Painting...

There was This Day,
There was This Shadow,
There was This Woman,
There was This Blue.

There was No Fame.
There was No Reason.
There was No Winner.
There was No Immortality.

Only

This Shaft of Light
This Sharp Blast,
This Foundering Ship
This Lost Child,
This Man Walking,
This Stream Flowing,
This Arc of Passion,

And

These Hands
These Eyes
This Ochre Clay
This Gold Foil
This Deadly Yellow, but USE IT ANYWAY
This MAGIC Poison White
This Blue from Gold-Flecked Stone
This Green from a Copper Pot
This Short Life
This Single Vision.

Inspired by Discovering that the Fiction I'm Writing Is about My Own Ancestors

The Past Will Be Heard

My Painting as it Hangs in the Show!

"The World is Out There" hanging in the SDMAAG show
"Contemprary Expressionism: the Creative Spirit"
Lyceum Gallery

Sold Paintings

At the Julian Arts Guild Fall Show this past weekend, I sold two paintings. I was stunned and happy. These are the sold paintings:

Descanso Falls on a December Afternoon

Rainy Evening

Persistence of Cedar

There was a guy posting on Facebook some time back (when I was "on" Facebook) who complained that there was Title 9 for women artists and that's what wrecked art and why he could never get into juried shows (I think that was his bitch)? I just now looked at the list of artists and works for the show into which my painting of the woman and the bunnies was accepted. Out of the 59 works, it looks as if there are 4 -- possibly 5 -- male artists. It's hard to tell from some of the names -- but definitely a minority. 

The percentage flips completely for artists who are famous enough to make it into Wikipedia's list of American artists. I wonder what would happen if, instead of having names or any other gender-reflecting moniker, we all had numbers, like if we used the last four digits of our social security number (which I'm thinking of doing from now on) or initials (which I could do easily since my first name isn't part of my signature). 

Another weird thing -- I recently helped hang the fall show up in Julian (Cripple Creek of So. Cal). Like last time, it was fun, even though it was 88 degrees and 100% humidity and raining. It was like working in the tropics. It's really hard to keep one's mouth shut in this situation because there is always bad art. Somehow I think bad art is objectively bad and I've painted some (I think my cows by the fence turned out to be bad art -- it looks like two painters painted it). As it's not a juried show, we have to hang whatever we have. Last time some people left 15 - 20 paintings (bad paintings) and we had to hang them. This time the woman coordinating the show said, "No more than 8 by any one artist." People got angry, but I still think that's a lot. I think it should be four. I think the show would be better with fewer and better pieces, but think god I don't make make decisions for them and never will. 

There were a couple of pieces that were just viscerally disturbing and made one want to recommend rapid mental health counseling to the painters. This time I was outspoken and said, "Don't hang that beside my table. I want to sell stuff. That's one of the most terrifying pictures I've ever seen." Fortunately, it wasn't the work of anyone there.

Then my colleague rifled through a rack of another artist's watercolors and found a painting of grapes she liked very much. I think what someone likes or doesn't like is personal taste completely and has little to do with whether something is art or not. She held it up and said, "There, Martha, that's art." I thought, "No it isn't." but I didn't say anything beyond, "It's very pretty" and it was/is.

I've been reading a book about Dada and it's interesting how each generation seems to come up with the same idea that art is going to change the world, that art is a revolution. It's cool having lived long enough to know that most people are just what the young call "going through the motions" (I no longer see it that way) and would be doing the same thing at any time or place in human history, and the young artist HAS to (a biological imperative?) see art as a revolution. Me too. It was a work of art that was the first step in my getting kicked out of college. I had the experience every romantic young artist dreams of. I installed a sculpture. Three cedar fence posts, a string of plastic flags and a For Sale sign from a real estate company (all salient information scraped off). The IDEA was this small triangle represented the last empty space on the planet. Cedar, steel and plastic don't rot (or they take a long time) meant to be a little note of irony... It was 1970. People driving by naturally thought the college was for sale. I didn't know the college was in financial trouble or anything about that; I didn't relate my sculpture to the college at all. Two things happened. 1) The college tore down the sculpture. 2) Because, when it was time to turn it in, there was nothing left of it but three holes I failed the project. 

14 years later, the college was defunct and I went to interview for a teaching job at a language school that used my dorm for offices and classrooms. I asked the janitor if I could see my room. He let me in. I opened the closet. One of the fenceposts -- the only thing I was able to recover from the sculpture -- was still in the closet. In my opinion that was a tremendously successful piece of installation art, but no one knew what it meant, that it had been there or that it persisted. In thinking about my own self as an artist I keep returning to what the one and only OKCupid date (date?), Rocky, said, "Ah yes, the persistence of the artistic impulse. You need to see 'In the Realms of the Unreal'." 

In getting a painting accepted into an Expressionist show I learned a lot. A long time ago, when I had my show in Denver, my brother said, "You're an abstract expressionist," I didn't know what he meant. In attempting to learn what expressionism IS I haven't found a clear answer, either. In the work of painting, I've pretty nearly exhausted my interest in landscapes and even in cowscapes. It's now for me a matter of finding the place where my perception of the world intersects with the world as it is. 

So, I don't know. 

"The World Is Out There" -- First gallery show!

The World Is Out There
Oil on Ampersand Gessobord, 20 x 16

I was discouraged about painting and shut down my Etsy store. Then...at the beginning of the summer I entered a juried show put on by the Art Guild of the San Diego Museum of Art. The show is called, "Contemporary Expressionism; The Creative Spirit." 

I thought -- think -- of myself as an expressionist painter and the paintings I've most enjoyed doing are those that I began thinking of painting moments in my life that marked major changes. I wanted these to be figurative and self-portraits without being pictures of me. I think of myself as a person wandering around the world doing my job and so on and also some other person who maybe has no body; she's something else. Anyway, I've done three of these paintings so far. I submitted this one to the show and it was accepted.

It's going to hang in the Lyceum Gallery in Horton Plaza which is really amazing and a long way from the Descanso Townhall. So, while I am not going to quit my day job and I still haven't really sold any paintings, I'm very happy about this, especially because this is a painting that was not painted to please anyone. It started out to be the painting of NYC I did for Ben and Sandi, but the surface was too big and the idea of painting it in oil was daunting. It cried out to be a water color, so I wiped off the paint I could and put the panel away. I pulled it out again to paint on some time last year. I painted the sofa and I painted over the black a couple of times. 

I got the figure from an image of Sean Connery walking out of a room in a James Bond movie. There was something captivating about the finality of his exit and I liked the shapes, the rectangles that were broken by his movement which, like the figure in my painting, was also, somehow, angular.

I painted and unpainted finally realizing what I wanted to do with it. She is wearing the Diane von Furstenberg dress Bess Altfeld gave me back in the late '70's when I was divorcing Matt. I remember wearing it to the hearing and to many other things. I loved this dress. It may be my lifetime favorite dress. She's also wearing shoes I owned. She is me. I made decisions about the paint, too. The colors are all "old" colors -- Venetian red, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, lamp black. There is bronze dust gold on the carved wood of the sofa and a bit on the wall to her left. I wanted it to go with the other painting in this series I had done which is now named "Danae."

This is the language I submitted with the painting:

Artwork Description

"This painting is 16 x 20, framed size, 19 x 23, oil on Ampersand Gessobord. I chose "old fashioned" pigments such as ultramarine blue, Venetian red, ivory black, terre vert, burnt Sienna and alizarin crimson along with Gamblin's Bright Gold (made with bronze flakes) for this painting because it is a painting of painting. I wanted the colors to be as close as possible to colors used to dye yarn used in medieval tapestries and for coloring illuminated manuscripts. 

This painting turned out to be a journey into self and into painting. I had begun a painting for a friend on this board, but didn't like it, put the board away and did that painting as a water color. The black underpainting here, that looks like a chalkboard or an asphalt street (which is what it was originally meant to represent) is what remains of that picture. Then I saw a James Bond movie (!) in which Sean Connery walked very powerfully out of a door. That image rested in my mind for weeks, and I realized I wanted to paint it. Later, I saw a photo of this velvet sofa, and I wanted to paint it. I painted the sofa first. Through its many mutations, this painting seemed to be taking me somewhere to show me something. When I realized I was painting myself, I dressed "me" in my favorite dress EVER (owned in the seventies) and red "disco" heels. Then I knew I was painting the tension between the faded word "Stop" and this woman's determined exit. That is the creative spirit; movement, specifically this movement. A painting, before it is begun, still in the mind of the artist, is really unknown; it has not yet happened. It's that doorway leading to life’s tapestry of mystery, color, image and mind, waiting for the artist to have the courage to walk resolutely out the door."

There are prizes, and of course I'd like to win something, but most of all I think it's really cool that this year I got a painting in the Del Mar Fair and now a painting in a real show, downtown in San Diego.

I'm really excited about this. I hope I get the nerve to go to the reception. I wish at times I had a boyfriend, but I don't and that's pretty much that. Here's the email I received:

Dear Martha Ann Kennedy,

mindwanderweg@gmail.com

The San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild would like to congratulate you 

on your acceptance into 

Contemporary Expressionism -The Creative Spirit 

ACCEPTED ENTRY: The World Is Out There__ 

Please download delivery instructions for important information and labels for your artwork:

http://www.sdmaag.org/delivery-instructions-contemporary-expressionism

And here is information about the show.

More information: Next Wednesday, we are hanging our Contemporary Expressionism - The Creative Spirit International Art Exhibition 2013 at the Lyceum Gallery at Horton Plaza, downtown San Diego.  The exhibition will be on view from September 7 through October 13 in conjunction with the San Diego Repertory Theatre play A Weekend with Picasso - www.sdrep.org/show.php?id=92#.  The exhibition is already on the Guild website - please take a look: Online Exhibition.   We very much appreciate all the work our website liaison Julianne Ricksecker has done putting up the online exhibition.

"Our thanks go to our juror, Dr. Derrick R. Cartwright, Director of University Galleries, University of San Diego, and former executive director of The San Diego Museum of Art, who took the time to go through over 160 entries and select 59 artworks for the exhibition.  Once we have hung the show, Dr. Cartwright will select three prizewinners which will be announced at the Friday, September 13, opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

The painting show is part of a whole "happening" (when will us Baby-Boomers just stop with this I wonder) at the San Diego Repertory Theater downtown built around a play called "A Weekend with Picasso." The play is in Spanish... Here's the blurb from the REP website about the show. I can't believe my little painting is going to be "curated" by the former director of the San Diego Art Museum. It's extremely cool and extremely strange but I'm very happy about all of it. It takes some of the fear out of the other stuff that's going on... 

In fact, Picasso had a big influence on me as an artist. When I went to Washington DC way long ago, 1979, to take the Foreign Service Test, I went to the National Gallery. It was a great time. It was my first time alone in a major city looking at art and I discovered that is something I LOVE to do. I saw Picasso's linoleum cuts and I loved them. I read about them, how he did them, on the little cards beside the pictures. I came home and did linocuts just like Picasso, using a spoon to make the contact between the "plate" and the paper. It took a while for me to find the best paper for this, but I ended up using hand made paper from India. If I had a little more space in my shed I'd try it again, I think. Maybe when it's not quite so hot and I can hang them on the clothes line. It was so fun, it was so fun to be released from "getting it right" which is still a hang up for me and maybe for every other artist. So, I think it's cool that my very first real exhibit is in conjunction with a play about Picasso. It's quite Fellinesque, too, as Picasso was Fellini's muse (as Fellini has often been mine). My explanation for my painting echoes Fellini, something I didn't realize when I wrote it. But it hearkens back to a quotation I love and that anyone can find at the end of this blog.

"The San Diego Artist Guild Presents Contemporary Expressionism The Creative Spirit In the Lyceum Gallery Sept. 6 – Oct. 6, 2013 Opening Night Reception: Friday, Sept. 13 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m As the Father of Modern Art, Pablo Picasso had enormous influence on those artists who came after him. This international exhibition features works that honor the spirit of Picasso. Enjoy this showcase of contemporary expressionism curated by Derrick Cartwight, the director of the San Diego Museum of Art from 2004 to 2009. 

See more at: http://www.scatenadaniels.com/san-diego-rep-presents-a-weekend-with-pablo-picasso-spanish-languages-performances-added/#sthash.FXkPCjrw.dpuf"

I am NOT an impressionist

Wow. I just did an awful painting and hated every minute of it. It's an apple tree. I wanted to paint like someone else and I didn't even paint like her or like myself, I just used a shitload of expensive paint. I will now go scrape it off.

Fafner

When I was an undergraduate at Colorado Womens College I worked as a nude model at my school and for adult ed programs around east Denver. Once I went to pose for an adult ed class and, for some reason (which I have since thought about and decided to ignore all ugly possibilities) the teacher wanted to take slides to use in other classes. I gave him permission.

The year before my friend Susie had gone shopping with me and together we bought a formal for the Christmas dance, the Hanging of the Greens. She saw me in a way I had never seen myself (and never saw myself) and she picked out a purple jersey dress with a low cut neckline. It was gorgeous and gorgeous on me. We also picked out a purple pendant of a dragon in relief, with gold chains for me to wear with the dress. It was an medieval looking outfit (not surprising since Camelot style clothing was still a fad at the time) and I liked it very much.

For some reason, the evening I was photographed by that art teacher, I was wearing the pendant.

In this series of self-portraits (self being not so much  myself as an image, but portraits of strange or defining moments) I've decided I want to include that moment. It was strange to be photographed this way. I remember feeling a sense of defiance, rebelliousness, against my mother's insane, aggressive, accusatory prudishness and her certainty that I was sexually active -- long before I actually was. There was a tug-of-war, a tension, I believe within her, but certainly between she and my father. My father believed people were sexual beings, that sex was natural between men and women and should be fun. My mother -- I do not know what she thought beyond her notion (accurate, I believe) that sex for women is not the same as sex for men. Other than that, I only know what she did.

This is a drawing of a painting to be.

"The World Is Out There"

I just entered this painting in a contest, "Contemporary Expressionism -- The Creative Spirit" in the San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild contest. The contest is described as:

In conjunction with the play A Weekend with Pablo Picasso, the San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild presents the juried exhibition Contemporary Expressionism: The Creative Spirit at Lyceum Gallery, San Diego, California.

The World Is Out There

I had to write a description of this painting.

This painting is 18 x 24, oil on Ampersand Gessobord. I chose "old fashioned" pigments such as ultramarine blue, Venetian red, ivory black, terre vert, burnt Sienna and alizarin crimson along with Gamblin's Bright Gold (made with bronze flakes) for this painting because it is a painting of painting. I wanted the colors to be as close as possible to colors used to dye yarn used in medieval tapestries and for coloring illuminated manuscripts. 

This painting turned out to be a journey into self and into painting. I had begun a painting for a friend on this board, but didn't like it, put the board away and did that painting as a water color. The black underpainting here, that looks like a chalkboard or an asphalt street (which is what it was originally meant to represent) is what remains of that picture. Then I saw a James Bond movie (!) in which Sean Connery walked very powerfully out of a door. That image rested in my mind for weeks, and I realized I wanted to paint it. Later, I saw a photo of this velvet sofa, and I wanted to paint it. I painted the sofa first. Through its many mutations, this painting seemed to be taking me somewhere to show me something. When I realized I was painting myself, I dressed "me" in my favorite dress EVER (owned in the seventies) and red "disco" heels. Then I knew I was painting the tension between the faded word "Stop" and this woman's determined exit. That is the creative spirit; movement, specifically this movement. A painting, before it is begun, still in the mind of the artist, is really unknown; it has not yet happened. It's that doorway leading to life’s tapestry of mystery, color, image and mind, waiting for the artist to have the courage to walk resolutely out the door.

Ancestors

"How all in a single whole doth weave, one in the other works and lives." Goethe, Faust

This painting came about when I learned that my ancestors came from Switzerland and that the people I'd written about in the book  now known as "Rudolf" were essentially the same people with almost the same names.

Descanso Valley -- Painting for Descanso Days

Descanso Valley in Winter, oil on gesso board, 5 x 7

This painting will be raffled at Descanso Days, July 13, at the Descanso Townhall. The proceeds will go for Townhall restoration.

The Cows of Summer

This will possibly be my "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" painting

Second pass at the 25 Cows

8 x 10 oil for the raffle at Descanso Days -- in progress

Garnet Peak Trail After the Fire

Garnet Peak Trail Looking West toward Garnet Peak, Winter, 2004 after the Cedar Fire

San Diego County Fair!

Cornflowers, Oil on Ampersand Deep Cradled Gessobord

I feel like a "real" artist right now. Last week I helped hang the Spring Show for the Julian Arts Guild. A couple of days later, I learned that I had one painting out of four submissions accepted to hang at the San Diego County Fair. Today I drove all the way up to Del Mar to take my little painting of cornflowers.

As much as I didn't want to go up there, I kept thinking that I paid for the opportunity to be judged and no doubt THOUSANDS of little ladies such as myself have painted flowers this year and MINE was picked to hang.  I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer number of entries they must have gone through to pick this small painting (8 x 10). I felt like I owed this painting the $12 in gas it took to haul it up there (and the same amount to haul it back).

When I got there I was very impressed by the way everything works! What a great system they've developed over all these years. I was in there, treated very well, they had everything ready for all of us to just go in, drop off our work and leave. We were all invited to a reception for the arts show before the fair itself opens and we get two special parking passes. I'm really happy I didn't chicken out!

Taste of Julian Event Saturday, April 13

I will be doing a "painting demonstration" (and grading midterms!) at Julian Tea and Cottage Arts Saturday, April 13. The event is "Taste of Julian." I was nervous and worried about finishing my school work but got gently pushed by another member of Julian Arts Guild. I went to Julian this past Thursday to meet the owner of this shop. She was a lot smarter than I when it comes to promoting a business clearly as she's had her tea shop in Julian for 18 years. At the end of the meeting, I was ready to come home and make brochures and whatever else I needed to do. She also sent me home with this table to paint. It belonged to her mother-in-law. 

So, for fun, I'm posting the table's progress! 

Interior 2

Finished! I liked it until I saw the picture below...

Now that it's finished, I like this version the best. I can't see me going out there and "unpainting" all that, though.

I loved my first shot at an interior/exterior so much, I'm trying another. I am not sure where these images come from. These are in process, wet paint, poor light, but I like the painting so far!

Got up this morning and really didn't like the green and preferred the underpainting, so my first job was getting rid of the green! 

Cities!

NYC in Red for Sandi, 2013

Chicago with Peter, 1981

Not my usual style or subject matter, but there is precedent for this kind of painting. Years ago I did a city scape of Denver in handmade paper and water color, and before that was this amazing thing of Chicago as it felt to me during/after my visit to an extremely problematic boyfriend.