Simplify

It's true in so many aspects of life. Simpler is better. The tendency to overcomplicate things is something I need to be mindful of all the time. When a painting starts to fall apart, my first reaction is usually to add more to it, which is not the best response. As Antoine de St. Exupéry said (about designers), "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

I think the above painting is more successful than the lower one, for a number of reasons--one of which is simplicity.

Happy Fourth!

Wishing everyone Stateside a great holiday.

Study too.

These small abstract studies are a wonderful way to reinforce the practice of color harmony. Easy to try colors, scrape and try others. Nothing beats the palette knife for ease of adding and subtracting paint.

Study

These are all small studies for possible larger paintings. Right now I don't have any room for making or storing larger work, so these are the way to go.

Which way?

One of few that seem to look good either way. And we have a winner! Unanimous decision.

Mmmmm, palette knife.

A quote to ponder: "You know what creating really is? To have the capacity to be embarrassed." Spoken by Franz Kline to Philip Guston. Especially true when you're blogging everything you create...

Practice, practice

The main thing is to move some paint around at every opportunity. Think with your brush (or whatever you use to move the paint around). I catch myself so often trying to think these through rather than letting them grow and evolve, which is ultimately the only way they'll end up being what they're supposed to be. Thinking just gets me stuck.

Still, I think these are getting a little thin and reserved. That happens to me when I use only the brush for a while. I begin to notice that the paint on my palette isn't getting used up, and I know I'm in trouble. Starting tomorrow, the palette knife comes out.

Perseverance

Staying engaged with an abstraction is much easier for me, for some reason. Much more primal. Regardless of how things develop, the conversation stays open.

The only thinner and medium that I use is linseed oil, no solvents at all. The underpainting visible at left shows the effect of extra linseed oil to get that streaming texture. It dries overnight and is extremely durable.

Growth

This is another painting that went through many stages--six, to be exact. I think that abstract images are more likely (than representational work) to evolve from reworking, and emerge better than ever. They're like living things. It's possible for them to get overworked and beaten down, but most often they are enhanced and made beautiful by their history. Good incentive to keep working on them.

The "rules" would dictate not having the picture plane so strongly divided in half, but I love the tension created by that division right at the lower edge of the flowers. Rules are best when broken effectively.

No fear of failure, no hope of success

I am finally painting for myself. No more preconceptions or expectations, or self-imposed pressure to get approval. Oh sure, we're supposed to do this when we're in art school; we're supposed to try all avenues and "find our voice." But everyone can discern the professors' predilections, and everyone knows that by steering their work that way, they can get recognition in the form of grades and awards. Then, when we're working artists, we often think too much about what might sell--even if we try not to. Especially once our work starts to sell a lot.

But now I'm in Italy, and I can't sell my work here (not legal without license; bureaucratic mess) nor internationally (mailing and customs are problematic from here). Although initially this seemed devastating, it has turned out to be the best-ever silver lining to a cloud--because now there is no reason at all to think about getting anyone's approval but mine. I finally feel completely free to try anything and everything that makes me happy.

This painting is the end result of the one that I reworked about 10 times. I finally resolved it in a way that I really like and discovered a lot along the way. Major win!

Experimentation

I've always been fascinated with underpainting and with negative imagery--forms defined by the paint around them. Layers are interesting to me--that invitation to look beyond the surface is irresistible.


Friday we visited a local contemporary art museum, with a reputation for a very good collection. They're showing a group of contemporary Italian artists right now, and it's a very impressive show. The museum itself needs better lighting for some of the works, but there were some amazing paintings and installations. You can see a few of them here though the photos don't do them justice, mainly because most of them are HUGE (like 30 feet long)--more like an environment than a painting: MART Rovereto

We're hoping to get over to Venice soon to see the Biennale.

It's hot.

The scenery here looks nothing at all like this (we're in the Dolomites--think Austria). It's hot and very humid, which is why I was thinking of something a bit more arid in this imaginary landscape.

Fail = Win

Scraped this one off, but learned a lot from the protracted battle that had taken place.

Our tendency is to not take risks, because they're scary and uncomfortable. Especially once we've sold some paintings or been published, once we have a following or a gallery representing us, the pressure is enormous to keep producing work that's not dramatically different than what we've done before.

But growth is vital, if we want to continue to work. We'll never know what we're truly capable of, unless we push beyond the comfort zone and see where it takes us. As stated in my favorite book, Art & Fear, "the seed for your next artwork lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece." So embrace failure! It really is the prerequisite for a win, as long as you keep working.

Getting started

Where to begin, when painting abstractly? For me that's often the biggest challenge. When learning about the process in school, we studied Kandinsky's writing "On the Spiritual in Art", in which he recommends taking forms that occur in nature as a starting point. Really, though, anything can be a starting point. To prove it, I'll talk more about the process behind this painting:


It began with this photo, from some tourist literature for the Trentino region:

This is "speck", a kind of cured meat like bacon, I'm told. It's an interesting choice for a reference, because I'm vegetarian and the thought of eating this stuff makes my stomach turn...but the colors! The colors in the photo are beautiful.

As a reference for the underpainting, I turned this photo upside down (this is very important, so that you'll see only the masses of color, and not a landscape or still life), and used that as a starting point. I massed in the colors quickly, but the result still reminded me too much of a landscape with a slab of bacon. Yuck. So, the next day (it's helpful to wait a bit so you'll see it objectively) I turned the painting on its side, and made a lot of big changes. I did not look at the photo any more after the initial upside-down session, because once the painting is started, the reference has done its job and is no longer useful. The painting will evolve on its own now. In the above finished painting, the red shapes are about all that's left of the original imagery--but they are the key to the painting. So, use anything as a starting point, and be willing to let it meander and evolve in whatever way will strengthen it.

Here's another reference (again, a tourist info photo, and again, turned upside down for massing in the shapes of color), and the underpainting for "Piccoli Frutti", posted last week.


This time, color was laid in with brush and palette knife, and the next day I worked back into it with a brush, enhancing the color and pushing and pulling the imagery. This is only semi-abstract, as it turned out. The shapes of the fruit were too seductive to leave out, but I didn't want to make them literal (see below, posted June 11).

Other ways to start an abstract include turning one of your own paintings upside down or sideways, and going from there. It can be hard to break the mindset that you had when you first painted it though, so a sketch or photo might be a better way to go.