"The Studio"

One of the most helpful insights since coming back from vacation pertains to the studio, on keeping it clean and having distance from the world.   I have since recommended to a fellow artist that she create just such a space in her studio. One wall  not cluttered with other paintings, or paint splotches.  A clean wall with a single nail on which to hang the current work  and a comfortable chair to view it from.

Let me back up. Travel always opens up the eye as we are jolted out of our habitual environment and are forced to see afresh, but my little epiphany comes found the work I did while on holiday, perched on a stool in the corner of a kitchen.  The paintings came so easily.  The watercolours lay down smoothly, cleanly, with  a clarity of mind and purpose that made me feel in love with painting again.  In comparison my home studio is crammed full of bits and parts. Oil, Acrylic and water colour mediums, books, brushes and paper, canvas, models and paintings; it all sits around chaotically grabbing at my eye and brain.

Ahh, the brain.  Here is the meat of the matter.  It isn't just that all the stuff grabs at your eye, but that it grabs at your brain. Each empty canvas suggests a painting. Unresolved work silently asks the question, what if?  Half-hearted efforts  whisper, why didn't you spend more time with me? Poor work shouts at you, YOU CAN"T PAINT!

Having a clear work space, encourages a clear conversation with your work.  Let go of the relics and remnants around you and focus instead on the process.  What did you experience, what did you discover, what did you learn?  Where are you going next?



To have a sacred place is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room or a certain hour of the day or so, where you do not know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody or what they owe you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. (Joseph Campbell) 

Watercolour work from my holiday this summer.
This is the order I painted them in.  
I plan to do them in oil over the winter.

 

Welcome back! I hope your summer was what you needed it to be.  That lovely summer sun is slowly making it's way back to the southern hemisphere and it is time to gather up loose ends and make preparations for winters shorter days.

This summer, I accompanied my mother (89) to her home town in Europe.  We spent our days visiting with folks well over eighty and taking slow walks through the orchards, vineyards and cobble stone streets. Away from the internet, the combination of a different place, the slow pace and looking at life through the eyes of the old provided me with a very different viewpoint than my life back home.

My little holiday studio 

I set up a rough studio in the unused kitchen   and happily painted a portion of each day away. For the most part the world shrunk to the elements directly within my immediate surroundings. Unhooked from almost all media sources: television, radio, newspapers and internet, the peaceful, patient, matter of fact, capable aura that hung about the farming people we visited seeped into the fabric of the passing days.

Now back home, I have switched back into hunter gatherer mode, actively on alert for what is new, sorting what is relevant or not,  consumed with deciding what has to be done next, what needs to be addressed now. I find myself checking the internet whenever I pass the screen and building stacks of newspapers with passages circled for further attention. I make lists of phone calls to return, commitments to follow up. I am sure you all could all add to this list of frenetic hunt and search behavior.

The difference between the two worlds is more than just having more to do.  I feel a  profound and physical shift in my brain, as if my grey matter is literally working from another area.  There is also a shift of operating modality, as thought is now charged with a resolving a different equation and is searching for a different balance. I sense that the farm-time-paradigm allowed for a different route of thought, not just a different scope of thought. 

As the holiday fades, my access to this route of thought is slipping away and I feel the sharp keen of an important loss. Perhaps, if I can pin enough of it down in print, it might amount to a map, or maybe it is a compass, to carry me back and forth between both states of thought.

Post Script:

One of the circled articles in my pile of newspapers bears the heading  Douglas Coupland, The Internet, how it's changing us, and the acceleration of acceleration itself. Our Brains, Rewired." The article features an excerpt from Coupland's book, Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent.   The following lines caught my eye:  
"Time is moving too quickly these days and yet, at the same time, it's moving too slowly. Quite simply, by brain no longer feels the way it used to; my sense of time is distinctly different from what it once was and I miss my pre-Internet brain... What's really happening is that, after more than ten thousand hours of exposure to the internet and digital technologies like my iPhone, my brain has been rewired, -or rather, it has rewired itself. Science has a name for this process: Hebb's Law.  When neurons fire together, they wire together.  It's no coincidence that the ten-thousand-hour rule has recently entered our culture's popular imagination, explaining to us that after doing something for ten thousand hours, you become an expert at it, because that's how much time your brain needs to fully rewire itself to adapt to a new medium.

Endurance Winners

The alstroemeria ( peruvian lily)  and the tulips outlasted all the other 

blooms in the bouquet. The varied yellows and the pink make good companions.

I like how the alstroemeria blossoms unfold like a fan in contrast to the 

solid ovals of the tulips.

Oil on canvas

10"x10"

HERE WE ARE - all done!
Final edit is on right.  You can do the cartoon thing where you check the differences between the images.  Comments are welcome. 

Work is 20 x 24 inches, oil on canvas. 
Available for purchase at www.DailyPaintworks.com

Oh, all the things one should know by this time:
Don't start a new project when you are tired and hungry.
Don't hack around on a painting that you have already moved on from.
Don't work from a dirty palette.
Don't work from memory.

There.  That just about summarize all the things I should not have been doing just now.

It is interesting how a brain sees different things at a different scale and/or media. At about four p.m. today I was at  the computer editing the last of the three large still life paintings from the last post.   On the computer, it seemed to me that the  painting had ungraceful 'hole' in the middle (dark with little detail) and that a spear ( a single brightly lit leaf) was cutting a straight and unnatural line to the sunflower.  No problem, I thought.  I'll just whip that in the studio and put some variation into that leaf to make it more interesting.
Well, here is, an hour and a half later and, I think this painting might now be a good candidate for a bonfire.  Oh my goodness.  Is my stomach complaining from hunger or is this feeling in my gut because this painting is now a hot mess?
The eliminated tulip on the left and moving the other further behind was a good move,  but the darkening of back ground has muddled up the congruency of the leaves.  Also still not happy about the lower midfield of the painting, while the two carnations are really bothering me now.

Sometimes valuable information can be gained by continuing to adjust a painting.  Will have to decide tomorrow morning if i want to hack at this one any more. I welcome feedback.

In the quest for a looser, more impressionist expression of these still lifes, the move from small itsy bitsy 5"x7" paintings to a more robust 20"x24" inch  format would help.  Besides using a much larger brush with the commensurate longer handle to keep me away from the canvas  surface, standing instead of sitting also seemed to give the strokes more oomph.  Here is the set up for the last two paintings, I am sorry that I didn't take a photo of the first for you to see.

The goal in these three paintings was to understand the relationship between the underpainting and the final highlight hits in creating the form, where to place vanishing edges, and what details to eliminate, what elements to include, to produce a stronger composition.

As you can  see, This first one painting has it all, flowers, carpet and details. IN a way, I enjoy all the bits of colour as it creates both the scene and a pattern.


 In the second painting, I took out the 'whites' partly to reduce the amount of colours included in the work, but also because I started thinking how odd it was to have tulips, asters, sunflowers, gerberas, lilies and orchids all at the  same time when they don't bloom in the same seasons.  I have wondered about this in other paintings as well, should one aim to have the elements of a painting be 'in season' with each other? Or is this just inevitable evidence pointing to a culture that supplies almost everything at anytime?

 















For this third painting, the canvas has been swung around to vertical and the still life has been cropped in closely to create a more stripped down composition.  I do miss the wild patterning of the first painting even as I enjoy the quieter look of this arrangement.  The darn tulips and the gerbera kept moving while I was painting even though I thought I was painting really quickly.  Hazards of painting from set ups rather than photos I guess.  At a workshop I attended this weekend  the presenter, a landscape artist said, that it is a real problem when painting outdoors!  I can imagine.  

Painting in stages:  Bowl of Fruit with Orchid backdrop

My first step is to do a quick prep  sketch 5x 7 inches   This allows me to work out the composition and figure out what is important to include in the painting.  At this stage I am mindful of how the eye will move through the work.  I find branches and stems are quite important when working with flowers and foliage

First stage of painting (above, 12x16 ") After getting the painting to this stage,  the patterns of the cloth on the left side of the bowl seemed to take focus away from bowl

Second stage (above) I wiped clean the detail in the cloth  and now can go back in
.

Third stage (above): I eliminated the folds in the cloth at the left of the bowl completely. I also toned down the contrast in the white napkin.  The partial leaf that was behind the left rim of the bowl has been eliminated as well to give greater clarity to the bowl edge.

This is the original still life set up with cold light source