“Some forms of success are indistinguishable from panic.” — Edgar Degas
Here's a student's first dog sketch. At only twelve, she already has a great eye. The model is Roxy, from my current works in progress. When I was a student, we worked on whatever my teacher was working on .... in the tradition of apprenticeship ... so, not knowing any other way to do it, I'm teaching the same way.
Here's Bubba after the second session. One more session should finish ..... don't you love the little pirate teeth .... Arrrrgh!
At it's best art communicates on many levels ..... and it takes a stand .... it has a point of view. Even paintings of dogs and ads for sports equipment can speak to our highest pursuits.
Easily two or three more days of work on this painting .... all but the top three flowers are just sketched in .... Roxy's volume definitely needs to be dialed up .... a few other adjustments to bring things into balance...
BUT we are, as they say, SO CLOSE I CAN FEEL IT! In fact, I've been living with the imagined piece so long, and feeling our way down the path together .... now as it comes to life, the anticipation is wonderful .... to sing the body electric!
This painting by Japanese (I think) artist, Soey Milk is a terrific example of various styles coming together beautifully. From what I can tell of her work, the focal point of the painting is rendered in the style of classical (Western) realism, and then drops off to complete abstraction moving out from the central focus. She is the best contemporary example I know of (although there are certainly many others) using this technique ... making Post Modern great again. I do love her work.
Working on Hail and Farewell. Been a day of contradictions, but isn't that what makes art interesting... and beautiful ... and disturbing ...
"They" have always said you can't use different painting styles in the same painting and still have the end product hold together. I have never listened to them, but so far in my work they have always been right. In working the vines and flowers I fell into the use of a very painterly style, plus outlining, which I love but seldom use. Although the contrast relative to the rest of the work thus far is subtle, any trained eye would spot the shift right away. I'm going to take this path further .... I want the two styles to keep moving forward, converge, and marry into one unified whole in the end.
So I have to report that this was one of those days in the studio when I know that all is well. That despite challenges on all levels, I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing. These different painting styles will reconcile on some new level where there's nothing to explain. That is the magic of an artful life.
Today was a good day in the studio .... some writing and correspondence, some canvass prep, some teaching, and some painting. I'm pleased with how these vines are turning out .... the leaves are underpainted in pale red-violet, which serves as the perfect complement for the bright green finish layer. I found the flowers for this painting down by the river yesterday ... they are perfect .... just wait! Nothing to do but paint tomorrow, so I can layout the flowers on this piece, and maybe even finish Bubba the Pirate ... but for now ... I need a good night's sleep.
On Sunday afternoons in my teens, my father and I would set out to explore. We would tell Mother we were going “driving around” …. she never minded because she’d have the house to herself, and give us her shopping list. Driving around was exactly what we did … sometimes talking, sometimes listening to music, sometimes we would stop at a greasy joint for a hamburger. We’d often visit a building site …. usually something significant like a bridge or skyscraper. Charlotte was then, like now, one big construction project.
At fourteen something happened on one of our drives that crystallized in my mind, and is still as real to me as the moment it happened. We were on the newly opened Brookshire Freeway, which we had watched take shape, so we loved driving it. With no fanfare my father said: “I will probably die at about the same age my father did (60), and I expect you to be the man of the family.” I said nothing, and knew two things with absolute certainty: 1. he was right and 2. I would never speak of this for many years.
He died at 62. It was one year from the out-of-the-blue cancer diagnosis until the funeral. Like me, he had always been in amazingly good health … seemingly indestructible. We both went to doctors only when my mother made us. During the year of the cancer he worked every day … in fact, most people didn’t know he was sick.
A couple of years before the illness, I took a job in Charlotte and moved back to my hometown. It was a great time. The family was together, and Daddy was surrounded by "his girls” — Mom, my sister Terri, her daughter Aubri, and me. For every occasion requiring a gift, and many that didn’t, he gave us each one of four identical objects ….. jewelry, cards, little boxes … all in the shape of hearts. It became a silly family ritual … “what kind of crazy heart-gift can Daddy come up with this time?”
That is why I hide hearts in my paintings.
Now I wear three talismans on a gold chain necklace, pretty much all the time, certainly when I work. Hard to put into words what they represent … and that is the glory of symbols … they embody what we could not possibly express. They hold worlds. There is a little crystal heart, monogrammed, one of Dad’s many heart-gifts. There is my cross from Jerusalem. And there is a little red canoe. They hold my story, and my heart, and magnificent worlds to come. One of these days, hopefully soon I'll start a new self portrait. Can't see the composition just yet, but I know these guys will be in there somewhere.
The plan to finish the dog sketch, Bubba, in one day of painting didn't work out. For a quick oil sketch to work, it has to be rendered alla prima (also called direct painting or wet-into-wet), and my technique for the pet sketches is not entirely alla prima ... I have always used a color underpainting, let that dry, and then do the second session -- the finish painting alla prima. So today I finished Bubba's underpainting, but trying to layer the finish detail wet-into-wet was producing a lot of mud ... so I stopped with the underpainting. When that's dry enough, hopefully tomorrow, we can bring him home.
But the free hours this afternoon gave me time to get back to Hail and Farewell. Started sketching the vines and leaves flowing around the figure. It's just a start, but I think I like where it's going.
One of the books keeping company with me in the studio this invincible summer is Daily Rituals ... a collection of short essays on various creatives -- writers, painters, poets, scientists and musicians -- describing their work rituals, habits and idiosyncrasies. It's a very interesting little book, and a must-read for creatives. Naturally, it makes you look at your own life, and in my case, provides a bit of validation .... that great 'I'm not nearly as weird as I thought' feeling.
I certainly picked up some rituals from two years with Ben Long: out before sunrise for morning plein air work, back by the time the sun is too high for painting (when shadows go black), break from studio work around 2:00 or 3:00 for lunch, studio or plein air in the afternoons, don't even think about dinner till way after dark, and (my personal obsession) ALWAYS clean the studio before work. Ben managed best with an entourage, surrounded by chaos, but of course, nothing could be more distracting for me.
Today I'm arranging my ritual around a new goal: produce the little pet sketches in two days or less. If I'm going to be doing several of these a month, they need to be a quick hit ... a momentary pause in the production of more significant work. The one I'm doing today, Bubba the Pirate, is actually a bit larger, and I've already set up the composition on a 16x16 board. Finishing the whole piece today is pretty ambitious. But it's 8:30 now, and all the chores are done ... including food prep and Popcorn's daily swim. In fact, even if this experiment doesn't go as planned, I'll probably stick with the sunrise swim ... what a great place for morning coffee!
Photograph of Broad River race, Lockhart, SC ... with Popcorn.
I have to offer a heartfelt thanks to my muse. OK ... hold the eye-roll. Here's the story:
Focusing this morning on the swirling botanical pattern around Roxy. I've had a general sense of it, but have not completely figured out the execution ... what would be the pattern, and what would it mean? So I worked on sketches .... mapping the flow of elements around the canvass and through the gate. Nothing seemed right. In fact, I found myself drawing a pattern, and then trying to retrofit an overarching logic (which lots of artists do, especially with abstract stuff ... makes me crazy ... I have a great story about this for later).
So that's when my muse helped out, my oceanic visitor of perception. Sometimes the sense of my muse feels like sharing a heart-shaped pod, with our lower bodies coiled into the base. Not at all sure where the shape comes from .... maybe it's just the right brain making picture-sense of an otherwise inexplicable feeling. And that image is exactly what came to me ... the perfect flow pattern: coiled lines drifting through the opening, connected to heart arches embracing Roxy. Even cooler ... the pattern around the figure forms an eight, for infinity. Lovely.
OK .... here we go ...
Here's progress on Hail and Farewell, with Roxy basically finished. Working the figure has been straightforward enough ... the real decisions have been around integrating the dog with the surroundings. My intention here is to create a wallpaper type background, but I don't want her to be floating in the middle of the canvass ... so how much interior-space-illusion to create? Naturally, the shadow under the figure plants her on the carpet. And I opened the form slightly around the shadow shoulder because nothing says "figure floating in space" like an entirely closed form. She will certainly evolve more as the rest of the background elements take shape.
What I love right now is the tender expression on her face. Sure hope that comes through on the photograph. I seem to be awash this evening in tender gazes from quadrupeds .... and listening to "Always on My Mind" by Willie Nelson, just to complete the package. Anyway... such a great feeling .... tenderness tonight .... and swirling botanicals first thing in the morning.
Yesterday driving home from the coast ... top down, country backroads, loud music ... I actually felt beauty ... not just saw it or heard it ... I was inside the matrix of beauty. And I understood beauty comes to us from an infinite number of pieces and parts colliding in time, not the least of which is courage. So today I'm returning to a piece started months ago. For years I've wanted to use gold leaf in a portrait ... Klimt did it masterfully, and lots of others too. If it works, and I hurry, it will show at an event in September ... and if it really works, people will feel beauty. But that's a whale of an ask ... I'll happily settle for finishing on time.
Back to work on Roxy after a much needed day off, which gave me time to understand the emotional story of this picture .... Hail and Farewell ... saying goodbye, honoring the past, and embracing change.
One of the most important teachers in my life is Janet Sussman. Decades ago she taught me to meditate, for a start ... and lots of other techniques from the world of weird ... healing mostly, but also metaphysics. She knew I was destined to be an artist long before I did.
Janet always said that the hardest thing we have to do in a lifetime is learn to let go of someone we love. Usually it's a person we've lost, but letting go of anything we love is horrible. She teaches how to separate oneself from the attachment and hold on to the love. That the love comes not from the one we've lost, but from within ourselves. When the person, or dog, is gone, the love they activated within us remains, and nothing can ever change that. So that's what this painting is about. When composing it, I could feel something distant and wonderful: letting go of some old pain, and recreating it in a new way... holding on to the fire of love and rebuilding ... beauty for ashes. Of course, I had no experience of those words until I stepped away for a bit.
Red is the color of the here and now ... of idea manifesting in matter. The red opening behind Roxy, rather than being a point of departure, represents a gateway for change ... for love to reshape and reassert itself even within the sadness. After the figure is further along, the PLAN is to have objects (probably flowers and plants mostly) flowing around her and through the opening ... hopefully conveying how porous the gate is, in both directions ... and how the love we feel is all that was ever really real anyway. Well ... that's the plan ... sure hope I can pull it off. But at a bare minimum, I want to make a beautiful painting, and thankfully, I've probably got the horses for that.
Another day of progress ... and finally I can see exactly where I'm going with this. Whew.
When I first started painting I could always see where I wanted to go with the picture ... could see it perfectly in my imagination. And for years I could never get there ... just didn't have the technical skill .... the voice without the hand. Finally, after years of punching away at it ... I won. I could execute just about anything. I remember my teacher, Ben, saying, when I complained about not having the skill to produce what I could see, "be careful what you wish for ... when you can paint anything, then what do you do .... what are you going to paint?" Man, was he ever right.
This is a long way from finished. After the background sets up I can start adding the other elements ... very exciting. In the meantime, need to bring Roxy up to level.
Woke up this morning to find this image … been working a lot on it, and went to bed exhausted, forgetting the work I’d done until seeing it in the kitchen. (Yes, moved into the kitchen to paint … who knows… I just love to paint in the kitchen!)
I'm going entirely on feel at this point. That’s definitely a double-edged sword. I have a feeling for what I want, but no exact plan …. so the trick is to get so deep into the zone that there is no worry, no fear, no self-doubt … and for me to outrun those rascals, I have to go very, very deep. If it works, you’re a genius, and if not, something WAY south of that.
But we go there anyway, don’t we? As Camus says, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer … no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger — something better, pushing right back. Let the situation be as cold as winter but the [fire] lies within you.”
With this painting, pushing myself to a new place … well, life feels pretty weird. I remember dreaming like crazy all night, and at some point I woke up to record a 'profound thought' from dreamland: “this level … with all the clutter … it’s just potato chips … a quick hit of hitness … it’s not joy or fascination or interest or discovery …. it’s hitness. the potato chip jolt of potatochipness. A stop in and of itself on the path to the next perch . and the next … and the next“
No editing ... that's exactly what I wrote in the middle of the night .... brought over to us from a forgotten dream. Hmmmmm. Not quite sure what to say … I guess it has a certain realityness to it … OK, back to work now.
Here's the design for the formal portrait of Roxy. Using the carpet pattern as the floor ... the figure won't say what we want if she seems to float in space .... so I'll plant her on the carpet, and let the other compositional elements float around. I want to suggest an interior space, but not actually render one .... just like the allegorical Gauguin painting in the preceding post ... Vision After the Sermon suggests a landscape, but is really a representation of two planes - the material and the spiritual, and the diagonal tree trunk divides the two realms.
This is a decent size 36x24 inches, which is plenty of space to swirl some story elements around the canvass. It's beginning to come into focus in my imagination. Not exactly sure how to do it, but it is starting to take shape, so that's good. I've told everyone what I'm planning ... so that's also good ... one way or another I have to figure it out.
... swimming around in words and images all morning .... composing these next couple of paintings .... considering all the pieces and parts and wondering how to assemble them. The feeling is clear ... rich, oceanic, dreamy ... and the story elements are more or less fixed .... but I can't see it yet. Normally I tackle domestic chores when I'm blocked like this. But these paintings have deadlines, so ...
I've been pushing to sort it out in a logical, linear way, and I think that's the problem. If I can move beyond that, it will show itself to me. Here's what I mean: there was this time when my father was dying. He and my sister loved each other, but always had trouble communicating ... a lifelong situation ... they just couldn't manage to strike the right cord. But when he was dying, all the troubles of all those years ceased to exist .... just melted away ... there was simply no need to talk it all out ... like a line from a favorite poem: "we crossed an ocean to a place where there's nothing to explain". In that harmonic place, love won because the conflict no longer existed.
So that's where I am this morning ... crossing an ocean to a place where there's nothing to explain .... where beauty is an end in itself, and delivers story without narrative. These are some of the images helping me along .... Gaugain, Klimt, unknown, Klimt:
Here's the completed Roxy sketch. It's 16x16, on coarse linen over panel. Took just under 20 hours, minus board prep (have become semi-obsessed with the actual time it takes to produce these pieces).
Although it may not be obvious to the viewer, the painting technique used on this canvass is quite a bit different compared with the finer, smooth linen generally used for portraits. Glazing (thin semi-transparent layers of color) is not really viable on this surface. What works instead is to lay in dark and medium tones as a base, and then apply thick highlights on top, with just the right amount of the base showing through ... not particularly forgiving, but highly energetic when it works.
The client couldn't decide between the formal portrait and sketch, so commissioned both. I'm really excited about the formal piece ... for that project and one other in progress (Josie) I'm seeing a tangle of intricate, floating background elements .... not precisely sure how the details will play out, but the feeling we will have is vivid ... I love getting back on the path from some time ago. Have been researching the idea browsing other artists on Instagram ... seems like I'm not the only one out there exploring a contemporary take on the theme (plus my cyber-tribe helps with isolation, which I admittedly cultivate, but probably isn't that practical over the long run). Very exciting creative time, a fresh embrace of the eternal ... I love how my muse is always in my dreams ... I promise you, there's nothing like painting in one's sleep. Wow!
8.8.18. Wow … and I love the number eight, so I guess I have to write something today.
In the ‘Life In Art Is Good’ department: I’m excited about three new commissions — two girls (on separate canvasses) and a dog (sketch). I’d hoped to compose the girls on a larger board, with meaning-rich background elements, but the family wants two, so that’s good. Those big paintings are coming soon enough, and then I’ll probably miss the days of the small ones.
Here’s what’s monumental about the transaction: we are trading two paintings for a car. It’s a funky, convertible car … and for some reason feels like a better fit than the ubiquitous SUV whose payments are overly burdensome. But even more symbolical than the car itself is the actual transaction.
It’s an artist thing. Over the past two decades in the arts — traveling, working, and interacting with fellow artists much of the time, I came to see myself as a player at the artist-lifestyle, but not a fully committed, wholly integrated member of the tribe. The stark truth is this: I was afraid to take the leap …. to risk it all (whatever “it” was) .… and see what I’m made of, as my father used to say.
From my one-foot-in-one-foot-out perch I observed that living the life came with all sorts of quirky business transactions. Not the DC-insider-money-laundering style of quirky …. more like the painting-for-a-car or pencil-sketch-for-dinner situation. So the way I bought my car, just like the way I bought my funky-village house, would for some suggest diminished circumstances. But not for me, just the opposite … I finally landed in the life I’m supposed to live.
Also finally, I understand something my teacher, Ben Long used to yell at me, “you’re nothing but a dilettante!” I always shrugged it off because and I didn’t believe it. Plus, he yelled at me all the time anyway. There was this one occasion I remember … love this story .... here we go:
We were seven: myself, five foul-smelling male artists, and a Basset Hound (whose name has left me) — in the lobby of a Paris hotel checking in for the night. Ben, for some crazy-ben-crazy reason had predictably insisted we share a room. All seven of us.
As usual, I didn’t protest … instead I went over to another check-in person, handed her my card, and proceeded to book my own room. Predictably, the Maestro exploded. He violently ‘dropped’ his baggage and paraphernalia (artists travel with lots of stuff … another artist thing), the dog howled, and he marched over to my queue to set the world right.
Trying to whisper, I explained why I preferred not to stay up all night playing poker, drinking, and smoking cigars. The exchange went on for a bit, and I seem to remember only that my usual tactic of giving Ben a little space wasn’t going to work this time. Next thing I knew the former-Marine reached out his giant hands ….
…. wait a minute … back up. Do you remember that scene in Gone With the Wind where Rhett Butler wrapped his hands around Scarlett’s head and SQUEEZED? It was later in the movie, in the Atlanta house. Amazing scene, really. I’m sure you remember.
Well that’s what happened. Ben wrapped his hands around my head, raised his eyes to heaven, and bellowed … (Yes, “bellowed” is exactly the proper verb choice.) … he bellowed: WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS THINKING YOUR OWN THOUGHTS! I’m fairly sure he howled the eternal question several times.
There was no oxygen left in the lobby. There was no proportional response. Everyone stood statue still until he took his hands down and began to quietly pick up all the brushes, bottles and tubes on the carpet. Even the dog was quiet.
Needless to say, the Basset Hound and I had a lovely, restful evening in my room.
