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.