Wednesday, October 25, 2017

The Making of Dave's Painting

Dave is my mandolin teacher. He is the greatest. The place where he teaches recently expanded and we now have a lovely new practice room with big, bare walls. I said, "You need a painting." He said, "Yeah! Do me a painting about music and cats!" (He loves both.) I said, "Okay, I can do that." 

I had an idea of what I wanted to do immediately. This is an unusual way for me to start a painting, with a preconceived concept. As it turned out, my idea didn't work and I ended up painting over it. That'll teach me to have a preconceived concept. No worries, though. It just made the surface more interesting.


The original idea was to start the painting with a technique that I learned in a Nancy Barch workshop. A collage is applied as the first layer, a cut out of a shape is positioned over the collage and the area around the shape is painted so that when you remove the stencil the image remains. 

I had a 24" X 30" wood panel onto which I had been cleaning off extra paint from my pallet, being one who hates to waste paint. I drew a shape of a cat to fit those dimensions and cut it out of brown craft paper.


The collage part was made up of pieces of sheet music and pictures of some of Dave's favorite musicians ~ BB King, Dylan, Hendrix, Elton John. 


The cat shape cut out is placed over the collage.


I used black gesso to paint around the edges of the cut out, using a roller so that some of the colors that were already on the panel would show through.


I peeled off the cut out to reveal the collage.





Details were added ~ eyes and nose, a moon, a bird, whiskers. But it just wasn't working. Maybe if I had made the pictures of the musicians more varied in size? I dunno. I just didn't like it. And besides, the matte medium I used to apply some of the pictures picked up the pigment and smeared it, so that everything looked dirty. I should have sprayed the pics with polyurethane. I tried to clean it up with a white oil pastel and as I was doing that I got the idea the stripes of the cat should be staffs of music. 


And I wanted to change the colors. So, blue background, orange cat. At first I had the stripes going the wrong way until I looked at my cat Lily's stripes and saw how they curved around her hip. (She just happened to pose perfectly for me at just the right time.) The stripes are made from the sheet music for the song "Little Maggie", which is what I named the painting, even though the cat ended up looking like Dave's orange cat, Bimmy. The landscape in the background finishes the piece. Dave liked it and it now hangs in his music room. 


As a bonus, with the left over black gesso, I made a monoprint on deli paper by pressing it onto the wet gesso and scratching into it with my finger nails - another Nancy Barch tip. I'll put this in my file of collage material.


Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Ten new paintings in a series

A new series for my solo show at Delaplaine Visual Arts Center...

 I wanted to take the idea from the paintings I posted on Sept. 19th, where I used gestural lines scored into wet gesso to determine the composition, and add the texture I used in the paintings posted on the 20th and try the combination on larger pieces. 

I began by applying layers of thin paper onto the wood panels with matte medium, letting it bunch and tear and fold and pleat to give me something to explore for composition, images and details. 

Then many layers of paint were smoothed on with a plastic scraper, so that I could have even more to work with when looking for things to enhance and turn into figures. At the bottom of this post I've shown the ten paintings in stages as they were worked on. 

When I delivered the work for installation at Delaplaine, the curator commented that it wasn't what she was expecting. She liked the work, but it wasn't anything like the painting she bought from me two years ago, when she invited me to exhibit. I apologized and tried to explain that I guess I keep changing, that I don't even know if I can paint like I did two years ago. 

Not sure what to do about that...

These paintings have titles. I don't always title paintings, because I want to give the person looking at them a chance to come up with her or his own idea about them. Or, if I do, I try to make the titles as abstract as the images for the same reason, often using fragments of poems by Emily Dickinson, for example. These seemed to develop story lines as they came into being. The titles could serve as the first lines or at least the subject of the stories and the viewer can take it from there.

The Cats Ignore the Talkative Bird (#3603)
Acrylic, charcoal, paper collage, oil pastel
18” X 24” X 2” on wood panel

The Blue Bird Thought the Clouds Looked Like Fish (#3605)
Acrylic, charcoal, paper collage, conte

20” X 20” X 2” on wood panel

The Town was Popular with the Rare Birds (#3610)
Acrylic, charcoal, paper collage

20” X 20” X 2” on wood panel

The End of Ground and Sky (#3611)
Acrylic, charcoal, paper collage, oil pastel

16” X 20” X 2” on wood panel
This one is obviously different from the others. It is the only one that I painted over completely and started again. I like the simplicity of it. The others may all meet the same fate. There is a funny detail from this painting in its original state. I put it at the bottom of this post. I couldn't help taking a photo before painting over it, because I thought it was... cute? Just too cute as it turned out. 

They Chose the Glass House and Piled Up Their Stones (#3612)
Acrylic, charcoal, paper collage

20” X 20” X 2” on wood panel

Brookside (#3613)
Acrylic, charcoal, paper collage, oil pastel

18” X 24” X 2” on wood panel

Bird Park (#3617)
Acrylic, charcoal, paper collage

18” X 24” X 2” on wood panel

Island Ferry (#3619)
Acrylic, charcoal, paper collage, oil pastel, conte

18” X 24” X 2” on wood panel

The Bug Walked Through the Town of Six Happinesses (#3604)
Acrylic, charcoal, paper collage, oil pastel, conte
20” X 20” X 2” on wood panel
(This is my favorite title that came to me. I have no idea what it means.)

There are More Species of Fish in Lake Chautauqua than You Would Think (#3606)
Acrylic, charcoal, paper collage, conte
18” X 24” X 2” on wood panel
This title came from being with my friend Kim at Chautauqua this summer when we were there doing a show together. We walked out to the pier one moonlit night and there was one of those signs with info about the lake and it stated the number of fish species swimming around there. I don't remember the number, but it was, like I said, more than you would think. 

Here are the pics of the 10 paintings in progress, and the detail from the one that got painted over.