On and Off

I haven't posted in a while and haven't painted in a while. After the little show/arts and crafts fair I wasn't in a mood, though I've done a couple small paintings they both suck and I am not sure why I did them; just to do them, I guess, which is perfectly fine.

From time to time I read something someone has to say about painting, and I realize that thinking about painting in that way doesn't make me want to paint. I find this kind of thinking, knowing, takes my joy away. Not words, color and a surface and a question and something to see.

Why? What is painting to me that makes it different? I don't know. Writing is a more disciplined combination of inspiration and craft; teaching is craft mixed with a tincture of inspiration. Dealing with the details of life, paying bills, registering the car, dealing with taxes is craft and nothing else. I think painting is, for me the OPPOSITE end of what appears to be a continuum. Painting is craft learned through joy just as dealing with everyday annoyances is joy (relief?) acquired through craft.

Entering a Contest!

Willow Leaves Sold

I decided to take the advice of Phebe Burnham, an artist (and great lady!) I met at the Descanso Arts and Crafts Fair and enter paintings in a juried contest in Balboa Park, in Spanish Village. I remember so many late Sunday afternoons after going to the zoo when I would wander through the little studios that make up Spanish Village. It's a "mini" neighborhood, a collection of smaller than normal houses built during WWII to fool the Japanese into thinking they were actually higher up in the air than they were. This would have made them easier targets for guys on the ground to hit. San Diego at that time must have been amazing looking, covered in camouflage nets with neighborhoods painted on them and a few of these scaled down neighborhoods to add to the illusion.




Yesterday I mailed in my entry fee. I plan to enter two paintings in the 1 foot show and one in the normal show because the frame on that painting disqualifies it from the one-foot show. We take our paintings down there on March 1; they are judged in "real life" not from an electronic submission, and the reception for the winners is March 4.

Berkeley Pit Mine - reframed in copper

Guatay Mountain in April

Sold!

Cottonwood in a Blizzard on Viejas Boulevard, Descanso CA
5x7 oil on Ampersand Gesso board

Old School

I decided to frame this in an ornate, old-style frame after seeing The Power of Art by Simon Schama and all of Van Gogh's paintings framed in this way. It seemed a lovely counterpoint to the brush strokes and light/dark interplay of impressionist painting, the raw color and direct strokes.

It took a while to find this frame, but I think it's perfect. The gold leads the viewer onto the trail, while the green areas, glossy and solid, focus the eye on the vortex made by the overhanging trees, their shadows, the up-reaching Manzanita, grass and wild-flowers as the trail narrows and heads up the mountain.

Pryor Mountains -- waiting for the horses!

This is a scene from a photo sent by a friend -- but the place is very familiar; it is the Pryor Mountains south of Billings! We'll see if I'm able to paint the small herd of wild horses grazing on the grass in the foreground of the picture!

So Much Fun!

This is an apple out of my refrigerator. It's also the first oil I've ever done directly from the subject without using a photo or a drawing. I like it a lot -- it's Gamblin Oil Paints on a 5 x 7 inch Ampersand Gesso Board. So much fun!

Small Paintings, Getting Ready for the Arts and Craft Fair November 19

The River Glatt, Wallisellen, Switzerland

Willow Leaves in Early Summer with Indian Paintbrush Blooming Behind

In the summer of 2000 I was in Milan. It was the kind of adventure no one wants; I’d gone in pursuit of promised love that wasn’t there. I found myself having to salvage a good experience out of a bad one. I wandered around the city every day and surprised myself constantly by what I thought I knew but didn’t, for example that there is no way of reproducing Leonardo’s Last Supper.

At the Sforza Castle -- which was filled with art before 2001, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent war, which Italy joined on the side of the Americans -- I saw a couple of fresco panels. One was St. Francis and the other Vulcan. I learned some years later where most of the paint had come from, the caves near Verona, but at that moment I saw fresco for the first time. It was luminescent, gorgeous, reflective, alive. Compared to the oil paintings hanging nearby, the frescoes were multi-dimensional, vivid while the oils were flat; greasy paint rubbed over a rather arbitrary and uncooperative surface. That’s how it seemed to me.

I resolved (partly because of the novel, Martin of Gfenn, my novel, the protagonist is a fresco painter) to take classes in fresco painting. I did this in 2006.

It was marginal. There’s a lot of work involved in fresco that has nothing to do with paint. Just getting the plaster to stick to the painting surface is hard work. The rest I liked; I liked the time limit (paint now or forget it), I adored mixing the pigment and I liked the surface. It was clearly NOT practical for a little person who lives alone and has a full time job, though. The school was in Howard Hughes former airplane hangar...

Recently I tried a new painting product, Ampersand Gesso Board. It is hardboard (like masonite) coated on the rough side with true gesso; gesso is the Italian word for chalk. In other words, it’s a “fresco” surface. I have been painting in oils and have seen how this amazing surface returns the luminosity of the frescoes with which I fell in love. The colors don’t flatten on this surface as they do on canvas. Ultramarine blue retains the miraculous sparkling beauty of the Virgin’s robes in medieval fresco, Giotto’s frescoes, for example. I paint WITH this surface whereas with canvas, I paint ON it.  I think the difference comes through clearly on these two small paintings, each 5 x 7, on Ampersand Gesso Board.