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.

The Advent of Light

The Advent of Light: Earth, Wind, and Fire

Click here for more info.

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. 

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...

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.

Spirit

This is the painting I did about 2 weeks ago when I was under the influence of a nasty cold. As do most of my paintings, the result was a surprise. What's new about this one is that there is some transparency in the paint (you can't actually see the canvas but can see an undercoat of paint). I find this effect gives the painting an airy feeling.

I was reluctant to call this one "spirit" for fear of being seen as a new-age freak but I figure what the heck. It looks like a spirit to me (in front of a tree), so that's what I'm calling it. Feel free to interpret the painting to mean whatever you think it means.

For more information on "Spirit," click here.

Hoping to hit the studio today

Ok, I'm now on day 8 of this nasty cold. I won't even attempt to describe what's being produced in my sinuses but suffice it to say the substance could be used to create an unusual piece of art that would be classified as a bio hazard. Nevertheless, I very much hope to get back to the studio today. I miss my paints. Hoping the feeling is mutual.

My 2 most recent paintings

Sea of Fire and Sea of Light
Both paintings are on view in the "Intimate Distance" show until January 12th at the 5th floor gallery at The Syndicate Building, 915 Olive St. 5th Floor, St. Louis, Mo. 63101
Gallery open by appointment only: Contact Connie or Paul LaFlam at: artthngs@hotmail.com or 314.436.9374

NaomiSilverArt.com

Since when are you an artist?

This is the question I keep hearing from people who've known me for a few years. You want the honest answer? The art thing kind of crept up and bit me, well, you know where. This past August, feeling a bit burned out from 2 years of running my website CultureSurfer.com, I decided to take a stab at doing some painting. I'd been around a good deal of art and artists over the past two years & the thought hit me that maybe I could create some decent art, at least decent enough to show and maybe even sell.

Off I went to the Ben Franklin and picked up about 4 bottles of cheap finger paint along with a few super cheap brushes and a few canvas boards. I went home and hit an old piece of poster board with the paints. Ick. I didn't like it. Neither did my husband. The whole thing just looked like mush. Not good. But I kept at it.



Time to hit one of the canvases. Suddenly, I found myself doing what I now refer to as "grown up finger painting," a process I now use in many of my works. What can I tell you? There is something very child-like in my personality that just relates to squirting paint out of a bottle and getting down and dirty with paint all over my hands. It's such a direct way to connect with the creative process. No brush as intermediary.


A few weeks later, BAM! Art show #1. I answered a post on Craigslist & within 2 days had 6 pieces of my art hanging at a wine bar out in St. Charles, Missouri. Cool. The show was up for a month and nothing sold but hey, it was a start.

NaomiSilverArt.com