Here is the next in my catch-up blog entries. This one is dated April 28, 2014.
I have been on an artistic adventure recently! I have been painting only a few years and have definitely seen my skill develop in that time. It’s really been a revelation to me how much of art is learnable. I guess I always had a somewhat naïve idea that talented people make art, and you either had talent or did not. I have a very modest talent, but I have discovered that art is like anything else: practice and education do make for improvement. Who knew? Not me.
Recently, though, it has seemed to me that my progress has leveled off somewhat. I felt itchy, wanting to take the next step to improve my work, but unsure what that step was. So I did two things. I asked an accomplished artist (Cathy Carey: http://www.artstudiosandiego.com) to take a look at my oeuvre and tell me what was working, what I needed to improve, and possible directions. (I just have to say, I can hardly believe I have an oeuvre!) I also did a kind of self-study……more about that in other posts.
Cathy’s comments were very helpful. She suggested several things to stretch me, including trying a bigger painting, trying abstracting an existing painting, raising my productivity, and painting to a theme.
I have tried one level of abstraction – here is the painting I worked from and the abstracted version.
This was interesting! Abstracting was harder than I expected. I had to think about how to eliminate details, but I wanted to keep the basic shapes and I wanted the scene to be recognizable. I also, in keeping with moving a step away from reality, changed the colors to a triadic palette (green, yellow, purple), which was another way of simplifying. I will say that making this painting was certainly no easier than making the original, more realistic one. Next I think I will try doing the same scene with an even further level of abstraction. I have no clue what that might mean, however! But Cathy was right: this exercise is definitely stretching me, which is always a good thing.
Enough for today, but I will write more in the next few posts about this journey.
The snow is almost gone here, finally. It’s been a slow spring. We have had a rough mud season: my road had worse moguls than it has had in years. My car has a pronounced wobble at higher speeds because of impossible-to-reach mud caked behind the wheels; I hope to get that fixed when I get my summer tires put on. But there are coltsfoot and bloodroot blooming, and my garden has snowdrops and glory-of-the-snow. Although I shouldn’t say “garden,” because most of them are in the lawn where the mice have replanted them. Happy Spring!
True of all skills perhaps, to get help on how to mix it up, or try something differently. Your persistence is so remarkable. I love the abstract and look forward to even more abstract whatever that might mean. Your color mixes are what most draws me in the most, so I would think more abstract would be very doable.