3 posts tagged “painting”
January... the new year.
Hope and promise and the full moon rising in the misty east.
Misty?
In January?
In Vermont?
The northlands are reeling with warmth.
Where is the snow?
I was given new telemark skis for christmas, but there is no backwoods snow. My skis are white with bright flowers on the front, like a japanese print. quite lovely. But they are sitting sadly in the mudroom, awaiting the opportunity to glide through the woods, across moose tracks and under heavy hanging hemlocks, weighted with ponderous snow. All the snow is in New Mexico and Colorado. Today began with freezing rain. and then thawed.
Many of my friends are interested in snow shoeing. They trudge up to the signpost on the Long Trail (Vermont's left hand turn to Canada from the Appalachian Trail) and then trudge back down. I've gone with them a few times, but it seems silly to do all that work in both directions. On skis you trudge up, but then laugh and glide all the way back down instead of sloshing along with wide, webbed feet. The long glide is the reward and another challenge
It ever so difficult at anytime of year to focus as an artist.
Even as driven as I normally am, the holiday season is particularly challenging. Family beckons.
Deadlines loom.
Energy wanes.
Here's a small painting that I just finished. The surface of the eggs is golden with an antique crackle pattern... a diversion from my norm of quasi-scientific accuracy. While I was working on it, my great-aunt Sis, Lillian Shipley, was continually in my mind. Among her many careers was a stint as a milliner in West Virginia. It was nice to spend time with her in the process of creating the painting. In another phase of her life she had a chicken farm in Westminister, Maryland, and she spent the last years of her life as director of the Carroll County Historical Society in the same town. She was born in 1890 and lived until 1989. Rumor has it that she was quite the wild young woman in West Virginia. I remember her warm, slightly raspy voice with a southern drawl, while she served us mint chocolate chip ice cream on the back porch, with the scent of summer box bushes rising up in the July heat.
Hard to imagine how the world changed during that time span...
Just finished a commission: a portrait of a branch with a small, exquisite nest that is probably from an American Redstart: entwined twigs lined with pine needles. Quite elegant and unusual. Tiny bits of birch bark are woven into the exterior. Attached to the branch on the right side are two leaves: one actually still attached to the stem & twig; the other is oddly impaled on the end of another twig. It was found in the yard of the people who requested the portrait, blown down in a storm. It took me quite a while to get the painted branch to have the sheen of living bark, but I'm finally pleased with it.
Painting is the most magical of mediums. The
transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I
see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat
surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a
life experience.
- Chuck Close
I began it in April, while visiting in Santa Fe, though I had planned it out somewhat before I got there. But, art is about communication, and part of that communication is between the artist and the art work. I work on it for a bit, and then listen to what the painting has to say. My muse has a private conversation with the canvas or clay, and the color and the composition. Sooner or later, the next step becomes obvious.
I begin with a black surface, and slowly the colors illuminate the composition, and the image emerges from the darkness.
When I work with clay, I begin with a simple coil process, essentially building a coil pot that turns into a figure. Sometimes the full torso, sometimes partial. This diva needed a bird. She holds a nest. A canyon wren is sitting in the palm of her hand.
I always said I would be one when I grew up.
Thinking of the stages through which we pass enroute to becoming/being an artist... Climbing that long, inward ladder of introspection, as we hone skills and accumulate tools with which we create. Art is communication, whatever mode or style or medium we choose. Representational, or the varying degrees of abstraction; performance, song, dance, sculpture... Opaque transparent or translucent; exuberant or somber. It's all about the message.
Having spent many, many years teaching art to children, I was always amazed by how the individual personality of each child shouted out off the paper, often far more coherently than they could express themselves verbally.
Blogging... about as verbal an activity as one could indulge in. An artist's blog: another form of communcation. New to me, as I sit here with 30 years of journals on the shelf next to me.
Public "journaling"... here I go...
As we enter the long dark of Vermont winter, I peruse imagery to add to the blog, I am remembering the warmth and spirituality of Machu Picchu where I spent 10 days last summer, leading a group of artists through the Sacred Valley of the Inca. It will be wonderful to be there again next spring and summer.
