Last Paintings from Class

Miami

The remaining painting classes were, happily, more personally successful.  In a small miracle, I employed perspective in a painting deliberately.  While the the figure is once again a wee bit weird, the sense of that sidewalk disappearing into the horizon works -- and I even know how to do that again; the magic of good instruction at work.

And then, oh happy day!, we had a day of just playing around with abstracts.  I'm so much more relaxed when it doesn't have to look like anything, can just be an exploration of shape and color.  Apparently, this is mildly unusual, and people who can paint objects with more realism and detail can get hung up letting things loose in abstracts.  Not me...I may not yet understand the balance in abstracts, but I do love trying.

Untitled

My thanks to Jared Peters and the Charlotte Street Arts Centre for a great class.
https://www.jaredpetersart.com/
http://www.charlottestreetarts.ca/

Painting Class

After not painting for close to a year, I'm back in a painting class.  It's a great class, although sadly, my painting remains rudimentary.  Still, I'm mildly encouraged that I am starting to see things in a painterly way again, to see the blocks of color a bit, even if I can't capture that.  And yes, I still can't draw.

Here's what we've been up to in class so far:

Class 1: Cupcakes and Apples

Yes, the cupcake is completely mutant, but trust me, icing is more confusing than you might think.  I completely ignored the ridges on the cupcake holder too because various attempts at that were hideous.  Let's just say: I'm rusty.  I was content to drown my sorrows by eating the cupcake model.

Apples, happily, are less confusing, although these are both still bizarre.  The first apple I painted in class.  The second was an attempt at home (with a different apple model, and also different paint colors).  Neither is terribly thrilling, but it got me thinking about value again.

Class 2: Portraits

My people still look like cartoons.  And I can't draw.  And the proportions of her face are wrong in both paintings, and so neither looks like the the original photo.  I tend to have all kinds of weird little dabs of color, rather than blocks of color or conversely, smooth blending of color, so it always looks a mess to me.  Twas my day to get frustrated and compare my work to the really rather gorgeous paintings other classmates were painting. I got over myself by the next class, regained my sense of humor, and got off the comparison trolley to hell, and back onto the, well, painting is fun, just enjoy. Apologies to my sister, the unwitting model.

Class 3: Landscapes

I spent most of the class working on the first landscape, and getting confused as to how to handle the detail and failing to capture, among other things, the color of the water.  But it's a pretty place (Bruce Peninsula in Ontario) in real life.

The second painting (road to Maroon Bells in Colorado) I did very quickly which is some ways worked better, as I got out of my own way.  I'd thought to make it more finished at home, but decided against it, since I'm not terribly attached to it. I like looking at beautiful landscapes in real life, and taking millions of photos, but I didn't have much of an emotional connection to these landscape paintings.  I think I need to take some time choosing not just a pretty place but also considering what I want to say about it more next time I attempt landscapes.

Bird of Prey

Watcher
acrylic on canvas
11" x 14"

Another new painting...this one grew out of a random swirls started last week that, upon reflection, ended up looked like eyes. I dug around for bird photos after that, and found a face that fit my start.

Our last class was made more festive by the addition of cookies - thanks Marylee!

Stained Glass Forest

Another new abstract.  I've been in a huge rut of frustration with painting recently, of the, what's-the-point, skill-less hack variety, and so this painting was a struggle.

It started out as a blank canvas with a light blue base last week in class. Demoralized by a particularly unsuccessful portrait attempt the previous week, I had opted for working on a relaxing abstract.

The painting turned into a swirl of motion, but with nothing appealing or cohesive, a mish-mash of energy and unfortunate colors. Some days it just doesn't come together. I went home when I realized my mother gave me most of my paints, and I would no longer be receiving the fancy paints from Mom on Christmas and my birthday.

On the way out of class, I accidentally-on-purpose dropped the painting in a puddle and then swished it around a bit, with the idea that either drip art would make it better, or dirt would add texture, or really, anything would be an improvement.  But the paint mostly just stuck there, still lifeless and now under a sheen of dirty water.

Once I got it home, I took the sink sprayer to it.  God love good water pressure.  Sections of it peeled up, others flaked away. Amazingly, that actually made it somewhat better.

I put it aside and ignored it for another week.  This week, I dragged it back into class, and started layering in the lined framework,and washes of color over places that were flaked back down to white canvas, and otherwise rearranging things a great deal.  I turned it around and around, and have decided that this way is up (partly because if I turn it the other way, I see an enormous duck).

I built a story line of sorts for it, involving a birch trees and a cave with pools of water and hidden jewels, some kind of ancient adventure, as seen through a window from afar.  And with that, I can find enough affection for it to, at least, keep it out of puddles.

Back to the Easel

Real Life

Still Life

I am back in painting class...and, alas, repeating my usual weirdness, with unclear light sources and an inability to draw, which translates to lumpy, bumpy shapes and questionable perspectives. That strange yellow lump is supposed to be a wilted flower.

Still. Even if the effort doesn't produce the desired results, it is, at least, evidence of effort. And that counts. And if the colors are odd, they are somehow a reflection of the breadth of colors that live within grasp of my vision, and that too is appealing.  The shapes, the technique, all of it, won't come without the steps toward exploration. And a lot more time standing in front of my easel.

The Art of Childhood

Margot Daffron and her children some time in the 70s

I haven't posted for quite a while here.  There is a reason for that: I was up in Maine tending to my mother during what turned out to the final month of her life.

I didn't know that would be the case when I arrived, but it was clear a week later - or really before, but we were willing to acknowledge it then - that it was time for her to stop treatment and enter hospice. The chemo was making her sicker, decreasing her quality of life even further, and not providing any meaningful help against the relentless march of the cancer.

Upon entering hospice, Mom declined more rapidly than anyone predicted. I extended my trip to Maine.  I was holding her hand when she died a few weeks later.

Family and friends did have time to say goodbye while she was still with us, although some just saw her bright smile, happy at their arrival, more than gaining from any long chats at the end. She was unconscious for the last days of her life.

There is a great deal more I could say about cancer, about my loved and complicated mother and the life she led, the person she was, about how amazing hospice people are, the enormous warmth of family and friends, and about the dying process.

I'm not there yet.

In fact, I'm trying hard not to think about those last weeks in Maine, her pain and kindness, my panic and erratic competence, friends and family and stress, the complicated mix of personalities and relationships in difficult times.

Instead, I'm thinking about Christmas in red pajamas.  I'm thinking about coloring Easter eggs and that smell of vinegar from the dye.  I'm thinking about collecting zillions of seashells and mild sunburns on Florida beaches. I'm thinking about curling the stems of dandelions walking home from kindergarten, going back to those early childhood years.

And I'm thinking about art, because art is always my refuge, even when it's not, when it's processing that which cannot really be understood.

In Maine during bleak times, art still provided some escape. I took photographs.  I re-read favorite childhood books. I stared into the art on the walls of Mom's house and talked to her one day about a small abstract painting near her bed, about the movement of paint that to her looked like dancers.  From early on, Mom instilled in me an appreciation for beauty.

Flowers & purple house, with
creative spelling of my name: Chthia

Flower, tulip, house, tree,
dog (maybe?), swingset

In Maine, my sister and I spent an afternoon going through childhood drawing dragged up from moldy boxes in the basement. We laughed until our stomach muscles hurt.

Some clear themes rose up through each of our portfolios of art. Susie had skill in creating dog and horse drawings, as well as flowers.

Tree & house painting

Hand-sized turkey bird, Xmas tree,
purple house and huge flower

She never drew trees then though, as someone once told her she did it wrong, so she didn't draw them again in elementary school. Thoughtless comments can collapse dreams and effort so easily.

Meanwhile, I was obsessed with drawing, in some combination, a square house with cross-pane windows and a pointy roof, enormous flowers, over-sized turkey birds (using my hand as the template), and other holiday figures over and over and over again.

I did draw some trees, often the standard lollipop tree, a green round blob on a brown trunk, unless I was feeling Christmas-y, in which case it was saw-like evergreens.

Lollipop trees, 2013

I learned recently that my tree technique has evolved very little in 30 or 40 years.  

Upon my return to Oregon, I signed up for another painting class through Klamath Community College. We started
with painting trees.  My first attempts were sadly similar to my nursery school drawings, even with Joni's reminders on adding light, medium and dark.

Later attempts came out mildly better - more tree, less lollipop - but it's still clear that, ahem, I can't really draw, and that limits my painting.

Sort of strange tree, 2013, but
at least not lollipop-shaped

If criticism can lead to a tree-drawing strike, praise can inspire greatly. A number of those childhood drawings had tape still stuck to them, or black marks from refrigerator magnets. Susie and I handed our artwork off to our mother and thrilled when the good pieces got a place of honor on the fridge. And many of those homemade holiday cards were tucked away for safety.  My father still has a drawer full of them, and many of Mom's cards appeared in those boxes, saved through several decades and multiple moves.

Cathedral Fire
acrylic on canvas

Cancer is a particularly brutal way to die, a disease that chips away at you from the inside.

Losing someone you've known your entire life is horrible, a shock even when you know all along what is coming.

In my mother's house in Maine, along with many paintings of the flowers she so loved, also hung one of my more recent paintings.  Mom requested it as Christmas gift a year or two ago.  It made my artistic ego happy seeing that painting up on a wall (it being way too large to fit on the fridge).  The painting is an abstract - no lollipop trees - but in it I hope my mother saw the same message contained in all my early drawings of flowers, houses and enormous Thanksgiving turkey scribbles, and writ large in cards:

Contrasting Views

We worked with charcoal last night in art class, and I continued with my ongoing problem with contrast.  I add in contrast - and then I smear it away, tone it down, erase it one way or another, whether with paint or charcoal. It seems a good metaphor, that I should be more bold instead of backing away.

Not a T-Rex
charcoal on paper

And no, by the way, the still life items on display did not include a T-Rex -- that's just how my drawing came out.  I think the skull was from a horse, although I forgot to ask.  

But my, my, what big teeth it has.  

For the Burn Pile

Yes, yes, I do know it's ugly.  But here is the good thing about taking a class: I know why it's ugly (at least in part).

Fugly Veggies with Apple
Oil pastels & pencil on paper

Composition failure: I was trying to go large with pumpkin (it was a small pumpkin, maybe 8 inch, so its relative height to the corn is more-or-less accurate), but somehow I didn't go quite large enough, so it's just floating *smack* in the middle.  Nothing quite anchors it to the edges of the drawing.  The lumpy little white squash, for instance, is more appealing in its corner as filling in the missing pieces gives the viewer something to do.  

Yes, that's supposed to be corn: I attempted drawing the corn at least 5 times, with lots of erasing ensuing.  What's the big deal, you say, it's just straight rows? Nope. Curved rows with all kinds of different shapes and colors, which was somehow made worse by the fact that the corn was tilted at an angle, and I was drawing the corn larger than life.  I don't know why drawing larger messed up my ability to see it, but it definitely did.  I was overwhelmed by details that didn't add up when I tried to connect them.  Eventually, I left the corn undrawn, and just went mad coloring with the pastels, which at least gave the idea of it, albeit a hideous one.  

Don't even get me started on the horrible stalks.  The corn was having a bad hair day.    

Did you really choose that background?: Umm, actually no.  I had turpentine on brush from smoothing out the pumpkin and it sloshed over into the straw-haired corn, and so I ended up just going with the odd orange. It doesn't work, and I don't like it, but I blame it on inhaling too many toxic fumes.  

Have you heard of contrast?: Heard of it, yes, but I clearly didn't apply it here.  Everything is lumped in the middle range, adding to that level of boredom. 

Rotating perspective aka Rotten Apple: That's a fold of tablecloth blocking the apple (yes, it's an apple -- trust me).  A fold only appears at the corner,  and the white squash on the other side is clearly seen from a different view.  Ugh.  

Pumpkin-y: Aren't pumpkins usually more uniform in color?  Yes, they are.  I just wanted to scribble with the pretty colors, so I did. And there is a mild attempt at working with light at the top, but its so mild it falls into the snoozer no-contrast look.  

In retrospect, I should have either avoided the corn completely, or only drawn the corn, since it was making me crazy.  I should have spent much, much more time drawing, and a lot less scribbling with pastels. More planning, more early sketches would have helped, and having some sort of plan when applying color would have been swell. 

On the other hand, some days, you just need to color like a cranky eight year old.  So here I am, tacking my masterpiece up on my virtual 'fridge.  We here in the land of Artful Mistakes believe in letting it all hang out.  

Books & Flowers

In an effort to loosen the hold of my "Depression-era" painting style, where I use the skimpiest amount of paint possible (and have thin colors and coverage as a result), my next effort is playing around with mimicking a Van Gogh painting of flowers in a vase. His paintings, of course, have gobs of paint and fantastic texture.

When I started this painting out, I could easily recreate the background color -- but there it was, thin again, flat. It took me another try to really go for it and use lots of paint. Teacher Dana Ellyn kindly helped me out with my inherent cheapness/conservation suggesting using gel medium to thicken things up a bit without using more paint, and getting busy with a palette knife.

Here's what I can tell you about painting with a palette knife: it's way harder than it looks. Brushes provide a much larger measure of control than I had ever realized. I do now understand why art stores sell twelves different sizes of palette knives though; angle and flexibility make a difference.

Once you have those big lumps of paint on there, unlike my usual thin, thin coats of paint, the paint stays wet much longer, hence the term wet-on-wet painting. This is a lot more like painting with oils, which is good in that it gives you time to blend colors together...and bad because it gives you time to turn everything into a brown lump if you're not paying careful. Ask me how I know.

No photos of my painting yet, because it's still in too too ugly in beginning mode. When I crabbily grumbled to a classmate that it was no Van Gogh (rainy day blues), she pointed out that, eh, big deal, and besides, I was less likely to cut off an ear. Good point.

Oleanders by Vincent Van Gogh

Have a gander at the Van Gogh. It remains one of my favorites. Books and flowers: crucial elements of any good day.

Beckmann-ish, in Process

Not Beckmann

The not-Beckmann painting in process.  A lot of work to be done yet, but basic form is in place now at least.

However bizarre my painted cat might be, Beckmann's is more of a mutant. If you see a cat with that kind of eye, run.

Beckmann

Beckmann

Dragonfly

Dragonfly

I did finally finish my first painting from class with Dana Ellyn.  I'm not entirely pleased with some aspects -- it's one funky looking dragonfly -- but I like something about the worried man.

New project is a combination of some Max Beckmann paintings, with lots of deep colors and sharp lines.  So far, mine is hideous.  But useful learning, to dig into the process more, and a relief to get back into Oz where all the color lives.      

In Process



As yet, untitled

I haven't decided if the lobster will make the final cut of the painting or not. 

But I'm having tons of fun pondering other objects he could be holding and accompanying cheeky titles.

We'll see what I decide to do when I next pick up the brush.

Painting Wheels & Maps

Children of (Montsanto) Corn
by Dana Ellyn
acrylic on canvas

Today I attended my first-ever painting class. I loved it - and not just because the studio has cats in residence (although that is a bonus). 

Dana Ellyn (http://www.danaellyn.com/) teaches classes out of her home in Mather Studios downtown. She is a full-time artist whose work I first encountered through Artomatic and last saw when attending the "Dystopia" opening (a joint exhibit with Matt Sesow's work) at The Dunes. Aside from her distinctive style, the sharp-edged humor and emotional content of her work has long drawn me in. Her website bio notes that "from childhood until about the age of 30, Ellyn was quiet and reserved. She has now found her voice and she is making up for lost time."  Hell, yeah.   

All of which is to say, I've been on the painting class waiting list for a while now. 

So when a cancellation came in that gave me a spot, I zipped myself down to the Gallery Place Metro and (because I was overly zippy and early) spent some time at the National Portrait Gallery basking in an arty groove. (Side note: the Portrait Gallery has a copy of the Adams Memorial there, which I found startling, given that I didn't realize others existed outside of the original at the Rock Creek Church Yard; having it indoors feels...not quite right).

Classes are informal with Dana, as she meets the artist wherever he or she is on the learning curve. Some of the other students in the class were immersed in projects now well under way, each exhibiting a particular style and point of view. Since I've been largely painting in a vacuum (an interesting image if taken literally), the hum of communal right-brain activity sounded a happy tone for me.

Given that my painting knowledge is, umm, spotty at best, Dana started me out with the basics. While creating a color wheel, we touched on a variety of topics, including: brushes (flat for lines, rounds for more brushstroke emphasis); paint types (opaque, translucent); mediums (fluid medium, used to thin paints without making them all watery and streaky, is my new best friend; I'm still not huge on gel medium); color mixing and blending; scrumbling (dry brush); and palette knife painting. We covered a lot of ground in just six colored wedges.  

From there, I dug through her many books and chose a photograph as a model for my painting.  To get a handle on tonalities, I'll be creating a version in black & white (original photo is also, conveniently, black & white). After getting a base background of a gray going, I spent some time sketching things out with a soft pencil (now also on the shopping list).   

Of course, being me, I ended up changed the cropping so that I could focus more on the face in the photograph, and may end up changing other details, as the balance is now a little screwy.  I started getting just the roughest bits of light and dark paint shading in before running out of time. Two hours goes quickly.

Typing away here, with paint flecks still stuck to my fingernails, I'm thrilled to have landed in a flexible place where I can ask all the questions that come up while I'm twiddling around with paints. I feel like I've spent the last two years driving around town, and now suddenly someone has handed me a map. I'd hit some good spots and some weird neighborhoods in my travels, but missed whole areas and major attractions, failed to see the shortcuts and connections and commonalities that, once known, make getting where I want to go much, much easier. 

So yes, I'm very much looking forward to my next class and working on how to make make people look like people not mannequins, and giving Peanut the cat another scritch behind the ear .