Recent Paintings

Here are some of my more recent paintings.

Blue Yonder (2010)
12x16 each, acrylic and tempera on stretched canvas

Moonlight (2010)
10x30, acrylic and tempera on stretched canvas

Prairie (2010)
12x36, acrylic and tempera on stretched canvas

New art

Cosmic Funk
This guy really put me through the ringer. I had to create a painting small than 20 inches by 20 inches for display at The Contemporary Art Museum for the recent Open Studios Tour. Ugh. Not easy! But now I know I can create something smaller (18x12 inches) if need be. The title comes from the fact that I really was in a bit of a painting funk when I had to make the deadline to submit this piece. I'd painted several paintings that I didn't like, some of which I've now decided are good. Live and learn.


Lazy Afternoon
I hadn't done anything impressionist in quite a while, so I had begun to think that the impressionist phase was over. But, alas, I kicked this one out last week. I don't know why, but the painting reminds me of the colors you might find in a Victorian park, so I was thinking "park", "Sunday afternoon stroll int the park," and I came up with the title.

Purple Haze
No, I didn't give this painting a druggie name on purpose! The phrase just popped into my head when I looked at the painting & then I googled it to find out it is a Jimmy Hendrix song-LOL! This is one of the paintings I had planned to paint over since I'd struggled with it & decided it was too dark. But now I've decided that it's a keeper.

Searching

I recently finished reading a fictitious account of Monet's life called "Claude and Camille" by Stephanie Cowell.  I'd read two of her previous books, fictitious accounts of the lives of Shakespeare and a woman who marries Mozart. She's a good writer. But that's not why I read the book about Monet.

You see, I am still trying to wrap my brain around the fact that I am an artist. This new identity has only been with me for about 9 months now. I'm still not used to it.  When people I meet ask me what I do and I say I am an artist, it feels strange. 

So I guess I read the book in search of something to help myself come to peace with being an artist. So did the book help? Well, yes and no. Monet certainly didn't have the happiest life. He fell madly in love with Camille, his muse/model, and finally married her only to have her die a few years later. If the book is historically accurate, he was very narcissistic (or at least completely obsessed with his work), and he flipped out and slashed canvases he wasn't pleased with.  Fascinating but depressing to say the least. But what I did get from the book is that many of the emotional struggles I am encountering in being an artist are universal and timeless. Not selling as much as I want. Fighting the need for affirmation from the world that my work is worthy. Questioning my ability. Accepting my "artistic temperment."

And now the reading continues. I went to the library in search of escapist British chick lit. (Go ahead and laugh if you will!) but came home with another fictitious novel called "The Painted Kiss" by Elizabeth Hickey. The story is told from the point of view of Gustav Klimt's muse, Emilie. I'm only part-way through so I can't say much about the book, but it is also perhaps in some subtle way helping me comes to terms with or understand who I am. Next on the list? "The Wayward Muse" also by Elizabeth Hickey, told from the point of view of the muse of Dante Gabirel Rossetti. So where is all of this reading getting me?  Stay tuned. 

"Falling Light" (painted while reading "Claude and Camille")

 Click for more information about "Falling Light."

The Advent of Light

The Advent of Light: Earth, Wind, and Fire

Click here for more info.

Back in the studio after a long break

After almost a month off, I finally decided to walk back in and hit the paints on Friday. I've noticed several times now that when I take longer breaks, my style of painting changes more dramatically and this is no exception. Here is the result.

For more information on "Awash", click here.

The Process: Waning Sun

People are asking more and more about the process I use to create my paintings. Because the process is 100% intuitive and spontaneous (and therefore different every time), it's really impossible to explain. So yesterday, I shot a few pics while I was working. Enjoy.

 
For more info on Waning Sun, click here. 

Dusk

This is the first time I've combined 4 different techniques of applying paint, in 4 layers.

Layer 1: Applied paint with brush.

Layer 2: Applied paint in small pats of my finger tips. Let dry overnight.

Layer 3: Rubbed paint into the dried, heavily textured paint from the day before.

Layer 4: Wiped paint across parts of the painting.

The Final Result

A heavily textured, deeply toned, complex, vibrant painting. And a contented artist. Well, at least for the moment.

For more information on "Dusk", click here.

Ch, ch, ch changes...

I finally painted my first abstract yesterday in weeks.I used the same technique- laying some paints on the canvas, swishing them around a bit with a brush, and adding texture & further blending the paint with my fingers. As usual, I had no preconceived notion of what I was about to paint. But something was different. Very abruptly, a change had transpired in my work. And it freaked me out a bit. There was more differentiation in shades of colors. And it was more static, which is very unusual for my work. Just about every piece I've done has had a lot of movement and energy in it. This piece is all calm.

So what's going on? I've been practicing portraiture, a huge departure from painting abstracts. I study everyone's faces now in great detail, particularly looking at how lighting casts shadows on their foreheads, their eyes, their cheekbones. I don't even like working with skin colors (depressing compared to the colors I can use in my abstracts). Portraiture is extremely difficult! I keep asking myself why I am doing it. I still don't have an answer, but I know it's something I have to do. And it's obviously affecting my abstracts. All I can figure out is that I am training myself, forcing myself out of my comfort zone. And changing. Enjoy the video.

A method to my madness

http://www.drawright.com/

So this is my bible. I love this book. I must have bought it back in the early 90's when I was doing the pastel portraits but am pretty sure I never had the patience or the discipline to work through much of the book. It's filled with what I'd call a psychological discussion of how our brains typically see versus how an artist must see, two very different things. The book is full of exercises which train you to turn off the rational left hemisphere of your brain & turn on the creative right side. Probably the most famous exercise is the one in which you turn your subject (assuming it's a photo and not a person ) upside-down in order to stop seeing the subject as a whole but rather as various components that fit together.

Having looked through bits and pieces of the book a few weeks ago, I decided to jump to Chapter 7 yesterday, "The Positive Aspects of Negative Space." One of the exercises was to draw the space around a complex object, so I took this photo of Jeff on the bike and did this sketch. I managed to hack off a bit of his leg , but I found the exercise very educational.

Finally, I did this sketch of Jeff yesterday after he crashed, totally wiped out from a day teaching 70 French students. It doesn't totally look like Jeff's but it's a huge improvement over the sketch I did a few days ago & it took 20 minutes instead of 3 hours. Today, I get some perspective. We can only hope.

Shifting gears...for the moment

I love doing abstracts. I can't think of anything much more liberating than throwing a bunch of brightly-colored paints on a canvas, blending them, and seeing what happens. I really can't describe how it feels.

But I've had this nagging feeling, and have literally been nagged (Ok, so gently nudged) by my husband and a fellow artist, to do portraits in addition to the abstracts. I am guessing that many people wonder if abstract artists can, in fact, draw. This is not to discount abstract work (I personally like my own work as well as abstracts of other artists), but there is something about being able to draw realistically that validates one as a "real artist." So I suppose part of my need to draw realistically is to help assuage my insecurities. 

 

I did a few portraits in pastels when I took a few art classes just for fun, back in the early 90's. And now, suddenly, I desperately want to paint portraits. I'm talking like the Masters. Ok, so it's a slightly lofty goal, but hey, why not shoot for the moon?

So here was my first attempt at a pastel portrait in something like 15 years (I'd kept some of the pastels in a Tupperware container). Obviously, I didn't finish. The pastels just didn't feel right. I missed the feeling of how paints move across canvas.


So I sat down a few days ago & did a sketch. It took 3 hours.


The painting took 7 hours. It's not bad for never having painted a portrait and having no clue what I was doing.. There are a lot of problems with it. For one, it doesn't look like the subject. The skin color is totally wrong, I couldn't do the shadows, she has a mop on her head instead of hair, and the poor woman has no chin! I may go back and correct and finish it, or I may re-do the whole portrait at some point. It practically killed me. I threw a few temper tantrums (but managed not to break anything) and cried. It was an immense struggle. Exhausing. Not the experience I was going for. So I've  decided to go back to the drawing board. Literally...

Mood Wall

This is my first series. The whole thing just popped into my head one day.  That's never happened before. Until this series, I'd just throw a blank canvas on the floor, and get some paint spread around, having no idea what the outcome will be. But with this, I knew I'd be doing 6 canvases in these specific colors. 

I was surprised at how long it took. Normally, I can finish a canvas in a few hours, so I expected the whole project would take a week.  But it took me two weeks. Painting the canvases was easy, but it took a surprising amount of energy. And then there were the sides of the canvases to deal with. 

I finished the paintings and then lined the paintings up in my hall. The unpainted sides of the canvases distracted my eye from the intense paint colors. I knew if I was bothered by the white, it would be the same for other people. So I painted the sides of each canvas, painstakingly wiping wet paint off the fronts of the canvases. What can I say? Live and learn. But at least I got the look I was going for. Color and nothing but.

So what's the point of this series? Color affects all of us, but how aware are we of this? The more I paint, the more color affects me. I love laying paint down on a canvas and then watching as the colors merge. It's fascinating and beautiful. I'll find myself staring at an ugly color on a wall or a piece of someone's clothing or car and subconsciously change it into something more pleasing in my mind. 

The mood wall takes your eye thought almost the entire spectrum (minus indigo). Let your eye settle on a color or colors. Maybe that color reflects you current mood (think mood ring), or maybe you need to look at a color that will calm or energize you. 

For more about the Mood Wall, click here.

Art for Haiti

HaitiLives.org

I have to do something for Haiti. I feel helpless, as do many of us.But what's the appropriate way to help? What Haiti needs, I don't have. Money. But I do have something that I can use to raise money from those who can afford to give. My art.

Soon after I started painting back in August, I knew I had to use my art to help people.  I am keenly aware of how fortunate I am to have a house, security, health, enough money, family and friends. It is my obligation to help other simply because I can. I have been looking to connect my art to a cause for several months and now I have one: Haiti.

The first step I took was to respond to an e-mail I received from The Sheldon Concert Hall and Galleries. I am on the press release list from when I filmed there a few times for my site, CultureSurfer.com.  The press release was about a concert which will take place on February 9 to raise funds for Haiti. I asked if I could donate a piece of art to be auctioned off. When they said yes, I asked if they'd like more art from additional artists. I posted a call for artists on Facebook and now at least a dozen donations of art have been made. I am grateful to all of the artists who so generously donated their work.

But now I am planning a long-term effort to raise funds. In my previous post, I told you about Ray, my personal connection to Haiti. But I have another connection to Haiti. I met Rene several years ago when I met his girlfriend who was then working at a local art gallery. Last week, I e-mailed Rene, asking him how he was doing. He told me they had been unable to find out how family and friends in Haiti were doing due to all of the phone lines being down. I can't imagine what he's going through.

Rene created the site, HaitiLives.org. He's an IT guy so he, like many IT people, is volunteering his time to do whatever he can help (I recently heard about someone creating a Creole-American translation site.). So I told Rene I want to donate a portion of everything I sell on NaomiSilverArt.com over the next year to Haiti. The challenge I have is that I'd like the donations to occur automatically when someone buys a painting, so the buyer a) knows for sure that the donation has been made b) the buyer gets the tax deduction (a further incentive to buy). I'm waiting for Rene to get back to me on this. He's got enough on his plate for now, and Haiti will be in need for years to come.

My Haiti Connection

http://haitilives.org/

Haiti is weighing heavily on my mind. I know I'm not alone in this. It's a struggle wanting to stay aware of what's happening with the relief efforts in Haiti while continuing to live our daily lives. How does one strike a balance
between being compassionate while avoiding sinking into a depression? The sheer magnitude of this tragedy (an insufficient word) is unimaginable. Yet we cannot help but imagining it. What if it had been us? By what stroke of luck were we born in a wealthy country and not in a country like Haiti, destitute beyond our comprehension even before the earthquake? We won the lottery of fate, you might say.

My tie to Haiti is personal. About 10 years ago, my husband received a letter in the mail from his friend, Ray, in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Ray had been on a program through the St. Louis Public Schools in which teachers from Haiti would came to observe teachers here. He observed my husband's French class and the two stayed in e-mail contact after he returned home. And now Ray was asking for a letter inviting him to come visit, something required in order for him to obtain a tourist visa. My husband wrote the letter and Ray got the visa.

The first thing that came out of Ray's mouth at the airport was "Where do I get a green card?" We had suddenly been saddled with an immense responsibility with which we felt totally unable to cope. Just like that. Out of the blue. Ray was helpless. He had very little English. He had absolutely no ability to fend for himself. We went to the grocery store & I broke down in tears. But what were we going to do? Throw him out on the street? No way.

Ray was my agen but it was like taking care of a child. Ray would stare into space for hours, not speaking, just sitting there. We suspected he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and probably a large dose of culture shock. He told us that his life had been threatened in Haiti. Why? Because he was educated, which meant he had money. When you have money of any kind in Haiti, you're a moving target. Someone had literally shown up at the door & threatened to kill him if he didn't give them money. So he left. He felt he had no choice. He left his mom in Haiti. Not an easy choice.

Over the next 5 weeks, we took care of Ray. We fed him, fixed up an old bike for him so he could get to the free English class we enrolled him in, and went in search of help for him. We found a Haitian church and attended services in order to speak to the pastor. He promised he'd help yet did nothing. We were astounded. At that time, I didn't have the contacts I now have to the many non-profits that help immigrants and refugees in St. Louis. We had no idea what to do but kept looking. We found a free lawyer who gave us some advice. In the end, we had to send Ray off before his visa expired. Even though this happened before 9/11, we feared that harboring an undocumented person could result in the loss of my husband's teaching license. We had to find somewhere else for him to go.

Finally, after many phone calls, Ray found someone in the US who was willing to take him in. He was in tears as we put him on a Greyhound bus bound for Delaware. We've only had sporadic contact with him since then. We know that for a while he worked in a chicken factory, married a Haitian-American named Noemie (the French version of my name!), and he went back to school. We Googled him last week and found an address so we could send him a card to find out how he's doing, how his family is doing. We are still waiting to hear from him.

Warm Embrace

Here is the the brown paint I was so dreading working with, which was very easy to mix by the way (blue + yellow + red). The paint looked so much like chocolate pudding that now I'm thinking I need to try some of the Belgian chocolate pudding I noticed in the refrigerated section of Trader Joe's. I have to admit that I didn't really mind working with the brown because it was such a warm brown, not dark and depressing.


 

And here is the painting. I did, in fact, use the brown as an undercoat but only on the bottom of the painting. It's actually on top of some others layers at the top of the painting. I tend to like to "anchor"  the bottom of my paintings that I do with a straight brush stroke (as opposed to the textured ones which I do with a brush & then my fingers) with a darker color so your eyes tend to wander up to the lighter colors, giving the painting a sense of upward moving energy. I love the warmth of this painting. I call it Warm Embrace because the brown shadows stretching upwards look like 2 people hugging and the colors in the painting feel so warm & nurturing. I'll be looking at this one tomorrow morning when it's -1F outside!

More information on Warm Embrace.

Brown? Blech!

Unless it's in the form of chocolate, that is.

I've changed the way I approach painting. Back at the end of August when I first began painting, I couldn't stop. It was an obsession. I'd go to sleep and wake up with colors floating through my mind. It's typical for me when I begin anything new to take off running out of the gate. Whole hog.

But now I've slowed down, thankfully. I don't have to stress over tearing through canvases so quickly (to the dismay of the lovely ladies at Dick Blick). Now I wait for an inspiration. The inspirations seem to come in the form of a color popping into my head. I let it sit there for a few days, just to make sure it's going to stick. This is how Dune came to be. That flourescent pink got stuck in my brain until I put it down on the canvas. This time it's brown.

Why am I surprised & a bit repelled by the idea of using brown? Because I really don't want to end up doing depressing, emo paintings. There's plenty of that out in the world & I don't want to contribute. I love the fact that even my darker paintings have a feeling of light in them.

But I have learned to trust my intuition to the extent that I can & go with it. I'm thinking tomorrow will probably be the day to paint. We'll see what happens.

NaomiSilverArt.com

Dune

I finally had to move my "studio" up to the front bedroom from the basement. It was just too cold down there-brr! Dune is my first painting done in a combination of room light and natural light (as opposed to the flourescent light I was painting under in the basement). The colors are, well, bright! Just think traffic cone when you look at the orange. Strangely enough, I find this painting both energizing due to the bright orange and relaxing due to the texture & design.

All I knew when I sat down to paint this one was that I needed to get some flourescent pink about the entire edge of the canvas. Then I just went by intuition. I knew I needed to add a slightly new technique as far as creating texture, but it was difficult to really understand what to do. I ended up working the paint slightly differently with my fingers. The end result looks like the waves formations you see in sand in the desert (visible if you click on the close-up to the left); hence the title Dune.

Not a bad way to close out my 40+ paintings for 2009.


For more information on Dune.

Slideshow of my art

Find more photos like this on MySLART.org

For more information about my paintings.