Women Abstract Expressionists Exhibit at the Mint Museum

The Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina currently has an exhibit of twelve women abstract expressionists, showing their paintings from the 1945 to 1960 time period.

Today, all day, I had the luxury of spending many hours with nothing else to do but stand in front of these works. It is impossible to get the sense of these paintings from a reproduction in a book, I don't care how advanced the printing process is. To be able to have your nose 12 inches away from the surfaces is a thrilling experience.

I've tried to share that with you here by taking details of the paintings. I think you will be able to see that these women used some paint! Thick, rich layers of every imaginable color. Drips and globs of the stuff. These were not timid women. They had something to say. They were expressionists!

                                       

The Three Unloved Paintings Finished and Loved

Here are the three paintings I showed unfinished in the last post, finally resolved. 

20" X 20" X 2" Since the last post, I've added some drawing with charcoal, collage, and smaller details. I've drawn in the lines connecting the point of the pod shape to the left edge to keep that main structure from being isolated in the visual field and a blue wash of pastel has been added behind that area so that it continues from the top of the painting to below the pod. This is a subtle painting, monochromatic, best seen in person probably. It certainly has a clear focal point, but I've included passages that lead the eye from it to other areas of the composition. Of the three I love this one the most. Can't tell you why exactly, it's just a gut reaction; everything about it to me says yes, every bit of it delicious.

24" X 18" X 2" This one I like okay, but I don't know it as well. I'm not as sure where it came from. Much of the surface detail and texture has stayed the same since the last post and I've also added quite a bit; the large area of dark rolled onto the right side with a brayer, the bird, which was found in the detail of the underpainting showing through, with its real leaf, the monoprints on deli paper strengthening the edges. Now that I look at it I'm not sure I was as successful as I was with the first painting with the passages from element to element. The features of the composition are isolated, not relating as clearly. But they are each strong in their own right, so that might be okay.

20" X 20" X 2" I kept thinking this one was finished when it wasn't quite. I'd take it outside and photograph it and bring it back into the studio and look at it and find something else it needed...or wanted. I'd work on it some more, take it outside, photograph, bring it back, tweak, over and over. It got kind of funny. It was a puzzle. It's such a strange image anyway; what the heck is it? Something like architecture? A city? A park? You are invited to make it what you want. This one is growing on me. There is quite a bit of drawing and collage, layering.

I can't help but think of each of these pieces I create as beings with personalities. And I'm aware of the personal relationship we develop between us as they come into existence. The first painting is all subtlety and grace, the second some kind of strength and pride, the third a trickster, a joker with lots of ways to approach it.

In a Funny Place (not funny haha)

I've been working on three paintings for about two weeks. Most of that time I've been agonizing over the fact that they just weren't happening for me. I couldn't find a connection with them.

True, the election result has me in a terrified funk, but I also seem to be crossing into a new approach with my painting.

I recently met with a small group of artists interested in learning about abstract art. It was conducted by the esteemed painter Joe Mayer (www.joemayerart.com). Each of us talked about our art and what abstraction meant to us. Then Joe gave us some exercises to work on, which, if you know me, you know its the kind of challenge I find really energizing. The photo below is of some ideas I played with after the workshop because I was fascinated by one of the projects: to draw a shape that touches all four sides of a visual field and place three to five shapes within the large shape and add lines. (Yes, those are Cooper's toes on the right, to show scale.)

These exercises made me start to think more seriously about composition. I've always depended solely on my intuition when composing a painting. This has been fine until recently; I feel I'm losing trust in my intuitive playfulness. Or I need something more from it, from myself.

Joe had also given us a list of terms used in discussing and thinking about abstract work, such as dominance and contrast, unity and variety, aesthetic homeostasis, to name a few. So, I was looking at this list, and looking at my unloved paintings and getting more and more confused. To add to this unproductive state I pulled Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane from my bookshelf, where it had been undisturbed since I bought it decades ago. You know, when you have a question in your mind and a book seems to grab your attention and say, "I have all your answers right here, just read me!". So I got through about fifty pages and I didn't have a clue what he was talking about and I felt really stupid.

TA DA Fran Skiles to the rescue. I have the great good fortune of being friends with Fran, a brilliant abstract painter and dear and generous person. Check out her work (www.franskiles.com). I had the opportunity (the timing was perfect) to spend some time with her in her studio where I brought my three floundering paintings and Joe's list of terms. Fran and I spent wonderful hours talking about our work, referencing the list of terms and finding ways to move where stuck. The helpful principles that stayed with me from our discussion were those of balance and rhythm.

When I came back to my studio I found I had a better vocabulary for solving the problem issues and at least some ideas for what to look for as solutions.

I've posted below the three paintings in various stages. They are not yet resolved, but I'm feeling more of a connection with them at this point. There is starting to be a dialogue.

Each painting began with a good deal of collage made with the pieces I mentioned working on in my last post. It is beyond me why I don't remember this, but starting with a collaged surface doesn't work for me. It inhibits any painting I feel I want to do. So the pieces all got pretty far along before I stopped and ripped much of the collage off and painted over everything to start again. The good part about that, aside from it definitely being the right thing to do, was that I ended up with all these beautiful pieces to apply to paintings after I've gotten them to a point where the collage works for me.

Here is the beginning of painting #1, with collage material plastered all over it at random. The mindless intuitive at play... (In my defense I was still reeling from the disastrous election and just making myself do anything.)

Here it is, still struggling for identity, still not making me happy...

Painted over with a roller. Much improved, more potential...

In its current state, not yet finished, but now we're talking. More authentic to what I want my paintings to look like. Also, thinking about rhythm, for example, repeating the black and white pattern from the left to the right in a contrasting, not so checkerboard, but still black and white repeated pattern. I've rotated it one turn clockwise, too.

Here is painting #2 going through similar stages...

Again, not yet resolved, but on its way. Also turned a quarter turn. 

And then #3, the most changed, the least resolved; same approach of creating, destroying, going back into... 

I don't know what that bird shape was, but it started to look way too strident to me. I tried making it smaller...

Still didn't work. Fran talked about how isolated the figure was, or I think she used the word "encapsulated", as in having all that space around all four sides of it, which was interesting to think about. (And good to get rid of.)

Here another bird is beginning to show up, but more lyrical, maybe?

It will be interesting to see where all of these go. I do feel as though I have something to work with besides just my gut feelings. I don't want to give that up completely. I want to integrate the intuition with the concepts of working elements. I just don't want the indigestion.

And Cooper has the last word.

Making the Most of a Bad Day : Monoprints

Like millions of Americans, today I am reeling from the results of our presidential election. As a coping mechanism, I thought the best thing to do was to get into the studio and make myself do stuff.

So I spent the day making monoprints to use in collage.

First I made things to make the prints from. I made pattern rollers by cutting Scotch mounting tape into small pieces and sticking them onto rubber brayers. I also cut grooves into a rubber brayer so that it would create a pattern when rolled.

I took polystyrene pieces saved from chicken packaging and drew patterns into them with a pencil or end of a brush. I peeled the paper off one side of pieces of foam core and drew into that surface. I wrapped rubber bands around blocks of wood.

I used fabric screen printing ink, which is water soluble and non-toxic, to print, rolling it on with a brayer from a palette. I printed on deli paper, wax paper, butcher paper and cleaned and flattened tea bag material.

The reason for the fabric ink - slower to dry than acrylic paint, but water-based as opposed to oil-based, so easlier clean-up. And a note about the deli paper - this was a material introduced to me for making monoprints in the workshop I took from Nancy Barch. I was having trouble finding it and ended up ordering it from a company called ULINE when I ordered a bunch of other stuff I needed from them. I thought I was ordering 1 box of 1000 sheets and ended up with 10 boxes of 1000 sheets, so if you want some deli paper, let me know. I ordered the butcher paper from ULINE, too, because I thought it would be an interesting printing material, so I also have a enough of that to last me a lifetime. I'll find out how it reacts to the matte medium when I use it in collage. I hope it gets somewhat translucent.

The Cat/Bird Diptych Finished

Here is the diptych I posted yesterday when it was still in progress. It's finished now with some more details on the birds and little things added here and there. 

Each panel is 24" square by 2" deep. The images wrap around the edges. I began by painting the panels the ochre color. Then applied collage material where I wanted the figures. I cut stencils for the shapes of the birds and cat and painted around the edges of the stencil using a palette knife and spatula so that the collage remains as the bodies of the figures.

For many of the large areas of color, instead of painting directly on the board, I painted translucent papers (wax paper, deli paper, rice paper) and applied those to the board with gel medium. Other materials in the collage areas include painted Pelon, construction papers, Thai banana paper. Much of the cat's body is deli paper on which I made monoprints from a puddle of sepia acrylic ink I had spilled on the floor. (Waste not - want not.) I added some flourishes with squirts of gold acrylic ink. The pattern of dots in the background was made with a child's rolling pin toy. Other details are done with acrylic paint, charcoal and pastel pencils.

This piece was tons of fun. I hope I can pull off the effect in future work. I find that the first time I try something new is always the freshest. When I get too comfortable with a process it can lose its spontaneity and rawness. But I guess at that point its time for another challenge, isn't it? We will just have to see how I do. As always, I'll keep you posted.

A Workshop with Collage Artist Nancy Barch

Collage had already made its way into my paintings for quite some time, but I wanted to take a workshop to learn more about materials and techniques. The three days I spent with Nancy Barch did not disappoint. Nancy is a gifted teacher who is able to inspire beginners as well as encourage those who are comfortable working on their own. 

We were shown detailed demos and then given the projects to try ourselves. Above is a redo of the first project which I totally did not get. I painted over the whole thing and used it for the second project which was image transfer. The bird is a transfer from an ink-jet copy using gel medium. Also used are a found leaf, a monoprint on rice paper, part of an acrylic painting, a tea bag paper and some charcoal drawing. It measures 9" X 12".

This one is on 10" X 15" illustration board which was first painted with layers of color. The section with trees is part of an old painting. I added monoprints on deli paper, painted paper towels, fabric and a piece of painted mat board with a bone button from an old assemblage piece. I also rolled on a pattern in the background at some point. And some acrylic ink was squirted here and there.

Also 10" X 15". Much the same approach and materials as the one above with the addition of gauze, commercially printed paper, dry wall tape, fabric, and a bit of drawing with charcoal. I will probably work on this one some more; applying more color to the gauze, integrating that piece of green, highlighting the little houses.

This one was so much fun! It's big, two 24" X 24" wood panels as a diptych. Painted the gold first, then applied various materials where I wanted to put the cat and the birds, cut stencils for the animal shapes and held the stencil onto the surface and scraped paint over the edges to create the silhoutte shapes. There are many materials used here; painted wax paper, monoprints with ink on deli paper and rice paper, construction paper, Thai banana paper, old painting pieces...some rolled pattern. Not finished yet, still in process. I hope to show you the finish next post.

** ** ** ** ** ** ** **

So, you might be wondering whatever happened with the gallery that wanted to return my paintings (last post). I will share the following with the sole intention of providing information to those of you who are in this business of selling your art so that through my experience you won't have to make the same mistake I made and I in no way mean to speak disparagingly of the gallery, which will remain nameless. Again, the bottom line is; get a written contract. It is the only way to make sure that you and the gallery you are working with is speaking the same language and to avoid a lot of headaches for both parties.

I proposed to the gallery that I would be willing to take back the paintings they didn't sell over the summer if they would consider changing our sales arrangement to one of consignment and reimburse me at that percentage (60/40 vs 50/50) for the paintings they did sell. Whether that changed their minds or something else I don't know, but I was then told that they would keep the paintings and I received a check for the paintings plus a 5% handling fee which was less than my original invoice. Let me explain.

My invoice was for the 13 paintings sold plus a shipping/handling cost which came to about 9% of the total cost of the paintings. The 9% was my total expenditure for getting the pieces to the gallery (gas) plus all the packaging.

When the people from the gallery bought the 13 paintings at the show I was so giddy I started babbling about how much fun it would be to deliver the pieces myself and see a part of the country I've never seen before. The way they understood this was that I was willing to ship these 13 paintings the considerable distance for nothing. A stupid mistake on my part, not to mention unprofessional. They had asked me what my additional percentage was and I said 5%, meaning 5% for handling in addition to shipping costs, but did I actually say that? No. I assumed (a really bad word here) that like most galleries, they would cover shipping costs in addition to the handling fee.

The next thing that happened was that an artist who had sold to the gallery for many years informed me that they required custom boxes and packaging for each piece. I did write a snail mail letter to the gallery asking them to confirm this and didn't get a reply, but I went ahead and ordered all the custom packaging materials anyway. Now, in all the discussion about all of this the gallery has never told me that I needed to do that. So, I can't really expect them to reimburse me for all that, can I? The artist who told me about the packaging also offered to take the pieces to the gallery with his if I could bring them halfway to his house. This was my gas expense. I asked this artist how he worked out the s/h charge with the gallery and was told his formula for gas plus packaging and that it all came out for him around 6%. This works well for him because the gallery buys big with him and 6% of big covers his expenses. My total was not as big, so my 5% barely covered the cost of some of the packaging let alone the travel.

So, after a lot of messy back and forth about who said or didn't say what, I'm still not sure it's a win/win. I did get paid, but lost some money in the transaction, and the gallery gets stuck with 10 paintings they probably don't have great feelings about anymore. All of which would have been avoided with an agreement in writing about how things were going to happen and what was expected of each of us. Not only that, this is a super gallery where I probably could have had a great future. Please learn from this! Take care of yourself.