Just Keep Swimming

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.