Back to the Old Easel

It's been almost two years since I posted to this blog, and very nearly as long since I've done any art. I was sidetracked by unfortunate family matters, but I think (I hope!) I'm ready to have art return to my life.

I'm about to start painting a scene from the 2011 Old Skool Picnic at Lakewood Park, using a photo I took as the source of inspiration. I laid out the sketch on the canvas a few days ago.

It's a small canvas, only 6 x 12 inches. A nice size for shaking off the rust from my brushes.

Mixed Media

I went to see the exhibit That's Women's Work at the Freight Street Gallery and was really struck by a mixed-media painting by Pam Bogert.

At first glance, I thought I didn't like it. I thought it was too crude, too grungy. Then I looked at it closely and realized that I love it. It's fantastic. I love the cartoonish depiction of Torrington, the caricatures of familiar sites, the playfulness of the depictions.

I'm inspired to do something similar of Waterbury, but I know it will be hugely challenging for me. Which is probably all the more reason to try.

Now for procedural questions. Do I try mixed media, like Bogert did with this work? When I was a kid, I loved playing with paper dolls and paper cut-out buildings. I used to take huge sheets of paper, lay them out flat on the floor or table, draw roads on them and then place the paper buildings I had made on them. Maybe I could do some sort of complex high-relief mixed media image. Something to think about!

Winter Blues

I haven't been posting much to this blog lately, mostly because I'm using my Facebook page for updates. I'll try using this blog for longer things, ruminations about art.

I've been thinking for a while about doing a winter painting. I've always been impressed by paintings of snow. Some favorites are William Glackens' Central Park paintings, John Twachtman's Connecticut Shore-Winter and  Winter Harmony, Ernest Lawson's Snow Scene, Robert Nisbet's Connecticut Winter Landscape, and Hobart Nichols' Winter Landscape with Stream.

One of the amazing things about snow is the color. You think it's white, but when you really look at it, there's a lot of blue. It's subtle, but it's there. You can see the blue more obviously in ice, like in this photo I took in Thomaston:

Drawing a Dream

I don't paint dreams. I don't paint things from my imagination. I don't paint from memory. I paint what I see. Sometimes I feel trapped by my literalness. I'm always in awe of people who create art derived solely from their imaginations. I've wished that I could do that. Artwell in Torrington sent out invitations to submit art to their Dreams and Nightmares exhibit. I wanted to submit something, but I have nothing that qualifies. I decided this needed to change. I've spent the past week or two with this thought in the back of my mind, that I want to start doing more creative art. Last night, while watching The Lovely Bones, I was finally in the right frame of mind and had a vision of creating a large painting, early Renaissance style, of a dream I had the night after my cat Ferdinand died many years ago. Since there's no point having a great idea if you don't start making it real right away, I did a series of sketches for the painting. There is a narrative that goes with the images, but for right now I'm posting just the sketches, in sequence. Next I have to figure out how they will all fit onto a single canvas.

Painting in the Dark

Well, not exactly that. I've got the lights on. It's the subject of my current canvas that is dark. Specifically, that time of day in autumn when the sun has almost finished setting, the lights of cars and signs are bright, dark shadows are everywhere, and there's just enough natural light left to make the sky glow.

This is the first time since 9th grade that I've tried painting a dark scene. It's an interesting challenge. Part of the challenge is making it dark enough. I've already had to go back over it once to make the sky darker, and it looks like I'll have to do the same for the buildings. This is the stage of painting where I need to see what other artists have done. So far, however, I haven't found too many similar works. I love Blakelock's moonlight landscapes, but of course his style is completely different from mine. I'll have to keep googling for images to inspire me.

"Urban"

I was recently browsing the shelves in the Barnes & Noble at Yale and was intrigued by a sign for section called "Urban Fiction". Now, since I consider myself to be an urban artist, painting scenes of city life, I was a little excited to think that maybe there was a larger trend going on, that authors as well as artists were exploring life in cities.

I was disappointed when I took a glance at the books in that section. "Urban" seemed to be a code word for African American trashy novels. As if the only African American experience is that of the city, and as if only African Americans live in cities.

I've done some research since then, and I see that there is a decades-old history behind this literary genre, and that there are some good novels within the genre, but something about it still doesn't seem right.

It seems like there is a sort of segregation going on in the literary world. Take, for example, one of my favorite authors, Tananarive Due. I have not read all of her books yet, but the ones that I have read are clearly of the horror/suspense genre. Try to find her books in the horror, or thriller, or even mystery or fantasy sections of a bookstore and you'll be out of luck. Her books are always in the African American section. Why? Because she and many (but not all) of her characters are African American.

I guess I'll have to stick it all in the category of things that don't make sense to me. My image of "Urban" includes everyone, of every color and nationality, because that is what cities actually are--a place where everyone comes together. Cities are the melting pot of the world.

Art Scam

I just stumbled across slightly old news stories from March concerning Lawrence Salander and his Madoff-like scheme to bilk millions of dollars from art collectors and investors. His basic operation was similar to that depicted in The Producers: selling percentage shares of artwork to trusting investors, but selling more than 100% worth of shares per artwork (so, for example, there could be five people who paid for a 50% share in a single artwork). His scheme was exposed by John McEnroe, the tennis player and now art collector. Since McEnroe was suing him because a painting he had purchased from Salander had outstanding liens against it, I'm guessing Salander had more than one type of scam going.

What brought my attention to the story was Arshile Gorky. After reading a NY Times review of a Gorky exhibit, I was reminded of one of my all-time favorite paintings, Gorky's Pirate I.

Pirate was on view at the Mattatuck Museum for many years, a long-term loan from Jean Levy before it was sold at auction by the Levy estate. It's a fantastic painting, perfectly capturing the mess and smell and noise of Pirate, a dog, raiding a garbage can. I loved being able to spend time with it at the Mattatuck and I still miss it.

When I read the NY Times article about the exhibit, I naturally was reminded of Pirate I and did a quick internet search to see if I could find out where it is today. Imagine my dismay to learn that it had been confiscated by "the authorities" as part of the criminal investigation against Salander. Poor Pirate! Do "the authorities" have the proper storage facilities for the painting (it's said to be in the custody of a bankruptcy court in Poughkeepsie), or is it languishing in a standard police storage room next to a wide variety of evidence? I suppose it will be stuck in the evidence storage room until the case is over and the true ownership is established, which could take years.

Plotting...

What to paint next? The clock painting is nearing completion, although I am dragging my heels about finishing it. I'm not sure why, but I just don't feel motivated to finish it. I suspect it has something to do with not having a lot planned for afterwards. The next that I intended to paint is another largish (20x30) canvas, which might be part of the problem, since the larger canvases take longer to work on.

After that, I don't really know what I'll paint. I have two other, smaller canvases prepped, but they don't excite me. I have some ideas for a new batch of canvases, but they're just vague ideas that will require some effort to formulate and prep, so again, not too much excitement or motivation there.

However... there is another painting, very small, roughly the size of an index card, that I started way back in 2005 or '06. It was the first canvas (if I'm remembering correctly) that I attempted after deciding to give painting a try again. I chose the small size for a couple of reasons. A year or two earlier, when I was working at the Mattatuck Museum, I had been given a similarly-sized canvas to do art on for the Festival of Trees fundraiser. It was the first time in about a decade that I had painted, and I really had fun with it. That was the event that inspired me to try painting again. It was also the first time I had worked on such a small canvas, and the scale really appealed to me. So, naturally, a small canvas was my first choice.

I bought a few brushes that I thought were small (oh how wrong I was!), selected a scene, and gave it a try. It was a disaster. Nothing worked right. I promptly decided to switch over to larger canvases, which were less challenging.

For the past year, I've had that first tiny canvas sitting on the bookshelf next to my desk. For the past two weeks, I've been looking at it more and more, wondering what to do with it. Today I finally realized that I now have enough experience to do a good job painting it, and quickly too. In fact, I might even be able to crank out half a dozen tiny paintings every month (yes, I am an eternal optimist).

Now, finally, I feel very motivated!

Here's a scan of the little painting. At the very least, it will be interesting to see if it really is as quick & easy as I imagine.

Another Idea

Here's another scene that I think would be fun to paint. I couldn't get everything in the frame with a horizontal photo, so I had to take a second, vertical shot as well. I think as a painting it would work best horizontal, but for whatever reason, I really wanted the water bottle in the scene as well. Maybe as an anchor, since most of the view is looking out over the edge.






After I was done with lunch, I accidentally knocked the empty water bottle off the balcony. I'm always knocking over my drinks. At least this one was empty, and it didn't hit anyone. In fact, no one seemed to notice it fell.

Inspiration

I went to the MET a couple weeks ago to see the Turner exhibit (the artworks were spectacular, the curation was mediocre) and also did some wandering around the museum, discovering a painting by a really fantastic artist, Alberto Pasini.










I love the realism coupled with the clean, sharp quality of his painting. He has just the slightest bit of an outline to his forms, lines that aren't there in real life, but that help define the forms and give the painting a fresh, clean quality that really appeals to me. I suppose that isn't too surprising, given that I collect prints and comic books. I suppose I have a preference for the visual qualities of traditional print styles--forms defined by outlines and enriched by inner color.

I'll have to add Pasini to the list of artists who have influenced my own art. And I'm going to start "hunting" for more of his paintings to learn from.

A Sketch (sort of)

I keep seeing things that might make good paintings. Here's one of them:




I like the way the figures of the women contrast with the hard straight lines of the subway architecture. If you look carefully, there are four women waiting by the tracks. The interplay of their positions and their forms is great. The woman closest to us, in the yellow shirt, is looking and leaning slightly to the right. In the opposite corner of the image, there is a woman in a green top who is turning to the left. And then there are the two women leaning up against the post, one with her back against it, the other resting her arm against it in a heavy contrapposto. I could not have posed them better!