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.