Back to the easel

With my mother safely at home and out of the hospital, I more than felt the need to decompress. I'm still worried as hell for her but I know that it's just way too much medical knowledge floating around in my head. I knew exactly what I needed to force myself to do today. I needed to get back in front of my easel.

When I was a teenager my parents bought me an easel. It's a simple A-frame easel that probably ran them a few hundred dollars back in the 90's. It's a great little easel. To be honest, I have no idea why they bought it. I never painted at home. Ever. But, being the pack rats they are, they never threw the thing away. So now it's over 20 years later and here I am back into painting and here it is in use again! The down side? (Other than the fact that they'll use this as an excuse to hold onto everything)

This type of easel was not designed for small panels and boards. It's meant to hold stretched canvases and not small canvases either. While wandering around many of the blogs I've found on Daily Paintworks, I came across the Altereasel! What a dream come true! Before I was wedging the board between the rims of the easel slots. Push the brush too hard? The board would pop out like a cork. This easel has completely changed all that. I love it, love it, love it!

My father is an avid gardener. He always has been. I was raised on organic produce before anyone knew what the hell that was. These are two giant beefsteak tomatoes straight from his garden. Although, I think he originally intended me to eat them.

These things have been an excellent exercise in squinting. The rubbery skins and red color make discerning value difficult. In the past, I would constantly mix color with my brushes. I'd mix enough for a couple of brush strokes and then have to remix. It didn't seem to matter much when I was a kid, but it seems like a waste of effort now. So this time, since I knew the predominant color of this painting, I mixed my colors in four values. It took a lot of testing before I got the hues to my liking. In fact, I painted the whole damned tomatoes four times. I am so proud of myself for wiping away this painting as many times as I have.

It's something valuable I learned in my recent art class... you can wipe it away. So that's what I kept doing. I drew in the tomatoes and I didn't like how high they were on the panel. I wiped it away. I redrew them but something wasn't right about the left tomato. I wiped it away. I redrew the left one, something was wrong again on the right. I wiped the whole thing and started again. I mixed up 4 colors, a dark, a light and two mid-tones. I painted the two tomatoes with it. I really liked the red color. I thought they looked beautiful and red and something was wrong. The red was too cool. I stared good and hard at them. I realized, I was trying to paint what I knew. I knew the color on my palette was red and tomatoes are red. Right? Wrong. I took a good solid look at the mid-tones and realized these tomatoes are slightly under ripe. They're leaning more towards orange and yellow and even a green tinge in some spots. It took three remixes of my colors until I got this result. I think the color is spot on now. There is still much to be done with this painting and I wouldn't consider it done yet. But I am very very happy with it so far!

Nuts and Bolts

Since I decided to make a charge back into oils, I have read so many websites and bought some books who all seem to say the same thing: don't use cheap materials. And I do connect some problems I'm having with the cheapness of my canvas.

The canvas is the only thing I really tend to cheap out on. I will spend the money on good quality paints and brushes and mediums... and toss them onto a 69 cent canvas panel I picked up on clearance at Michael's. I have been trying to improve the canvases by coats of acrylic gesso but I suppose that will only improve the canvas to a point. I have a small pack of Ambersand gessoboards that is sitting in the shrink wrap that I can't wait to try sometime soon. I also desperately want to give linen a shot but the cost of the stuff is staggering and I doubt my illness will permit the level of strength or stamina to stretch and prime a canvas. Reading a blog entry about stretching linen, applying and sanding multiple coats of white lead exhausted me. I wonder if even buying one pre-made expensive linen canvas just to try it out is worth it at this stage of my painting ability.

Although, I am not really sure what to consider my level of ability. Sometimes I think of myself as an intermediate painter and other times as a beginner. I'm not really sure if classifying myself would even be helpful.

I am trying to return to some mechanical basics of painting. I am planning to create color charts ala Richard Schmid's Alla Prima book (which I have read up to chapter 5 so far and is arguably the most informative painting resource I have encountered thus far). I'm trying to do as he suggests and slow down. Yes, i want to get paint onto canvas but he's right in the fact that if you don't plan and you don't think and you rush, something is going to go terribly wrong and you're going to end up unhappy...

The cherry and pitcher painting is the particular case. At this point I have become quite fed up with the painting to the point where I think I need to stop fiddling with it for a good amount of time. Whenever I sit down in front if it, I feel exasperated and I haven't even started the painting yet! Time to walk away from it for a bit I think, step back and slow down because everything that I am fed up with in that painting has to do with things done in the initial steps of a painting: the placement, the composition and inaccuracy of my drawing. I'm sure this thing would not be giving me such hell now if I had taken the patience to do them well in the beginning instead of rushing in. Check the pool for water before you dive.

I remember when I was a child, I had something that people always say children tend to lack... patience. My mother would give up on a problem almost instantly and it was always Kelly to the rescue. If a necklace chain was a tangled mess, my mother would pull at one end and when it didn't magically unravel, throw her hands up and give the thing to me. I remember her continually saying "That's just too much work!" so many times that it almost became the mantra of my childhood. I have become far less and less patient as I have grown into an adult. I always thought it was usually the other way around! I tend to constantly think that I was born with only a certain pool of patience and that I've used it all :)