It's difficult sometimes to be an artist. So much to do to keep the work on the easel moving along. Then there's the business aspect of it, like posting to this blog and making sure the web site is up-to-date. Today the spell checker isn't working so get your red pencil out! Can't spell to save my life!
I need to update my resume and artist's statement too. That's a big job. It preys on the mind: what to say? Artist's resumes and artist's statements vary greatly, as you've likely noticed. It's really important how that statement sounds because sometimes it's all a dealer or collector has to help them figure out what's going on in your work. And don't get me started on the use of Art Speak in artost's styatements! Well, maybe another day. Right now I have to work on that lower left corner of the painting on the easel.
This abstract landscape project is a new way of working for me. All the years I spent painting on location used a different set of skills and a different part of my brain, a very logical, step-by-step part. Once I arrived at a location and gazed around, sure enough, a sceen would catch my eye. Naturally the direction of the sun and time of day determined how interesting the play of light was going to be in the painting. And then there was always a goal in my minds eye that I would hold on to as I painted.
Painting a representational landscape in the studio was similarly organized. A vision of what the fisished painting was to be must come before any activity began. The steps to building that painting were logical and set. There were very creative and more intuitive parts of the process for sure, but that was, by comparison with this new work, a very small aspect of the tasks.
Now I feel freerer but often like the proverbial blind man in the cave. I have no idea what will happen next. It's a real adventure!
The drawing part is pretty much a simple technical exercise once the pine cone has caught my fancy in a particular way. But even that has an intuitive aspect that seems to be growing over time.
The painting is a whole other matter and comes from some region deep inside my head. I squeeze out the oil paint, grab up my brush, and let it all happen. I'm profoundly pleased with this aspect of the present work and each entry to the studio is, I know, going to surprise me. I look forward to it with happy anticipation.
Maybe it won't always be this good, maybe there will be darker days ahead when the work doesn't reveal itself so easily. I'm ready for that too. That's the way life is: ya gotta enjoy the good when it happens. And right now it's very good in the studio.
Can't remember where I first read it a long time ago but there was a thought about an artist only needing an audience of one person who completely understands what you are doing, or trying to do, with your art and is educated enough to know what they are looking at and be able to give substantive feedback.
As a college art professor for a number of years, the art and science of giving feedback is not a skill everyone possesses, even though everyone and their dog seems to have an opinion! "I like it," people often say even while they are clueless as to why a work of art speaks to them.
And that's very cool if you are choosing a piece for your home, a work of art that you want to live with: either it hits you in the gut or heart and you gotta have it or it doesn't. I have a hunch that many collectors work through knowledgable dealers because the dealer can put words to what the collector is seeing and feeling, thereby underscoring the quality of the art under consideration.
However, if you are an artist giving feedback to your artist friend you need to know what you're talking about and how to say it. For example, during class everyone was encourage to practice their feelback skills so there was a lot of talk that wasn't helpful... some was even harmful. "Maybe you should move the main image up/down/left/right?" Really??? Why? Maybe not!
Anyway, a long way of getting to the point that I consider myself lucky to have at least three very accomplished artist friends who give great feedback. I feel that I can take what they say to the bank and use it immediately. And I am very thankful to have them!
Artists need peers and mentors. You can tell who an artist really is by the mentors and peers they have.
Went to the local Trader Joe's the other day with my husband who is a photo artist specializing in the land especially the untamed and wild places. Luckily we're both crazy about nature, and so much so that we drive along rhapsodizing about clouds, a wonderful tree, the light, the wave pattern, etc. We're perfectly matched!
Coming out we were accosted by a Greenpeace volunteer. Our experience with all of the Greenpeace volunteers has not been wonderful. We've found most easy-going and cheerful. But some of them have been, oh, how to say this... a bit over-zealous. We're sure they mean well and all but it's been too "in your face" for us who are more relaxed than that.
So here's this Greenpeace guy trying his very best to get us to stop and looking like he's about to follow us to the car (if not all the way home) and we simply said, no thanks, gotta run, maybe later but not right now, we were in a hurry. So, giving it all he's got and taking one last shot, he hollers after us, "Don't you love the environment?"
My husband, Gerry who has a wickely sharp sense of humor, in the blink of an eye, turns and says to him real serious like, "What's the environment ever done for me?" The poor guy was so stunned he didn't know what to say so we got out of there fast before he could start up again. A woman walking nearby practically fell on the ground laughing. At least she got the joke!!
Ya gotta love the desert in bloom with wildflowers! It's a sight to behold and we've been trecking out to Anza Borrego to see them for almost 20 years now. There is no experience the equal of standing in a gigantic field of wildflowers and inhaling the sweet perfume of flowers all around.
Sometimes you love a thing and see it so often you take it a little for granted. I'd come to expect that the annual visit to the wildflowers would go on forever, some years being better than others. We'd even developed our own system for predicting how good the bloom might be and were crazy with anticipation to see if we were correct. But there would always be a bloom, usually arround the 10th to 12th of March.
This year was a shocker of the greatest magnitude! When we got there we noticed there was a lot of green around. We had heard about the Sahara Mustard plants overtaking some of the desert down by Ocatillo. We found that it had spread to Anza-Borrego and especially the usually prime areas of DeGeorgio Road and Henderson Canyon Road.
The rangers at the visitor center answered our questions honestly. Yes, that was Sahara Mustard we saw, an invasive non-native plant, and it was killing out the native wildflowers. It hogged any water that came its way. To make matters worse, each of these water-hogging plants would produce up to 16,000 (yes, that's sixteen-thousand) tiny seeds that will get airborn and spread, many landing in among all the natives species.
I sat by the side of the road on Henderson and cried.
It's a desert milestone: the invasion of mustard and the demise of native species. When we got home and told friends about it, one pointed out that Fr. Junipero Sera, the first European had spread mustard seeda as he walked California and founded the missions. It was a metaphor about the spread of his faith to the Native Peoples. Guess you have to watch what you're putting in motion when you set out to change the world.
We love being out in nature, don't we. Even with an allergy situation one of my very favorite things to do is to be out and at one with nature, especially the wild places. Just this week there was a small magazine article that stated we enjoy a 20% increase in short term memory after a nature walk! Maybe it will help us find our keys?
Since I'm working out of my imagination (which can be a very strange place) I do have to remember to give ideas time to brew. Like this morning. It's Monday and as does everyone, I've got a list of about a hundred things I need to do this week. Laundry, groceries, dust... like that. Riveting, isn't it? And you know that I'd much rather be painting!
This morning, and I have to state that I'm a morning person, I sat at the easel and got going right away. The funny thing was that in the back of my head my To Do list was rattling around and making too much noise. Even tried turning up the volume on the internet radio to drown it out. Didn't work. And KTYD-FM in Santa Barbara plays really cool stuff too. UGH! Things were not going well at the easel.
After catching a quick bite to eat, actually got a couple of things done on the list and now am (almost) back at the easel and feeling so much better with ideas flowing like cool water downstream. That imagination of mine is such a picky girl!
If this is your first time visiting this blog then you'll want to scroll on down to the very first post and get the full story from the beginning of how my abstract landscape project came about.
So, I now had four pieces finished. Then life started getting in the way. It happens that way sometimes. You begin a project and get on a roll and wham, boom, life gets in the way. For me it was a home remodel project but I won't bore you with details as I'm sure you have your own remodel stories that we could share over coffee sometime!
As the days and weeks passed and I visited the studio with less frequency than I wanted, I'd gaze longingly at the work already done. Then too much time passed and I started to worry that I wouldn't be to pick up where I left off. That pile of worry got larger with every passing day and pretty soon I had a real crisis going on about it. Could I pick up the project again? What if I'd lost all momentum and couldn't get the project off and running? What if I only had four paintings in me??!! All would surely be lost and the world would have to end, no?!
From time to time every artist runs into blocks. Creative blocks can really get you down if you don't recognize them for what they are and don't move to overcome them ASAP. The fear of not continuing on the project should have tipped me off... but it didn't. Instead I flopped around for a while until I talked to an artist friend who said, don't be silly. Snap out of it and start painting again. So that's what I did and sure enough got back into the whole project right away. All fear was gone, all hesitation done away with.
That's pretty much where I am at the moment, happily working on three more pieces. And once again very excited about this direction and where it will lead next. I happily obsess about each piece as it unfolds. It's the greatest adventure an artist can have. Me, happy, happy camper;)
If you're new to this blog you won't have a clue what I'm talking about unless you go down and read backwards from the bottom.
The first four works in the abstract series came together slowly. Felt like cooking without a recipe. When I paint a realistic landscape I have the subject before me either literally when I'm on site or in source material form such as a sketch, small painting done on site, or even photographs. The new work was bringing itself together from my imagination. Sure I have a dandy collection of pine cones, large and small, and lots of sketches and photos of pine forests but that wasn't going to be enough. This work was coming totally out of my imagination. And that was a different process entirely. A freeing thought but, to be perfectly honest, kinda scary because it was all on me.
It's really important for an artist to understand and embrace their own individual artistic process so I had to go slow and savor each phase and step. I could see right away that this was going to be exciting and fun... once I got past the scary stuff! More later...
![""]("http://data.fineartstudioonline.com/websites/DianeWeintraub/works/8997_427446m.jpg")
Anza Borrego desert, 2008
