Year-End Painting Review

Two years ago on 12/29/15, I walked into a morning class at Wet Paint with Kat Corrigan and painted my first painting. I signed up for the class mostly on a whim and it was a birthday / Christmas present to myself. While I had already made a New Year's resolution to work on learning to draw in 2016, this class made me add painting to this goal / resolution. What a wonderful two years it has been. I like looking back. It's the main reason for this blog. It helps me capture where I was at and how I was feeling at the various steps in this journey. While there is so much to learn, it makes me profoundly happy that picking up a pen, pencil, or paint brush to try and capture a moment or image has become a normal activity in my life as compared to January 2016. Back then, putting a line on a piece of paper was anxiety-producing.

A lot of good things happened with my painting practice in 2017. First of all, I figured out how to fit in daily painting during a very, very, busy time this fall. Each day, I get up and paint. On most work mornings, this might mean only five minutes, but even in this short amount of time it is a good way to start a day. I also figured out that I have trouble maintaining focus at times, so painting in shorter spurts has actually helped.

After two years, I'm beginning to understand some of the basics. This includes mixing paint colors with the limited palette that I use. With paying more attention and experimenting a bit more, I figured out things like using more blue when mixing the tans and light oranges found in orange tabby cats or making grays more neutral. Some of this came from starting a second palette with a different blue and a different yellow, which caused me to slow down and think more about what I was doing. 

The biggest change happened over Thanksgiving when I had a major breakthrough with values and shapes. On the one hand, it's frustrating. Why did it take 2 years? Every bit of information out there focuses on these two concepts. I took classes. I read books and blogs. I watched videos. I thought that I was listening to the message, but I wasn't really hearing it. Experiential learning is like that sometimes. Understanding comes in its own time.

On the other hand, who cares. The message finally started to connect and it has improved my painting. I want to bring this over to my drawing in 2018. While I got better with line drawing, I mostly outline things and haven't figured out how to add depth, dimension, and volume. Working on values and shapes should help and this is a goal of my drawing practice in 2018.

To finish up this year-end review, I looked back on the paintings that I completed in 2017. Here are four of my favorites from throughout the year.  This one is from January 2017. I am not sure what to say about this one. I just like it, although maybe I included it so there would be one non-cat painting.

Next up is Chandler in the sink from May 2017 from when I was in a small group that met with Kat. She would give us homework assignments and the assignment was to paint your kitchen sink. I ignored that and went with the upstairs or downstairs bathroom sink. Trying to build any type of interesting composition was beyond me. I was having trouble mixing colors. My values were off. I did 4-5 paintings, which were disasters. Then one morning, Chandler was being Chandler and he crawled into the bathroom sink. I took some pictures. This put me back in my comfort zone, I was painting a cat with an unusual background.

This one and the next one tie for my favorite paintings of 2017. This one is the breakthrough painting from November 2017.  I was back in my hometown over Thanksgiving and decided that I would try painting 4-value paintings using the app, Notanizer. This is the first one I did. I painted this standing in the basement of the Airbnb where we were staying. I did not paint a cat. I painted the shapes that I saw in each of the values. It just flowed off of the brush. Yes, it is on the stylized side, but I love this painting. It makes me happy whenever I look at it. With this one and all of the other 4-value paintings, I still can't get over how little you need to actually paint an eye (or the entire cat for that matter). Both of the eyes in this painting are 3 fairly small paint strokes. Overall, this experiment really got me thinking.

My other favorite painting of 2017 is from December 2017 and, of course, it is a cat. It's great when  you capture the physical essence of something. It's even better when you luck out and also capture part of the spirit. This is Jacques and I like this one because it captures a bit of the Jacques-ness of Jacques.