Maple, Green

Maple, Green; 12" x 6", oil on panel, 2010

My family did the annual watching of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I love Schultz's* use of color and his watercolor night sky. His landscapes fascinate me. There is a stage-like, comic strip, panel-to-panel, left to right movement throughout. The cartoon is thoughtful; the pieces of color make us feel, qualities I strive for in painting. The music, story, and visuals make it something to return to. The annual ritual is not unlike the Swedish tradition of watching The Donald Duck Christmas Show. A friend told me the whole country tunes in on Christmas and many people are severely annoyed if phone calls come during the broadcast.

Relationships between actors, the drama, keep us coming back. I'm totally hooked on the show Mad Men. The psychology of the characters is layered and complex. Fashion is stunning as is the color of Joan Holloway's hair (played by Christina Hendricks). Most of all, the animated intro is absolutely brilliant. The black and white ad man/mad man is flat and absent of color as standard newspaper print. He slowly falls through the metropolis, the opposite of superman, past colored moving billboards, the creations of his mind, like Alice down the hole to Wonderland. Distress is communicated in both. There is a 20th century angst as in the American novel The Great Gatsby.

Charlie Brown is known for struggling with identity and his own painful growing pains, striving to fit in with kid society. Every year we watch him gets rocks for Halloween and conned by Lucy in her fall football false promises. Great design holds it all together. My dots serve this purpose. They are the actors taking their place, bouncing your eye around, intermingling while still their own. The painting is the unifier. The rectangle is the parameter, the screen, the viewfinder for studying them and seeing ourselves.

*[Who knew there is a Charles Schultz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA? It's more appealing to me than Disney Land.]

Blackberries

33" x 24", oil on canvas

It's been a while since I've painted hands. Previous examples include:

Firefighter 9/11 No.2, 36" x 32", oil on canvas, 2002

and For You, It's Love, 20" x 16", oil on panel, 2008

The earlier paintings have expressionistic, loose paint handling. Blackberries retains some of that in the bottom left corner and especially in the wrist. The energetic blue paint seems set free.

picture plane

Artists need other artists. When I first went to Massachusetts College of Art and Design for undergraduate studies, I was intoxicated with excitement to meet other people who thought like me. Wait, that's not quite right. Artists are defiantly individualistic in their thinking, but there is a commonality in thinking differently from the status quo. "Art School" is a funny thing, even more so, a MFA program. Art is a bit elusive, go ahead, try to define it. I double majored painting and art education, seeing both sides, the doing and the teaching. Visual language can be taught, mechanics. I suppose it is like teaching someone to be a writer. Most of the language of painting, the ABC's and grammar, is taught in undergrad. Using grammar or rebelling against grammar in order to best serve the expression is what happens in a masters program. The process is about articulation, developing ideas, learning about what's out there and finding one's own vision. A MFA program sets an artist out on this life-long process. How to begin, how to continue, how to see direction in one's own work from the work itself. It is so unlike most fields where factual knowledge needs to be consumed in large quantities and tests are administered to make sure it is absorbed. I remember someone almost mocking my degree because it culminated in a thesis exhibition rather than a paper.

In the visual arts, graduate school gives access to other artists as peers in addition to artist-mentors/critics/professors. The latter are generally older, often quite older, and definitely more experienced. They're like Yoda. I'm not kidding - Yoda, Dumbledore, Professor McGonagall. [nerdy Star Wars and Harry Potter reference] In addition to materials and techniques (potions class), there's a feeling that how to use "The Force" is being taught. Now some artists are very concrete and don't believe spirituality, philosophy or anything mysterious at all is involved in their work. Georgia O'Keefe insists she only paints flowers (not sexuality) but Magritte says the painting of a pipe is not a pipe, so he knows there are other layers. The thing is artists are involved in attempting to give form to their experience of the world. Experiencing the world is mysterious. It's pretty strange (I overheard two artists remarking on how weird sleep is). Artists think about what it's like to be in the world and they do it rather uniquely. Each has his/her own points of interest. Maybe they notice more than other people; they think more during the rote tasks. There are probably a lot of people who aren't anesthetized and are observant but don't make art about it. Art education theorist John Dewey asserted that experience is the touchstone for art-making and that anyone can be an artist.

My intoxication with an art community was even more fervent in entering Penn. When touring the MFA program I saw a final critique of a graduation painter, Brian Kreydatus. His work reminded me of Marsden Hartley and Lucien Freud, high quality. Even then he showed he is one of these people who see more in daily life. I am still totally nuts about his work, especially his Self Portrait on 41st Birthday. You must, must click on the link to see this painting depicting himself shaving. The shaving cream is almost like a mask, as if he is trying on a white beard, imagining aging before the mirror; the birthday title marks years. It is a moment in time during a typically morning ritual; the shaving cream isn't going to stay but will be gradually removed to reveal something else. The brushstrokes mark locations describing both the form and light that won't always be there. It reminds me a bit, not by what it looks like but by what it means, of Bonnard's famous self-portraits, many also done in a bathroom. The MOMA's description is fascinating, much of which could equally be said of Self Portrait on 41st Birthday.

My hand paintings have some of this searching, temporal vulnerability. Blackberries is more of a statement, a proclamation. It shows the viewer the fruit, individual clusters, small things worth looking at in the human hand that found them.

Iris Series, 4 iPad, 1 oil on panel

#1

#2

#3, Flowers and Chair

#4, White Flowers

Iris, 24" x 18", oil on panel

I would like to draw your attention to the new exhibit by artist Iris Osterman at the Bowery Gallery in New York City. An excerpt of her press release:

"Bowery Gallery is pleased to present the third exhibition at the gallery of works by Iris Osterman, whose starting point are the streams, falls, rock formations and forests around her home in Massachusetts. Working with a restricted palette in oil and encaustic, the images come from the area where she has lived for the past two decades, as well as from trips to Maine, New York State and California."

For more information and to see images from the show, please consult the Bowery Gallery website.

This series of irises were done from life. The iPad images informed the oil painting. I like their boldness, snappy, and the complementary colors of purple and yellow, yellow-green. Some of them relate to other abstractions I have done including Blue Yellow Radiant from 2009.

I love the way Matisse uses chairs in his work as in the stolen drawing, Nude in a Rocking Chair, and the painting, Interior with Yellow and Blue. He loved curves and arabesques and he used the structure of an arch-backed chair to make those, not unlike the arms of the figures in Dance I.

Strong verticals provide visual support for the "follow-the-bouncing-ball" circles, energetic lines, curved flowers, and the "follow-the-bouncing-ball" circles. If you want a smile and some nostalgia, check out the Comin' Round the Mountain 1949 cartoon on You-Tube and head to 4:10 in to get to the song. I just love that and remember singing along to others like it. So there's your pop culture reference. You can stay tuned if you are a die-hard paint fanatic.

Technical shop talk:

Color in oil painting can be very rich, a quality I wouldn't use to describe digital color; that would be better described as "vibrant". The oil painting leans more toward organic color rather than synthetic. Even within oil paints there are some considered "organic" and others "synthetic" in actual composition. Newer colors like quinicridone mageta and the pthalos are synthetic while cadmiums, olive greens, ochres, etc. are considered more organic (not in the farming sense but as more natural :). Synthetics began being made in 1935, followed by many more in the 1960's, from raw materials taken through chemical reactions. Organic pigments are made with mined ores or other earth substances (clays, mica, silicas) .

[Mayer, Ralph. The Painter's Craft. An Introduction to Artist's Methods and Materials. Revised and updated by Steven Sheehan, Director of the Ralph Mayer Center, Yale University School of Art. New York: Penquin Group. 1948. 1991. ]

Rainy Day Window and Green Tree Seen

Rainy Day Window, Sketchbook Pro on iPad

Green Tree Seen, 8" x 8" oil on canvas, PRIVATE COLLECTION

On the creative process and new media:

I recently posted paintings about the blank page. Artists of all kinds confront how to get the juices flowing. Transitioning from the activity of regular life to the state of mind of creating can be difficult even though it is craved. It feels great when inspiration self-propels but if the time set aside to work doesn't coincide, it can be hard to break through. I heard a discussion on the subject within an interview of southern writers on NPR. The new book of short stories selected by writer Sonney Brewer called Don't Quit Your Day Job is about the jobs the writers had before writing full-time.

One writer said at the end of his writing session he would leave a line unfinished but only if he knew how to finish it. It would wait for him until next time, a hook to resume the process. Another said he would observe what is around him, however simple, and write a few lines as a warm-up. A visiting artist in undergrad said she put on the same music. I did that a lot in the past but now I do podcasts. My favorite is Fresh Air, Terry Gross' voice settling me into a quiet listening space that allows me to focus. Only problem is I run out of episodes, switching to other podcasts which may be equally interesting but don't have her magic. I scrape down the palette and get out my materials. I look to sketches, out the window, or try to remember what an image seen or imagined. When I worked in an Abstract Expressionist style I could make any mark and have something to respond to. Now the white smooth surface is important to me and I like to be fairly clear on what I'm after from the beginning. Both methods are equally valid. Now the absence of a specific idea feels like muddling around and I don't want the picture to get clogged. You can paint over anything but luminosity is facilitated by light going through paint, bouncing off the white ground and coming back to the eye. Art conservators recommend PVA size for canvas preparation over gesso as it is more resistant to water damage. PVA is clear so the natural color of the canvas, not bright white, is the starting point. Sometimes I like it as it operates as an interactive color much like the colored sheets of paper greatly preferred over white for pastel. I might try an oil based white ground. It is a non-issue for digital images as light comes from the screen. This technicality makes them easier than handling oil which can fight against you. Easier isn't inferior. Additionally, it is easier to think rapidly in a succession of changes and save possibilities with a digital art program. It mirrors quantum physics, showing outcomes of a multiplicity of actions (thanks to Chuck and Josh from How Stuff Works, Stuff You Should Know for explaining the science). It can be done in old-fashioned drawing but the stages can be lost unless one uses photography to document them. The exhibit of Matisse on view at the MOMA (Radical Invention, 1913-1917) uses technology to unravel the series of actions he took in making singular works. Now we can playback actions using Brushes' ability to transfer them into a Quicktime video or, as aforementioned, by saving intermediate steps as separate files, some as complete works on their own. The problem of when a picture is done in contemporary painting is stretched, made pluralistic.

Sonny Brewer quoted Truman Capote:

"Truman Capote just said, 'Write something true,'" Brewer says. "It doesn’t matter if it fits in the book or not, but if it’s true that the wind is blowing and that the sky is blue … write the truth for a minute."

"Then, start lying," Groom adds. "A very convincing lie." [Copyright 2010 National Public Radio].

Green Tree Seen was made in this way. I always look around when I'm outside for striking visual situations and I saw a tree which became my own in the studio. Looking from dot to dot is a journey in its greenery. Texture is an important part of the looking experience here as is in Rainy Day Window, something like oil pastel. I took the photo of the window, surprised by the reflection of synthetic colored light from the T.V. I imported the photo into Sketchbook Pro on the iPad and reworked it. So I adapt and utilize the new tools available to painters to bang through to the idea. Much more will come.