Touch and go,…

This one was teetering on the precipice of abandonment for a short while. It began as a simple pencil sketch, followed by watercolor washes — that refused to do what I wanted them to do.

So I let it teeter there for a while longer,….

Shadows of a Doubt

A day later, and refusing to admit defeat to a piece of paper, I had at it again.  Again, it refused to do what I wanted.

When I entered the studio yesterday morning, it sat there on my drafting table, silently mocking me.  I picked it up and dangled it in a very threatening manner over the waste basket, when the little light bulb in my head began to shine,…

… if this fledgling work refused to become the painting it was supposed to be, then it was fair game for experimentation.

I switched from watercolors to acrylics.  Prussian Blue was coaxed into bleeding upwards, while Payne’s Grey was allowed to bleed down.  I scrubbed severely thinned Payne’s Grey into the previously failed background, then began pulling the subject’s highlights forward and pushing his shadows backwards with more opaque pigments, then picked his finer details out with four different tones of color pencil.

I had my doubts, yesterday morning, when I first began reworking the painting — but now I’m wondering if the painting needed to be something other than what I had in mind.

I’ve never done it THAT way, before — !

… or,  “How I Used My New iPhone to Make a Sale”.

[First, before I get really deep into this story, I'd like to set the record straight to avoid any future confusions: while I do indeed want and need to support myself solely with my art, money is not the reason I draw, paint, sculpt, or write -- I do it because I Just Gotta.  It's a calling, y'know?  When I'm busy on any kind of artwork, I don't even think -- much less obsess -- over any sort of fiscal rewards.  I'm doing my thing because I have to,...]

Alrightey, here we go,…

Last Tuesday Ben and I delivered an artwork to one of my supportive friends, and then we drove into the Pearl for a talk Gwenn was giving on a subject close to my heart: making a living as an artist.  [In the photo on her blog post, mine is the second denim-clad knee from the left -- you can't miss me.]

As Gwenn recounted some of her experiences and shared her wisdoms, I paid close attention and took copious notes — if I can indeed make a living as an artist, then none of my irreplaceable time will get sucked away by wage-slaving for someone else.

And one thing Gwenn said that really struck me was a bit she’d mentioned in passing, almost as an aside, something someone else had told her –

“Use every opportunity to tell everyone what you do.”

That bit really resonated with me.  My Muses whispered in my ear: take that one to heart! And when my Muses talk to me, I listen.  After Gwenn’s presentation, Ben and I talked about it over dinner at Screen Door [I heartily recommend the jambalaya].  And we discussed Gwenn’s talk some more when we then went to one of our favorite haunts, Wine Down, for desserts.

Well, being me, I started showing off my new toy, the iPhone, to the guys there [man, this thing really can take some great pictures!] and I used the ‘camera roll’ feature to show Josh the art that I’d delivered to Charles.  The lady sitting next to me asked to see the watercolor figure on the viewscreen [but had left her glasses at home, so I loaned her my reading glasses].  She then showed that picture to the gentleman sitting at her other side — and he asked if I had any more work he could look at,…

With my new motto in mind and without hesitation, I pulled up my art site on the iPhone for him, and let him browse through it — he found a drawing he really liked and asked, “Do you still have this one?”

I leant forward and glanced at the image and nodded.  “It’s hanging on the wall, at home — “

“How much is it?”

Not having any of the prices memorized, I took the iPhone and pulled up the page with my price list, and showed him –

His response:  “Let me get my checkbook,…”  He left for a few moments and came back with the aforementioned checkbook, bought the drawing, and we arranged to meet at Edgefield for its delivery on the following day,… I’d had my first iPhone for three and a half days, and it had already paid for itself.

The next morning I pulled the framed drawing off the wall and put it into an Utrecht shopping bag, and off we went to Edgefield.  The drawing has a new home, its new owner just emailed me how pleased he is with it, and I’ve got an empty spot on the wall howling to be filled with new art,…

When some girls go to a wine bar, they get dates,…

… me? I got another art collector — and that’s the way I like it.

Wutchamacallit

A few months back I was talking shop with another artist, and we got onto the subject of the qualities and elements that make a body of work distinctively recognizable as the creation of a Particular Artist, so that when you see that new work you know without a doubt who did it.

[watercolors/acrylics on paper, 11" x 15"]

In the Blue Room

He’d used the word signature — and, dopey me, at the time I’d thought he actually meant the manner of signing one’s name to a newly finished work.

Yeah.  I shoulda had the wits to press him for clarification right then, considering he refers to the figures in his own works as ‘characters’ [a concept I totally dig], but I have this naive tendency to take things at face value.  As a consequence, I completely missed any nuances that might’ve been in his wording.

Hindsight is said to be 20/20 — but it takes some things longer to come into focus for me.  Wisdom needs to gestate, like a pearl accumulating its layers of nacre.  That, or I just need to pay closer attention.

So here I am, again pondering this thing he’d called signature.  For my own needs that word doesn’t quite work.  I don’t want to replace it with the word style — style can be shallow, a passing fancy tied to an era and its social politics, unforgivably dating it.  But ‘technique’ doesn’t fit, either — that’s the mechanical process of physically creating the art.

Okay, back to the idea of ‘characters’ instead of ‘figures’, approaching it all as narratology –

Maybe the word I’m looking for is ‘voice’ — like when a writer has a distinctive, recognizable way of stringing words together to get ideas across.  That kind of recognition is akin to being able to pick out a voice you know in a crowded and noisy restaurant — a personal blend of pitch, timbre, cadence and vocabulary, and sometimes unconscious poetry.

Along with having and developing my ‘voice’ as a visual artist, I need to ask myself :  What do I want to say?

Another fine mess,…

I’m finding impossible to be tidy when gessoing masonite panels [big ones, little ones] — if any artists out there can share any sane and low-tech tips on being neater with this stuff, I’m listening.

For “C” –

Figure study — watercolor washes over a pencil sketch, 15″ x 22″, on Arches 400 lbs. Cold Press mould-made paper — completed, matted, framed, and delivered:

For "C"