Aubergine

How I start a painting

Carefully remove my nipple from the sleeping baby's mouth.
Freeze until I am sure she's asleep.
Slowly get out of bed, hoping the bed frame doesn't creak and wake her.
Sneak down the hall, avoiding the squeeky board.
Turn on the baby monitor.
Check the time.
Empty the sink, wipe the counter.
Put away the mail.
Add a couple things to the running to-do list.
Empty the litter box.
Peek in the bedroom to make sure she's breathing.
Check the time.
Start a load of laundry.  
Put on some music.  Change my mind halfway through selecting an album because it will wake the baby.
Go in the studio.
Go back to the kitchen for the baby monitor and a glass of water.
Go in the studio. 
Pull out a photo and fight the urge to go print a better one off the computer.
Pry open the palette and check the paint.  
Toss the dry paint out and apply new colors.
Fight the urge to go vacuum. 
Check the time.
Talk back to the voice that says I'm not any good and I don't know what I'm doing and I have lots of other things that are far more important and a better use of my time. 
Go fill a jar with water and sit.
Fight the urge to go check that the baby is breathing.
Rummage around for an appropriate surface to paint on.
Resist the urge to choose something that needs a coat of gesso, thereby giving me an excuse not to start the actual painting yet.
Sit down at the easel.
Notice that the support I chose is a different aspect ratio than the photo and rummage around some more for masking tape to mask the photo to the right shape.
Listen closely to the monitor to make sure the baby's breathing.
Go get the mail.
Check the time.
Panic, because the baby's going to wake up any time now.
Sit.
Take a deep breath.
Dampen a brush and pick up some color.
Take another deep breath and let everything fall away.
Begin.

July 23: in the studio

I've been spending a lot of time in my studio recently.  Making stuff.  Thinking about stuff.  Tinkering around.  Playing with color just for the joy of it.  Just being.  I found this old receipt last night in a pile of old book pages that I bought from somewhere a long time ago.  It says, "Received of Mr. J. Frailey Smith one hundred and fifty dollars payment in full for instruction to March 1st, 1889.  James H. Penniman.  March 7th '89."  It has a hole punched in it, like it spent a while on one of those receipt spikes (that always make me think of Death of a Salesman and cringe).  I have no idea what I'm going to do with this piece of paper, but I think it is pretty cool.  I wonder what kind of instruction Mr. Penniman gave to Mr. Smith in the early spring of 1889?  And where has this piece of paper been for the last 118 years?  How did it avoid getting tossed in the trash somewhere along the way?

June 26: how I heal

So hard this week to keep on keeping on.  Tonight, after a day when it felt like I failed at everything, I locked myself in my studio.  Turned up the music (Dead Can Dance and Lisa Gerrard alone) and let myself just be. Lit a candle.  Lit some incense. Tidied up a bit.  Studied my drawings from the weekend and found the most beautiful lines ("I made that!").  Thought about the haunting painting on the easel, circled it a while, but left it alone for tonight.

Honored the fertility of my creative well.

June 16: the art of evasion

I've been circling around a new painting recently. I opened a fresh canvas and put it on the easel.  A few days later I did a light pencil sketch on it.  A few days later, I repeated the sketch in my journal.  I made myself some time in which to paint.  Then I did other things with it.  Today I was determined to start this painting. On my way to that, I gardened a bit.  I had a snack.  I updated my blog.  I cleaned up the studio.  I poked around on the web a bit.  I cleaned some more.  I wrote myself a note on the canvas:

That made me laugh, and was enough to get me going.  The universe laughed back and sent me a sign:

But I did it.  The painting is started, and that's always the hardest part.

 

gems from Artfest

Each evening after our workshops, we'd all return to the house and display our projects on the mantle in the living room and talk about what we'd learned.  11 talented women in one house.  "That's a lot of girl art," a friend at home said when I described our little ritual to her.  After three days, our creations had spilled out onto the nearby bookshelves and the coffee table.  A room full of inspiration.

The three encaustic pieces in the top photo were made by Stephanie Lee. The rings are mine.  The metal and glass book in the background was made by Lori Brofsky.  The bird head in the background of the second photo is also Stephanie's, and I made the heart and pomegranate in the foreground in her class. I'm not sure who the zebra/fish-bellied sculpture belonged to  - it showed up overnight one night, an import from the Art Asylum, probably.

I rented a car this trip and travelled alone, a different experience from my previous Artfest visits, but a good one.  Time to process what I'd learned, time to just be.  I left Port Townsend pretty early and drove slowly through the pretty countryside back to the Bainbridge Island ferry.  Once back in Seattle, I walked through Pike Place market (pretty crowded with tourists on a Sunday afternoon, but the flower stands were amazing), and then along 1st street's botique row before a quick stop at the Daniel Smith store before heading back to the airport and home. 

I was so tired at the end of this trip - I didn't waste time sleeping when I could have been spending time with my friends talking about art and life and kids and everything in between, and was feeling the lack of rest by the time I got home.  I'm normally very protective of my sleep hours, but I have so much crazy energy to burn at Artfest that sleep is the first thing to go.  Also so much creative input and inspiration makes my brain spin so fast that sleep would be impossible even if I tried. 

Returning to work felt a lot like re-entry from outer space into a forgotten atmostphere. I had been letting my artist self hang out in the open for a few days, feeding her, honoring her, and then *slam* back to being a manager, back to the fast pace, the details and emergencies.  I endured a few meetings wide-eyed and overwhelmed, and I was pretty crispy around the edges after that first day back at the office.  These two lives of mine are sometimes hard to reconcile.  I was describing my "other" life to my friend Lori one night at the fort, late, sitting out on the porch of our big creaky house, smelling the ocean air, paint bits coloring our hands and jeans.  "Which one is more you?" she wanted to know.  I wasn't sure how to answer that.  The artist, I think, is more real, but also more often hidden.  Certainly she has a longer history.  The career woman is no less true to myself, but also more polished, less raw, more a public face.  The artist is who I am when I let my hair down.  When I feel safe.  More and more though, they overlap.  The frank curiousity and devil-may-care attitude of the artist is influencing the manager, and the organization and determination of the manager is starting to show in the artist.  And this, I think, is a good thing.

the rain makes beautiful, too

practice

I took a day off from work in the middle of this week to go to a painting workshop.  More of a demonstration, as I sat near the instructor's easel with my notebook and watched and absorbed.  I have visited this artist's studio in the past, and I love the looseness and rich colors of her work.  I wanted to see how she got there, from blank canvas to finished image.  While I did certainly pick up some technical tips, and some ideas to experiment with, the main thing I learned was that she's good because she works at it.  She paints all the time.  She's been painting since she was 17.  This is her work, and she probably puts into it the same amount of time that I put into my work.  Which I'm good at.

"If you want to get better," she told us, "go home and paint, paint, paint."  She advised us to paint at least 3 times a week, for a couple of hours at a time.  Set up the work, our space to paint in, the night before, so you can arrive and begin.  Paint still lifes, over and over.  Just paint.   Someone in class asked what books or instructors she recommended to learn from.  "I don't," she said,  "You have to learn from yourself."  Just do it, make mistakes, and keep going.  Show up and do the work, that's the only way to learn.

grungy hands

A sure sign of a good weekend is my hands right now:  Dirty and dry from gardening, spattered with gesso and paint.  How would one take a self-portrait of one's own hands?  I can't figure out how to get my hands in the frame and also operate the camera.  There is some combination of tripod and remote shutter that I have not yet figured out.

I did a lot of settling in this weekend.  Nesting, like I do in the fall, but less about the cycle of the year than having just let the clutter get too out of control.  I started Saturday by trying to tidy the studio, but I've run out of places to put things away.  A good clean-out is overdue.  Disgusted, I went to another room to tidy, but had the same problem.  Our stuff is started to overwhelm us again.  I did make some progress, but I'm irritated by those corners that are often overlooked - the piles that have been set down because one or the other of us don't know what to do with that stuff, and have been there so long they have become part of the landscape.  I want to look around the house and not have to have blinders for those corners.  I want each vista to be beautiful, every item to be loved.  Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful - William Morris

Another thing I'm overwhelmed by is magazines.  I have a bad magazine habit.  I love to buy them, but then they collect.  Often I read part of them, then they get abandoned, piled, saved for a time when I can get back to them.  I save them so I can tear them up, save the bits that I want to remember.  House design or style, images that capture my attention for my journal.  Tips and recipes.  I should apply the junk mail rule more often to my magazines: Touch them only once.  So I spent some time tearing up and discarding old magazines.  I think I need to make an inspiration wall in the studio, but in the mean time, I made a collage in my journal of images that my magpie eyes alighted on.  Always an interesting exercise, to see the patterns that emerge.  What surprised me most was the colors - brighter than I'm usually drawn to.

I bought a big canvas this weekend.  I've been wanting to paint bigger.  A craving that is getting hard to ignore.  I don't really have space in my studio, the way it is currently set up, to paint big.  This is one of my biggest frustrations in my current working space.  But I've been putting off reorganizing, putting off fulfilling the craving, just generally ignoring this voice, the one I know I should be listening to.  So I bought a canvas that I don't have enough room to paint, to force the issue.  It is leaning against the desk, staring at me.  It scares me, a little.  I'm not sure yet what it wants to be.  I have some ideas, and some sketches.  I started fooling around with one idea in watercolor in my new Moleskine watercolor journal, which is a similar shape to the new canvas.  Then I shied away and started painting something else.  I got out the M.Graham artist's gouache paints that I bought recently and hadn't yet tried and started sketching from a photo I'd torn out of a magazine.  How is it that I have missed gouache as a medium all these years?  I have had some tubes of designer's gouache in my paint box for years that someone gave me (from their studio clean-out), but I don't think I'd ever tried them.  I ordered these M. Graham tubes when I was ordering some watercolor tubes recently, because I've been reading about botanical illustration and I really like the look of some of the pieces painted in gouache. 

But even more, I like painting with it.  And I didn't even know it.  Gouache is somewhere between watercolor and acrylic, the two mediums I most often switch between.  Water-soluoble, like watercolors, but with the ability to be opaque, like acrylic.  I can control the opacity by thinning the wash, like I do with acrylic paints, and I can layer to my heart's content without making a big muddy mess, which is what I often end up with when using watercolors.  Also, the paints have a bit of a sheen from the medium that makes the colors sort of glow.  I *love* this stuff (click the picture for a bigger image).  I can get the lovely blended delicacy of wet-in-wet watercolor, but also go back in and correct colors until they are just right by layering color over color.  But the best part is that I can also lift out - the one thing I wish I could do with acrylics, but once they dry they are bonded plastic.

That scary canvas, still blank, is to thank for this fantastic discovery.  Who says avoidance techniques are always bad?

Sudio Friday: contrast

Recently:

Now:

This is a little misleading, as it isn't like I've just been home painting like crazy this week.  I wish.  I've been cleaning the house, planting in the garden, napping, reading.  All good things, all good for feeding my creative spirit.  But the painting is still slow to come.  It is so nice out, and so dim in here.  I want so much to move all the furniture around in this studio. Create myself a big place to paint big things.  But there is other furniture in the way, furniture that hasn't sold yet, nor been picked up by the intended new owners.

But still, nice to have a desk messy with paint, as it has been a too long spotless.

Today's is this blog's first anniversary, and I am still seeking the balance I talked about in my first post.  It is elusive, this balance.  Just when I think I have the hang of it, it slips away.  But I'm learning to be OK with that. 

It was good to go back and read some of those early posts.  I'm such a cyclical creature.  In the same places, thinking about the same things, about the same time each year.  It is good to see the progress I've made, even while feeling like I'm standing still.  It is good to see where I've grown.  As a writer, as a photographer, as a human. 

looking up

I'm completely enamoured with clouds recently.  I don't know if I've just started noticing them (taking the time to look up) or the cloud formations recently are unusual for this area.  We've been having crazy weather here for a couple of weeks, but most crazy in the last few days.  There was so much hail on Friday night that it almost covered the windshield of my car, and was still blanketing the garden when we got up in the morning.  The mini mountain between me and work was closed for snow on Friday, and again on Sunday.  They say the globe is warming, but it sure seems like there has been more snow around here in recent memory than ever in my youth. 

So I don't know if the clouds are just the storms or if I'm just newly noticing them.  But they sure are pretty.  Driving back from our realtor's office on Saturday morning, we drove the long way along the cliffs so that I could oooh! and ahhh! over the crazy, fat clouds.  Crisp and brilliant blue, blue sky behind low, thick, white clouds.  Big waves, too, and a traffic jam in the water at Steamer's lane.  Lots of walkers out enjoying the brief sun, lining the rail along the cliff to watch surfers jostle for a good position.  Cold, cold, too. 

I spent several hours on Sunday using my frustrated March energy to throw things out of my studio.  It is a tremendous task, and I'm only partially completed, but I can feel the additional space in here already.  Cleared, clean workspaces are inviting, though I'm still swirling around and don't know what to focus on.  I want to paint those clouds, and I took dozens of pictures this weekend.  I don't have room to paint as big as I'd like to.  I want to paint with my arm, and my space only has room for finger painting.  I found a link this morning to Nila Oake's paintings, also clouds.  It looks like she paints in a garage, on the floor, against the wall.  I yearn for an upstairs studio with windows all around where I can see the sky unobscured by other houses and power lines.  I crave big sky, big space.