News — Process

I love Goals! Love them so much the word is capitalized.

But. Before we go into goals for 2016, here’s what I feel good about in 2016.

I’m starting month six of this full-time-artist experiment, and my natural instinct is to feel like most of what I’ve done is a failure. I still don’t have a style. I feel like my abilities haven't gotten a ton better. Blah blah blah. This isn’t a pity parade. It’s the usual stuff us artists feel. This is also background information so that you can understand that despite all of that, I feel like a rock star for having survived the past five months. I feel amazing about 2015. Because the past five months have taught me how poorly suited I am for self employment. Horribly suited. I thrive on third party deadlines and expectations. With third party expectations I am a pro. (Wait, let’s capitalize this for important emphasis: a PRO.) But not so much on my own. Different skill set completely. I have spent five months in an isolation chamber. Can you imagine if at your day job, for five months no one talked to you about your work nor did anyone ever offer any feedback whatsoever. It’s like that...but with endless cookies near bye and unlimited smoke breaks. So the fact that I’ve gotten any painting done let alone drawing let alone exercising the past five months feels like a huge feat. Sure, the bar is low, but even sometimes low bars are hard to get above.

2015 Accomplishments

1. Learned a lot about how I work.  

I'm going back to basics with my back to (art) school goals this winter and one of those basics is drawing. Drawing drawing drawing. Every artist I've talked to says the foundation of painting...even if you're a highly figurative painting...is drawing.

For me learning to draw is about confidence and validation. I feel that if I can draw then I'm a real artist. But it also is about freedom. Drawing gives me the freedom to play. I worked hard for two years to learn to draw faces. I'm still not a master by any means, but that understanding allows me to now play with paint and value and work on other things other than how the hell the nose connects with the eyes. Plus, because the very basics are now second nature, I can advance my face drawing skills, which feels really really satisfying.

While I worked for two years on faces, I still don't really know how to draw in general. Ask me to draw a semi-realistic vase, I have no idea how cylinders connect with cubes. No clue. I also don't know how bodies hold themselves or how owls are put together. I didn't realize until recently how much frustration this causes me when I want to paint a bouquet or a bird. Plus, maybe the most important part of all of this, I haven't taught myself to really see.

So here are five drawing exercises I've found that are helping me navigate the mental and physical planes of drawing. I try to do one a day although some day I'd like to get to the point where I'm doing all five every day.

The day I left my job and the week that followed were one of the happiest of my life. All that freedom. All that control. Seeing work politics and low pay behind me and fulfillment ahead of me. All that potential glory to days well spent. Pure elation.

And then it stopped. I found it confusing, and then I found it kind of embarrassing. Here I have this great opportunity and I’m not happy. What a waste. And what a selfish human being I must be to have this space for happiness and squander it with sadness.

I love me some transparency, but I think I'm going to take a week to play in the heavy bodied opaques. They allow for more mixing on the page and they are more forgiving. If you mess up, you can just cover it with more opaque. Not so when dealing with translucency. Although, even just after one painting I've already fallen into more transparency than I'd like. Eventually I want to figure out how to marry the two, but that will take getting use to the heavy bodied acrylics first.

Unexpected discovery: Paint is way easier to blend on a canvas. I'd mess this up as soon as I collaged paper of any sort down but it's been such a pleasure to be able to do some basic blending.

I heard Carol Marine’s great Artists Helping Artist interview today. One of the things she talked about was failure. Every year she has a bad paintings party where artists bring their bad paintings and they destroy them. She said that every time one of her paintings goes into the bad painting pile she feels bad, and each time she pledges to have fewer in next year’s pile. But this year she’s changing her approach. She wants her bad painting pile to be huge. Bigger than it’s ever been. Because if it is, that means that she’s trying new things and taking risks.

I love this idea. I don’t have a bad painting pile, but I'm realizing that bad paintings give me something else: freedom. If a painting looks terrible there’s no way I can screw it up. In fact, it’s very possible that the worst thing I can do will actually make it better.