bit of blue so as to have a lush
contrast to the dynamic light green. You are not
thinking cartoon when you think hair: you are thinking
of meditation, you are dreaming the girl and maybe
a patch more there but also maybe not, maybe of 
a different color: you must respect the two levels
of language, the patch-language, and the language of
the girl/muse you are calling on, as art is a prayer.
Be sure though, that the prayer is not an attempt to
put together what ought not to be put together, for
the prayer happens within that God-mind of reality 
and there is a consequence of it, and the consequence
is not sweet if it is a bad thought in it. The prayer
must have ethics, it is not voodoo. It is not trying
to conjure something against something else. It is
an honoring of the generous "milk of kindness" in
humanity. It is an honoring of the god-source of
all: painting in a sensual sense must know that awesome
force and this also has to do with how the paintings
are used, and who gets to see them.



















If something is harmonious, it is harmonious without you
having to consciously realize at first anything about what
it might be on the level of imagined beings in an environment:
the colors work with themselves, as a lofty dance which is
pleasing. Remember that your body has many inner sub-language
activities and the artist must love to sleep among her
paintings and associate herself with them for many hours
many days of the week, must love to work and train and
make love among them, and there must be many paintings, for
one is not a painter unless one has completely lost track
of how much one has painted. But this quantity, this first-hand
generated quantity, surely shall have to have a lot of
deletion of initial tests, and so the computer is an
excellent tool where you don't have to waste tons of
kilograms of paint while you learn to make and force yourself
to throw. The stupidest thing a painter can do is to stick
to something when there is a sense of sluggishness the
next day on seeing something done the other day.


















Then when you've had it with patches you go for the small
patches and the greater accuracy just for fun, just to show
yourself that you can do that too: but still you must
respect the coarse-grainedness of paint, and still there are
the two levels -- of paint against paint, and the being
in the environment. The S shape, or the diagonal, and the
sharp sharp contrasts can make something stand forth and
create a power but then know that that power is controlled
by goodness, by health; don't mess with power or power will
mess with you: so you must be very careful when you do strong
contrasts.


















And so when light comes from above and you know what it means
that a girl has chinbones and shining skin and up-tilted nose
and white teeth and all that, allow yourself to dream them
up, perhaps dark hair even though you perhaps meet most with
blonde hair, for hair is an impression in flux. 






















If the girl can be given some item such as clothing or hat
or whatever which can blend exactly in colors with the
environment the brain has more challenge in conjuring her
up, and is stimulated more. As with cartoon-drawing, the
nose can be indicated perhaps just on one side. A cartoon
often begins by outline of face, then eyes so as to coordinate
the rest. A painting might have much the same sequence.
In a sense, blonde hair is striking for it reflects light
so well: but in a spring BI painting, black hair is striking,
for it is so other than perhaps most other elements in the
painting. So do not try to represent, but rather be playful
about what a color mean. Tease, perhaps a little bit like in
burlesque, in that sense, but don't forget the spiritual
sense of stretching high up towards God with long legs;
and longer still; it is not about being realistic but about
giving reality more spiritual entertainment if you wish.



















The machine and the girl: her skinny forms and the broadness
of the machine, its shadows. Squeeze eyes and her limbs become
shining, open them and it is a mystery how it works out that
they are shining. It doesn't necessarily take all that many
colors. 


















Give in to it; kiss her navel. What is goregous is gorgeous
and don't try to cultivate the ugly as if it is original.
There is only one type of originality: the immersion, the
total immersion if you like, in beauty, without a thought
of imitation. Be inspired, acknowledge the big inspirations
for main things put up big and on top, be kind about it, but
all beings and all photographs are essentially constructed
by a universe which is not manmade, but are emanations 
of this obviously art-friendly universe.





















What matters about hands is the overall shape of their
expression and the slenderness of lower arms that connect
to the hands. If the language of the paint-patches in your
spring BI painting is coarse, it is coarse, and let it be
coarse also when it comes to the fingers and the brain 
of the observer will forgive you completely because the
shapes are so right and the approach is so coherent. Don't
forget the enjoyment of body with body, don't merely
cultivate the statuesque but get the melt and the dance also.













There is not one way to stand: and the gorgeous girl
with her gorgeous slim legs standing in front of
whatever-it-is may stand in a way which, in a flash,
can signal her readiness for you. Of course it should
be up on a wall -- and all the more so, that you have
to work it out sometimes what it all means again. It is
a puzzle and the puzzle works out to great sex.























And as the long slender longlimbed beautiful blonde girl
has a body which you can never look enough at, and which
this universe is so keen on making that there will always
be more such beauty with all sorts of very subtle and
very refined forms of evolutions to them, so also is
face portrait a question of depth, sex, meditation,
physics, radiance. The big fleshy glamorous smooth lips
and the wild patches which make them up: that paradox,
and how the observing mind solves it.



















SO WHAT IS SPRING BI REALLY ABOUT? 
NOW RESCUE THE CARTOON DIMENSION!

Have you read all of the above? Have you browsed all the
above images? Have you meditated on it? Good. NOW DROP IT.
That's right, drop it all. Leave it. For when you have the
canvas, you have the paint -- I prefer acryllic, because
it is not containing false shine, the shine you must make
yourself, and it is possible to be much in the same room
as it dries (and it does dry in less than a couple of weeks),
without feeling one is getting high on oil chemicals. --Anyway,
when you have the canvas, you have the paint, these rules, these
hints, these examples, these ideas, THEY DO NOT APPLY.
  For you must go beyond -- beyond Kandinsky, beyond ideas,
beyond the graphical re-presentation of what you have seen,
beyond the greed to impress, beyond the greed to put to canvas
a sense of that mystery you don't get in real life. 
  And, you may find, that when you are a decent citizen on
Earth, that you may want to think of decent people having
decent living-rooms in which they eat decent dinners with
their decent parents and their soon-to-be-decent children,
and on the wall, there's your painting. And if you paint the
way it's indicated here, it is bare, it is nude, it is hippie,
the parents are going to wrinkle their noses, the children
are going to laugh, and some will be shame-faced. That is
why they buy a painting of bananas, or a painting of wase,
or a painting of sheep: it melts with the furniture. 
Or they may go and get a reproduction of some graphics
by Gustav Klimt, who had copulating females in his studio
and on his sketch-paper, but who dressed them all up in
golden flowers before releasing it unto the market.
  And here, when you are beyond the ideas of spring BI,
beyond Kandinsky and his condemnation of his dark green,
yet inspired perhaps by some formulations of his -- such
as, what counts is not what the painting is about, but 
what happens to the soul upon encountering the painting --
you may find that there is a relief in working towards the
cartoon approach after all. You may find that in bringing
in the palette of just a few greens, perhaps a golden 
background, a little white and lemon yellow, and with
black black hair and black outline of her thighs and
light green swirling spirals, perhaps number-like,
both around her and to some extent on her, it appears
suddenly that she has on clothes, even though you were
thinking nude and naked and hippie and you were forgetting
about all those questioning parents and about all those
family dinners. For by the cartoon you achieve the
abstraction that makes the painting, although full of
porn-inspired truth, melting more easily with the
chair, the desk, the wallpaper and the lamp. It comes
less fully out and is less a photo-image; it is less
something vulgar made for the masses who has bad taste
and it is more a playfulness of 2d with just hints of
3d, rather than the elaborate 3d -- and so, by the
playfulness, by the mentality of that which I sometimes
call the Lisa Cartoon Dimension, or the fourth dimension,
you can come up with something which, if given a solid
price and painted on a real big canvas and framed
professionally, can go into the world without making
havoc in the world.


================>GOOD LUCK!!!








BACKGROUND OF ARISTO TACOMA, ARTIST NAME FOR
STEIN HENNING BRATEN REUSCH,
AS REPRINTED ON ART EXHIBITIONS
============================================
* As kid, wildly interested in astronomy and
making star-stuff on canvas
* Also interested in computer graphics,
assembly language on computers put
together, chip by chip
* Editing a magazine on science and art in
a popular sense (the Norwegian "Flux" 3.5 yrs)
led to a number of conversations with artists
* Some of these conversations became very
intense and prolonged and led to a kind of
student-attitude in the undersigned with
some of these artists, long after the editorial
activity had passed away (due to programming
efforts, on making new platform and programming
language, Lisa GJ2, as on geocities.com/atiroal
with further links from there).
* In particular, hundreds of hours of talking
through every aspect of art with painter Frans
Widerberg in his atelier led to the picking up
of own art activity
* Experiments with computer graphics and 
learning afresh drawing based on programs
in which the computer screen is a cartoon-like
drawing board led to new ways of exploring
acryllic
* Similar discussion-series with long-
legged dancer and founder of dance group,
Monica Emilie Herstad led to new explorations
of movement, the concept of movement earlier
on explored in science with the notion of
the so-called "Flux" magazine -- and taken
further in my development of a new approach
to physics, entitled supertext or supermodel
theory -- spelled out in informal philosophical
terms but inspired by works also in computer
language






Any questions, contact atiroal@yahoo.com.