This is the finished version of the happy baby that started out as zombie baby. I don’t know why babies make people so happy, but they do. Anyway, when they’re smiling and laughing, they make me happy. This painting tickles me, and I hope it starts your week off with a smile.
I wish the best for this little guy, the newest member of the fiddler’s clan, and I look forward to seeing him grow up.
Painting is not all flow and happy splashing. There’s a fair amount of angst as well. Tears. Ranting. Tantrums sometimes ensue.
Especially when, after hours of work, the painting looks like this:
I start to get a little nervous. Happy Baby now looks like Zombie Baby (my apologies to babies and zombies everywhere.) But as someone once said, painting is an act of controlled panic.
My portrait teacher, Rob Anderson, taught me to put the eyes into a portrait last, or at least later, so that they don’t distract you from the rest of the face. I generally try to abide by that; I find that as I work on the surrounding face, I sometimes have to redraw the eyes a bit. But there comes a point when the lack of eyes is more distracting than not having eyes.
Even after more work and adding eyes, this painting still disturbs. My blood pressure and frustration level are rising.
But when I finally put in the eyes, the painting began to lose some of the creep factor. But not all. I’m really getting worried that time, my most precious resource, has been frittered on a loser painting. I’m babbling and ranting at this point.
My fiddler, the best coach I have, said, “be quiet and forge ahead. If it’s ruined now, you’re not going to make it worse.”
So, after a few more hours of painting and public radio, my blood cortisol level has gone down as the painting begins to take shape.
There are still some things I’m unhappy about, like the yellow I just added to the face (the yellow is exaggerated by the photo, but not by much), but I’m not so worried about that. A cooler color layered transparently over that bright yellow will soften it, and the brightness will glow through the coolness.
Next: Finishing up.
Last week I heard a mockingbird singing in the wee hours for the first time this year. I’ve been seeing them sitting in the overgrown apple tree in my backyard (I think they’re year-round residents in the Bay), but I hadn’t yet been awakened by their midnight battle arias.
I love the songs of mockingbirds although I know they’re just the yells of horny males. They’re endlessly entertaining; I try to figure out what they’re mimicking. Sometimes I whistle a tune to them (I’ve been trying to teach them Sail Away Ladies since forever). Once, back in the first days of the now ever-present cell phone, I heard one singing the then-standard ringtone.
When I was young (just as this sixth mass extinction began in earnest) mockingbirds lived up and down our street, and their repertoires included stanzas from all the seemingly thousands of songbirds that nested in the eaves and trees and foundation plantings of suburbia. Sadly, these days the mockingbirds mostly sing songs of squirrels, crows, sparrows, and noises I can’t identify. But they still make me happy to hear them doing musical battle in the middle of the night.
Happy Valentines Day!
I don’t watch tv, so I have only a vague idea of what is going on in the current pop culture, but based on my Facebook feed and my addiction to NPR, I am guessing that three things are uppermost in the churning American zeitgeist: The Winter Olympics, a lot of snow, and ZOMBIES!
Yesterday while plein air painting on the cliff overlooking Bean Hollow State Beach, I watched legions of families troop down to the pebbly beach. Every so often kids would stop and politely ask if they might look at my painting; My goodness, yes!
A small boy sat at the edge of the cliff next to me, a packet of colored pens and a sketchbook in hand.
“Yes,” he said quietly, “I think this will do nicely.” And he opened his sketchbook, ready to draw.
But those cliffs are slippery; it’s best to be careful on the California coast. Absorbed in the view, the little boy leaned forward, and in a scraping of dust and sand he slid down the cliff to the beach below. (Don’t worry. The cliff face is shallow, the surface smooth from generations of kids zooming down on their bottoms, and the sand and pebbles below make the landing soft and delightfully scrunchy.)
He never dropped his art supplies. He stood, brushed himself off and gazed out to sea. Then he turned and ran up the stairs, around my easel, and, still grasping pens and sketchbook, slid down the cliff again.
Gentle painters and sketchers, take a lesson from this small boy. Even though life might send you sliding down a cliff, never let go of your sketchbook!
I love the darkness of winter. The short days and long nights encourage introspection and reflection on life. But even while I’m gazing inward, the season is expanding as daylight lengthens incrementally after solstice. During this time I find it helpful to set intentions for the coming year. No, I’m not making resolutions, for those are easily broken. I’m simply setting directions in which to move as the world gets lighter.
I intend to work on:
Creating opportunity
That means work like crazy to make the most of what I do have, instead of bemoaning what I don’t have (a job). I want to fill the employment vacuum I’m in right now with creativity, energy, and hope. More painting. More writing. More blogging. And maybe some badly needed studio organization.
Grabbing opportunity
Opportunity is a slippery little critter, like a speckled trout. If I’m fortunate to catch a fish, I don’t want it to slip the hook and flip back into the water. That means I’ve got to keep my wits about me and hold on with a firm grasp to opportunities large and small. And while one fish might evade my grasp, there are more in the lake who will take the right bait.
Finishing
Yes. Finish projects. ‘nuff said.
Building skills
Learn useful skills to become a better product, so that I’m more marketable to potential employers. But also learn useless skills, to make myself a better human. Yes, that means the banjo!
Fighting fear
Sometimes it seems like disaster is only a breath away, and the fear of the unknown is paralyzing. So when the dragon-who-breathes-anxiety attacks, my plan to fight it is to grab a pencil and paper and write something, or take up a brush and paint a picture, thereby defending calm, peace, and productivity. (All the while incidentally helping accomplish my first intention.)
Playing
I mean to have some real fun. Shoot some hoops, go rock jumping, dance, make up dirty lyrics to pop songs. Anything that is pointless and brings smiles and unrestrained giggling.
Those are my winter intentions. Reader, what are yours?
The holiday bazaar last Saturday was lovely, with beautiful artwork and Irish music provided by my own fiddler and our friends from the Irish music community (if there’s any reason—other than sheer joy—to learn to play Irish music, old time, or any folk music, it would be the wonderful groups of friends you’ll make doing so).
The day started a bit slowly, so I took the opportunity from my seat inside the circle of musicians (in between firing off the tunes I knew on the whistle) to sketch the dulcimer player with the intention of later making a painting solely from my sketch after the dulcimer player left to go to another gig.
Sometimes I can’t take photos for reference. Sometimes I just don’t want a camera intruding on the moment. And I like the practice of trying to find a painting from my initial sketch.
I payed particular attention to these elements as I gathered information for a painting:
I had about half an hour (give or take a tune or two) to make this sketch, so some areas, like the far eye and hairline, were left a bit hazy. These omissions would later bite me in the butt as I tried to recreate this sketch in color.
Then, while the hall bustled around me with holiday shoppers, I painted.
After a day of painting between customers, I ended up with a sort of half sketched painting that was almost a likeness, but not quite.
The prevailing wisdom about watercolor is that you can’t erase it. Nonsense! While you can never get down to the beautiful pristine paper again, you can certainly lift much of the color. I didn’t like the purply-red I’d put in her hair, so when I got home, I scrubbed it off with a toothbrush and a spray of water. Then I let it dry completely and repainted.
The mouth also didn’t match the sketch, and so lost much of her character, so I lifted the paint using an old sable brush (I don’t know why this is, but nothing lifts watercolor as well as sable), let it dry, redrew it, and repainted it. The nose got a little surgery and lost its bottom edge. I adjusted the angle of the far cheek and the perspective of the eyes.
This almost captures the likeness of the dulcimer player, and I’m pretty pleased to have done it without a photo-aid. To be fair, I’ve known her for years, so that when my brush drove past the likeness, I knew I’d arrived.
Oh, November! Internet meme month of get-on-the-stick- and-get-started challenges. Write a novel in a month! Post a drawing a day for 30 days! Draw 30 characters in 30 days! Write, design, and ink a manga comic page every day! Make a masterpiece in November!
Exhausting.
We all know that artistic and creative success doesn’t happen in a month (don’t we?). That do accomplish goals, we need a sustainable rate of practice every day of the year. But it’s hard to do, especially in the vacuum of those empty rooms in which we’re supposed to work.
Enter painter and blogger Paul Foxton. Riffing off the book Composition, by Arthur Wesley Dow, and tapping his own knowledge of drawing (Paul is a lovely painter) he created a series of exercises to help build skills, as well as sensitivity to design and artistic ability. Then he created a place called Creative Triggers where folks could find the exercises, and get together to support each other as they work.
Creative Triggers video (Here I’d like to embed Paul’s video, but WordPress won’t let me, so you’ll have to go check it out yourself)
The exercises are well thought out, and he’s built them so that they are bit-size junks that bring you to the next step. I’ve been drawing and painting my entire life, and even so, it’s nice to revisit these basic (and not so basic) exercises in a systematic manner. Plus, it’s been very nice to post to the forums, and later that day get a couple supportive emails from other students (you don’t have to sign up for the emails if you don’t want to).
My favorite exercise has been the most beginning exercise: “breathing lines,” a way of developing your drawing muscle in a quiet and meditative way. I make a page or two at the beginning of every work session; they put my chatty-Cathy monkey mind into a more reflective, deliberate mood. And I do them every night before I go to bed; they are calming, and I can say goodnight to my favorite paints and paint brushes (you know that I’m in love with my #14 sable Rosemary watercolor round.) Of course, sometimes this backfires, and I have to stay up and paint!
On November 1, Roz Stendahl wrote a great blog post exploding the “empty room” notion as she suggested some ways to deal with being creative in “all conditions, whether he or she feels so inclined, isn’t “inspired,” is tired, is stressed, whatever.” I suggest you read it if you’re interested in upping your art (or writing, or stitching, or any kind of practice you might have). Because since life just happens, we have to make sure we get our own stuff done.
Mockingbirds at midnight 