First Morning of “Paint Historic Waxahachie”

Ellis County  Courthouse, Waxahachie, Texas

Rising at 7:00, I traveled with a painting buddy to Waxahachie, Texas to begin our first day of “Paint Historic Waxahachie.” I began with the Ellis County Courthouse, enjoying the 71-degree overcast temperatures.  This courthouse has deviled me for years with all its minute detail, but this time I was in the mood to go after it. As soon as I finished, Ibegan another on the northwest corner of the square, but fatigue had already set in, so I dashed it out pretty quickly and hauled my weary body back home.  I opened the Levitt Pavilion Music and Art Festival last night, and have to return to my booth this afternoon.  So, I got in a quick couple of paintings and then turned it around.  This double duty is exhausting, to say the least.

Yes, I misspelled “Antiques”!

The fatigue factor got the best of me.  I misspelled “antiques”.  Nevertheless, I’ll mat the painting and see if anyone wants to buy it anyway.

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I feel alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

 

Musing Over Watershed Moments

Organizing Inventory for Upcoming Art Festival

There is the new movement.  There always has been the new movement and there always will be the new movement.  It is strange that a thing which comes as regularly as clockwork should always be a surprise.

In new movements the pendulum takes a great swing, charlatans crowd in, innocent apes follow, the masters make their successes and they make their mistakes as all pioneers must do.  It is necessary to pierce to the core to get at the value of a movement and not be confused by its sensational exterior.

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

As a perpetual idealist, I have known the exhilaration of recording a life filled with new movements, first movements, watershed moments, epiphanies and fresh beginnings.  As an aging student of history, I still feel my blood stirred when I read of pivot points in the history of ideas, art and litetature.  Though my blog posts have fallen off of late, my mind has not.  I am still recovering from a lingering illness, and the daily school routine along with the art business have taken all my prime time for a couple of weeks now.  I have been storing my daily ideas and readings in my handwritten journals, but have struggled to shape them into blog posts, with the daily schedule getting crazier.  I begin a three-day art festival tomorrow (Friday), and then go straight into a week-long plein air painting event, and enter into yet another art competition.  The following week, I close out school for the semester and launch a two-day watercolor workshop.  The week after, I launch a week-long watercolor workshop.  When I return for that, I begin teaching summer school for the duration of the summer.  No rest for the sick.  In the past forty-eight hours, I have framed five new watercolors, matted and sleeved about a dozen more, and have created over thirty new greeting cards with my watercolor images and newly-composed texts.

Despite all the industry, I am stirred up with new thoughts, new aspirations for painting and pursuing new compositions.  This three-day weekend, I will enjoy the art public as I sit in my booth during the festival (The Levitt Pavilion in Arlington, Texas opens its music season Friday night).  And during slack times, I will be recording new thoughts in the journal for what I wish to engage next.  On Monday, I get to pursue my painting passion with abandon (Paint Historic Waxahachie, Texas).  To consolidate my energy, I have been retiring to bed about three hours earlier than normal.  I just cannot seem to get enough rest, and still am not back to full strength.  I certainly don’t want to “cave” when the plein air season hits next week.  I’ll be doing school every day and painting every evening.

Following the spirit of Robert Henri, I am excited about this chance to “pierce to the core” of the movement that is currently carrying me, examining it for its value.  I’m ready to put this school term behind me and enjoy some quiet space in which I can scrutinize this art enterprise, and get a sense of what I am doing.  Below is one of the five new paintings I’ve framed.  I’m looking forward to putting it before the public view at the Levitt Pavilion tomorrow.

Warm, Proustian Screen Door Memories

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I feel alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

The Open Door. Imagination Preceding Technique

Completed Watercolor Study of Screen Door

There is the heart and the mind, the Puritan idea is that the mind must be the master.  I think the heart should be master and the mind should be the tool and servant of the heart.  As it is, we give too much attention to laws and not enough to principles.  The man who wants to produce art must have the emotional side first, and this must be reinforced by the practical.

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

I wrote of some of this over the weekend when I discussed “Imagination vs. Technique.”  Henri’s words continue to thrill me as I read further into The Art Spirit.  He really fired up his disciples who became the nucleus for America’s Ash Can School at the turn of the century.  This book just crackles with intensity.

I really believe that I was more technician than artistic passion when growing up and pursuing my art.  From my childhood, I wanted to be good, wanted to excel in making art.  From the first junior high art class I took, on up through my college degree, it seems I tried to seize all knowledge, Faust-like, and translate it into technique to make better and better art.

Not long after the millenium turned, I became deeply dissatisfied with my art.  As I’ve reported in earlier blogs, I was moved profoundly by the offerings of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, feeling a deep-seated connection with their lives and interests, yet feeling that myown work was merely illustrative, merely exercises in technique and craftsmanship, and not truly art that would express my feelings or evoke feelings from observers.

Since the beginning of 2013, I have suddenly shifted to painting still-life compositions filled with objects that have stirred me from childhood.  Odd that I had not attempted a still-life watercolor since tenth grade, and the thought of trying it terrified me.  I started simply with one or two objects, and eventually grew to more complex compositions.  The transformation was slow at first, but now it is starting to make sense to me–I am painting things that truly “matter” to me, objects that stir my imagination, and bring to the surface, in Proust-like fashion, warm primal memories from my childhood, memories worth holding.  Passion is now driving my art, and technique just seems to be the tools in the box, ready and waiting for me to take up and use as needed.  Though I am not a mechanic, I think I feel some of the mechanic’s sense of satisfaction when he reaches for a socket wrench that happens to be the right size to fit the bolt that needs adjusting.  I too, feel a sense of satisfaction, when a particular brush is just what I need to scumble or glaze or detail a particular portion of the composition slowly emerging from the white plane before me.  I have the imagination burning, trying to give birth to an image, and the tools of the trade that have been taught me over the years stand by, ready for service.

Right now, in my endeavors, technique is serving imagination, precision is serving passion, thinking is following feeling.  It seems that this is the first time I have experienced this, in decades of making art.  And I like it.  I’m interested in seeing where this is going to take me.

Today after school, I put the finishing touches on this screen door composition.  I spent a large part of my day at school glancing at it (while students tested for four hours), trying to get a sense of what was still needing to be completed.  All I did was finish out the borders of the screen, texture the wood further, work a little more on the spring stretched across the bottom and re-do some of the area surrounding the door knob.  I’m ready to find another subject to paint now.

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

The Seer, Part 2

Re-Touched Watercolor, after Masquing Removal

Art after all is but an extension of language to the expression of sensations too subtle for words.

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Most of what we express creatively is prelinguistic.

Ian Roberts, Creative Authenticity

Too subtle for words.  Prelinguistic.  Indeed.  I fumble for words, trying to blog what I find so appealing in these vintage doors, aside from the fact that they remind me in Proustian fashion of what I saw, visiting grandparents in rural southeast Missouri during my childhood years.  Over the past twelve years, I have acquired a total of nine vintage doors that are now hinged together in twos and threes.  They form the modular walls that shape and re-shape the space in my garage Man Cave.  I love hanging antique signs on them, attaching reading lamps to them, sitting among them reading, and for the past few months decided it was time to start putting them into my watercolor compositions.  I note with bemusement that for the past decade, as I’ve sat among them reading and journaling, I have often looked up from what I was doing, and found myself staring at the details of their abused surfaces, wondering how I could “solve” some of those textures in watercolor and drawing techniques.  I guess one could say I’ve been “composting” these recent watercolor experiments for over a decade now.

So, what is it exactly that I “see” in these compositions?  A potential sale?  A market?  A new style, new genre to pursue?  Not really.  I see character, I see history, I see volumes and volumes of stories.  When I look at the body of an abused, vintage guitar, I see stories.  I see the worn places along the neck, especially on the 3rd, 5th and 7th frets, and muse about the “boxes” this guitarist made use of when he worked on lead riffs.  I look at the cigarette burns near the nut, and realize the guitarist frequently inserted his cigarette up there while playing, a makeshift ashtray.  I have a pre-World War II Gibson archtop that belonged to my late uncle.  There are grooves above the frets, showing that he preferred the C chord, along with the G and D.  The nicks all over a guitar body tell the story of clubs, bars, campouts–all the places the guitar had visited during the player’s life.

When I look at these doors, I can tell which sides were interior and which were exterior.  I can tell which ones had a screen door in front. leaving the sun imprint as a stencil on the door.  I can see the key gouges around the locking plates, the grime on the porcelain door knobs, the dents in the metal ones.  I can see at the bottoms where they have been constantly kicked open, I suppose when one’s arms were laden with groceries or provisions.  So many stories.  So many lives.  Now they stand mute in my garage.  But I take up the brush and record their stories, adding my own as well.   And of course, I lay my memories over the tops of the stories, leaving a virtual palimpsest for readers to translate.

What I see in subjects such as these, and what I think about the art milieu are things that defy words, yet I managed to cover my blog with yet more words.  But what are my alternatives?  I love to paint, love to muse, love to stretch.  And I love to share what’s going on. I appreciate that there are those “out there” who take the time to look at these images, read these words and have something to say in return.  I’m appreciative of that as well.

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

---

 

The Seer

Masquing Removed from Screen Door Watercolor

A genius is one who can see.  The others can often “draw” remarkably well.  Their kind of drawing, however, is not very difficult.  They can change about.  They can make their sight fit the easiest way for their drawing.  As their seeing is not particular it does not matter.  With the seer it is different.  Nothing will do but the most precise statement.  He must not only end technique to his will, but he must invent technique that will especially fit his need.  

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Art, to me, is seeing.  I think you have got to use your eyes as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn’t work.  That’s my art.

Andrew Wyeth

Before I go to work on redrawing the screen wire mesh over the light areas, and toning down the stark white masqued areas of the screen wire over the dark areas, I decided to go ahead and post the “raw” picture of the watercolor with the masquing stripped off.  There is a ton of work to do now on the screen, and I’m tired already, just thinking about it!  I’m going to have to spend a good deal of time just looking at the composition now, and how much it’s radically changed from the way it looked just a few minutes ago.  I’ve been “tagged” by my reading today, loving this idea of artist as “seer”.  During my graduate school years, I did quite a bit of reading and researching over the Hebrew prophets, the concept of Nabi, and the sense of vision.  I love the way it translates now into art.

More later.  Thanks for reading.

The Dawn

Working on a Watercolor of a Screen Door

The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.”  Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour.  All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise.  To him whose elastic and vigorous thought, keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.  It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men.  Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.  Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I awoke to a beautiful Sunday morning, before 8:00.  After a quick shower, grooming and breakfast, I entered the Cave with delight and began whittling away on this screen door study which has gotten hold of me.  My companion this morning is this watercolor song sent me several weeks ago.  I cannot get it out of my head, and it has apparently been enriching many bloggers.  I enclose the link below:

http://shygemini.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/watercolor/

Rae Hering has written a song here that really moves me, really helps get the creative juices flowing when I’m alone in my Cave.  I like her notion of “Getting to Know Myself Again.”

I’m hoping for another splendid day like yesterday.  I have a stack of books ready to be opened, a journal open and ready for recording thoughts, and of course, watercolors in progress.

Thanks for reading.  I should be posting later in the day.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

Capping a Full Day and Night in the Studio

Watercolor of Screen Door

My brains are fried, and my eyes refuse to focus any longer.  Since rising at 8:30 this morning, this entire day and night has been given to the studio, both watercoloring and reading.  The time has been absolutely sublime, just what the doctor ordered.  

I am unable to photograph well at night under my studio lamps.  The masquing fluid is still all over the composition as well, so it’s rather difficult for me to show what’s going on.  I’ll have better images in the morning and will push this one quite a bit further along its path.  But I am loving the activity so far!

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

Another Crack at the Screen Door in Watercolor

Beginning a more serious study of the screen door in watercolor

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual–become clairvoyant.  We reach then into reality.  Such are the moments of our greatest happiness.  Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom.  

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

I consider myself most fortunate to have this three-day weekend without appointments, without deadlines, without tasks.  The leisure time spent lingering over the words of artistic muses (this weekend has included Robert Henri, Robert Motherwell, Annie Dillard, Andrew Wyeth, Wallace Stevens and Ernest Hemingway) has left me more refreshed than a good night’s sleep.  The Man Cave environment has been perfect, the DVDs, VHS tapes and CDs have provided the best music, the best documentaries that any painter would have craved.

Now I am getting down to work on a more serious study of a screen door, and main door behind it.  I have already finished the preliminary sketch, all the masqued screen wire and the first few coats of wash.  Now I am trying to get serious about the drawing, dry brush and texturing that bristles all over this composition.  The last attempt went by quite fast–just a couple or three days, I lose track.  Lately I have been shocked (though pleased) that my work is running from start to completion quite fast.  Now I wonder if I’m truly putting everything I can into a composition, am I quitting too fast.  Probably all of us wonder over those things.  At any rate, my intention is to linger longer and more studiously over this one, to see if I can actually make the work better over time, by adding more layers, more textures.  I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

Thanks for reading.  This is going to be fun.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

So what, if you have to move the whole thing over just two inches?

Close Up View of the Screen Door and Coffee Can in Progress

He would work on paintings for enormously long stretches of time, just simply be dissatisfied.  I would come in and there would be a terrific painting of a man, and Bill would grudgingly admit that it wasn’t bad, but then say: “But he has to be moved over two inches”, and he just eradicated him.  He was very discontented constantly.  It was what kept him going.

Elaine De Kooning, describing the painting habits of her husband, Willem De Kooning

This anecdote always amused me about Willem De Kooning and his constant studio revisions.  Long ago, I had been taught that some revisions were just not possible in watercolor.  Slowly, I’m finding all of these statements to be untrue.

Andrew Wyeth relayed the story that he was working on this composition of Karl Kuerner in drybrush, and it sported a gigantic moose head trophy on the wall.  When Anna walked in on him, perturbed, snapping at him in German, “Why didn’t you come down to breakfast when I called,” Wyeth was fascinated at the sight of the man turned away from his wife and the high-powered rifle pointing at her.  She allowed him to put her into the portrait, and he sanded the moose head trophy off the wall between them.

When I read that account, I thought, “Wow! They always told me that you could not erase watercolor, you’re just stuck with what you’ve got.”  So, I went back to a painting that I had recently finished and regretted.

Blues on the Corner

Once this watercolor was finished, I regretted not having put a guitar player seated in a chair on the corner.  Having read of Andrew Wyeth’s revision, I purchased 150 grit fine sand paper from my local hardware store, sanded a full circle out of this painting until it was white, and then drew and painted this guitar player inside the circle, finally retouching all the background colors and textures I had obliterated.

Why am I going into all this detail?  Well, when I awoke this morning and looked at my current painting before leaving for school, I realized to my dismay that I had drawn the left frame of the screen door too narrow in proportion to the coffee can and the horizontal screen door slat below the can.  I was 3/8″ of an inch too narrow.  And I had already painted in the dark screen interior with masquing and painted the left margin as dark as I could get it.  My first reaction was “Too bad.  Nothing can be done about that now.”  Then I remembered Andrew Wyeth’s “Kuerners” and my own “Blues on the Corner” and thought “Why not?”  I laughingly recalled Willem De Kooning saying his man had to be “moved over two inches.”  I came home from school, measured the new margin for the left frame, and sanded the devil out of it, turning the entire page surface blue-gray.  A good scrubbing with the eraser turned the page white again, and then I started all over “aging” the wood with drybrush and graphite work.  I’m happy I decided to do it.  The widened door frame looks right now.  (Incidentally, the door frame is straight; when I shoot close-ups with my camera, the lines curve, and I don’t know enough yet about Photoshop to straighten those lines again.  The painting of the door frame is actually straight-edge straight).

I had to stop painting to put this stuff on the blog.  I really wanted to share it, with all the fun and laughs.  I feel “madder” than ever, as the scientist noodling around in his laboratory again.

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

Mad Scientist in the Watercolor Studio, Part 2

Second Day on the Screen Door Experiment

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to the world if you paint or dance or write.  The world can probably get by without the product of your efforts.  But that is not the point.  The point is what the inner process of following your creative impulses will do, to you.  It is clearly about process.  Love the work, love the process.  our fascination will pull our attention forward.

Ian Roberts, Creative Authenticity

I could not agree more strongly with Mr. Roberts on this point.  I get far more joy in the studio, in the midst of a painting in progress, than I do sitting back looking at it on display, or sitting in a festival booth, waiting to find out if patrons like the work or not.  The joy is in the doing.

Today, I took my Art History classes through the legacy of Andrew Wyeth and his drybrush watercolor studies from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.  And the whole time we looked at and discussed his work, all I wanted was to be in this Cave proceeding with my latest “mad” experiment.  But alas, I had a list longer than my arm, of details I had to chase down after school, and heavy lesson plans for tomorrow’s class load, and couldn’t get into the studio for nearly five hours since the close of my last class.  It was total despair.

Finally, I got to get in a few strokes, working only on the coffee can and the left border of the composition.  The door frame will be white, so I had to lay in a left-hand darkened border.  I’m already wishing I could remove the masquing and take a peek at what is happening, but that cannot happen for a long time still.  My only anxiety now is to get this looking the way I really like it, only to find a disaster when the masquing comes off.  But . . . I cannot think of that right now.

I am still a little tired from Saturday and Sunday’s output, but really feared that if I took a little time off to rest, that I would find myself already into the next weekend, that a day off would turn into a week off, and the momentum would have stalled.  Several years back, I attended a workshop led by J. Jason Horejs, owner of Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona.  He had just flown into DFW airport and was holding a session at an area hotel in Dallas.  The session, for me, turned out to be life changing.  The only question he had for the artists assembled that day was “How prolific are you?”  I sat there in shame, realizing that I had used my full-time job as an excuse for turning out an average of ten watercolors a year.  I left that class, determined by year’s end to have at least thirty completed.  I completed nearly a hundred, and have completed at least a hundred a year since then, though many of them are small watercolor “sketches” or “vignettes”, I nevertheless can say for the first time in my life that I am “prolific” as an artist, and thanks to the blog, feel a compulsion to keep cranking them out.  So many good things have happened as a result, but the greatest is that I have rediscovered a joy in the learning process that I had not known for years.

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal because I am alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.