Abstract Art

de Kooning--An American Master

I just finished reading de Kooning, An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.  This is a big book, at 631 pages without the notes, and it covers every aspect of de Kooning's life and his art, including the lives of his wife Elaine de Kooning, and his friends and contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock, Rothko, Franz Kline, and others.  The book provides a fascinating look into the beginnings of the New York School of painting or "action painting."  The name that stuck, however, was "abstract expressionism."

I had been an admirer of de Kooning's work long before I read this book.  I always loved his lush brushstrokes, the confident looseness of his compositions, and his courageous use of color.  But I had known nothing about his life.  Learning of his difficult childhood in Holland and very hard beginnings in the US after stowing away on a freighter at age twenty-two to get here, his ongoing struggles with depression, artist's blocks and alcohol were understandable. 

But de Kooning always put his art first, and that's what saved him and gave his work its strength.  His stubborness cost him, when he refused to give Peggy Guggenheim a painting to put in a show she was organizing and therefore probably delayed his acceptance in the art world.  But his stubborness also saved him from lavishly following the trend of the day.  When the official art world moved on from abstract expressionism to pop art and conceptual art, de Kooning refused to follow.  He went in his own direction in spite of poor reviews and a loss of following among younger artists. That's not an easy thing to do once you've had the limelight in a big way, and de Kooning did. 

De Kooning's example helps strengthen my own resolve to paint what I must, not what is fashionable.  His work habits and singlemindedness are an inspiration, while his humor and playfulness remind me not to take myself or the world too seriously. 

If you have an interest in art and artists, I highly recommend de Kooning, An American Master.

Holiday Blues

It's Monday, the day after Christmas and the first night of Hanukah, but since it's a national holiday here, there is no mail and the partying goes on.  But not in our house.  Both Adrian and I are feeling a little depressed and out of it. 

I always have trouble getting through holidays.  I do best during ordinary work days, and I tend to work on the holidays anyway, unless we have guests.  I tried to paint this morning, but it is not going well. 

I've been revisiting a painting background that I had used successfully years ago--making stripes on the canvas with masking tape.  I prepared four canvasses this way:  white stripes on a black background, parchment on black, gray on black, and gray on white.  By the time I finished the first one, I was sick of black and white, and especially sick of these backgrounds.  Sometimes you just can't revist an earlier style.

Now my challenge will be to makes the rest of these paintings work, in spite of myself.  I put some red lines on one canvas because I knew I had to get back to color again.  What are rules for if you can't break them?

The Studio

A comment was made recently by Kent that I should show some photos of my studio, so here they are:

      

The windows on the left face the North, which provides the perfect light for painting.  Southern light is not as good because it creates a glare on the canvas.  The other windows face the back of our lot, which is bordered by a brook.  This is an idyllic country setting in which to paint. 

I love the view out my windows, but I prefer loud music to the peace of the countryside when I'm painting.  The past couple of weeks I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen's DEVILS & DUST cd.  I tend to listen to the same cd over and over when I work until I sense a need for a change.

I am still working on my black and white series.  I made a grid of lines on some canvasses by applying masking tape, painting over it, and then removing the tape.  We'll see what I can make of this background.

Happy Holidays!

Inspiration from the Past

Whenever I visit family and friends I haven't seen in a while, I always enjoy looking at my art on their walls.  I get to revisit these pieces, and sometimes seeing them inspires new work.  I love trying to figure out how I made them.

This fall I was at a family reunion in San Diego, where I saw some of my paintings at my niece Jill's house.  One, PLANETARY FOREST, was basically black and white with some blue highlights:

When I say black and white, I include all the shades of gray between them.  Seeing this painting again inspired me to paint a new series of black and white paintings recently.  There is something freeing and clear about painting in black and white.  The form and composition become obvious.  They are in your face. 

We got 8 inches of new snow this past weekend, on top of the 3 or 4 already on the ground, so it looks like I am going to be seeing white outside my windows for a long time.  The white of the snow puts everything else in stark contrast to it.

I went for a walk this afternoon at Cornell Plantations with my friend Liz, crunching through snow and ice on the paths.  We looked down into a gorge at one point to see the creek below surrounded by snow and ice, which created a black and white abstract landscape for us.  It was magnificent.

Here are a couple of the black and white paintings I've been working on recently, EYE ON YOU and END OF THE SYMBOL:

          

Do Art and Art Business Mix?

Every artist I know wants to sell their work and to make a living as an artist.  If you're not selling your art, that becomes pretty depressing and makes it harder to go to the studio and work.  Unsold paintings begin to collect, filling closets, attics, basements. You begin to wonder, "Why bother making more?"

When I wasn't selling my art, I became depressed and found it harder and harder to work in my studio.  Then when I'd sell a painting, my mood would brighten and I'd happily begin the next one. Now that my paintings sell regularly, I have no trouble being motivated to paint.

I do find, however, that the business side of my art business takes a different mindset than the art side.  In my business, I need to read and respond to email regularly, answer phone inquiries, prepare invoices and shipments--the kind of tasks that require attention to detail, organization, and a "customer conscious" mind.

Sometimes it's hard to switch gears from the business mind to the creative mind.  That's why I try to paint first thing in the morning when I'm fresh, leaving the business tasks for later in the day.  But sometimes the two just mix anyway, in spite of my best plans.  Then I'm standing in front of a canvas with thoughts of a recent price inquiry trickling through my head, or reminding myself to call my printer about a print order. 

No, no, no, that's not what I want to be thinking about when I'm standing in front of a canvas.  I want all my attention, my vital and engaged attention, to be paid to that canvas in front of me.  I want to be responding to color, shape and form, not invoices and bills of lading. 

That's when I turn on my cd player, volume high.  Music is the one thing that can get me out of my business mind and back into my creative one.  Before I even paint a stroke.   

X Marks the Spot: Multiple Meanings

A student who is doing an art project for school about me emailed, "I notice that you paint X's a lot of the time.  Why do you do that?"

I do like X's, I answered her.  I think they have multiple-meanings, so I'm free-associating here to see what comes up.  Sometimes making an X is an act of  "crossing-out" what has come before--a strong mark of emphasis.  Making an X is a way of saying "no" to the world.  In a way, X's are the opposite of O's, which I also use a lot in my art.

X is a primitive kind of mark which may come from the unconscious, a kind of making your mark or staking out your territory.  X is also used as a place marker, to mark one's place.  It is used as a signature for those who cannot write their names.  X accumulates meanings.

But there is also a physical satisfaction in making an X, especially a large one that fills up a canvas.  It feels decisive to make this strong mark.  A large prominent X also presents a challenge--how am I going to get around it?  To make the painting work?  In some contexts, the X is playful.  For example, in my painting TIC-TAC, the placement of the X's and O's playfully suggest a game.  Here it is:

Building and Preparing Canvasses

This week I am building canvasses, since I used up all the ones I had.  I buy my heavy-duty stretchers from Craft Cut Products in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  After assembling four stretchers to make one frame, and adding a cross-bar, then I cut the canvas, wrap it around the sides and staple it to the back of the frame, so the staples won't show.  I built eleven canvases, using up all the stretchers I had around the studio.

Now I'm in the process of applying gesso--a white undercoating which acts like a "primer."  I used to do this with a brush, but now I use a paint roller and it's much faster and easier.  Unfortunately, I ran out of gesso after doing half the canvasses.  I've got some on order, but until it comes I can start painting on the canvasses I've finished.

It's lovely to look at all the stretched canvasses sitting round the studio--it is reassuring to know they are waiting for me.  Yet they also present a challenge.  How will I fill them?  The stark white squares and rectangles are beautiful in themselves.  Will I add to or take away from this beauty?  I can't wait to find out!

In the meantime, here is another new painting I completed in the last group of canvasses: FINDING YOUR PLACE.

The Challenge of Painting a Large Canvas

I've been working on a 60" x 60" canvas, which can be intimidating.  It's one thing to ruin a small canvas, but you don't want to mess up one this large.  You have to get past that feeling and just go about it as you would any other painting. 

Another issue that makes this size harder is that it simply takes longer to cover the whole thing with paint.  I like to treat a canvas in an overall manner, addressing all the parts together.  With such a large canvas, one area may dry before I get back to it.  You get a very different result working wet on wet than you do working wet on dry.  For example, often when I draw lines of paint, I go over them with a dry or barely wet brush in order to feather the line.  If the line has dried, this doesn't work.

So once several days of background paint had dried, I painted quickly, adding lines in blue, green, white and black, one layer over another.  When I stood back at the end of that session, the canvas had a very spacious and comfortable feel to it.  Then I opened a tube of Cadmium red light and made two curving swoops of thick lines, flattening them a bit with my palette knife.

I left the canvas to dry, and when friends came over later that evening, it got a lot of compliments. Here it is at that point:

I liked the painting as well, but felt it still needed more to be complete.  The swoops of red were floating on the surface too removed from the rest of the canvas.  I added more fine lines of Cadmium red and red light, feathering the lines to thicken them and give them more character.  Next I used black lines to fill in some spaces and to emphasize others through outlining, in order to create a clearer movement and focus for the eye. 

Finally, GALAXY was finished: