rediscovering painting
Creativity
“Hidden in Shadows”
3921 days
“Hidden in Shadows,” 9″ x 11″, oil on canvas board, $300
I know I’ve said it, but I’ll say it again: sometimes you HAVE TO break the toy. You must. You can’t help it. You just gotta. It’s like throwing your keys down a storm drain and not being able to get them back again. You get the urge that most people resist. But not you. Oh, no, not you. You dirty bitch.
Taking chances on a painting can be awkward. Sometimes you make total crap. I mean total, fuck me I can’t believe I call myself an artist, crap. Crapola. Shitty shitty bang bang.
Sometimes, though, it just works. Like this painting. I was going to call this something else, but the painting, as is their wont, spoke to me as I painted it. It told me that I was on the wrong path, it whispered, “A little dab of light here, a subtle variation in shadow here… now BREAK IT, bwa ha ha.” Yes, it gave me the bwa ha ha evil laugh. I swear. You’da heard it if you was here, I tells ya.
You’re never gone, are you? Sometimes you just hide. In the shadows. And most people never look. You’re a crafty little demon! Ah, but you’re not going to get away with it this time. I’m gonna look. I’m a gonna stare ya down. I’m gonna grab on with a Chuck Norris fucking death grip and not let go. I’m gonna go where others dare not.
I’m gonna see it. You. Me. Hidden. In the shadows. Because I dared to look. Come, hold my hand as I swan dive over the edge, into the abyss!
(I painted this alla prima… then I came back with a brush full of thinner and smeared the crap out of it. Then I refined some more. Then I took a 2″ brush and splashed red all over… then I took that brush, dipped it in thinner, and whipped thinner at the canvas repeatedly… then I painted back in some parts… then I used a small brush and whipped thinner at the canvas a few more times. I was having too much fun. If that’s possible. BTW, I fucking LOVE this painting. I’m considering labeling it NFS)
Nagelesque
0923 days
Update: here’s the picture:
“Nagelesque,” 9″ x 11″, oil on canvas board, NFS (this baby’s a keeper!)
I finished my “Nagelesque” painting last night. I decided to do some experiementing – I used my typical restricted palette (Cad Yellow Light, Alizarin Crimson, French Ultramarine, Burnt Umber, Titanium White) and I did a quick undercoating with a #10 brush… then decided I didn’t like that so I came back through with a palette knife for the rest of it. Thick, impasto painting.
To do this, I had to mix up a lot of paint to start out with, which is something I don’t normally do. That was good for me. The first time, with the light purple, I didn’t mix up enough and had to mix more, so that sort of forced me to be able to duplicate my results. Which isn’t as easy as it sounds.
I decided to skip the underpainting, which I think was a mistake. I wanted the skin to be whitest white… so I left it unpainted. I wanted to see how that worked. Well, lemme tell ya, with no underpainting, the fine black outlining was tough because it didn’t flow, it stuck on the canvas’ rough texture. I had issues with a consistent line quality and came away a bit frustrated. Lesson learned – do the underpainting.
I didn’t take a picture of the completed piece last night – it was getting late and I was tired, and I’d really like to get some natural light on it because I’m tired of yellow and dark and non-representative images of my paintings. Ugh.
I also prepped another canvas with a more brownish mixture of Payne’s Gray (my own mixture). I’ve got 4 prepped canvases now. Quite honestly, I’m once again at the fear point of “oh, FSM, what if I ruin the drawing and underpainting?” that paralyzes me and makes me procrastinate on doing them at all. I need to remember: Break the Toy (TM).
“Art every day month” is hard
0925 days
I work full time + I have 2 small kids + I have a house to maintain + I actually have a life, so actually doing some art EVERY SINGLE DAY is hard. I’m committed to it because, as I’ve said, I really want to be an artist. I really am working diligently towards it, even when it’s hard, even when I’d rather crawl up with a book and block out the world for an hour. Or just plain go to bed early… which is usually what gets me because staying up until midnight painting and getting up at 5am for work really wears me down. I can stop painting, I can’t stop working.
But in the spirit of Art Every Day Month, you don’ t have to actually do something every day, so I watched the rest of the movie, “The Cool Kids,” about art in the 70s in southern California while the world was going stark raving mad over the New York gallery scene. It was a good movie and I always love seeing people explain their breakthroughs as mere epiphanies brought about from just plain working at their art – like the guy that reduced his paintings to simple horizontal lines over a solid color because “everything either contributes or takes away from the painting.”
I love those moments. Just wish they’d happen to me more! But I suppose they will if I keep at it.
Today’s gonna be another hard day for Art Every Day Month – I had some cleaning to do, some errands to run, and a party to go to later (which is when I’m usually painting). So I may not get the chance to work on one of the 4 canvases I have prepped. Then again, I might. I’ve got some other ideas I’m forming, some themes.
One such theme is challenging people. I’ve got this Atheist group at work and I’m a pretty vocal member. One of the things I’ve been talking about recently is surrounding the arts and whether the government should sponsor them – and since the government DOES sponsor them (the NEA, et al.), should the government sponsor such things as Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” I say that if you’re going to do it, go all the way. Art is SUPPOSED to make you think, make you question.
Then I thought… “Hmm, does MY art make you think or make you question your beliefs?” No, not really. Sometimes, maybe, but not always. I just make most of my stuff intuitively and, moreso lately, just let myself go with whatever’s in my head at the time and let the artwork speak to me as it’s in the process of being created.
Now that I think of it, my old manager might be at the party tonight and her husband, apparently, has been taking painting classes and getting into art. If he’s there, I’ll definitely have to drag him aside and bend his ear. Ed, you should hope I don’t drink too much or you’ll never get me to shut up!
Bent
0929 days
“Bent,” 9″ x 12″, oil on canvas board, $300
“Sometimes you have to break the toy.”
He said that as he was smashing something of his that he really liked. He wasn’t talking to me, he was talking to my friend, Derek, the same guy whose wife blew his head clean off with a shotgun. Different story. Anyway, Derek laughed and I didn’t really get it at the time. I wonder if Derek was laughing because the guy was crazy or if he thought it was really funny.
The moral still holds true: sometimes you have to break the toy. I get it now.
I got this idea for a painting while watching Helvetica and I sketched out a thumbnail over the weekend: a painting split at the Fibonacci point with the top half blue, tainted/dulled with a wee dab of orange, and orange on the bottom, turned rusty/dirty with a wee spot of blue. The word, “Bent,” HAD to appear across the horizontal line and HAD to stretch off the edges. Sometimes I don’t know why they come to me, these ideas just DO. Okay?
Today, as I was prepping to continue my last 2 paintings in the self-portrait series, I flipped over a canvas board and found this really old self-portrait I had begun YEARS ago. The drawing was good in a technical sense but lacked emotion. Vivacity. So I thought to myself, “Self, why not do that blue and rust thing right over this old self-portrait?”
Then, devilishly, I continued, “BREAK THE TOY.”
Bwa ha ha ha!
I broke it. I borked it. I smashed it into little bits. I covered it up in thick paint then rubbed it back out again and left the canvas raw and the paint rough and the strokes mish-mashy and every which way, and I threw in a thought that I couldn’t dismiss as I was painting: “My, you’re a dirty little boy, aren’t you?” Mmm, yes, deliciously dirty.
I Reject This, WIP
0930 days
“I Reject This,” 11″ x 14″, oil on canvas board, WIP
There’s a powerful moment when I ride my motorcycle, when the man-machine connection swells up and washes it all away, when I am. When I just fucking am. I arrive and put on the mask. I reject this.
There’s a part of me that does it because I must. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to. There’s a part of you that I see and I think as I narrow my eyes at you, “Liar.” There’s an inner monologue that just won’t quit. There’s a little bit of it that I wish I could just turn off. The nag chooses me and I begin to melt into the mould. I reject this.
I look across and see the danger and the white triangle consumes my thoughts. I push it down. I reject it. I reject this.
I see what you’re doing. I hear it in your voice but I go on like I didn’t notice. I see the sacred path unfolding. I hear the “musts” and “shouldn’ts” and I hear you whisper, “Conform.” I reject this.
Falling, WIP
0931 days
“Falling,” 11″ x 14″, oil on canvas board, WIP
The fire burns cleanly when it’s hot. But looks can be deceiving. That’s why, just when you think you’ve got your shit figured out, that god-forsaken deck of cards comes tumbling down around you.
Only thing is, most of the time, for all your stalwart appearances, nobody notices. You quietly control the countenance. Just enough so you’re allowed to be alone in your inner fire. Just enough so it’s only you that knows you’re falling.
I want to be an artist.
0935 days
“I want to be an artist.”
Those are the words I said back in 1987, my freshman year of high school, to my guidance counselor. I was 13 years old. He was a dull-looking man with pale skin, well-trimmed beard, short, black hair, and a glass eye. I don’t remember his name but I do remember that glass eye.
I wonder if glass eyes have gotten any better since then?
I was asked what I want to do “when I grow up” as a way of mapping out the classes I should take in high school. I ended up taking a LOT of art classes. I think that sometimes Mrs. Hammerman really disliked me but couldn’t do much about it because I was her little star pupil (much to my chagrin – I didn’t really like the attention, which made it all that much easier for me to push her buttons). In my senior year I had 2 study halls and always managed to get a pass to go paint. I was in Painting II and Directed Study, which was where I painted some more.
I would stand there in my backwards, oversized button-up shirt, Walkman on, and paint.
And, boy, did I love it.
Things went downhill after high school – the military left me bereft of art opportunities and I had built up a nice salary and a corresponding lifestyle by the time I left the military 8 years later.
Then I settled in and put the dream on ice.
Then I started to write out my ramblings and ideas on Facebook last year. As more and more people joined, I got more and more heat about it, and I eventually stopped. Now I’ll still write but I’ll do it on a scrap of paper that will promptly make its way to the recycle bin. My ramblings haven’t stopped, I’ve only stopped sharing them.
However, what I really wanted to untap was the artistic flow that I had stopped up all those years ago. Gone were my lame excuses. It was time. I STILL wanted to be an artist. I still WANT to be an artist. I AM an artist.
So I dove in one September night and painted a picture, Summers End. I was hooked.
It’s been just shy of 2 months and I’ve completed a decent number of paintings.
I work at a Fortune 500 company. I can’t say I hate it, because I don’t, but it’s mostly dull but mostly pays the bills. I’ve been coming to a slow realization as I read Ayn Rand’s “Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal” and reading Seth Godin and catching up to successful artists on Twitter that I’m a wage slave. I can’t quit my job. I can’t stop working today. I’m a slave to it. And a deep, dark loathing bubbles up inside of me to even type out those words. This isn’t who I was supposed to be.
So what should I do?
I should be who I’m supposed to be. It seems pretty obvious, but, like all things that seem easy and obvious, it’s all-at-once difficult and simple. It’s its own paradox.
I will break out and continue with my themes. I will capture the fleeting thoughts and ideas on my blog, on scraps of paper (that I’ll keep instead of making them grist for the 80% post-consumer waste mill), and on the voice recorder in my cell phone. I will continue to draw, the watch inspirational art movies (I just watched “Helvetica” and I could really relate to the guy that said “bad taste is ubiquitous”), I will continue to PUSH myself.
Sometimes I have an idea and I’m afraid I can’t reach that one quite yet. Sometimes I paint total crap and share it, anyway. Sometimes I see myself through perspective of dissociation, sometimes I sketch it. I have some ideas that I pursue and they become impractical. I have some feelings I forget before the shower is over. I have drawings in canvas where I’ve lost the muse; I have others where I’m afraid to destroy the drawing with paint.
Above all these things, though, I have a goal: I want to be an artist.
“Becoming,” self-portrait #3
0949 days
“Becoming,” 14″ x 18″, oil on canvas board, $700
Third in the series of 5 self-portraits. The series is about me, exploring me, exploring what it takes to become an artist after all these years of denying myself and trying many, many things instead. I’m trying to let the pictures paint themselves as much as possible. Myself the idle passenger, the casual observer changing the results of the experiment simply because I’m observing it.
“Becoming” had a few inspirations. First was the idea that I read somewhere that you should paint the human face with a yellowish upper, reddish middle, and bluish lower. While I understand the reasoning, my personal opinion is that you should describe the face you see, HOW you see it. How YOU see it. So, being the impish little prick I am, I exaggerated that statement in a pseudo-mockery of it. Because I reject things dictated to me by self-proclaimed experts.
I also wanted to do a painting without any white at all. And I succeeded in that – probably for the first time ever.
Burnt Umber has been my nemesis. It always turns to mud. So I re-introduced it here in the underpainting and let a bunch of it show. Look, mama, burnt umber and no mud!
“Becoming” is about edges, mostly. The paint is becoming something because I drew in the outline in my colorful black (or my hand-mixed Payne’s Gray, if you please), intentionally losing edges and intentionally bleeding color without abandon. I put some straight black on one side to push some contrast, but I wanted to keep the painting dark. I’m becoming, but I’m not there yet. I may never be what I am to become, but I am in the process, emerging from the darkness, pushing your fucking rules aside, rejecting what you’re telling me, letting me be me.
Which is all at once intensely simple while simultaneously eluding me at every turn.
Shadows of me
0950 days
So, first, I realized I’m only on my third self-portrait in the series of 5. And I’m not quite sure how to pull together tonight’s painting – I’m going to let it lead me in our subtle dance. I have documented some loose ideas for the other 2 – one’s an old post here and one’s on the nifty voice recorder on my cell phone. Though I’m struggling with one idea. I might pitch it to the bin. The circular file. Yes, the inimitable shitcan. Well, it’s actually a virtual shitcan, but you get the idea.
I was looking at Linda Apple’s bicycle shadow paintings yesterday and my brain did a lightning cross-check of stuff I’ve done, and I had a minor epiphany. Just minor, nothing big. Okay, more like a “duh” moment. I often take pictures of my own shadow. Yes, I’m a dork. So my wife tells me. And she’s probably right. But what just came together was a menage a trois of inspiration (bicycle shadows + my taking pictures of my own shadows + self-portrait series) – series 2, another 5 self-portraits, this time with my shadow lying across various objects, or showing me doing things. I’ve got some tungsten lamps in the garage that will make some nice shadows if the sun doesn’t cooperate.
I can also use this as a platform to get a little more detailed in my paintings. I can burn through 5 of my smaller canvases, toying with detail that way. I can play with contrast, exaggerating colors and values. I can play with various techniques for massing large areas. Hmm, perhaps some additional limited palette exercises.
(as an aside, I accidentally created Burnt Sienna last night from my Payne’s Gray mixture (“colorful black”) and cad red medium – these are things you’ve just got to experience by slapping down some paint on the palette and sloshing it around and asking yourself, “Self, what happens if I do *this*?”)
Eventually, I’ll get to the point where even my bad days are great pieces. For now, though, soldier on and learn, learn, learn by continuing to paint, paint, paint.
Did you ever notice how paintings are somehow disappointing when you get close up? It’s like you expect to see MORE detail when you get closer, but you just see how the artist deftly fooled your eye. I end up feeling a little let down but at the same time I get inspired because I see the mystery unravel before me. And I realize that I can do that, too. And I will. Soon. By exploring some Shadows of Me.
Sometimes I wonder
0955 days
Sometimes I wonder if I’m going down the wrong path with my art. So many great artists do the “traditional” thing. While I use a fairly traditional method, my results are not something that would fit into the nice, neat categories of still life, landscape, or portrait.
Sometimes.
Then there are other times when I question myself, censor myself. For example, I’m an atheist and I see a lot of god-culture crap around me. I see a lot of church-state issues. I see a lot of zealots trying to ignore facts to get their church’s viewpoints made law for all to follow in obeyance.
It’s hard for me to say, “Fuck it” and do what I want to do, say what I want to say. “Oh, better not say that, there might be repercussions,” and “Uh oh, that might piss off so and so,” and, worse yet, “I won’t do that even though I really want to because it might impact my art market.” I don’t even HAVE an art market yet, and I’m worrying about it.
Fuck me.
So I’m going to do this self-portrait series that I started yesterday and sketched out another idea for tonight’s painting (inspired by Hazel Dooney – again) and just be me. It’s called, “And Still I Persist.” It’s all about me. Isn’t it always?
So if I say, “Fuck your god,” then it’s no personal offense to you, really. Just fuck that god that keeps trying to creep into my secular society.
And if I say “fuck” a whole lot, then so fucking be it! It’s my artwork, it’s my world, and I have to live it. Besides, nobody cares, so I’m told. I’m also told that I should ignore everybody. So I’ll selectively take that bit of advice, thank you very much. I’ll just create my art in my own little hole until I’ve got about 20 pieces or so to start to share. Which should be in about a month.
In the mean time, I’ll still have the nagging thoughts. I’ll still censor myself, despite efforts to the contrary. I’ll still wonder. And I’ll still say “fuck” a lot.