First Time's the Charm

Yesterday I sat down to do some watercoloring, after seeing an inspiring painting somewhere.

Its easy for me to mess them up by treating them like other paints, or like pens and outlining with them.  This time, after spending some time practicing drawing cows, I used enough restraint to paint one I'm happy with.

Getting greedy, I attempted a seal and a horse, and they turned out like kindergardener scrawlings.  Of course at that point I was on my second glass of wine.

Buddy Drawings

Recently I've been doing drawings of people as animals, it started with this one:

That was by Joey's special request, he's the hawk, obviously.  I decided to work on one of with me and Chrissy in it... (work in progress):

Someday I'll get a bigger scanner.  Anyway, in honor of the theme, I'm digging up the other various buddy drawings Chrissy and I have done.  Its a fun sort of wish fulfillment for us, whether we depict ourselves hanging out with celebrites or being particle physicists or whatever.

Here's Chrissy's Gangnam Style pic she did I think last year:

Here's my Mad Scientists from 2010:

Here's mine from when I was daydreaming about boating around the world:

 

Project Work Day Recon

So I did it, I worked an eight hour day this Monday, on art projects.  It was good and bad and I came away from it addicted.

It was surprisingly easy for me to keep the mentality of working and being on the clock.  I started a little late, had a nice leisurely morning, but when I started I started.  Truly I didn't think I had it in me to follow through without external pressure like there is at my normal job.

Nearing the end of the day I was already trying to plan when my next project day would be.  I decided to fit in a short two hour session this evening.

The most positive thing about this experiment is that I'm now secure in the idea that if somehow I were able to support myself on art, I could hold up the work ethic required. 

The most negative thing was all the sitting down.  Normally I'm on my feet all day which I prefer.

And another negative thing was the work I produced.  I was watercoloring and all that time spent highlighted my inexperience with the medium.  I'm optimistic that I'll improve, and actually finishing a painting is a good feeling even if it went wrong in so many ways.  With real time invested I can make the progess needed.

Posted via Blogaway

Painting

When you paint an object or person, you can no longer take its lines and curves and colors for granted. Neither can you see it as an isolated thing. Its surroundings touch it and reflect colors and shadows on it. You have to see that it exists in a context, and that context is continuous.

When photography was invented painting became less useful, it wasn’t the only way to record an image. Photos record the reality of a moment, so that even when that moment is gone we can look into it with minimal outside interpretation. Even if the photographer doesn’t see something, if its in the frame, its there forever.

Painting, though, is a totally different beast. Its not a captured instant but the result of a scene in four dimensions being processed through the artist’s senses and then compacted onto a two dimensional canvas. Light, color, weight of an object, how it arranges into its surroundings, and all the tiny changes that happen to these variables in the timeframe of the painting process, are all summarized into the scene.

The artist is working from many moments in time for many hours put together. Maybe rather than a photograph, a painting might be more relatable to a video, although of a generally still scene. On the other hand all that indirect processing makes a painting much more subjective. This adds on another dimension, of consciousness, when the painter’s mind and hand interacts with the scene.

While I’ve mainly been talking about realism, which I love, there are so many types and styles and lots to say about all of them for sure.

Why Paint

My plan for this year is to learn to paint.  Why in this digital age would I want to mess with icky sticky toxic paint?  The age of the rock star painter has long past.  But still I want to, and I've been thinking about why.

Painting is hard to get right.  It is taking this world and seeing it, knowing it, recreating it.  It is understanding a material and adding that skill as an arm to the creative mind.  There is something about hands on experience I can’t get over.  I haven’t mastered it and the frustration is compelling.  If I keep messing with this stuff maybe it will become second nature, I reason.  I want to make something beautiful.

Of course it is about the mind, an activity to keep it occupied and calm, to give it nice problems to solve and ponder, to let it dream of the earth and atmosphere.  The painting itself is the proof, the final output to summarize the experience.  It is an excuse to be here, to be anywhere and just stand around figuring it all out.