What I did today (or: why paint?)

The view from French Mill Lane, November 2008.

Snow Farm

A week at Art Camp!

Vancouver Island III

By the saltwater pool.

Vancouver Island II

A yellow chair, one of many.

Vancouver Island early June

Almost enough time.... here's the beach cabin.

Madrone.

Oak (with Tim kayaking past).

View from the porch.

Life Drawing

I've been reading Jack Flam's book about Matisse and Picasso , which is full of little grayscale thumbnails of many works where they played off of one another (or fought off one another, more like). Looking at those, rubbing and erasing charcoal ...

Life Drawing 5/27/09

A sassy long-legged long-armed dancer/gardener for a model!

The Impact of the Unequivocal ("Silence is so accurate")

Oh and then there's Rothko: "We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth."

"Scatole contemplative": fugitive, exquisite, and secret

“Screwing things up is a virtue,” said Robert Rauschenburg. “Being correct is never the point."

From Josef Albers, Rauschenberg "gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing tool."

Hmmmm.....

"Kicking around Europe and North Africa with the artist Cy Twombly ... Rauschenberg began to collect and assemble objects — bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in Rome who exhibited them under the title 'scatole contemplative,' or thought boxes."

Around 1959, Rauschenberg developed a "transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers and magazines with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a pencil. The process ... created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secret."

Fugitive, exquisite, and secret.....

Quimper Arts Life Drawing 5/20/09

Quimper Arts Life Drawing 5/20/09, originally uploaded by Skeinfest.

One more from last night.

Return to Life (Drawing)

Deborah was a beautiful model at Quimper Arts Life Drawing Session tonight. Drawn with "LithoCoal" which handles like charcoal then heat-sets (and although we know from Ray Bradbury that Fahrenheit 451 is where paper burns, it is still possible to scorch the drawing paper in a 250 oven if you put it too close to the element. Luckily the last drawings of the night came out fine.)

Where the dancers came from

Quimper Arts life drawing session in February 2009 (Dava).

Next layer (dancers)

Next layer: transparent red earth; Indian Yellow (I meant Naples Yellow, on the first layer -- it is more buttery and opaque; Indian Yellow is transparent and warm). Also some titanium white. Putting on and wiping off. (Looking, just a little at a time, at the Rothko catalog from the 2008 Tate show; it just arrived today.) Then some cobalt blue and quinacridone violet, plus a little of the rest.

Five Figures, or two, or one

Started a new larger oil painting today (18x24). Anthraquinone blue, some places grayed out with tiny bit of burnt umber, or lightened with titanium white, or warmed with a tiny bit of quinacridone red. Indian yellow [I meant, Naples Yellow], some places with titanium white. Used Galkyd medium mixed with a little Gamblin Cold Wax Medium (thinned with Gamsol).

They started as tulips

Oil paint; second layer.

Seven Million Dollars and over 39 miles

My friend Sally Light just walked a MARATHON AND A HALF. IN 2 DAYS! In the RAIN! Well, she's from Seattle so she takes the rain part in stride. The big deal is that she and her fellow walkers on the 2009 Washington DC Avon Breast Cancer Walk (successor to the 3-Day that inspired me to make my very first web page in 2001) raised $7 million for breast cancer research and treatment.

So this is inspiring me to upload a video to my blog, another first -- may require Internet Explorer rather than Firefox to view it though. An experiment! Video from the DC-area television news coverage. Sally wrote: "Just after the Arlington girl holding the cardboard sign on day 2 of the Walk, you can see Jyl to the left in the blue poncho and me next to her in the middle in a baseball cap and rain-soaked jacket, brown capris (also soaked). The best news -- we raised 7 million!"

Big cheers for Sally!

Drawing practice

"The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance."

From a review in the New York Times of two new books about the nature of "genius."

Ginevra de Beth: Beauty Adorns Virtue

I have believed for years that my friend Beth resembles Ginevra de Benci. This is the earliest known painting of a woman by Leonardo da Vinci.

The motto on the back of the painting (which lives at the National Gallery in Washington DC) is "virtutem forma decorat" --- beauty adorns virtue. I take this to mean that Beth's manifest virtue is in the creation of beauty.

Here's my sketch of Beth from a few months ago.

The Table Where the Poems are Made

I met Beth at Third Place Commons to paint. Light from skylights made dramatic shapes on walls and floors. Models obligingly stayed at their tables, laptops, cellphones for a long time.

I painted chairs. Beth painted the guy.

Neither of us painted the dramatic light on the walls! By the time I took my picture it had moved off the wall. But we saw it!

Third Place to Paint (part 2)

Beth painted this scene next:

Then we moved over near the window and painted the outdoors.

This was our view over the parking lot, looking south (toward the north end of Lake Washington). Here is Beth at work.

... and her finished sketch:

... and mine:

What a good day! Painting makes the clocks stop!

Spring is coming (as Beth shows!)

post 4-11-09, originally uploaded by polusladkaia.

I missed the SketchCrawl last weekend but about a billion sketchers around the world got out and made pictures, including Beth. Isn't this a hope-filled image? Yes it is.

Back to the easel

Beth in her infinite faith and wisdom has nudged me back toward making pictures. Later this week we will meet at Third Place Commons (adjacent to Third Place Books) in Lake Forest Park to do oil sketches in public.

Their website explains the name: "Third Places are the many public places where people can gather, put aside the concerns of home and work (their first and second places) and hang out simply for the pleasures of good company and lively conversation." This is taken from a book by Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. These are our favorite kinds of places!

Since I haven't been making pictures, you should go look at what Beth has been up to!

Variations on a stripe

Can you guess which one is mine?!

I did a different painting today; I'll post it later. Still working on it.

Tillering the painted fields

This weekend I am taking a painting class from Don Tiller, who makes colorful and exuberant paintings. Today he walked a dozen students through his process of designing and making a painting, starting with a surface of black gesso, drawing in chalk, and applying successive layers of mostly translucent Golden Fluid Acrylics. We ended with a dozen ersatz Don Tiller paintings -- his stripey style is quite distinctive! Quite fun to see how we all started the same way (same colors, same picture elements) and end up with variations. This is a great way to learn his specific approach, and I'm happy to play with luminous colors. Tomorrow we'll work from our own compositions. Stay tuned...

Is it Real Art if it is framed?

Just picked up two pictures from the wonderful Megan at Frameworks in Port Townsend. This is the first time I've ever had my own work properly framed. She is working on 4 more pieces (by Ronald Jesty, Robert Powell, and a New England artist whose name I cannot at this moment recall).

These are collages of (mostly) acrylic colors on torn paper, made in October 2002.

Mom's new scarf

I crocheted a silk/wool neckwrap for my mom to wear; here she is on Friday the 13th of February at home, still recovering, still wonderful. She dressed up specially for me to take a picture of the shawl.

This is Doris Chan's wonderful "All Shawl" pattern, which I've now made 3 times -- free pattern on Ravelry. It's great for reading in bed. Another way to play with colors.

Mary J

Here's my mom, at the Relay For Life in July 2006. She has had some significant medical challenges since then and last night was admitted to the hospital after fighting pneumonia at home for a week. Fingers crossed.

Color in winter

Even if it's NeoColorII crayons!

Matisse's armchair