New Day

Hanging some paintings today at a women's clothing store. Checked out the place last night, plenty of space, all up a little too high. Two outa three walls are brick. Nails of different sorts litter the wall stuck in the mortar/cement in between, but are they where I need them? Must also go through the naming and pricing procedure. I forget what i once called many paintings and come u with something new on the fly (whatever that means). Try and make sure I don't come up with demeaning names by accident while trying to be witty. Once called a painting "wall to wall carpeting" as the female figure was clearly painted within a living quarters. Wanted to put people into the painting by suddenly feeling carpet under bare feet. A close friend, female, upon hearing the title gushed "aw that's awful, ha ha.." as I realized the title could be mistaken for a description of the models full patch of pubic hair.

Busy day. After that I'm taking the commissioned landscape over to the commissionees. If they like it I've got mortgage, if they don't...

All right my zeroes, work to be done. Good day.

monday (or how to use and abuse the colon and semi colon)

Fresh paint, painting in progress: that perfect stage of wet and workable.

How my 24 hours were spent instead of taking advantage of the muse, who sat bored and unbelieving, kicking her heals and chewing on my conscience as I ignored the studio (insert: easel, painting, passion, future)?

Woke up at 3:am. Breakfast, news, email. 30 minute workout and stretch, 4:45 am, frost on the ground, ice on windsheilds, moon low in the late night, early AM cold black sky. My breath precedes and trails me: I take the dog for a run (or she takes me. I need the workout, she wants the excercise, it's symbiotic...). Shower, dress, drive to the next town to work @ 6:am (one minute late, must find a supervisor to let me punch in). Hack, slice, dice and grind the farm animals of the world for Northern California kitchens. Off work at 2:30 pm: bank, shop, home by 3:30. Dishes to wash, dinner to prepare, HOLD ON! A vital household chore rears it's mandatory mug. To hell! 5:30pm, crack open Anchor Steam Seasonal Ale (g-r-r-e-A-T-E!). 7:30, finish my business, eat, watch Fedor_The_Last_Emperor_Emelianenko while eating then fail to find another interesting fight video that will load on the 24hundred dollar Mac. Decide to blog, finish wine, go to bed. Wake up and repeat with the hope of Art being allowed to breathe next time.

Good night my empty audience. Cheers.

Black Sunday

Or blue. Maybe soon to be seeing red Sunday.

I saw the work of another local painter having painted the same landmark (landscape) I just abandoned (finished). As I mentioned in my last post "emotion" is a strong and necessary component of a painting, and yes, even in a landscape. Well, my painting seems rather stiff and two dimentional in comparison to the painting by the other artist. Trumped certainly in the emotion category as well as technique for that matter. Ahhh, what better way to start a day at the easel than feeling lame and second rate.

That aside, my thoughts today are on Picasso's 'bull' series and how important it is as a theory in strategy. I never really cared for the piece as a work of art, still don't, but the idea is not only phenomenal but crucial. Pare down the subject matter to what is most important. Paint that. Everything else is too much. You can quote me on that. Make a bumper sticker out of it: Everything else is too much!

Being a painter from the loathed and scorned group of painters who work from photographs I can tell you absolutely that the photo gives you too much information. Unless you took some overexposed photos (that sucks), you must choose the 10 to 25 percent of information that will make the most interesting composition and throw the rest away. Let me tell you first hand that is no easy task. I love every morsel of the female figure and now I have to throw most of it away? As a matter of fact I just scraped two sessions, four days of painting off of a canvas that had become a parody of itself in no small part because I refused to make the cuts necessary. Painting and scraping and standing away scrunching my face at the easel I thought "Picasso's goddamn bull". Took a break, ate a sandwich, checked the news on that Pulp Fiction style shooting of those cops in Tacoma, and wrote this.

Back to the fray.

I should be painting

Finally finished the large landscape; took months of neglect, stagnation and life's other demands along with quite a few days off and week ends to do. Someone, artist or poet once said: art is "never finished only abandoned". I feel that. Especially with that piece. The flip side of that is getting through all the composition and color/contrast issues and really enjoying those final moments where I intensify the highlights and make minor adjustments, feeling a little sad about ending my relationship with the work.

What about those mission statements artists are bound to come up with to get their work shown anywhere? Does anyone find those as useless as I do? I was thinking recently about what I am trying to achieve with my work and i came up with four things:

One: Subject matter. I want the subject to matter. Imagine that?

Two: Design. The composition must be pleasing, allow the eye to move and come back to points of interest. Crazy shit, i know.

Three: Emotion. There should be an emotional impact. Easier said than done. Look at the Mona Lisa to see famous failure.

Four: Technique. The manner in which the paint itself is applied should have it's own interest value. Illustration of point: from a distance the painting works and is pleasing, from up close the texture of the brush stroke is interesting in and of itself.

That's it. Hang my shit on your gallery walls and tell the people I tried. I tried very hard to achieve these four goals. Hope they like it.

To put it another way, I do my very best to not waste a potential viewers time. If they are going to stand before my paintings opening their minds and using their eyes there had damn well better be something there for them to find. All the other crap about color and feeling and meaning and your mother and your father and your lonely ass feelings, where are they listed next to any of the classic paintings? Who knows what Klimt was thinking? Who cares? His subject matter is important. His design is impeccable. Emotion. Technique: how the hell does he make woman's head sit at an unnatural perpendicular angle to the body while preserving the beauty of the figure? Style and technique.

I'm not a worshipper of Klimt's necessarily, he was just the first to come to mind. On the other hand, many of the artists that society holds up as the big winners for me, lose the ability to excite. I can look at them and see how and where they were successful but I am not inclined to be inspired by their work. But that's a whole 'nother discussion. I've got a day off and the howling November winds are reminding me there's painting to be done.

working long

I made good headway during my three days off, working the wet paint as best I could into the places it needed to be. Another three day weekend this week and I might be able to finish it off, or not. As they say: the devil is in the details.

For 25 years I burned the candle at both ends. I always worked full time (mostly cooking in the restaurants of northern California) and worked on my art full time. Drawing/painting during the day before I had to go to work at night and then again on weekends. When I met this painter, Paul Husbands at a life drawing group, a man the age of my father, he mentioned to me how his art had suffered all his working life because he had been fated to being a week end (weakened) artist. Ouch. I felt sorry for this man. Now, for the last four years, working mostly days (cutting meat in a market), I have become myself a weakened artist! So very hard to build momentum and really get anything accomplished.

On another subject: this little foray back into a landscape, reminds me of the inherent difficulty of the figure painting that is my passion. The odd brush stroke that lands a little off target merely changes the shape of a natural object like a tree or clump of grasses. As these objects really take on any and every shape anyway it is of no real consequence. Take the same errant brush stroke in a figure painting and the subject becomes disfigured! So many times I have labored over a small patch of canvas containing the subjects face FOR DAYS. All the time working the paint to make it appear simple and effortless and not overworked. Such for me is the magic of a good figure. The appeal that lingers. The haunting attraction. Where as for the most part, landscapes are just nonoffensive. Perhaps color choices and contrast, over all composition are particularly pleasing, it is still for me, finally, decorative rather than engaging. Like wall paper or a house plant. A place saver. Where as a good figure painting strikes mysterious chords within the viewer. Feelings that require and then justify a second or longer viewing.

working big

It has taken three days and no small amount of stamina to cover a 40"x60" canvas with oil pigment. Once in this state I have maybe two days to set pigment where I want it and blend it enough to make it look like it belongs there. Some areas have been fine tuned a little but most will still require a facelift for it all to work out. Too tired to continue and almost too tired to properly care for my brushes I will quit for the day and hope the next time I return to the canvas enough was done right to continue the work.