If you look at some paintings & drawings by both Matisse and Picasso, they are child like. This is not a pejorative term though. When Matisse painted his wife reclining on couch, you knew you were seeing a woman in kimono on couch but one would never study anatomy via this type of piece, it was not (hyper) realism.
Emotion ruled out over technique.
Picasso would occasionally lay on the floor and paint with his children. There is a purity in when a child does art, they do not get hung up on rules and restrictions. He wanted to capture a spark from this.
Both men had said something along the lines of an artist should create with the seriousness of a child at play.
I had read some biographies where burgeoning painters at young ages were given blocks of cheap paper to let loose on. This was a sort of test by parents, the paper was inexpensive so if the child gave up, as children sometimes do with things which they show initial enthusiasm for, it would be no big deal.
Impulsively, while restocking needed art supplies, I bought myself a block of cheap newsprint paper.
I am currently working on my next short story/essay collection and a small painting.
A for fun project, I decided to do a page or two every day in this block, but each piece had to be loose. It’s just daily doodles 9×12 newsprint paper. I am earnest in this, like a child.
Read enough biographies on artists and regardless of medium and era a commonality becomes apparent. It is what I call The Sweet Spot. This is the time when the struggle/work for the artist to achieve their distinctive voice has been achieved. All the work which goes towards fostering the skill to do so now takes no more effort to motivate into action than a health habit. And there is now an audience which gets rid of the abstracted “someday,,,” aspect the lack of which causes the “Why am I doing this again?”.
There is an audience but not so big that the artist, even if only on a subconscious level, incorporates into the equation all the expectations of fans, critics and gallerists. There is the luxury of being able to work and experiment giving no thoughts to consequence.
More often than not, the artist recognizes this golden age only after they are well past it. If lucky, in old age they may get a second shot once established as an institution or national treasure but this is not always guarantied.
I feel fortunate, for among other things, recognizing that i am in the sweet spot. I decided to try a bunch of new things for this painting. Why not? I am very pleased with how it turned out. To me, it does not look radically different from my other paintings despite all new things I tried.
I just finished a new Cinefield®. It was labor intensive. A few things made this one different. I was on the road off and one again over the past few months. Normally I work on a Cini until I am done. This time I worked on it, hit the road, came back to it several times.
There was a definite apprehension about working on such a complex piece in this manner but it ended up stronger for it. The mini breaks allowed me to maintain level on concentration and intensity consistently.
The entire work is comprised from one photo which I personally took, reprinted over and over. I used my trusty scissors to hand cut each tiny piece using a brush to apply adhesive. The picture is 11×17 inches and there was no digital magic utilized.
It occurred to me only while working on this piece the nature of my Cini’s. I always have in my head beforehand the design and the effects/properties i.e this part will glow, here will be darker section etc etc. However, even as I am cutting out the tiny pieces, I do not know where they will ultimately go. It is only as I am laying a piece down that I know where I will put it. I look at each Cini as akin to a piece of music, so that makes the denser ones a sort of improvised symphony. Every Cini possesses the dichotomy of being super controlled while also improvised. It’s Charlie Parker & Schoenberg.
Lotus 11×17
A word about copyright & A.I:
A lot of my peers copyright a work only after a magazine/gallery, whatnot accepts the work. This is a big mistake, as soon as you post your work or submit it, first step in this process should be to copyright it. Generation instagram feels it a victimless crime to take what they want from the web for content beyond pics of them giving heart hands in some sunny local. There’s now plenty of examples too of artists having their works monetized by others . A copyright is not a forcefield, these things are still going to happen, but to have a copyright gives recourse should someone be using what you created without permission. It also makes having things taken down from sites/webpages far quicker too.
A.I is very misunderstood right now by many. It is not creating content so much as reconstituting things already on the web created by others. Whether it is literature or visual work and even music, it’s basically a super system which creates chimera based upon instructions. Most artists regardless of medium have some works online.
Copyright helps protect when your work goes into creating something without permission using this method.
compulsively, I read biographies on artists of every medium & era. I will even delve into people who are not my usual thing which has more than once made me become a fan. There is a commonality which transcends both nation and decade, that of practicality initially dictating artistic direction/materials & methodology.
The Impressionists are mainly talked about in relation to how they used color and lighting effects. Their importance was not just their revolutionary portrayal of light as it effected perception though. Before them, some painters had started breaking away from the pervading “must” of people being heroically portrayed ala history/myth/allegory (Courbet & Millet had started towards more naturalized milieu) they were the first to fold it into their works wholesale.
People were portrayed having an eye opener in a cafe before work, dirty nails, bad skin. Objects were portrayed in natural positions, a wife’s hat left atop a shrub, detritus atop a studio table waiting to be swept with forearm into the trash.
Part of the reason for this all was practicalities sake. Models could not always be afforded and it was easier using friends and family to pose, especially as scheduling could prove to be more convenient and often all it cost was to eventually return the favor.
These things would be enfolded into the methodology of their work and then honed. After this point, it was became their lexicon.
The same thing happened with Picasso/Braque cubist still lives, it was just things they had laying around which were part of their every day lives. Money need not be spent on flowers or any other kind of specialty objects. The only downside to this was that by the time Picasso was moving on from cubism, cubist paintings by participators in the genre more often than not had “required” objects to be included which had initially made appearances in a natural manner due to pragmatism.
Practicality is often an important initial dictator of choices an artist makes, but once the path chosen is felt to be the right one, a philosophy sprouts up. Like the methodology, it is ready to be honed, its articulation, whether to the public or just in the artist’s head, fine tuned.
The Italian painter Giorgi Morandi rarely left his city of Bologna, Italy (only three times, much later in life and then only briefly). He did not portray life in his home city but was fueled by it. He mainly did still lives. Most of these were of bottle which had just been laying around. A cursory look at his work and they seem deceptively simple. There is no bursting forth virtuosic moments to be found in his work. What makes them remarkable is that they very much look like every day objects imbued with organically occurring poetry.
A generation later and half a world away, Henry Virgona worked along a similar philosophical line. He kept the same 300 square foot Union Square studio for fifty nine years (sadly, ending in 2019). He rarely traveled, preferring to stay within the confines of the city whose fabric he was very much part of. He did still lives which showed him to be the artistic son of Morandi. He was an accomplished draftsman and this urban Antaeus did amazing candid drawings of all the people that he encountered in his daily city life, their natural poses maintain the power of the pieces. Two men, one mainly using objects, the other, people encountered every day, both showing inherent natural beauty of regular life.
I had already hit upon my philosophy and modus operandi before discovering Henry’s work. We definitely have marked differences, some of which could be generational. It is inspiring though, to see that one’s idea of serving the process is not completely out of left field but rather an evolved link in a chain which goes way back.
Most of what I work in and how I work all started out from practical considerations. I mainly use people in my life in some manner as models for convenience’s sake. When no one is around, I will paint or draw whatever catches my eye which is right in front of me. I too go for the beauty which organically comes through in every day objects or scenes.
One of my greatest pleasures in life is to conjure up, even if only with a pencil nubbin and scrap paper, either something I am seeing or talking about.
I was at a concert and observed various moments where, as much as I was enjoying the music, got caught up in people watching. Doing a sort of raw-visual-reportage after the fact, I caught the moment in a bigger sized for me piece. Aside from the size of the piece, another departure for me was the fact that I did a few studies as I wanted the crowd scene to be accurate and maintain a certain degree of looseness which already having knowledge of positioning and compositional balance would help with.
When I first started seriously painting, I used a French cotton paper. I did not realize it at the time, but it is far less forgiving than the paper which I currently use (which is non-cotton).
I made the switch when the already up there price raised even more. There was much experimentation before I found the paper which became my main one.
In cleaning my tabouret draws, I came upon an unopened block of French Cotton paper. As my skill has increased from when I originally had used it, I was interested to see what I could do with it now.
My preference with cotton paper had always been cold pressed, but even with this, there is more tooth to the paper than what I currently use. This gives a sort of chunky effect when portraying flesh, watercolor impasto.
I enjoyed using this paper and I will work my way through the block but to my surprise I now prefer my current non-cotton paper. The cotton paper does not blend as easy, so getting effects I want with cotton paper will now make it “easier” with my preferred paper.
Unintentionally, my last three paintings form a cohesive series. The news continues to be bleak. It is the responsibility of all artists to do their thing. Not necessarily art with a message but putting forth things of beauty as a reminder that there are things out there bigger than ourselves. And more importantly, not everything need be connected to a “Us versus them” issue.
As I cool down on use of some of my other social media sites I had a revelation. Just because you disagree with someone or even if they are legitimately wrong, it’s often not worth yelling back. You are not going to change hearts and minds. Even if in the right, more often than not it is just adding to the cacophony, feeding the pervading negative zeitgeist.
All art regardless of medium is a way to look towards better days, here’s hoping I see you there.
It’s that time a year again. I am lucky enough to get a birthday cake from The Caketts. Music remains my main source of inspiration and outside of serving the creative process, my main passion.
Every year the cake is musically themed. I have no say in what it will be, although obviously it’s music I like.
The first cake I ever got was reproducing The Rolling Stone’s Let It Bleed album cover but with cats replacing the lads.
One eats with their eyes first. Aside from that obvious pleasure, the cakes themselves are very good. The flavors are always unique. This year’s (Miles Davis/Gil Evans Sketches of Spain album cover) was a Manhattan flavored cake. With the bits of bourbon macerated cherry to be found within combining with everything else going on, the cake was patisserie-decadent enough to easily be expected to be found in Vienna.
Everything is made from scratch, no prebought sheet cakes, no stencils. Even all frostings are made by hand, nothing shooting out of plastic tubes, aisle five thank you kindly.
These are all the cakes over years so far, in order. (W/later cakes my name is watermarked on photo. This might seem overly cautious but w/first photos i Put up of a cake, people just put it on their Instagram w/no attribution where it garnered thousands of views. Insult to injury, in one case, person who reposted knew me but w/pic put that they forgot where they had come across this. In general, if you didn’t create it ask person who did. Or at very least, link to their site. It’s basically stealing other wise.)
Blogs, social media, online news, news updates via text, it is way too easy to get caught up in doom scrolling. The seemingly reasonable assertion that to be hyper vigilant in regards to all the bad things allows one to have a hand on the wheel so to speak. While I do think it important to know what’s going on, a steady diet of the bleak and negative is not healthy for anyone. Even if unintentionally, you end up just adding to the negative. There needs to be some moments of calm, peace and the positive, otherwise what’s the point of it all?
I would like to think that at the very least my work offers a brief respite from the woes of every day life and its accompanying concerns. A moment of beauty to serve as a counter balance to the bleak and out of our control so often now a part of the news. Sometimes a way to implement change is by just engaging with the things outside of the struggle.
There’s an old adage that money makes money. This saying is still parroted today but the meaning is mostly no longer known. If you are in sales and have a specific number which must be reached within a certain time frame, if lucky enough to reach it well ahead of schedule then most likely you will find yourself well over the number by the deadline.
Why? Because you are now relaxed, goal met. Time left on the clock, you can continue to sell with a casual mien which puts others at ease and prevents motives from being scrutinized.
Essentially, this is the power of wiggle room. Anytime you find yourself with no pressures of time frame or other matters of control, it facilitates a kind of ease in which things can get done.
Of course there’s many types of wiggle room, it’s far from restricted to a sales thing.
Currently, I find myself with wiggle room of no expectations of gallerists or other decision makers. This leaves me free to explore and stretch myself which suits me as I never want my work to become mere mannerisms.
I shake things up with what and how I create while I can. It’s a way to facilitate evolution too.
Most of my CINEFIELD® work is 11×17 inches. My last two I kept the size the same but set out with different goals for both, sort of challenges to myself. Wiggle room, wiggle room, I decided to keep the challenge method going.
For this one, I decided to go much smaller 6×8 inches. Although I prefer a certain amount of density compositionally, I would eschew that too. I also decided to make this one more overtly narrative. Luminescent elements so much a large part of other pieces would be dropped down to a smattering in favor of a more limited, muted palette.
I was pleased with the results. This piece is very different from its siblings. As is always the case, the images used are all from photos which I personally took. I used no digital magic, only the traditional method of scissors and adhesive applied with a small brush.
Paper Life Painting 