ARCHIVES: August 2010

what if I try this with hind leg feathers
Musings because of a microraptor

Evolution is amazing stuff. I truly do not understand why some folks are afraid of evolution. It’s nature, it’s process, it’s proven science. It’s fascinating. We were watching a show on microraptors the other day. Evolution, while being nature’s way of adapting to the ever-changing environment, is also a huge force of infinite creativity.

What if it has blue feathers, what if the tail feathers are really long, what if those feathers curl, what if it has another pair of legs, what if there are four horns in a row behind the ears, what if those horns are really soft and tipped with fur, and what if it’s eyes are orange? I’m not quite sure what I just created there... but the nature of creativity, whether in the natural world or in your studio, is one of constant variation, based on what has come before. Evolution.

I wrote something about apples once, or more specifically, about being an apple painter. Now, this could be someone who paints the surfaces of apples, or more likely someone who does paintings of apples. Let’s say this artist paints pictures of apples; the three or four varieties found in the average supermarket. The apples are sitting on a table, maybe on a plate or in a bowl, but there is at least one apple sitting there on the table itself. Maybe that apple is cut open, but has not yet oxidized. And there you have a standard apple painting. But after awhile... meh. Time to evolve!

If you are an apple painter, then go for it. Go to the farmers’ market and pick up some new varieties. There are hundreds, because nature loves creating variety. Paint them anywhere but on the table. Line them up in new ways. Play with pattern in the background. Abstract them to varying degrees. Paint a single apple as iconically as possible. Pair an apple up with something else that brings new meaning. Use all the wrong colors. Use all the wrong painting tools. Ask yourself; what if I try this, what if I try that, what if I try these other ideas? What if apple pie is involved?

The painting above right is called Jesters and was painted a few years ago. Silly gourds.

posted August 29, 2010

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stupor sunday
The show above the window seat

Mysterious landscapes are appearing on our bedroom windowsill with great frequency these days. Wooo. There are hilly cityscapes, arched bridges, fields and meadows with trees in the distance. Lovely oil sketches on little panels, like the kind I paint on, portable and efficient for tight spaces.

I’ve tried plein air painting a few times, and never say never, at least not in this case, it’s not something I see myself picking up again anytime soon. I seem to have much more of a problem with gravity outdoors than I do in the studio, where things rarely fall to the floor. In the wilds of a field or a sidewalk it’s all about wrestling with bugs, fighting the wind, ignoring the passing commentary. I always feel rushed when painting outdoors. I’m better off taking notes.

This is one of those Sundays when I feel like napping all day. I couldn’t convince myself to crawl out of bed for the longest time this morning. And I have nothing to not look forward to today, so was it one more day of foot pain, one more day of relative immobility, one more day of the same old same old that kept me glued to the pillow? Both restless and stuck at the same time. Not a good place to be.

I need to ask my feet what the problem is. I mean I know what the physical problem is, and I can see some slight improvement there, so that is good. But I don’t know about the other part, what the contributing factor is. As said before, all I want is to move forward, and now just moving a few steps forward hurts often enough. Something is up. Must get to the bottom of it, so the bottoms of my feet can be their true happier selves again.

Many of the plein air paintings on our windowsill were painted in Valley Forge. I haven’t been there yet. But I need those landscapes, I’ve been looking for them; the rolling hills, the varied foreground and distant lines and shapes and colors. I have a digital camera, we’ve got a car to borrow, we have the time, everything we need is there, exept for my ability to walk far without pain. But I am willing to try. I need those pictures. If it’s in the stale indoors and not of the fresh outdoors, what would post-photograph memory-induced painted landscapes be called?

posted August 22, 2010

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thatsa lotta paintings
Taking inventory

It wasn’t on my to-do list for today, not at all. I was on the verge of making sense of the mess on my desktop here, the mess in the folder called ‘new ptgs’. My messes are well organized, yes. Like my sock basket. All socks go in the sock basket. And they do. But once you get into the basket, it’s a free for all. But that’s where the socks, and only the socks, are.

About a year ago, about the same time this blog was in its final planning stages, I put aside the paintings with faces..., and also stems. There’s either a face or a stem in almost anything that isn’t a landscape that I’ve done until about a year ago. I am going back to faces and stems, I miss them, but probably not until a few more months have gone by.

I am trying to organize the images of all the abstracted paintings I’ve painted in the past year. I’ve got two folders now; one of azaleas, all beautifully scanned, and another of everything else I’ve done, the folder called ‘new ptgs’. It’s a mess. Did I mention that? It’s got a few original scans, a bunch of photographed images, a few of which are cropped, but most are still raw. And I thought that maybe first I ought to list the paintings I’ve completed since last September, just to get a handle on things. So I decided to open my inventory list.

Okay, maybe I’m obsessive. How many artists do you know that keep an inventory list? I remember fellow students at SFAI getting on my case because I organized my paint tubes - But only into two categories; large tubes and small tubes. That was just too much organization for them. But okay, maybe I’m not obsessive.

In the past year I’ve painted 42 small paintings on panels, not including the half dozen or so I began, said “yuck” out loud, and then painted over. Since 1980, I have names on a list for 398 paintings. This does not include experimental mixed-media pieces, works on paper, a few plein air paintings, things I’ve forgotten all about, and paintings I’ve done between 1975 and 1979 — of which there were quite a number, including the two years I spent at Mass Art. So I would say I’ve easily done about 500 actual paintings to date. I think that’s a magic number. Five hundred.

posted August 15, 2010

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creative fun from almost nothing
The cardboard composition window

Composition is about editing. This would be signified by the edge where either a form or a picture plane ends. You can use a window like a cropping tool to visually edit larger forms and/or to isolate them from distracting surroundings. This will work for anything that is viewed either in two or three dimensions, or anything that will be translated into a two or three-dimensional art form.

Take a regular piece of cardboard and cut a window into it. The cardboard should be about the size of notebook paper. Cut a rectangular window, about 3” x 5”, into the middle of it. You would then have a nice border around the window, about 3” all around. This will help you edit what you see. You do not want your vision to get too cluttered. The window will help you focus in on a composition. You can hold the cardboard at different distances from your eye to change the size of the composition that you are viewing. The window works as though you are seeing something through a camera viewfinder.

Place tracing paper over the window and trace what you see. Even better, get a piece of clear plexiglass, about the size of the cardboard. Use this to back your tracing paper, so that it will be easier to draw on. Masking tape will help hold the tracing paper in place. You now have a window-tracer for recording compositions that you see around you. You could take actual photographs, but this will allow you to concentrate on the composition itself and nothing else. To find plexiglass, go to a plastic supply store. Look in the yellow pages under plastics. Most cities have at least one plastic supply store, and they usually sell plexiglass scraps pretty cheap.

Take your window-tracer and find interesting compositions everywhere. Trace the placement of things by making outlines of what you see. You could start with small, two-dimensional things. Hold the cardboard window up to magazine pages and other pictures to make smaller, maybe abstracted, compositions. Try using your window on other flat things like older exterior walls where surfaces change frequently. This will force you to seek out interesting details in paint, brick color, cracks, texture and so on. Hold your window up to some scenery and trace the three dimensional world. Shift the window ever so slightly. How does the composition change?

View lots of compositions. Trace only the ones that appeal to you. Don’t feel like tracing? Just look. And look and look and look. You can make other cardboard windows that are about 4” to 6” in size, just to see the possibilities, explore and find new ways to look at things. You could also try any of the following shapes for your cardboard window; square, circle, oval, trapezoid, triangle or any other polygon that you can imagine.

Simply by seeing all kinds of compositional possibilities, you will be inspired to set up your own visual arrangements in a new way. You can also take the outlines or silhouettes you have traced and use them in an abstract composition. You may want to try working with “multiple exposures”, tracing one composition and then tracing another over it on the same rectangle of tracing paper.

There you go. Whole new worlds have just opened up for you. Now, go out there and have some fun, compositionally speaking.

Excerpted and paraphrased from the book;
Creatively Unblocking Creative Blocks
Author: Alexandria Levin
ISBN: 0-9743267-1-2
Published by Painted Jay Publishing
www.paintedjay.com

posted August 4, 2010

All images and content ©2009-2010 Alexandria Levin