- My new favorite painting tools are plastic scrapers (the kind you can buy in the hardware store for spackling) and kitchen sponges, preferably the kind with scrubber stuff on one side.
- Painting in the garage does not work when the garage has no light except what comes in the open garage door. It can also lead to pain in the knees from crawling over the concrete floor.
- Painting on a picnic table outside is nice, but can lead to stripes in the paint and pain in the lower back.
- Buy stretchers when you buy the canvas because waiting for them to arrive so you can stretch the finished painting is really frustrating. Especially when it's Labor Day weekend and you know the order won't even be processed till Tuesday! (remember 'Til Tuesday?)
- Showing incomplete paintings to people is risky. Sometimes they can say helpful things. Other times their likes and dislikes can distract you from whatever it is you're trying to work out.
- I used to think my painting was all about color and texture. Now I know it's also about gesture.
- There's a really interesting Flickr group where people post photos of paintings in progress. I thought I'd post photos of the second painting there, until I looked at what's already up. Those folks are amazing painters!
- Like Kenny Rogers said, "You got to ... know when to walk away and know when to run." Sometimes you just need to put the sponge down and step away from the canvas. You can always come back later. And if you don't like it, there's always gesso.
- Isn't it annoying that using a bulleted list in Blogger messes up the spacing? It also happens with blockquoted text and sometimes after inserting pictures. There are several hacks out there to fix it, but, really, this just shouldn't happen!!
Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Afterthoughts
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Painting update
Work on the big painting has ground to a halt. First, it was the series of thunderstorms that made it difficult to work in a garage where the only light comes from the open garage door which can't be opened because the rain is wailing. Then it was the set-up - working on a 4' x 5' canvas on a hard cement floor covered with a plastic dropcloth is not optimal. The plastic bunches up and makes unexpected lines in the paint - not always a bad thing, but mostly annoying. The whole thing slides around and the plastic sticks to my sweat-covered self. (It is August in New Jersey.) The cement hurts my knees. Who knew knee-pads were crucial painting gear?
But after a few days away from the painting, I figured out the real problem was the feeling that I was painting a request. K wanted something that would "go with" the greenish-khaki of the office decor and didn't want anything remotely representative. "Think Rothko - just colors." I don't do Rothko, but I gave it a go. After a few days of painting what I had was a swirl of completely undistinguished blues and greens, with a few accents of burnt sienna and yellow ochre. Pretty colors, totally uninspiring.
Something that was, maybe not inspiring me, but nibbling at me: the collage I'd done a couple of months ago and blogged about here. It came about after some friends and I posted childhood pictures of ourselves. Comments one of my friends made inspired me to make a copy of the picture, alter it with some screen printing and writing, then build this collage around it. The process was totally different from anything I'd ever done, it was fun, I liked the result, and wanted to do more - but work and life intervened and I hadn't returned to it. Frustrated with the whopper, I decided that now was the time to do something else.
I'd been remembering a little scrap of a practice painting that I'd done over a year ago from a sketch of my face. Instead of going back to the childhood photos, I thought I'd start with that. I also wanted to work on a slightly larger scale so a 2' x 3' piece of hardboard became the backing for the collage. Grubbing through my test pieces and rejected paintings, I came up with a few more to rip into strips, but the textures and colors weren't exactly right. Whatever. I wanted to get started and figured I'd fix it later.
After much ripping, pasting, and moving around, I had the hardboard covered. It wasn't coming together in the way the first one had though: too many different colors and textures (aka, whatever bites me in the butt). So, I pulled out the stencils and added some texture that covered several pieces at a time. More unified, but too busy. I left it for a couple of days and when I looked at it with fresher eyes, I thought the problem was that there was no sense to the color arrangement. One of the things I like about the first collage is the color progression from dark red-brown to blue-yellow, to the sepia of the photo. The colors of the canvas strips in the new piece weren't organized as coherently. Well, that's what paint's for, so I added some washes over some of the canvas strips to unify their colors. I think it's done, at least for now.
But after a few days away from the painting, I figured out the real problem was the feeling that I was painting a request. K wanted something that would "go with" the greenish-khaki of the office decor and didn't want anything remotely representative. "Think Rothko - just colors." I don't do Rothko, but I gave it a go. After a few days of painting what I had was a swirl of completely undistinguished blues and greens, with a few accents of burnt sienna and yellow ochre. Pretty colors, totally uninspiring.
Something that was, maybe not inspiring me, but nibbling at me: the collage I'd done a couple of months ago and blogged about here. It came about after some friends and I posted childhood pictures of ourselves. Comments one of my friends made inspired me to make a copy of the picture, alter it with some screen printing and writing, then build this collage around it. The process was totally different from anything I'd ever done, it was fun, I liked the result, and wanted to do more - but work and life intervened and I hadn't returned to it. Frustrated with the whopper, I decided that now was the time to do something else.I'd been remembering a little scrap of a practice painting that I'd done over a year ago from a sketch of my face. Instead of going back to the childhood photos, I thought I'd start with that. I also wanted to work on a slightly larger scale so a 2' x 3' piece of hardboard became the backing for the collage. Grubbing through my test pieces and rejected paintings, I came up with a few more to rip into strips, but the textures and colors weren't exactly right. Whatever. I wanted to get started and figured I'd fix it later.
After much ripping, pasting, and moving around, I had the hardboard covered. It wasn't coming together in the way the first one had though: too many different colors and textures (aka, whatever bites me in the butt). So, I pulled out the stencils and added some texture that covered several pieces at a time. More unified, but too busy. I left it for a couple of days and when I looked at it with fresher eyes, I thought the problem was that there was no sense to the color arrangement. One of the things I like about the first collage is the color progression from dark red-brown to blue-yellow, to the sepia of the photo. The colors of the canvas strips in the new piece weren't organized as coherently. Well, that's what paint's for, so I added some washes over some of the canvas strips to unify their colors. I think it's done, at least for now.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Big canvas
With all the traveling and jewelry making I've done this summer, there hasn't been much painting going on. Then K, whose staff just moved into a new set of offices, asked if I'd like to make some very large paintings for a 30 foot long wall in one of their reading rooms. Not exactly a commission, but an expression of support that provided a much needed kick in the pants. Yesterday after the bead show I hit Pearl Paint, aka heaven on earth, and bought 6 yards of primed canvas, some large jars of acrylic paint in my usual colors, and a few other sundries. Then on to a hardware store for some rollers, wallpaper brushes, super-sized scrapers, drop cloths, and anything else I thought might be useful.
This morning, in spite of the fact that it's Sleep-in Sunday, I popped awake early, anxious to get started. I set up shop in the empty garage, thus furthering my ultimate goal of taking over all the space in and near the house for my art and jewelry-making. I lined up my pots of paint and gels and matte medium on some chairs that are stored along the wall of the garage. The big door was wide open and sunlight streamed in.
My paintings have always been smallish - I think the largest was something like 36 x 40. One time a woman who was at our house for some reason I forget asked me if all my paintings were this "comfortable, human scale." She was, of course, from Manhattan. Perhaps I imagined the patronizing tone, but in the spirit of those Gary Larson "what we say, what they hear" cartoons, what I heard was "Are all your paintings this bourgeois dilettante size?" Things were about to change. I tore off 5 feet of canvas and the rrrrip gave me shivers. Laid out on the floor it looked huge and I wondered where to begin.
One thing I sometimes do is put down a layer of matte gel for texture, so I decided to start there. As a first step it was perfect: I could start to get the feel of working on the canvas without making any color commitments. Twenty minutes later I had used two-thirds of the big jar of medium and I was pretty happy with the result. I figured I'd let it dry for half an hour and then start laying on washes of color. I didn't reckon with NJ humidity: after half an hour it looked as wet as it had when I put it on. I decided to work on jewelry. I strung a necklace, worked out a design for a fused wire pendant and cut up the silver wire, re-strung the necklace, took pictures of a new necklace, listed said necklace on Etsy, noodled around in various forums, and finally, in desperation, did a variety of chores I would really rather not have done. Four hours later it was finally dry.
By this time I knew that I wanted to work mainly in blues and greens on this canvas and I was rarin' to go. I used the roller, the wallpaper brush, scrapers, sponges, and balled up newspaper. It was great. After half an hour, I and everything I was wearing, including the ugly but very comfortable Teva sandals I had bought in Greece when my old sandals blew out, were covered in paint. Apparently, big canvas = big mess. That layer dried more quickly, being quite watery, and I was able to put on two more before the light gave out and the mosquitoes set in.
Working on a large scale is definitely different. It made me realize that I have characteristic gestures that work for the scale of paintings I'm used to making. How to translate those gestures into the larger size? A larger implement is just part of the solution - the gesture itself has to be larger or else it has to be broken down into smaller component parts. Or maybe the old gestures just aren't right for this scale. This painting may end up being a "do over" - thank heavens for gesso - but that's ok. It's thrilling to have a new problem to work on and to be painting again. It's also pretty great to have a partner who's as excited about this process as I am.
This morning, in spite of the fact that it's Sleep-in Sunday, I popped awake early, anxious to get started. I set up shop in the empty garage, thus furthering my ultimate goal of taking over all the space in and near the house for my art and jewelry-making. I lined up my pots of paint and gels and matte medium on some chairs that are stored along the wall of the garage. The big door was wide open and sunlight streamed in.
My paintings have always been smallish - I think the largest was something like 36 x 40. One time a woman who was at our house for some reason I forget asked me if all my paintings were this "comfortable, human scale." She was, of course, from Manhattan. Perhaps I imagined the patronizing tone, but in the spirit of those Gary Larson "what we say, what they hear" cartoons, what I heard was "Are all your paintings this bourgeois dilettante size?" Things were about to change. I tore off 5 feet of canvas and the rrrrip gave me shivers. Laid out on the floor it looked huge and I wondered where to begin.
One thing I sometimes do is put down a layer of matte gel for texture, so I decided to start there. As a first step it was perfect: I could start to get the feel of working on the canvas without making any color commitments. Twenty minutes later I had used two-thirds of the big jar of medium and I was pretty happy with the result. I figured I'd let it dry for half an hour and then start laying on washes of color. I didn't reckon with NJ humidity: after half an hour it looked as wet as it had when I put it on. I decided to work on jewelry. I strung a necklace, worked out a design for a fused wire pendant and cut up the silver wire, re-strung the necklace, took pictures of a new necklace, listed said necklace on Etsy, noodled around in various forums, and finally, in desperation, did a variety of chores I would really rather not have done. Four hours later it was finally dry.
By this time I knew that I wanted to work mainly in blues and greens on this canvas and I was rarin' to go. I used the roller, the wallpaper brush, scrapers, sponges, and balled up newspaper. It was great. After half an hour, I and everything I was wearing, including the ugly but very comfortable Teva sandals I had bought in Greece when my old sandals blew out, were covered in paint. Apparently, big canvas = big mess. That layer dried more quickly, being quite watery, and I was able to put on two more before the light gave out and the mosquitoes set in.
Working on a large scale is definitely different. It made me realize that I have characteristic gestures that work for the scale of paintings I'm used to making. How to translate those gestures into the larger size? A larger implement is just part of the solution - the gesture itself has to be larger or else it has to be broken down into smaller component parts. Or maybe the old gestures just aren't right for this scale. This painting may end up being a "do over" - thank heavens for gesso - but that's ok. It's thrilling to have a new problem to work on and to be painting again. It's also pretty great to have a partner who's as excited about this process as I am.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Jewelry Camp
From Friday, June 15 through Tuesday, June 19 I will be away at....drumroll, please.....jewelry camp! No, they don't call it that, but it's how I've been thinking of the jewelry-making workshop at Peters Valley Craft Center. This place is out in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, meaning it's out in the woods. Normally this would be enough to put me off - I'm not a woods kind of gal. At all. Famously, at least among my friends, I once said to a hiking enthusiast, "So this hiking business - the idea is that you walk up the hill and then you walk down? That's it?" What could she say? "Uh, yeah, that's it...but it's really worth it!" Uh-huh. If that's the case, why is it that the stories you hear from hikers and climbers are always disaster stories?
As if the ruralitude of the locale weren't enough of a trial, the list of things to bring contained this disturbing entry, complete with bold font for emphasis:
So why do I want to go to jewelry camp? When it comes to making jewelry I like to say that I've been raised by wolves. I've never taken a class - everything I know came from books and lots of trial and error. I'm sure there are easier, faster, more elegant ways of doing half the things I do on an almost daily basis. (Actually, that's probably true of a lot more than making jewelry.) And then there's soldering, my attempts at which fail around 90% of the time. I'd like to get it down to around a 50% failure rate by the end of the class. According to the brochure, we'll also learn to use "die forms with texture hammers and roller printing for surface design." And we'll bezel-set some cabochons. All of which sounds like heaven on a bun.
Nevertheless, it struck me last night that the real reason I'm going to jewelry camp is that I want to take a painting class. I've also been raised by wolves when it comes to painting and I'm starting to feel that I need outside eyes to look at my work and push me in new directions. I've been wanting to take a painting class for a couple of years, but it's difficult with work and, also, I've been scared. It's one thing to paint in the privacy of your home and show your work to friends and colleagues. It's quite another to put myself into a class in front of strangers, most of whom will no doubt be decades younger than I am, who have no reason to believe that I'm an artist of any kind. I'm getting a little nauseated at the thought even as I type this. Clearly, some healthy part of my psyche got annoyed with my lily-livered ego and said, "ok, if you're too much of a wimp to jump right into a painting class, start with something artistic that you don't have so many hang-ups about - like, say, jewelry."
The reason all this became so clear last night was because, for the first time, I actually got nervous about jewelry camp. I don't mean I got nervous about the ticks and lack of civilization (i.e., no Starbucks within walking distance). I got nervous about being a beginner in front of strangers. It's been a while since I've gone out on that particular limb and that's not a good thing. So, thanks for the push, hidden healthy part of my psyche, just don't expect me to go hiking.
"We had the most awesome weekend! We went hiking on Mt. Pointless and about halfway to the campsite we realized we'd forgotten all the tarps, but we went on anyway. Then Emma tripped and sprained her ankle so she had to give her pack to Kim and I helped her walk. Just as we got near the site these huge black clouds rolled in and the wind started to blow so hard we couldn't even set up the tent! Oh my god, we were so cold and wet! It was great!"Fortunately it doesn't look like there's any obligatory hiking at jewelry camp, even though the studio is a short two-miles from the living/eating area. I'm bringing my car.
As if the ruralitude of the locale weren't enough of a trial, the list of things to bring contained this disturbing entry, complete with bold font for emphasis:
Insect repellent This season we are experiencing a high than normal amount [sic] of ticks and we suggest everyone bring repellent with them.It gets better. Three lines down I read: "Flashlight with batteries, there are no streetlights here." Ok, so I'm going to be out in the middle of nowhere stumbling around in the dark with my ankles covered in fat ticks incubating a nice case of Lyme disease. This guy Frederick Marshall better be one hell of a teacher.
So why do I want to go to jewelry camp? When it comes to making jewelry I like to say that I've been raised by wolves. I've never taken a class - everything I know came from books and lots of trial and error. I'm sure there are easier, faster, more elegant ways of doing half the things I do on an almost daily basis. (Actually, that's probably true of a lot more than making jewelry.) And then there's soldering, my attempts at which fail around 90% of the time. I'd like to get it down to around a 50% failure rate by the end of the class. According to the brochure, we'll also learn to use "die forms with texture hammers and roller printing for surface design." And we'll bezel-set some cabochons. All of which sounds like heaven on a bun.
Nevertheless, it struck me last night that the real reason I'm going to jewelry camp is that I want to take a painting class. I've also been raised by wolves when it comes to painting and I'm starting to feel that I need outside eyes to look at my work and push me in new directions. I've been wanting to take a painting class for a couple of years, but it's difficult with work and, also, I've been scared. It's one thing to paint in the privacy of your home and show your work to friends and colleagues. It's quite another to put myself into a class in front of strangers, most of whom will no doubt be decades younger than I am, who have no reason to believe that I'm an artist of any kind. I'm getting a little nauseated at the thought even as I type this. Clearly, some healthy part of my psyche got annoyed with my lily-livered ego and said, "ok, if you're too much of a wimp to jump right into a painting class, start with something artistic that you don't have so many hang-ups about - like, say, jewelry."
The reason all this became so clear last night was because, for the first time, I actually got nervous about jewelry camp. I don't mean I got nervous about the ticks and lack of civilization (i.e., no Starbucks within walking distance). I got nervous about being a beginner in front of strangers. It's been a while since I've gone out on that particular limb and that's not a good thing. So, thanks for the push, hidden healthy part of my psyche, just don't expect me to go hiking.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Work that look, or Artistic Discipline
A piece of advice that I see all over the selling tips in the Etsy Wiki is that the product should have a coherent style. Certainly some of the most successful sellers on Etsy take that approach and there is something aesthetically pleasing about looking at a store full of products that are on the same design wavelength. My store is full of whatever I happen to be making at the moment. There are categories of things, the largest being handmade silver - and I think that's probably where my work will go more and more. But still, I love gemstones and can't help ordering strands after strand of carnelian, chalcedony, iolite, rhodonite - yum. And then there's the weird stuff I want to make combining leather and duct tape and lace and silver and crystals - maybe not all in the same piece, but in bizarre and fun ways. The Punk Victorian "line" also
doesn't fit the handmade silver theme, but I have a big supply of the metal mesh that inspired it and want to make more pieces like this pearl and mesh necklace. Truth be told (as the captain of Firefly used to say), it's a little more Elizabethan than Victorian and it's not really punk at all. But if I can't be orderly and coherent in my design, at least I can try to be in naming the pieces. So, anything with metal mesh in my store is going to get the Punk Victorian label.
The same issue exists in painting. I admire tremendously those artists who exhibit the discipline to work within a set of principles or problems for years. Stephen Westfall is one.
His paintings are full of energy, but within the bounds of a very strict discipline. He works with "the grid" in a very patient detailed way. In some paintings it looks like he's performing an experiment: "what happens if I take this section of the grid and just skew it like this?" Then the whole thing goes slightly wacky. Here's a really interesting interview with him where he attributes his penchant for segmentation to ADD and dyslexia. I don't know about that, but I do know that he's a terrific painter and a great educator. (He taught at my workplace for a semester. Sadly, I wasn't in his class.) Yesterday I went to an opening at the Phoenix Gallery in NYC. The artist, Young Ja Yoon, is the mother of a friend and her work also shows an amazing coherence and discipline, though it's totally different in style, content, and technique from SW's. Her paintings are serene, minimal, and organic. Most have a soft colored background, often a light sage or spring green, sometimes lightly shaded. Unlike SW's work, you can see the trace of the artist's hand in the few lines (pencil, charcoal, chalk?) and daubs of paint laid on the background. The paintings are very restrained, but also quite sensual, because you can really see the gestures used to make the marks.
My style as a painter isn't much more coherent than my style as a jewelry-maker, but I'm less worried about that since I haven't even shown anywhere much less tried to sell my paintings. I'm still exploring materials and techniques in a very basic way. A couple of things are clear to me though:
doesn't fit the handmade silver theme, but I have a big supply of the metal mesh that inspired it and want to make more pieces like this pearl and mesh necklace. Truth be told (as the captain of Firefly used to say), it's a little more Elizabethan than Victorian and it's not really punk at all. But if I can't be orderly and coherent in my design, at least I can try to be in naming the pieces. So, anything with metal mesh in my store is going to get the Punk Victorian label.The same issue exists in painting. I admire tremendously those artists who exhibit the discipline to work within a set of principles or problems for years. Stephen Westfall is one.
His paintings are full of energy, but within the bounds of a very strict discipline. He works with "the grid" in a very patient detailed way. In some paintings it looks like he's performing an experiment: "what happens if I take this section of the grid and just skew it like this?" Then the whole thing goes slightly wacky. Here's a really interesting interview with him where he attributes his penchant for segmentation to ADD and dyslexia. I don't know about that, but I do know that he's a terrific painter and a great educator. (He taught at my workplace for a semester. Sadly, I wasn't in his class.) Yesterday I went to an opening at the Phoenix Gallery in NYC. The artist, Young Ja Yoon, is the mother of a friend and her work also shows an amazing coherence and discipline, though it's totally different in style, content, and technique from SW's. Her paintings are serene, minimal, and organic. Most have a soft colored background, often a light sage or spring green, sometimes lightly shaded. Unlike SW's work, you can see the trace of the artist's hand in the few lines (pencil, charcoal, chalk?) and daubs of paint laid on the background. The paintings are very restrained, but also quite sensual, because you can really see the gestures used to make the marks.My style as a painter isn't much more coherent than my style as a jewelry-maker, but I'm less worried about that since I haven't even shown anywhere much less tried to sell my paintings. I'm still exploring materials and techniques in a very basic way. A couple of things are clear to me though:
- I'm more interested in color and texture than in line, probably because drawing still freaks me out. (See yesterday's post on art education.)
- I'm fascinated by the way random acts with paint on canvas create meaning. Humans are very good at discerning patterns, even when they're not there. It's why random repetitive noises can start to sound like garbled language or why we see faces in wood grain or why, if you look at random flashing lights while listening to music, the lights and music will seem to synchronize.
When I'm painting I usually have a problem I'm working on: what does this new medium do to the texture of the paint? what happens if I use a roller instead of a paintbrush? how can I link this shiny drippy part of the canvas to this rough sandy part of the canvas? what do these colors do to each other? I don't know if these local problems or puzzles will necessarily lead me to a coherent style of painting. Mostly I'm just having fun and hoping that at some point the lights and music synchronize.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Jewelry, painting, writing
The world doesn't need this blog. But I do. This is a public space that feels semi-private, a useful illusion.
Dear Diary,
Today I started a blog...
I started making jewelry just last year after I saw a bracelet in a jewelry store that cost around $200. It was a long narrow suede strip with tiny gold beads sewn all along it. You wrapped it around your wrist several times and it closed with a button and loop. Very simple. I went to the local bead store, bought some suede lacing and gold-foil lined beads for under $20 and made myself a lovely bracelet. Not as labor-intensive as the one in the store, but a nice effect. Then I made a few for friends. Soon bead lust set in and then tool lust and metal lust and now, less than a year later, I've bought many tools, a small kiln, a tumbler, and turned a spare bedroom into a jewelry studio. I don't live off painting or jewelry-making, which means that I can love it without requiring it to support my life. I love my other work, but these days my fingers itch and images of jewelry that wants to be made run constantly through my head. I want to be making - everything else is a distraction. So why am I writing this? I need to get meta with what I'm doing. Not usually a problem for a professional intellectual. When I paint, there's always a problem I'm working on, maybe technical, maybe conceptual, something I'm trying to "solve" with the work. Not so much with jewelry-making, though it's coming along.
Here's another reason for this blog: I have a store on Etsy and I've been surprised to discover that I love writing descriptions for my pieces. Sometimes they take the form of little story fragments - but when the piece is sold, the story disappears. So I'm going to post the stories with pictures of the pieces here, so that they can live on in active cyberspace.
Dear Diary,
Today I started a blog...
I started making jewelry just last year after I saw a bracelet in a jewelry store that cost around $200. It was a long narrow suede strip with tiny gold beads sewn all along it. You wrapped it around your wrist several times and it closed with a button and loop. Very simple. I went to the local bead store, bought some suede lacing and gold-foil lined beads for under $20 and made myself a lovely bracelet. Not as labor-intensive as the one in the store, but a nice effect. Then I made a few for friends. Soon bead lust set in and then tool lust and metal lust and now, less than a year later, I've bought many tools, a small kiln, a tumbler, and turned a spare bedroom into a jewelry studio. I don't live off painting or jewelry-making, which means that I can love it without requiring it to support my life. I love my other work, but these days my fingers itch and images of jewelry that wants to be made run constantly through my head. I want to be making - everything else is a distraction. So why am I writing this? I need to get meta with what I'm doing. Not usually a problem for a professional intellectual. When I paint, there's always a problem I'm working on, maybe technical, maybe conceptual, something I'm trying to "solve" with the work. Not so much with jewelry-making, though it's coming along.
Here's another reason for this blog: I have a store on Etsy and I've been surprised to discover that I love writing descriptions for my pieces. Sometimes they take the form of little story fragments - but when the piece is sold, the story disappears. So I'm going to post the stories with pictures of the pieces here, so that they can live on in active cyberspace.
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