A Whiff of Reality

As noted in “Issues with Shape,” an earlier post, teachers have said that I define or articulate too much, I am too descriptive, I leave no mystery. They urge me to try to define as little as possible. One would think I could do this, given that I was a psychologist and perfectly familiar with Gestalt theory. This theory posits that we are hard-wired to perceive certain shapes and that we will “see” them even if they are not there. For example, what is this?

                                                            *

                                                      *          *

Most people have no trouble seeing this as a triangle, when it fact, it is just three asterisks. We innately try to see shapes, and WE complete the gestalt of the triangle without it being actually completed or articulated. We only need a hint to guess what something is.

I keep trying to paint interesting, nonobjective shapes with soft edges, and then I try to define the subject with as little description as possible, just “a whiff of reality” as Christopher Schink told me. I had some success with “Flamenco!” seen below in the January 18 post.  You can see lost edges throughout this painting, and only the head, arm, hand, hip, and waist are defined. 

Intuitive versus Planned Painting

There are two schools of thought on creating watercolors. One is the spontaneous or intuitive approach, called the “pour and pray” method by some people who disagree with it. The second is the planned approach, in which artists choose to impose their form, interpretation, perception on the subject. There are respected artists from both approaches.

Fran Larsen argues that with intuitive painting one is letting the paint do the work and thus the artist is not learning anything. Artists make choices, and with spontaneous painting, artists let the paint make the choices. Valid point.

Lawrence Goldsmith in “Watercolor Bold and Free” wrote: Watercolor owes its success to the artist’s ability to improvise. ...The artist who can grasp a situation and make profit out of it has a prize talent. ...Beyond that (a general plan and color scheme), you are wise to leave things to chance and to rely on your resourcefulness. (p.133)  Another valid point.

John Singer Sargent even likened painting in watercolor to “an emergency.”

I have to say that I greatly enjoy the “pour and pray” method. I like being free and spontaneous, and then making something out of it. Might be part of my rescue fantasies. After all, even with spontaneous painting, artists choose what to keep and what to cover up. But I think my paintings turn out better with planning and thoughtfulness. So what to do? I tend to let the underpainting be intuitive, and then impose a planned order on it. I also experiment with planned, wet-into-wet underpaintings that look free and intuitive. 

Here are two “pour and pray” paintings. I literally poured paint on in semi-wild abandon and then “found” my subject in the result.  I then put in some defining lines and shapes to bring out the subject. Most of the paintings on this blog were planned, so you can see which you like better.

Flamenco!

Dancing in My Red Dress

Lost Edges

Most art teachers stress the importance of lost and soft edges in paintings to allow the viewer’s eye to travel through the painting. My natural tendency is to make hard edges, so it was good to learn that one can have lost hard edges by having some shapes around the subject that are similar in color and value to the subject. However, soft edges are encouraged.

Christopher Schink uses an elephant ear sponge to soften edges. I just got a brand new elephant ear sponge, so I got out some newer, not-so-good paintings to experiment on. (I had no old ones, due to my habit of throwing them out -- see below.) I smudged away, and I think I greatly improved the paintings. But I couldn’t stand it and put some edges back. Still, it was great fun to play this way, taking away, putting back. Here are the comparisons, all hard edges first, smudged edges second. Note that smudging the edges spread paint around and changed the colors.

Throwing Paintings Away

After we’ve been painting a few years, most of us have stacks of paintings under our beds, in closets, stashed here and there. As you may know, I am strongly in favor of neatness and lack of clutter, so I tend to throw old paintings away. Some artists, especially people who do collage, argue that you should never throw anything away, that it might come in useful later. Besides the fact that I resist saving stuff, I don’t have a studio and work in the “family room,” so space is shared and at a premium. 

Some artists, such as Barbara Nechis and Christopher Schink, argue that it is good to throw away old, not so good paintings. We could keel over at any time, and if we leave a lot of not so good paintings behind, well, that is not to be desired. Out with the old and in with the new. Toph tells a funny story about putting some of his old paintings in the trash and watching as his gardener took them out, looked at them, shook his head, and put them back.

I have to admit that there are times I wish I had an old painting back, because I’ve learned something new and want to try it on it. Here’s an example of an old painting that was headed to the trash can, when I decided to experiment further on it. It started as trying out a grid with an architectural subject, but it seemed boring, so I stamped on it, added line, used watercolor pencil, and generally made it overly busy. Also, it has all hard edges.

Bird on a Wire

Since it was headed for the trash anyway, I decided to try softening some edges, creating some mystery, and making for bigger, more interesting shapes. 

Bird on a Wire Reworked

This is a little better. I like the light shape around the bird and the light shape on lower left. The blue shapes are joined into one better shape. The design is better, but I think it's still going in the trash.

Uncreative Art Work

I paint only because I love to cut mats.

Arthur Alexander

Having spent a good part of the day cutting mats, I thought of this quote. Cutting mats helped me feel organized, but it didn't feel very creative. So then I looked at these quotes, to encourage me to refocus on painting:

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

What the painter adds to the canvas are the days of his life. The adventure of living, hurtling toward death.

Jean Paul Sartre

Issues with Shape

According to several teachers, my “strengths” are color sense, design, and paint application (I always thought that was an odd one -- yes, indeed, when I put it on, the paint sticks to the paper!). My main “problem,” according to these same beloved teachers, is descriptive, uninteresting shapes. They have repeatedly told me the following.

Design takes precedence over accuracy. Artists impose their own feelings and shapes on a subject. Choose shapes and put shapes all over the painting. If shapes are too accurate (descriptive) or too general (“cartoony”), then they’re dull and can be grasped in one look. Exaggerate shapes and make them “yours.” There’s a difference between an accurate shape and an interesting shape. When drawing shapes, look for asymmetries, and if there aren’t any, create some. When painting, ask “What does this piece of paper NEED?” and “How can I make this (always asymmetrical) shape more interesting and more mine?” 

Although I think these lessons are starting to sink in, I still struggle with shapes. I recently made a little painting of birds. The shape of real birds is actually fairly boring and symmetrical, so I try to distort them, but make them still look like birds. In this painting, I think I leaned too far towards accuracy.

In addition, the two big birds are too similar in size. The one on the right is a little better than the one on the left. But the one I really like is the small duck! It is assymetrical, has some unexpected pieces, is made up of lines of unequal lengths, has some neat curves and some sharp angles, and still looks like a duck. The interesting silhouette is filled in with subtle color variation and a bit of texture.

I also liked how I got looser on the left side of the painting. Look at these cool flowers.

Why I Love to Paint

While I am painting, I feel absorbed, happy, and pain free for several hours -- all this for only a $3 piece of paper. That’s less than a Starbuck’s, and besides, paper is a renewable resource. And it’s caffeine and calorie free, too!

Painting What We Love

Many art teachers tell us to paint what we love, what we feel passionate about. Besides my loved ones, here is what I most care about.

When I was young, coordinated, athletic, and dancing, I took all that for granted. Now that BPPV and arthritis pain and stiffness  mean the end of dancing for me, I paint people in motion, especially dancers, and dream of freedom of movement. After much suffering and hard work, I have finally achieved a degree of personal serenity, and I paint romantic landscapes in the hopes of expressing and maintaining that serenity.

In terms of society, I care about the environment and social justice. It is difficult to make a painting that expresses a political viewpoint, and it is nearly impossible to convince people who believe otherwise that protecting the environment and increasing social justice are morally right and actually in their own self-interest. If you can’t change people’s minds, then any political painting is “preaching to the choir.” So far, I have not attempted to paint my feelings and thoughts about the environment or social justice.

One Good Thing about Painting Is That No One Dies

One of the many things I love about painting is that you can get better at it as you grow old. Even my essential tremor makes for a more interesting line.

I was privileged to watch Milford Zornes at age 98 make a gorgeous painting even though he was nearly blind. Henry Fukuhara was also creating new paintings at an advanced age and nearly blind. As long as you can move an arm and hold a brush, you can still paint.

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.

The Risks of Personally Expressive Painting

The teachers I most admire, such as Skip Lawrence and Christopher Schink, urge students to make their work more personally expressive, more uniquely “theirs.” I think I have finally managed to do that in a few recent paintings. These paintings are full of personal symbols, and they tell a story about a meaningful moment in my life. The unexpected side effect of doing such paintings is that I’m very reluctant to part with them or even to exhibit them!

It feels a little like selling my soul to take money for personally expressive paintings. It feels slightly exhibitionistic even to show them to people. It seems odd, but I don’t mind when people don’t like these paintings; I feel more uneasy when they DO. I suppose it is the risk all artists must take -- to share one’s intimate feelings and private thoughts to anyone who cares to look, to be revealed before the whole world.  I will take that risk right now, and show one, titled “Dancing in My Red Dress.”

Insights from Nonobjective Paintings

John Salminen has an interesting hour long dvd lesson on nonobjective painting. It’s called “A Designed Approach to Abstraction with John Salminen.” To very briefly summarize, he demonstrates first drawing overlapping shapes onto watercolor paper, then choosing a fairly central interesting shape to leave as the lightest light and painting in a few small shapes with the darkest darks around it, and then working around the painting, coloring in shapes in various ways to modify the values from dark to light and from light to dark. 

After seeing this lesson, I tried to create several nonobjective paintings in this way. I found that doing nonobjective paintings (or “abstracts” as some people call them) taught me insights about the principles of design that I did not figure out when painting subject matter. In addition, they were fun to do, and I recommend trying nonobjective painting as a way to focus on design. Later, maybe I can figure out how to make nonobjective paintings expressive of an emotion or thought as well.

Here are a few of my nonobjective paintings:

Struggling with Collage

There are some artists, such as Gerald Brommer, Jacki Long, and Joan McKasson, who make collage look fun and easy. And they get fantastic results and great texture with collage.

Now I am a bit of a neatness freak. I keep my work space uncluttered, I always put out fresh paint, and I keep my palette clean. Nevertheless, collage calls to me.

Every time I have tried collage, using matte medium or diluted white glue to apply colored tissue or painted papers to the surface of a painting, I have found it to be disturbingly messy. My workspace ends up looking like an explosion in a confetti factory, I have sticky stuff all over my hands and arms, and I invariably ruin at least one article of clothing, even when I wear an apron. 

In frustration, I tried to figure out a neat, clean way to do collage. I ended up using a glue stick to apply cut up pieces of old watercolor paintings to a piece of mat board. Then I tried wadding up wet Masa paper to create texture, painting it, tearing it up, and using the glue stick to apply it to watercolor paper. These two methods seem to have potential for me.

Here are two paintings, self-portraits, that were made from cut up pieces of old paintings applied with a glue stick:

Here is a mixed media painting with some wrinkled, painted Masa paper applied to watercolor paper with a glue stick:

Here is an earlier painting done by collaging Chinese papers with matte medium in the usual way. The collage is subtle and adds texture to the greenery of the plants. I made a terrible mess, but the painting was a success and sold for $450!

"California, Here I Come"

Feeling Entitled to Paint

My happiest times are in the midst of a painting, when playing with my beautiful watercolor paints. I forget my worries; my arthritis pain disappears; I feel alive and just plain happy.

Yet sometimes I am plagued with self doubt and I don’t feel entitled to paint all I want. I think it would be better if I spent all this effort on environmental and social justice causes, in order to improve the world for my grandchildren. When I first retired, I volunteered at such organizations, but I did not enjoy it. In fact, it felt like WORK, perhaps because my career had involved a great deal of community service.

My “solution” to this internal conflict is to donate money to good causes and to spend my time, a far more precious commodity this late in life, on painting and with family.

Painting in the Negative

Some people have difficulty with "negative painting." Some people, like Canadian artist Linda Kemp, paint entirely 100% in the negative. If you paint a subject, say a flower, directly, putting down yellow petals and an orange center and a green stem, you have just engaged in positive painting. Negative painting involves painting AROUND the subject. Gerald Brommer said he doesn't care for the term "negative painting" and prefers to call it "painting the unoccupied space."

Carrol Wolf said that someone told her that negative painting was like drawing. With drawing, you put a line around the outer edge of something. With negative painting, you put paint around the edge.

Here is a little demo of negative painting:

First, start with an underpainting of colors you like thrown onto wet paper. I used yellows. Let it dry.

Next paint orange all around a tree shape. You can take the orange all the way to the edge of the paper or just let it blend away. It doesn't matter, because most of it is going to get covered up. Let that layer dry. Let the paint dry between layers for hard edges. Painting on top of wet paint makess for soft edges.

Now paint quinacridone violet around two more tree shapes. Note how there now appear to be two orange trees that are behind the pale tree. Also note how parts of the orange trees show through the branch holes of the pale tree.

Next, paint red around some more tree shapes. Note how there now appears to be a row of violet trees behind the orange and light trees.

Now use ultramarine to suggest a row of red trees.

Finally, use an opaque paint, such as jaune brilliant, for the sky, leaving the ultramarine to look like mountains behind the trees. A few dots of jaune brilliant between tree trunks may suggest light shining through some trees way in the back.

"Little Trees"

Here are some of my paintings using Linda Kemp's 100% negative painting method:

 "Flame Trees"

 "Forest for the Trees"

"Mauve Evening"

And here is a floral painting done entirely by "painting the unoccupied space":

"Winter Whites"

The Summer of the Grid

During the summer of 2011, I worked on trying to make my paintings less descriptive and more expressive by trying various ways of breaking up the picture plane and figures within it. I ended up experimenting with grids and even collage. Being a neat freak, I find collage too messy most of the time, but I found using a glue stick to collage painted Masa paper to be within my limits. I also tried stamping. Here are some of my efforts: