Trying to break through old patterns using patterns

Geez!  I can't believe it's been a week since I last posted anything - a flurry of posts then nothing!  I've been busy in the studio despite that.

Last Friday we took my youngest to college for his Freshman year.  Since then each day i've been checking my email frequently, hoping for a missive from him, telling about the good times he's having.  I've received a total of 20 lines, 2 of which regarded money.  Yes, well.  I guess I'd better get used to it!

In the meantime, I've been walking with my friend Lynn, a 65-year-old woman who runs marathons and is planning an ascent of Mount Kilamanjaro for February 2011.  I am so blessed to have her in my life.  She's helping me get in shape, but she also inspires me like crazy because of how she lives her life.  I love spending time with her!

The way I got to know her was through her modeling for me.  She saw my 12 Naked Men show in Petersburg and told me she'd like to model for me.  Unfortunately I couldn't read her email address accurately so couldn't get in touch with her that time around, but luckily she found me again at Crossroads when I was showing The Dancer at 89.  She was adamant that she wanted to model for me so we set up a time right then and there.

Bling Lady was the first piece I did of her from that session.  I have several other pieces I'd like to do from then, but haven't gotten around to them yet. 

A couple of months after I first photographed her, she told me her sister and neice were going to be in town and she'd like to bring them over to see the painting.  I told her that would be fine and if they wanted to model while they were here, that would be great too (just kidding!).  Lynn took me seriously and told them that's what they were going to do. 

We had a great time in the studio that day!  Her sister and neice were wonderful models.  The three of them were so at ease with themselves and each other.  I got some fabulous shots and have painted a picture of them already.  I'm not at liberty to show it because, though they're comfortable with my painting their faces with their body, they prefer me not to show them on the internet.  Totally fine.

One of the props we used that day was a fake fur coat Chris had just gotten me for my birthday.  I turned 50 and his gift to me was to take me shopping for a winter coat because mine was getting worn out after 8 years of constant use.  I was looking for another practical piece to replace it, but then Isaw these crazy floor length fur coats.  I tried on a white one with a huge hood just for kicks.  I actually LOVED it!  I felt like a fairy princess snow queen.  Not the look I usually aim for, but I loved it!  I tried on more and more of the coats and told Chris that I was actually going to get one of them!  In the end I bought two - a short one I wear almost daily and a floor length one that looks like a racoon coat from the 50's or whenever it was the guys wore those in college.  I love it!  I haven't actually worn it out of the house yet because I don't quite have the gall to show up with it on anywhere - I don't really go anywhere that calls for a fur coat - but I'm working on it!  Maybe by this winter I'll have come up with someplace - maybe I'll wear it at my opening in October despite the heat in the building with 100's of people crowding around.  Or not.

At any rate, I brought it out to show to Lynn and her sister and neice.  They loved them and started clowning around in them.  Of course I snapped pictures while they were playing.  They're very fun!

That's the back story.

A couple of weeks ago when Lynn and I were walking, she was telling me what she thought of the paintings I'd done during Tom's workshop.  She LOVED the Jenny Saville one.  She said that's how she feels!  Like that paint, those colors, that energy!  She wanted to know why I didn't paint her that way.  She said she liked the piece I did of her, but it was so calm and restrained - why didn't I do this with her?

Well!  I'd been wanting to try such unrestrained painting ever since the workshop, but I'd built up in my mind that my models might be bothered by it (is that true, models???) - that they might find such outrageous energy shameful or ugly or excessive - can you tell what my judgments are?  Yet that was exactly what I wanted to do. 

And here Lynn was giving me permission and asking me to do it with her painting!  That evening I went out to the studio and started playing with Adobe and modifying some of the photos I have of Lynn.  The one on the left is the one I played with the most.  She loved it!  I don't know that I'll paint it like this, but it could give me a good start for getting wilder with the colors and the energy.

The thing that is difficult for me is to recognize that crazy colors and wildly energetic looking doesn't mean random, wild strokes with equal intensity to the mark making.  Those strokes have to be every bit as careful as the way I normally work.  So really, the painting isn't different except in the colors I would use.  At some level I'm looking to be more expressive with the strokes too.  It's the process I'm in, I guess.

As an intermediate step, I decided to work on a piece of Lynn in the fur coat.  I really love her expression and her pose and figured I could have some fun with it.

The first picture was the beginning.  I decided to put a very bold color down for the background colors and to play with the colors in the coat.  I regret the colors in the coat.  I don't like how greenish the yellow is.  Lynn's coloring is pinker than that, so I find it jarring, but I'm not done yet!

I decided to paint her body completely realistically and make it as beautifully rendered as I could manage then play with the coat and background, sort of like Gustav Klimt did his women.  As you can see in this image, the face and hands are painted very realistically (except for his color choice perhaps - she's a bit too blue and pale to look completely realistic), then the rest of it is full of incredible patterns.  The piece is a portrait, but clearly it's more about the patterns.  I haven't decided if I want to go that far or not.  I love drawing patterns.  It's how I doodle.  I would love to figure out how to combine both things - patterns and portraits - but so far I haven't been able to see how to do it.  I could take that chance in this painting, but, frankly, I've gotten attached to the outcome and want to make it pretty.  I'm afraid to screw it up.

Writing that makes me know it's the only choice I really have.  I have to let myself play.  Otherwise why should I even bother doing art?  If I don't take a chance, I should just close up shop and go home.

Yikes!  Here are some of the patterns I've done before.  OK.  I'm ready!  They're gonna be in the painting!  Wish me luck!

Workin' my stuff

It took me a while to build up my courage to start on the new canvas.  For one thing, I asked Chris to make it 40"x60" then decided to reduce the size to 30"x45" but regrettably forgot to mention that to Chris (!), so when I came home from teaching Tuesday, he had already made it the larger size.  Intimidating!  It has ended up being perfect - I'm loving the larger size - but it made it a little harder for me to get going.

Plus I couldn't figure out how to incorporate all the new stuff I learned from Thomas - Jenny Saville?  Freud?  Rembrandt?  Whose lead should I follow?

I took out my books by each of them plus another 10 or so books with other nudes in them and looked to see which sort of image I wanted to end up with.  The interesting thing was that none of the pictures looked like I wanted mine to look.  The colors were off, or they were too extreme, or not extreme enough, or they distorted the figure - whatever.  Though I didn't quite have a vision of how I wanted mine to end up, I couldn't find it in the books either.

I decided that was a good thing and it meant I was doing something unique, so I began!

I mixed up a bunch of colors I saw in her flesh - purple, pink, green, burnt sienna.  I decided to use a light green for cool and alizarin crimson mixed with vermillion for hot colors with enough dioxinine violet in there to deepen the shadows.  For those of you for whom that last sentence was Greek, what I mean is this:  when I look at a photograph or a person I want to paint, I think about values - where the lights and shadows are.  Then I take that one step further and consider where the woman's flesh looks warm and cool.  Creating those contrasts helps bring the form forward or send it back, thus creating a stronger illusion of three dimensionality.  If an artist accentuates the cool colors, the figure will be less appealing in most cases - more corpse-like perhaps.  If she focuses on the hot colors, the body looks more sweltering and full of life.  I think Freud focuses on cool greys, and Saville has hotter colors in her works.

In the picture of my palette(s), you can obviously see the darks and lights, but perhaps the hots and cools are evident also.  There are some cool greens on the left, and the oranges and reds and browns are on the right.

I put a lot of turpenoid on my brush then picked up a gob of paint - the turpenoid thinned out the paint a lot so it would drip and run and go on smoothly.  I worked in the shadow areas mostly because I wanted to get some interesting color into those so the piece would feel strong.

My next step surprised me - I had thought I might let the darks dry like that then come back in with the lights later, but instead I picked up some of the light green with my brush and started putting it in.  The brush was large - 3" - twice the size I usually use - so I didn't have a lot of control - a good thing, in my case!  I picked up some of the dark colors accidentally.  That ended up spreading the shadows and modifying them in lovely ways. 

After that, I took a smaller brush and did some work on her face.  I did a lot of it with larger brushes, but knew I wanted a better level of detail there, so I let myself use smaller ones.  After that I put in the curtains in the background and worked some areas up more.  I especially focused on the hand but was excited by how that went.  I'd put down the shadows and finger delineations carefully even though they looked like sausages hanging off her arm.  When I went back in with the right colors and a slightly smaller brush, I was surprised  how easily I could move the paint around and get an accurate-looking rendering quite quickly.  I'm finding it helps a lot to have so much paint on the canvas.  I'm used to working with it much thinner.

Today I want to refine her facial features and some shadows which seem a bit off.  Her left leg seems odd too, so I'll check on that.  Otherwise I'm feeling like she's pretty much done.  All that huge canvas in about 6 hours.  Ones that size usually take weeks.  I think it's the difference in confidence and looseness and trusting that I can say what I want to say in broader strokes. 

Dear Chris - now he's going to have to spend the weekend making me more canvases! 

Musings from the Studio

I haven't gotten into the studio since the workshop ended, but my head has been there almost full time.  I've been thinking a lot about what I'm going to do next.  I feel so freed from my normal constraints after travelling into Saville- and Freud-land.  (See previous post if you have no clue what I'm alluding to!)  I can see many more ways to apply paint, many of which fit with my yearning to explore my inner landscape more fully.  I have a feeling that my work will shift from here on out - permanently?  temporarily?  no idea.  But it feels great to have all these thoughts and ideas and visions in my head and now to have some idea of how to realize them in the physical world.  Fun is coming!!

More from Thomas Bosket's workshop

Whenever I work with Thomas, I do brand new things which challenge and exite me.  I go to lands hitherto unknown to me.  I learn things I didn't know existed. 

There's the saying, "Reach for the stars and you may just reach the moon" - or something like that - the idea being that going way far out and reaching high at least gets you further than you'd be if you hadn't left your comfortable easy seat. 

It's like that for me with Thomas.  I am reaching for the stars.  Ultimately I end up at the moon after a long while of integrating what he's taught.

Here are the images I've been working on this week.  They're not nicely cropped because my canvas is too close to the wall to be able to get back far enough to take a good image, but it'll certainly give you an idea of what I'm working on.  They're quite different than my usual work!

This first picture will give you an indication of where the pieces all started.  They were in this shape at the beginning of the week, though the others had some indications of value on them as well (darker paint where the shadows are).

The second picture has two different images.  The one on the far left is the first one I did.  Thomas was showing me how some of the Masters painted.  They would put down a carefully gradiated layer of grey values and from there they would work darker with transparent paints and lighter with opaque ones.  Obviously I haven't gotten to the second stage of that one yet.

This is Thomas's first layer of a painting by Rembrandt to show me how to do the layers juicier and looser.  I used that technique - believe it or not - in the second one before putting on all the crazy layers.

The second picture in this image is what I spent most of yesterday on.  Thomas gave a demo on mark making in the morning then I decided to try to incorporate all those types of marks - and more - into my painting.  I went into the basement and found a bunch of crazy tools to use - bad house paintbrushes, twine, scrapers, plastic pieces, etc., -  then looked outside for more - leaves, sticks, twigs.  I think I used them all.  It was very freeing to try to think of ways to use each one.  It gave the picture a lot of diversity of marks and many interesting passges throughout.

Chris looked at it in the evening and wanted to know how people feel looking at it who already like my work the way it is.  I told him that isn't the point.  I have to keep developing as an artist - it's the only way to be an artist - to keep exploring and learning new things.  I doubt my work will continue to look like this, but for right now, it does - and it might.  And if that's the case, then people will either like it, or they won't, but I'm not creating for other people - I'm creating because I have to.  I think artists die inside if they get trapped into making art that always looks the same.  It's a horrible fate, and I refuse to consign myself to it.  Period.

So the second image has lots of explorations in it.  Lots of different types of marks.  Lots of intense color.  Chris commented that it has lots of emotion in it - I can certainly see how it gives that impression - but I wasn't angry or anything like that.  Instead I was curious.  I was playing.  I was intensely interested in what I was doing.  I listened to music for part of it, but that was actually too much - it got in the way of the rest of my mind. 

This last image was a real gift from Thomas.  He came out to the studio with me after the other students had leaft, after dinner.  We looked at a book of Jenny Saville's images.  She's amazing the way she paints.  The image here is the one we were looking at when we did the above image.  It hasn't gotten to the finished stage Jenny Saville's piece is at yet, but we're heading there.  Saville puts all those colors underneath - those gashes of paint, the drips and runs and stains and deep darks and shocking lights.  Then turns out with something so exquisite and real looking, it makes me want to weep with recognition of the pure humanity of it.  Her work is also 10' tall or bigger usually.  I wish I had such a large canvas prepared so I could practice on it, but this smaller one will have to do for now.

Thomas sat behind me and told me the strokes to put on and how.  It's so completely foreign to me to figure out how to do those strokes - I mean, compare that image to the first, grey, subtle one!  This later one is NOT my normal predilection!  But I'm loving learning how to do it.  I am looking forward to figuring out the next layer today.  I feel trepidation about being able to figure it out myself, but that's the task I'm setting for myself.

So now the canvas looks crazy with the three different styles of pictures on it, but I'm seeing it as an incredible opportunity to learn so much in one week.  Amazing!

Off to the races!  Who knows what'll be up here tomorrow????!!