February 2009 Archives

Last weekend the Boy Scouts went on a ski trip, so William went on a ski trip, so I went on a ski trip. I've never in my life desired to go skiing -- it never even occurred to me as a possibility -- and now I can firmly state I will never desire to go skiing again, either. I'm certain there's skiing in Hell.

After our time on the slopes we waited in the lodge while the other Scouts straggled in from the mountain. I'd brought my pad and sketched William with my brush pen. Never leave home without it.

Recently I read David Hockney's Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. Hockney's thesis is that the use of mirrors and lenses entered art in the early Renaissance and completely changed, almost instantly, how artists drew and painted and how audiences related to art. I'm not sure I buy his thesis entirely but he makes a convincing argument for how lens-based art -- realism -- has become.

That book freed me in a very real way. I realize now that I am an excellent draftsman, whereas before, I felt that I was pretty bad. Because I was comparing myself to artists like Ingres. But by Hockney's reckoning Ingres and others used optics extensively -- the visual evidence is pretty compelling -- and when you see the unaided work of artists down through the years, suddenly I look really good. That is, catching a likeness with something like a camera lucida, while not strictly easy, is definitely easier than trying to eyeball it without aid. I'm not saying here I'm up to Ingres' standard by any means. But I realize now that, by working without optics as I do, I'm working with a different set of tools, and so I should compare myself to those artsts working the same way. Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse. And pre-Renaissance artists, too. And when I compare myself to them, I feel pretty good about my draftsmanship.

It also made me realize that the direction I've been naturally going in -- that of trying to see, with my own eyes, rather than use photos or projections or other aids -- that my goal of capturing what's there rather than what one thinks is there based on generations of lens-based art and photography -- that that direction is a worthy one, and a good one, and, most importantly, that I'm doing well in it.

It's a good feeling.

One of the results is this entirely eyeballed, non-lens-based portrait of my son William, tired after a day of skiing. It took me less than ten minutes to get this down freehand, and I must admit, I'm inordinately pleased with it.

Oh, I almost forgot. While I was in Lowe's next door to my studio getting paper towels, I picked up a whole bunch of paint chips to play with. Did I mention I'm running out of panels again? I quickly cut out this little hommage á (ou de détournement de) Matisse. It's really tiny, maybe two inches high.

I'm expecting to use the chips to play with different color combinations, which should make Stephanie happy.

I have some new paintings for you. Cathleen's Knees you've seen unfinished, so here it is all done. Followed by Bubble Yum Girl, so titled because the colors I mixed up reminded me of Bubble Yum bubble gum flavors I used to like when I was a kid. As for why she's a girl and not a woman, well, she's younger than I am, and my rule of thumb is a girl is any female about my age or younger. Women are all old. Then there's Head in Hands, which is based on the phone camera photo I use for my wife in my mobile. The photo clearly says, "I am exasperated with you." The painting's a bit less of a total downer.

Then I've got a trio of works in progress for you. Stephanie's always busting my hump about my use of color. I visited her apartment last week and brought a painting to show her but I left it there so I wouldn't have to drag it on the train home with me. A day or so later she sent me e-mail: "And you need to work on your color theory.  Your painting is sitting in my hallway, and its lack of any particularly interesting color relationships is really getting on my nerves." Thanks!

So I decided to work a little more on color. The main problem I have with what Stephanie calls "interesting color relationships" is that what she considers "interesting" I consider "labor intensive". In order to get much more than a few flat colors down, you have to mix things, paint, and then wait for drying. I don't like to wait for drying. Of course the other problem I have with interesting color relationships is possessing no innate talent for color. I have to work on it, she's right.

Hence these two underpaintings. I like the yellow-green one a lot. The second one less so, but again, I was using colors left over from a previous couple of paintings (see if you can guess which ones). Come to think of it the first underpainting is recycled, also, but those work together much better.

The last work in progress is just, well, exactly what it looks like.

I drew this last night with my Kuretake brush pen while watching TV. I have no idea why but I'm really fond of it.

I've been in the studio again. I spent a week or two -- let's call it a week and a half -- in my basement at home, putting panels together with the compound miter saw Santa brought me for Xmas. I'm learning about woodworking, which my friend Dave, who made me some lovely panels in 2007, finds adorable. "They're so cute when they're young," he says. Anyway, after carpentry comes priming followed by sanding. One of these days I'll put together a whole post on my process from start to finish so you can tell what I'm doing wrong.

The important thing, though, is that I made it back into the studio with all the new panels but the largest, which I'm saving. I think I'm going to tackle a reclining nude. Another friend of mine, Joe Bopp, says, "You might get further if you're nice to the reclining nude, instead of tackling her..." Of course he doesn't realize you're not allowed to be nice to the model. They're there to be abused. If you're too nice to them they get upset. Anyway, the important thing here is that I'm going to attempt a reclining nude, like the Venus d'Urbino, the Maja, and Olympia. Make that my stake in the ground.

But the important thing right now is that I made it back into the studio. My previous two paintings had gone badly, but the new day brought new light, and, as Franklin says, "Having a productive studio practice is the ultimate balm for the irritation caused by the iniquities of the art world." And a bad day in the studio is an iniquity indeed.

I realize now I didn't share my earlier two paintings with you, so they're the first two here. As I wrote on Facebook after I did these: I did the first one and then I saw I had a lot of paint left over. I tend to mix more than I need because I hate running out, but then I hate wasting paint, too. By coincidence, I had another panel the exact same size, so I decided to see what would happen if I painted the same kind of thing but without being so precious, without drawing first or anything, just jumping in and painting. When I was done and cleaning up, I noticed that the color scheme looked familiar. Then I remembered I'd used it before. I guess it came out the same since I used the same idea in my head, which is the color scheme of my bedroom.

Fact is, I think both these paintings are pretty lame and I'll probably end up sanding them down. So I wasted the paint anyway.

The next one down was, I don't know what it was. Fooling around. I started thinking, okay, I'll play with the palette knife and then paint over it. Then somehow the painting over part didn't happen.

Then came the squiggles. Stephanie says -- the painting's in her apartment for the moment, I brought it by to show her and left it there -- she says, "You need to work on your color theory.  Your painting is sitting in my hallway, and its lack of any particularly interesting color relationships is really getting on my nerves." Of course she likes to bust my hump about my colors.

Then came the two paintings I was happy with. First is Bubble-Yum Girl. The first image here is a good photo of the painting unfinished; the second is a lousy photo of the finished version. After that I decided to do an underpainting for a change, and sketched out the painting you see here. I think it'll go places.