Two Lemons with Blue

Jean Townsend wrote on Saturday that working toward reducing detail
and losing edges feels hazardous, like everything will result in chaos if
allowed. That perfectly describes my inner state as I keep plodding. What
causes this fearfulness? It's just paint! It may have to do with a fear that I
may not be able to live up to my dream or shouldn't really trust my belief
that I really am an artist. Hence the trying too hard and the need for control
kicks in and before I'm aware of it, I'm painting from a conflicted place.
These past few months of using photos, images from TV and looking for
different ways to paint the same subject has eased the need to get things
"right." My little voice isn't scolding me for not quite matching that color.
More often, it now asks, "what if you put a splotch of red in that green
area, would it liven things up?"

Two Lemons

I'm actually thrilled with this little painting! I painted the lemons last,
mapped in their location hoping to keep my mind on making a painting
rather than on painting lemons. I thoroughly enjoyed making messy and
non-sensical strokes and blotches for everything non-lemon so when it
came time for the lemons, it felt easier to not over-think. I've been working
toward putting down marks, strokes, colors that would serve the picture
plane rather than the subject for quite awhile. It seems it's so much harder
to do when working figuratively. I've also been looking at "messy" painters
like Alex Kanevsky, Quang Ho, Robert Spooner, Kim English, Jordan
Wolfson, Thai Shan Schierenberg. This painting isn't much but it feels like
a milestone. It's another step . . . forward, I hope!

Recovery

Experimenting . . . trying to use paint more loosely so the result is
airier and less "concrete." This is painted from an image on the TV.
My aim is to move farther away from realism while still working
figuratively and the thought was that an image from a moving screen
would help my brain in the transition. There are many versions under
this one (for anyone who might have missed me and thought I was
slacking off :-)) but however loosely I approached this subject, I always
steered automatically towards smoothing and trying to get it right.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm forcing myself, too much, to go against my
"natural" inclinations. I do think I've made a lot of progress and have
done some competent and decent paintings but am feeling there is still
so much more to explore. The drive seems to come from incorporating
the abstract sensibility I seem to have lost once I decided to paint
figuratively.

Break Time

I had thought this was finished a few days ago but I had 

spelled out every leaf and it seemed wrong. So I set it aside 

and did the study I posted yesterday before tackling it again. 

I love painting this tool because of its ruby-red throat . . . it 

seems like it has a heartbeat. Is it sick to anthropomorphize 

a tool? That's kind of what we're all trying to do as painters: 

bring life to paint? Animate the inanimate? I had once 

thought of painting as self-indulgent because it doesn't really 

help anyone but then Daily Paintworks offered the Help Japan 

challenge and raised quite a lot of money! "Splendor in the 

Mess" did sell by the way and proceeds will go to the Japanese 

Red Cross. 

Thanks so much to all of you who are so supportive and take 

the time to comment and encourage!

Chisel Study 2

I had so much fun painting this . . . the good thing about
being willing to paint the same subject many times is that
you lose attachment to result. It's very freeing to know that
you can try again to use paint differently, emphasize different
aspects, experiment with color. Since embarking on painting
from life, I had lost my adventurous side . . . became fixated
on getting things "right" to the detriment of thinking pictorially.
I've taken down my lightbox and now set things up outside in natural
light and photograph them. I know many artists think it's a copout
to work from photographs but it's useful to me because I'm not
really interested in making pictures that look real. I'd rather make
pictures that have poignancy and presence and working from
a photo gives me a step away from "real reality." It gives me
license. This chisel was set on a warm earthy flagstone but once I
got the yellows and reds down I needed turquoise to make the reds
pop. I felt none of my usual compulsion to be faithful. There are
leaves in this setup and I had no real need to portray them . . . they
were amorphous shapes and colors, just supporting players. I am
feeling momentum.

Chisel Study 1

Also posted on http://sometexasartistsliketopaint.blogspot.com.

There They Are . . .

Always misplacing those glasses . . .
This is a little larger than usual --- 8 x 10. Maybe because it's spring
and I feel like breaking out but I'm finding the need to include more
space and background in my paintings.

On The Rocks Sold

I thought this was finished twice and I photographed it twice. But
each time it looked dead to me. I had rendered it fairly well, the second
time better than the first but it still didn't have the life I hoped for it.
I had read a comment from someone online who had said that in looking at a
Stuart Shils' painting, he thought Shils' had painted it with a credit card.
I wasn't happy with what I'd done so I mixed a wad of paint and gathered
it up with a credit card and scraped it vertically down the surface. For a
split second it felt actually painful to do that, to obliterate the hard work in
rendering a complicated subject. In the next second, I was trying to assess
what to do with the mess I now had on my hands and feeling no regret at all.
My thought was to put in only what was needed to make the subject recognizable.
In the end, this painting is not "it." I don't see that I'm any closer to achieving
what I'd like to see myself do---as result. I do, however, see myself as braver
in the process.

I'm shrugging here . . . I don't know . . .

Splendor In The Mess Sold

Here's another I will need to paint again . . . it's from a photo I took
late last year of the tangerines I'd picked and set on my messy kitchen
island. One morning, the sun slanted in at a beautiful angle and bleached
the leaves on the one at right. Fortunately, my camera was right there in the
midst of bills, papers, magazines . . . This photo offered a wealth of
challenges and also illustrated them quite clearly for me. The short focal
length blurred everything behind the main subjects, bleached out the
lights and gave me more depth than I can invent in my shadow-box.
My set-ups often seem so dull whatever I do with the lighting. There was
also so much information that it forced me to paint the shapes and values,
a much-needed exercise to keep tipping my brain towards thinking that way,
but what I haven't done as well as I hoped was to capture the blurry whites
through the center. They're quite blazing in the photo but behave and recede
just like they're supposed to. When I painted them as bright as I saw them,
they totally misbehaved---something to be aware of and work at: how to
capture whites/lights in a background? This mess is pretty much an example
of "home" for me. Should I post it for the Japan Challenge?

Teabowl and Apple 2

This is a revisit of a set-up I did a week ago . . . I never seem to tire
of the same subject matter. With a little time lapse, I get to compare
what I thought was important on the first go and what stands out to
me now. With this, I wanted to purposely leave information out and
see if I could stand not tinkering with it and putting it back in.

I visited Carrie Waller's wonderful blog yesterday and read that she had
been juried into a show by a judge who stated she didn't like literal art. I
had a regretful thought: I had written how impatient I am with myself when
I'm too literal but I want to make it clear that I love good realism! I'm
amazed by and admire the facility of these artists!

Full/Empty

This is my painting for Jean Townsend's zen challenge
for STALP this month. What could be more full and
empty than oneself? It looks just like me. :-) I had fun
and may have stumbled on a way to handle paint that feels
natural to me. Must continue to work at it, but possibly not
too hard.

Teabowl and Apple

I laid down really thick paint on the objects and kept them small
to continue practice in eliminating detail. One needs to get really
good at value relationships to lay the paint down and leave it alone . . .

Apple Studies

These were done very quickly. The first (top left) is the free-est. It
appears I got tighter as I went.

Teabowl with Fruit

It's kind of ironic that after my big push to be more experimental,
this painting seems so traditional! Who's in charge here? This is
another handmade pot by Michael Simon.

Triangle

As I was photographing this and even now as I post it, I feel an
underlying itch to "tidy" it up. Every morning I spend about 30
minutes looking at artists whose work I like and they are definitely
not tidy painters. I'm thinking that part of developing one's own
vision is to trust what you respond to in others' work and become
accustomed to valuing it when you do it as well as you can. I need
to keep it around and get used to it until the urge to tidy goes away.
I do see my work as more lively overall: there's less concern with outlines
and boundaries and more focus on making color resonate and how it
relates to the entire surface. The cup is actually a strong gray-blue
but it seemed dull to me so I tried a lavender which perked things up
a bit. I feel progress---less fear in trying things that are not actually
"there" if they contribute to the painting, and more confidence in the
way I judge what I've done.

For anyone on a budget, I'm working on Canson mat board that I seal
with two coats of Liquitex matte medium. The paint glides on, there's
a canvas-like texture and it's archival. And, no need to mount it on a
more rigid surface for framing.

Apple, Cup, Orange

This really isn't what I intended for this painting at all but it was
coming together in a way that I was liking so I decided to forget the
"plan" and just go where it was leading me.

Little Lady 2

I've been working on archival paper sealed with matte medium so
I can have 2 or 3 starts of the same set-up to work on. Leap-frogging
from one to another makes getting a result less important and offers
more chances for exploration. Setting them aside at various stages
provides a delay and an opportunity to see each one fresh before going
on with them again.

Little Lady 1

One of my main concerns over the past couple of months is in
assessing my own reaction to what I see developing on my canvases.
It's sort of a schizophrenic exercise: look hard at the set-up, try to find
the elements of it that excite and serve to anchor a conscious intention
which will then inform the paint. That kind of intentional looking has to
be maintained throughout the process. But, then, so does looking critically
at the canvas to see if the marks you're making reflect your intention.
Not to work towards getting it accurate but to find something in the canvas
that makes me react to my own work the way I do when looking at the
work of the painters I love.

Looking in both directions should be all of a piece, united in one goal,
but it's so easy to go unconscious and veer off course.

Lady Apples

Nice to take a break from cups . . .

Cup

Still trying to get over my tendency to describe and illustrate. The
quest continues . . .

The Set-Up

An 8 x 8 panel seemed huge! Still not brave enough to go where I
think I should (haven't identified where that is) but it was fun to have
a larger surface . . . seemed to help in making me consider the whole
painting and not just the objects. I've been trying to be conscious enough
to have one specific intention before I begin a painting, like for this: to use
many grays and just a few areas of bright color. An intention works as an
anchor if and when I start mindlessly copying or get too obsessed with
individual elements, I can bring myself back to what I intended. I fall short
but am beginning to see glimmerings of stuff coalescing.

Why do I always see the flaws once the painting is on the computer screen?
I should probably work on it more before posting but there's that precarious
edge where I could ruin one small good thing.

Green-Rimmed Cup 2

Another go . . . I'm painting very slowly . . . I don't have  a
problem with being too tight or detailed: I like swashbuckling
strokes, stray pieces of color, painting outside of the lines.
But I am beginning to understand Kehoe's comment that it takes
a long time for her to see how something really looks. The
shadow side of the cup, for instance, looked like a gray-green
to me so I painted it as I saw it. But the canvas looked odd with a
greenish shadow on the same canvas as the cup handle which had
almost blazing red reflected lights and shadows cast by the red table-top.
It probably could have worked if I got the "right" gray-green and
the right color for the cast shadow so they would resonate, but I elected
to "purple-up" the shadow side thinking it must also be influenced by
the red table-top. Not sure if I'm seeing what's there accurately or if
I'm being tricked by all the vibrating color? With practice, I hope it'll
become more intuitive and go a little quicker.

Green-Rimmed Cup

I've been reading Ken Kewley on Color on Kehoe's Powers of
Observation site and he said one should begin with a color that
excites. I picked prussian blue which hadn't left the drawer in a
couple of years, and then tried to key the rest of the painting to
work with it. Also practiced mixing many colors of the same value
to get variety in the whites, variety in mid-tones and darks. I'm
trying to cure myself of abrupt value and rampant color changes
and learn to mix interesting grays so purer colors are more effective
interacting with them.

Espresso 7

A many-layered "thing." This was painted, degraded, sanded, built
up, scraped, some areas layered with transparent paint and Liquin,
and some with layers of thick paint. The intention was to use transparent
layers to achieve grays and contrast textural areas on the same surface,
finding and re-finding edges, hoping to be surprised by color and the
interaction of paint. There were some very happy passages now buried
in there somewhere . . .

Espresso 6

Exploring warm grays/attempting to get a handle on "light." Almost
had a nervous breakdown dealing with the red reflected light on
the shadow side . . .

Espresso 5

Still experimenting, trying to find different ways to handle paint . . .
I had read a long time ago that part of exploration was to find and
re-find the edges and then recently, on a college student's blog, read
her account of taking a workshop with Ovanes. He had stressed to
keep the painting a wash for as long as you can---so contrary to my
habit of laying down thick paint as soon as I can. So, I'm practicing
both by not sketching the boundaries of the object and laying in washes
of values in the general area of where an edge might be. It's helping to
not commit too soon, to not get attached to getting something right while
freeing up a part of my brain to assess whether I like what is developing
on the canvas.

Espresso 4

Another step closer. For anyone wondering what my problem is:
I have a vision or a feeling about how I "should" paint. I want to capture
the essence of things without copying them. I've been on a path to
learn how to paint from life and finally decided I'm committed to it, but I
have an abstract sensibility. And, even though I haven't come anywhere
close to mastering the skill of painting from life, I have nagging thoughts
that striving for it isn't IT for me. But what is? How to reconcile the conflict?
If anyone should have a clue as to what my inner vision is, it certainly should
be me. Except it isn't. All I do know is that what I see on my canvases hasn't
been IT. I questioned the "paint what you see" mantra and found it was
absolutely true thanks to Claire Christinel and her very articulate translation
of what it means. It uncoupled some chain in my head, made me realize
that adhering to what I "see" doesn't have to have any limitations. I had
cursed my literalness but it was only me propelling myself into one narrow
tunnel. I've found that I can look closely and observe and simultaneously
invent.

In the scheme of things, this little painting may be nothing but it was pure joy in
the making. Not sure if I can capture the same feeling tomorrow but now I
know it exists.

Espresso 3

Another small step . . . which may be noticeable only to me. It may
get worse before it gets better. I had some nice effects about 30 minutes
before I called this finished but foolishly thought I could improve on it.
Among the repertoire of things to be conscious of, there's also
recognizing when something is fresh and know to leave it alone.
I feel so close to crawling my way towards a different way of working
but it still escapes me. The good thing is that I can't wait to try another!

Espresso 2

There are several others but this is the second I'm willing to post. There's
a lot to learn by focusing on one subject, one is that I've been too abrupt
in value jumps so am now mixing colors on my palette differently, each
value slightly overlapping the previous---it helps in not being tempted
to blend between values. Also trying to be conscious of varying the
thickness of the paint. I'm painting very slowly, pausing between strokes
and considering where I want to put my next one. Seeing this on the
screen, it's clear my color shifts are too abrupt as well. I still have a long
way to go but, with each panel, it's becoming more pleasurable to apply paint.

I heard on npr this afternoon that Jaspar Johns was awarded the medal
of freedom for his art. Johns was quoted as saying that he had to work as
he did, even if each piece was a failure, and accepted that he would likely
have a life of failure. That's a brave artist!

M Simon's Espresso

I've been painting this cup over and over and find it a very challenging
object. I'm not yet brave enough or can't quite get the right values for
the cool colors that are clearly in it or making the lit side bright enough.
Focusing on one object in space has helped me notice how much gray
there is in life! And, the need to be inventive in applying paint on the rest
of the surface. When I worked abstractly, I was paying attention to the
entire canvas so it was easy to see areas that needed a mark or stroke for
the sake of composition and I could do whatever I wanted, but working
from life, I need to respect the integrity between the object and the space it
occupies. This is the best of the series so far but there are more in the works.

Michael Simon Cups

In my ongoing quest to see differently, apply paint differently, it seemed
a good idea to use Georgia potter, Michael Simon's salt-fired cups as subject
matter. They are so unique with his hand and personality, I really wanted
to do them justice. So I looked and squinted and tortured this poor panel
with multiple scrapings and obliterations, but in that process, realized that
"paint what you see" is very different from "copy what you see." I still
don't have a clear path but there were moments and I want to go wherever
they're leading me.