Discipline is Freedom...

One in Every Crowd   oil/canvas   8 x 24 x .75

said Garth Fagan, the Tony award-winning choreographer of "The Lion King".  "Study the rules before you break them".  Quotes of this nature abound.  Probably because they are so true.  When you study your craft so very much that its nuances become part of your nature, it is then that you can begin to play....true play from which creativity springs forth.  Yes.

A few weeks ago, the program at my local art club was about breaking the rules.  I was unable to attend that evening.  Sometimes, in breaking the rules, we are more able to completely say what it is that is felt.  "One in Every Crowd" is a case in point.  A painting about chicks, sweet chicks.  And also a painting about following the crowd, or not.  I chose to paint my independent chick a different color and to put him facing a different direction than the others.  These changes made the painting more interesting to me, and also made the painting more interesting and challenging to paint.

Alice...

Applause   watercolor   9.25 x 13.25

(of the Wonderland tale) would love stepping into Heavenly Cupcakes in Kent!  Pink and Green everywhere.  Antiques.  Bold stripey wallpaper.  Games.  Tables.  Sparklies.  and now.....cupcake paintings.  Artists in both of my classes have contributed to this wonderful exhibit of cupcake art:  Sheri Linzey of Kent; Norma Ott of Cuyahoga Falls; Jackie Roberts of Sagamore Hills; Carol Weigand of Rootstown; Delores Zink of Kent; and myself.

Check it out.  And, btw, Alice said to bring your sweet tooth along.

Change of Pace...

Country Eggs   oil on canvas   6 x 6 x 1.5

Changing my painting pacing keeps me interested.  Some days are large oil painting days....they take quite a while to resolve.  On watercolor days, I often work on more than one, switching back and forth while trying to time the drying times.  And, when I become overwhelmed with problem solving, I paint small oils on small canvasses, just painting as I see things.  Simple.  Uncomplicated.  Refreshing.  Often, these small works are driven by color harmony and color experimentation.

Country Eggs....change of pace.

Swoon

is defined by dictionary.com as "to enter a state of hysterical rapture or ecstasy".  What a marvelous word!  Swoon is also one of my favorite street artists.  She studied painting at Pratt.  Her subjects are street people.  Most often she does wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts.  I love her style as well as her subject matter.  Sometimes her figures are a combination of great design and draftspersonship combined with decorative elements which make me swoon.  I noticed her work in "Exit Through the Gift Shop".  She is also represented in Graffiti World:  Street Art from Five Continents.

What a surprise to receive one of her images yesterday in my mail.  My son photographed this work on Grand Street in Brooklyn and sent it to me from his phone.

Technology.

Swoon.

Pear Possibilities...

La Poire 3   watercolor and gold leaf

Early next month, I will again be presenting a program called "A Pear is a Pear is a Pear".  It is a fun and playful session that involves process rather than product.  During the workshop we consider such things as:  edges (soft vs. hard); texture; color temperature (warm vs. cool); line and mass; and color (neutral vs. pure).

The slide show shows some the fine small pear paintings that were made that during our Thursday watercolor class.  The pressure was off....we were loose and free.  After all, it was only play-time....right?

Bling...

So Young Worries   watercolor/mixed with gold leaf   15.5 x 10

current slang for shiny things, is a distraction.  Shiny things attract crows as well.  I was inspired by Picasso's "Woman With a Crow" done in watercolor, pastel and charcoal in 1904 and owned by The Toledo Museum of Art.  I love everything about it...its simplicity, the soft caress of the woman's hand, the colors, the elongated fingers.  Some pictures just move us....who knows why?  Maybe it stirs up something in the memory.  Perhaps it indicates a place we would like to inhabit artistically or emotionally.  I painted "So Young Worries" d'apres Picasso.  My work is done also in watercolor, pastel and charcoal.  The gold coin is gold leaf applied.  I guess I feel that we are too often distracted by bling and all it represents.  It really keeps us from knowing ourselves.  To have or to be.

Yardsticks...

Pot of Potatoes   watercolor on paper   13 x 17

are good for measuring things, even measuring finished work, but lose their function when trying to measure the quality of our work.  One day at the end of class, one of the artists asked me if I thought his work had improved over the past couple of years.  Wow...talk about a loaded question.  I hate to respond with another question, but I think that improvement can only be judged from within.  With some paintings, I felt that I really hit the mark.  Others, not so much.  I have sold many paintings that were not among my favorites.  I am happier with my work than I was a decade ago....does that count?  It seems that my earlier work garnered more awards....but I may be wrong.  I am doing riskier things these days...solving more difficult problems....I feel that my work is now really mine.  But how would others measure it?  I don't know.  Sometimes I really love a painting that has not even gotten a second glance by others.  I guess improvement is in the eye of beholder.

"Pot of Potatoes" is the aforementioned work.

Life is just a bowl of....

Eat Your Broccoli   watercolor   13.25 x 6.5

let's see...we had spools of thread, bok choi, fruit and my own response, broccoli.  In this case I was working on an unusually shaped scrap of paper.  I wanted the darks and lights to play against each other to create drama.  And....I had the green/violet combo in my brain.  The tops of each floret are a kind of bluish-whitish-greenish.  Millions of little pieces.  The goal:  to indicate broccoli without too much detail.

"Eat Your Broccoli" is my response.

Winter-ful...painting snow...

Blue Hen Falls   watercolor   11 x 11

This has certainly been a winterful winter....after weeks of slightly warming temperatures and chilling rain, we are back into the grips....the trees and ground are covered with the fluffy white stuff.  Last chance to paint a winter landscape.  Painting snow in the spring seems, well, just wrong, like looking at a Christmas wreath in March.

"Blue Hen Falls" is the result.  About half of it was painted during class.  I was terrified to complete this in the studio at a separate session....worried that I would be unable to continue the earlier color palette, the earlier soft rhythm.  I guess the muse was with me on this one.  I am pleased.

Literature...

What Have We Done With Us?   oil/canvas   24 x 30 x .75

(that which one chooses to read) and life experience are inextricably related.  Life experience, then is inextricably related with what one chooses to paint.  I am a fan of the work of Louise Erdrich.  I found Love Medicine and Plague of Doves to be both haunting and a bit disturbing.  When I was in elementary school, our class assignment was to question our relatives about our heritage.  In a super-moment (one that remains strongly engrained in the conscious), I asked my grandfather where our ancestors came from.  He replied that my grandmother was a "wild injun".  My grandmother gave him a mean glance and then went about her chores....she was a woman of few words.  I thought it was a joke, even though she really did look Native American.  In years to come, I did find out that her own mother was the child of such a "bi-racial" relationship.  The details are quite sketchy but researched to a degree by a cousin.  I have no desire to undertake the task of genealogy.  But the interest is there.  That my tolerance of cold, that my extremely slow metabolism and my love of silence could be a product of genetic coding.  When Twelve Eagles posed, I undertook the project with enthusiasm.  Indian art runs the gamut from being a bit scientific (as specimens from The New World) to a bit too sweet as in "cute little Indian girl".  But as I worked, I realized that even though Twelve Eagles is authentic, she came off as a beautiful woman in a costume, as defined by my narrow middle-class-America-Ohio-to-be-specific cultural dictionary.

"What Have We Done With Us?" was painted of a sketch of Twelve Eagles.  I see myself in her.

Nuances....the stuff that others don't notice

become apparent to anyone who creatively undertakes a given task more than once.  Cake-baking.  Fire-building.  Plant-watering.  Whatever.  I have never trusted the opinion of anyone who deems any undertaking to be a cinch.....that indicates to me an unawareness of nuance.

Take materials, for example.  I usually follow the plan of:  the larger the work, the larger the tools, the need to stand.   And so it follows with smaller.  For our Wednesday evening model, I decided to sit instead of stand at the easel.  And so it followed that I would use a small piece of paper and a small charcoal pencil.  I usually use vine charcoal for drawing which mushes easily...sometimes too much.  The pencil was harder.  Even though I used my blending stump, the lines are still visible.  That can work to advantage, or disadvantage, of course, depending on the goals.  I used the less-bumpy side of the paper so that there would be more merging of the medium.

Sometimes it takes years to understand all of the hidden nuances hidden in art materials.  And to work with them to advantage.  Utilizing our own strengths as well as our limitations, including our materials, can improve our work.

The inner unconscious world...

Bartlett Pear   watercolor and thread on paper   5 x 8

the one we're not directly in contact with or in control of - that's the one I try and privilege.
                                                                                                 Charlotte Rampling, actress

Here here.  I was privileged to lead a program Monday eve on "A Pear is a Pear is a Pear" at the Medina Art League.  Due to time limitations, we created 8 small paintings, very quickly painted, with the pear as our subject.  Oh, the possibilities!
     1. vanilla....blah, blah, blah.  The pear painted as seen using local color.
     2. daring do.  We worked on this one throughout the session beginning with unlikely colors
          and strokes....how dare we?
     3. feeling edgy.  Manipulating hard and soft edges to tell different stories
     4. the thermostat....some artists worked on warm dominant paintings, and the others cool
     5. curly or straight?  some artists worked on texture within the pear form, and others texture in
         the background
     6. the feng shui way...bringing the outside (the form) in and inside out
     7. towing the line....adding a straight line to the organic pear form to offer strength
     8. color power...utilizing both pure hues and neutrals

My goal was to illustrate the possibilities inherent in the design principles and to help artists to prioritize what key ingredients please them in order to make their art more personal.  It was a rousing session with so many great little beginnings! (especially those of a 3rd grade art teacher)

Rum raisin, anyone?

Portraits...

Delores in Fendi   watercolor   11 x 8.25

are an amazing opportunity to commune with another individual in a very personal way....an intimacy beyond measure.  A silent wordless relationship.  For me, a portrait painted in love is the only way to travel.  I am inspired by real people with real humanity and a real soulfulness.  When presented with whiny uninspiring models or those in costume, I am at a bit of a loss, as a boundary has been laid which I am unable or unwilling to penetrate.  Portrait painting for me is so undeniably connected to my brain.  Painting Delores was such a work of love.  She is a perpetual student who is 86 years young.  We have been painting together for many years.  The muse seems to guide me in these joyful endeavors.  The work was started from a classroom situation where she was painting someone else, so the simple shapes changed a bit from time to time as her head rotated both from up to down and from left to right as she dipped into paint.  Once the groundwork was laid I was committed and finished as best I could.

A tribute to my friend and colleague Delores.  I am pleased.

Paint it Forward..

Pine Cone Pair 2   oil/canvas board   8 x 8

of course, is a play on the phrase "pay it forward".  To me, it implies works of good faith, done for the joy of it, with no expectation other than the happiness it gives or provides.  And, so, pine cones.  My sister in law recently asked me if I paint seasonally.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  My regimes, my thoughts and my soul seem to be enveloped by the weather, the scene, the feel around me.  I simply could not paint a summer landscape while surrounded by snow.  Right after the holidays, I had a difficult time returning to the large unresolved work in my studio.  And so, I thought that I would spend some time doing smaller pine cone paintings, 8 x 8, the idea seeded by a find of wonderful wood frames hanging from chains.  These little paintings seemed to go on forever, as I was in love with the paint-on-top-of-paint thing that was going on and the surface texture that emerged.  Although I did have pine cones in front of me, I pretended that they were enveloped by and topped with snow.  And now, with the first warm rays of spring penetrating the glass, I am, at long last, finished with these four small works.  And, I believe, I have had quite enough of pine cones for a while.