Adding colors to a representational painting that is in no way photo realistic can be incredibly complicated. The options are endless as are the potential for bad choices. A few rules to help you in the dark like a match on a windy night: Reflective light is 'warm'. Maybe only one rule-slash-guideline. Darkness again.
Mixing the colors themselves is the first step. I use only primary colors and mix the necessary shades I will eventually paint with. It's not the only way. It's just one method. While mixing your secondary colors and the lighter and darker shades thereof, something may suggest itself to you on the palette. Today not me. Not so much. They all shout their positive attributes to me while the canvas itself and painting to be is silent. Like a lover looking to see if you know what your doing.
Mixing the colors is also some kind of crazy therapy. The light of day illuminating the pigments on the palette, changing with every turn and scrape of the knife. The light reflecting off of the pigments and soaking into your retina and from there right into your central nervous system. I wish I could just do this all day. Mix a thousand different shades of a half dozen colors. Not really. That would be ultimately unsatisfying.
The wooden palette itself is making the job of painting more difficult every week (I would say every day, but I can't. See last entry). It is a thin piece of smooth, cheap particle board, with a thin layer of hardened pigment from every painting session from the last ten years affixed to it. The paint is thinker than the original tool itself and much heavier. It has me fantasizing about some gizmo to hold the palette always at the ready: telescoping, adjustable, some sort of cross between a music stand and a dentists work station on wheels. Sensitive to height changes but sturdy beneath the weight of the brush.
More so I fantasize about time. Time to think. Time to do it wrong. Time to get it right.

Weakened Painter

Worked on a new painting for 3 or 4 weeks. It had a certain poetry in the figure so even as I ran into problems with my color choices and abstract background shapes it was worth the battle to try and save. I scraped hours of work and bad decisions off the canvas on numerous occasions and worked through it. Finally I came home from work yesterday, had a couple of beers, my son was quiet and satisfied in his room for the moment and the paint on the palette was still usable: I squinted my eyes to see the major shapes and how they were reacting with everything and began applying pigment. Using a far too bright and bland value I attempted to simplify and rectify areas that had become misshapen and complicated. I realized almost immediately that my relaxed boozy techniques were too crass but I painted on with the anger and frustration of someone who works so many hours to pay the mortgage that his muse is effectively tied up and gagged and stuck in a closet five-sevenths of her days. On weekends she is drug out, untied, slapped straight and expected to perform immediately and with the brightness and vitality of an eternal spring morning. Instead, I stand there confounding my mind trying to use technique that is rusty and instincts that have been starved and choked.

I have a new sketch and a vague sense of how to attack it gnawing the back of my mind. In 4 more days I will wake up, feed and stroll back into the painting room, stare down a blank canvas like a prize fighter, looking for weaknesses and a way to win. The muse, unshackled and haggard, will not rub my back or massage my sore legs but she will still entice me, then play hide and seek with my minds eye. Showing me the way then disappearing, leaving me in the lurch; older, unshaven, unsuccessful and trying to expand a minor local notoriety into greatness. Again.

A painting should be compelling from a distance and rewarding from closer inspection.

Similarly the subject matter of a painting is a priority at the beginning of a work but becomes increasingly a loose guide for interesting brush patterns and color pairings toward the end. A painting with the wrong priorities will hence be either uncompelling or unrewarding or both.

This image is a loose sketch: finding the subject matter and forming the composition while gambling and testing a color scheme. It has since changed quite dramatically. 

Striving for Imperfection

To take the female form and simplify it, distort it and create the decorative nude
without losing any of the beauty of the original form.

Gustav Klimt painted his Water Serpents with an impossible angle of head and body. It is the wrongness of the figure's structure that makes the image so appealing. Picasso used it famously but inconsistently.

Painting the figure in this way adds a dimension (while removing much of the extraneous detail) that gives the work a depth that is compelling.  This in contrast to a meticulously painted object that, surprise! looks just like the object. Admittedly, I have no interest nor the technique for photo realism and I am rarely moved by strictly abstract work.

Most of my paintings are failed projects, frozen in transition between where I began and where I had hoped to go.  By failed I mean within the context of my original strategy. Too many anatomical details seduce me into including them. Much of my work is more representational than what I had imagined when I first stood before a blank canvas with a palette of paint and a handful of brushes.

Take the female form, reduce it to it's most simple geometric shapes, render it uniquely and decorative, then re-infuse the form with the charm and melodrama of the human spirit.

Sharing one's work

 

I originally wrote a post to accompany this painting two weeks ago. I thought it was an interesting and insightful post. I shared it with a couple of friends, writers of whom I respect their respective talents and opinions.

I reread my post like a proud father.

Later, I looked at the post again and found it much less interesting and insightful than I had originally thought. In fact, I found it thin, boastful and generally badly written. The aforementioned friends/writers never made any comments about the original link. They either bit their tongues or shook their heads, respectively. Or both.

I took the post down, rewrote it, removing much of the original material and re posted the edited version. A short time later I reread the post; still I was shocked and mortified by the arrogant voice I found.

I deleted it again.

Writing, like painting and many other media, stands in evidence of itself.

I met this young woman modeling for a life drawing class. She was a firefighter. She was also quiet, and slightly withdrawn. Shy. 

I completed at least two good paintings from the photo shoot (a matter of opinion, sure). Chances are good I will go back into the photos at another time and work on more; one of the great options one has when working from photos.

As is often the case with student models I have not seen her since.

Selling

During a recent exhibition, in a restaurant, I sold two paintings. One was marked NFS (not for sale). This illustrates a couple of things: one, a good restaurant where people are sitting around and enjoying themselves for an hour or two is not a bad place to show and two, I needed the money more than I needed a favorite painting of my wife.

My strategy these days is to have any painting I sell digitally scanned before I hand it over. I am quite happy with this option. I'm less happy with the fact that I paid a professional photographer years ago to photograph many of my paintings (that are now sold and lost -to me) and the resulting images are of such a low quality/resolution that they are useless to print anything besides a postcard, which by the way, no one buys anymore...

He's now of course out of business thanks to digital photography.

It is not that the technology wasn't available at the time; he did one set of "four by five transparencies" for me that are excellent. But this was apparently too troublesome and, he argued "overkill" and therefore talked me down to a larger (smaller) format slide.

I saw the proprietor of the restaurant recently. She told me a customer was interested in another painting marked NFS but informed me that she had told him he was out of luck, it was a (another) painting of my wife... Is she crazy? A month of mortgage is lost to sentimentality.

Blogging

Over half of the people who have stopped by this blog page were using Firefox. Mac's Safari comes in second at 19%... Internet explorer, once the only dog in the woods sniffs around a distant third. Chrome is neck and neck with IE. That's right. Mobile Safari gives Mac another boost with 4%. Never heard of Mobile Safari. But then, there are a lot of things I have never heard of. Tons of popular technologies I have no experience with what-so-ever.

This free blog for instance technically blows my mind. Did you know I have had 16 page views from Russia? Didn't think so. I didn't either until I found a tab marked "stats" on my internal behind the scenes blogger instrument panel!

That's not all. I have more intriguing facts: The browsering system Opera came in with one percent of my viewing audience. I'm vaguely familiar with that name. Vaguely. Like, not really. But how about you? Have you heard of the NS8 browser? Because TWO people from somewhere on this planet surfed my turf with NS8. They might have been from Qatar. Three of my worldly web-surfers were. Or Germany, France, Australia...Who knows? Perhaps you're pretty worldly and you whisper to yourself, "Oh yeah, I'm familiar with NS8..." Well, how about Konqueror or SeaMonkey? Because those engines are bringing eyes and minds to the light, Searching for Sparks also. Chances are they didn't stay long. I know my attention span is pretty short these virtual days.

These are the days of the wild cyber frontier. Unlimited possibilities and space for everyone. The frightened and greasy Dark Lords of Infinite Economic Growth haven't spoiled this apple yet. Rejoice.

Whoever you are, from where ever you hail, huge, galactic, virtual, curious and spirited greetings to you. Really. And thanks to the Googles of minds and bodies that make this technical playground available to me. For free.