A long-overdue update -- part 1

At least one of my faithful blog readers has noticed that it's been a long time since I posted anything, and wrote to ask me whether something dire was going on.  Thanks for asking, Karen, and no, nothing awful has happened on my end, except that for some reason I have gotten out of the blog habit and will have to perform some brain surgery on myself to get back in.  So I will do a couple of posts to bring you up to date on what's been going on since last fall.

First, an update on my daily art.  After 365 paintings in 2022, I came to the conclusion that I love to paint, but I have no ideas that I want to express in that medium.  I love the paint on the palette, the paint on the brush, the feel of the brush on the paper.  I love mixing colors and watching the accidental effects of wet-into-wet.  But throughout the year I struggled with what to paint.  I would get an idea, usually by copying from somebody else, and paint it more than once to see if it might strike a chord and stay with me.

In the past, when a student in my workshop or a blog reader would ask me whether they had my permission to use a technique I have used or taught, I would say of course you may (nobody owns an idea).  And if you like the technique, make it three times and by then it will change enough that it will belong to you, not to me.  I tried to apply this rule of thumb to my painting.

I've posted about the faces I painted based on black-and-white photos in the paper.  I did that 52 times, and maybe10 of them were pretty good.  But they were getting repetitive, and I didn't think that they in any way belonged to me.  

I thought maybe if I put some stitching into the paintings it would resonate, since stitching is so integral to the rest of my artistic life.  I made several with hand stitching, and a few with machine stitching, and again, I liked them, but there was no surge of desire to keep on making them and after ten tries I stopped trying.

I had a nice long run at the end of the year with 15 paintings following the tutorials of Vanidas Mangathil on Instagram (he's also on YouTube).  I loved painting the little people and I highly recommend his instruction if you're into painting little people.  But after two weeks I didn't see any signs of them moving into my art space.

By the end of the year, I had decided that I was done with painting.  In fact, I even cut up a bunch of pages from my painting sketchbooks to make my Christmas ornaments.

Daily painting -- lots of faces

In my last post I showed you the very start of what has turned into a fairly long series of faces in my daily paint project.  I have been finding photos in the newspaper and using them as references to paint my own versions: all spaces heavily outlined, faces rendered in two different non-face-like colors against usually dark backgrounds.  I'll share some of the ones that I'm proud of (but you can see them all on my daily art blog). 

As you can see, I do better with men than women!  I have tried women but have never been happy with the results.  Maybe it's the hair -- and why so many of the ones I like feature bald guys or those in hats!

So far I've done 45 of these faces and am not sure what if anything I'm accomplishing.  As time passed, I started experimenting with different techniques, such as washy shading of the facial contours, and yet I worry about getting away from the flat, graphic quality that I liked from the start.  

When I go through the whole series I find that the ones I like best are those toward the beginning.  That doesn't seem like a good sign.  The more you work in a series, the better you're supposed to get, not the other way around.

I still don't know what I'm going to do next.  In two days I start a new, much smaller sketchbook and a new series, because we're heading off on a long trip and I don't want to carry a huge paint kit.  What will I put in the new sketchbook?  Will I return to the faces when we get home?  

I think that December 31 will be my last daily painting.  Several times in the past I have kept the same daily art theme for multiple years when I was having fun and felt there was still more to explore.  I know there's still a whole universe of painting out there that I have yet to learn, but I'm drawn more to another stitching project for next year.  I'll keep you posted, of course!

Daily painting update

As July turned into August I started feeling blah every day when I brought out my sketchbook for daily painting.  My intentions when I decided to do painting as my daily art for 2022 were to learn how to use paint and brushes, and with any luck, to develop some kind of personal style or voice that felt good.  I even thought maybe I could eventually come up with small paintings good enough to be torn out of the sketchbook and displayed in the gallery.

But none of these things had happened at mid-year.  I had learned that I loved gouache, especially when watered down a bit so I could use wet-into-wet techniques.  But my default composition of three horizontal segments, stacked one over the other, was feeling stale.  Some days I liked what I did, other days not, and I was definitely in a rut.

My sketchbook ran out of pages toward the end of August and I waited until the last possible day to make a run to the art supply store -- where to my dismay, there were no more 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 sketchbooks on the shelves.  I had to buy the next size up, 7 x 10.  That doesn't seem like a lot, but it's actually 50% larger and the expanse of untouched white looked orders of magnitude more daunting.  

So, time for a life-changing experience -- I painted a person.

I was thinking of Rouault's people, crudely outlined in black, usually dark against dark, not photorealistic by a mile but also not cute or cartoony.  

Georges Rouault, The Old King

Here's my first such guy:

I liked him, but what to do the next day?  I was less happy with the second guy, getting too much toward the cute/cartoon side:

Then an idea: what if I copied my guy from a photo in the newspaper instead of drawing him?  Here's the third guy:

 

I was much happier -- without having to worry about the outline, I could still do my own thing with the painting, and the two-color face approach was very satisfying.  I'm now two weeks in to the newspaper photo series and feeling pretty good about it.  

I'll show you more of these new faces in another post.

Feeling trapped

I've been painting fish for several weeks in my daily art project.  Since fish live in water, and since I am intrigued by the washy effects of wet-into-wet painting, I've been doing a lot of experimenting with making the fish blurry, as though seen through the water.

I've enjoyed this series, although I think it's about to end, because I have other ideas to explore.  But a strange thing happened with the fish this week.

We have been tied up in organizing a family transition, as my sister-in-law is going to move across the country from a single-family home on a multi-acre lot in the exurbs to a senior living center here in Kentucky.  We are her closest family, and it's time for her to come to where we can support and help her.

We visited four, count 'em, four places yesterday, which is at least one too many, if you're planning a similar endeavor.  But fortunately, we found one that looked pretty good, and this morning we went back for a second look and more gory details.  I think this is going to happen -- as soon as the minor tasks of selling a house and moving across the US can be worked out.  Things will be better for everybody once it's done; just the doing will be hell on wheels.

So back to my fish.

I was going to be the get-it-done, voice of reason on yesterday's expedition.  I was familiar with three of the places we visited, because two dear friends, now dead, had lived there.  I had set foot in these three establishments dozens or scores of times.  I knew that my husband and his sister were emotionally fraught by this task, so I was going to be the one who would guide and evaluate with a slightly more objective and detached view.

But as the day wore on, I found myself un-detached, and unexpectedly feeling trapped and claustrophobic.

The fish told the story -- when I did my painting last night the fish ended up in a box.

And this morning, before we headed out for the second visit to the best place, the fish ended up in a trap.

I'm a decade younger than my husband and his sister, so I have known forever that it's likely I'll be the last one standing, the one who does the caregiving and the support at the end of life.  But something about visiting these places made me painfully aware that we're all getting older.

I have sworn that I will never enter an institution when I get old; instead I will die in my own home if it kills me (thus cleverly avoiding the issue of what to do with my studio and my stash and my collections of stuff that I intend to turn into art.  Let my kids deal with that after I'm gone.  And sure enough, just walking into these places -- even the best, most pleasant of them -- reminded me of why I have sworn this oath.

I think the place we have found will be the best solution for my SIL.  It will allow her to easily make friends in a city where she has never lived, thousands of miles away from her present home.  It will give her support and infrastructure so she won't have to lean on us for everything.  It will provide access to dozens of activities and lots of companionship that she could never get in a regular old apartment.  I'm not sure why I'm feeling trapped instead of happy.  (Actually, I guess I'm happy too, but the fish certainly aren't...)

Another painting motif

I wrote in my last post about the lake motif that I've been using in my daily painting.  Another motif that I've used several times is a hand.  Simplest execution you can imagine: trace around the hand, fill in with color.  

I've been using this motif to experiment with color: not so much which two colors will go well together but how to lay down the color within the hand and in the  background.  I don't want a flat, uniform coat of paint; instead I'm looking for ways to vary the tones and achieve an interesting texture.

Because I don't wash out my paint palette dish at night, I always have five or six dried-up blobs of paint in different colors ready to be reconstituted.  I tend to mix up a supply of my main color, then vary the strokes by occasionally dipping into one of the side colors.  Sometimes the colors blend smoothly, if they aren't too different in value and if the first color has stayed pretty wet before the second one comes on.  Other times there are distinct lines between one color and the next.

I find that I like both approaches.  I also like varying the shape of the hand, either by moving the fingers or cropping the shape on the page. 

When my granddaughter was visiting one day I showed her my hand paintings and she let me trace her hand a couple of times.

I am also using these motifs as a way to practice carefully laying down the paint.  I don't paint a background first and then put the hand over the top; instead I paint the hand first and then paint the background color exactly up to the edge, trying to leave no bit of white between the two colors.  It's improving my hand control!

When I showed these paintings to a friend, she suggested that I try to make my depiction more realistic by shading to show dimension.  I thought about that for a while, but then decided that I like the flat look, at least for now.  Maybe after I've gotten more comfortable with the paint I can circle back and focus more on the "drawing." 

(I even thought about extending this flat approach to other mediums, cutting hand shapes out of patterned paper or fabric and collaging them.  Might hold that thought for another day!)

I'll show you my next recurring motif in another post.  Meanwhile, you can see all my daily art on my daily art blog.

Painting update

The last time I posted about my daily painting project, I had just purchased a whole array of gouache paints, plus some new brushes, and had started experimenting with this new-to-me paint.  The glory of gouache is that it's opaque enough to totally cover whatever was underneath (helpful for fixing mistakes) and able to lay down a beautiful matte surface if you want.  Or you can dilute it for washy watercolor effects.  I've been trying both approaches.

Frankly, I've been way more interested in learning how the paint behaves than in coming up with artistically rewarding compositions.  I have been fixating on a certain motif and doing it over and over, changing a little something each time I do it.  Today I'll talk about my first repeated motif, the lake.

Maybe it doesn't look like a lake to you, but it does to me.  Not that I have any particular lake connections that this brings to mind (my childhood lake, Huron, is so big that it more resembles the ocean) but it's a nice shape.

I know that other painters can make their gouache expanses look like paint chips -- perfectly smooth and without color variations or brushmarks -- but I can't.  I can get close, as with the pink lake, but that's not really a goal I want to work toward; I find the mottled surfaces of the sky and land far more interesting.

I've played around with the composition in several ways, with multiple lakes, upside-down lakes and portrait-format designs.  All of them have the narrow white outline between the different colors, sometimes rendered in white paint but other times achieved by very carefully leaving white paper between the painted areas.

One of my early lakes was a disaster -- why did I ever think it would be a good idea to give it a handle?

So several days later I decided to paint over the bad part.  It was an experiment in whether I could successfully match the color, and whether I could actually conceal the color underneath.  Success on both fronts, and I find the composition much more pleasing.  The original lives on digitally but at least when I page through my sketchbook I'm not faced with that ugly version.

After 18 days of lakes, I was ready to move on.  I'll show you my next motif in another post.  Meanwhile, you can see all my daily art on my daily art blog.

Daily painting -- setting a deadline

I started my daily painting project with several tubes of acrylic paint that I have owned for a long time.  They're low-end stuff, and when applied at full strength they're shiny rather than matte, which I don't particularly love, but the tubes are big and I appear to have a lifetime supply.  After a couple of days of using the paints with very little dilution, I decided I would be happier watering them down and doing washes.

I found myself doing landscapes with receding ranges of mountains and hills, working from the top down, intrigued by the way that a new layer of dilute wash would combine with the previous layer to make the next closest mountain range a little darker.  I also found myself making some of the landscapes in portrait orientation rather than landscape.  

In mid-January I showed my sketchbook to some friends, including the one who had been my drawing teacher a few years ago at the University of Louisville.  She thought I was shooting myself in the foot by using low-end paints and brushes (and didn't think much of my palette knives either).  She made me promise to buy some better brushes and suggested that I switch to gouache instead of acrylic for the time being.  So I obediently went out and bought a big bag of stuff.

But I wasn't ready to give up on the washy landscapes.  I told myself I would open up the gouache on February 1, but do what I could with the acrylics until then.  Which gave me a week and a half to experiment with some abstracts in addition to the landscapes.  

I was happy with how they came out, but a promise is a promise and at the end of the month I put the acrylics away.  I'll show you what I've been doing with the gouache soon. 

If you can't wait, you can see all of my daily art at my other blog.

Daily paint -- how it's coming along

In my last post I told you about my new daily art project and why I am feeling quite scared and hesitant.  With ten more days under my belt, I've overcome a bit of the initial paralysis through that time-honored artistic method of stealing from somebody else.

I decided to copy from my four-year-old granddaughter, who brought her paint set along on our Christmas vacation and made two beautiful paintings in her sketchbook.  Since the sketchbook lives at my house, I have it on hand for inspiration.  I was taken by the total fearlessness and joy with which she goes at her art, and thought that if I copied her paintings I might be able to capture some of her mojo.

Her first painting

I copied it

I copied it again

I copied it three times

Her second painting

I copied it 

I copied it again

By this time I felt confident enough to strike out on my own, at least a little bit.  No more copying from the child.  In future if I want to steal another artist's ideas, I think I'll choose a grownup.