"Jostling" and "Time Out"

Jostling, 6x6", oil on canvas board

So, as I mentioned in the prior post, I'm trying to loosen up my painting, so I'm going back to frequent small exercises. Being loose means a lot of things. For me it means being painterly and feeling more relaxed -- mostly -- while I'm painting. I got tired of feeling tense and perfectionistic.

OK, so, I did the painting below (blue basecoat). It made me impatient with myself (I might have to paint over it). But you don't paint every petal! You know how they say to mass in the general shapes? I haven't been doing that enough! So I simplified the composition and redid it and came up with the above (black basecoat). Better. OK, I see a few problems, but it's in the right direction.

Time Out, 6x6", oil on canvas board

I looked online to see what people said about painting loosely. One page said that to paint loosely, you put down the paint once and don't touch it. Fixing it is what looses the freshness. It brings to mind a wonderful exercise we did in the Carol Marine workshop I took long ago: How many strokes does it take you to do a painting? I did a little 6x8" in about 200 strokes.

What did I learn so far? Set up your still life so there are interesting shadows. Then I like to mix my main colors on my palette. Then mass in the shapes just like they say in the books. Spend time loading your brush the way you want, then put down the stroke. Use a couple of variants of each color to add richness and build dimension. Don't be too attached to making it match your setup. Instead, be interested in what's on the canvas. Use the setup only for reference. As the painting continues, you should look at the canvas more and more and the setup less and less.

"Lush"

5x5" or so, oil on unstretched canvas

So there are a few skills that I want to work on, so I've decided to go back to my small still lifes. I don't know for how long. Like this blog's title, as long as it feels right.

What it came out of was that I was painting these figurative abstract pieces, and I'd have a sketch or a photo to work form, and I'd find myself trying to replicate it much too carefully. I want to use it as inspiration, but take the painting where I want it to go.

So the skill I'm trying to learn is to paint looser. That's what everyone wants to learn, right? It's kind of the holy grail of painting. So I decided to do some little studies. This one came out reasonably well. I also went and looked at Daily Paintworks, since they have a really nice collection of active painters. And I started to pick up a few tips and develop some criteria. I'll get into those in posts in the near future. But for right now, let's start saying what loose painting is not:

• Cautious
• Tight
• Realistic

OK. More later.

"Trajectory"

6x8", oil on canvas board

I use a glass sheet to I put out my paints on. It's next to my easel, on the drawing table. Along the back of the table is a row of smaller display easels, and I've put various little canvases there. There are little canvas boards, and also some bits of unrolled canvas wrapped around a piece of plexiglas. Some might be unfinished paintings I started a few years ago that never worked for me and have been collecting dust. Others are just bits of canvas that aren't fit for stretching, so I might as well paint on them. Maybe I can put them in a frame or something.

Why did I put them there? For two reasons. The first is that I wanted something to experiment on. Like, what happens if I add some marble dust to my paint? Or what happens if I put down some thick paint for texture, let it mostly dry, then scrape it? Which brand of water soluble pencil works best on wet paint? Or how about if I scribble with an oil pen and then paint over that? What if it's RED oil pen?

But I mentioned two things. The other thing is that I'm kind of cheap, and I hate seeing paint go to waste. Sometimes I have a pile of paint and it won't work on my current painting. So I smear and scrape it onto one of the little canvases. The biggest benefit (besides the cheap thing) is that I'm not risking much, so I can cut loose. It's pretty hard to loosen up when you're working on a 36x36" canvas. I mean, you CAN, but it's not the same. I guess there's another benefit, which is that paintings that weren't going anywhere are now becoming useful. It's fun to paint over an existing image and see what happens.

So, this was one of those small canvases. And I like it. I'm not sure why. Maybe I should try more neutrals. I did spritz it, and you can see the drippies at the bottom. Love those. I'll admit that there's one part of it that seems a little wacky, but I'm going to see if anyone else picks it out. 

Anyway, that was a long story, but I put it out there in case anyone else wants to set up small canvases to play on.

This one is now framed and hanging in my house. I don't do that for a lot of my paintints, for some reason. So, cool.

Work from class: Still lifes

Last year I took a still life class from Jim Smyth through the Palo Alto Art Center. Below are three of the better pieces that came out of the class. There were more, and I might post them; not sure. You can tell by looking at them what the challenge in them was. For the second and third, it was about reflections. For the first, I think it was about the fruit and getting its transparency, as well as the shape of the platter under it.

It's satisfying to see that I have some ability to render these (although I could point out flaws in any of them). But I'd like to put that ability into something with more, oh, passion or gut. Jim teaches some figure classes. Hmm.

Chinese Vase, 12x16", oil on canvas board  

Brass Cup, 12x16", oil on canvas board

Red Vase, 12x16", oil on canvas board

"No Warning"

18x36x1.5", oil on canvas


This is another like the one I posted a couple of days ago: Warm neutral colors with a large area that lacks detail but actually has a lot of texture. I also did this one with a lot of marble dust. At the top I put in some dynamic elements because it just looked too static otherwise. To me, at least. 


That "To me, at least" is a funny question. I'm wrestling with how to gauge my paintings. The easy answer is to use my own judgment or follow my heart, etc., etc. The trouble is, I have a couple of paintings that really don't do much for me, but other people seem to like them. Are they being honest, or gently kind and supportive, or is my perception out of whack? And if they're right, do I go public with the paintings? Keep them in my stack and wait? Similarly, I have a couple of paintings that seem like they're executed just fine, but the content doesn't do anything for me. I haven't gone public with any of these paintings because they seem to lack something. Maybe I should paint over them.


Don't know. I think I'll take one or two back to my painting group and talk about it.

"Inconspicuous"

24x30x1.5", oil on canvas

This doesn't look like something I'd do, but I really like it! (And I'm not sure what to make of that.) Normally I paint in saturated colors, and it's literally hard for me to tone that down. This one is mostly cool and warm neutrals, with a little black and red. And white. It took courage to scribble in the black. It's very exposed -- right on the white canvas -- and I just hauled off and scribbled and didn't know how it would come out. You have to do that without reservation, because if you try to be careful, it will look like it. There are also some cool drips going down. I put a lot of marble dust in the paint, and it was almost like clay. Then, since it's water soluble oils, I sprayed it with water, and the heavy drips crawled down the surface. I like it when my work uses naturally occurring events. Things feel more organic that way.

I'm getting up the courage to paint bigger. More later.

"Ponder"

20x24x0.75, oil on canvas

I did this a few months ago. It was one of the early ones where I used a technique from my class with Melinda Cootsona: You start with abstraction and play with it until you find a figure. I find the playing really important, since it's when you apply paint intuitively, and it doesn't matter how it looks, so you're more free. You also get to experiment with marks, so you improve your painting vocabulary. Melinda likes to create more layers in her paintings before she finds the figure. I can see where that would add richness. I should do that. I guess I need more patience.

Here, I started with a painting that hadn't worked for me, then painted on that, so it had two layers under the figure. The earlier painting had had a chair with slats in it, and the paint had formed ridges. I kept those and liked how they overlapped the figure. (I later used this overlapping in another painting, posted earlier this month.) I'm also really enjoying the oil crayons. I like the scribbly texture.

I took a picture of the painting during development. You can see the random marks and drippies and scribbles. As I recall, I turned it in different directions while playing with it. And you can also see that I kept the large round shape in the upper left corner.

Painting upside down

11x14x1.5", oil on canvas

In my last post I mentioned that I'd painted a head by turning the reference photo and the canvas upside down. (Thanks, Melinda.) This was the picture that came out of that. It's a pretty cool exercise. You're less attached to how realistic it is -- these aren't portraits -- so it lets you start painting looser and not get buried in details. I decided to place him in the corner of the canvas because I'd chosen a kind of grizzled picture, and I thought he looked more expressive this way. Sort of like he's hiding or something.

"Introspection"

36x36x0.75", oil on stretched canvas

OK, this one surprised me. I had a background with lots of texture and color, then started working on a face and got frustrated. So, using a trick from a recent class with Melinda Cootsona, I decided to turn the reference photo and painting upside down. When you work with an image upside down, you're less invested in how accurate the shapes are. Rather, you're more in touch with the composition. Also, I had seen some paintings where light blue was used as a way to articulate contours on a dark background, so I used that. Eventually, when I turned it right-side up, I liked it much more, and I clarified a few things and balanced the values better.

That blue really is kind of neon, isn't it?

"Geometric"

30x24x1.5", oil on stretched canvas 

In an earlier painting (that I haven't posted yet), I had a figure with lines crossing it. Wherever that happened, colors changed on the figure. I used that approach here. It's relatee to some earlier work I did, where I painted still lifes in non-representational colors. The theory is that, if you keep the value the same, you can still figure out what the subject is. I can't say that I stuck with actual values here, but I hope that makes the work more interesting. You can still see the figure, but it merges in the background more.