A Year of Making Art: Day 2

4/21/07 Day 2

Yesterday I showed my daughter Blixy the self-portraits and she said, "Do you realize you've made yourself look more male than female?"

"No," I said, "I didn't realize that, but now that you point it out, you're right.  I guess my inner image of myself has always been that of a young boy."

"Yeah, but your early portraits look more feminine."

"True."

This morning I tried drawing another self-portrait, but it was coming out so badly that I stopped working on it.  Then I did an abstract drawing, which also started out poorly.  I was going to abandon it, too, but decided to keep working on it.  Here it is:

  Drawing #1

Next I tackled the painting I've been working on for a week without success. It was very dark, with no light in it at all.  I opened a tube of bright orange and drew thick lines across the surface of the canvas.  Then I took a pale lime green and made some marks with that.  Finally with a brush wet in a thin wash of orange-green, I brushed over it all.  And then I used thin lines of brown umber to outline, accent, and texturize.

I kept working, adding some reds, until I had a pretty ugly canvas in front of me.  This is it:

  Canvas #1

Have I forgotten how to paint completely?

In frustration, I went to work on another 44" x 44" canvas, using white, black and brown paint directly from the tube.  I figured I had to cut back on color and concentrate on line and form, in order to get myself back to the basics.

This is how that one ended up:

  Canvas #2

So it's true, I have forgotten how to paint.  The only solution is to just keep going, even though I feel impatient and frustrated.  I don't know what to do, so I paint faster.  That isn't working.

Will I be able to salvage these paintings?  I don't even know what I'm looking for.  I don't know what a good painting will look like any more.

I imagine my neighbors walking past and looking in my studio windows thinking, "Look at that ugly painting she is making."

(Note:  There is a gap between the  dates I'm writing and posting  because I had to give myself time to get ahead in case we travel and I'm not able to post.)