Giving Thanks

Work in Progress

Sunset Stream 30 x30

Here is one of the pieces I am working on now. The under painting was posted here. Now, the sky has been laid in and an initial color glazed over the foreground. Still many painting sessions to go on this one.

Yesterday I spent a good portion of the day writing and sending my holiday studio newsletter. After it went out I received a number of emails and a few phone calls from other artists and collectors. One conversation in particular reminded me of the power of art to connect perfect strangers and made me grateful for my role in that process. I had never spoken with this person-let's call him Bill- before, but he is a regular reader of my blog. He told me a bit about himself and his passion for collecting art. His tastes and his collection cover a wide range - he clearly just loves art.

Its easy in an economy such as this one to let the question "will this sell?", or worse, "what can I paint that will sell?", creep into the studio. Talking with Bill yesterday, I was reminded of this quote from The Writing Life by Annie Dillard:

...the more literary the book-the more purely verbal, crafted sentence by sentence, the more imaginative, reasoned,and deep-the more likely people are to read it. The people who read are the people who like literature, after all...I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.

And so it is with painting. The more passion for your craft and your subject you put into your work, the more likely it is that people like Bill- people who love art- will find your work. Nothing you do can make someone who does not care about art -or about your kind of art, care about your work. But the people who do, are the ones with whom you have a bond, a shared passion and to whom you owe thanks and the responsibility to make the best work you are capable of. So, thank you Bill.

Imagination & Execution

This past week I reread the book Art & Fear. I was first introduced to this wise little tome over ten years ago. Its one of those books that you can reread again and again, finding new and deeper insights each time. This time was no exception. The passages that seemed particularly apt had to do with what the authors call the "correspondence between imagination and execution"- that is, the place where your work actually gets made. The idea is that at the beginning the work can be whatever you can imagine but as it progresses- as you actually begin to make it- the possibilities narrow with each successive brushstroke, until at the end only a very narrow range of choices remain to complete the work. It is then its own thing, separate and apart from the world and what inspired it. In other words, as Annie Dillard (paraphrasing Paul Klee) wrote:

The painter...does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
I have read those words a dozen times over many years and have only just begun to understand what they mean. I had this ridiculous notion that I was in control!

This past week I've been working on the large painting-the underpainting is posted here. This first image is one glaze over the foreground and trees and the sky laid in with opaque paint.

Once the sky was laid in, I began to adjust the values and color temperature. It gets tricky here because you have to remember that each successive glaze will darken that portion of the panting. In this next image, I've put several more glaze layers on the foreground and the distant trees, repainted a portion of the sky, and adjusted the distant tree shapes and color harmony throughout.


So far, I've done very little to the large trees in the foreground and nothing to the small piece of water in the very front. And the sky will need repainting again. There are zillions of little adjustments to edges and shapes and color needed everywhere now-each needing to be fitted to what came before-to the paint.

Creative Capital

Evening Pond
10 x 8
Please contact me if interested in this piece

You know how sometimes it seems like an idea keeps popping up everywhere in things you are reading, or looking at or thinking about? I've been thinking a lot lately about what I choose to paint- what ideas and imagery interest me and why. I wrote a bit about that here (quoting both Annie Dillard and Thoreau) and since then, it seems I find references to this notion- that your aesthetic sensibility is a like a vein of ore you are meant to mine. Then last week I was rereading The Creators by Paul Johnson, and there it was again- except this time Johnson had given it a name- creative capital.

"By experience I mean the combination of observation and feeling that leads to a creative moment...this precious capital can be spent- thrown away, as it were...and replenished by undergoing fresh experience...of an intense kind."

I'm not sure I would have agreed with that a few years ago, but now it seems just about right, at least for me. In my own case, I can't help but notice that certain imagery- water, for example- and certain times of day- evening, night- are favorite motifs. Although it was mostly an unconscious thing, I think the change in my painting techniques were directly related to my desire to explore these ideas. Perhaps the most dramatic change came about because of our move to a landscape which in many respects reminds me of the landscape of my childhood. There are powerful associations for me, childhood memories that I hadn't thought of in years-but which now seem to inform everything I want to paint.

"There are a lot of things I could say about the art (of poetry)....it should be about major adventures only,outward and inward-important things that happen to you, or important things that occur to you. Mere poeticality won't suffice."
Robert Frost 1928

I also think there is an edge of melancholy and sometimes a sense of sadness or loss in my work, that wasn't there until the last few years. Perhaps this is just an acknowledgment of the loss of my parents, who I miss terribly, and the fact of my own mortality. At 58, I am not exactly at death's door (at least, not that I know of, but I do feel a sense of urgency and mourn the loss of so many creative years when I was otherwise engaged.

"Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case."
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

But truth be told, I am not so sure I would have been able to tap into that vein 25 years ago or even 10 years ago. So perhaps this is my time and these are the things I was made to give voice to. One thing I know for sure, there's no time to waste.

In Search of Style and Merry Christmas

I've been working on larger paintings so I don't have a painting to post today. But I thought it might be fun to do something else......a wonderful English artist Sheila Vaughan recently posted some comments about style and what elements make up an artist's style. She invited others to comment on the topic. As I mentioned in my post to her blog, its a subject I have been thinking about quite a bit and had been formulating a post in my head- so hers gave me just the nudge to actually do it. I won't repeat her very cogent analysis of the elements of style but invite you to click over to her blog for that. But, I will repeat my comments and expand a little on them.

An artist friend recently said to me that my style had undergone a radical change. I was both surprised and pleased by that description. While I definitely think something has happened in my work over the past 9 months, I had thought of it as more a further refinement of the direction I had been headed for several years. But when I really thought about it, I could see that much of what I thought had been going on, had taken place in my head and really didn't start showing up in full force in the paintings until about 6 months ago. That caused me to wonder, what changed? Its really pretty simple- I just made a choice to paint in a particular way. Once you have learned the basic understanding of values, color, drawing, composition , edges and have years of painting experience under your belt, you can really choose to paint anyway you want. But, to create a cohesive body of work, you must choose. So it becomes a matter of intention. You eschew certain subjects, techniques, colors, edges etc because they do not further your intention. We all do this as we create each painting- sacrificing one passage so that the focal point or emphasis is placed in another place where we want it. The same must be done in the entire body of work. In my case, that meant to paint what I love, and only that- and only in a certain way. For example, I enjoy thick luscious paint- I think most painters do- but I have found that thinner paint and in particular, transparent passages of paint, are much more suited to the effects I am trying to get. So instead of struggling with thick paint in order to be "painterly", I embraced transparent paint (which I was never trained to do) and things begin to happen. Instead of letting shows and galleries dictate the subjects of my paintings, I painted what I loved and what I was moved to paint. I found new techniques (or at least new to me) to better communicate those visual ideas. I feel that I have just scratched the surface now of what is possible. I was freed, rather than constrained, by choice and intention.

Annie Dillard, one of my all time favorite authors says it best:

"You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity. Thoreau said it another way: know your own bone."

and this

"The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding not fighting."

Thanks to everyone who has dropped in to visit this blog over the last few months (and waded thru this last pontification....:) !) Merry Christmas and best wishes for a wonderful 2008.