La Lucha

I don't speak Spanish - despite having purchased a complete CD audio learning set to teach myself more than 10 years ago. But I understand that in Latin America and Mexico, this phrase, "La Lucha" means "the struggle." When I heard it, the phrase clung to the walls of my consciousness. In the US, to struggle connotes a negative: maybe you are not up to a challenge, or you are facing a foe or something equally undesirable. Maybe it is our modern expectation of an easy life. Like that Easy button in the TV commercial. Money, cars, everything - and without any work, or at least with no more work than is absolutely necessary. And, by the way, I am not excluding myself from this characterization. Let's face it, like most artists - most people, I am lazy, by my very nature. Any of us who are working hard, who appear to have a work ethic, are really just compensating for our inclinations: trying to disguise the slothful underpinnings - afraid people will actually find out we are lazy.

But La Lucha - that got to me because it suggests that there is a POSITIVE side to struggle itself, not just to the potential gains. The battle hard fought AND worth fighting for and winning, but also fulfilling in its own right. The effort is EQUAL TO the gain. La Lucha suggests difficulty on the one hand and opportunity on the other. As Einstein said, "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."

So struggle is on my mind because I feel somehow especially mired in it over the last few days. I am working on a portrait (referenced in an earlier blog entry, "Blossoms"), and reached a point - all too familiar - where I neither like what I see nor what I am doing. Admittedly it has all along been a project with technical challenges (working from a single, imperfect photo, wrestling with compositional adjustments for which I have no reference at all), but despite recognizing these challenges, I have given in to impatience and frustration. I believe the axiom that nothing is denied to well-directed labor. Yet I have given in to avoidance behavior several days in a row now.

I remembered La Lucha, and steeled myself to jump back into the struggle. Told myself to pick up a brush and paint ANYTHING - even a lemon, rather than withdraw from the struggle. And so braced, I return to my easel and La Lucha. Perhaps my next blog will include the reclaimed and completed portrait.

WIP: Blossoms from The Same Garden

“Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.”
John Singer Sargent quotes (Italian Painter and Artist, 1856-1925)

As I come to the "home stretch" on this WIP - a portrait of my oldest friend and her sister - I fiercely hope Sargent's sentiment does not prove to be true in my case! I am painting this to be a gift for her birthday, next month. A challenge on several fronts: working from a photo is never desirable... but a flash photo is truly the dregs. And the full-tooth smiles certainly don't make for a classic portrait pose. But... I know that the photo I used as reference is one of her favorites, capturing a special moment and an irreplaceable, cherished relationship. So the die was cast: this would be the image reference.

I replaced the dinner plates and wine glasses with my friend's favorite flowers: white tulips. (Still have quite a bit of work left to do on those and on the vase). I also tried to reduce the effect of the flash... but here I feel I have not been successful. I don't feel satisfied with the depth of atmosphere. Most of the portraits I have done (of people, at least!) have been painted from life. Tthe fundamental difference between painting from a three-dimensional subject actually in front of you, complete with actual air and space, and a two-dimensional one on a piece of paper, is that in the photograph, perspective and spacial relationships have already been captured (by the camera). A painter must make decisions on what to include from what s/he sees. When painting from life, one never really looks at a subject from the exact same angle in any given glance, so there's an amount of perspective interpretation that's impossible when painting from a photograph. The end result is, of course, what matters most, but for me, the experience is completely different - and less satisfying when the project must be done only from photos.

Book notes: a few favorite books on art

So I am still unpacking, a bit at a time. This morning I spent a half hour organizing my art books. I think I have too many... but as I consider which to give up... well... can't pry my hands off of any of them!

I have always been very reading oriented - when I get interested in something I immediately get books on the subject. So it has been with Art. Perhaps to a fault (when I read rather than paint!) I have a pretty significant collection of books on artists who have interested me, as well as a few on the history and techniques of painting. Art technique is, I think, an especially tough subject to explain effectively in a purely written format, even if illustrated. So, fresh from a good look across my collection, I share here a few that I have found truly helpful, sometimes inspiring:

-- Alla Prima: Everything I Know About Painting by Richard Schmid

-- Problem Solving for Oil Painters: Recognizing What's Gone Wrong and How to Make It Right, by Gregg Kreutz

-- John Singer Sargent : The Early Portraits (Volume 1), and the Late Portraits, (Vol 3) by Richard Ormond, Elaine Kilmurray;

-- Bouguereau by Fronia Wissman

-- Joaquin Sorolla by Blanca Pons-Sorolla

-- 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship by Salvador Dali

-- Rembrandt: The Painter at Work

-- Classical Painting Atelier by Juliette Aristides

And now I am going to stop... and pick up a brush, which is always more fruitful than reading a book about art no matter how lovely!

Reverie

"The artist gazes upon a reality and creates his own impression. The viewer gazes upon the impression and creates his own reality."
~Robert Brault

Today the weather on Cape Cod is gorgeous: bright, crisp with the unmistakable fragrance of spring in the air. And the sounds, too... a veritable symphony of birdsong.

The only thing that can make this better is to put brush to canvas. Although I am planning a still life, I haven't got the composition of that worked out yet... so I am sharing here an outdoor scene, also on my easel.

This is a view of Stage Harbor light - a privately owned lighthouse at the end of Harding's beach, and part of the view from the end of Sears Road. This is the other side from the view we see. I am working from photos I took two years ago... and have inserted an invented figure. I wonder what she is thinking? Perhaps by the time I finish I will have some idea...

Departure

We are having some work done in our home... today my studio is not as accessible as usual. So, rather than doing without any art activity, I picked up a clayboard and tried my hand at scratchboard work.

I did this nude directly and freehand, with no visual reference: it was more an exercise in using this media - with which I have no experience - than in draftsmanship. I have seen some extraordinary scratchboard works, ranging from bold, loose graphics to meticulously rendered detailed portraits - admire them very much - and assume that most involve preparatory drawings being transfered to the scratchboard. This little sketch was by no means that kind of drawing.

I am sure most who look in on this blog know that scratchboard is a special cardboard or thin wood surface coated with white
clay. A layer of black ink covers the clay layer. The image is made by removing the black ink leaving white marks to show. Artists who work with scratchboard make marks using special tools to scrape off only the black layer: probably quite a variety of tools. I have no such tools... I used an Excel knife...and a small awl! I added color using watercolor paint and a brush.

So what did I enjoy and what did I learn? I feel slightly surprised and quite satisfied with how it felt to do this: I felt very free (perhaps due to the fact that I had no expectations of myself in a "new" medium)... and I enjoyed the process itself, which is a reverse of most drawing processes. I guess that prompted one of the learnings: the reverse nature of the process made me more acutely aware of the use of space. The positive space - for the most part - was the white marks, with negative space being formed by what was left black. I worked somewhat in layers of scratches across the whole board. Each layer or level of detail added more 'light' to the form. I was loose - something I struggle with in my oil painting - and experienced the whole little adventure more as a discovery than a creation.

I will definitely try this again... perhaps even invest in a couple of tools!

A Rediscovered Path: The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron

I first read this book nearly 20 years ago, BEFORE I had found my way into fine art as a pursuit. I had received a copy from a person who worked for me, and I read it as a guide to self-reflection and a goal of being a better leader (I work as an HR executive, and do quite a bit of executive coaching, etc). I found it surprisingly effective and helpful as a "zen" alternative.

In the years that passed I actually took up drawing and painting and have recently "come out of the closet" on the place art has in my life, and my commitment to it. Late last year, I purchased another copy of the book, this time to apply it to my learning journey in fine art. Once again, it did not dissapoint.

While not a how to book, nor an art theory, criticism or history book, it does, in fact, prompt the motivated reader to look inward in a disciplined way, and bring up some of one's own untapped energy and undiscovered point of view: like a guided retreat might do.

Other's might find such an aid superfluous - but I am grateful for some structure and experience laying out a map - complete with suggested detours - for my journey.

I recommend this classic to anyone interested in plumbing the reaches of their creativity and willing to devote some rigor to that process.

Making Room for Art in a Crowded World

I am thinking about my art... yearning to saturate myself in it over the next week when I take time off my day job...

I came to art incrementally and somewhat later in life than other artists. When I think about why I paint, I find that I cannot explain it better than Thomas Merton(American and Trappist Monk at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey in Trappist, Kentucky, 1915-1968) when he said "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."

And so it is for me: an escape and an exploration at the same time. An exploration through the choices I make, as an artist, every step of the way: what subject? what point of view? what colors, what edges? and then, I get to why? Why do I choose to paint what I paint? and on and on.

I love to paint animals - I love what I see when I get into those paintings: the sentience, the soul, unobscured by pretence... when I paint still life (for me the best way to paint from life), I almost always include some living thing, such as a bird or a mouse. It feels more alive to me that way, provokes more of a story. When I paint pet portraits, of course, I paint mostly from photographs. When I paint these still life compositions, though, I often rely on taxidermy specimens I have gathered over the years for just this purpose... allowing me to truly paint what I see, in the same light with the rest of the arrangement. Currently on my Facebook "Artworks" page: a still life of a crow, painted from "life" from a taxidermy specimen I got from a museum in Elmyra, NY, and which was sold to a couple in Washington state.

I also like to paint people: portraits and genre scenes... because for me, it is the feeling and the implied story that is compelling in the first place... the decisions about how to depict that story then create the painting.

I am pretty old now (middle aged - I won't fess up to particulars), and yet I am learning more about who I am and what is important to me today, through my painting, than I have throughout my earlier life.

All told, art is a losing proposition for me: I lose my inhibitions, all sense of time and all my obsessive worries...aaah!