"Still Life with Cherries"

10x8", oil on canvas board

OK, yeah, this is getting closer to a more interesting painting done in non-realistic colors. Note that, as I mentioned in my last post, the items themselves need to have some of the local color of the item. I think. Would these still look like cherries if they were all blue? And the guidelines for painting still apply, of course. Things like having the focal point away from the middle, having some rest areas as a break from the dynamic areas.

I went looking for a book on how to use nonrepresentational color, and I couldn't really find one. I'm looking into the Fauvists, especially Matisse and Vlaminck. The closest current book I could find was Brilliant Color by Julie Gilbert Pollard. She does, indeed, use intense colors. Where I might differ philosophically from her is in having a dominant and focal color. The colors in this painting are blue-green, white, and alizarin crimson. It's rather cold, with a little warmth in the plate.

I've been feeling recently like I need to have more of a concept when I create a painting. Last night I was looking at some of my still lifes from a year ago, and I discovered that, whether I knew it or not, I did, indeed, have a concept. Leaned against books on the bookshelf to my right I can see paintings where I explored seeing shapes through colored glass, how a glass vase looks with a highlight hitting the inside of it, how different the colors of tomatoes can be, and how to do a traditional still life but add sunglasses. This is kind of liberating. I'll have to go look at my abstracts.

So, at the moment I don't know how to classify myself as a painter. I also don't know if I need to. What the heck.

"Odd Orange Out"

8x10", oil on canvas panel

A college art teacher once said to me, "Connie, when are you going to stop experimenting?" My amazed response was, "Never!" Now, I know what he meant: At some point it's good to choose a specialty and pursue it, specialize in it, become expert at it. But I just don't seem to be able to do that. At least, not yet. The subtitle of this blog is "Painting What Feels Right." In an earlier post I think I spoke of the amazing selfishness of art: You can't paint from someone else's vision or perspective. Well, you can try to channel them, but hey. So the only thing you can do is to stick with what's authentic. And you get to define that.

So, I recently saw some Fauvist style paintings and became fascinated with wacky color. I also remembered a truism I've heard: "If you get the value right, you can paint it any color you want." Wow. Color doesn't matter, value does? OK, we know this, right? What if you push it?

So I did. First I did the apple study, below. Then I did the oranges, above. (I like that painting better, so it's at the top.) It reminded me of the still lifes I was doing a year or two ago, but with strange colors.

"Apple Study," 8x10" oil on canvas panel

What did I find? Well, I'm still figuring it out, but I think I discovered a few things:

• Color matters a little. Like, in the painting of oranges, it did need some orange color. As it is, it could very well be pink grapefruit.
• A digital camera is really, really handy. Yes, I have a piece of red acetate, but that darkens everything. The digital camera isn't perfect but it does give good value data.
• I'm able to loosen up a lot if I paint this way. It's way fun.

I'm noticing a lack of neutrals in these and many Fauvist paintings. I'm wondering where that will go.

OK, back to the topic at hand: Should I specialize? Maybe some day. I feel like I'm collecting a wide variety of tools and means of expression, and that maybe at some point I'll find a concept that I stick with for a long time. At the moment, though, all I can do is what is right for me. And these are fun.

"Churn"

9x12x1.5, oil and cold wax on couched hardwood

My mojo is back. Or at least within reach. You know what I mean? You can feel it out there, and you just might have a hold on it. I'm not quite sure yet, since I'm coming back after some excitement (OK, tenth wedding anniversary trip to Paris) (and some other stuff), but things are starting to gel again. I'm playing with the cold wax techniques from the workshop (see my summer posts) as well as my prior methods. Soon I'll start to meld them.

Meanwhile, this is another painting from that workshop. I love purple and green (OK, greenish-yellow) together and this also has some delicious texture. After I got it to a point I liked, I burnished it. That removed lost some of the intensity from the color, so I went back in and boosted that. Still learning, still playing.

I'm also having some serious fun playing with intense textures, and I'll post some of those soon. Nice to be back.

(I'm probably not supposed to use words like "mojo," am I? I mean, I'm a middle-aged white-bread type. But it felt right.)

"Amber"

8x10x0.75," oil and cold wax on couched board

As mentioned in an earlier posting, I invited Rebecca Crowell to California to teach a workshop. Her paintings are wonderfully textured abstracts with the look of age and depth to them. That seminar was at the end of July, but between vacations and surprise trips, I haven't made time to work much more with her techniques.

But the other day I revisited some of the work I did during the workshop and decided that I liked this one as it is. Yes, it can be hard to know when something is done, of course, but this didn't ask for any more work. So here it is. I did buff it a bit to bring out the texture.

Hmm. Actually, I did make one final change. I had been looking at it with the red part at the top. Just how my mind's eye saw it. Then, just for grins, I turned it over. The red part, being darker, anchored it better. The amber part then looked more richly texture. It was interesting, and, as I think I've said before, realistic painters can't do this. Here's how it looked the other way, in case you're curious. I welcome opinions.

SBAWCA show

I recently joined the SBAWCA, which is a part of the Women's Caucus for Art, a national organization celebrating women in the arts. The SBAWCA is the branch in my local area. Today the group opened its 20th anniversary show, and two of my pieces were in it. They looked gorgeous! When you first walked in the door, the first thing you saw was a wall of paintings, among which was Abyss (here's my original blog post):



Once you stepped into the room and looked around, you saw that And So... (see my last post) had a wall all to itself. It looked wonderful, and glowed proudly:



And, yes, I totally got the book for the show, which contains the paintings and my statement about each one. The show runs until September 19. The location is Art Object Gallery, at 592 North Fifth Street, San Jose. It's Japan Town, so it's a fun area to visit.

This is the first national arts organization I've joined. I admit I still don't know how they work, but I saw work from a lot of talented women artists, and I'm looking forward to learning and networking.

"And So..."

36 x 60 x 1.5", acrylic and mixed media on stretched canvas

This piece and another of mine, Abyss, will be in the SBAWCA show starting this Saturday, August 29, in San Jose, CA. Information is here. SBAWCA is a local branch of the WCA, or Women's Caucus for Art, a group I joined recently.

What to say about this? Well, I got interested in circles, and learned about the Enso. This is an image strongly associated with Zen. Its simplicity is profound, and monks who do brushwork will use it as a practice: create a perfect circle with one brushstroke. More at wikipedia. I couldn't name this "Enso," since it's not one brushstroke, and the monks have an entire discipline that I have too much respect for to use the name. So the name is evocative to those who know, but still has a flavor or sense of movement. Also, it turns out that the circle fascinates a lot of people, who attach metaphorical meanings to it, or analyze it mathematically, or associate it with shapes in nature. I'd like to do more. I have one in the works that is resisting completion. You know how that goes.

When I look at this, I'm reminded that they say "the simpler, the better." While I'm cautious of rules (someone will come along and break them and succeed), I can agree that there's something profound about simplicity

This is also the largest piece that I've done that isn't a theater flat. I have another canvas this size, and I got it so it would sit and mock me. OK, not mock, really. But it would encourage me to work larger.

Rebecca Crowell workshop

Wow, you blink and weeks and weeks go by. It's been busy recently, with a few summer trips, some non-art activities, and a workshop, so I haven't posted. But this post is about that workshop.

A few months ago I encountered the work of Rebecca Crowell, an artist who works in cold wax and has developed ways to build depth and richness through layers. Her work can remind you of old walls or ancient frescoes; it just has that deep, grounded feeling. So I emailed her, asking if she was planning a workshop on the west coast. She replied and said she didn't have one in the works, but was available. Being pretty much inexperienced at setting up workshops, of course I decided to set this one up. It was a lot of work, but it was wonderful! We had a total of eight students, all talented and passionate. And my gallery, Gallery 2611, proved to be a wonderful, bright space to work. Here's the set-up:

As a teacher, Rebecca is a thoughtful and perceptive, balancing demonstrations and presentations with time to play with what we learned, and communicating with each student based on her personal concerns. I loved how the room felt when everyone was buried in her own work, and a focused hush descended. We also, interestingly, had scads of passers by come in, curious about what we were doing.

The workshop was three days, and the cold wax was dry enough to work over those days so everyone came out with finished or near-finished work. Here are two of mine that I think need a few more layers. But you can see that they form a good under layer for something rich and deep. The original jpg is pretty big, so if you click it you can see a lot of detail.


What's next? I can intuit that there are ways to combine Rebecca's approach with my texturing techniques. I have ideas swirling around in my head, and I now get to have the fun of playing with them.

"Spirsa"

24 x 18 x 0.75", acrylic and mixed media on stretched canvas

In my last post, I mentioned that I came out of teaching my workshop with two paintings that I liked, which was a bonus. This is the second one. When the earlier painting looked finished at Step 2 (I usually paint in three steps; see the last post), I needed another Step 2 painting that I could use in a demo and develop to Step 3. So I went home and created a tremendous mess. This one has some dry wall tape, in addition to the regular texture material (stucco patch, flexible patching compound). Then I took it to the second day of the workshop.

When it came time to discuss developing a painting, we used this as material for sharing ideas. So we kind of painted this as a committee. My purpose was to demonstrate simplifying a painting (in other words, you shoulda seen this before I simplified it). The students sat where they could see my easel, and we discussed different features of the painting and directions we could go in developing it. For instance, just right of center and a little up is a wonderful wrinkly section that we agreed looked like a dragon's head. I could have punched up the detail in it and made it a focal point. But it fought with the orange circle at the center of the spiral, left of center, so I attenuated it.

The whole experience was wonderfully fun: throwing ideas around, demonstrating what you can do with texture when you're putting a second layer of paint on it, figuring out what delicious little bits to sacrifice to the whole. I got to see how much the students really did know. I think I'll keep this exercise it as a feature of future workshops. I was initially kind of terrified of having to take a painting to completion. After all, I can't guarantee that any given painting will come out well. But if we all do it together then the learning happens whether or not the final result is ideal.

"Phosus"

18 x 14 x 1.5", acrylic and mixed media on stretched canvas

I was fortunate enough at my workshop last weekend to create not one, but two paintings I'm pretty happy with. This is one of them, and it came about kind of by surprise. You see, I often paint in three steps: Step 1.) Apply the texture material. Step 2.) Add the foundation paint layer (this is usually a tremendous mess, lots of free form color applied any way I feel like). Step 3.) Take the tremendous mess and simplify it. I have to say, Step 3 can be difficult; Step 2 can result in wonderful passages where colors run into each other or trickle around the texture or whatever. But it's usually too busy. So in Step 3 I have to paint over parts of it, which can be heart breaking.

This one was a surprise because, at the end of Step 2, I didn't think it needed a lot of work. I figured it should need work, but I wasn't sure what to do to it. Eventually I did go in with some gold and pick out some highlights. And I had to go home that night and create another Step 2 painting for a demo the next day.

I have to say, though, that Step 1 and Step 2 are enormously liberating. You kind of put your logical mind on hold—well, after choosing your palette—and you enter the moment and just go on impulse. I should do something about that...

First workshop: How it went

I finished teaching my first workshop today. This was the title:

Painting Fabulous Textured Abstracts

(or why the hardware store is your best friend)

(Later it occurred to me that I shouldn't have used the word "fabulous." No man would take a workshop with that in the title.)

Two people signed up for the workshop. On the one hand, I'm bummed not to have had a full group. On the other hand, it was nice to have a small, intimate group, especially for my first workshop.

Both days were hot. Saturday, Day 1, the German restaurant next door was having a beer garden in the back parking lot, so there was a lot of oom-pah music plus partying people. It was also a local open studio tour. So, on the whole, pretty busy. In fact, a bit overwhelming. And I hummed polka music for hours. Sunday, Day 2, was even hotter, and we agreed to start a half hour earlier. It was much quieter, and I played some Hawaiian slack key music on my iPod (no oom-pah!). Mostly we all developed the projects we started on Day 1. I did a demo that actually came out well! This was one of my fears: I can't always guarantee that I'll be able to create something good. Both days, people kind of ran out of gas an hour or more before the nominal end time. I can understand this; I've felt kind of overloaded at all-day classes. And the heat was really hard.

I learned a lot. There's one explanation I know I need to improve. Like, it's really hard to estimate how long things will take. Also, even when I give students the composition and the technique for applying paint, they can come out with really different paintings. And we did a few group discussions: One of us would want to talk about a painting, and we'd set it up on an easel and gather round. I loved those. They weren't critiques, per se, since it wasn't about what was wrong, but rather about what they wanted. I don't want to give students a solution, but, rather, give options or remind them of the color or composition guidelines.

And nice students! Willing to share experience and knowledge and enthusiasm. One of the students said she'd been looking for a class like this for years, and wants me to tell her if I ever give another workshop. That's really encouraging.

I'm content. I asked the students if they had enough information to take home and work with on their own, and they said yes, they did. This was good to hear, since at the end of Day 1 I could tell that not everyone was feeling successful. That was a bit hard. I really want them to feel empowered by the class. But Joyce Faulknor, one of the other artists at my gallery and also a teacher, said something that helped: All you can do is give them all you got. Then, even if it doesn't work for everyone, you know you did all you could.