Macro fun with the point and shoot...

"[Photography] is the easiest medium in which to be competent. Anybody can be a marginally capable photographer, but it takes a lot of work to learn to become even a competent painter. Now, having said that, I think while photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is probably the hardest one in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision. It’s the hardest medium in which to separate yourself from all those other people who are doing reasonably good stuff and to find a personal voice, your own vision, and to make something that is truly, memorably yours and not someone else’s. A recognized signature style of photography is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve."    ~ Chuck Close

My husband has stated that "there is a low threshold for entry into photography" for years (trust me, we have seen a lot of less-than-marginal photography, so this is not snarkiness as much as observation), so when I came across the Chuck Close quote above, I giggled because it is, essentially, the same idea wrapped within a more eloquent concept. 

I am a marginal photographer.  But, that is no great feat because I have had enough dark room experience, made more than my share of pinhole cameras and have probably taken about 800 rolls of 35 mm film (oh, it is true, and I still have the negatives in shoe boxes in my studio closet!).   At some point, after all of that, the process of making a decent picture sort of sinks in.  And, needless to say, the age of digital photography has lowered the threshold for entry into photography even more than the accessability of the Polaroid or 35mm ever did (take a gander through flickr - there are a lot of really good, interesting, and inventive photographs out there).  Now I even have the luxury of taking about 10 photos of something that I like and picking the decent photo out of the lot (and deleting the rest) which is far better than the old days of waiting for a roll of film to develop only to see that the one precious shot I was anticipating is out of focus or has the blurry dark line of the camera strap across the lens.   Okay, I do love the beautiful surface of an analog photograph, but the digital is just so darn handy.

And really, the art teacher in me thinks that it is quite a good thing that the ability to compose an image, capture and idea, or document a scene is so easily attainable for everyone.  Art is long, processes can be frustrating, and sometimes you just want to make something fast.

Truthfully, I do not have a passion for the photograph as a medium as much as I see it as a utilitarian way for gathering references for my drawings (which are often composed, or at least formatted in photoshop - the final composing takes place on a full size sheet of tracing paper).  But, I love, love, love taking photos of the little things in the world with the macro setting of my point and shoot.   There is something about getting eye-level to the ground or right up to a bug and putting the camera an inch away...finding and capturing the image of something so tiny and transient.  

So, my macro fun in the garden continues with mushrooms, butterflies, and that fabulous leafy green swiss chard...

 

 

 

I have another Moleskine finished and it will be posted at the end of the week, plus I will write about my official curatorial debut next week! 

War Paint 3

Self-Portrait in War Paint 3

graphite on Arches paper

18 x 17 inches

This is the current state of the third War Paint drawing. It is not finished. Actually, none of the drawings in this triptych are finished, as I have not felt compelled to take them off their little drawing boards. Something is going to happen with them; somehow they will interrelate, come together, either with a connected compositional element or literally put together into one drawing. I am setting them aside for awhile and waiting until I know what will finalize the triptych.

Here are all three together as I have planned to arrange them:

Plus, some details of the War Paint 3 drawing:

The new drawing that I have started is very intense, both as an emotional undertaking and with subject matter: although not by any means offensive or particularly disturbing, it is acutely autobiographical. I think it is best not to post this one until it is further along or perhaps even finished: newly started drawings are a bit like newly-born foals on spindly, unsure legs - not quite ready to weather the outside world until fully stable. I will let the drawing out of the studio when the idea and composition are more decisively out of my head and formulated on the paper.

Art in process is not something that I take lightly; I protect my ideas in the earliest stages because, quite frankly, when I start a drawing I do not always think about what I am drawing and I do not want any external responses during this embryonic stage of the artwork. Rather, I intuit the work on a more subconscious level and then, as the drawing is coming into more of a defined and recognizable state, I will gradually allow the analytical parts of my brain to explain and articulate the narrative. Frequently negative space and even larger compositional elements are not even resolved until the drawing is well underway.

It is a rather risky affair for those without a deeply realized sense of their own creative self or confidence in their own skill to show their artwork to others during the germination of an idea. I learned this the hard way during graduate school – I allowed myself to get caught up into what a couple of my professors thought I was, or should be, pursuing. The most damaging guidance came from the professorial type who felt that too highly “tight” painters or drawers need to be broken and “loosen up”. That damage was only compounded by the professorial type who decided to take a total hands-off approach to “teaching” without offering guidance or to even acknowledge the more banal and lowly sides of art education, specifically craftsmanship and, heaven forbid, design and composition.

I took some hard turns, had some ridiculous run-arounds, got side-tracked and otherwise lost a couple of years of my own art. But, I eventually found my creative self again: it was not bruised or distorted, rather well-weathered and tolerant of criticism, intolerant of prevarications and misguidance.

Now my creative self is welcome to suggestions and useful, sincere, and constructive criticism. But I am only willing to act on suggestions that seem to viscerally resonate once I am alone with my work in the studio. Since my creative self is also protective, I also know when an idea is ready or not ready to emerge from the studio, and this new one must wait.

Who Does She Think She Is? Screening and Panel Discussion

I am very excited that I will be participating in a panel discussion at the Hillyer Art Center in Washington DC this Saturday after a screening of the film Who Does She Think She Is?  This event was organized by my friend and fellow artist, Kate Kretz, in conjunction with her exhibition Purge/Deluge at the Hillyer, which runs through April 30th.  If you are in the area, it is a must to see her exquisite hair embroideries and paintings.

Who Does She Think She Is?

Date:  Saturday, March 20th

Time: 2 PM

Location: 9 Hillyer Court NW,  Washington DC

Who Does She Think She Is? documents the conflict of being an artist and a mother, and the dual responsibilities and sacrifices that come with balancing the two roles.

Ironically, my mom-bligations have prevented me from seeing this film at any of the local showings over the past year, so I am looking forward to finally being able to view it for myself.

I am sure that I will identify with the movie: I have spent the past 9 years contemplating, musing, and clarifying my own feelings of balancing my life as both a mother and an artist, and I have some highly resolved opinions of my own.

To tell the truth, it has been very positive experiencing the two ventures of mother and artist, but I believe this as much as anything has to do with the support from my family and local community of artists, because I do not have to fight with anyone about the relevance or validity of what I do from day to day.  From a family standpoint, my husband has been in the profession of marketing music for years and he is more than aware of the time and dedication that artists have had to commit to their calling, often having to suffer relative obscurity for a very long time before they have success, if any comes at all, so his support has been unwavering. And, my local community is filled with creative types who are not working full time and stay home to raise children or run a household and pursue their interests, so there is an underlying community acceptance to the homemaker with an industrious side vocation. 

Not that there is ample time and freedom for creativity as a stay at home mom.  I have a lot to do as a mother of my children - on a daily basis I cook, feed, bathe, transport, monitor, negotiate, discipline, council, and plead for the finishing of homework. 

One question that people always ask when they see my drawings is "how do you find the time?"  I am quite convinced that it is not the amount of time, but the consistency of schedule that gets my drawings finished.  If I work an hour a day, that is equivalent to 7 hours at the end of the week, 28 hours at the end of the month, and so forth.  It is easy to find an hour a day (turn off the television, for one) and I am able to rummage up about 2 to 4 hours on most days of the week.   The average drawing takes me 120 hours to complete, at a few hours a day, and my fuzzy math skills, that is about two months.  My drawings are finished through drop-by-drop persistence.  And, as long as I get my one-hour-a-day in the studio to keep my serotonin/norepinephrine levels in check, I am pretty happy and can do anything for the other 23 hours of the day.   

I also work in an advantageous medium, too - there is a certain ease in slipping into the studio and working on one square inch of paper and then slipping out again.  I could see that abstract expressionists, who no doubt require longer lengths of time to fall into the emotional and mental space needed to interact with their work, would have trouble with my "hour a day" approach. 

And, thanks to my feminist period in college which compelled me to read Virginia Woolf, I learned early-on that it is imperative, imperative, that all artists (not just women) establish a room of their own to create.    And "room" can simply be a defined space - for a couple of years when my husband and I lived in a tiny apartment, I worked in a 4 foot x 4 foot nook off the kitchen that had just enough floor space to fit my upright 6 x 4 foot drawing board, a box of pencils and erasers, a sharpener, and my stereo.  Having a physically defined space in which to work and a place to leave out supplies has thwarted my tendencies toward procrastination for years:  the hurdle of "getting stuff out" each time one has the impulse to create is a brutally resistant step on the path of creativity.  Now that we have a larger home, the room of my own has evolved into a 12 x 12 foot studio with large sunny windows, a storage closet, and a lockable door to keep out curious little hands.

So, with all of these protective routines and habits in place to help sustain my life as an artist, there is really no excuse for motherhood to keep me out of the studio.  Oh, I could mention the fact that I was an only child and that I am wired with a slightly selfish streak that enables me to draw as I please, only compounded by the fact that I spent so much of my childhood in my own head.  But, I don't think so - I think routine is everything insofar as motivating an artist to create.

The great sacrifice, I suppose, is that I quit teaching for my art, not that I was bringing in any significant salary has an adjunct.  Quitting my teaching has been fabulous, actually, because I am free of the tedious and time consuming part of the job (grading, preparation, tracking down the idlers who seem to forget that they do have to attend class for credit) and although I enjoyed the actual classroom teaching aspect of being an adjunct, I do not miss the frustration of losing so much of my time to busywork.

I did not have to do a whole lot of soul searching before quitting my teaching career.   In the back of my mind were words of wisdom from an exceptional art teacher of 25 years (who happened to be my mentor for student teaching).   While she was flipping through a portfolio of intaglio prints that she had created decades earlier while completing her MFA, she remarked "artist, mother, teacher - pick two, but you cannot do all three."  Her own work was beautiful, but it placed third behind the teaching and the raising of her children, so eventually her printmaking ceased.  She had genuine regret in her voice, but it was mixed with a resolute feeling that made me think that she felt she had made the right choice.  I am quite sure that it was at the moment when she uttered those words that I prioritized my top two choices and that has been in the back of my mind for years:  I will not do all three.

The most compelling aspect of the mother/artist experience has been the impact that childbirth and raising children has had on my artwork.  The physical act of birthing children is such a life-changing event in itself: unremarkable in its universality, utterly mind-blowing in the complexity of the seamlessly integrated processes involved, from the genetic (sperm + egg = zygote) to the structural (woah, a baby and placenta are actually growing inside me!), to the raw power of birth itself.  Sorry to you c-section ladies, but vaginal childbirth is simply wild and primal.  Of course, being the only mother who happened to be birthing "spontaneous" twins (biological, not IVF) on that certain March day in the hospital, I had the pleasure of 3 nurses, 2 doctors, 3 residents (with their adviser), and 1 husband in attendance while I was up in stirrups pushing out two babies.  After such a display, any sense of modesty is permanently askew. 

From the intensity of childbirth to the responsibility of raising three little individuals, the impact of motherhood on my artwork was inevitable.  I find that having children has changed my view of the world:  from the reemergence of my own inexplicable childhood fears by observing them in my own children, to the sheer joy at revisiting the worlds of such fascinating little critters such as caterpillars and ducks.  And there is a whole new unexpected array and depth of emotions - protection, security, and advocacy - that come into play, too; emotions that underlie a lot of my current drawings and would have been utterly inaccessible to me were I not a mother.

Perhaps the most peculiar transformation is that I have ceased to see my own art as my "baby".  The art is a thing that I am driven to do.  The art is a filter for apprehension, love, and anger and has become more journal-like as the years have progressed.  The art is simply pencil on paper and I move on.  It is not some holy sacred thing because, really, anyone can make an object, anyone.  The extreme monetary value and mystique that revolves around a select few individuals in contemporary art, driving auctions and creating art stars is truly amusing to me:  oh, sure, I see technical skill and execution, I see slick concepts, and I see lofty and ambitious transformations of space.  But I am rarely moved in a powerful way, not like the act of childbirth - that was god-like, transcendent, and divine; but likewise an earthy experience that was only compounded with the intense emotions that have come with parenthood.  Motherhood has moored me to some great chain of humanity unlike any other event in my life. 

So, the last thought is whether the emotions and experiences of motherhood are an acceptable art commodity in the disproportionately male-dominated realm of galleries and museums.  My answer to that is a resolute no.  Do I care? Not really.  Is motherhood truly living for me?  Definitely.

Alter

Graphite, gouache, 23K gold leaf, and blood on Arches paper

46 x 26 inches

Strange Tales From My Little Black Book #9

A new sketch from the Moleskine ~ pencil and india ink on paper, approximately 7 x 5 inches:

Oceans Of Lotion, But No Magic Potion

My husband's comment when he saw the above drawing was "you look like you are coming off of a 3-day meth binge in that sketch", so this little drawing has been unofficially retitled "the meth portrait".  He has quite a few amusing alternate titles for my work, my favorite being "one day I am gonna kill that man..."

The studio clean out is starting to wear me down, but it has been a long time coming and I am happy for the space (and, by golly, I found one of my missing circle templates, as well as a treasure trove of oddities...but more details on all of that when I am totally finished cleaning/organizing and get around to doing the blog post documenting The Great Studio Clean Out).

I have a lot of in-progress drawings in spite of the clean out going on in the studio, but nothing is finalized.  I am still working on the Conversations with Goya self-portrait series, but I had this irresistible impulse to do a new piece for the Exhibitor's Co-op's Cube and I show slated for March/April at the Gaelen Gallery East at the JCC in West Orange, NJ.

This new cube drawing started simply as a Moleskine sketch, but then I realized that I wanted to do a fully rendered drawing, so out came a fresh sheet of Arches paper.   This is a smaller drawing - 14 x 25 inches - so it should be done in a couple of weeks.  A little detail snapshot, grey and fuzzy, as usual:

As far as the first Goya self-portrait, the values have been totally reworked (thank you Barbara!!!), the drawing sprayed, and I am starting a subtle black-on-black lace mantilla background for the negative space.  I was wavering on the background for a week or so - I was originally going to do the lace in yellow gold or white gold leaf, or possibly a red glaze, but was not fully at ease with any of these ideas, and as serendipity would have it, while at the National Portrait Gallery a few weeks ago, I saw a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I in which the anonymous artist had rendered a totally gorgeous pattern on her dress using black-on-black:  this pattern was not at all visible from a distance or in the reproduction of the painting below. Only by the light in the room and directly in front or to the side of the painting is it really evident that the dress has a floral/print patterned black-on-black:

FYI:  This Elizabeth painting is one of a few done around the same time that are referred to as the Clopton portriats, all with generally the same pose (details if you click that link - the Queen was apparently aware of the importance of getting her image "out there" by the way, totally on a side note, I recommend a dual biography about her and Mary Queen of Scots called "Elizabeth and Mary" - a bit of an English slant on the relationship between the two, but enjoyable and, as usual, I digress, but I don't pass up the opportunity to mention a good book here or there).

So, black-on-black it is, and I have a few ways to pull this off, but some Goya contemplation comes first - contemplation on lace, the presence and visual weight of darkness, the magnificent Maja, and then the technical ways and means.

Truth be told, in the end this series of drawings will have everything and then absolutely nothing to do with Goya...

The second Goya self-portrait is started, too - and, thanks to The Great Studio Clean Out, I have all of the above drawings spread out in my newly spacious studio, I can get to all of my art books, and I can easily access that precious circle template...

Currently Reading:  Ken Follet:  Pillars of the Earth

Symmetry and Storage

My eyes are crooked.  Seriously, my eyes are slightly misaligned - the right one is a millimeter higher than the left.   I have been aware of this since I was a teenager when it dawned on me that the reason why I could never get my eyeliner to look right was because one lid was shaped with a little more of a slope and the other eye was a little higher...so it goes, but it makes for some frustrating asymmetry when drawing.

The current work is a triptych of self-portraits...my internal monologues with Goya.  Each drawing is about 18 x 17 inches:  smaller, straightforward self-portraits with concentrated and candid observation.  I will post these drawings as I finish them.

At my husband's insistence (via repeated suggestion), I have rented a storage space for my finished and framed drawings.  I suspect that a commercial that we saw for the "Hoarders" show on A&E was the catalyst ("Hey - that looks just like my studio!") but, in truth, I cannot organize the studio supplies that I use because I can barely navigate the framed drawings I have stacked in my studio space.  I cannot even shift my chair to the left or right more than a couple of inches...it really is that bad.

Plus, there are little frustrations such as the day that I spent 45 minutes looking for the circle template (the second one that I have purchased this year) and as a last resort I ended up tracing glasses out of the kitchen (and not the exact circle size I needed) - a particularly exasperating instance when I knew that I owned something but I could not put my hands on it at the moment when it was desperately needed.

I suppose I could stop doing such large drawings that need to be framed...but since this drawing thing is a compulsion, that is not going to happen unless heavy medication is involved.

I remember asking one of my studio art professors what he was going to do with his stockpile of 15 x 20 foot paintings after his death...oh wait, digression:  I really am not that tacky or insensitive to ask an artist what they were going to do with the paintings that did not sell during his/her lifetime - this professor, both self-absorbed and eccentric, held one very open-forum class during each semester that was an "ask me any question about my experience as an artist, anything, no holds barred" so he encouraged this sort of dialogue.  My other question during one of these forums was whether or not women and men painted differently because of their actual physical differences (the innie-outie question), which, oddly, he shied away from answering, but the death question got him very excited...his answer was that since he owned the old high school gym in town (the only space large enough for his paintings) he had already made a stipulation in his will that the building would be sealed with his paintings left inside, protected, until anyone cared or bothered to get them out.

Alas, I do not think I will find a spare gymnasium anytime soon.  So, it is time for a good cleanout, a good system of organization, some fun trips to Ikea (oh Swedish storage paraphernalia, how I do love thee), and then I can at least move my chair around...perhaps I will even get one of those rolly-chairs since I will have some room for momentum when I wheel myself around the studio.