Painting Fun with Grandchildren

It is fun to paint with grandchildren, but mine paint fast and furiously. I end up with a LOT of “abstract” paintings by them. For even more fun, I take some of these and try to make landscapes out of them, utilizing mostly negative painting.

One of my favorite childhood games was “Squiggles.” My sister and I would each draw a random squiggle on a piece of paper, trade papers, and try to make something out of each other’s squiggle. Of course, we tried to make our squiggles as complex and impossible as we could. That was the challenge, and some of my grandchildren’s paintings are pretty challenging.

Here are some photos of this activity. Ryan paints with both hands. I did not take photos of their “underpaintings,” but here are the landscapes I created out of their paintings.

Two Fisted Painter

Autumn Sunset

Mauve Afternoon

Always Evaluate with a Mat

It's amazing how if you put a mat around something, it suddenly looks like Art. It isolates it, and lets you see it without interference. That's why it is so important to evaluate your paintings with a mat periodically as you paint, so you can see what you are creating without all your painting stuff around to distract you.


Sometimes my grandchildren paint with me. I like to mat and even frame their efforts, because it often looks quite good that way, and it makes them feel like their creation is being taken seriously. Below on is a painting done by my granddaughter when she was two. She said it was a flower.

The painting here was done when my grandson was 18 months old. I asked if it was a mountain, and he said "Unh."

A Bottle Tree Answer to the Titanic

After my titanic doubts about the value of art yesterday, today's L.A. Times had an article that answered them. It was about artist Elmer Long and his Bottle Tree Ranch. He started sculpting bottle trees in his yard in the desert after he retired. After creating hundreds of his artworks, he said, "It changes you. It changed me. I'm a much better person than I was."


Here is the link to the article:  http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-me-bottle-farm-20111204,0,4510530.story


And here is a link to a YouTube video about Elmer Long:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD-nVh49xnM

The Orchestra on the Titanic

Painting makes me happy, but sometimes I feel like a member of the orchestra playing while the Titanic sinks. The list of terrible problems our country and the world face is long; global warming and environmental destruction, the ascendance of belief over evidence and the rise of fundamentalist religions, the reversal of progress in terms of social justice, the over-privileging of corporations, and over-consumption are just a few.

As an artist, am I distracting people from what they SHOULD be paying attention to or providing meaning or comfort in the face of disaster? Global warming is now inevitable, and it will wreak havoc on human society and nature, destroying a lot. There ARE things we could be doing to mitigate the disaster. Should we all focus all our energies on that? Or is there a worthwhile place for artists?

Would the Titanic’s orchestra members’ time have been better spent towards rescue efforts? Maybe some of them would have survived. But the overall outcome would not have been much changed. And we remember them! We remember them as courageously doing what they loved in the face of death.