The Next Right Thing

When my husband and I were just a guy and a girl who kind of liked each other but weren't dating, we went running together a lot. These were our "dates." I remember one time when I was just about dying for the timer on his watch to go off, signaling the end of our run.
"How much longer do we have to go?" I wheezed.
"Ten minutes," Josh answered, looking at his watch.
Ten minutes! I couldn't go ten more minutes! Overwhelmed by the thought of such an insurmountable amount of time, I stopped. Sure I probably could have gone a little longer, but not ten whole minutes longer, so why bother? Thirty seconds later his alarm went off.
He had been attempting to motivate me to keep going by implying that we hadn't been running nearly as long as it had seemed. However, that's just not how my mind works. I'm not one of those that can look toward the summit as motivation to get up the mountain. I have to focus on this step, then the next, then the next, each in its own turn.

I've discovered this applies not just in running, but in other aspects of my life. Kitchen's a mess? Just do the dishes in the sink. Then just put away the clean dishes, clear off just this area of the counter, etc.  I find it especially applicable to art where every creation is, in some way shape or form, unchartered territory. This painting is too huge and I have a deadline? Don't focus on the deadline. Just paint in this moment, just work on this square inch. I have a show coming up and I'll never get enough work finished? Just focus on this step. Go to the art supply store, sit at your easel, paint, clean your brushes, block off your painting time for tomorrow, and so forth. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way and several other books on creativity calls this doing, "the next right thing." Last week when I wanted to cry constantly for the loss of my pet, "the next right thing" kept me moving through that initial pain to bittersweet acceptance and peace. From exercise, to art, to life and loss, taking one more right step will see you through. What is the next right thing that will take you one step further up your mountain?

My current "mountain." I feel like I'll never get this pine cone right!

Anyone have any overwhelming projects looming on the horizon? How do you handle them? Any tricks to share? I'd love to hear from you!

To see my last painting of a pine cone (which I also moaned over until the last coat, when I ended up loving it), click here.

On to adulthood

I few posts ago I showed you picture of an "adolescent"painting still in its ugly awkward phase (click here to see). Here's the finished painting, all ready to be delivered to its new home. 

T.J.'s Winter, oil on copper

I'm so proud to have been able to usher it on to adulthood.  ;-)

T.J.'s Winter, detail

Exploration

Just a Spoonful of Moss

Sorry I've been M.I.A. I've been off exploring exotic and far off places. Like, for example, my backyard. Hanging out with a toddler is great for training the eye and soul to notice and delight in little things. On our explorations we picked up dozens of acorns, some with "hats" some without. To most of us, one or two of these treasures would have sufficed, but not so for my 14 month-old. She had to have as many as she could hold in her tiny hands and when one would slip out and roll away, she'd chase it down crying, "Oh no!" My favorite discovery was this cheap, cafeteria style spoon partly buried in the dirt with moss growing in the bowl. We live in an older house and finds like this always lead me to wonder how they got there. A little boy digging in the dirt? A family picnic in the yard? What do you think? Any ideas?

Drastic Measures had to be taken

New Beginnings and New Beginnings II

You may remember this picture of two of my paintings at the Birmingham Art Association juried show from this post and I told you here of some of the struggles I had with New Beginnings. However, I don't think I ever shared with you the kinda scary measures I had to take to complete New Beginnings II.  

I was having a REALLY hard time getting the shape of the egg right. It was turned at a sort of awkward angle and I just couldn't quite get the curve. One of the things I love about painting is that pretty much everything is fixable. Just paint over it! This time, though, more extreme measures had to be taken. I felt the need for a clean start in that area (a "new beginning," Ha!). So, I sanded it down. Yep! It was a little scary. Look below-

Sorry for the kinda awful photos. My husband had the good camera with him. Do you see the really shiny halo around the egg? That's where I sanded it back down to the bare aluminum. Then I turned both the painting and my reference photo upside down (a good little trick to turn off that voice in your head that says, "An egg looks like this,").

                                                 

I've written a lot about letting your paintings go through their ugly stage and not giving up on them prematurely (see this post and this post, for example). In this case, it just took a little more extreme parental involvement!

Adolescence

A current painting in its "adolescent" phase

You remember that age- the awkward tween years when suddenly your body didn't fit you right, your skin started doing weird things, and you forgot how to talk to anyone over the age of 12 or any member of the opposite sex of any age. It was rough. It was embarrassing. But you got through it, and look at you now! Wearing clothes that fit, understanding how makeup works, and talking to bank tellers and grocery store clerks without stuttering or blushing. 

Well this is just a reminder that brain children go through the same awkward phase. They start out as beautiful, pristine canvases (or lumps of clay, or in my case, sheets of metal) full of potential. Then, as they develop you may reach a point where you say, "Is this really going to work?" and you fear that your poor little creation is destined to forever be an ugly duckling. See it through. Nurture and love it for what it could and will be. Like I've said before, you gotta work past the ugly (click the link for other works in progress and the source of that quote)! 

Any of you ever given up on a project because you just couldn't stand the ugly phase? It happens. Any of you ever pick that abandoned project back up and see it through? I'd love to see the results and hear your stories!

Stay tuned for follow-up pictures in the development of the painting above.

Brain Child Wins a Prize!

New Beginnings at the Birmingham Art Association juried show

Guess what! My painting, New Beginnings won Best in Show at the Birmingham Art Association's annual juried show. I was very excited just to be involved the show. I felt that the work this year was especially beautiful, so I'm all the more honored by the award.

Mary Liz Ingram and Dariana Dervis with Dariana's lovely
 mixed-media collages (and second place ribbon).

My dear friends (and fellow members of the art group, Eclectic Art Social Club) Mary Liz Ingram and Dariana Dervis also each received second place ribbons in (respectively) "drawing/printmaking" and "mixed-media" for their work in the show! Way to represent!!

Dariana Dervis, Mary Liz Ingram, and Chi Roach with
Mary Liz's beautiful pastel
 (her second place ribbon is behind Chi's head :)

A pretty awful picture of me,
but pretty good of my paintings.

You may remember New Beginnings (and my struggles completing it) from this post. Just goes to show, the brain child is worth the labor pains. So proud :).

New Beginnings

 Hi all! I was excited to see some of you at the show the other night at Parkside. It was a really fun night- good turnout, relaxing evening. All in all I'd call it a success!

A couple of posts ago I showed you an area of a painting that I had to just leave alone for a while. However, I never did show you the finished painting! Here it is!

New Beginnings I

And here is a companion piece:

New Beginnings II

These are actually kind of big paintings for me. I typically work rather small (around 10"x10" size). These are both 20"x24" inches. I really enjoyed doing some bigger work, however, and I think I'm going to continue experimenting with size and scale.

Nesting

Nesting 10"x10"
Oil on metal

At long last here it is, my latest painting depicting a tiny speckled egg nestled in a what I imagined I would use for a nest if I were a mama bird held, of course, in a silver bowl.

Magic

A freshly prepared sheet of aluminum, awaiting a painting.

I've had a sort of interesting experience with the last couple of paintings I've started. I've cut, prepared, and mounted my copper or aluminum, I know what I'm going to paint, however when I pick up my brush I'm struck with a sense of, "Wait... how do I do this again?" You may think that the idea that it's not all automatic would scare me, but it doesn't. Instead it sort of thrills me. I love that even after all this time and all the paintings I've done, nothing is rote. Despite the fact that I'm confident in my ability to face any challenge there's still a little spark of, "Will it work this time?" that makes painting feel a little like magic.
I have a newly finished painting I can't wait to show y'all. Stay tuned! All it needs is some drying time before its big debut.

Shiny things

Here's a quick study of the little nesting metal canisters I unearthed in my messy studio

Common mistakes of the new artist and how to avoid them; Part I

I'm trying to provide plenty of visual examples, therefore this will be a 2 part post.
I've been looking at some of my older paintings and noticing the mistakes I made as a newbie artist. About 6 years ago when I started painting, I had no formal training. I just bought some acrylic paints and sorta went to town. Over the years I have gained some knowledge (both from mentors and formal training, and from experience) and the quality of my work (as well as my style) has WILDLY changed. I won't say that one style is better than the other, but my techniques have definitely improved. Below are some mistakes I made and that other rookie painters  tend to make and how to avoid or fix them.

Note: There are exceptions to every rule and you may choose at some point to commit one of these "mistakes" in order to achieve a specific effect.  However, the important word there is "choose." What I have listed here are mistakes people often unconsciously make when getting started painting. 

Mistakes to avoid:

Mistake #1: Making brush strokes go in all one direction. Check it out: 

Brush strokes should not go all one direction

Vary the directions of the strokes

It is especially tempting to make your strokes go in one direction when you're trying to fill a large space like an empty background. Varying your strokes looks much more natural. While we're on the subject of backgrounds...

Mistake # 2: Making the background an after-thought. Ideally you want to paint the background before the main subject. Especially on the last coat (or, of you work with one thick coat instead of many thin coats, you probably want to add to the edges of the items in the foreground of the picture at the end).  If you completely finish the subject and then try to paint the background, the edges will have a forced feel to them. I usually try to paint from back to front. For example, in the painting below, I painted the yellow and red marbles before the blue, since the blue one is in front.

Mistake #3: Finishing one area of the painting at a time. I know that you don't have endless time to paint and painting a layer over the entire painting at each sitting may not be doable. That's not what this is about. The mistake many new artists make is completely finishing one part of the picture before starting on another part. The result is usually a very disjointed final picture. Below are some examples of working on the whole painting rather than one bit at a time. These pictures show one of my paintings in progress.

See how the entire painting progresses from less detail to more detailed rather than filling in all the details of one part while neglecting the rest of the painting? If you find yourself getting too caught up in one little part of the picture, walk away for a few minutes and view it from a distance as a whole.

Mistake #4: Not using a reference or model (if you're doing a representational painting rather than a non-representational abstract).


Mistake #5: Painting what you think you should see instead of what you actually see.

Mistakes #4 and #5 go hand in hand. Say you're painting a picture of an apple. Your brain will probably say, "I know what an apple looks like," so you either attempt to paint without an apple as a model, or you don't look at your model and you paint a roundish thing with a stem. Even if your goal is not realism, having the subject in front of you and truly looking at the qualities of the model will improve and vitalize your picture. Try to turn off that little voice in your head that applies symbols to objects (example: "Apples are round, doors are rectangles, etc."). If you're working from a photograph rather than from life, it might help to turn the picture (and your painting) upside down so that it is less recognizable to your brain. If something seems off with your picture and you can't figure out what it is, it helps to hold the painting (and reference photo, if using) up to a mirror. By reversing the image, you can often see what is and isn't working.

Stay tuned for part II of this post! Are you having any painting problems that you'd like me to address? I love hearing from you!

Golden Girls rock

I have this sort of high-minded belief that you shouldn't buy art to fit a particular space or because the color-theme matches your couch. It seems like if you only obtain things you love, they all seem to work together somehow. However, I've amended this creed somewhat and have come to realize that sometimes the perfect piece for a room can make the entire room a work of art. 

This is my bathroom: 

Note the pink tile. It's not 50's bubblegum pink. It's more of an 80's mauve. The walls were previously a pinkish beige, which was fine with the previous owner's decor, but didn't really suit us.  When it came time to paint, let me tell you, we struggled to find a paint color that we liked with the mauve that didn't make it look like it belonged on the set of Golden Girls (click on the link to see a blogger who was totally inspired by the idea of modernizing the Golden Girls' style). Come to think of it, their couch was about the same color as these tiles. 

Then, I found these:

and inspiration struck. I would do a painting of river rocks for the bathroom, bringing in the pinkish color of the tile and paint the walls a beautiful river rock greenish grey! Perfect. So and painted the walls greenish grey, and I painted this:

And it sold before I even got to try it out in my own home! Not that I'm complaining at all. It sold to Energen, Birmingham's Natural Gas corporation, for their collection of Alabama artists.  I've painted a couple of smaller ones, too, but none have made it to their pre-conceived spot. Again, not complaining! So, I started a new one. I gave you a sneak preview of it here. Here it is now:

Stay tuned for more progress. 

The moral of this story? Inspiration can come from anywhere. Even pink tiles.

How about all of you out there in computer land. Ever been inspired by anything totally weird and random (a la doorknobs and faucets)? Tell me about it! Send me pictures and let me know if you would like me to share them on this blog. 

Coming soon

Here's a sneak peak at my current work in progress:

Stay tuned for more. Same art time, same art channel. (Click on the link for fun, or for you super-youngsters that didn't get my reference). 

For more posts like this, check out:

Work in Progress Finished- Take 2

Work in Progress Day 1- Work Past the Ugly

Lessons learned

I mentioned in my last post that I had learned a few things from my most recent painting experiment. So, in no particular order, here they are!
Lesson #1: Prime, prime, prime!

It's important when using oils on wood that you prime the surface. Over time, oil degrades wood and paper, so you need that primer as protection for the wood. This I knew and I did apply a couple of coats of clear matte medium to protect the wood. What I didn't fully appreciate was the importance of preparing the surface for me, specifically. If you look closely at the image above, you can see the bumps and roughness in the surface of the wood. I didn't realize how much that would distract me. I swoon for super smooth painting surfaces, so the texture of the wood bothered me. 

So, in short if you're working on wood with acrylics and you like rougher surfaces and texture in your work, don't worry about priming. Jump right in! If you're using oils on wood and like texture, a couple of coats of gesso or matte medium should work fine for you. But if you're a lover of glassy finishes like me, sand, prime, repeat ad nauseam.

Lesson #2: Use a good reference photo (or model if working directly from life).

This was my reference photo, which wasn't absolutely terrible, but didn't provide me with what I needed for this picture. Had I been striving to recreate this picture, it would have been doable, but to recreate the patterns and shadows of the face in muscle and patterns, I should have used a clearer, not so blown-out picture. 

Lesson #3: Get out of your comfort zone.

This experiment was pretty far out from realistic portraits of everyday objects and their reflections and that was great for me. Try a new painting surface, subject, or technique! You'll never know your own style unless you explore. Who knows, it may turn out even better than you imagined! Or it may turn out that it's not your cup of tea at all. Either way, the experiment will be a success. 

So what about you? Learn anything new lately? Discover a love of a different subject or technique? What have you been experimenting with? Let me know about it!

Like this post? Check out:

New Goodies

Life is just a bowl of... doorknobs?

A few of my favorite things

A few of my favorite things

 One thing you should know about me- I love, I mean LOVE mixing colors. It may be my favorite part of painting. Rarely do I ever use a color just straight out of the tube. So, now and again I'm going to tell you about some of my favorite colors and how I use them.
My mentor, Dori DeCamillis, taught me that when laying out your palette you should put out all, or almost all, your color whether you think you need them or not. The reason nothing is truly only the color you think you see. For example, what color are these apples?

Greenish yellow, right? So you only get out your green and yellow paints. Look again.

Do you see it? There are so many other colors in there. Pinks in the skin, dark grayish blue in the shadows, white in the highlights. I even see a little light blue in the highlight on the top of the apple to the left. So don't be scared of wasting paint and go ahead and get it all out. You may surprise yourself. Oh, and my color tip for the day? Try a little caucasian flesh tone mixed with blue for that funny little color you see around the base of the stem. 

Do any of you have any tips or favorite color combos you'd like to share? I'd love to learn from you. 

Work in Progress- FINISHED!

Here it is! Bright Idea is finished at long last.

To see the many stages it went through click here, here, here, here, and here (in that order). Now, I just need to make a frame.

Work in progress: Movin' right along!

Thanks to my wonderful baby getting on a nap-time routine, I've really made some progress on Bright Idea. I've decided that in a weird way working around baby girl's schedule has actually made me a little more disciplined. I know that I only have an hour to paint and I get right to work rather than letting other stuff get in my way and distract me. Here's how it looked my last post:

The next time I painted I mainly focused HERE: 

And here it is now:

I think all I have to do is figure out those silly corners that are giving me such trouble. Any tips anyone?

Work in Progress- Day 3- Making (slow) progress

Work in progress- 2nd coat

I don't know if you can tell it or not, but I've started the second coat. I got about 1/4 of it done today. This stage is always just a little frustrating because, since it's my second coat, I feel like it should look better than it does. However, once I step back from it, I realize it really is coming along. I started at the top left corner , however I wiped off that paint and am going to go back to that part. I felt that the lattice work was looking too sharp and may draw attention away from the lightbulb and its reflections. I'll have to experiment with how best to do the corners.
On a side note, I'm thinking of calling this piece "Bright Idea," (Get it? It's a lightbulb...). What do y'all think?

Work in progress- Day 1 "Work past the ugly"

My friend Sunny Carvalho took a class once from a woman who kept reminding her students that "ya gotta work past the ugly." That has become my mantra because most paintings, especially the ones that turn out well, have at least one point where you look at them and go, "What am I doing? This looks terrible!" As visual artists, I think it's really easy to immediately cast a work of art aside when it gets to that stage, whether it's because we're afraid to proceed, embarrassed for others to see the ugly stage, or because we don't know that even the most beautiful of swans has to spend some time as an ugly duckling.

I started a new painting today and currently, it looks pretty awful. I've come to expect that, though. However, its ugliness inspired me to share the many life phases of my paintings with you. So, here it goes!

Day 1: I drew an outline in pencil of where the main objects and reflections of the painting would be, however I didn't take a picture (it probably wouldn't have shown up anyway). So, we'll skip just to the painting part. I didn't quite finish the first coat, but above is what I got done today.

Not lookin' great, huh? The prettiest part of the painting currently is the copper which has yet to be painted. Be patient, though. It'll get there. I'll be posting in-progress pictures of the painting in the next few posts and we'll see how it turns out. In the meantime, take it easy on yourselves. If you're working on something that just doesn't seem to be flowing, remember, "Ya gotta work past the ugly."

I confess I have been quite distracted and unproductive lately. I don't know if it's due to summer, pregnancy brain (we just found out we're having a girl), or what, but I vow this week to get back track. I've done pretty well so far and, I must say, I feel better when I'm productive.

When I was a little girl my Memaw gave me a tiny brass vase. I didn't really think about or notice it much growing up, however it is in my mental snapshots of every place I've ever lived- from my childhood bookcase, to teenage dresser, to college dorm desk, to my current spare room studio.  It's held a wide array of flowers from remnants of bouquets to weeds that I thought were pretty. It makes me happy. I know it's just a vase, but I like that it's been with me so long. I like the millions of different colors I see in it. And I love who gave it to me.

Recently my little vase has found its way into my art. I have wondered if I should polish it, but I like that if you look closely there are millions of fingerprints on it. I wonder if I would see all the reds, greens, and lavenders in it if I cleaned it up. So, I think for now I like it just the way it is. My sturdy, loyal, little vase.