DWP Challenge... sort of...

Ever since discovering the Daily Paintworks website and their weekly challenges. I have really wanted to try one. The Zippo Challenge is the one I most wanted to try first. You use only titanium white, ultramarine blue and burnt sienna on your palette and nothing else. To be frank, I had to force myself into my studio. And after only a few brushstrokes, I wiped the entire canvas board clear.

I've been in a horribly depressed state for the past few weeks. 6 months of chronic pain and exhaustion and the return of my mother's cancer? Not exactly what I'd call conducive to happiness and joy. I was wandering about the house aimlessly. My appetite all but vanished. I spent many of my days feeling close to tears. I'd love to say I snapped myself out of it. I'd love to say that prayer and positive thinking is what did it. But I broke down and asked my therapist for anti-depressants. Since my breakdown two years ago, I had been on a variety of anti-anxiety and anti-depressant drugs but was weaned off of them in the spring shortly after my illness began. In retrospect, it probably was not the best timing to come off of them. But I was holding my own until a few weeks ago. The great thing about the medication I'm on now is that it begins to work almost immediately. I've only been on the stuff for two days and I can already feel my spirits lifting.

And they lifted enough for me to begin painting again. I probably should have gone back to the Zippo Challenge but I decided to do something harder. I went for The 10 minute challenge. 10 minutes is not a long time especially when you're caught up in painting. And I knew that it would not be long enough for me to complete anything I'd be happy with. I pulled a lemon out of my fridge, I figured it would be the simplest object, and then modified the time allotment.

The top three versions were done in 20 minutes. It was immediately clear to me that 20 minutes was too long. I felt as if I was able to more leisurely futz with things and make minor corrections. Even though I knew I had extended the time limit too much, I completed the other two anyway. I do feel that I improved what I was able to fit into those 20 minutes.

For the bottom row I decided to shave off 5 minutes from the time allotment. Now, I felt like I was racing the clock. I was surprised how fast those 15 minutes flew by in my first attempt. I felt like I was in an episode of Iron Chef. I was more prepared for my second attempt and managed to fit more in. But, again, the time beeped there were still things unfinished. The last attempt I got too comfortable. I felt like I had the time management down but I actually didn't. I think the bottom middle is the best effort.

I plan on doing more of these so that I can get it down into the 10 minutes. All in all I found this to be an excellent exercise in simplification. I am always bogged down in the details. A great learning experience!

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!

Safe and sound

I didn't really sleep Saturday night. The rain and the wind was so loud I have no idea how my husband slept through it. It sound like a herd of elephants were river dancing on our roof. As if that wasn't bad enough there was this pervasive constant roar of the wind. I fell asleep around 5:30 when the rain finally died down enough to make it quieter. In my latest insomnia news, I have a feeling that what doctors have been telling me about caffeine is right. Ever since I stopped working my intake of caffeine has decreased a great deal. And on the weeks when I'm consuming literally zero coffee, I'm actually sleeping better. Well, not really sleeping better. I'm waking up better. I wake up far less groggy. I'm very not happy about that. I do love my coffee in the morning. Actually I just love coffee.

One of our neighbor's trees fell down about 3 houses down the street. That seemed to be the only major damage I could see from the yard. I'm sure other trees came down but Chris and I didn't really drive around looking at the damage. Most of what was littered everywhere was leaves and small branches. All in all, not bad.

The only real inconvenience was the loss of electricity. It went out around 5AM and didn't come back on until 10PM. Again, not really all that bad. There are quite a few people, like Chris's friend Steve, who don't have power and the power company doesn't expect them to have it back on until Friday or later.

I still haven't done any painting. I am in the middle of creating some shadow boxes so I can control the light on my still lives better. Basically I've spray painted the inside of some cardboard boxes black. I'm really trying to minimize the amount of light bouncing around. I need to do more web searching to see if there are some other ideas I can use.

Signed Cherries!

The cherries finally dried and I was able to paint in the stems. Something is still bothering me about the damned thing and I can't figure out what it is. I admit that I'm the type of person who will continually futz with a painting but there's something more than that about this one. I mean it's usually the little things I tend to screw around with ad nauseum. There's something larger here and I think it's compositional.

Ah well, it's heading off to my parent's house after it's dry anyway. That way I won't have to look at it very often and it won't have to bother me.

I really do like still life. You can control the composition. You can control the light to some extent. I'll probably do more still life. When I was a kid, I used to paint on large canvases. In fact, the bigger the better. But I'm finding a lot of these smaller canvases are so much nicer. The less surface area is really nice. I have some gessoboard I really want to experiment with.

As usual, I can't sleep. I'm not quite sure why I'm so frazzled lately. I fell asleep for about 4 hours this (technically yesterday) morning (8AM to noon). The night before that it was from 4AM until about 10. The night before that, I got no sleep at all. I'm not really sure how to approach it anymore. I mostly spend the night trying to fall asleep about every hour with other activities in between. I got into bed around 11. Laid in bed with my eyes shut not falling asleep until about 1:30. Read for about an hour. Tried again to sleep around 2:30 until about near 4. Got up, painted my cherry stems. And here I still am.

And as usual I walked around dragging myself all day, barely able to keep my eyes open. Except for when I actually got into bed. Then my eyes snapped right open and I was wide awake. Probably could have run a damned marathon.

I can't wait until tonight. When I get to repeat this happy process.

The human figure

Probably one of my most challenging things to paint is a human being and more specifically faces.

It has always given me trouble. I have never really nail a likeness. Oh it ends up looking like a person and relatively non-deformed and I get the proportions mostly correct. But making the picture look like the particular person in question? So difficult and not something I have not gotten the hang of yet. So I was a little nervous (okay kinda panicked) when my teacher said that this week we'd be having a clothed figure.

(I apologize in advance for not asking this model if I could publish a picture of her sitting on this blog). The picture I took of the actual model is pretty much garbage for trying to work with on my own. The printout I made came out horrible. I may be able to use it for basic corrections though. Next time I may bring my actual camera to class and perhaps photograph the model from various angles. There was a view on the other side of the room where the light glinted beautifully off a necklace she was wearing but once she put her hair up in the pony tail, I decided that this was the view I wanted. There's also a great quality to the light on her face at this angle. She is a lovely young woman. There's almost a graceful elegance to her face. And I really admire her being able to sit still like that even at 20 minute intervals with 5 minute breaks in between.

I have been reading that book by Richard Schmid and have found a lot of his painting advice to be very helpful. I think one of the best things he keeps saying is the concept of slowing down and thinking and rethinking and considering and taking a step back. Those are probably the two most biggest things I need to do. I need to stop the autopilot and think and be more careful about how I'm painting rather than trying to just churn something out. I also really need to stop staying so glued to my canvas. I need to start stepping back and considering my work more.

This is the result. As a starting? I think it's getting off great. I am a little nervous that I didn't flesh out any of the actual skin tones since I will only have two more chances for this but I really wanted to concentrate more on the actual drawing and values. I even ran out of time with just that. The shoulder looks extremely wrong since I didn't get a chance to put in the values for the sleeveless dress she was wearing. Honestly, I'm not too worried about capturing this particular model's likeness or face. It would really more be a bonus to me. I more want to get the pose right. I can already see that in the set of the shoulders, you can tell she's sitting slightly off angle, but you can't tell that in the set of her jaw and neck. I can already see several errors in the shapes of the values I placed on her neck and cheek area.

I really was trying to follow Schmid's advice and try to get everything as correct as I possibly could at this particular stage. I am so happy with it at this point. And it's so rare I say something like that!

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 :)

No rest for the neurotic

I swore to myself I would sit on the couch and rest my arms. I really did. Really.

But the silhouette of the pitcher was bothering me yesterday evening... and last night.... and this morning.... and early this afternoon... and my neurosis finally won around 4PM. After fiddling with this edge for nearly two weeks with no success, I also gave in and broke out the tracing paper. I really do love the right side. The curve seems perfect to me. I figure trace it, flip the paper over and voila! Easy peasy! But it seems that left edge is still bothering me though not enough to gnaw at the inside of my head.

The best part? I'm finding that I'm actually overjoyed that it wasn't as simple as that. For the first time since my pre-veterinary days, I'm not feeling a sense of utter failure and worthlessness that I'm having trouble figuring it out. For the first time in nearly 3 years, I'm seeing challenges to overcome and not giant holes in myself as a person.

I remember when I got my first organic chemistry exam back. The C- was sobering. This was an aluminum bat to the head that this was not the community college I'd come from. This was not some sort of romantic or nostalgic return to being 20 years old. This was Ivy League. This was the dream of a lifetime. This was serious. Heart attack serious. I worked harder. I went to the chemistry resource room study times. I'd go to professor and TA office hours. The next exam? C. Better! So I worked harder. I signed up for the free private tutoring from chemistry majors. I spent more hours in the library. I started walking back to my car well after dark. The third exam. C+. Still better!

I kept this unrelenting storm up for 3 long years until I was walking back to my car in the cold Ithaca winter when the library closed at 1AM. Always feeling, even though my grades had leveled into the B range, my hard would pay off. Only towards the end, when the rejection letters came did those B's I was working at least 100 hours a week for start to devastate me. It had finally dawned on me. Everyone had lied to me my whole life. Years of hard work, dedication and sacrifice don't always pay off. And it wasn't going to pay off for me.

As usual, life had shown me that my cold glass half empty attitude was right. Because not only is the glass half empty, someone is going to come along, drink the rest of the water and steal the empty glass. I became afraid. I became afraid of everything. I saw death and felt its presence everywhere. I didn't want to invest myself in anything again. I didn't want to chance it - working for anything again. The smallest flaw, the tiniest imperfection shined a giant spotlight on the biggest failure of my life.

Is this a ray of hope? Am I finally moving on? Could it be that my soul is finally starting to heal?

Pitcher and Cherries

Oil painting isn't one of those things that's taught to kids in school. Even back when art programs weren't in danger and you always took art in school, they didn't teach you oil painting. My school had a pretty damned great art program (consequence of growing up in a rich neighborhood with insanely high property taxes I suppose) and oil painting wasn't taught. It's messy. It takes a long time to dry. The clean-up can be horrible. It just isn't conducive to a grade school environment.

I often envy people who went to college for fine arts. And I don't think that majoring in fine art is a fluff sort of major in the slightest. Those classically trained painters always seem to have some sort of quality I really want to gain. Yes, I went to the Roslyn School of Painting for a number of years as a teenager. My parents have roughly a dozen or so paintings in their house to show for it. I wouldn't really have called it a school of painting. The classes are not instructional, they consisted of me picking a picture out of a magazine and painting it. Fine for getting started and fine for a young tween but not really when you want to take things more seriously. So for the first time, I decided to take a beginning painting course at The Art League of Long Island.

It is a five week course. The first two are with still life and the last three with figure. The teacher, Irene Vitali, is excellent. I feel like I'm really learning how to build up an oil painting from the initial washes to the final highlights. She's very good at seeing exactly what your particular painting weakness is and quickly zeroed in on the fact that mine is painting exactly what is in front of me regardless of whether or not it's good for the painting. She constantly walks around the room, praising and correcting and offering explanations for her corrections.




It was a shame that we only go two weeks with this particular still life. I really would loved to have maybe painted it from another angle (should have taken a picture, just thought of that). I think that her removing the still life and setting it back up actually was a very good thing. The cherries ended up being somewhere else and in a different configuration. Everything was just a little bit off.




After taking a number of pictures with my phone, I printed them out and have been using them as a reference. I think that it is going exceptionally well. I am working very hard to not overwork or overpaint. I really want to leave a very painterly quality. And you also can't really see it in this picture but the upper left hand corner of the background is still thin and you can see bits of toning of the canvas underneath. Trying to smooth out brush strokes and trying to blanket the whole canvas... trying to make it look too photographic are things that I really need to work on. Don't get me wrong I find that level of realism impressive, but if I want my painting to look like a photograph, why not just take a photograph? There are extremes, and I have seen some examples of both on blogs and websites. I've seen paintings so real they truly did look like photographs (Oriana Kacicek's Sunny Side Up). And I've seen paintings where I could probably count the brush strokes on both hands (Carol Marine's Cheery Cherries). These are two opposite ends of the spectrum and I'm not saying either one is wrong. I'm just really want to find my own style and my own way.

Now if I could just figure out how to figure that out.....

Manhattan Henge

The fascinating phenomenon of Manhattanhenge is something that I'd really like to see myself one of these days. It truly is amazing how many wonderful and flat out cool things exist out there that are just waiting to be discovered... by being bored and watching a random episode of CSI:NY.










I don't know about anyone else but I find this whole concept really interesting. I have never been a fan of cityscapes (painted or otherwise) but something about the juxtaposition of the darkened buildings and the pure light of a sunrise that struck me.

The first section was merely laying out shapes and making sure the perspective was correct. I know that most painters tend to snub their noses at the use of black but really sometimes there is just no way around it, in my opinion. It wasn't that straight raw umber wasn't dark enough, it was more that it wasn't devoid enough, if that makes any sense. I originally had it as straight out of the tube and it just felt like a giant mud puddle. Once I added just a little black it all started to look much better.

But I think the biggest challenge of this painting is going to be letting go of my perfectionism. The temptation to break out the ruler is going to be overwhelming. I think that the darks of the buildings are going to be difficult for me as well. In the past I always painted from pictures or from life and tried very hard to replicate exactly what I saw. In cases like that, it was easy to ignore the old technical lessons like how cool colors recede back or how the eye is drawn to harsh lines. Here I really want to try to take a concept and create my own image using pictures only as basic guidelines so it's going to be interesting to see if I can remember all that and see how it will all work out.

The one thing this painting is not turning out to be is the quick and easy project I thought it would be. It seemed so minimal and so simplistic but the more I painted the more I found out that the simplicity is just an illusion. Yeah it looks like a simple value and color grade to the sky some blobby dark grey and brown and black buildings on the sides. But when you paint it like that? It looks flat and boring and, for lack of a better word, wrong. I had to add in small scumbling of purples and pinks (which you can't really see in the photograph) and very light pinks and oranges and yellows (again which you can't really see photograph). I am expecting the buildings to be equally as challenging.

Frustrations....

The new job is going great. I really like everyone there so far. It seems to have the usual issues of any workplace. There is a great deal of what I've come to call "caty-ness" that I tend to see in a lot of workplaces. It's been difficult to separate myself from the backbiting and gossip. I know that I am supposed to not participate in such talk and not even listen to it but the most I seem to be able to manage is not participating... although that doesn't seem to be going as well as I'd like. This lack of gossip seems to be the worst thing for me to avoid participating in and avoiding in my daily life. Gossip and backbiting are very commonplace in our lives. It's been difficult, also, for me to distinguish between gossip and backbiting vs complaining. I must work harder.

I didn't expect to be faced with the aspects of veterinary medicine that I hate so quickly. I am experiencing frustrations with owners already. Several have made extremely rude and flat out offensive comments to me that I have had difficulty coping with at the particular moment. I must further develop my brain mouth filter. One particular owner has decided to prolong the life of his dog that has been unable to walk for nearly two years; a decision that I do not agree with but, of course, must respect. It is my job to care for the dog and provide it with care in compliance with the owner's wishes. Even though my personal decision is that continuing this dog's life is, in fact, inhumane, I must continue to respect the owner's decision. The dog is, after all, his pet and his responsibility but I feel compelled to be an advocate for the animal and while I have voiced my concerns to a few of the veterinarians, I have been repeatedly told that voicing these concerns to the vet responsible for this dog's case will be not only futile but viewed as confrontational and offensive.

It's not the sort of line I want to take because I know from experience that these sorts of unvoiced feelings and opinions tend to fester and contribute to the gossip and backbiting in a workplace. I think it build resentment and makes for a lot of unnecessary tension.

What is disappointing is that this job, being full time, has completely obliterated the blissful amounts of free time I used to have. It leaves me physically and emotionally exhausted. When I get home, all I want to do is sleep. Of course, I don't feel like cleaning the house or doing other chores. What is more disappointing is that it also leaves me little time for my crafts and artwork.

I haven't even started on my collage projects and the painting for my father is sitting in a room completely untouched. Although I did get to work on it Friday, I quickly got frustrated and set it aside. It's a painting of a single rose of sharon. I decided to work the background in a very impressionistic style since the background of the original photograph is very blurry. The photograph was one actually taken by my father and submitted for some sort of photograph contest. It's a great picture. Now that the background is done I've moved on to the flower itself and it is giving me all sorts of trouble. The two petals I've attempted look terrible. Since the flower is largely white, my main problem seems to be value. The dark sections are not dark enough... the light sections aren't white enough and I'm not sure how to solve the problem.

I haven't even touched my planned collage project. Although I have pieces of the concept worked out, I am not sure what I want to do to put it together. I want the collage pieces to encompass date due cards and/or card catalog library cards. I also want them to include print block letters of various fonts and sizes. But I'm completely unsure of how to put the whole thing together. Do I do a freeform? Just laying elements out? Or do I attempt to use the cards as a medium and create? Do I print on or over the cards? Do I cut the cards up? Do I attempt to keep them whole? I'm hesitant to just experiment because the card catalog and date due cards are a limited resource. I'm even unsure about the base surface for the collages... Wood? Paper? I have no real idea about the scale or size either. This kind of out of the blue art has always been difficult for me. I'm used to guidelines and restrictions like the kind you get in assignments.

One of my new goals is to improve my pencil skills and get better at portraits (pencil and painting). I would like to be able to paint portraits later on.

I think I have way too many ideas swimming in my head.