marciahillart

I’ve never painted a self-portrait. I guess I never saw the point, really, although I know of an artist who painted a number of them because he himself was the easiest and least expensive model he could get. However, I belong to a small group of local artists and we are taking turns suggesting things for all of us to paint. The most recent challenge was to paint a self-portrait.

I knew right away that I wanted to do a pandemic self-portrait, mask and all. Because most of my face would be covered, I wanted to make my eyes as realistic as possible. And I wanted to include an exaggerated version of what I’ve been calling my “pandemic hair.” I have not had a professional haircut (or color, my color of the last several years being blue) since March of 2020. My partner cut my hair very short last May and I have not done anything about it since then. I have thick hair, and as it’s grown it seems to have acquired a life of its own, waving around my face in often ridiculous shapes. As I thought of the self-portrait, I visualized my hair waving all about, flying out away from my head.

I have found that symbolic paintings like this need a fair amount of time to develop in my imagination before I can start to paint. As time passed, I imagined leaves in my hair as well. And then I thought that I might include snowflakes, too. Finally, a few days later, I suddenly thought: and a bird! I could have a bird perched on my head! In this, I may have been inspired by a friend telling me a couple of months prior about one of her chickens flying up and landing on her head. What a story! I wish I’d had a chicken on my head! So this was my chance to have something similar. With the decision to add the bird, the painting in my imagination felt complete, so I started work.

I needed to find an image of a bird, so I looked in my bird identification book. I looked first at songbirds, searching for one that was positioned the way that I wanted. Finally, there it was, a photo of a yellow-throated vireo, a bird that was beautiful, positioned just the way I had in mind, and that even comes to Vermont.

Portraits are interesting to paint. Unless you want to forego reality (a perfectly legitimate choice), you do need to get it right. I once heard an artist define a portrait as a painting of a person in which the mouth is not quite right. So true! For this painting, I took a photo of myself wearing a mask by using a mirror. Then I printed it out, sized it, covered the back of the paper with pastel, held it up to my painting surface, and used a pencil to go over the primary lines. Voila! A faint “sketch” of my face with the proportions all correct.

Painting my eyes was not as difficult as I had imagined it might be. I think it was just one of those things that happens sometimes with painting. Occasionally I have to struggle and struggle to get what I want and occasionally it just comes. Mostly it’s somewhere in between. This one just came. I painted the rest of my face (mostly mask) and my crazy floating hair. I decided that the kinds of leaves in my hair mattered to me, and I chose oak and witch hazel, both trees important to the Celts, my ancestors. Once I had done that, I realized that adding snowflakes would detract rather than add to the image. Then I painted the bird. Then final tweaking. Here is the result. I am very happy with it indeed, because I feel that it shows something true about who I am. And that, I suppose, is the definition of a successful portrait! [“Pandemic Self-Portrait,” 10″ x 10″]

When George Floyd was killed – yet another Black man dead at the hands of the police – I thought a lot about this country’s reaction to racial differences. We have struggled throughout our entire history with this evil. It changes form, but it is still deeply embedded in our culture.

These paintings are part of my response to that.

And now for something completely different!

I have been trying Pour Painting, which – as the name suggests – involves pouring paint. But it’s a bit more complicated than that, as you might expect. You mix each color of paint with pouring medium, which was in turn mixed from three other ingredients. One of those ingredients is silicone oil, which helps the paint to make “cells,” or small bubbles of a different color. Here is an example of a pour painting with lots of cells:

“Rainbow Fire,” 24″ x 18.” See the red “cells” in the blue area?

The next step is to layer the colors in a larger cup. This is where you start making artistic decisions. What is your color palette? I found that I particularly liked the bold combination of black and metallic paints. You have to consider that adjacent colors may blend. With some color combinations, that could be a bonus; with others a disaster. Next you consider how you want to apply the paint to the canvas. With the painting below, I poured the paint across the canvas in a sort of S shape. The blending of colors here added a softness to the painting.

“Jupiter,” 18″ x 24″  You can still see that basic movement in the finished image.

In other instances, I turned the whole cup over onto the canvas and allowed the paint to flow over it. Here’s an example:

“By the Time I Got to Woodstock,” 12″ x 12″

Next comes the fun part. It’s a kind of collaboration between the artist and the medium. You tilt the canvas to move the paint. The paint, of course, has its own ideas about how to move. You make artistic decisions on the fly. Is there an area that doesn’t please you? Let it drip right off the edge. Is there a particular kind of movement you want? Tilt the canvas to encourage that.

Pour painting is not a small undertaking! I did it with my artist friend Cindy Griffith. We set up in her garage. First, we covered the floor with tarps and plastic. Then we brought in tables and covered those with plastic too. We set up a drying area using a ladder propped horizontally. We put newspaper (and usually cardboard as well) over the tables. On a central table, we laid out our paint and mixed many cups of colors with pouring medium. We wore old clothes and surgical gloves. We had a hose nearby to clean cups, other materials, and ourselves.

What a mess! You can see why we will only do it if we can set up with access to the outdoors and with plans to paint a few days in a row. It’s tiring, too. We were on our feet for hours every day. But what fun! Each painting is a surprise. Look at the “Pour Paintings” page to see all of them. But I will leave you with a final image here:

“Dragon Flight,” 18″ x 24″ Do you see that dragon? I did not plan that!

Summer paintings can be a challenge because they are so, well, green. First, although there may be a hundred shades of green, it’s still all green, and a single color lacks interest. Green is the bane of artists. Somehow, the green in that spot in the grass, in the tips of that tree’s branches, the green right in front of your eyes, is never in your selection of pastels.  Pablo Picasso famously said, “They’ll sell you thousands of greens. Veronese green and emerald green and cadmium green and any sort of green you like, but that particular green, never.” At this point, every artist reading this is nodding in agreement.

One solution is to mix greens, and often you can get just what you need that way. Why the manufacturers of pigments cannot also mix greens to get what I need is a mystery.

In “Midsummer Maple,” I was faced with a delightful abundance of greens. Sigh. I love them, but they are a challenge. Here’s the painting:

“Midsummer Maple,” 16 ” x 20″

This is a larger than usual image so that you can see some of the difficulties and my solutions. I cannot tell you how many efforts I made to get the color of the grass just right! Finally, I tried a fairly bright yellow-green (close to the patch of grass just to the right of the flowers), painted a very pale yellow – almost white – over it (Pastellists call it “scumbling”) and blended the two. Voila! Whew.

The tree is the star of this painting. I love all trees, and here in Vermont a maple is certainly nothing special, but I think they are my favorite. Look at this one, in its prime. It’s a rich explosion of a tree, a lush exuberance of a tree, the very definition of maple health. Oh, I wanted to paint that tree!

Most representational painting is a matter of using a two-dimensional format and making the subject look three-dimensional. For a tree, that means “sculpting” it with light so that you can see the shape not only of the tree itself but also of the branches. Every kind of tree has its own characteristic arrangement of branches, with those of the maple being fairly horizontal. See how the shadows in the left part of the tree, away from the light, gradually become less frequent as you look at the tree’s right side. Yet even in the side facing the light, there are shadows, and these define the branches.

Looking at the tree, it’s easy to think that it’s just green, with a lighter and darker green. But there are at least half a dozen greens in that tree’s leaves, and another three or four in the shadowed areas.

As to the overall green of the image, this has the visual relief of those magenta flowers as well as the half-hidden house and the distant mountains. The magenta of the flowers (again, there are four or five shades of it in there) is a direct opposite on the color wheel of yellow-green, so the viewer gets the excitement of that contrast.

I don’t know that you can see it in this image, but I also added magenta throughout the painting. A dark magenta is in the far trees. Both dark and pale magenta are in the maple, its leaves as well as the trunk. The fence and house are both touched with the color. It’s the kind of thing that most people won’t “see” (in the sense of being aware that it is there) when looking at the painting, but they will respond to it. And that’s what art is all about: the response of the viewer.

One of the pleasures of painting is that I can immerse myself in any season at any time. Longing for green in winter? No problem! Feeling a need for the hot colors of autumn? Easy!

But in general, I find that I tend to paint the season that I am experiencing. Sometimes there’s a lag, especially with winter, as I slowly let go of fall’s fiery display, but eventually I come to rest in the reality that is outside my window. Here are my two most recent paintings:

“Yellow House,” 11″ x 14″. This scene is deep into winter, but it has a certain warmth to it nonetheless, because of the color of the house and even the snowy near hillside. I used an olive green paper, which has a bit of warmth to it. You can see the paper showing through in those background trees, since I used small choppy strokes of pastel and allowed the paper to show through to give it texture. I like the effect. The subtle golds in the far trees and the road contrast with that cool blue-gray sky. The sky speaks of coming cold. The home and its setting speak of coziness.

And just finished:

“Winter in Parentheses,” 12″ x 18″. On today’s weather report, the forecaster mentioned that this is the last day of winter’s historically coldest average temperatures, which start January 9th and slowly change as of January 30th. I must have felt that in my bones when I chose this image to paint. This is the depth of winter: the sweep of snow, the lowering clouds, the pale sun. But there is light here as well. The small structure is now in the distance, looking not cozy so much as protective. This is a portrait of winter’s power, and the force of the season is prominent. The paper underneath is black. It does not show anywhere, but I think it adds a depth and solidity to the scene.

I find it interesting that I usually paint the current season. Of course, I have much lived memory to bring to painting the images of any time of year. But there must be something about living it right now that helps to shape what I want to paint. Perhaps it is that every season, even the slushy mud of early spring’s “mud season” and the stark colors of late fall’s “stick season,” has its own visual message.