Category Archives: paint

From Drunken Mermaid to Drunken Employee…

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Sorry I haven’t written or posted anything for three weeks! I hope nobody minds or misses the posts too much, though I miss being creative and having something to blog about! Not being able to do anything besides work and recover from work is making me cranky. :(

I get up at 5:30 a.m., these days, work till 4 p.m., and then invariably find myself alongside half a dozen bearded men in greasy Safety Orange work gear, having a shot or four of rum at the Dinah Beach Yacht Club before rowing home at half-past-six in the evening. By then I’m too tired (and slightly tipsy) to do anything but make some salad and have dinner with Kris. I stumble to bed by 9 on most nights.

So I’ve become part of that bleary, grey workforce that leans against a bar at the end of the workday, reviving its lagging spirits with a fiery liquid of one kind or another. “Work is the curse of the drinking class,” and all that…

But it wasn’t always this way! Rum used to be something I imbibed as I sat on a beach, digging my toes in the sugar-fine sand, some pencils and a sketchbook on hand, an interested man making flirtatious conversation close by…

My brother, Bruihn, visited me while I was living on Malapacao Island, and because he’s an amazing artist—and paints as easily and effortlessly as the rest of us make cups of tea—when I asked him to paint a sign for the bar I was going to start up “one day”, he dashed The Drunken Mermaid off on two planks of palisander wood in a couple of hours.

Here’s an old ‘postcard’ for ya, “from where I’d rather be!”

Weird dolls, familiar sentiments…”Strange As Angels” by Brian Uhing

The Flowery Cake Shoppe of Compromise

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A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece.

 — Ludwig Erhard

for Mick's mum
I talked myself into an ambiguous state in my last post. See, although it is just a painting in exchange for some canvas that Mick probably would have thrown away if I didn’t take it, I have to admit that I wanted Mick & Mother to really love the painting. I wanted him to feel that the debt had not only been repaid, but had been handsomely recompensed. I wanted to give him something that was a little better than what he was expecting.

When I sat down with a resigned sigh to start the painting, I knew that I would do my best to produce something that ticked all the conventional “Still Life With Flowers” boxes.

Untitled

As it turned out, I managed to strike a compromise between those conventions, my technical limitations, and my abhorrence of a certain kind of impasto oil painting with soft-edged, ruffle-daubed, faintly muddy-colored and impressionistic flowers. I was so out of my depth, tackling this subject matter, that I really thought long and hard about what I wanted, and how it should look.

When I am unsure of myself, I tend to splat a lot of gunky paint on, every color I have, aiming for “texture” and “interesting” messes, hoping that I will manage to “save” it all at the end by some well-placed motifs and a bit of stitching; these are leftover bad habits from the scrapbooking/mixed-media school of art that was such a rage for a few years. My approach is usually very heavy-handed and, yes, why not say it?…lazy. I’m too lazy to think things through, to pay attention to composition, values, line, and order; and the rare times when I do, I drop them all by the time I have the brush in my hand—and then spend as many hours trying to cover my mistakes up with yet more paint, ending with a really hopeless sludge of splatters and childish shapes, the color of mud.

Untitled

I was so determined to steer clear of this approach, here, and so I very atypically kept to a strict palette of about 5 colors. I took three separate photographs—two of flowers growing around the yacht club, one of an empty olive oil bottle in my kitchen—and used them to sketch an arrangement. I decided on liquid acrylics with some gloss medium for glazing, and aimed for a painting that evoked watercolours rather than oil paints, leaving areas of white canvas exposed to serve as the highlights, rather than painting them in later (which never quite works)…I wanted the whole painting to be simple, almost graphic, in its shapes and colors. I wanted clean hues, with lots of transparency and the illusion of light through glass and water. At the last minute I rejected the idea of patterned tablecloth or lace-curtain backgrounds, and I am so glad that I put a very pale, neutral background in, instead, as it doesn’t compete with the rest and the feeling of the painting remains one of clean spaces and light.

*breathes out in relief* Surprisingly (to me) the time I devoted to really thinking very hard about what I wanted, until I could see it in my head, and what I woud have to do to get that look, paid off in the end…because the washes were kept thin, translucent and minimal, the actual working time of this painting was about 6 hours, not counting drying time…and no time spent covering up, scraping back, or trying to right any wrongs with cheap tricks.

This experience has been another valuable lesson to me! I am pretty sure that Mick will be happy with it, and I am happy with the way it turned out, myself. Many big wobbling slices of pink and white cake for everyone!

and the green three-toed sloth whistles far and wee

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giant 3-toed sloth with hot air balloons

in Just-
spring          when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far          and             wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles
far
and
wee

—[in Just-] from Chansons Innocentes by e.e. cummings

Fooling around in my journal pages recently. I couldn’t think of what to paint after I’d done the striped clouds on this journal page, and slowly, out of my not-caring and my not-thinking of very much at all, came this cahracter. My queer little balloonman is neither lame nor ominously, sexually goat-footed; he’s a harmless giant three-toed sloth, sporting the greenish fur that many sloths develop during the rainy season, as a result of algae growing in special grooves in their fur.  Sloths, like sly satyr balloonMen, communicate (far and wee) with whistle-like sounds.

Below, painting of a bunch of slightly sinister allium blooms that was really an experiment in laying down blocks of background color using a large square piece of foam, and the sort of rippled texture created when you pull the foam away from the wet, semi-translucent paint.

I find the subject of flowers—unless they are stylized into ornamental ones—very awkward to do…am not used to drawing or painting realistic ones at all. I’ve been asked to do a painting of flowers for an acquaintance’s mother, in exchange for the 6-meter roll of absolutely gorgeous Belgian linen painter’s canvas that he didn’t know what to do with and just gave to me. So I have been trying to get used to the idea of painting flowers, though I realize that these alien-looking spore-balls are not what he means. The guy is a local drunk and a grease-monkey off the oil rigs…i.e. very working class, and I’ll bet my money that his idea of a good painting of flowers is “like  a photograph”. I can hear the echoes of countless old biddies at the art stalls in airports the world over: “Oh, my, now isn’t that clever?! They look so real, just like a photograph! So clever“. (Oh, hey, now there’s an idea. I could get a flower photograph blown up and printed on canvas, then shlop on some transparent textural acrylic medium to look like dimensional brush strokes. Dear old mum probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Just kidding. I may be a cynical person, but I have a little integrity. So I am thinking of Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, because I would be happier doing a large close-up of a flower than the usual “flowers-in-a-vase on a tablecloth” arrangement. But really, I don’t have an idea, yet…it could turn out completely different from anything he, or I, anticipate!

alliums

DIY craft foam stamps

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DIY craft foam stamps

I drew the design onto a thin sheet of craft foam, using a pink Sharpie marker. Then, using a combination of scalpel (X-acto knife) and small, sharp scissors, I cut the design out. Patience and very sharp new blades made this part easier. Floating bits, like the flowers inside the paisley shapes, weren’t a problem, because all the loose elements got glued to a rigid base, later on.

homemade foam stamps

I cut a piece of MDF to size, sprayed it with a permanent adhesive (90 High Strength Adhesive, by 3M, in this case) and stuck the foam shapes down. I let the adhesive dry for a couple of hours, and by then I was dying to use my new stamp…

For printing with foam, I like to brush acrylic paints (plus a few drops of retarder, but hardly any water…a damp brush is pretty much all the water that gets into the paint) onto a second piece of foam (I’ve got thicker foam for this…I use those smooth foam camping or yoga mats) and press my stamp onto the paint. I check to make sure that the entire surface of the stamp has paint on it.

Then, because I am too impatient to prepare some nice surfaces for printing (typical!) I grab anything that looks printable—an unpainted hand-bound journal, a sheet of creamy writing paper, my messy personal journal—and stamp my new design around a few times, for some instant gratification and just to work it out of my system. I might play with the impressions afterwards: painting in different colors, outlining with pens, shading with colored pencils, whatever…

Now that I’ve had my ‘play time’ with the stamp, I can start thinking about better ways* to put it to use than just stamping everything in sight, like some demented ‘Cowboy X”. :)
MDF cannot be washed in the sink (it goes to hell), so when I want to clean my stamp, I moisten a rag and blot the stamp against this rag a few times, then use the rag to wipe around the sides of the stamp, until the foam looks clean.
* Foam stamps work very well on cotton fabrics, too (wash and iron fabric, first, okay?!) You can use regular acrylic paints if you don’t intend to wash the printed fabric. Otherwise, use fabric paints and heat-set according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

If you’ve got any questions about this post, fire away in the comments section, and I’ll try answer them as best I can. Have fun!

What goes up…

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what goes up must come down

Took my show down today. A good feeling…as of closure.

I eventually managed to send 9 of the 12 paintings off into the world, one way or another. Very surprised that I didn’t end up stuck with most of them…I brought a utility knife and fresh blades with me, thinking I would just cut the large canvases off their stretchers, and then maybe quarter them, for easier transport back to the boat. The plan was to use the colorful canvas pieces as backgrounds for a bunch of handmade journals.

Probably because I mentioned these plans to some last-minute gallery visitors, and to friends on facebook, people made offers for the pieces they liked. I was happy to accept whatever was offered: I guess I’d much rather send the paintings home with people who like them, than cut them up or roll a couple layers of gesso over them…and certainly I didn’t want to live with all of them, wrapped and banished to the bilges of our crowded boat, for the humidity and salt air to eventually destroy, anyway.

(I have to admit, though, I feel a little sorry I didn’t get to experience the incredibly cathartic act of destroying a painting that, just a month ago, took me several weeks to make. I reckon it would have taught me something valuable. I suspect I have chosen the comfortable path over the meaningful one.)

It was sort of like an art auction. *silence*

Okay. Who am I kidding? Really it was more like a hostage situation.

If I could draw a cartoon for this post, I would feature as a rabid, unhinged psychopath in the narrow aisle of an Asian grocery, holding a gun to a painting’s side and screaming “Go on, make me an offer…or the painting GETS it! I’m not kidding! I’ll f****** KILL it!”

Unorthodox method, to say the least (though actually it was all very peaceful…I made pots of tea or coffee, and passed round a glass plate of dark chocolate and mint biscuits…a nice touch, n’est-ce pas?) but it produced very satisfactory results for both me and the individuals who went home with something of mine.

Dare I say win/win?

Thank you for putting up with me all this time. I am grateful to my friends, acquaintances, blog readers, neighbors, and gallery visitors who encouraged me, enthused over the paintings, counselled me, and did such a great job of protecting me from myself. :)

A dozen paintings and a playlist

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Process is nothing. Erase your path. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs. I hope you will toss it all, and not look back.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Here are the twelve paintings I did for my show, together in one post, at long last (a week later!)

No pictures of the show itself, or the guests, because there was no photographer present. There’s no way that I could have done it, I was so busy just trying to have a word with everyone present that I unintentionally neglected my own friends (who were good enough to come and entertain themselves, and then leave without making a fuss.) David went home to his blog and wrote a post about the show on the very same night! Which puts me to shame, as I didn’t manage to do that, myself. I must say, there certainly was a good turnout, thanks to the big group show (16 artists) that opened simultaneously in the large gallery next to my ‘intimate’ little room.

Six days later, and I am deep into other things already…

(WordPress introduced their photo gallery feature just in time! Click on a thumbnail to view the whole gallery in a scrolling format)

Looking back on the paintings themselves with a calm and detached eye, I can honestly say that the process was more rewarding than the finished product. And that’s exactly as it should be, because I have never done anything like try to paint several works for a show before, and could not expect to make ‘amazing’ work just like that. Painting these, I was acutely aware of my ignorance—not just of the technical skills necessary to manipulate paint or treat a figure—but also my ignorance of what it is about painting that makes it come alive, what is that elusive kernel that drove (and still drives painters) to pursue this craft all their lives?

Like any art, you start out and it’s all about you, and all about pretty, and all about being liked, and all about trying to make things look realistic…the slavish reproduction of objects and faces around you; that’s fine, but it’s called ‘early work’ and is only valuable in a poignant way. It’s not seriously any good, but you have to go through that shit and come out the other end, and then maybe you will make something good.

I’ve recently read Annie Dillard‘s The Writing Life, and many of the things she says about a writer’s life are true about any artist’s life. Things can be split into two piles: The Good and The Bad. It is essential to a writer who wants to rise to a level of serious mastery and worth, to be able to tell one from the other. There are no greys, even though there might be small parts of really good writing in a sea of bad writing. Dillard relates a story about a photographer who worshiped the work of a certain master, and wanted to learn how to take photographs the way this master did. Every year, he took a selection of his best work to the senior photographer, and asked him to go through it. Every year, the old man divided the work into two piles: good and bad. There was a particular photograph, a landscape, that the master put into the bad pile. The next year, the same photograph appeared again; again he put it in the bad pile. This went on for a few years. Finally the master asked the young photographer, “Every year you bring this photograph, and every year I put it in the bad pile. Yet you keep bringing it back. Why do you like it so much?” To which the young man stammered, “Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.” Again, from Annie Dillard’s book:

How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent? Is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer, personally?

The moral? Your finished work must stand alone in the world. You will not always be around to hold its hand and tell the touching story of how you made it. The process is important to you, yes, because you learn from process…but the process doesn’t matter in the least to the finished work, or to the other people who will view or experience your work. Sever the umbilical cord to your work. You may be an emotional and loving person, and may be emotionally and lovingly attached to your own life (well, I hope you are, anyway) but don’t burden your work with that. It doesn’t cross over well. Your work is either good, or bad, and if it’s bad (i.e. mediocre, self-centered, naive, empty, shallow, banal), banish it from your life (not without gratitude and a certain amount of introspection, certainly you needn’t hate it…but be firm) and go out there and do it again, and again, and again, until you get it right. Until it unmistakably, unquestionably belongs in the Good pile.

Friends have protested when I told them this. They think my work is “wonderful” (whatever that means). Okay, fine, but that doesn’t tell me anything about the work, though it tells me a lot about my friends. Do they reserve a special criterion for works by friends like me—because they want to encourage and cheer me up—as opposed to the critical appreciation they show works by Dali or Drysdale? How can someone who likes Matisse or thinks Goya is “wonderful” then turn to me and tell me they think my work is “wonderful” as well? I mean, you’re really a lovely person, but be serious, will you?

Your friendship and well-meant sentiments are cherished, but your art criticism is not. You do not care whether I fail or succeed…you will probably love me, anyway. But that doesn’t help me. Honesty helps me. It will help me to get better…or even help me to finally see that I may never be anything but a so-so painter. So that I can then decide whether to spend more years (and the years are flying by, the funnel narrows, the opportunities to do something else, and get any good at it, are dwindling) trying to get something right, or acknowledge that my paintings will never be any good and that the years might be better spent doing something else.

No, I’m not giving up just yet…stupid to stop after one’s just begun! There are bits in these paintings that have something…very small areas, here and there, something honest and raw and true. Even I see them. But that is not enough…the price tag is bigger than the gift, right now. This whole show is just that…a visual representation of what the effort cost me. I had to climb a mountain to get it. When the show ends, I won’t keep the ones that didn’t sell, to rot in the bilges of a boat, to live on singing mediocre hosannas to the novice painter that created them. I will, most likely, paint some over, and cut others up for book covers, and erase my tracks, and not look back. The only way I can possible move is forward.

The show came with a playlist on cd, because music played such an important role while I was painting. I wish I could include some sort of player on here, but my blog is limited, and I am in a hurry to post this, before even the strong emotions about the show’s aftermath fade away and I don’t feel anything but weary of the paintings:

  • Profile of The Artist:                     Do You Swear To Tell The Truth The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth So Help Your Black Ass     •     Amanda Palmer
  • They were an Irish bunch…         Anti-Pioneer  •     Feist     •     Metals

Dirty Old Town     •     The Pogues     •     Rum Sodomy & The Lash

  • Reading Monsoon Dervish         The Pirate’s Bride     •     Sting     •     Symphonicities
  • Lady Kitsune                                  Foxy Lady     •     The Cure     •     Three Imaginary Boys (Deluxe Edition)
  • Smoke Reality                                Smoke Reality     •     The Naysayer     •     Smoke Reality
  • Birdhouse In Your Soul              Birdhouse In Your Soul     •     They Might Be Giants     •    
  • The Sulking Chair                        The Perfect Girl     •     The Cure     •     Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
  • Crying Like A Cat                         Edna St. Vincent Millay     •     Beth Lodge-Rigal     •     Children On a Ride
  • Debussy                                           The Holy Egoism of Genius      •     Art of Noise     •     The Seduction of Claude Debussy
  • Senbazuru                                       Princess Mononoke     •     Marco and his friends     •     World of Miyazaki Hayao (Koto and Shakuhachi Duo)

Because the Origami     •     8in8     •     The Best Imitation of Myself: A Retrospective

  • Pyromanicat                                   Stray Cat Blues      •     The Rolling Stones     •     Beggars Banquet
  • Mitzi                                                 Ragtime Cat      •     Parov Stelar     •     Coco, Pt. 2
  • Ton Katze                                        Morph the Cat     •     Donald Fagen     •     Morph the Cat
  • Afterword                                       Chromolume #7 / Putting It Together     •     Stephen Sondheim     •     Sunday In The Park With George

Growing up with the right values…

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A dancing fox spirit in form of a woman...

Fox Spirit

Color in a painting has tremendous emotional impact…I love using colors, so much that often all I can see is the dazzling juxtaposition of color—wanting to use them all…wanting that vermillion to sit and glow beside a deep bluish green, enjoying the way a reddish gold pulsates next to a stormy Payne’s gray—and forget to take care of my values.

Values are the spectrum of light to dark in a painting. It is the use of different values that gives an object in a painting its form, its depth, its solidity…not colors. To see this at work, open a photograph in a photo editing program, and turn the color saturation up to 100%. The result is painful to the eyes. With every color saturated and glowing brilliantly, the solidity and form of the painting recedes.

It’s important to remember that every tube of paint has a value…dark red and dark green may be on opposite ends of the color spectrum, but in terms of value they are both on the very dark end of the value scale. Too many colors of the same value will result in a heavy, uniform, rather lifeless and shapeless painting…and often, because the colors themselves are so different from one another, you won’t be able to see or understand why your painting seems so flat, so “washed out” or “dark” or “leaden”. Our eyes often become so overwhelmed by the interplay of colors that we become unable to accurately identify their values.
color oversaturation

Now desaturate the image all the way to black and white. Even without color, it’s easy to identify shape and form in the photograph. It still works. So if my initial pencil drawings (with paper standing in for lights, some sort of wash to indicate greys, and a heavy marking for the darks) don’t look balanced or clear, there isn’t much chance that adding color will ‘fix’ things. If anything, it’ll just make the illustration more confusing. A good thing to bear in mind. It pays to make thorough grayscale studies, if you’re in a hurry or don’t like scrubbing back, covering over, and strating from scratch too often.

values

I’ve started using a quick way to keep tabs on my values as I paint. I take my simple point-and-shoot camera, set it to black and white, and take a photo at every stage of the painting. You could then upload to a laptop for viewing, though I usually don’t bother…the viewing screen on the back of most Canon cameras (even the el cheapo ones) is usually big enough to look at the shot straight off. This allows me to keep an eye on what my values are doing. I can see right away if my painting is starting to get an allover dark treatment, if my subject is slowly disappearing into the background behind her with every burnt umber glaze I give her. I can see where a light outline might be necessary, or something needs to be brought back up to a lighter shade. I can also immediately see whether the way I have applied highlights and shadows to the subject makes it real, makes it solid, or if I have gone and put different shadows in all the wrong places, so that the light doesn’t actually come from one source, as it probably should. But even when I am not trying to paint realistically

—because painting is not about copying objects in the world so accurately that “it looks just like a photograph”…bah, what do you think a camera is for, then? Before the camera, sure, people wanted a way to document their lives, their wealth, their surrounds, and painters did that for them…but now that cameras are as common as sinks, painting has been freed from that slavish documentary role, and can finally exist for its own sake. Folks who think that ‘realistic’ determines whether a painting or drawing is good or not should go back to mowing the lawn or watching Find My family, and leave art alone. Rant over.—

…I keep an eye on values for the liveliness and movement within the painting. A dynamic balance of lights and darks, quietly leading the eye from one part of the painting to another, can give it that energy. Think Jackson Pollock. You could accidentally tip forward into one of his paintings, and might be falling forever…there’s so much space behind, inside his paintings.

All of which real painters know, and I’m not a real painter, so forgive me if I presume to spout off about some basic knowledge that I, myself, have only just stumbled upon. But if I didn’t know it before, maybe someone else will find it new, too. And these things can apply to any art or design that involves form and color…embroidery, for example. Not everything I’ve done was checked for values, and I still went ahead and made a ton of mistakes, even knowing about ‘the values thing’…like I can see in this painting that her big blooming rose of a head is the same value as the background wall…and her yellow skirt could have been a little lighter, or patterned to stand out from the background some more, too. I might make a few minor changes, but time’s a’flying, so I can only hope the next painting will be better.

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I don’t have time to do things like this…

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…but it couldn’t be helped. I had arrived at an impasse with a painting, and the only options were to either start over, or leave her unfinished forever. So I overhauled the half-finished painting today…meaning I put it under a tap, squirted dishwashing liquid onto it, and scrubbed most of the paint off with a  Scotch Brite scouring pad.

Then pretty much started the painting over. Heart was not in it, but there’s no time to quibble now. Damn, I don’t know what would be worse…a show with some paintings that were heartlessly churned out,  or a show with only 4 paintings, all painted from the heart? Ack.

Yet another back-alley coat-hanger abortion…cleaned off, dressed in bright colors and bundled off to attend the birthday party. Hope no one notices… *pfft!*

Work tomorrow. My Mondays-only day-job. Even these measly 8 hours a week, I resent having to lay my brush down and shovel salads, instead. I resent being subjected to the mindless yammer of local radio stations and indifferently selected pop music. But I have been eating spaghetti, with nothing but salt, olive oil and fresh basil, for 4 days in a row, lunch and dinner, so yes, maybe it’s time to earn just a little bit of money, and buy something else to eat.

I should learn to fish…I live on a boat, after all. That would take care of both me, and the cat. Faced with meager rations, you know I’m more worried about the cat being displeased? He’s that sort of cat.