Found Imagery

I love found imagery. I was very upset when my son told me what happened to his apple macbook pro. It was completely crushed. He opened it to show me the screen and of course I had to pull out my iPhone and snap a picture of it. It was a fantastic found image. I like the composition and love the texture in the black areas. The remnants of brown in the white areas give even more texture. Reminds me of prints, specifically a print I made called “Six Steps In”. Fantastic. I want to make a painting from it. These images shout out at me and I need to make art with them somehow. I collect them. Sometimes it’s just a portion of the found image that inspires me, or it’s the texture (often it’s the texture) and the shapes. This particular image speaks to my new series of paintings that are layer map-like forms. This has a very map like quality to it. All good, except we had to get my son a new laptop and believe me, we paid for a really good warranty.

Less is more

Cropped painting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Capturing the crux of something is at times achieved by reducing things to their essence. Boil it down, edit. I find these days we are so verbose. That’s why twitter allows only 140 characters, and I’ve heard of others that are even less. Often, as I am working on a painting I find I want to immediately start another, one that is just a portion of the prior. This distillation process is good, it reminds me to edit my compositions, to zero in on the focal point of the painting and eliminate the unnecessary parts. Good writing is well edited. Good design is simple. I think the most elegant and sophisticated are the understated. So, while this crop is okay, it needs to shift a lot in terms of color.  I will experiment with the canvases by continuing to reduce my elements as well as my color choices. And, I will think about what I am saying before I say it. Perhaps a few words less would allow for listening instead of talking. . .

Snow snow painting and snow

It has been snowing most of the month of January with 7 school snow days. Shoveling out to the studio when we can get my son to do it. Hopefully today I can get  out there.

Snow outside the studio

I am working on an even NEWER series of paintings. Using the previously posted paintings as bases, I am working from a sketch and responding to the canvas as it develops. I clearly need a palette to develop, but right now I am working with the composition.

base painting for siena series

I am happy with the above base as a start. As I continue, here is where I have left off:

step two on siena base

Again, the colors need to shift, but I am trying to constantly simplify. I think I may even just take a piece of this painting and redo it as a new painting. Crop it to simplify the composition even more. This canvas is 36″ x 48″ as are all of my canvases I am discussing. It has been weeks since I worked on this so I am chomping at the bit to get back to it. I’ll post more as it develops.

I’m off and runnning, but where you ask?

I was hooked again, I couldn’t get enough painting. I was in the studio painting one canvas, taking a picture, painting another canvas, taking a picture, etc. every hour I could find. I’m working with line and topographic elements and my cellular structures and layering paint and trying to work out colors and making all kinds of decisions. Here’s an interim look at what I was working on with the various canvases (I am voracious):

another painting

Yes, I know they are hideous, but they are layers. They are sketchbooks where I try out ideas. I get to see what works and what doesn’t, what I like and what I don’t and I keep painting on top even with areas I like. That’s the hard part. Risk. Not being safe. It’s all good.

Here’s where it took me, and keep in mind I am still not done!

to this:

and another:

I’m still nowhere where I want to be, but I am encouraged. Dan shows me how to work with my surface texture and paint application techniques, and I explore the forms I think are working. I am liking scratching and revealing what is underneath the surface and drawing by removing paint. Oooh, yum. I like the topographic elements and how they reference my cellular structures too. Here’s a detail:

This is where I want to be going, I love the way this looks, just this spot. OK so on to another canvas…

So it begins-with a landscape?

The first step was quite a surprise. My studio mate Sharon Nakazato and I went to Baxter Road nearby to try out plein air work as a test for a future plein air date for charity. We wanted to see what supplies we would be missing and how it would work, so we went to nearby Baxter Road, a beautiful pastureland where horsemen and women ride and people walk their dogs. Fields and trees, hills and dales. We found some hay bales a ways into the back fields and set up. I tried painting with watercolor the view. I wanted to abstract it, but kept getting caught in the description of the landscape and going representational. OK so maybe we do the abstracting back in the studio…

In my first class with Dan Becker I showed him the watercolor and I turned it sideways and said I wanted to start from there. So I did, on a big canvas. Here’s the watercolor and my derivation on canvas:

Here’s the 24″ x 36″ canvas I painted from the watercolor:

And, as I am a fan of cropping the best composition and area I like, here’s the detailed area I decided to go with as the first composition:

So this is my starting place. Where I want to be is another thing entirely, but I’m on the path…

I know this is very Diebenkorn-like, and I like that quality, but I don’t want to paint like Diebenkorn. So I take what I like from this and what I can learn from what I have done and I go from there. Dan recommended I work on a few canvases simultaneously and work larger. He said he could tell that I am more comfortable working large (how did he know I used to do 6-8′ canvases in art school?). So I bought myself 6 36″ x 48″ canvases and started three new ones, using this composition as a starting place for one of them. I had been working with map imagery in my printmaking and am interested in the lines and the topography from them, so I wanted to add that element, so I roughed in one of my new canvases:

And another:

And I added the topographic element to it:

Now I was working with different ideas and forms and techniques, areas that I liked….

Back to Painting: The process

I just needed to get back to painting. There seems so much that I want to do with it, and really find my voice. I have been mixing media and printmaking and doing visual journals, but painting is my first love and I want to get to that visceral place where my abstraction is compelling and and my expression enigmatic. I want it to convey glimpses of thought/memory/idea/feeling. I want it to reach people in a place beyond words. Because that is what I want to describe, that place where we KNOW, but cannot quite articulate. Perception. Existence. What it means to be human and be in the world.

At some point I will be able to articulate that. It is ineffable though. The struggle to do so is the process that I love. Paint has texture, color, shape, stroke, gesture, layer, transparency/opacity, line, composition to work in it’s favor to convey this idea.

So I am going back to class. Studying with Dan Becker at the Ridgefield Guild of Artists. He gets me. We speak the same language. I appreciate his comments and assistance and his pushing me. I like being challenged and stretched and I needed someone to help me do that. It couldn’t be done in the studio in a vacuum.

In the pursuit of trying to understand that wonderful striving, in my baby steps of getting back to my painting roots, I will show you the journey visually. Where a painting comes from and where it goes.

This is the first installment of that process.