Snow. And books. And saying “Yes.”

Good lord–it is snowing again. Really snowing. And it’s been sticking ever since it started to fall at about 6:00 PM. The street is completely whited over, and my sad, hummocky mess of a lawn almost looks attractive (as snow hides myriad landscaping sins).

This means Seattle will once again be in a state of paralysis and panic until it all melts, of course. Oh, well. I have plenty of coffee, there’s nowhere I have to go, and I can always eat one the cats if it comes to that.

Now, what was I going to post about? Oh, yes–

One of this year’s New Year’s resolutions is to read more books–a book a week, in fact.

Considering that I used to read 2-6 books a week years ago, this isn’t a very ambitious goal. But after quitting grad school back in the spring of ‘05, I was so burned out on reading that I quit altogether. I didn’t intend to, but for almost a year and a half the only things I could bring myself to read were posts to various online communities, countless gigs of crappy fanfiction, and the captions beneath photos in Elle Decor magazine. Occasionally, I would pick up a book and try to read it; I even continued to buy books that looked interesting. But I couldn’t get past the first few pages of any book, and my stack of new purchases to be read kept growing.

When I finally started reading books again, it was hit-or-miss. It took me forever to finish one, and weeks or months would go by before I picked up another. It’s only been in the last six months or so that my old enjoyment of reading has started to return, but I still haven’t got my bibliophilic groove back. So this year, I’m determined to reclaim my love of reading.

And every once in a while, I’ll review books I’ve read. It won’t be every book, and it won’t be every week (if I wanted to do that, I’d go back to grad school). I don’t even guarantee in-depth reviews. But when I really like a book (or even acutely loathe it) I like to tell people about it. So I’m going to spend this snowy evening indoors, with a pot of coffee at my elbow and cats underfoot, hacking out a review of the first book of the year.

Another thing I’m going to do–for at least the next 30 days at any rate–is a little bit of inspired weirdness I call “The Yes Project.” I’ve even made a separate blog for it, and if you want an explanation, here’s the incredibly long intro post and the mercifully brief About The Yes Project page.

It seemed like a silly idea, and I almost pushed it aside. But for something so silly, it was awfully persistent. So I figured, “Why the hell not? What’s the worst thing that could happen if you do it?” Taking a cue from Steve Pavlina, I’m making it into a 30-day trial just to see what happens. If continuing it after the 30-day mark seems like a good idea, I will, but at the very least I’ll give it 30 days.

New Year, new goals, new blog

So I’m down to the last hour or so of 2008, and, as I’ve been doing since October, I’m thinking about what I want to accomplish in 2009.

I don’t make the kind of resolutions most people make (lose weight, go to the gym, get organized). After all, I’m not broken, wayward, or degenerate. I don’t need fixing, making-over, or reforming. I don’t carry around ridiculous burdens of guilt for failing to measure up to arbitrary social yardsticks.

Plus, I flat-out refuse to suffer. Especially not for ridiculous things such as the size of my ass or the state of the “junk drawer” in the kitchen.

I am most likely to see things through and put a resolution into effect if it is something that will expand my horizons, challenge me in meaningful ways, and increase the sum total of my happiness at being alive. So over the last couple of years my resolutions have been things like “drink Champagne whenever you want it, not just on special occasions,” “go look at more art,” and travel to at least two places.” And I’ve done those things, and had a great time.

This year, the big one is “Move back to San Francisco.”

But the other one, which I only decided upon a few days ago, was “Finally learn to play a musical instrument (as you’ve wanted to do since you were fourteen, for crying out loud).”

Okay, I’m back.

Way back in April, my energies got diverted into other things, and while I occasionally thought about it, I never quite made it back to this blog–not even to finish and publish the backlog of posts still in draft form.  I had to set aside most of my creative work, and writing about creativity while not being able to do much that was creative was just too frustrating.

But I’m back. Or, rather, I’ve decided it’s time for a major life overhaul, and while I might not be doing much creative work even now, I’m still doing little bits here and there, and thinking about stuff, and using the aforementioned life overhaul to get rid of some old, self-defeating habits and ideas that have always hindered my creativity.

Among them is the idea that I have to identify myself as some specific sort of artist, rather than just a creative person who likes making or re-making all kinds of different stuff. One thing that I’ve allowed to hold me back is the idea that I have to choose some specific style, subject matter, or theme and stick with it in order to have an art career. It’s all part of some very old, and not terribly useful, ideas about what it means to have a career as a creative person, and how work gets sold, and who buys it, and in what form, and how it is valued.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those ideas over the last few months, and turning them on their heads, and taking them apart, and eventually rejecting most of them as irrelevant to me and the kind of work I really want to do. And about a month ago, I realized that my “Artist’s Statement” had finally boiled down to this:

I like to play with different colors and see how they work together. I like pattern. I like decorative work. Sometimes I make Serious Paintings, using Serious Technique, but most of the time I’d rather goof off and follow whatever inspiration hits, and not worry about creating a coherent, mature body of work, or confining myself to one particular mode of expression.

My whole purpose as a creative person is to have fun and see what happens, and to make lots of money at it. That’s all.

So there–I’m finally reviving this poor blog.

Does this self-portrait make me look fat?

I’ve made 16 posts on this blog, but I have 17 unfinished posts in draft form, waiting to be published. That’s just wrong. So I think for now I’ll tie the score with this post, and then see if I can’t get my act together and finish at least one draft in the queue by tomorrow.

I arrived at last night’s long pose figure-drawing session ten minutes late. Getting set up to work in acrylics would have been disruptive, so I decided to draw instead. Here’s last night’s effort (mechanical pencil on paper, 14 x 18″):

There model is still recovering from a terrible leg injury, and even in this “easy” pose it was causing him a lot of discomfort. He held the pose just fine, but I wasn’t the only one who ended up producing a drawing that could have been titled Portrait of Dude in Distress. I hope the poor guy’s leg is doing better by next week’s session.

So I didn’t get to paint last night, but I’ll take along my kit next week (and get there early). I gessoed over last week’s mediocre acrylic study and tinted the panel gray; I planned to use just Ivory Black glazes with a bit of white added toward the end–sort of a non-dusty, watermedia version of charcoal and white chalk on gray paper. I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t get to do it last night, so this morning I got up, put water on to boil for coffee, and started a small self-portrait on a stray 5 x 7″ canvas panel primed gray.

I made this much progress in about 25-30 minutes, then went to make coffee. It’s just Ivory Black fluid acrylic and gloss glazing medium:

I had a hard time with it for a while because no matter what I did my face looked Vegas-Elvis bloated, and as if I had a huge double chin lurking just beyond the edge of the picture. The way my chin is cut off at the bottom of the frame didn’t help at all. I wrestled with it, got it to a point where it was good enough, then went to make coffee and give the glazes a chance to dry.

Fortified by caffeine, I came back and added more glazes. Once they were dry, I scumbled white into the light areas:

That’s where it stands so far, after about an hour’s work. I’ve already got what I wanted out of it, but if I can figure out something else I want to try maybe I’ll play with it some more.

And yes, it’s on a canvas panel, and yes, I know commercially-prepared canvas panels are of the Devil. But you know what? I’m going to use them anyway, at least for now. I got the damned things for free, and I know full well that what I’m painting on them isn’t Great Art for the Ages. I am absolutely of the mind that artists should use the best, most stable materials for any work they intend to sell; creating a painting that will look the same 50 or 100 years from now as it did coming off your easel is only fair to the people who buy it. But for playing around, experimenting, learning from one’s mistakes? They’re perfectly fine for that use.

What I do find interesting is that I was able to gesso over last week’s effort without a moment’s hesitation or regret. It wasn’t a very good study, and I wasn’t going to use it as the basis for anything else, so after I snapped a photo of it out came the gesso bucket.

I was never able to do that when I was younger. I used to have a huge stack of truly crappy oil figure studies on canvas, all leftovers from my art school days, and I couldn’t even bring myself to take them off the stretchers and roll them up so I could re-use the stretcher frames. None of them were anything I wanted to display; I kept them all in the basement when I lived in my last house. When the basement flooded, all of them were destroyed, and in the cleanup I discovered that my only real regret was that all those stretcher bars were rendered unsalvageable. In the nine years since then, I haven’t missed any of those studies, or regretted that they were destroyed. And while I haven’t done much work in that nine-year period, the lessons seem to have stuck–keep moving forward. Don’t hang onto anything that doesn’t make you proud you created it. Be willing to destroy in order to create.

Spring has sprung! I think I need a nap…

We’ve all had Bad Hair Days now and again, haven’t we? Well, today I’m having a Bad Computer Day. My scanner, according to my computer, no longer exists. And that’s just for starters. So okay, okay, I’m taking the hint; I’m going to get the hell offline and go do something outside on this pleasant spring day. (Just as soon as I hack out this post.)

This week’s figure-drawing sessions didn’t go as well as I would have liked. I’ve had headaches this week and haven’t been sleeping well, which I think might be due to both low-level seasonal allergies and the fact that all of a sudden there’s a lot more daylight. I’ve been waking up at 7:00 or 7:30 the last few mornings, but I’ve still been stumbling off to bed at my usual 1:00 or 2:00 AM. So I’m going through my annual adjustment to spring, and it’s made me just a wee bit crabby. 

Wednesday night I had no energy at all, but dragged myself across town to the long-pose session nevertheless. I look at attending figure-drawing sessions as the artistic equivalent to going to the gym. Like going to the gym, if I talk myself out of attending one session it will be easier to talk myself out of going to future sessions, and eventually I’ll stop going at all. (I suppose, in the interest of transparency and full disclosure, I should mention that I don’t go to the gym.)

So I used acrylics again, and while the results weren’t disastrous I found myself in a profound state of not-caring. I was just too damned tired to summon any passion for or interest in what I was doing, despite having a really good model on hand and far fewer people in attendance than last week’s crowd. As a result, I turned out a rather uninspired study that looks exactly like something I would have done in art school twenty years ago. In fact, if I dig through all of the old stuff in my basement I bet I’ll find something very much like it.

[Okay, now WordPress is acting up when I try to insert links. What the hell!? Seriously, Computer Gods. I promise to go mow the lawn if you just let me finish this post.]

Last night’s session turned out much better. None of the drawings I did were great, but I did get into the flow of things, and each 20-minute session went by in a flash. It didn’t hurt that we had an attractive model who was good at his job, or that someone had tuned the radio to a rock station, or that I took along some industrial-strength paint stripper cunningly disguised as coffee.  I can’t seem to take decent photographs of my work to save my life (and the scanner is trapped in a state of non-existence), but here’s one of the 20-minute poses, plus the 40-minute pose.

As tired and headache-y as I’ve been this week, I haven’t made much progress on other work. I still have prepatory drawings for three pieces in the works, and thought about posting them, but they’re ugly as sin. Really, they look like the dog’s breakfast. If I do post them, it will be in conjunction with some more refined studies because to look at them now nobody would know what the hell I was trying to do. But I have been playng around with a couple of small pieces over the last week or two, and while both are works in progress, they are far enough along to post. And maybe, by posting them as they are now, I’ll feel more impetus to actually finish them.  

The first is a portrait, done from memory. It’s a tiny wee thing, only 5 x 7″, collage and acrylic on canvas:

The second is total fluff, and I’m doing it just to play with certain colors and maybe a different technique. So far, I’m still fiddling with the underpainting, which is done in Ultramarine Blue and Titanium White. Why blue? Because I felt like it (which is the only reason I need, really). Acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14″:

The original source image came from the cover of an old issue of McCall’s from the late ’50s. I’d cut the image out in order to use it as a collage element (and I might eventually get around to using it for that purpose), but decided to play with a variation on it, instead:

It’s funny, looking at the original. The model is wearing so much makeup, her face looks like she’s been stuccoed. Even under the dead-flat lighting, she looks a bit crusty. It’s the sort of image that sets me to wondering whether that troweled-on look really was considered glamorous, back then. It also makes me think about how technology in image-making and printing has changed our relationship to images, and our expectations for what people should look like in photographs. Am I so used to seeing heavily made-up–yet Photoshop-flawless–models that I can’t help but see 1950s glamour makeup as crude and spackled-on (much in the same way that I, raised on Star Wars and CGI, find 1950s special effects incredibly hokey and obvious)? Would someone back then, when that issue of McCall’s was still on the newsstand, have noticed how hard-pan that model’s foundation was, or how clumpy her mascara? That’s one of those things I’ll have to ask my mother, I suppose.

Okay. That’s enough for now. The lawn beckons…

In which the artist makes many blunders, only to have a happy ending after all.

At last night’s life-drawing session, I became acutely aware of how out-of-shape I am as an artist. And I do mean out-of-shape. While trying to sketch the figure on a canvas set upon an easel, I could feel the strain in my arm, especially in the deltoid muscle. I’m not that much of a marshmallow; really, I’m not. But holding my arm in that high position to draw was very uncomfortable.

As an excuse for last night’s mess, however, that doesn’t hold water. Once I switched over to brushes, and held my arm at a lower angle, the muscle tension went away. Everything that happened after was all my own (un)doing.

The mess started when I decided to experiment by painting the model in acrylics–the first of many not-so-brilliant decisions on my part. The main issue I struggled with wasn’t so much that acrylics dry very quickly (even when used with glazing medium),  but rather that I decided to try painting alla prima with them at all.  My choice in what materials to take with me, and my half-assed state of preparedness, didn’t help either.  

My usual painting method is fussy and painstaking. I start with a detailed drawing, develop a monochrome underpainting, then gradually build up color through glazes and scumbling. I can paint directly in oil with some success, but acrylic is different animal altogether.  So what I tried to do was a radical departure from the way I’ve always painted. I knew it might not work out very well, but experimentation and learning through your failures (as well as your successes) is crucial to one’s development as an artist. Every time you fuck up, you learn something new.  And since I’ve spent too much of my creative life paralyzed, unable to act or create out of fear of fucking up, I decided to go ahead and take the risk and do something different, even if it meant making a mess where other people could see it .

I’ve had a lot of cheap 16 x 20″ canvases and canvas boards lying around unused for years, so I decided why not just go ahead and use them up for things like this? They certainly aren’t fit for any better use. The worst thing that could happen is that I’ll end up with bad, ugly, embarrasing paintings–and is that really so terrible as my younger self used to think? It’s acrylic, for crying out loud. I can easily gesso over my fuck-ups and do other experiments on top, or rip the canvas off the stretchers and re-use them. They don’t represent a huge investment (except perhaps to my own crazed ego).

I pulled a canvas out of the stack in the basement, not bothering to add another coat of gesso. While I usually paint in fluid acrylics, I decided to take the opportunity to use up some of the stray jars and tubes of paint I haven’t touched in ages (after checking to see that it hadn’t dried up after so many years in storage–hey, at least I did that much). I selected a limited palette of Raw Umber and Titanium White (my usual underpainting colors), plus Oxide Red, Yellow Ochre, and Cobalt Blue (because the only Ultramarine I had was fluid acrylic in a great big bottle, and I didn’t want to lug it along). That trio of primaries, it should be pointed out, is one I’ve never used. While Yellow Ochre is a mainstay of my palette, I don’t use Cobalt Blue very often and only use Red Oxide to tint paper and canvases before using other colors on top. 

(If you were to compare last night’s session to a horror film, my selection of that particular palette would be equivalent to the moment when the girl is standing at the top of the basement stairs, and the light doesn’t work, and she knows something’s very wrong down there. And you, in the audience, are thinking, “Don’t go down the stairs, you idiot! The monster/serial killer/alien is down there!” even as you know she’s going to go down those stairs and get eaten/hacked to bits/impregnated with alien spawn anyway.  But I digress…)

See? I really do make art stuff!

Part of getting my creative act together involves the actual making of art. The other part involves getting out in the world, interacting with other artists, and developing some sort of real-life creative social network.

So it dawned on me that it would be a good idea to combine both, by attending life-drawing sessions. 

The first one I went to, on Wednesday night, was held in an artist’s studio way over in the northwest part of town.  There were maybe eight or nine people in attendance, and it was a pleasant, low-key group. I’ll probably go back–it takes me 20 minutes or so to get there, but there’s tons of parking, and on my way home I can easily stop by one of my favorite coffee houses to decompress.

And I do need to decompress afterward, because after two hours of intensely observing the model and drawing like mad, the noise in my head gets really loud and I’m simultaneously wired and exhausted. I suspect that the more sessions I attend, the less frazzled I’ll be by the end of them, but there’s definitely a point in each session when most people seem to hit the wall, and I’d forgotten all about that. (Then again, the last figure drawing session I sat in on was twenty years ago.)

The second one was downtown, in the basement of a gallery–which sounds like it would be awful, but in reality it’s a great space–high-ceilinged, well-lit, with plenty of room to spread out and move around. This one I’ll definitely keep going back to, despite the fact that close-by parking tends to be on the scanty side.

And because this is an art blog, it should have pictures of art, right? Otherwise, I might just as well call it An Art Blog with No Art. And while I call myself Magical Realist, I’m not enough of a Surrealist to do that. So yes, I’ve done it–I’ve finally taken photos (however mediocre) of the drawings from those sessions,  and offer them for your perusal… 

What I’m painting now.

I’ve been back from Dallas for almost a week, and I still don’t have a complete account written. For the moment, suffice it to say that I saw a lot of incredible art, had a great time, and wished I’d decided to stay at least one more full day because there is so much to see in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I missed a lot of stuff at the Dallas Museum of Art because I was simply too overwhelmed to look at any more, and while I made it to the Kimbell the next day I missed other museums entirely.

As I stumbled out of the DMA last Thursday evening, I was still so hyped up from looking at art that I took my time in getting back to my hotel. I needed to unwind, to slow down my racing thoughts, to downshift from looking at things with such intensity. So I wandered the near-deserted streets of downtown Dallas, admiring the way the reddish late-afternoon sunlight illuminated skyscrapers and slanted in between buildings.

I had my camera with me and took a lot of photographs; most of them weren’t so much of the buildings themselves, but rather the way the light hit them. And since I was still so buzzed from looking at paintings, I took a lot of photos of things that were, like, so profound dude when I first saw them, only to discover later that the “Whoah” factor didn’t translate into pixels.   

Some things did translate, however, or at least well enough; even if an image was disappointing I was usually able to recall what was so magical that I had to stop and capture it. I immediately spotted the beginnings of two or three worthwhile paintings in some of them, and for the last few days I’ve been working on prepatory drawings–re-translating the scenes I photographed so I can restore the magic I originally saw in them (and maybe add some of my own).  

It’s forced me to brush up on my rusty perspective-drawing skills, and I’m having to invent new architecture because the buildings in the photos aren’t quite right, but I feel like I’m on the right track with them. I feel like I’ve hooked into something compelling with these particular images, and that I might actually have something to say with them. It sounds crazy (and maybe a bit pathetic) to say it, but for the very first time I’m not sitting here fretting over what to paint about.  I don’t exactly know what the story behind these paintings is just yet, but that’s okay for now; if I keep working on them, I know I’ll figure it out.

On baggage, and dreams about cockroaches.

My flight for Dallas leaves at 6:00 AM, so I’m just going to stay up and get work done before heading off to the airport. I took a nap earler, and I can also sleep on the plane.

Since I’m only staying one night, I hardly need to take anything with me at all. A toothbrush. Deodorant. A clean shirt and a change of underwear. My camera. A book (nothing too big). A sketchbook (because if I don’t, my head will start buzzing with an idea and I’ll be a distracted mess until I can draw it or write it down). An assortment of pens to suit my varied moods. A sweater, just in case. A snack, so I don’t turn into Snarly McBitchpants because my blood sugar’s gone out of whack again.

All of which will fit nicely in my usual bag–a half-sized Trager messenger bag–with room to spare. Unfortunately, there’s a hitch in that plan. Because you see, last night I realized I was bored with the dominant color on the outer flap of my bag (a color that can best be described as “Avada Kedavra green”), so I decided to modify it a bit. I decided to see if it was possible to paint on heavy-duty nylon. (It’s all in the interest of research; I want to see if artists’ acrylics will stand up to extended wear in this particular application. Given the slick, non-absorbent properties of nylon fibers, they might not. BUT I WANNA KNOW.)

So my preferred bag is currently out of commission (which really means that I’ve put a coat of white primer on the areas I want to paint, and it looks like hot buttered ass, and I don’t want to be seen carrying it).

My alternative bag choices are either a big orange purse I like a lot and don’t carry often enough, or my old black nylon briefcase, which usually contains my traveling paint kit (when it hasn’t been appropriated for use as a cat bed). Problem is, the purse isn’t quite big enough and the briefcase is too big–I started to put stuff in it and realized I had tons of extra space, so I added another book, and thought, “Oh, hey, maybe I should take my journal as well.” And then I realized that my box of watercolors was still in the front pocket and decided to leave them–why not? Because I have been known to wake up in hotel rooms at 3:00 AM, wishing I could paint. At any rate, all that cavernous space in the briefcase begs to be filled, but if I fill it I’ll end up schlepping a whole lot of crap I don’t need all over downtown Dallas, and maybe Fort Worth, for that matter.

In the past week, I’ve been faced with 1) an unexpectedly massive bill, and 2) a quandary about what bag to take to Dallas for a one-night stay. And guess which problem has involved the most mental exertion on my part?

Oh, and while I was taking a nap earlier I had a dream that I was pitching an idea for a new series of collectors’ plates to the Franklin Mint. In an attempt to interest a younger, more affluent demographic in buying collectors’ plates I proposed a series based on classics of Existential literature; the first of which would pay homage to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I already had preliminary studies of the artwork done, and was showing it to a bunch of bewildered, balding executives in navy-blue suits, who all looked alike.

“And here’s where Gregor Samsa wakes up, only to discover he has turned into a giant insect,” I said, holding up a painting for them to see.

“But that’s a cockroach!” one of the bluesuits replied. “We can’t put cockroaches on our products!”

“Look,” another bluesuit said, “We realize you’re trying to be hip and ironic, but–”

“No, I’m not,” I objected. “These aren’t meant to be ironic at all. Because if ever there was an artform totally devoid of irony, it’s collectors’ plates.”

And that’s when I awoke, with the idea that I should take up china painting–one of the most ladylike, blue-hair-and-mothballs hobbies imaginable–and put that medium to all sorts of provocative and subversive ends. And cockroaches would definitely have to come into play, somehow, somewhere, if only to prove the bluesuits wrong.

Creating space.

I haven’t been blogging because I’ve been painting. Simple as that.

And when I haven’t been painting, I’ve been trying to impose some sort of order on my studio.

I own a house, and I live alone, which means I can use any room in the house as a studio. I’ve chosen the living room because it’s the largest room in the house; being a hermit, it’s not as if I’m going to be short of space for entertaining by doing so. And since the room is large (roughly 12 x 25′), I can fit a lot of stuff in there. And that? That, kids, has turned out to be a problem.

If I have space, I will fill it–unless I exert constant vigilance in keeping the clutter at bay. And it’s not really an organizational problem; I can definitely keep things organized. The problem is that I have too much shit in my studio, and even if perfectly organized it’s still too much perfectly organized shit.   

My tolerance for visual clutter in my workspace has dwindled over the years. I used to be able to work in spaces where there was a lot of “stuff’ stacked everywhere, but I can’t do it anymore. I’m trying to paint, and not only do I have to move shit out of the way in order to do so but I’m constantly distracted by the sight of it. I have 300 square feet of work space, but all of the excess shit in my studio makes if feel as if the walls are closing in. And by “shit” I don’t mean junk, either–it’s stretched canvases, stretcher bars, packages of paper, extra bottles and tubes of paint, gallons of medium, and boxes of supplies I rarely use (colored pencils, pastels, watercolor, various inks). It’s objects I intend to paint, such as boxes and small pieces of furniture. It’s all the picture frames I’ve picked up cheap at thrift stores and yard sales. It’s old student paintings and craft items and portfolios of old drawings I’ve made and don’t much care for, but still don’t have the heart to get rid of, .

It’s a lot of shit, but it’s good shit.

So I’ve decided to take one of the rooms in the basement and convert it into art/craft/sewing supply storage. Shit Central, if you will. I already had some shelving, so I put it up over the weekend and moved a lot of stuff down there. I need more shelving (which means a trip to IKEA–yay!), and I need cardboard file boxes, but so far it’s working out very well. Already I have more breathing room, and feel much less tense and crabby when I enter my studio.

The only things I’m keeping in the studio itself are my easels, some basic furniture, and whatever supplies I need to do the projects at hand. If I decide to focus only on oils for a while, I’ll put the acrylics away. If I want to work in watercolor, all I have to do is go downstairs and bring the box of watercolors up.

So there you have it. I think I’ll go move a few more things downstairs, now, before I go back to painting.