News — Process

Image note: WIP. A few layers to make a base layer.

After spending all day Monday building IKEA drawers and then rearranging an entire studio so that they'll fit, it felt good to be painting today. On the desk, abstract paintings. Maybe they'll become something figurative or maybe they'll stay abstracts. Right now they are pure fun.

Image note: Oooooh stencil fail.

I was battling some serious tired today and so opted for something fun: Stencil making. Even though one of my rules is no television before 6PM, I gave in. Doctor Who season 8 JUST came out on netflix and who doesn't need some clever adventure on in the background.

The picture above is a small reminder of why such rules were made. Half thinking.  I was designing the next stencil while my Cameo happily (and very noisily) cut away when I realized my mistake. Oh yes, one too many lines and I had basically designed a large checkered shape with a lot of pieces to remove off the sticky matting.

Image note: Mixed media collage

It can be hard to know when a piece is finished. I have a tendency to stop a few steps before I could even consider it finished. I think it’s an artistic defense mechanism of sorts. If I never get to the final steps, then I never have to commit to anything. Never have to stand behind something and say, “This is ready.”

I spent two weeks avoiding my studio. Every time I walked in I could feel frustration mount. Every time I thought about the fact that I wasn’t painting, I could feel that same frustration. The head is always ahead of the hand, but if you don’t want to just avoid both forever, you have to figure out what is the frustration source.

And for me, finding the source of this frustration was a two week process of starting to think about or do my art, and then note when I had the strongest negative reaction to it. I’d then stop and analyze what specifically triggered the fire. It felt like a slow mental prodding of, “Does this hurt? How about this?”

What Hurts:

One of the things that I think keeps people from becoming artists is that we let structure dictate what we learn first, second, and third as opposed to letting interest dictate what we learn first second and third.  And as a pretty structured person myself, I understand this approach. It makes sense to use this approach in classes and art school. But if I had tried to learn to draw in the strictest sense before I could move on, I would have never moved on because I would have quit. Drawing for the longest time, held no interest for me because while I understood theoretically why it was important, I didn’t understand it practically and emotionally for me and my art. It was the difference between knowing I should do something but wanting to do it exactly zero.

But now that has changed. I understand that my limits begin where that set of knowledge begins. And that makes it suddenly really exciting to work on drawing, value and color because I understand exactly how they will strengthen my work. And now I’m ready to approach them.

I’ve painted very little since March. I’ve been using my time to focus on a creative project that ends this Sunday, but I’ve realized that I really do need something like painting a day to keep me going back into my studio. I’ve also realized, in direct opposition to painting a day, that the painting a day doesn’t give me time to really think about the next steps to push my work or to focus on basic art skills, which I’m now realizing I really want to focus on. So for the rest of April and all of May, I am creating a new challenge for myself. I am challenging myself to paint a simple value study each and every day. I will use three or five values of marker and then three to five of pre-mixed paint. If I have time or interest, I will then collage and paint on top of those values, making sure that the paint I’m using keeps in line with those colors.

Rules (some similar to my first painting-a-day rules:

1. Paintings don’t have to be fantastic.

2. Has to be posted to the blog for it to count.

3. Take one painting a week and add color and collage over it making sure that stays with the same value families.

I will start all of this on Monday May 14th.

What are your daily-painting challenges? How have you approached studying value?

Desaturated version. I've got very few 1s and very few 9s and a whole lot of 4-7s.[/caption]