It's a beautiful spring day here in Indianapolis.
The warmth is just overpowering.
Well believe it or not, we're here on this gray day
to talk about color.
Oh yeah?
I feel like there will never be color ever again in my life.
We're here to meet with Lauren Zoll,
an Indianapolis based artist who most recently has
used a lot of black latex poured paint in her work
and has shown that black, like white, is not a neutral color.
There's a lot of color within it.
This is a fascinating conversation.
And I look forward to continuing it.
But I'm hoping that we can continue it in,
like, not the snow.
You want to go inside?
I want to go inside.
All right, let's go see Lauren.
I am Lauren Zoll, and this is your art assignment.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I was trained as a metalsmith, blacksmithing, fabrication.
I was just always in love and attracted to metal.
I feel like I grew up around it, it's part of me.
But at a certain point, I decided to give that up.
I wasn't feeling well, and it was dirty.
And it was costly.
And then actually, I did get sick.
So I was spending a lot of time sleeping,
and my eyes were closed.
And it occurred to me, well I had the desire to make a void.
So I want to make this void.
But then after you make a void, it immediately
materializes into something.
So how do you solve that problem?
And so I just went, and I started pouring black paint.
I was like, I've had it.
I don't know, I'm just going to pour this.
I knew that the painting had an ability that was something
other than being a painting.
It was talking to me.
And it was saying, I can see too.
The viewers are always staring at paintings,
but I want the painting to stare back.
And that was the beginning of this process.
When we see reflections in something,
like a screen or even a window, to me that's information.
Maybe it's mystical information.
But pulling those in and making sense of them
is another alternative way of seeing.
Your assignment is to demonstrate
that a flat, black, static screen has the potential
to show a dynamic visual world.
So step one is turn off a screen.
Step two is take a photo of only the screen.
Step three is while you're taking that photo,
think of color, pattern, and form
to help demonstrate this multi-dimensional world that's
around this screen.
Oh.
And this is not figurative work.
So leave yourself and others out of it.
I could do this with my old phone in my bedside table
or one of my other old phones in my bedside table.
It occurs to me that I have a bunch.
I am aware.
But it's interesting with this assignment
to think about reflections in art.
Perhaps with something like Manet's "A Bar
at the Folies-Bergere," which is this wonderfully puzzling image
that art historians love to discuss,
where what's reflected in the glass
is different than what's in front of it.
No, I think that's probably just
because it involves vampires.
(LAUGHING) Oh, boy, John.
This is a really high level of discourse.
I know, I thank you.
I'm bringing my A game.
But Lauren said specifically that there shouldn't
be people in her assignment.
And there are definitely people there.
Fair point.
What about Anish Kapoor's "Cloud Gate" in Chicago?
Oh, you mean "The Bean?"
Yeah, "The Bean."
JOHN GREEN: I love "The Bean."
I love how you see the city reflected
in this funhouse mirror.
But you also see yourself, so you
see yourself seeing the city.
It's super cool.
Yeah, it is great.
But I think I have a better idea of what it relates to.
In the 18th century, a number of artists and tourists
in Europe and North America started
to carry around a small convex mirror
with a tinted black surface.
To use it, you would turn your back on an especially lovely
landscape and hold the mirror in front of you,
to view the reflected scene.
The black glass had the effect of simplifying the tonal range
and shaping the image into a neater view.
It became known as a Claude Glass, named after 17th century
artist, Claude Lorrain, whose then popular landscape
paintings display a similarly subtle gradation of tones.
Tourists put them to use to give a vista a painterly look,
while artists used them to help frame their image and achieve
a quality like Lorrain's.
18th century writer William Gilpin
thought the Claude Glass should be used to better appreciate
the picturesque, which he described
as that peculiar kind of beauty which
is agreeable in a picture.
Looking through either a Claude Glass,
the surface of one of Lauren Zoll's paintings,
or the off screen of your phone all frame and shape
the world around you in a specific
and sometimes revelatory way.
I think this is a good exercise because it shows when something
is off it can still have a potential to be productive,
to see something different.
Whether it's things being off around you,
and how that makes you feel, or when
you're kind of in the state of you're just off today.
Other ideas might come to you, other thoughts or feelings
kind of creep up to you.
And those are important moments to have.
That's how the assignment came to me.
I was just in off mode and sitting on the couch.
And it hit me like that.
So I wanted to express how important being off was.
And then I think that's when I said OK, turn off your phone,
turn off your television, and take a photo of that
off screen.
Kind of find the space that the screen is showing you
and start moving things in.
Like it could be a pile of books.
It could be colored paper.
If you can use natural light within that setup,
that also really helps.
I will never forget my instructor
telling me about variation.
And what that means is to not have the same size of anything,
but have varying sizes or varying patterns.
When it's interesting to you, it's a successful composition.
Find the first reflection that you see on your way
out and smile at it.