The Signs, they are a comin'! Thank you, God!

This morning I woke up full of anxiety and other feelings about several things, but one that popped to the top pretty quickly was my decision to stop tutoring and to devote myself to art full time.  It's such a HUGE decision! 

This is my last week at Trinity.  This morning I got a lump in my throat several times while I was tutoring my students, especially one whom I have been seeing for 3 1/2 years.  I will miss her a lot.  I've built up such a personal relationship with many of these kids.  It'll be hard to let that go.  Hopefully they'll choose to stay in touch, but it's actually the rare student who does so.  I can count them on my thumb actually.  After 23 years of tutoring.

While doing my Morning Pages (see Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way if you don't know what they are) at 5:30 this morning, I allowed my feelings to pour out then eventually allowed some rationality to break in and told God I'm letting go and asked him to take over.  I do believe that when I surrender to the forces that be, my life is 100% better.  I tend to think I'm in charge and can do very well, but again and again I find that I do better if I let go and let God. 

I am feeling so driven to do this work, I no longer have a choice about it.  It was difficult staying focused on Calculus this morning.  It feels like my brain is a dam, holding in information like derivatives, balancing chemical equations, quadratic formulas, metaphors, the Constitution, the difference between ser and estar.  But it is full to overflowing and can't wait to open its gates and let all that extraneous knowledge go! Pfft!  Occasionally I'll worry that I might let in Alzheimers if I don't keep using my brain as actively as I have been these last 20+ years - "use it or lose it" - but I am SO ready to let it go (not my brain - the plethora of high school subject matter, I mean)!  I want to fill my brain with other things, fill my eyes with other images, fill my heart with other thoughts.  It's been wonderful tutoring.  I will grieve the loss of my students and my colleagues, but I am ready to move on.

I had lots of affirmations today that I'm doing the right thing.  My colleagues were uniformly kind and supportive and encouraging.  Then I met with Valley Haggard for lunch.  I was feeling raw as could be, but tried not to show it - who wants to dump the second they see someone?!  But she almost immediately read my mind and said, without any prompting, "You are doing the right thing.  It's perfect.  It's going to turn out great!  It's exactly what you're supposed to be doing."  Of course tears came to my eyes as I thought of the students I'm leaving and as I felt my fear rise to the surface.  But when I focus on my gut, I know I'm doing the right thing.  There just isn't any question there.

Valley and I were meeting to  plan a workshop we'll be offering in February called Body Shop: Exploring our real feelings about our real bodies through drawing and writing.   I love working with Valley!  She and I seem to work well together and came up with a dynamite workshop with joy and enthusiasm.  I'm looking forward to teaching this workshop with her.  If you are interested in taking it, email me at susansingerart@msn.com, and I'll send you more details once we get the flyer made up.  I'll also be posting the flyer here once it's ready.

Valley also agreed to meet with me to help me brainstorm about the book I'm going to write.  I know it's there, ready and waiting, but I don't have a format for it yet.  So much is swirling in my head about it - I need to figure out how to get it down on paper.  She is going to help me figure that out.  I'm a lucky woman.  We'll meet another time to do the same for her and the book that is swirling inside her head.  I feel so blessed to have met her and to be collaborating with her in so many ways!

When I got back to school and checked my email, there was an email from a woman who's the publisher of a small press who might be interested in my book.  She saw my catalog and liked what she saw so is wanting to meet with me to talk about it.  We set up that appointment for Friday.  God is working overtime giving me signs that this is the right thing for me to be doing!  

When I got back from school, there was an enticing pink gift bag hanging on the doorknob.  My dear friend Lynda had brought me a birthday present, a book entitled: True Work: The Sacred Dimension of Earning a Living.  Sounds perfect to me!  I can't wait to dive into it!

As if all that weren't enough, I just took a break for a moment from writing this and got an email from Foundry Gallery in DC saying that my piece Sally kissing Susie got accepted into their show Celebrate Gay Marriage.  Yippee!  The show will be in DC in January.  Details to follow.

It's been a great art day!

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????!!