Challenge

I like to paint big. If I had my way, my paintings would be measured in feet rather than inches. I’m talking four by four feet minimum. My wife has put down her foot because we have no walls big enough to accommodate large paintings, and they stack up.  

I get to paint big when I play around in my carport. I buy canvas drop cloths and cut them into manageable sizes and staple them to an old sheet of plywood. I don’t use gesso or any kind of ground for these canvases. I get out all the old cans of wall paint and the quarts of various colors I’ve added. I use wall and trim brushes from two to four inches wide. I turn on the music I enjoy, Brazilian jazz, the Hot Sardines, Cassandra Wilson. I go to town splashing paint on those canvases and enjoying myself. The mail carrier smiles at me and I take a break so I don’t spatter her. This is fun. But I end up with rolls of canvases. A friend who teaches in Florida moved to a new school and asked for several of them. I sent them and she uses them in her classroom as discussion and decoration.

The biggest ‘formal’ painting hangs in our living room and is a little over four feet square. I see a geometric seascape. Other people find meaning I hadn’t expected - icebergs, for instance. It took weeks to paint and I enjoyed the process. When I took it in to be framed, because I hadn’t used braces, the framer re-stretched it with multiple braces to make it square. We enjoy the painting, and I sit and look at it, get lost in it.  

But there comes a time when I need to challenge myself, when I need to find a new path, when I need to get out of my routine. That’s when I paint small. 

I am currently working on a series of fourteen six by six inch paintings - The Stations of the Cross. Every one of them has at least one figure in it. Complete with faces. Instead of the large brushes I love, I am working with small -tiny even - brushes. Some of them have only a few fibers. The faces on the figures are frequently less than an inch wide or tall. It challenges me to paint this small. It challenges my eyes to paint this small. But I persevere. And I learn from this process. As always, if I don’t like something, I paint over it or re-stretch the canvas. Some of these figures have faces that are three or four layers deep. It’s ok. The one I am most pleased with so  far is of Mary holding the body of Jesus after the Crucifixion, a Pietá. It’s the next to the last image in the series. When I stand back and look at it, I see the anguish. If I examine her face closely, however, I see all the imperfections in my painting. Be that as it may, I’m going to keep this image. That’s kind of the point. I paint until I am satisfied with the images.

And I’m going to keep working out of my comfort zone because that’s where I learn. 

View Widely 

    I strongly believe that it's important to look - really look - at other artists' work. I do this frequently, and frequently write about my impressions and the artists' techniques. This week I am sharing my writing about Lucien Freud, 1922 - 2011, the grandson of Sigmund Freud. His family escaped the Nazis in the 1930's and settled in England. He is famous for his portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. She reportedly sat for a year for this 9.5 x 6 inch painting.

    So let's take a look:

“Double Portrait,” (1985 -1986), No size given, no media given, photograph from The Lucian Freud Archive / The Bridgeman Art Library

    Recently I finished up a commission of a man and his two pets that I was talked into. I googled dog paintings and this is one of the first paintings that came up. I love Lucien Freud and his monumental paintings. Freud usually painted whippets, because that’s what he owned. Now, the painting: The dog is the center of the painting and the woman has her arm over part of her face so we cannot see it, and the dog is the focus. The size of the dog (I’m trying to figure out relative proportions from several unrelated photographs for my commission) is clear in relation to the woman. While this painting is realistic, it is not photographic. Perhaps it is super realistic in some places like the veins on the woman’s arms and hands. Flesh tones are difficult, and in some ways Freud ignores actual skin tones. Her skin is as much blue as pink, interestingly. The dog is also painted in shades of blue and pink, with ochre and brown thrown in. The dog shows up, in part, because of the contrast between the dark garment of the woman and the dog.

#2

“Girl with a White Dog,” (1950 - 1951), oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

    This painting, 35 years earlier than the previous one, is much different in style than the other two. The dog, the woman, the background, the couch, are all grayed and cool (despite the supposedly warm yellow), pale tones, so that it is almost ghostly, but also has a luminous quality. The woman’s nipple seems to be the focus rather than her face or the dog. The dog is well grounded (one of the things I am having problems with), with its head lying on the woman’s leg. The figures form a backwards L in the negative space, and the woman’s head touches the edge of the canvas, in violation of all rules. But it works. Again, this is very realistic without being photographic.  This is not a painting my wife Ann would allow me to hang, but we couldn’t afford it anyway.

    Analyzing other artists' work informs mine. I encourage you to try it, at least occasionally.

     I Don’t Feel Like It

There are not many times when I don’t feel like painting, but when those days arrive, they come in weeks rather than days. 

I have choices, of course. I can not paint. I can read. I can watch television. I can work in the garden - one of these days when the weather is reasonably nice. I can clean the basement, which I did for a couple weeks late last month. 

I can find excuses - like I don’t have any canvases. That, of course, is utter poppycock (I was going to write bullshit but decided to let my better self prevail). My buddy who owns a Painting With a Twist franchise (Bottle and Bottega in Homewood, a great place!) keeps me supplied with canvases; I have at least two dozen pristine odd-sized canvases that force me to be creative. For example, I put twelve of them together to create the “window tree” shown in a previous blog.  

I can find other ways to procrastinate, like stretching canvases in large sizes, and then giving them a coat of gesso and then waiting for it to dry so I can apply another coat of gesso and wait for it to dry. 

I can hope for a pet portrait commission. 

I can write a blog. Like now. 

I can whine that my life gets in the way. After my wife’s recent cataract surgeries I spent a few days taking care of her. But that doesn’t really count as not feeling like painting. When she was able to take care of herself, I was desperate to paint. 

I can dither around thinking, “I don’t know what to paint.” And by dithering, I don’t paint.

But I CAN PAINT ANYWAY.

I have very few dry spells because I just go ahead and paint. It doesn’t have to be good, but it might be. It doesn’t have to be permanent, but it might be. Yesterday I ripped a painting I didn’t like off the stretchers and stretched new canvas. It now has a couple coats of gesso and is waiting for a third. This morning I painted over a lot of what I painted yesterday. It doesn’t matter because I keep working and I keep painting.

I was planning to finish the blog with a flourish, but I need to go paint.

         Annex

Every few years I decide that too many things own me, that I no longer own them. Sometimes I sit with it. Sometimes I act. 

This spring I decided that I need to act. My wife and I are nearer to 80 than to 70, and we have no direct heirs. Our executor, the man who said we could be grandparents to his two sons after our son died, is really busy and effectively has two jobs. He doesn’t need a workshop filled with stuff to go through and dispose of. Some of the stuff is really good. I have an air compressor and nail guns of assorted sizes that are great fun to use, but I haven’t used them in years. I counted four crowbars, dozens of screw drivers and pliers, and three sets of socket wrenches. I had cans of wall paint I hadn’t opened in over ten years. Luckily I was able to knock the slabs of solidified paint into the garbage and recycle the almost pristine cans. 

I have to admit some things still own me. I inherited a lamp from my grandfather, who was kind of a dirty old man. It’s a bronze hula girl with bare breasts and a fringe skirt. The switch has three settings, one for the light, one for the hips to move so she dances, and one for both.  I seldom turn it on because if I forget to turn it off, the motor will burn out. 

My father was a chemical engineer who loved woodworking, and I inherited some of his tools. But I no longer need pipe clamps - and probably didn’t need them in the first place. I have some wood clamps that were my great grandfather’s, and a mallet and fro (used to make cedar shakes) that were my wife’s grandfather’s. They are interesting antiques, but they’ve been tucked away for years, and I had forgotten I had them.

What does this have to do with making art? The answer is simple, by giving away tools I no longer use, I have a couple hundred square feet that I am turning into my “Studio Annex.” I found a very inexpensive butcher block table on Craigslist, and I wrestled it into the Annex. I can package paintings on it to mail - as well as use it for other projects. I frequently invite people to come paint with me, and I will use it then. An old rule of thumb is that if you buy one thing, you need to give/ throw away two. I “paid” for this table with a couple hundred items. 

I’m ready to use my new space.

It feels good.

A Deliberate Black Line

One of the things I consider most when I paint is contrast. Do I have enough light areas? Do I have enough dark areas? Without contrast, my paintings devolve into a lifeless mass of gray or muckletydun, a word I can find in neither the dictionary nor Google, but one which I’ve heard and used all my life. In art, as in life, I occasionally add a black line. 

You thought this was going to be about creating art, and it will be. Eventually. But let’s talk about life first. I had a girl friend - not a girlfriend - when I was in high school and college, whose mother had gray hair and was pale. Melva (I can’t remember her name at this point, 60+ years later) was not pale in the translucent, lively, pretty skin way. She was sallow. She wore no makeup, and no jewelry. And she dressed always in beige and gray. She got lost in the twilight or a dim room, which may have been her wish. A black line of some sort would have given her life. A jet necklace. A shirt with a black collar and cuffs. A strong, deliberate black line would have made a difference. 

I use black lines in my life all the time. My motto, when I was teaching - when I was merely a Curmudgeon in Training - was “It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.” The last year I taught my school had posters plastered in the halls that said things like Smile! You could brighten someone’s day! Or Believe! and Succeed! The poster publishers used up their lifetime supply of exclamation points on the posters. They were ostensibly to be inspirational posters. The administration was inordinately fond of them. I hated the platitudes. I painted a passage from Thoreau around the top of the walls of my classroom, a border that said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” When I saw administrators passing in the hall, I’d pull them in and show them what I’d done. They would say things like, “Great! But don’t tell anyone I said so.” Forgiveness was easier than permission. And it was my last year. What could they do?

These days I’ve changed my motto. I draw deliberate black lines. Now I smile sadly and repeat my new motto, “I’m too old for that shit.” This works effectively at my very liberal church. I refused to be on a committee when I was a member of the church board. I declined to help with the coffee hour after services. You get the idea.

In painting, the deliberate black line, or shape, or background helps to emphasize the image you want the viewer to focus on. I’m posting a couple examples, one which uses lines, and one which uses shape. I posted one of these images in my last blog without the black lines. Notice the difference. You might want to give the deliberate black line a try. It works in both life and art. 

We had this series of panels framed as if it were a window. I think the deliberate black frame and mullions emphasize the painting and gives it a completely different perspective.

Gary Cat emerges from the deliberate black background.

 

                    Explore

The last two years of COVID seclusion have been tough on many of us. My wife and I have been very isolated because we are “at risk” for this plague. When we go out, we are sure to wear our face masks, and for a long time we wore disposable gloves. We have hand sanitizer in the car, and after our few trips out, we always use it. Despite being old white people, we are both vaccinated and boosted, by the way, and we have a liberal bent despite the constant begging texts asking if I’m a Patriot. We started having our groceries delivered, we started a dinner service that sends us four DIY dinners every Monday, and we order out occasionally.  Somehow in the last two years we have gone from being “kind of old” to elderly, and that has a lot to do with lack of socialization, lack of movement, and fear, quite honestly. The first year of quarantine we put gas in the car only three times. And that was to get us to doctor appointments or the pharmacy.

In a different, earlier time we traveled. A lot. My wife had a cousin in a suburb of Nottingham (who knew England had suburbs?), her "English mum," and we visited her at least once a year. We loved cruises because someone always was available to wait on us and I could order the escargot appetizer every night even when it wasn’t on the menu. We took dancing lessons as we traveled through the Panama Canal, we bummed around Greece for a couple weeks, and we put up with the very loud, camera-in-hand tourists in the supposedly silent Sistine Chapel. It’s very small, by the way. In a couple hours we saw the weather change from sunny, to rainy, to snowy, to foggy, and back to sunny in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost point on the continent of South America. In Asia, we went to the DMZ and stood briefly in North Korea in the “Peace” building, which was never used but remains at the ready. These days I don’t want to be cooped up with a horde of people on an airplane any more, and I fear norovirus on a cruise ship as much COVID. So we don’t travel.

But we do continue to explore and that keeps our minds functioning at least a little. Back in the day - the Fifties, probably - it was called armchair exploration. I read a couple books a week, for example. I’m partial to mysteries set in England, especially ones set in Elizabethan times. And I also love author Estelle Ryan’s Genevieve Lenard series that explores the world of art theft. I always learn a lot. (Start with The Gauguin Connection.) We also watch a lot of European series with English subtitles. I’ve picked up some French and Italian, and improved my Spanish. In fact, I want to be Detective Montalbano (a great series!) when I grow up. 

After that way too long introduction, I’m getting to my point: We continue to explore, even from our armchairs. When I watch a European (An European?) series, I am always aware not only of the story and characters, but also of the way in which people apparently live, and that always includes the art on the walls, sometimes the most interesting - at least to me - part of set decoration. I frequently find that art inspiring. I don’t paint copies of artworks any more unless I have a very specific goal in mind. And I’m generally left with only an impression of the art on TV shows because I don’t stop the episode and take photos from the television. Every experience has an impact on me and changes my life forever, even if only in the most minute way. And looking - frequently at art - has become a major experience in my life.

In an earlier blog, I suggested that painters / artists choose different artists every week and focus on a couple of their works, writing down impressions not only of the techniques they use, but also of the emotional impact. This exploration provides a discipline and a method of analysis. 

As the weather improves - at least here in the Chicago burbs - we can get outside more easily. I was barely out all winter because I’ve broken both an ankle and my wrist in the past, and I’m afraid of falling. My wife takes walks and then reports to me as I’m painting in my small studio. When I go out, I look at small pieces. What does a leaf really look like? What is the bark on that tree really like? Too often we’re like kids drawing a house as a box with a triangle on the top and a round yellow circle as the sun in a corner. We don’t really look. We don’t really explore. We can change that.

My invitation with this essay is Explore. 

Explore your world, and explore the worlds of others.

This was inspired by a painting on an Australian series. 

"Red Tree"

Acrylic on 12 stretched canvas panels, each 8 x 8 inches

 Balance

   I got a haircut the other day. It was the first time since November because the lady who cut my hair last was in a car crash, and I was waiting for her to recuperate. She isn’t returning until at least May and I was getting desperate enough to chop at my hair around my ears, a bad sign. Anyway, I went to a guy who hadn’t cut my hair before. During the cut, Jordan stood back and chuckled to himself.  “About half way through I look and realize I have another side to do.” It’s a matter of balance, of course. 

We all try to find balance in our lives in one way or another. When I was in high school, about a hundred years ago (no, not really - only 59) the smart kids in my physics class talked about going to college and “working hard and playing hard.” That was, I suppose, a sort of balance. I, on the other hand, was delighted to pass physics and graduate. In college I worked hard and got very good grades, and I suppose I played hard, too, but it didn’t involve the binge drinking my high school classmates suggested.

As my life progressed, I looked for other kinds of balance: between family and work; between what I was required to do and what I wanted to do; between buying and saving; between - you get the idea. With luck, each of us creates individual, personal balance in our lives.

I’m retired now and I’m more conscious of finding balance in my life than I used to be. Lately, I work to balance painting with the things I have to do, the external, and also within my art itself, the internal.

There are all kinds of balance within a painting. I look for contrast in value as well as in color to provide balance.  I take a photo on my phone and then using the editing tools, I put the picture into gray tones. That way I can clearly see the light, the dark, and the gray values. If the painting is lopsided, the phone photo smacks me in the face with it. 

A second balance is shape. Identical shapes need not repeat, of course. And the same shapes don’t have to repeat. A rectangle-ish shape can balance a roundish shape or a triangular-ish shape. Negative space can balance positive space. A quick definition: negative space is the area around an object; positive space is the object. Giorgio Morandi is a still life artist who makes great use of positive and negative space in his work. The Tate in London has a good webpage with his works: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/giorgio-morandi-1660. Check it out.

Third, when I’m looking at color/ hue, I mentally divide the painting into a grid of nine squares - thirds both vertically and horizontally. Do colors repeat from one side of the work to the other? From the top to the bottom? They don’t have to repeat equally, and they don’t have to repeat at all. It’s just one more consideration when looking at a painting. I use this mental grid for shape and value as well. 

I work at balance in my painting, but I don’t always achieve it. Balance is just one way I consider my work. When I think I’m finished with a painting, I step back from the it and look out the window for several seconds. Then I look back at the painting and see how it affects me, whether I like it or not. Sometimes, my work is a failure. Sometimes it’s a success. Frequently it’s somewhere in the middle. 

But it all balances out in the end.

 

This has top to bottom balance-ish, and clear positive and negative spaces.

 Drawing Every Day

    I find time to paint practically every day because I have a small studio in my home. I know most people don’t that that advantage, but there are a lot of ways to work around limitations. The easiest, I find, is to DRAW EVERY DAY.

    A sketchbook and drawing pencil are nice, but they aren’t really necessary. Any paper will do. Lined notebook paper is not optimal, but it works. The clean back of junk mail works too. And while professional drawing pencils are wonderful, a regular pencil or a cheap ball point pen can be satisfactory. In fact, limited resources may hone your skills. The point is to draw every single day. People may think you’re just doodling. That’s tough because you have to define yourself instead of letting them define you. Just draw!

    Drawing can be a formal experience, too. Before COVID isolation, my wife and I took a series of weekly evening classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. We were given boards, a folding stool, and mediums (I know, the correct plural is media; but this is art). Each week the instructor led us to a different gallery to copy a painting or sculpture in pencil or pastels. By doing this I learned how artists approached their work. After about 90 minutes, we’d return to the classroom for critique, which was always positive. This was a wonderful discipline that required me to draw something I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to draw otherwise. But it got me drawing. And improved my skills.

    Around that time I broke my right wrist. I’m right handed. But I went to the classes anyway, and I drew with my left hand. I was awkward at first, but I quickly became dexterous. And I continued to draw.

     Another thing I find helpful is to find an artist you like and study that person’s work weekly. The library is a resource for finding books containing work by any artist. And the internet, of course, is also great. If you study one or two paintings by artists each week, you can learn a lot. It helps to ask yourself questions about the works: How do they use color? How do they use balance? What is the focal point? Where is contrast - and is it contrast by size, hue, or light and dark? How does they accomplish something you find a weakness in your work? Having asked yourself these questions, draw the entire piece or a portion of it. 

    The point is to draw every day. You’ll improve. I can’t guarantee that the images in your head will match what you put on the paper. Mine don’t. But they are closer than they used to be.

Draw!

Left-handed drawing after I broke my wrist. Conte crayon and charcoal on paper.

     The Process

I’m not Van Gogh who dragged his easel out

Into the fields of France, whose magic sight

Enabled him with swift, sure strokes to paint

An earless portrait or a starry night.

No. I prep a canvas with leftover paint

And hope beyond hope that pictures emerge.

No clean clear canvas surfaces for me:

A dirty plane will make my painting surge.

It doesn’t work? I gesso over, or

Slash the canvas and rip it from the frame

Without a fear. Defeat creates new work.

I move from failure - and refuse all blame.

I am not Hemingway who set a sheet

Of paper on his desk, picked up a pen

And wrote of bullfights, civil wars - in fact, 

Whole books before he set it down again.

I jot ideas, draw, scratch through, revise.

Revise again. My paper’s not pristine.

I take a breath, consider, write some more.

Or print out what I have, start a new screen.

I own no failure - only lessons new.

Each time applying what I learned to do.

I considered the painting on the right a failure (acrylic on 16 x 20 inches stretched canvas). I ripped the canvas off and restretched new canvas. The painting on the left of Owen, age 11, is much better, I believe. Ignore the shadow at the top of the portrait. Grace and mercy, remember?

Perfection

 

Perfection

    As a child, my parents drummed into me: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well!”  This implies perfection, and is a platitude that most of us can relate to. For years, I believed it. They were my parents. I know I’m not alone. Believing this has caused paralysis in a lot of people. It makes a lot of people afraid to try new things because they might not be perfect. What we fail  (there’s that word) to realize, however, is that if we were afraid to be imperfect, we would never have learned to walk, to speak, to think, or even to do somersaults.

    When I was teaching high school English composition, I had students who couldn’t put even a single word on a page because it might not be the right word. They were paralyzed mentally. Sometimes this was the result of overwhelmingly high expectations by parents. I was never sure why they were afraid to fail, but whatever the reason, they were paralyzed. 

    I see this among new painters, too, in the classes I take at the local community college. Making the wrong brush stroke is so terrifying, they don’t paint anything and instead of failing by trying, they fail through inaction.

    I paint most days. And I have at least a couple paintings going at a time. If I get to a point that the paint has to dry before I can continue, I have another painting to work on. 

    When I start, I don’t worry about that first stroke. Frequently I have sketched. More usually I have an image in my mind. (I hasten to add that the image on the canvas never matches the image in my head.) Sometimes, at the end of the day, I have paint I don’t want to waste so I smear it on a fresh canvas. And occasionally that sparks a painting. 

    Before I paint, I slap on a thin coat of ochre or raw sienna. I don’t start with a pristine canvas. It’s already imperfect, and I can’t make a mistake with it. I just paint. If it doesn’t work or I am not happy with the result, I have choices:

• I can paint over the mistakes. I do that with every single canvas, I have to admit. 
• If the painting is beyond help, even after re-painting, I can cover it with gesso, which is a base coat on raw canvas - or in this case a new base coat on the crappy painting I don’t like. I do this a lot. 
• My third option, one I use less frequently, is to rip the canvas off the stretchers and put new canvas on. Suddenly I have a brand new canvas to either succeed or fail with. 

    After I wrote this first blog, I read it over. I deleted a couple whole paragraphs. I moved some things around. I added and changed some words. My first draft was not perfect. Too bad. This one probably isn’t either. 

    But perfection is overrated. And in painting, as in writing, nothing has to be permanent. Give yourself some grace and mercy. I do.