Gamblin my money away.....

Back in early October, I attended the Pasadena Art Methods and Materials Expo and signed up for a very interesting class called “Roots of Impressionism”, taught by Ross Merrill (conservator at the National Gallery) and Robert Gamblin (of Gamblin Paints.) It was an all-day class, and I had an outstanding time. Much of the information was familiar—having a degree in art history, I already knew most of the background that the Impressionists were building off of—but what I did learn were specifics on the materials and colors they used, application methods, and how their techniques differed from artists that came before them. Both presenters were professional *and* entertaining (a rare combo). I was in a quiet mood so I didn’t speak up much—I wish now that I’d asked Bob some questions about Gamblin, alkyds, the delaminating controversy, etc. Overall, I think I’ll attend next year again. I did feel that the Expo lacked a cohesive center—there was no sense of a central space to come together, just a collection of lectures and workshops going on simultaneously. It would have been a real pleasure if all the motivated, interested people I saw in the hallways and in classrooms could have had a meeting place to socialize either before or after classes, to discuss the events of the day. Maybe next time I’ll do one of the plein air events—by its very nature, a paint-out should be a little more sociable than the lecture I attended this year. I guess my life as an artist is so isolated in general, that I look to an event like this as a rare opportunity to meet some kindred spirits. I drove home motivated, ready to paint, wishing I were organized enough to start a local painting group. Maybe someday….

Paint or bust

Above: Matisse copy for a friend’s holiday present.

For the first time this past couple of months, I’m creating in a regular way. It helped that I had a vacation during that time. Traveling always puts me in a good mood. Another thing that helped…drumroll please….

I switched completely over to oils.

I know I always said oils wouldn’t work for me. The constant need to clean up to avoid muddiness in color irritated me. Also, I have…um shall we say, patience issues.

Nevertheless, I am now an oil painter. I think perhaps this reversal has to do with my background in art history: obviously oils are tried and true, and so many of the painters I admire used them. I think also, the catalyst was getting out to more galleries lately and seeing oils taken much more seriously than the pastels I’ve been working with. Of course acrylics weren’t even in the same ballpark (or salon). I still think I’ll use both of those materials for particular types of work–studies and sketching will still be pastel, as it’s portable and quick. Acrylics (Golden Liquid) will work well for a thin washy watercolory piece I’m working out in my head.

But oils are what I am calling my medium now.

I’ve tried oils before and didn’t use good materials, hence mucho problems, and also didn’t use oil techniques (i.e. the traditional ones). So. what did I do differently this time? I purchased the best, yes the very best….or at least the most readily available ‘best’, which is Old Holland. Old Holland paints are so expensive that if I were ever faced with a New Orleans-style evacuation situation, I’d have to grab those puppies first. The paint load of OH is amazing, though. I squeezed out a nickel sized nut of venetian red on my palette for a small section of my canvas, and ended up having enough to imprimatura three other canvases with what was left over.

I also changed how I worked with oils. Instead of trying to paint alla prima like I did with pastels and acrylics, I learned how to do a grisaille (actually a verdaccio, since I used greens, not grays). I learned from the amazing forums at Studio Products. I am blown away by the talent and information there. Would love to take a class with the proprietor, Rob Howard, someday. What a wealth of information. I ordered a sampler of their mediums: it came in three days, and the quality was awesome. I plan on trying their paints soon.

O-kay. I know you are asking “where are the pictures” so here are a few…




Top picture is in a first verdaccio stage. I’ve indicated the darks and lights, and the imprimatura (pale sienna base) makes up most of the middle tones. I’ll work on this more later. Bottom picture is in a middle phase. It was a verdaccio and has now been covered with opaque flesh colors in pale tones. I will glaze it this weekend to bring up the color to the correct key. The right side is reserved for an area of text I will stamp/write over it….I love words and pictures together.

Here’s another one that was done over my vaca:



This is the underpainting (grisaille, only this time it’s in ultramarine mixed with Studio Products underpainting medium—dries VERY fast.) I’ve already laid in opaque colors on this one, but the tones went too much toward blue…must do over…

Time. Need more of this.

Sad to say, I haven’t made much time for art lately. I did give my mom a birthday present of a day at the ARTbar in Santa Ana last month, and we made lots of groovy collages and worked with encaustics, which was a new medium for me.

I bought some Holbein oil pastels this past week. Bill Creevy’s pastel book talks about using them with Liquin and Wingel, and I really like the “ancient fresco” effect he gets. Of course when I use them, the effect is more like “gooey mess”. And my digicam appears to be busted, so I can’t even post a picture of the gooey mess. Nor of the not-entirely-horrible soft pastel I also worked on this weekend.

In the meantime, this site sells incredibly cool stuff for art restorers, and wannabe art restorers: Sinopia.

Next stop, Nowheresville Art Depot

Today was a day spent searching for art materials. Some time on Ebay, some time at local flea markets…I even ventured into (gasp) Home Depot, only to find that their wood cutting machine was broken. Since I had been hoping to get some oak planking cut into manageable-sized panels for paintings and collages, I was unhappy with this complication. I only half consoled myself by picking up some tiny brass hinges and eye screws. Then as I was passing the paneling area, I spotted some sample pieces cut into four-inch rectangles. The cashier seemed puzzled that I was buying so many, but I was on a quest for wood and at 50 cents apiece, the price was right.

I’m trying to work on a project for Somerset Studio’s call for submissions on the topic of Music, but my ideas keep changing. At first I was working with the theme of the danse macabre, specifically a band of musical skeletons I saw years ago at a Renaissance festival. I couldn’t get a handle on it, though, so I went to bed irritated, thinking that I had wasted my Saturday on something that didn’t pan out. I slept fitfully and found myself wide awake in the middle of the night. While listening to Art Bell talk about alternative 9/11 theories, I had a strange sort of half-dream about my late grandmother and a particular song she used to warble while she was cleaning the kitchen or washing her hair. I wasn’t nostalgic about the song, which is from a movie from the 60s that I’ve never seen, but rather the funny little off-key sound of her voice, which I can still hear clearly in my head, although she’s been gone for fifteen years. I started to think of another song, one I *am* nostalgic about–”They Can’t Take That Away From Me” by George and Ira Gershwin—in particular, the version sung by Michael Feinstein. “The way you wear your hat,” it goes, “The way you sing off-key”. And I had a different idea. I guess the musical skeletons will have to wait for another time and a fresh inspiration. The good thing about art is that it doesn’t go bad, like food or fashion.

I sketched tonight. Whenever I get bored I do more masks, as they have a strange simplified quality I find enjoyable to draw. This is pastel on prepared wood board.

March 4, 2005

I issued my aunt a challenge today….she has to take 6 images I gave her and turn them into an artwork by the end of the day. She likes to make artists’ trading cards. I haven’t made one yet, but I told her if she finishes by tonight, she can issue me the same challenge with her choice of images, and I have to get them done by the end of the weekend.

Having artistic relatives is a cool thing.

In the meantime, I am perusing this link: Copyright for Collage Artists….very interesting.

This reed pen is very interesting. I used it for these sketches today along with my sepia Dr. Ph. Martin’s india ink.

The line produced by the pen is either dark-dark-dark (when the pen has just been dipped in ink) or light-light-nonexistent (when it’s running out of ink, about one second later). This is an all-or-nothing instrument, that’s for sure. I see myself using it to create hard lines but as far as shading goes, I much prefer pastels to the tedium of scratching in the halftones. Even when I was able to get a fairly good looking shading effect (for instance on the nose on the top sketch) it didn’t satisfy me.

I just can’t bear to leave the paper looking white when colors add so much as far as tone and shade, so I worked the bottom two sketches over in pastels. These are masks, my latest obsession. The pirate on the bottom came out particularly well. I think I caught the “Aye, that’s what YOU think, matey” sneer quite expressively. It’s a little weird in combination with the innocent geisha mask on the bottom left…she came out with a strange eager expression as if she can’t wait to run and get Captain Nasty a glass of sake.

My desk is messy. Need evidence?

This is what I bought today.

Reed pens have been used since antiquity for writing and drawing, and a few oddballs still use them today, particularly for sketching, since their somewhat awkward and scratchy line is very expressive. I saw one at my very favorite local art supply store, Walser’s , and couldn’t resist buying it, just to try out. I picked up a bottle of sepia drawing ink, as well; sepia has a certain charm for me lately. It’s mellower and less in-your-face than my black Higgins waterproof; it should give an interesting effect when combined with pastel. I’ll try it out tomorrow. I think the reason the pen appealed to me is that I remembered that Van Gogh enjoyed the rustic nostalgia of a reed pen; he talks about the particularly springy and good ones available in Arles in his letters to Gauguin and to his brother Theo. I wonder if he chose these pens of his own volition, or if it was primarily a lack of cash that encouraged him to experiment with a writing instrument that was nearly as old-fashioned to his era as they are to mine. Reed pens were easy and cheap to make, even in the leanest of times. This drawing was done with reed pen and quill in Arles in 1888.

February 18, 2005

This is a picture that’s been fascinating me lately. Degas sketched it in pastel on a piece of blue paper in 1884, and what I like about it is its slight but unmistakable creepiness. I’m particularly interested in the effect of stagelight, coming from below (probably some kind of gas light in those days) which throws the upper part of the girl’s face into shadow. The cheap finery of her costume blended with the youthful scrawniness of her face and figure conjures up a strong emotional response in me, one I’d like to elicit in my own work.

One of the things I wonder about is how much the public really understands about the nature of Degas’ pictures of dancing girls and singers. Today, ballet is an elite sport—those that win places in companies like the New York City Ballet are usually the daughters of upper-middle-class parents, who have the resources and wherewithal to choose any life they want, and who select the art of ballet as their means of self-expression. The dancing girls of Degas’ time were from the working class—girls who had run away, or been thrown out, and had to make their way in the world. Having a bit of gumption and a saucy look was probably more valuable in securing a position on stage than talent or experience. And, of course, willingness to don a scanty costume was essential.

Although Degas’ singer’s costume looks sweet and wholesome enough to those of us used to crop tops and low-rise jeans, one has to remember that respectable women of the time were cinched with whalebone and swathed in bombazine skirts that required twenty yards of material to construct. The scrawny little singer’s outfit was tantamount to nudity, and that combined with her presence on stage was enough to brand her a prostitute in the eyes of the world. Soon enough some man would come along and prove the world right; very few dancers and singers lived as chastely as Gaston Leroux’s Christine Daae. A great man had the star of the Opera as his lover, while a artisan might draw his lovers (and his models) from the corps de ballet. If Degas’ singer wasn’t a courtesan at the time he sketched her, she became one soon enough. Having already left any vestige of respectability behind her as she stepped on stage, it was only natural (and practical) to accept such offers as would inevitably come her way. Why be lonely when she could have company, at least for a little while?

One imagines Degas’ singer thrilling to the still-new sound of applause, green with excitement over her first solo part, still sure that somehow there will be a happy ending to this grand adventure of hers. The juxtaposition of a youthful and somewhat naive subject with the eerie and dissonant lighting of her face and arms is striking but at the same time harsh and unnatural—not unlike the theater life.

February 17, 2005

New sketches. Pastel on cardboard, like Degas. A little bit of black pen and brush work as well.

February 15, 2005

I used to think that it was better to do a few big things really well, at long intervals if need be. In college, I always preferred classes in which one big paper decided your whole grade, rather than classes with a midterm, several short essays and a final exam. Maybe it’s just my nature to be a procrastinator, and this style of getting through life suited my essential slothfulness. One big push has always been easier for me to deal with than a series of small, painful nudges toward any particular goal.
Slowly, though, I’m coming around to a different point of view. I am beginning to really believe that it’s better to produce things steadily and regularly, even if some of what you do is crappy. I started 2005 with a goal to produce some artwork every day, even if it was something small and incomplete, and already by February I’ve produced more than I did in 2003 and 2004 combined. Not all of it is great. I’m not sure any of it is great. But it’s tangible, which is new for me. I have dreamed my art too long.