Painting in the Studio

It is cold out. Today I needed to do work in the studio and also paint (and run around, but that isn’t part of this story). My studio is a little office/gallery where I do paperwork, phone calls, packaging reproduction prints and cards, and, believe it or not, actually draw! When I began painting, it seemed prudent to keep that mess away from my drawings and paperwork. We have a workshop with lots of windows in the front half, and it is a fairly mess-proof place. That is not exactly right – it is full of messes, but it doesn’t matter. As I said, it is cold out, and it made sense to only heat one building. So, I did 5 miniature paintings because they seemed to be the least likely to create a mess.

These are 2×2″ – miniature, for sure! The purpose of these little poppies is to sell at Colors for the First Saturday of March. March 5, Three Rivers, to be specific. The theme is. . . POPPIES!  I know. duh.

What is Geotourism?

According the the web definition it is ” ‘best practice’ tourism that sustains or even enhances the geographical character of a place, such as its culture, environment, heritage and well being of the residents”. What does that have to do with cabinart? The National Geographic Society is making websites of maps for geotourism. Currently they are building the site for the Southern Sierra Nevada, and it includes Three Rivers. We who choose to participate are nominating ourselves to be on that map. This is a wonderful opportunity to market Three Rivers, to present our best self, and to show us to be irresistible to those who are planning to visit Sequoia. All the sites in Three Rivers are currently pending nominations, but they are visible if you go to the National Geotourism website. Click on the Main Map page, and when you mouse over the Three Rivers area, bubbles appear with a title, photo and description. (If it is too cluttery, use the sliding scale at the top to make it larger and more spread out.) I invite you to visit my site and if you like it, please give me a thumbs up. Thanks! Thanks a lot!

I thought it a fine example of my very regional oil paintings – showing off our river!

Three Kinds of Artists

Seventh in the series “Thoughtful Thursdays”

A simple way of categorizing artists is to divide the approaches to art into 3 varieties: those who make art for fun, those who make art as a secondary occupation, and those who earn a living from their art.

Those who make art for fun undoubtedly have it the easiest. Without thinking about what might sell or being bound to any one style, this type of artist is free to try any medium or technique. He can bounce from teacher to teacher, class to class, pottery to watercolor to drawing in any order. He can dabble at anything that strikes his fancy. Goals may be set, and even reached, but in the end, fun and self-expression seem to be the main purpose. Once I even had a drawing student tell me, “I don’t care much about art – I just want to meet women!”

Those who straddle the line between a day job and making art probably have it the hardest. To make quality art in enough quantity to sell takes an enormous amount of time, and it is very difficult to fit this into a week with a 40+ hour bite already missing.  There is a struggle while working a “real” job to focus on the task at hand while one’s mind is roaming the halls of Artland. I remember working in a dining hall at a camp and constantly being distracted by the deep golden brown color of a giant container of tea, or admiring the brilliant orange of grated carrots against the spring greens of lettuce. Needless to say, my co-workers thought I was a nut-job.

Engaging in art as one’s main paid occupation rather than as a pastime is a highly rewarding approach to art-making. It takes a strong commitment, an unwavering resolution to never give up. When sales drop, galleries and shops close, students get old and no new ones come, long-term art shows fold, there is much to do besides make art. If sales don’t happen, there is no income! Art is a luxury item, not a necessity, and in the current economic atmosphere this fact is more evident than usual. Tulare County has higher unemployment, poverty and welfare dependence than much of the country even in good times. Despite that, it is possible to earn a living as a professional artist here. In upcoming articles, I will explain some of the avenues I have followed to make that dream a reality.

Wave Action, 10×8″, graphite, $100

Broken Sleeper

My sleeper is broken. In the olden days of my life, 9 hours a night was a requirement. For the last several years, I feel lucky to get 8. What does one do in the middle of the night if sleep won’t happen? I think, I pray, I plan, and sometimes I just give up. Library books, knitting, and the internet are all good quiet occupations for those wee hours. Looking at the art of those I admire is one way I try to not just veg-out, because it is a given that I will be fairly useless during the day after one of those super-early mornings. I hope that by looking at the art of the Big Boys and Girls, something helpful will get absorbed into my memory. These are the artists I am currently watching:

June Carey – I saw a piece (reproduction) by her at The Wooden Indian in Visalia and never forgot her light, the lay of the land, the subjects, the realism combined with impressionism, the brilliance of her colors. She paints orchards, vineyards, hillsides, all with purple shadows on the roads, high contrast, fuzzy edges, perfect proportions, a building or two, Italy, Sonoma (or is it Napa?) and has typos all over her incomplete web pages. Who cares when her paintings just stop me in my tracks? Maybe I should sell my car and buy one. . .

Morgan Wiestling – “First Dance” was my first vision of this man’s mind-blowing fabulousness. It was at Masters of the American West in 2008, and it almost made me flip over the handlebars because I stopped so suddenly. My hand had to mechanically reach up to close my mouth, because my jaw truly fell open in awe. I don’t know where he gets his material – maybe he hires models and stages his scenes a la Norman Rockwell. Maybe he finds old photos and recreates the scenes in color. Maybe he is just a freakin’ genius! His edges are a little blurry, the light is subtle, the colors are muted and yet everything almost looks photographic in its proportional perfection. No maybe about it – he must be a genius!

There is something both encouraging and discouraging about viewing work of this caliber. The negative side of my brain says “Give up, you Poser because you are already 51 years old and aren’t even 1/100th of the way of getting to where these folks are and besides, you quit school and didn’t even go to a real art college”. The positive side of my brain says “WOW oh WOW, I’m just sure if I keep painting the subjects I love that one day my work will grab people as this work grabs me”.

Perhaps instead of producing 100 paintings per year at a very low price, I should paint just 10 and price them at $6,000-10,000 each. What do you think??

Get real, Toots.

Doesn’t this look like something June Carey might choose to paint? maybe if it had a house or a barn. . .

I Love February

Because there are flowers in the yard and the flowering quince is coming soon.

Because it is green around the studio.

Because the daylight lasts longer, the sky is blue, and the cats don’t beg to stay in the house during the day.

Because Kaweah is waiting for me to go paint.

And although she prefers my lap, she is content directly underfoot while I stand to paint!

Hope I never squash her sweet little self!

Working from Photos

It isn’t popular in the artworld to admit that one works from photos. In fact, the closest you’ll get to reading that someone works from photos is “I use them for reference”. Brings to mind something Jack White, my painting inspiration/guru/mentor said – “All realistic painters either work from photos or they lie about it”. Me? I TOTALLY work from photos – if I just use them for reference, it is because the scene was so complicated that I just started making things up!

The other JB and I visited the Buckeye campground in Sequoia National Park over the weekend. There is a mellow little trail that leads to a picturesque footbridge over the main fork of the Kaweah River. (You can read about it in the  January 17 blog post.) When JB saw the view, she burst forth with the declaration, “If you paint that, I will buy it!” Being a hard-nosed business tycoon (snort, guffaw), I said, “Okay, I will show you some sketches first so you can see if you like it and after I paint it, I won’t hold you to buying it.” (Jack White would not be pleased with me for that!)

Here is the main view that JB was so taken with; you can barely see the bridge in the photo! This is why I will have to sketch things in advance of painting – how large can I make the bridge without distorting reality? How much rock, if any, in the foreground is actually necessary? Can I “grow” the river, because in our memories, it is The Main Event?

All these photos will be useful to create a small (“thumbnail” in Artspeak) sketch that will determine what size and where each part should be in proportion to the other parts. If I was carrying a backpack that day, a sketchbook would have been a helpful item. But I am a modern chick who uses a digital camera with tremendous gratitude for the technology.

Thinking About Facebook

A Thinking Place, 11×14″, colored pencil

In the fast-paced, always-changing high-tech world we occupy,  there are decisions that need to be made. By not making a decision, a decision is still made. (And some people think I just stand around painting all day, lah-lah-lah, happy little idyllic pastoral groovy life!?)

I’m trying to decide if Facebook is a good idea or a bad one in terms of business promotion. If you are on my email list, you received a request for your opinion on the subject. The number of responses was wonderful – honest, helpful, informative and abundant! And I was able to respond privately to everyone of you with real gratitude in my heart.

I love the personal and immediate nature of email. In snooping around Facebook (some of the pages are visible even without an account), it seems as if the nature of communication is quite shallow. Of course that could be due to the fact that the pages I saw are not private!

Here are some of my conclusions from the feedback you provided.

  1. The correct term is to “be on” Facebook, not to “use” it.
  2. I am an ICG, not a DBO, and the correct spelling is “Okie” because “oakie” is a little tree. ICG means “Ivanhoe Country Girl”.
  3. About half of you are on FB
  4. Most of you are on FB just to stay current with family, particularly newly grown children or grandchildren.
  5. The staying current consists of seeing photographs rather than having conversations.
  6. More women than men are on FB.
  7. They are not “sites”; they are “pages”. (It IS called “faceBOOK”)
  8. Very few have ever visited a business’s FB page; if so, it was for coupons and freebies.
  9. A business page has “fans”; a personal page has “friends”.
  10. There are many privacy options to be learned and used.
  11. If the page isn’t updated daily, people lose interest.
  12. Many of you offered the help of your sons, daughters, nieces and nephews, all of whom are quite good at this sort of stuff. I thank you!!
  13. A participant can quit any time. (like smoking or drinking??)

What to Draw

This is the third article in the series, Thoughtful Thursdays.

Were you ever given vague art assignments in school? The ones I remember the most vividly were generally focused on ways to use different media, and somehow the students were expected to be instinctively creative enough to come up with an idea to illustrate the teacher’s inadequate instructions. “Show transparency” “Design a container for air” “Make a self-portrait but don’t draw your face” (as if we could draw our own faces at that point!)  In addition to terrifying us, those assignments instantly caused the problem of WHAT to draw or paint or sculpt. Endless thumbing through magazines provided by the teacher only occasionally solved the problem of WHAT (never mind the copyright issues!)

Now, I hear similar woes from my drawing students. “Oh no, I’m almost finished and I don’t know what to draw next!”   I watch them struggle through piles of photos to find an image to draw and remember that awful feeling of a blank mind.

Part of the struggle comes from something I tell everyone who draws with me: pick something you LOVE because you will be staring at it for a long time.  This is much harder if the only photos available are from someone else. How is it possible to love something that represent another’s experiences?

The older we get, the more we experience, and it is precisely this experience that gives us the ideas.   Now that I am at the 1/2 century mark, the ideas are overwhelming me! Everything I see, every place I go, ideas are flooding into my brain. Nothing in my life is exempt from consideration for a drawing or painting. The only necessary filter is the consideration whether or not anyone else will like it, because if my art doesn’t sell, I will have to get a job!

If making art is part of your life and you find it difficult to choose subjects, remember to examine all your life experiences, surroundings, views and belongings. When you encounter the parts you love, you will have the beginnings of a piece that you will enjoy spending time on, which ultimately translates to a good piece of art.This is my dad with his great-niece Claire, who had just lost her grandpa. I drew this in the year after my Dad died, and was somewhat fearful that I’d cry the entire time. Instead, it felt as if I was spending time with my Dad every time I worked on the piece.

Cranking Up the Painting Machine

That would be me, the Painting Machine. I’ve spent the past several weeks evaluating my inventory, thinking about subjects that might appeal to a flatland audience, analyzing my photos and asking others to share their opinions on a pile of pictures. After making decisions about subjects and sizes, putting the hanging hardware on the backs of canvases, assigning inventory numbers and titles, and adding them into my inventory lists, today I finally picked up my paintbrushes! This is how things look right now; think of this as a sneak preview into a solo show that is coming for me in May!

New Year Lessons

Here is a list of what I am learning so far in 2011

1. How to use the Total Gym

2. How to update my website by adding pictures

3. What a mistake it is to not photograph every piece of art

4. What a mistake it is to not label every photograph of art

5. That plantar fasciitis takes forever to heal

6. That it takes a very long time update my website

Here is a list of what I would like to know:

1. Is 1000 miles too many in a pair of walking shoes?

2. Do people actually consistently use the Total Gym?

3. When will my website be ready?

4. What should I paint on my repaired garage door, now that I feel more confident it won’t end up in the county dump?

5. Whatever was I thinking when I didn’t bother photographing some paintings or keeping a list of which was where or checking in regularly to the stores that were selling for me???

6. Will I learn from #5???

Here, let’s try to take the edge off of the hard lessons of life:

Think of it as a “bridge over troubled waters” (and no, I don’t know the title, size, when it was painted or who has it now.)