art as work

I like the idea that art is labor intensive, whether this be a novel, a cd, a painting, a film, whatever. Aside from my poor hearing issues I don’t like going to concerts because they are less precise/intensive and more expensive than the accompanying cd. I don’t necessarily want making art to involve a lot of painful toil and emotionally depleting effort, but I do expect an investment of time. Writing a play in forty-eight hours is an interesting exercise, but this condensed schedule should also preclude it from being taken too seriously.

So another artist was telling me that whenever they do a public painting event they try to produce a piece of work every half an hour and sell that piece for thirty five dollars.

This prompted a lot of conflicting emotions in me.

Like: “And people buy them?” “Yes,” the artist assures me, “I sell most of them”.

And I think, Well good for you. And then I think, You’re a schmuck. You are ripping people off. How dare you charge people that much for something that you invest so little time in.

And then I think, this artist has been working for fifteen or twenty years, so that experience should be factored into the price. And if people like the work and want to pay for it, then charge whatever the market will bear.

And then I think, Wait seventy dollars and hour. I can’t justify anyone making that much money, let alone an artist. I am a bit of a socialist in this way, but that’s a tangent for a different day.

But this artist doesn’t make this kind of wage consistently, they’re not making a hundred and twenty five grand a year, they only do a couple of these events a year and who am I to begrudge an artist getting a five hundred dollar day a couple times a year.

I charge less than three dollars an hour for my paintings, less than half of minimum wage. Making minimum wage is a long-term goal for me. Who’s wrong here? Am I an idiot or is this person a con artist.

But this is an established, mid-career artist who has worked up to this point, and I’m just hoping to have a solo show maybe eventually, it’s only fair that it be this unfair.

It should probably give me something to aspire to. Instead I make pledges to myself that I will never charge this much. I would rather go without food for a day than charge more than two thousand dollars for anything I make. And I feel (perhaps pretentiously) assured for a little while.

And then I have to pay some bills. And later I think I am going to make a huge painting, four by four feet (not really huge by most people’s standards). I do the math on the square inches and at my current three dollars an hour or less wage it will probably price out at thirteen hundred fifty. Which seems like a ridiculous amount of money to charge for it. But it will take me at least three to four months of solid work to complete.

And then I start to think I should charge more.

more on Edward Corbett

Corbett’s paintings are abstract, but do have a certain resonance of nature/landscape. Occasionally there is a horizon line, but generally it’s something about his paintings’ expansiveness that echoes something of the western landscape.

Again I identify with this imperative. I feel continually inspired by nature and yet reluctant to retain any specifics. Just because the painting was based on a photo I took of wildflowers doesn’t mean it’s about wildflowers. And frequently I’m afraid that naming the source (when I can remember it) will deflate the viewer. As in a viewer says to me, This is a lovely painting, and I say, Yes it’s based on a crate of rotting apples, I found the way they had either retained some of their round form or decayed and softened away from it really interesting. Or if not disgusting the viewer in this way, something like telling the way a magic trick is done, like it might make the painting more mundane, as in the viewer says, This is a lovely painting, all these colors and the nuances of light, and then I say, Yes, it’s based on some stones in a creek.

So I want to avoid making the paintings this specific. Not necessarily grand in the way Corbett aimed to do, but to use painting to capture the sublime elegance of nature.

Here’s Landauer on Corbett:

He seems to have been especially fascinated by its primordial element, the inhuman image of eternal nature. Corbett insisted that his images not be understood as landscapes in the literal sense; rather, they were intended as poetic renditions of imagined or remembered experiences in nature

And here’s Corbett:

I have no intention or desire to illustrate the nature around me; my wish is to express some quality of experience in relation to nature, some quality of self-awareness, deriving perhaps, paradoxically from the responsiveness to a vastness and inhumanity of environment. The painting of a particular mountain in order to represent its geological uniqueness, or even its special beauty and grandeur, would not interest me . . . Rather than to choose the mountain or any other specific fact of nature, grand or small, as my subject in painting, I myself prefer to be chosen.

Corbett worked from memory rather thank photos as I do. Either way it’s about the aspects of nature that resonate with you than the specifics. I suppose that there are any number of landscape painters that might say the same, except that they also enjoy the challenge of trying to represent the local colors, at least some of the recognizable specifics of the moment. I very much enjoy the work of the Canadian figurative artist Heather Horton, but find it a bit confounding when she refers to rendering an awkward wall color behind a sitter. I think why not pretend that the wall was painted green instead of white, who would know.

So rather than painting scattered stones in a shallow creek as they are I start by trying to echo some of the naturally occurring aesthetics of that moment and then depart from them in order to enhance them in a more considered design. Hopefully anyway.

Edward Corbett

As I mentioned previous I recently enjoyed reading about the Abstract Expressionist Edward Corbett. In the late forties and early fifties he felt that praising the importance of the psychology of the artist over the art itself was resulting in ugly paintings. And while there was a lot of context for this ugliness, the war, existentialism, damaged emotional psyches, etc, that it would be much nicer if artists still painted beautiful paintings. Guernica is about an awful event but it’s still a beautifully achieved painting. In his words, “there is enough ugliness and neurosis in the world without putting it down on canvas.”

So Corbett’s call to action was to make abstractions that were beautiful. Rather than saying that since Ab-Ex was blazing a new trail it could ignore and vilify the history of art, that it could still incorporate it. Just because it was a new type of expression didn’t mean it was exempt from the long held principles of aesthetic design. Whether you think figure painting is dead in the present doesn’t mean that Rembrandt isn’t still beautiful.

From the Corbett monograph by Susan Landauer:

Corbett strongly disapproved of the concept of Action Painting, agreeing with Reinhardt that “any painter peddling wiggly lines as emotions ought to be run off the streets”. For Corbett, such intentional lack of discipline was both fraudulent and self-defeating. “Painting is always improvisation because you don’t have the thing already created . . . Rosenberg’s idea is so easily distorted to mean a kind of unconscious, unfocused act or movement with tools on a surface which one hopes or presumes will have some kind of meaning. I don’t think it does. I think random markings by anyone or random actions are the opposite of what leads to art. Art is design. It is intentions, careful concentrations, acute awareness. Art is purposeful. It is not accident.

Which is to say that even if you approach the canvas with a zen beginner’s mind and start slapping paint, later you need to come back to it as an editor. You may have chosen a particular red-violet at random, but now you have to decide what to do about it, leave it, excise it, expand. You have to consider it in context, how do these forms fit together, do these lines move the eye around the canvas well. Since you may not have started with a specific intention you can ask yourself Have I achieved want I wanted to achieve, but you still need to ask What have I achieved and do I like it.

And while I don’t like all of Corbett’s work, I really identify with his imperative. Painting non-objectively and yet retaining some classical elements of design.

the New York School

I recently read a monograph about the (mostly SF based) Abstract Expressionist Edward Corbett. I like some of his paintings, but many veer to close to color field for my taste, or at least to appreciate in book form. Despite my lack of exuberance over his paintings I found his thoughts about paintings, and the analysis of his paintings by Susan Landauer to parallel my own feelings about painting in many regards. I will have more to say about this monograph, but today I wanted to consider my paintings in relation to Corbett’s hate for action painting. He was friends with many of the key New York School, but disliked the idea of emotional improvisation, preferring to emphasize the necessity of design and concept.

While I share some of his sentiment towards action painting, I can’t help but feel that it’s somewhat contradictory to praise design exclusively over improvisation when working in an abstract mode. I think about rhythm and balance when I’m planning a painting, as well as throughout its progress, and I like my paintings to be more refined than gestural, but clearly I do not qualify as classical in any sense. Since I’m not classical in composition or content, I must have something in common with the energy and gesture and improvisational nature of Action Painting.

When I paint I am very unenergetic, usually I am sitting, and there is as much time spend blending the marks I’ve made as making them. The most movement I engage in is walking ten feet away to examine the painting from a distance, then walking in close to make a quick brushmark to indicate something I want to change, then pacing back to consider what I’ve just done. The paintings themselves have a fair amount of energy, they sit somewhere between field painting at one end of the spectrum and all-over paintings at the other end. My aim for the past two years has been to make more complicated paintings and by making things complicated some of my paintings do veer close to the “overwhelm you with sensation” of say late-forties Lee Krasner. This gives me some trepidation because I want there to be subtlety and passages of stillness, but enough movement to keep the viewer interested. So I’m not exhibiting Pollack/De Kooning style kinetic energy when painting, but the paintings themselves have plenty of energy.

I also strongly reject the New York School of psychological/emotional mark making. I don’t think I am conveying emotion in my gestures or that the gestural process of painting is revealing me as a person, nor is it a cathartic excision of psychology or experience. There is a wonderful Portland area artist Jolyn Fry whose best work in my opinion are her Bloodlines figure series, which by her explanation were created by meditating on events and emotions and letting those recollections come out of her through color and gesture. I appreciate the results of this method, but I feel no connection to that practice. A slight caveat here that my painting are expressionistic, but their subject is not me. I am painting aesthetically and not emotionally.

And improvisation versus design. Well this is another compromise, though mostly I fall on the design side of the spectrum. I don’t approach a blank canvas with nothing in mind and then proceed to paint the first sensation or explore through automation. I do a fairly thorough mock-up, which is my term for digital studies that I create. But I use the mock-up for at most a quarter of the painting process, then I let the painting proceed on its own inertia. Once the painting starts to gain its own life it usually has as much going wrong as working well, so the middle half of the painting process is about addition and omission. With periodic spells where I stare at the painting and make lots of notes, such as too much yellow in upper third, omit dangling bit off lower left blue form, add more neutral greens, etc. I then spend many hours trying to enact these design notes. By the time I added and edited these notes into the painting, there are a new set of problems to consider.

So I agree with Corbett that the New York School probably got too much respect and for some of the wrong reasons and its dominance in the teaching of art since the fifties has had some unintentional effects on the art scene, moving art away from providing pleasure and allowing consideration by audience, to supporting the artist as being as or more important than his or her art. The artist’s psychology and thematic intention and other things that provide context to the work being necessary to appreciating the work because it doesn’t have enough elements design and enough aesthetic principles to stand on its own. But all of the rhetoric and context aside I still enjoy many aspects of the paintings from the New York School, and find parallels between their work and my own. So I guess enjoy what you can and ignore the rest.

back to work

I’ve finally had a reasonably productive painting week. But it’s still been a couple months since I’ve finished a piece larger than 6x6 inches. I have several that are making significant progress, but the only one that’s really close to being done is one that I previously declared as being finished that I’m reworking. It doesn’t exactly feel like progress. As usual I have plenty of new pieces that I want to start, but with POS three months away I should really be churning out the polished work about now.

is abstract art difficult?

I desire for my paintings to be without message, I am actively trying to remove content so that the meaning is entirely up to the viewer. I feel that in my previous figurative art is was sometimes too easy to dismiss something if it was recognizable. That’s a portrait of Milla Jovovich or even if someone didn’t know that my portrait was of Robert Rauschenberg they could simply recognize it as being of an older man. And having labeled it, having glanced at it and understood its subject, this viewer could move on, could dismiss it too easily. Could disregard the effort of its making, the craft and style of how it was made and portrayed and move on.

Even the concept of titling my work is frustrating to me, should I apply an evocative but meaningless title that will inspire further connotations for the viewer or title them in a more mundane cataloging manner.

My point is that my assumption in not determining the meaning for the viewer is that the viewer will want to determine their own meaning. Or meaning might be too specific a word, the viewer will interact with the piece in their own intimate way whether that be to attempt to label it with meaning or emotion or to accept it as it is. This is not to say that I assume that everyone will like my paintings, I know otherwise. But by not having explicit content I assume that the painting creates a sort of question or problem which the viewer will want to consider.

Somehow I’d forgotten the flipside to not giving an explicit meaning is that it requires slightly more effort. Yes, it’s true that a viewer can recognize ‘Hey, that’s a painting of a cat’ and then having recognized the subject move on, but it is equally true that approaching an abstract painting and not recognizing a subject they could choose to dismiss it without any further effort on their part. My assumption is that if I remove the subject the viewer might pay attention to the craft, quality, style, color, etc of a painting, but the same viewer who wouldn’t notice these qualities in the cat paintings because they understand the ‘Oh, cute kitty’ will also not notice these qualities in the abstract painting, except they won’t say cute, they’ll say ‘I don’t get it’ or ‘Just a bunch of blobs of paint’ or ‘I could do that’ and on and on. Which is to say assuming anything is a pointless endeavor.

I mention all of this because I recently donated a painting to an auction. I then received a phone call from the woman organizing the auction, who after having identified me as a donator asked “What is this thing?”.

She was perplexed with my painting and I was perplexed with her reaction. I said something to the extent of “It’s a painting. Oil on wood.”

Afterwards I went through the scenario that could lead to someone calling an artist who has donated a painting to your auction and not only saying What is it, but calling the painting a Thing. A “Thing”, as in This is not a landscape, therefore it is not a painting, what exactly is this Thing. So I thought, okay this isn’t strictly an art auction, it’s a general auction, with gardening tools and quilts. I know that the auction has ceramics, but in other contexts this could be defined as a craft or as functional art. And it could be appropriate to call abstract art non-functional, as in it doesn’t do the work for you, it doesn’t provide a service, you have to meet it halfway, you have to interact with it.

I’m so embroiled in art history, galleries, and my own little world that I’ve momentarily forgotten that just as much as some people don’t get paintings of cats and velvet clown paintings, but love paintings by Clyfford Still, there are other people who not only don’t get abstract painting. And some might not even put in the effort to dislike abstract painting because they don’t want to understand.

So complaining that people don’t appreciate the Mona Lisa or Starry Night for the right reasons is pointless. Aside from the fact that saying right reasons implies that my opinion and perspective have primacy over someone’s else; something which my beloved Spinoza would chide me for.

So I need to reframe some of my thinking. The backstory spin I’ve put on my abstract work as a reaction against obvious subject matter is fine in some contexts, but it’s pointless to think that anything I do wouldn’t be dismissed by half or more of its potential viewers. The relevant thing is that at one point I was replicating reality with technical skill and now, though I’m not exactly expressing myself in terms of a world view, I am expressing myself by merit of being a conduit, the paintings emerge from my taste, my tendencies, my awareness. So I have shifted from simply replicating, to not having a specific goal in mind, simply interacting with and taking a journey with every painting. And this is considerably more fulfilling for me and hopefully more enjoyable for some.

moving

Finally finished moving stuff out of my old apartment and cleaning the apartment so that it can be shown and hopefully rented (letting me out of my lease early). The closing of my house, moving and cleaning of apartment have taken up pretty much all of my time for at least three weeks. So I now find myself 17 weeks away from the open studios and I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished much in the last two months. I understand why I haven’t accomplished much, the moving plus three weeks of concentrating on writing, leaves two or three weeks of painting productivity accomplished. But the fact that I know where the time went doesn’t make me any happier that it’s gone.

And really what I should do for the next couple weeks is write, but the weight of everything artwise that is pragmatically possible to do, let alone all that I would like to do is heavy. At the moment it seems like I’ll only be able to finish the paintings that I’ve already started. And while there are several of these that feel promising, I am, as I have previously mentioned, always looking forward.

And my studio is an hour away (by bike and Max) from my house, which makes the studio fairly obsolete or at least inconvenient unless I plan on doing mucho hours on a given day.

All I need to do is paint. Why is that so difficult.

restraint versus ambition

I’m great at starting pieces, I get very excited about new mock-ups, new paintings, but then I lose energy. I hit the mid-point where the painting has as much that is awkward and not working as is does nice moments; or even the almost done but not quite stage when my painting method requires a very slow, rather tedious refinement of what’s already there to bring it to finish and I run out of love for the piece. This energy and love is then directed to the next thing, the next piece which is no doubt going to be so much better than the current one(s) that I shouldn’t bother finishing the current one, it’s only a waste of time compared to the genius not yet accomplished.

The appropriate thing to do at this point is to have discipline, to show restrain, to push on and finish the current piece. And usually when I do push on the painting will turn a corner and move past its current awkwardness and get good or great. But it is so very hard to have faith that this effort is worthwhile or to merely summon the energy to push on when something else is calling me more urgently.

color values

The most important thing that I learned in Jef Gunn’s Intermediate Painting class was to consider the value of colors. Value refers to light and dark, the lightest value 10 being white and the darkest 0 being black and a spectrum of grays between them. One usually hears values discussed in reference to black and white photography, see for example Ansel Adams’ zone system. Color is a made up of Hue, Value and Chroma, but generally when people talk about color they talk about hue, as in Red, Yellowish-Red, or Cool Red.

Many aspects of Munsell’s color system and color theory in general get excessively complicated, but remembering to consider the values of the colors I’m using in a painting has been become important to me. After having this revelation about value I reviewed some of my older paintings that I disliked. When putting the image into grayscale I noticed that many of my problematic areas occurred from having too many colors of a similar value in the painting or having colors of great disparity in value next to each color.

In other parts of this blog I refer to the fact that I try to have some modulation and rendering in the forms in my paintings, such that there is a light and shadow within the form (though not really a consistent light source for the entire painting) or light and dark informing the foreground and background of the painting. Now periodically I check photos of my paintings in grayscale to look for value disparities.

If I’m being vague or convoluted or just uninteresting, let me bring up a different example. My favorite artist for the last few years is Raimonds Staprans. Like most of the Bay Area artists that I like he was an abstract expressionist at the beginning of his career and transitioned into figure painting in the sixties. He has referred to himself as an abstract realist and that he only paints real objects as a means to play with color. While this might sound contradictory, what it means in a practical sense is that in a painting of a pear you can tell that it is a pear, but at the same time there are colors used to paint the pear that are not generally pearlike, teal, blue-violets, and pale oranges. Below I have one of Staprans’ paintings of a chair, the first in second in black and white, the second in color. In the b&w everything looks like its been rendered realistically (with exception to the post-modern/pentimento fifth leg), clear highlights, midtones, and shadows. In the color version instead of the highlight being a pale tan, the midtone being a ochre brown, and the shadow being a warm sienna as you might expect there are instead yellow-green highlights, gray green midtones, orange midtones, cool and warm blues as the shadows. One’s first perception of the color version could be that it’s wildly expressionistic, but the colors have been chosen very carefully to create realistic values.

ode

While working on the In the Shadows series I got frustrated enough with the drawbacks of direct painting to return to indirect painting, which is what I’ve concentrated on since. Do you notice a pattern of frustration and vacillation in my history? Anyway I’ve learned a lot of lessons in the process of vacillating from indirect and direct styles, such that I was able to solve a number of my issues and find methods that lessen my frustration for other aspects. So pretty much everything created in 2009 will reflect my new and improved indirect style. This does means slow paintings, and by slow I mean about 5 sq inches per hour – or to put it another way an area the size of this paragraph would take me two and half hours. I dislike that I can’t be as prolific as I would like, but I do like the finished quality of my paintings. The primary example of this at the moment is Ode.

Ode was my piece for Launchpad’s ‘4th Annual Love show’. As previously mentioned with the ‘Dreams’ show, I try to tailor pieces to a given show’s constraints, so I wasn’t going to just pick a random painting that had red and titled it Love. Although I did figure I’d include some pinks and pale violets in the palette, and also that I would base it on the bloom of a flower, with the overlapping petals creating the primary rhythms in the painting. Now I knew this was cheesy, but I figured by the time I was done with it no one would look at it and say ‘Look, a flower’, so it wouldn’t matter.

As I was drawing some sketches (with a pencil and not digitally for once) I was reminded of a painting I had seen, Esteban Vicente’s ‘Bridgehampton Rose’ seen at the bottom of this post. Vincente’s composition tends to fairly simple, more about subtle modulations of colors than about having complicated forms and rhythms. So I thought what would happen if I took his painting and overlayed my more complicated drawing. I thought making the painting a homage to Vicente could also further it as a piece about love. Of course this little narrative would be completely unapparent to the viewer, but it made me feel better.

I proceeded with this conception for about twenty hours before realizing that it wouldn’t work. I would either have to just recreate Vicente’s painting or do my own thing, I couldn’t manage any sort of melding. So I went back to the computer and did some more mock-ups combining one of my original sketches with a photo of the inprogress painting and of course throwing lots of other digital noise and layers at it as well. This really helped shift the direction of the painting. Now doing additional mock-ups and sketches in the middle of the paintings as a form of problem solving is a regular part of my practice.

Ode is probably my favorite piece of mine at the moment, although the photo of it doesn’t look fantastic. I’m pleased with the journey it took and the lessons I learned in the process. More importantly it looks good in person. It has the slightly inexplicable quality that can only be achieve with glazing, or at least this is the only way I know how to achieve it. Most particularly what I mean by this is that there are a lot of happy accidents of color. Now I love to mix color, I frequently spend an hour or more at the beginning of my day mixing colors for the day’s paintings. However, there are colors that I would never have picked and painted, which occurred because of semi-transparent layers of color stacked on top of each other with light refracting around between them.

time

I did the math this morning on how long I have until POS. At first five months sounds like a lot of time, as in who knows what I’ll be doing by then, or as in think of all the amazing work I’ll have completed by that time. So at first it seems expansive and exciting.

Then I started to break this down into days and hours. Then I factored in my other jobs (writing, bookselling) and the fact that I will be moving into a house in June. That after having moved into said new house I will have a commute in order to get to my new studio. Now it starts to get depressing.

I worked out a whole set of estimates based on all these variables and find that I will have somewhere between 450 and 900 hours available to me. The most likely number seems to 750. I paint around 6 square inches per hour, so that’s 4500 square inches. An 18 x 24 inch painting is 432 square inches, so I might be able to complete ten 18 x 24 inch paintings in this amount of time. And this is and is not a lot of paintings. Since I currently have mock-ups that I’m excited about for considerably more than 10 paintings, not to mention the paintings I’m currently halfway through that will cut into this time, this is not a lot of paintings.
And that I know the limit of what I can achieve in the next twenty five weeks, that’s pretty oppressive. And I can kid myself that I will somehow become superman and work ten and twelve hours days and never see my wife or sleep, I know that this is not true. And not only that, but my currently probably and possible estimate of 750 hours will steadily become my most optimistic estimate as reality and all its contingencies interfere.

a not-so-brief history of myself as an artist, part four

I took a second Painting class at PNCA, this one with Jef Gun. Unlike the class with Cecilia, we only worked on paintings in class, and since I am a slow painter I am fairly displeased with most of the work done in the class. Although I did gain even more appreciation for Cezanne’s early work. The only homework that we did have was to complete one painting during the course of the term applying a concept touched on in the class. I choose to do a painting using the six tertiary colors. Interrupted View, which at 24 x 32 inches remains the largest work I have completed to date (though I’m thinking about making changes so maybe it’s not so done).

Because of the time constraint (I realize most people wouldn’t consider five weeks to be a constraint, but once again my paintings take time) I painted in a slightly more direct manner. And the limit I placed on colors results in less modulation, creating the bolder, more delineated look to the painting.

As mentioned in the previous entry I was somewhat frustrated with some aspects of the glazing process, including the time require, the difficulty to change the composition in mid to late stages of the painting, and the fragility of the painting (when the finished paint layer is measured in millimeters, the painting tends to be very susceptible to scratches and chips). So having completed a couple more direct paintings in Jef’s class I decided to continue painting in this vein for a time.

Now mind you, my interpretation of painting in a more “direct” manner would still be considered by most to be indirect painting, i.e. I’m still painting in semi-transparent layers. Be that as it may, it was at least two times faster and more direct than my usual indirect/glazing style. This period at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 resulted primarily in the In the Shadows series. 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

Aside from experimenting with painting methods, the experience of doing a larger series was valuable as well. I didn’t realize that I was starting a series when I began, which was a big mistake. Once I had completed the first one I had to try to make the next three look like the first one. Two of these three I didn’t finish because they were awful and one was okay but looks nothing like number 1. I decided to change the size of the support and the scale of the forms/subject in 5, which is the one I’m probably the most fond of from the bunch. Then I entered a show specifically for square foot pieces on canvas, so 6 thru 9 reflect this with the change of support (I’m not a big fan of canvas, but it had been awhile, so I figured why not) and another change of scale in the forms.

I did about twenty mockups after I had started 6, but once I had finished 7-9 I was ready to move on. With 7-9 I finally realized that if you want things to look similar in style you not only have to not only do the mock-ups for them in advance, you need to paint them all at the same time. This makes sense but also means that you have a lot of unfinished work for a long time and then all of sudden finish a bunch in a week. But again I had made the mistake and completed 6 first, then tried to make 7-9 look like 6. I haven’t managed that skill yet, and I spent more time trying to make paint recipes to keep my colors similar and making sure that the level of contrast and values were similar than working on refining the composition. With a deadline and trying to make the paintings look similar I never quite finished them to my satisfaction. But I learned some lessons which I am taking into the next series I have started underpaintings for and another series that I have mocked-up.

a not-so-brief history of myself as an artist, part 3

As previously mentioned, though I felt assured in my painting skills in one way, I was lacking confidence in another and these mixed feelings inspired me to take a Beginning Painting class at PNCA. I figured that I would know most of the material, but that if I learned one or two tricks of the trade that it would be worthwhile. In terms of that expectation, the only thing I learned was that it is permissible to mix different mediums together. I had assumed that this was at least slightly an oil and water situation or that people simply should prefer a single solution over a concoction. I am pleased to have been corrected of this ignorance. Otherwise there was no basic painting instruction that I was lacking. Which in itself was a sort of confidence booster. Sort of like if you try to figure out how the electoral college works based on what you half remember from eighth grade, what you’ve overheard, and wild assumptions and then you find out that your guesswork is correct.

More importantly, I was fortunate with my teacher. The teacher that was originally slated for the class was replaced by another occasional PNCA teacher, Cecilia Hallinan. At first I was wary of her exuberance, the way she could rave about certain colors or lines. I am generally a reserved and reticent person and as such I am suspicious of people who are laudatory, not that I necessary assume that they are disingenuous, I just find it a slightly unnatural quality. Since this was a continuing education there was also a little bit less discipline and skill in the class than I was expecting. So I was rather discouraged after the first class thinking that this would not be beneficial for me in any way.

However, Cecilia noticed that I was not taking the same copious notes as the rest of the class and then on seeing me paint immediately inquired as to why exactly I was taking a painting class. I explained my fears and she volunteered to spend extra time before and after classes with me, since she felt I wouldn’t get much out of the lessons themselves. So despite my initial cringe reaction, her willingness to reach out and support me and her general exuberance quickly became very important to me. She had me bring some of my finished and unfinished paintings into class for her to see and she was extremely encouraging about my painting abilities and potential.

Even after the class had ended she had me bring several paintings that I was working on to her studio. These were #50 which I had finally finished after many many months of work and the Driftwood series, #53, #54, and #55. William Park came by her studio and she asked him to comment on the paintings as well. They both exhorted me to view myself as more of a professional and to present my work as being of professional quality.

All of this support was vital to me and I definitely wouldn’t have pursued exhibiting or selling my work without her encouragement. Cecilia had named Launchpad Gallery as a place I should look into and when I saw that they were having a non-juried show later in the year I signed up.

The painting class had also been the first time in several years when I had really tried to paint a subject, and the first time since high school when I had worked on still lifes. I had also done a landscape, #52, which I then turned upside down and abstracted to some extent, while still retaining some of its perspective. Having dipped my toe back into realism based expressionism I decided that for Launchpad’s ‘Dreams’ show I didn’t want to pick a random painting and say that it was about dreams, rather I wanted to paint a larger and slightly more realistic painting specifically for the show. This paintings would be #57 – Dream Canyon. It’s still important to me that if a show has a theme or guidelines that I work on a painting specifically for that show or those constraints.

Dream Canyon was hung in the ‘Dreams’ show at Launchpad and I was delighted to have the first line on my résumé’s exhibition history. The piece didn’t sell during this show, but it did illicit some praise, particularly from the gallery owner Ben Pink.

a not-so-brief history of myself as an artist, part 2

So one Friday night I bought a pad of 12 x 16 inch sketch canvas and set to painting. I painted for a solid three hours and was reasonably pleased with the process and the result. My wife came home and was pleased with at least a portion of the painting. Within a day or two I took a photo of the painting and played around in photoshop with various croppings. Since I had done no preliminary sketch there was a fair bit of repetitive elements (rectangles within rectangles) and the painting would be more effective if cropped down to half its size. In the process of looking at various crops I noticed a section of the painting perhaps four inches square that I particularly liked and I decided to make this into my next painting.

It is somewhat odd for me to realize that several of these habits are ones that I have maintained. I still crop my paintings, in fact this is one of the reasons I work on panel, because it’s fairly easy to get out a saw and trim a problematic two inches off. And I still cannibalize my previous work for ideas for new pieces.

At any rate, I painted another half dozen of these alla prima sketches with little to no preliminary outlines. These paintings have a lot of white, flesh tone, and blue and are mainly populated by nearly rectangles and nearly squares, but all a bit lopsided or squished. There are several that are clearly influenced by Diebenkorn and others that were achieved by more random means, painting the outlines of random forms and then filling them in with whatever color.

The next dozen or so paintings, some now on 16 x 20 inch canvas sheets, vary between the previously described method and by method of making a photoshop outline first. For the first such, #8, I cropped a photo of a man in a rumpled shirt and jacket and then processed it through several photoshop filters.

Painting #15 was done without any prelims and was an awful painting, much worse than the first painting I had done, enough so to convince me that faced with a white canvas and left solely to my own imagination I tend to paint overly simple and overly geometric. This pushed me almost entirely into using photoshop outlines from then on. Inspired by Diebenkorn’s writings about flying over farms and deserts, which then resulted in his wonderful Berkeley paintings I started to search out aerial photographs.

At some point around this time I shifted away from flesh color and towards ochres and siennas. Perhaps inspired by Still or perhaps inspired by buying more paints. So by late 2006 or early 2007 I was settling into a palette not terribly unlike the one I use now. The number of paint tubes have accumulated since then, but I still have the same penchant for uses dark reds, siennas, ochres, neutral yellows, and either green or blue.

Also around this time I discover Francoise Gilot. Already looking at aerial photos, Gilot’s work further influenced me towards flat shapes, irregularly shaped forms, and the use of lines to outline, create contrast, and create rhythm. She also inspired me to briefly switch to painting with a palette knife. #29, #30, and #34 are particularly representative of her influence.

Having gained some confidence by this time I tried four figurative paintings. The brushwork was much improved from my previous attempts, but my color was still random rather than expressive. The backgrounds were awful and I still tended to monochromize each section of the body. Disappointed by these results I decided I had to stick with abstraction for a while longer.

After having tried the hard edges and subtle texture of using a palette knife, I wanted to return to the soft edges of charcoal and pastel. I executed several abstract drawings that I was pleased with, including #35, except that I couldn’t find a support for them that I liked and which I thought was suitably professional.

One aspect of the drawings I liked a lot was the level of detail I could achieve. #41 had way more detail in it then I had achieved with my paintings thus far. So I decided the appropriate solution was to do a thorough under-drawing and then paint on top of it. Which is what I did for #41 and #50 and what led me into glazing. The trouble with finishing the drawing too much was that it made it hard to change forms or values in the painting layers. This results in the colorized photo look seen in #41.

Just before leaving California for Portland, I completed #43, which synthesized the influence of Diebenkorn and Gilot and yet felt like one of the most original pieces I had completed.

I had started #46 in California when I was first looking at aerial photos. In Portland I applied the lessons I had learned since then to finish it. By the time I had finished #46 in January of 2008 and had started #50, I was enjoying abstraction for its own merits rather than at least partially thinking of it as a means to an ends. Perhaps oddly, this confidence in my work also made me want to take a proper painting class. I thought my skills were vastly improved, but I was wholly unsure of my technique. This uncertainty that the finished product could look good but that it would have been achieved improperly is something that continues to haunt me.

During high school, my maternal grandmother died I inherited her oil paints. I attempted a painting and I was frustrated by not only how hard it was to blend or to change the values, but also how interminably long it was taking to dry. I expressed this complaint to my step-mother

She immediately asked, What medium are you using.

Medium? I said.

Yes, like linseed oil, she said.

What’s linseed oil, I asked.

This sums up my fears. I regularly think that I am lacking some trick or even essential component that every artist who has had “proper” training knows. So this fear led me to enroll in a continuing education beginner’s painting class at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

a not-so-brief history of myself as an artist, part 1

I have been a writer and artist since before my first memories. According to my parents before I could actually write I would dictate stories to them and in some cases I would have them lay out the stories over several pages of a pamphlet so that I could illustrate each page.

I spent the first nineteen years of my life in northern Virginia, which has a surprising lack of culture for being so close to the capital. I was writing plays before I had actually been to a professional play, and likewise my exposure to art was limited. Most of the art that I saw firsthand was craft fair style art. In terms of art via books, my local library provided me only the basics of Van Gogh, Dali, and Picasso. By the time I was in middle school and high school one of the primary ways I heard of painters was when my work was compared to theirs, such was how I learned of Edvard Munch, Alberto Giacometti, and Henry Moore. There was also the influence of comic artists such as Jim Lee and Dave McKean, such that much of my work was a sort of surrealism crossed with the odd physicality of comic action heroes. This refined itself to a barely expressionist realism that dominated my work for more than five years (spanning mid high school through post-college).

I briefly attended college for screenwriting but money problems and severe disappointment with the lack of rigor in the curriculum led me to drop-out. During most of this period, I concentrated on drawings with graphite, charcoal, and pastel. However, I was becoming disillusioned with realism. I worked for many years to have the skill to draw portraits that were life-like, but once I reached a certain plateau of achievement, I then didn’t know what to do with it. It looked life like, but that was all; it was too easy to look at, identify, and dismiss.

After exploring the work of Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, I decided that I needed to add color and expressionist techniques to my work by shifting from drawing to painting. Unfortunately, my forays into painting were mostly frustrating. Having received only limited instruction in painting with tempera, my attempts with oil painting were overwhelmed by my ignorance of how to manipulate the materials. In my drawings I was technically adept with portraits, but I could not transfer this aptitude over to painting.

This led to a dry period where I did very little art. By mere happenstance while wandering through a library one day I found a book on Elmer Bischoff, the on again off again abstract expressionist. Bischoff’s work completely destroyed and reformed my ideas about what artists do. At this point, I had read some art history but still saw artists through the reductive lens of the central image that art history is wont to impose on their work. Therefore, I was familiar with the New York School of Abstract Expressionism only through their major works once they had hit their stride. While I did not and do not particularly like Bischoff’s abstract work, the idea that he could succeed in more than one mode and more importantly could take lessons learned from his abstract painting and bring those into his figurative work was mind blowing to me. His figurative work maintains a degree of realism but has a stunning palette that came from the more open form of abstract expressionism.

It had never occurred to me in this way before, but since my interests were in realism I looked at primarily in terms of subject, and perhaps secondarily in terms of compositional structure, balance, and movement. So though I had undoubtedly seen Kandinsky or Mondrian or any of the many artists who shifted between realistic and abstract across their careers, I really didn’t pay much attention to them because their abstract work lacked enough subject to interest me and I wasn’t attuned to appreciating color and form on its own merits.

After a year of digesting Bischoff, and then Richard Diebenkorn, as well as Clifford Styll, and others of the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, I decided this was the way I intended to work myself into painting. I would learn the techniques and materials of oil paint by making abstract paintings. I wouldn’t be frustrated by the disparity in my technical aptitude with painting compared to drawing because I would not be trying to make the paintings look like anything in particular. And eventually I would take everything I learned and shift from abstract expressionism to just plain expressionism.

questioning

As much as this blog will have a purpose or mission it is for me to reflect on my artwork, my methodology, and to a lesser extent my general opinions on art. I am writing it with the idea that there is an audience, and if you’re out there reading this (and hopefully enjoying it) then great. Art and my artwork is something I am fairly capable of being talkative about, but I’m still not extrovert and so perhaps this will allow some interested person to understand me or my intentions more fully.

More likely, however, the act of composing my thoughts will be the reward in and of itself. I was recently asked a number of questions about my intentions and methodology and I was not fully able to explain or defend my choices. Now I am not one of those people who doesn’t want to understand the process of my imagination or my art, and I don’t think that digging too deep will destroy my capabilities. Rather my lack of self-reflection has been more due to my perception of myself as a hobby painter.

I view writing as my main calling and art as a less stressful creative outlet. I have always had a lot less emotional issues with art, there is something about the craft aspect of it, that there is a more explicit process and science to it, that allows me to do it more easily (i.e. I don’t have to be “in the mood”) and also allows me to do it for longer stretches of time. To some extent the lack of stress could be related to it not being my proclaimed profession. Though so far the increased emphasis that I’ve put on painting in my life hasn’t added any stress to the act, so yea me. I think that main reason that painting is easier and more pleasurable for me is that my paintings have no message. I paint them with the aim of creating something pleasant or beautiful, not with anything didactic in mind, nor for the last few years even really a subject/object in mind. So since I just want them to be nice things the journey of making them is generally enjoyable, not frustrated by trying to achieve something specific.

However, returning to my point about what this blog will be, just singing lalala as I skip through the painting process is fine to the extent that it gets paintings finished, but it would be more useful if I had some goals and some guidelines for myself. Presumably if I question a number of the things that I do, why I do them, why I like what I like, et cetera it could also result in better paintings. So herein will be that exploration.

There will be contradictory statements, bizarre statements, esoteric references, convoluted run-on sentences, and self deprecations, but hopefully it will be amusing as well. Perhaps neurotic haha and oh what a weird and pitiful man haha, but some haha none the less.

the next six months

I have been selected for Portland Open Studios, which came as quite a surprise to me, but hopefully this represents a significant step for my art. Accordingly, I want to document to some extent my life in the six months between being selected and actually having the open studio weekends.

In response to this selection, I have elected to take myself more seriously as an artist. Perhaps I don’t paint like the typical Sunday painter, but that is long what I have regarded myself to be. In high school when I actually had an art school courting me, I decided that art was an impractical career choice. Why I thought that writing was more practical is an entirely different story. How I ended up going to a university that didn’t care about me or how I ran out of money before graduating from same university are also different stories. I would certainly be interested in how my life would have been different had I gone to said art school, but this is not for me to know. So now, some years on art has risen to a higher priority in my life. Moreover, for the next six months at least I will be devoting more time to painting than writing. Investing in this potential career as a painter may prove to be a foolish choice, but apparently, the way life works is that you have to take risks in order to find these things out. I can think of much safer and more convenient ways, but so far, none of those has materialized.

In regards to “taking myself seriously”. I hope to avoid being as pretentious as I have been in the past and as pretentious as my wife continues to think that I am. Yet I am writing this with the mindset that someone(s) out there will care enough to read it. A modest person would probably keep these thoughts to himself and not use them as a vague marketing tool, so you decide.