A Short Note

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Early post tonight. I actually did two small projects this morning, and then spent a lovely Memorial Day…cleaning the garage for six hours. I actually had planned to do something else, but quite frankly I’m exhausted.

The first project is another artist card size drawing of an apple. It was a simple drawing exercise I gave myself to do. I need to work on shading and perspective. The other is also an artist card size, but for an entirely different project. I have for years been making fairies. I’ve sold hundreds of them, usually around Christmas. I have decided to continue doing so this year, but have some ideas for making them even more artistic. I designed some wings which I plan to print on vellum. Once I have a finished fairy I’ll put up a photo.

No philosophizing about my artistic life tonight, no “woe is me”, just a very tired woman who needs to relax.

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Good Things Can Come In Small Packages

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5 25I have to admit that there was so much I didn’t take into account when starting a year-long project, particularly one that requires writing and the creation of a piece of art each and every day. I know that I have touched on this before, but life got in the way again today. It’s a holiday weekend, we had friends and family over today, and so I find myself once again rushing to finish something for my blog. I seriously had several false starts. It seemed as though I wouldn’t get anything done for tonight, and as tempting as it might be, I refuse to put up older work unless I am near and dear to my bathroom floor (which I was, by the way, last week). I feel like I’d be cheating myself if I did, and I have been cheating myself for far too many years. Not every project has to be a big one. Just creating is the idea. I mentioned the 365 Project when I started this, and the tag line on that book states, “Do something creative every day and change your life.” It is so true. Here I am not even two months in and I can feel the difference. Like so many artists, and more so, so many women, I don’t place enough value on myself and what I do. That is changing, I’ve learned a lot about myself in ways I never considered. I’m so excited about the months ahead, wondering where this journey will take me, and anxious with anticipation to see what work I  will produce.

Back to the subject at hand, life getting in the way of my project. I realized tonight that there might be days ahead where it will be difficult to get my work done. There are birthdays, and our wedding anniversary, and other holidays, all of which will require my attention elsewhere. I guess I will just try to take them as they come and hopefully still be able to create a little something. I did just that tonight. From a photo outside Claude Monet’s house in Giverny. I saw a gardener standing still studying the garden and took a photo. It is a photograph that I would like to paint some day, but for tonight a pencil sketch on an artist card. It is only a two and a half by three and a half-inch drawing, but this one I love. I captured the essence of that moment.  It took me back to Monet’s garden, and our journey there. We took the train from Paris to Vernon, and chose to walk the rest of the way to Giverny instead of boarding the bus with the other tourists. The air was filled with the fragrance of  flowers, and each cottage and garden we passed was more beautiful than the last. When we finally saw Monet’s house and garden, I turned to Dan and said, “How could you live here and not paint?” Now I have to ask myself, “How could you have been there and waited so long to paint?’

It was one of ten days in France with the one that I love, and that makes this little piece of art priceless.

Gaining Vision

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Sound the alarm! I actually read one of the many, many, many art instruction books that I own (Well not the whole thing, just the part I had a question about). I did that because I also returned to the full figure painting of my daughter that I began several weeks ago. The same one I have been avoiding like the plague. I really liked the way the initial sketch was looking on the canvas. I also for the first time with a painting have a vision of what I hope the painting will look like when I am finished. That is a giant leap for me. For years I complained that I couldn’t get what was in my head onto the canvas. I really think my mind was so bogged down with all the nonsense of not being good enough. I really feel like my artistic vision is developing. I’m not going to post the painting yet. All I did today was some color blocking, and honestly it looks a little creepy at the moment. It actually looks like a portrait of one of the kids from Village Of The Damned. But proportionately it looks good, and I can see my daughter’s face emerging. I still wanted to have a piece of art to post this evening so I played around with my watercolors. A photo of my garden provided inspiration. It’s a little abstract, but I love the color, and I enjoyed painting it. I did it just for fun, which was actually quite nice. I really feel like I’m moving ahead. I’m not getting as stressed about what I’m working on. One of the benefits of working every day I guess. When I started this blog I used words like pressure and homework. I will admit that there are days when I have fleeting moments of wishing I hadn’t gotten myself into this, but they don’t last long. I think this blog and its accompanying artwork is one of the best things I have ever done for myself. It’s about time.Image

Creating Dreams

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I wasn’t feeling great tonight, residual issues from taking the wrong medication last week. (Let that be a lesson to all of us, don’t just pop the pill out of the foil, turn it over first to see what it is!) I started to paint something architectural, but I didn’t even make it half way through the preliminary sketch, I just wasn’t up to the task. It was going to be in watercolor, and since I had the materials out I decided that watercolor would again be my medium for this evening. One of the best parts about being an artist is the ability to create your own world. We have a creative license to draw, paint, sculpt, or carve, etc., the world we want to be in. In some cases we can even have a little fun. When I was about seventeen I drew a sketch of my dad, bald. He wasn’t, and at eighty still isn’t. I thought it was funny, needless to say he didn’t. So tonight while I wasn’t feeling good I decide to paint someplace quiet, relaxing, and peaceful, someplace I’d like to be in the moment. I had glanced at a photo, but then I put it away and let my mind take over. That too seems to be coming easier these days. So tonight’s project is a place I want to be, somewhere to lay in the soft grass, look at the clouds, and relax. Now if I could only find a way to make that a reality…Image

No Surrender!

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Tonight’s project is a small oil painting, but before I get into that I want to be really honest here about my struggle today. I’m actually working on several projects, most of them have to do with refurbishing flea market finds. I’ve been putting those projects ahead of this one, thus the late night art work and posting. I’m fine with that because it isn’t about avoiding my art, it’s about earning a living. My struggle today was with the very same issues I addressed last night. I almost did it today, I almost walked away from this painting. Oil painting is my biggest obstacle. It is the art I am most drawn to, and the one I have the biggest issues with. To begin with I really am an “instant gratification” artist, when I want something done, I want it yesterday. I’m also a bit of a control freak, (A bit? I don’t like to fly, I hate it actually, but as I have told Dan repeatedly, if I could fly the plane there would be no issue) anyway, oil is not a medium for control freaks. It directs the time line. Things were not coming out the way I wanted and the canvas only had paint on half of it. I put it down and went in search of my watercolors. I decided what to paint, but then I stopped. I made myself go back to the oils. The struggle continued right on to the end. I won’t give in to it. I have to keep pushing. No Surrender!

Whew! Got that out. The painting…

Struggle Part Deux

My other problem, I have no style. Not personally of course, that is if you consider jeans and a shirt of some form roughly three hundred fifty days a year a style, but a painting style. Again the lack of lessons has left me clueless in the use of materials. Just before I started writing I told Dan that my paintings are flat. My Dad was a house painter by trade, it’s sort of how I used to paint. No dimension, like painting with a brush on a wall. When I go to art museums I am as close as legally allowed to paintings, always studying the strokes and texture of the paint. My paintings looked for the most part lifeless. The other issue (there’s more?), is that I can’t decide how I want to paint. Realism? Yes and no, too much precision. Impressionism? More yes than no, love Impressionism, first place we went to in Paris was the Musee d’Orsay, the Impressionist museum. It’s a difficult style for me because I’m still a little hung up on the “it has to look like it’s supposed to look” issue. I love Grant Wood, Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. Particularly Hopper. I’m just not sure who I am as a painter. I just decided to post two pictures tonight. The one I did earlier this evening, and another older one. In my efforts to get over myself I figured out a little trick. I had put a soft focus filter on a photograph to blur the lines. It helped me get past the “has to” nonsense. I only needed to do it one or twice, but it really helped. Once I realized that my “not exactly as it really looks” paintings were something I liked, I was able to move past some of the crap in my head. (The older painting was actually in part a photo from Gourmet magazine. Just want to make sure I give credit.)

So tonight I was playing with style and texture. I didn’t work from my actual photograph, which was from a sunrise I photographed in Virginia Beach, but from what I saw in my mind from looking at it earlier in the day. Not entirely pleased with the results, but happy I didn’t give up.

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The Art Of Simplicity

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I think I have spent years complicating my artistic process. When you focus on what you can’t do I think it tends to color what you can do. I have now spent forty days on my project. When I started I was focused on this idea of using up all of the materials I had filled my studio with over the years. I don’t think I really thought about the commitment to the work, or how it might affect me, and it has. Over the course of the last twenty years I have started far more projects than I’ve finished. Drawings, painting, even silly craft projects, where something didn’t look right, or I would make a mistake, or more likely, I would decide that whatever it was, it wasn’t good enough, and then the project was scrapped. Even now if I were to clean out the studio, and our garages, there would be a lot of half done paintings, pieces of wood, etc.. I had given up on myself and it is reflected in every unfinished project. What has happened to me in the last forty days is a transformation. I kept my promise to myself, and that’s a big accomplishment. I have produced more than fifty pieces of art in that time. Not every piece is something I love, or even like. But what is important, the biggest accomplishment is that in the process of creating those pieces I struggled with several, and didn’t stop.There were a couple that I was ready to quit, but I didn’t, I stuck it out. Some of those turned out to be some of the best work that I have created since I started this. I believe that forcing myself to confront this mental ball and chain I been dragging along has done great things for me.  My thought process is changing. The thoughts of what I can’t do are straying further and further from my mind. That is because I have forty days of “can do” looking me in the face. When you start something and you are already defeated, you have lost before you have begun. I have a quote on a magnet, I think it is Eleanor Roosevelt, but it states, “Do something everyday that scares you”. I bought it a few years ago when I was in another of the endless “new starts” that I promised myself. Sort of like all the diets that start next Monday, and  trust me I am very familiar with that one. The magnet has been sitting on my drawing table, and I have looked at it so often and thought, “It’s time”. I didn’t do it. I was afraid. Of what? Failure, maybe finding out that after all of the years of “what if?” I might discover that even if I had taken those art lessons I felt cheated out of, I still wouldn’t have been the artist I wanted to be. I am doing something every day, but guess what? I’m not afraid anymore. A little uncertain, yes. A little lost, yes. But things are getting better with every day, with every project. It’s simple. One project, one day at a time.

Two motivations behind tonight’s project. The first is that I am still trying to fulfill the object of the project. I bought a couple of mat boards at Blick last year simply because I liked that the size of the opening was different, it is long and rectangular. So when I went upstairs to see what I would do today I came across them and decided that whatever I did tonight needed to fit in that opening. The second motivation is that Dan likes pen and ink drawings. So for tonight a “simple” pen and ink.IMG_9705

The Season

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It’s Autumn

But the leaves

Have yet to fall.

The time is now,

Opportunity is in my waiting hands.

The frost of Winter

A distant expectation.

Mother Earth at her voluptuous best,

Ripened fruit,

Lush with knowledge.

Now is the time of realization,

Seeds of Spring

Long since grown,

Summers promise

At last fulfilled.

Now is the time

Before Winter’s harsh wind

The harvest of self,

To reap reward,

To be at last,

What I was meant

To be.Autumn (1)

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday’s thoughts, today’s project, watercolor and ink.

Putting Life In Perspective

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I finished my project for today in the late afternoon. I hadn’t taken the time to post either the drawing, nor the accompanying text until now. Just yesterday I had spoken to Dan about the tone of this blog. I feared it was becoming a little “woe is me”, and quite frankly I have no tolerance for whining. I told him I was planning to expand a little on my personal history, and despite my complaints here of feeling as though my artistic gifts were sorely under appreciated (because it’s true),  all of my history and the people in it, make me who I am. That was the plan, and it seems that with this blog the plans I make the day before are rarely the things that happen.

This morning the line of a poem came to my mind. I haven’t said so here before, but I also like to write, and have done so for years. New plan! I was going to take the line, which by mid-morning had become several lines, and write it all down, and then my intention was to in some way illustrate either by paint or pencil the thoughts I was having. I even had some idea of what it should look like in my head, but then I came downstairs and looked at a drawing that I began yesterday. It is of the niece of one of the dearest friends I have ever had. She is four, and in her short history, (which I will not share) she has had much loss and sadness. I put aside the brilliant epiphany of my poem and began to  finish her portrait.  As I sat here this afternoon working, the news of the tornado in Oklahoma appeared in the news feed on Dan’s phone. We turned on the television in time to see the devastated school. In the course of less than a single day the some of what I feel, the self-pity, the feeling of being inadequate, the chip on my shoulder, seem petty.  Sure, I’m entitled to my own human struggles, everyone is. No ones pain is any less than that of another, because pain, its causes, and its individual effects are just that, individual. But when I look at the face of this beautiful child, her history, her future, and the futures that so many children won’t have, I see my struggles in a different perspective. It doesn’t mean I won’t continue to look at the whys and hows of who I am. It just means that maybe I won’t be so hard on myself. That I will continue to grow as an artist, and in the process become a better, and more whole human being.

A little note about my materials. I worked in a grocery store for more years than I care to think of. It was then that I began to draw on the blank side of the bags. I love the look of chalk on brown paper.

So here is Emily, in pastel chalk and pencil.IMG_9710

Still Moving Slow

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IMG_9719Still a little under the weather, so I just did a small still life sketch with colored pencil.  I struggled a little as always with perspective, but I feel like it’s getting better.  I think maybe a need a day of just doing a lot of sketching, nothing precise, but just some free form sketching.  I’m still a little timid and uptight in my drawing. Amongst the piles of stuff in my studio are giant sketchbooks that belonged to my kids from their school days. I think I need to make it my mission this week to just grab a piece of charcoal and fill one of them. I also need to get back to the painting that I started. It has been dry to the touch for more than a week. I had planned to get back to it ASAP, but I have been allowing other projects to get in the way. If I’m going to be honest with myself I think I’ve been avoiding it.  It will be my first full figure painting, but again, time to face those fears head on! 

Regaining Lost Ground

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I’m back, not 100% to say the least.  Very, very bad reaction to some medication, I think it may take a few days to feel better. That being said, I managed to create not one but two pieces today. Dan asked if I felt like I had to do two pieces since I lost the day yesterday. My initial reaction was to say no, but I think deep down maybe I did feel something. As much as there have been those days when I felt pressured, or an obligation to this project, or felt like it is an unwelcome chore, I have gained more than I imagined from it. I have an old leather portfolio, I’ve had it for more than thirty years, and up until the last few weeks it  didn’t have much in it. It isn’t that I haven’t worked at all, I have always kept a toe in the water, but never in my life have I worked this consistently. My portfolio still had work from high school in it. The plastic sleeves are cracked, and the zipper isn’t what it used to be, but I have aged as well. I could go buy a new one, but this portfolio has been waiting for an awful long time to be filled, almost as long as me. Each day I feel more and more authentic in my work, and each night as I slide a finished piece into my portfolio I find myself feeling happy that I haven’t given up. I find myself excited at the prospect of what lies ahead for me and my art. I am taking one day at a time, each day looking through my studio to decide what to do today. I also realize that as I look around my studio that it would take far more than a year to use up all the materials that I have. What no longer seems overwhelming is all of what I own. I will use it all. There may be days in the future like today where I produce more than a single piece of art. I feel as though the chip on my shoulder is fading away. I am no longer focusing on what I can’t do, but rather what I can.

I saw a photo in the New York Times that I found very appealing. It was of a couple of ballerinas, one of which had her back to the camera. I loved the line of her body. I have mentioned that figure drawing is something I haven’t done much of. I jumped right in again and did a watercolor. There are a few sections of it I would like to redo, but watercolor can be an unforgiving medium, so it stays as is. I still love it. My second piece is a pastel. On a drive home from Arizona last year I took some beautiful photos that I wanted to paint. I had a box (unopened) of some soft pastels. A medium I am still not used to using. I like the way the light fell in the photos on the hills, and I’ve managed to capture it fairly well.

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