News

I love me some transparency, but I think I'm going to take a week to play in the heavy bodied opaques. They allow for more mixing on the page and they are more forgiving. If you mess up, you can just cover it with more opaque. Not so when dealing with translucency. Although, even just after one painting I've already fallen into more transparency than I'd like. Eventually I want to figure out how to marry the two, but that will take getting use to the heavy bodied acrylics first.

Unexpected discovery: Paint is way easier to blend on a canvas. I'd mess this up as soon as I collaged paper of any sort down but it's been such a pleasure to be able to do some basic blending.

I heard Carol Marine’s great Artists Helping Artist interview today. One of the things she talked about was failure. Every year she has a bad paintings party where artists bring their bad paintings and they destroy them. She said that every time one of her paintings goes into the bad painting pile she feels bad, and each time she pledges to have fewer in next year’s pile. But this year she’s changing her approach. She wants her bad painting pile to be huge. Bigger than it’s ever been. Because if it is, that means that she’s trying new things and taking risks.

I love this idea. I don’t have a bad painting pile, but I'm realizing that bad paintings give me something else: freedom. If a painting looks terrible there’s no way I can screw it up. In fact, it’s very possible that the worst thing I can do will actually make it better.

You guys! This is happening in just a few weeks! Full disclosure: You may notice my name is not on the list of artists. This is because while I am a Red Dot member (and proud!), I'm not actually partaking in the show. The time pressure was a bit too much, and I realized it was more important for me to work on my studio practice and style than try and force myself to create something in time. As soon as I made the decision, I knew it was the right choice, and because of that choice, I've made some pretty broad gains.

It does bring up an interesting challenge that I hadn't realized before. One of the challenges to a beginning professional artist (notice I didn't say a beginning artist because these problems are professional challenges) is that you want to try and be in group shows. Group shows often have themes, and some work lends itself better than others to theme. Sometimes that theme is square or red (like our next show) and for those, it's a bit more straight forward. However, for something like PDXTRAOrdinary, an artist like me who basically does portraits runs into some challenges. I could have painted a Portlander (which in retrospect, um, right, yes.) I still really love the idea of bringing in colors and patterns from Portland. But the challenge is how to adapt what you do to a style so that you're work can be seen. I'd never thought about this before, but now I'm thinking about it a lot. There are all these wonderful opportunities to join group shows...but I'm not yet sure how to take my style's take on a theme without going outside of my style.

Good problems to have though. It means I'm not using all my energy being angry at my drawing abilities.

Portland Open Studios is a four day basically Christmas holiday for Portland artists. I’d meant to go for years and then had a taste last year. This year I did half. Next year I’m marking out the entire four days on my calendar to wander all over the city and meet the amazing artists taking part.

Artists are juried in and then they generously open their studios and their practice to the public. It really is an amazing opportunity to take a peek inside the lives of some of Portland’s best artists. Here’s a bit of what I learned: 

(Image below: Yesterday Today Tomorrow, Ruth Armitage)

Ruth Armitage:

I’ve loved Ruth Armitage’s work for years but it was only when the WSO show was held in Albany that I realized that she’s an Oregon artist. It was a kick to meet an artist I’ve for so long admired. She lives out in beautiful West Linn and at times I thought I was going to be wandering the wilderness forever (oh look at me, such a Portlander) but it was worth the extra driving. She has three dogs. The puppy is the softest dog you’ve ever petted, and as I talked to her about where I am in my career, she gave me some really good advice:

1. Skip the small shows and work to get into the big ones. She said it took her many tried before she got into some of her big shows, but it was worth the wait. She suggested Art in the Pearl and the Salem Art Festival. I’ve never been to the latter, and her daughter (who is also really great) suggested I go next year and do reconnaissance.
2. Before starting an abstract make some basic choices. Is this painting going to be warm or cool, colorful or neutral, busy or calm. She writes these choices down so that when she’s at decision junctures, she reminded of her original goals. This will help me a ton in both my abstract work but also my non abstract work.
3. Armitage creates incredible abstracts and she said they are based on tangible things like memories. An in studio example she gave was of a walk she took one night as a child. The lines represent the path and there are elements in the painting that represent fronts and the night sky. This helps give her a guide.

Clearly my goal for October is to use ALL the yellow paint.