Vacation Brain

Thursday night was the first night in the current set of painting classes with Kat Corrigan. It’s been somewhere between 1 to 1 1/2 years since I’ve taken her class. Class was full with 7 other participants. One of the them was also a repeater and I really enjoyed what she said in class. She mentioned the idea of “vacation brain” as a side effect of her painting practice. Let me say a big YES to that! That’s how I feel and it’s a perfect way to describe it.

Before class started, I should have thought about what my goals(s) would be. Of course, I didn’t, but it came to me after class. I want to work on picking up the “right” amount of paint on the brush and making better paint strokes. The last 6 months or so, I’ve been working on values, value shapes, and mixing colors and that’s helped me improve. At the same time, one of the things that I consistently don’t like are my brush strokes, a problem which is caused by or exacerbated by the paint management on my paint brush.

Mostly, I’ve been ignoring the problem, but I recognize two patterns. The first is pushing down with the brush too hard so more paint ends up in the sponge of the palette than on the paint brush. I’ve been trying not do this, but haven’t figured out what to do instead. The second is picking up too much paint on my brush, so that it’s goopy. Sometimes I achieve the middle ground, but not often.

During Kat’s painting demo, I really watched how she mixes and picks up paint with her brush. During painting time in class, I tried to pick up paint in the same way and really tried to not have dry, scratchy little paint strokes or overly goopy ones. It felt good to focus on this part of the process and not worry so much about the outcome. That is another goal. I don’t want to get hung up on painting something that I think is good or that I like. Instead, I hope to relax into the process in order to lean and experiment and let go of the outcome.

I forgot to take a picture of my painting during class and we left them in the studio until next week. As a substitute, here is a quick value drawing of an apple, which was also done during the first class.

A Happy Continuation

My person looks like a person! It doesn't look like the actual person in the picture, but it looks like a person! Let's hear it for values and the shapes of the values. That's where it's at. Okay, color-mixing is also pretty high up there and that could use some work. The person in my painting looks Caucasian, while the actual person was African-American, so my colors were off.

I am completely at a loss about approaching the background, so I might leave this one "as is" for now and think about it. 

A Good Start

While I can't put it into words (which is frustrating, since I generally want to put everything into words), I am feeling a different connection to my recent paintings. Most of them have gone or will go to Art 4 Shelter, and it's been hard to part with them. I haven't felt that before. Mostly, this has happened when I use a picture of something where I have a personal connection, so maybe it's just that. I don't know if anyone else can see it, but that doesn't really matter.

I started this one before the frog painting and returned to it after the gull painting. It's another one from a picture of the Heart of the Beast May Day parade. I love when the puppets in the parade both read true and have a quirkiness about them. That's why I like this puppet of the blue jay.

So far, I am having that same feeling about the start of this one.  Ha, ha, ha! It's on 8" x 10" paper and Art 4 Shelter wants 5" by 7" pieces, so this one is mine.

Pattern, Pattern Everywhere

My most recent painting caused me to think quite a bit about patterns, and more importantly, seeing patterns.

#198 - Block Island Gull - 5" x 7" - paper

I tried painting the water by first looking for patterns in the water. I found this to be difficult and I really had to slow down and stare at the picture. The reason I gave this a try was because of something Kat said to me awhile back.

This is a picture of my friend's family cabin. To say I love the place would be an understatement. The main cabin was built 100 years go and one of the many charms is the masonry work, which was done by my friend's grandfather. Here is one of the chimneys and I would like to try and paint it some day.

Awhile back I showed this picture to Kat and asked her how to approach something that contained so much detail. She looked at the picture briefly and declared that she would approach it by focusing on the patterns in the stones. She also tried to point out what she was seeing. I could see that she saw it, but I didn't really see it. However, the idea must have been rumbling around in my head because it came back to me when I decided to do the gull painting.

Kristin Nicholas’ gorgeous new book, Crafting A Patterned Home, arrived in the mail on the same day I finished the gull painting. After flipping through and looking at all of the beautiful pictures, I have slowed down and am reading several pages each day. In the first few pages, she talks about how our lives are filled with visual patterns and she mentions being fascinated with the floral-patterned wallpaper in her bedroom, as a child. Currently, I've read up to page 10 and I can speculate with a fair amount of certainty that Kristin would also easily see the patterns in the stones.

What's interesting to me is the difference in what each of us sees because of the underlying architecture of our brains and what we train our brains to do. By profession, I am an accountant. I am not a scientist, so this conclusion is armchair-thinking on my part. 

By the way I am not completely inept at seeing patterns. If I stay in the world of orderly ones, I'm fine. In fact, I think it's the reason I am drawn to the work of Louis Sullivan, the architect. His ornamentation consists of wild, detailed, patterns, but there is always order or symmetry in them. 

Frog

This one has grown on me over the last several days. I especially like how the rock and the frog's belly turned out. I enjoyed trying to mix dull greens and brownish greens of the frog or maybe this is a toad.

It's easy to see and/or comment on the flaws. I'm feeling like focusing on the positives instead.

#197 - Frog - 5" x 7" - paper

Here's where I was one year ago when I painted from the same picture.

A New Pursuit

I signed up for Roz Stendahl's online class on making a simple round spine book. This class is only offered once per year, so I leaped and signed up for it. Roz is interested in people being able to make simple books at home without fancy equipment.

Today, I tore down my paper using a bone folder. There were two sheets of 40 inch by 26 inch paper, which were torn into pieces of approximately 5 inches by 13 inches. Each piece was folded in half so that the final dimension was around 6.5 inches wide. The process is fascinating in building a tear diagram so that your final folds are on the grain and also getting the two different sides of the paper to match when you build your signatures (stacks of paper).

In spite of watching the videos and practicing on some other paper, my initial tears were a bit sloppy. The top picture is my first tear. The next picture was in the middle of tearing up my paper. The bottom picture is one of my final tears.

The other thing I learned was to be careful about making a crease on the edge of the folded paper. While her instruction was spot on, several times, I was not as careful as I should have been. 

Once I started the mantra of "gentle, gentle" in my head, I didn't have this happen again.

Breakthrough!

I painted at Kat's studio tonight. She had a first Friday of the month open studio night. As I have complained before when I paint around people, I usually can't concentrate. This time, I showed up with two paintings that I had drawn out, which I had also barely begun. Tonight at the open studio, I finished both of them. Being around people plus interacting with them plus successfully painting equals breakthrough!

This is the second of the two paintings.

#195 - Goldfinch - 5" x 7" - paper - standard palette

The first one is from a gorgeous picture of Chandler. This is take 3. The first two attempts will not see the light of day. This one is for Art 4 Shelter because I've done a portrait of Chandler for each of the last three Art 4 Shelter events.

#194 - Chandler - 5" x 7" - paper - standard palette

It's fun to compare this to my Chandler painting for the 2017 event. This is one of my favorite paintings. I have it as wallpaper on my phone.

This is my Chandler painting for the 2016 event. I started my first set of painting lessons in March 2016 and I painted this in May 2016. 

This is a really fun way to look back and see how my painting has evolved and changed.