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.
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.
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...
