In Training: Aimee

 

In my third portrait of the day, I finally choked.   The likeness wasn't coming together by the half hour and I quickly fell behind with corrections.  I didn't even have a chance to get to the hair before the bell!  If this was the real deal competition, I don't think I would have passed elimination with this result.  Above is where I was at at the one hour point.

 

Ah well, I wasn't going to let a little failure from stopping me from making a decent painting today.   This is the result of an extra twenty minutes that I won't have next Saturday.  I will have some serious trouble if my model has long hair and soft features.  

In Training: Melvin

 

Today I set up shop in UNCP's painting studio to practice my technique for the upcoming ArtFields contest.   Four of my students each generously donated an hour of their time to sit  and help me train.   First up, Melvin Morris, who is studying Painting as his primary studio area.   I set my watch and carved out the above in an hour.   I have to admit, I was pleased by the result, even though it doesn't really look like Melvin, but more like some heroic, Biblical figure.  He had on a great green shirt, so I was forced to cheat and add in the rest in an additional five minutes:

For the sake of pepping up my ailing blog, I will post the remaining studies over the next three days...

Bring on the Green

Here's the latest from the Beata/Abi addition to the series.  I can be very rough and intuitive, but occasionally I do stop and make some conscious risks.  I began the painting with violets and ochres instead of conventional flesh tones, and kept warming things up with pinks on top of that. The painting was needing highlights, and my first impulse was to keep going with a lighter pink in the highlight for naturalistic skin tones.  I paused and thought, "what's the fun in that?"   With the colors left on my palette, I mixed up cool mint which would add maximum contrast, hoping this would bring out the volume, and it worked.   Though I've discovered this color logic over the years on my own, it is essentially a very old idea stemming from Venetian painting, where color, not value, is relied upon to create the illusion of volume.  Reflecting further, I am struck by a little more irony and contradiction built into this series:  I began by riffing off of Leonardo's imagery, which is essentially Florentine and his methods are Florentine, relying chiefly on value.   By all accounts, though, my methods are direct and Venetian.   It's a conceptual flaw, but I think I'll just keep going regardless.

The Devil's In...(Goat 6,7)

When painting a goat, one is aware of it's more sinister connotations, but I'm not really thinking of that devil.  I'm thinking of the old saying, the "Devil's in the details,"  which usually refers to some small, missed, detail that can wreck an undertaking.  In finishing a painting, I find myself more and more concerned about the detail that gets added, of overworking.  The unwanted added detail amounts to the same effect as the detail overlooked, failure, but my meaning is an inversion, a reminder to avoid the trap of detail. Distraction helps. Luckily, I've been either stretching or priming a canvas each day, so new paintings will join the cycle as these near completion. 

Here are the two latest sessions, with the right showing the current state.   More light has been built up over the face and arm, adding more solidity to the form.  A little youthful roundness has left, the eyes are more tranquil with information added.

Titles

I've made a lot fuss over the cat in this painting, so when it comes to a title, I had thought of simply calling it "Millie."   I tend towards pretty dry titles, in the Modernist vain of "Sleep no. 1" and "Sleep no.6.  Such work makes sense in a title formal series and leaves the viewer to wrestle with looking at the painting without an easy lifeline.    After all, shouldn't the painting to do the work without having to being completed with a title?  I'm also keen on a little bit of mystery. People are infinitely complex and a good portrait just scratches the surface, telling you little more than the sitter's name.   For observed portraits it seems pretentious to make up something literary, so I usually go with something obvious like "Beata and Sadie."  Things are getting a little stranger with the narrative paintings, however, and stranger still when I'm inventing the sitter.   There's a history I'm digging through, someone I'm discovering, and a new working title comes to mind:  "Leonora's Venetian Tendencies."  I'll live with it for a while and see if it sticks.

Rough, Smooth

Between the relative ideas of rough and smooth, I would say my surfaces tend more towards the rough, but only if you compared them with a highly varnished panel.  (A Dutch still life comes to mind.) With regards to the image, most people would still see the image as smooth, thinking of the roundness of the form, even when looking at at painting with a lot of impasto, and general crusty paint. (Monet's haystacks, as an example.) I tend to let surfaces mostly dry and allow opaque layers to show one over another over many sessions.  This latest layer had a lot of direct painting into a wet surface and it felt uncharacteristically smooth. (Previous layers.)   With this series, I am really trying to keep the surfaces as thin for the very practical idea of getting them to Poland.

Design

 

Another new one;  I snapped a few pictures during the drawing process so you could see me working with an idea.   Something I tell young students, a painting isn't started until all the white (in this case, pink)  is covered. I mainly tell them this to give them something very simple to achieve in the first class to break through the intimidation of starting a painting.   I don't ask for quality, just coverage.

I often use a toned ground for the same purpose and to see value relationships more clearly, yet I become just as reluctant to see this new clean surface disappear. Drawing on canvas is so beautiful in itself that it could be tempting to just leave it as it is.  When the ground is covered, that energy of a start does die a little, but it leads to a new, quieter, level of process. 

Grounds

I've been preparing new canvases this week for paintings that can travel to Poland later this summer. Right now, I'm imagining removing them from the stretchers when finished, and restretching them once there, so I'll need a flexible ground.  For the archivists out there, I'm using one coat of Golden GAC 100 to seal the linen, lightly sanding the surface after that dries to promote better adhesion between layers, followed by some Golden acrylic gesso, another light sanding, and then one final layer of acrylic gesso.  For the winter series, I liked to start on a ground that was slightly blue, and I've altered it further here with magenta.  It's not riveting, but it's relaxing and a bit exciting imagining all the new paintings to follow. 

Accident

So I was working on this little linen painting. Two days before, the head was a green blob. (Really thought I took an image of that) The face developed rapidly, and I was imagining that it would go the way of eave; maybe he was just some guy leaning against a tree, catching his breath.  I didn't know why he was leaning into the tree so hard with his shoulder like that--I try not to question at this stage.











Anyways, still the same painting.  I was photographing a lot of little work for the blog, and was being lazy (or efficient) by placing this painting on its side to photograph since the camera was already on its side in the horizontal position.   I was immediately struck by how much more sense the image made.  There's nothing like lying in the snow, feeling ice against your cheek.  (Now that's a breather!) All that was lacking was some light and gravity.

With the paint still wet and the camera still on the tripod, I was compelled to make some quick changes.   Okay, so it's a little colder and maybe a wholly more pessimistic image, but that's what happened.   I may have to make more images of this situation to figure out what's going on.  

Overworked, defined

After posting, I realized that I was taking the word "overworked" for granted.  Of my handful of readers, there is an even split of artists and non, so I was forgetting that the non-artists may be lost.  This blog gets distributed to Facebook, where "overworked" has a much more conventional meaning, the "I'm trapped at the office-overworked" sort of meaning that I genuinely feel for. So,  I need to clarify:  I'm not overworked, the painting is. 

Sometimes a painting goes too far:  what was once easy becomes effort, then chore. As a result, the image loses some of the life the artist wishes to convey. When this happens, the picture is overworked.  I tend to overwork things, pride myself on the effort, the struggle to bring them back to life.  The picture may never regain it's vitality, it's youthful exuberance,  but it may gain something of a hard-won maturity-- adulthood, grit.   However, sometimes the effort fails, it's a loss, a wash.   The torture of the digital age is having a record of the past steps. or what was.   In Photoshop, you can click undo.  The game of oil painting is a constant wager of risking safe solutions for somethings perhaps better.   Of course, this can be addictive.  Somethings stages may be better left alone. 

Breaking It Open

After a brief hiatus from blogging and the studio, I've returned with ideas to wrap up a few paintings. The luxury of working business hours in the studio during sabbatical has been rewarding but the working rhythm has been difficult to establish and all too easily broken. My normal working method during semesters is on a paint-when-able basis, consisting of a few hours here, an hour there, and even thirty minutes when I can take it. I teach literally next door so I run over whenever I can even if its just to eat lunch and stare at my paintings.

I may have mentioned that I don't have an end idea for paintings when I start. It can make the painting process daunting or slow-going to say the least. You could say I've grown to depend on resting intervals to come back and see things differently. It may be cliche, but I often do strike out quickly with a solution in apparent bolt-from-the-blue inspiration. Far from being a true mystic, I recognize inspiration, like intuition, as a cultivated faculty. I believe in the mind's back-burner, the thoughts that simmer, and the value of periods of gestation.

The big reason I went to Indiana University, aside from the scholarship, was to study with Robert Barnes. What little I knew of his narrative paintings I liked, and we seemed to share a decided non-academic bent to representational imagery. Well, one thing Barnes would talk about was "breaking a painting open." At 22, the last thing I could stand was timid or even careful painting so it wasn't much of problem back then. I had no idea how to finish a painting. Now, this current series is lending itself towards resolution, I can't bare to make it too easy. When I take some time away from the studio, I often have to come back and make a significant change to get the ball rolling again. (Sometimes regret tells me what to do, like the time I added the cockatoo to a finished, but boring, self-portrait after it sat around for a year.)

Today, the break was an insane amount of red highlights. I also found an old coat to reference the lapels I'd been imagining and brought it in. I've know for months that there was no consistent light in the painting, and that the coat was a big violet void between the hand and face. At first, I was convinced I liked that void, so common in medieval painting. Then I tried the red highlights, which didn't work, so I painted them back out. So a few hours ago, I scrapped some aging red paint off the palette, muddied it up with some phtalo, and I could just feel the wool. Okay, so I am a bit of a mystic. We'll just have to see how it strike me in the morning.

Prep for Stonington

Leaving in the morning for a few days to paint in Stonington, Maine. A house was donated by Stephen Pace to the college a few years back, and I was finally offered the opportunity to go. He is a painter, so there's a studio I should be able to use. As you can see, I've been priming surfaces all week in preparation.