You have the chops, but you’ve got no soul. You have a big vocabulary and nothing to say.

The show in july will be at this gallery: The Hostess.

“If you’re working out of your head, you’re dead.”
-Bill Garnett

“You can’t possibly be thinking about those things while you’re working.”
-Mark Andres

“If there’s something in your painting that isn’t working, GET IT OUT.”
-Joseph Mann

The Centurian Cosby says “Carpe Theo, you see.”

Never has done me a whole lot of good to chew the fat over a painting rather than simply get to work on it. But I’m at a bit of an impasse at the moment and typing doesn’t interfere much with wheels already set spinning…

(more…)

Here’s another quote from Bill Garnett. (yeah I’m a big fan) “Take your own painting and treat it like a painting in a museum: make variations on it, analyze what’s making it work, find a structure.”

So, at the risk of sounding overly self-satisfied with my recent progress, I’ll take a stab at doing just that.

First off, here’s a nice sun lit picture of the painting as it is right now:

(click the thumnails for bigger images)

The tree in the bathers painting uses stacking of flat shapes and value shifts to open up the space in the center of the composition. This is a stacked construction.

(click the thumnails for bigger images)

The stacked construction is placed over an under painting of overlapping glazes. Those initial glazes are varied in shape so that together they form an interlocked negative space between the figures of the painting. (Note that I mean negative space and not neccesarily ‘ground’. This acts in concert with contour continuation throughout the entire composition to create a sense of synthetic space.) These shapes are glazed over one another darker and darker to push the space back into the picture plane.

(click the thumnails for bigger images)

The stacked shapes of the tree step back in value as they cross over the overlapping shapes of the under painting so as to seem to receed into the darker center of the glazes. Ok, this is hard to describe, but it seems useful to try. The location of the steps are shown in the pencil sketch above with thick black lines.

The result is a tree that seems to lean back away from the picture plane. Surface elements have then been added to interlock the stacked construction in a manner that implies a continuous flat shape flush with the picture plane. These flat interlocking surfaces fight the receding stacked construction creating a tension in the complete figure.

These three techniques could be applied in a thoughtful manner at the outset of the next painting. An initial sketch of the relation and continuous contours of proposed figures and negative spaces would provide direction for the placement of the glazed backgrounds. A second sketch would layout the stacking constructions and would provide a basis for the the overall value composition. A third sketch would suggest a means for interlocking and resolving the figures. The three sketches could be done on velum and viewed on a light table. This would guide the whole glazing and construction process much more efficiently than a single sketch of the finished surface.

David Langhorst was in town. He knows how to build stuff. He practically built all my stretcher bars for me from scratch. Here he and dug poke at the last stretcher bar.

Dave built a jig to facilitate squaring the frames. The chop saw we used was a little wonky.

Looks like a lot of frames huh? Well I just finished hanging the paintings this afternoon, and I assure you, they cover the walls of the salon nicely.

The whole preparation process has been far more work than I could have imagined. Not that I wasn’t aware that this would be a learning process. It will take a couple more babystep shows like this before I can swing a real show me thinks. The paintings do look good, it’s just the time consumed has been vast.

I was caught in the rain yesterday. I had all of my painting supplies with me and a very flimsy windbreaker. Thirty minutes in the downpour. I’m broke, I’m starving and I’m lonely. Then it occured to me: I’m exactly where I want to be. I draw every day. I paint nearly everyday. I have a show the month of October, and a couple of commisions for paintings. I’m doing it. I’m living my dream. A grin split my face and I began laughing maniacly into the rain pouring out of the night sky. This is exactly where I want to be.

I have no idea how to go about doing all of this nonsense. I’m having a hard time getting all of my canvases stretched and due to this fact it looks like I’ll be stuck with one crazy all nighter painting binge to bring them up to par. I still have no confirmation on when I’ll be able to begin the opening and so I have not sent out any final invites. I hope to have this part settled by this evening. the real crunch is in the paitings though. Many of them have rough edges and need to be matched and filled in some places. this is going to be time consuming and will probably keep me up all thursday night this week. I was hoping to hang them all on Friday night, but it’s looking more like I’ll have to consume some of my saturday doing it. Blah blah blah.

Every artist is a conartist. It’s all a big sham. Ready? Go.