On September 13th I decided to begin a painter's journal to discuss the paintings I was working on as well as anything else that seemed relevant to the making of art. Today, November 17, I am publishing these notes to a blog. From now on I'll post the new messages here, but first, to catch up, we start with 9/13/05:
What was I trying to do today in my studio? I picked a canvas on which I had already painted a background in tan, black, brown and white. I wanted to do serious work, not to care about color or pretty pictures. This painting would not be about any color someone wanted to match to their living room sofa.
Why attack color? I love color, and there's no reason to attack it as frivolous. One can match brown and tan or black and white as easily as red, green and blue.
So what was I trying to do this morning? I wanted to paint something significant, to move to a new place. I wanted the painting process to be AN EVENT. I really wanted too much from this one modest painting.
Bob Dylan's Blood On The tracks was playing on my boom box. I drew lines of black, brown and white on the canvas, flattened the lines with a palette knife, and then worked the whole canvas with a brush and a tan wash to create some movement and form.
I stepped back and looked, added more brown, tan, hints of mustard yellow. I'd stop and look, then paint, getting an over-all sense of balance and the beginning sense of shape.
I love it when there is a painterly blending, wet on wet, dry brush, glazing, giving the whole canvas a sense of texture and depth. At some point I put caps on the end of some tubes in order to draw finer lines and create a scrabbled texture. I went back and forth between drawing lines, over-brushing them, and adding more brushed-on paint. I added a lot more black. The canvas was coming along, but not yet there when Adrian walked up and loooked at it and said, "Do you want to know what I think it needs?"
"No," I answered. "I need to be alone with this."
An hour later he came back. "Wow, what did you do to this? It's so different."
"I did what needed to be done to make it work."
And that only comes with patient looking. The painting tells you what it needs. But it doesn't come by magic or willpower. You have to look and look and then work and look some more.
I'll see tomorrow whether I still like it enough to sign.
9/23/05
Today I worked on two large canvasses, 56" x 56" and 60" x 48". I had been listening to Bob Dylan's new and old songs for a couple of weeks, but today I switched to Flute, Guitar and Harp of the Andes.
The 56 x 56 was coming along nicely. I'd done a "block" background by dabbing different colored spots of paint from the tube randomly all over the canvas, then flattening them into a rectangle with a palette knife. Next I painted over the whole canvas with a thin wash.
After the background dried, I drew curving lines all the way across the canvas, feathering the lines with a brush and then filling in the spaces with alternating pale yellow and green. I turned the canvas 90 degrees and did the same. Then I drew lines in alizarin crimson to form large petal-like shapes. After they dried, I painted them in with a pale rose wash. Finally, I drew a series of smaller petals, circles, etc., within the larger shapes, beginning at the center with cad yellow, then orange, red, and alizarin crimson.
The yellow is somewhat jarring and I wonder if I should have used it? No way to tell until I fill in with the washes. I was also thinking of filling in the spaces around the petals with green lines, making leaf-like shapes, but decided to wait and see how the rest of the painting goes before I make that decision. It may already have too much going on in terms of color and line.
This painting did not feel natural, in that I felt I was copying some earlier technique of mine and I didn't feel really comfortable with it. I think some of the movement in what I've been doing over the last couple of years is because I grew disatisfied with earlier methods. For one thing, making these lines is not foolproof. Sometimes a gap occurs in the line, or some of the paint falls to the side, so the line is not crisp and even. In the past I just ignored these errors, considering them to be part of the spillages and accidents that a painting is made up of. These things seem to bother me more now. I am concerned that the surface look as if it was all supposed to happen that way.
The 48 x 60 canvas was in an earlier stage. I had just drawn the lines, but only in one direction--that is, left to right and not top to bottom. I liked the placement of the lines and had a plan to start filling in the spaces with a pale yellow at the top and to work my way down gradually to green at the bottom. I started with a yellow I liked at the top, but then I made some bad choices. I didn't want to use too many new jars to mix paint in, so I used some colors I had already mixed. Because I made do with what I had, by the time I got to the bottom or fourth section, I was using a green much too blue and deep. None of the colors flowed as if they were tints of each other, because they weren't.
In the end I had to mix several more batches of color and repaint over every section of the canvas in order to get shades that looked right together. The result is still a bit fluky and not at all the pale light-emanating background I'd hoped for. But I might be able to do something with it.
All in all, I don't feel comfortable with these paintings and have no sense of where I'm going with them at all.
9/25/05
Yesterday was my birthday. I played tennis with a friend, went to a movie with Adrian, relaxed, and started reading Nickled and Dimed. Amazing book.
Today while painting I listened to Nakai Earth Spirit, Native American flute music. All I did was fill in the lines I had drawn last time on the 56 x 56. Unfortunately, I chose saturated colors, whereas up to this point the layers were of very subtle shades. I used cad yellow for the center petals, then orange, red, and alizarin crimson. As I started to use the red, I knew it was going to be wrong, but I used it anyway.
Naturally it was wrong. It was too far from the yellow-orange and too close to the alizarin. So I had to paint over it in a red-orange. That was better, but the painting was not working. I decided to highlight the outlines of the first large shapes I had drawn and painted in a pale wash, so I used a strong yellow wash to fill in the central areas, then a strong slightly bluish-green to frame the outer areas. This green will help, I think, but the painting may still not work.
While I was working I thought about the choices an artist makes. How do I decide what to do next? What color to use? Sometimes I decide wrong and have to repaint, but what makes me choose a particular color in the first place? Experience? I suppose experience with all the paintings I've made in the past has something to do with my choices. Or the experience of looking at a lot of paintings and having a feel for what worked in them.
Sometimes it seems that the only way I get anywhere is through trial and error. That I ruin most canvases and then have to fix them. That I select the wrong color and then have to make the painting work around it.
9/29/05
Well, the 48 x 60 painting came easy. I splashed a meadow-like effect across the canvas, almost but not quite obliterating the underlying outlines. The colors are muted and soft, with the overall effect quite loose and meandering.
The 56 x 56 was another story altogether. I've been working on it for days and days. When I added the bluish-green to all sides to frame the central design, the painting looked better, but not yet done. There were these huge petals plopped in the middle of a yellow-green background. Nothing connected.
I decided the background was too flat, and began to draw little leaf shapes starting with a cad yellow in the negative spaces around the petals, next using bronze yellow and then hunter green. Well, the cad yellow was invisible on the yellow background, so I went over them with a pale yellow-green.
After letting the canvas dry overnight, I colored in the petals, first filling the yellow-green outlines with a yellow-green glaze. I filled the bronze yellow outlines with a green glaze, and then went back and covered over the first ones with yellow. I filled the third layer of petals with a pale yellow green.
Still, the painting did not work, so then I thought what might help would be to paint a darker blue-green from the outside in, up to the outside lines of petal-like objects I'd drawn. This would create a strong frame for the painting. Also, Adrian had said he thought the lines which formed the large petals were too thin and light and needed to be made stronger.
At that point I decided he might be right, and what did I have to lose? The painting didn't work as it was. So I drew the outlines of the petals again with alizarin crimson and then went over them with a dry brush to make them thicker.
All this work took several days, and when it was finished, I still felt the painting just didn't come together. Someone may have actually liked this painting and bought it, but I didn't want to sign my name to it. It was time for radical action.
I especially hated the dark blue-green frame I had painted, so first I went over this with a very pale light green. Then I decided that one of the biggest failings was that the yellow-green background and the red-pink-orange-yellow foreground were two separate color palettes totally unconnected. Something had to bring them together.
I put a cap on the end of a tube of Hooker's green and drew 8 or 9 large circles of varying sizes all over the canvas. Then I mixed a thin glaze of pale yellow-green and started filling in the centers, brushing the hunter's green toward the edges of the circles. I filled in all the circles, some with the hunter's green still on the brush, making those darker, others lighter in the center. Three I filled with a thin rose wash.
OK, now the original painting was definitely obliterated, but there were all these clashing vibrating colors and weird shapes. It needed to be toned down and given some form. I put a cap on the end of burnt umber and began drawing straight lines glancing off the circles, forming angles and intersections.
That was good, but the canvas still needed some toning down, so I took a thick whitish-beige and began brushing it loosely here and there, blending it with the burnt umber.
I stopped and stood back.
That did it. I could now sign this painting.
Just hope and pray no one wants me to paint another like it.
10/6/05
My dealer outside Philly asked me to paint some more florals, since they'd sold one of the two I'd sent them previously. If you stand back, these florals look like a bouquet of flowers, but actually they are quite abstract. So today I painted two of them.
The first one was hard. I didn't know how to start. I couldn't remember how I'd done the first two I'd sent the dealer. I knew I had painted the top of a vase at the bottom of each painting, but I didn't want to do that this time. So I just started higher--at the point where you wouldn't see the vase anymore.
When I'm fooling around with the kids doing art projects, I often paint or draw abstract floral bouquets. It's easy and fun for me. I love flowers, so it seems natural. But painting them now to sell wasn't as much fun. The first one I painted seemed a bit forced and self-conscious. I was worried about making a mistake that wouldn't be correctible, even though I reminded myself that I was painting on paper and it would be no big deal if I had to throw one away.
I worked for about an hour more, when our son Dan, who was visiting, came out to see what I was doing. Then Adrian came out and said he really liked the painting.
I signed that one.
The second one came more naturally and was looser. I had more fun with it, using lines of paint to draw the outlines of some of the flowers and leaves, then filling them in. I didn't worry so much about achieving some pre-planned result. Hence, I like this one much better. If I keep painting these, I'll have to find a way to explore and have fun rather than duplicating the same painting over and over.
11/16/05
About a week ago I started work on two new canvasses, just for me. I was looking for something new. I wanted to go somewhere I hadn't been before, and I didn't want to repeat the same patterns.
My usual method on canvas is to get some sort of background done first, covering the canvas completely, including the sides. I often used the stubs of tubes for this--a way to efficiently use up all the paint. It was that old waste not, want not idea I'd learned growing up poor in a large family.
Sometimes these backgrounds would become part of the final painting, showing through in places. Other times they became obliterated as I applied layer after layer of new paint.
In any case, I was tired of painting backgrounds first. Why not just start the painting?
On the first canvas, I used a palette knife and gobs of paint to make two large crescent-like shapes, one cadmium red medium and the other alizarin crimson. Then I mixed a pale yellow-green wash and filled in the rest of the canvas. OK, that looked kind of neat. Let it dry.
On the second canvas, I wanted to try painting in black and white, something I've been think about lately, but haven't really been able to put into practice. About fifteen years ago I did some black-and-white canvasses and I liked those a lot. But that was then.
So I started drawing black lines across the canvas, and then a large black circle in the middle. Next I brushed in all the alternating spaces with white, getting a gray around the edges where the white mixed with the black lines. After that, the only logical next step seemed to be to fill in the empty spaces with a very pale yellow. (So much for my black-and-white idea.) OK, let that dry.
The next day I had to turn these canvasses and paint the sides, which would become the top and bottom. After that, I drew more black lines on the second canvas, trying to get something interesting going. Unfortunately, it just got worse and worse, and when friends came to lunch that day, I hid it.
On the first canvas, the one with the reds and greens, I drew thin dark green lines across the canvas from left to right, in a zig-zag pattern. Then I drew thick lines of zig-zag shapes straight from the tube in the cad red and alizarin. Next I added green circles in thin lines randomly across the surface. But nothing I did was satisfying.
When I was working on these two canvasses, I felt like I had forgotten how to paint and how to be spontaneous. They were going nowhere and I was ready to dump them.
The next time I tackled them, however, was entirely different. I was no longer interested in completing what I had started, since the beginnings were disasters. Instead, I used them as backgrounds, and the painting session was great. Something exciting started to happen in each one, and I was able to engage with them in a loose and spontaneous manner.
What I learned from this is that I need something on the canvas to react to before I can really engage in the process. Looking at a blank canvas just doesn't do it for me. So the best procedure for me is to calmly and methodically do something to cover up that white. Only then can I really become engaged creatively.
