Gazing West

Gazing West acrylic on 6" x 6" board

I admire the daily painters.  They pop out acceptable works of art on a daily basis - seemingly with no trouble.  They are efficient and competent. I'm thinking of painters like Carol Marine in Oregon.  She is a wonderful painter and I love her work.

I notice that many of the daily painters, especially at Carol Marine's Daily Paintworks website, do tiny paintings. 6" x 6" seemed to be a favorite size, so there was a time when I tried to do the same. But I could never pull anything off in a day.  I am too particular.

Take this piece, for example.  This was a bit of an experiment - abstract in acrylic on such a small scale. Unbidden there arose a theme.  It seemed like the west to me, because of the colors, and I saw figures and, yes, a dog.  None were intentionally painted.

I did that fairly quickly, and liked the result.

Then I took a photo.  Somehow in the photo there was more depth and it was warmer in tone.  I liked the photo better.  The painting looked insipid.

So I decided to give the board a glaze of a transparent rose tint in one fell swoop and .. I hated it! Panic.  Ruined! I thought.  I was wearing rose-colored glasses!  I was in a bordello!

I had erased all of the variance in color that had made it interesting.

So then I started bringing those colors back, through some repainting and lifting.  I worked on it over a span of days until finally I abandoned it, thoroughly disgusted.

I believe it was relegated to a drawer.  Then eventually a shelf.  I would walk by it and evaluate. And, you know?  This wasn't the first painting, that I liked.  It was not what I saw in the photo that I liked even better.  But I like it.  I like the result.

I am going to paint larger.  I think if, no matter the size, a painting takes forever, than I may as well paint in a size that the market considers to be valuable. But I know the truth.  There is value in a small painting too, even it takes forever to make.

Welcome 2015!

18, 32 41  ink and watercolor, 6" x 4"

I'm posting this tiny artwork that I made last night because it makes me feel happy, and happiness is something that has been lacking for much of the past year.  I've made other art and I've even scanned some, but I have not been able to bring myself to post of late.  I am unsure why.

Maybe this year I will correct that.  Perhaps I will post more in 2015.  Or maybe I will start a new blog instead - a fresh start for a new person - because I am changed.  Or I feel changed.  I am a darker self, less light than I used to be.  Or maybe I won't blog at all.

I really don't know.

And that is what the coming of 2015 feels like to me.  The direction of the year is uncertain, and that is unsettling, yes, but full of possibility too.  And I like the possibilities.

Best wishes for a happy and fulfilling 2015 - may all that you experience make you flourish and grow in color and in depth - like a painting in a master's hands.

Best Laid Plans

Best Laid Plans, acrylic on canvas, 14" x 18"

With the posting of this painting, my first impulse is to say, like William Kentridge ,  "My job is to make art - not sense."

But that wouldn't be quite true.  I almost always find meaning in my abstracts.  All I pay attention to as I paint them is the marks and colors and textures and shapes - yet meaning appears.  They make sense to me.

Go figure.

I'd say more, but I've decided not to.

What do you see?

And if you can't quite beam to wherever I'm at, never fear, I have some representational paintings in the works right now.

More scribblism

The Accident 5"x 7" ink and watercolor

Microscribblic 7" x 5" ink and watercolor

What can I say about these except that I am indulging all of my artistic impulses.  I've got to feed the muse!

The first one remained unfinished for a long time.  I began the "eruption" part and stopped before it became too regular and did not know what to do next.  Then, wouldn't you know, I had a dream.  In the dream I drew or made a ruler-straight segment with irregular notches in it.   Extending from the segment came a pipe-like structure that curved.  I knew I would have to use it somewhere, and last night I realized that this was the place.  Then I finished it up.

The second I drew a while back, and resisted coloring it. I still resist. I like it in black and white.  I was thinking of my oldest son's laboratory - he's a chemical engineer, working on his doctorate.  (Oh, sorry, that sounded like bragging and paternal pride - how on earth did that slip in?!)

On the Way to Somewhere

"On the Way to Somewhere"  14"x 14" acrylic on canvas

There are two family members that I always show my work to.

The first, my valued critic - who brutally tells it like it is every time, and so helps me improve my work - loved this one.  

The second, when I texted this image to her, did not respond for a good forty minutes.  When she finally did, it was with the word I was fully expecting.  "Interesting."  

She went on to say, "The man is scary looking.  Don't like this one as much as the one you gave me."  

She was referring to the other recent abstract that I posted in my June 29th post, here.  She loved that one. The funny thing is that my valued critic hated it.

So if I can imagine that each of these family critics represents 50% of the population, then I have 100% covered, don't you think?

After All These Years

Watercolor on 14" x 11-3/4" Daler-Rowney Langton Prestige NOT paper
"Life As a River"  (Click to enlarge)

Here's a tale:  Burger Chef was a chain that pre-dated the biggies, Burger King and McDonalds.  At our local Burger Chef, on A-1-A in the city of Satellite Beach on the Space Coast of Florida, the manager Bill M. didn't really know how to control the place.  The assistant manager would be running to the grocery store once or twice a week to buy something he forgot to order, like hamburger buns or meat, for example.  And the place wasn't doing well.

When McDonald's finally came to our small town, it stood only a block away from Burger Chef.  That was when Bill M. decided that it would be a good idea to buy the Burger Chef and turn it into his own place.  Now if Burger Chef wasn't doing well then, let me tell you, Bill's Big Burger wasn't going to do any better.  It failed within months.

But while Burger Chef and then Bill's Big Burger existed, my best friend Jeff and I worked there in high school.  Great fun.  We were good kids, but had our moments.  Once we showed up together drunk and sang "Cheeseburger in Paradise" throughout our shift.  Everyone stayed out of our way.  Another time we were closing the place together and started randomly throwing cleaning fluids into the mop water.  When a white poison gas wafted out of the bucket we fled the place in stitches.  Then there was the time that Jeff and I challenged two ladies that worked there to a tennis match.  We were good, but not at tennis, and we bought them their steak dinner.

I have a terrible memory.  Big chunks of my childhood, and of my life through high school and beyond is absent from my mind. So if you measure the days that I remember from my life then I am really 19 years old.

Yeah.

But I remember this:  Jeff and I hung out together, listened to music together, did side jobs together, went to each other's houses constantly, yearned for the company of the Scorpionettes (the objects of desire of all healthy young male citizens of Satellite High School), worshipped the Muppet Movie, and spent hours talking about life and everything else.  And so much more.

We grew to respect one another, and I knew him as a soul with a heart of gold.

So what happened?  What often happens.  We grew apart.  He went his way, I went mine.  Life got in the way.  It's only natural.

So it was a surprise when Jeff contacted me and said that he had been following my blog.  He said that he liked the two abstract pieces that I had done, which you can see here and here.  The first, "Organic/Inorganic" was my response to the news that a close family member had cancer.  It dealt with invasion, injustice, and vulnerability.  The second, "Mortality" was my response to the death of my employer of eleven years.  It portrayed the passage of life.

I considered them a series of two.

Now there is a third.

Jeff asked me to continue the series with a piece that would portray the "fragility of friendship,"

This was different for me, and quite difficult.  Whereas the others had sprung unbidden (one was actually from a dream), I had never attempted to intentionally portray a concept abstractly before.

This is a semi-abstract piece, I suppose, as I've used the analogy of a river for the lifeline.  This is consistent with the nature references in the other pieces, and it has the flowing and directional qualities of the others as well.

Each tributary represents the encounter with a new person (they with their own lifelines as well), and each adds a pattern which the main lifeline carries with it.  So by the time this life reaches a ripe old age, the pattern is very complex.  The person carries the vestige of all of the experiences and encounters he or she has had to some degree or the other.  The person is far more sophisticated by reason of these encounters than at the beginning.  These encounters have impacted the person.

I like the analogy of the river (and I toyed with many visual concepts), although it is not the most original, because it so easily illustrates this concept but also because I could visually represent by the land between, that the individual's environment (whether physical or through major life stages events) changes over time as well.

So thank you Jeff, for stretching your old friend just a little bit further after all these years.

Metaphor

"Organic/Inorganic"  10" x 8" ink and watercolor on 140 lb Fabriano Artistico rough paper

On a day when I was feeling particularly laden with the sad news that a close - very close - family member has cancer (which makes three significant people in my life battling the disease), I wanted to paint, but was too exhausted to think too hard.  I decided I would let my subconscious control, and the above painting resulted.

At first I thought it was going to be an abstract piece, but representational elements intruded.  It became a pictorial metaphor:

Invasion.
Injustice.
And vulnerability.

A flow of rocks severing a vein-like stem.

I was surprised at how letting go resulted in the near-perfect representation of my feelings.

Funny how the mind works, isn't it?