Creative Calamities

Today I met Guillermo an old friend from Miami at MoMa for an evening enjoying art. We chatted about the art, why he liked Clifford Still and why I liked Mark Rothko. We both enjoyed the fact that quite often we couldn’t understand why certain pieces were considered good enough to warrant a space in the museum.

To my surprise, what struck me most and even made me a bit emotional wasn’t the high art. It was a set of pastel colored tupperware tumblers on display in the exhibit, Shaping Modernity: Design 1880 – 1980.

I was swept away is a sort of waking dream. I saw myself back in the home I grew up in. We had an identical set of tumblers when I was seven, eight, nine or thearabouts. The blue cup was “my cup” was till I left for college.

I’ve been trying to push myself away from the table of these small scale food paintings. I’ve been working this week to dig into some larger pieces for a spell, but they are a lot of fun to play and experiment with. Today I began messing with a creamy textured soft mixing white with a pallet knife. Initially I only intended to apply the thick paint as the creamy topping on the cupcakes but continued using the technique throughout the piece.

I enjoy the way it can appear to be abstract shapes but at the same time it is clearly cupcakes.

Wayne Thiebaud who has inspired me to go in this direction noted about realism, that an artist “can enliven a construction of paint by doing any number of manipulations and additions to what he sees,” which makes it possible for representational art to be “both abstract and real simultaneously.”

I like the concept and the day’s discovery.

These days when I am in my studio painting my wife walks in and rarely comments on what I am working on. Earlier this week she walks in and I am startled by her emphatic statement, “Now that is nice!” in reference to a small still life of three pears.

Not having much luck selling my paintings on my own I figured I would give the Etsy community a try. With a slow start well in hand, I am wondering if the rest of the public is reacting to my work the same why my wife does. So rather that continuing to try to sell my more expressive work I began to try to think of a subject matter and style that might have a more universal appeal, which started with the pears.

So I have been borrowing from one of my favorite painters Wayne Thiebaud. I should probably feel a little guilty “borrowing” so heavily from him but, he said himself . . .

“I’m very influenced by the tradition of painting and not at all self-conscious about identifying my sources. I actually steal things from people that I can use … just blatant plagiarism.”

That being said I am “stealing” from Thiebaud’s colorful foods paintings. His food paintings tend to encapsulate much of what I like to think of as good old fashioned Americana, which conjures up images of diners and drive-ins and ice cream stands. For me, these paintings evoke a distilled Norman Rockwell-esk feeling, a pure uncluttered memory or daydream that is very personal, because they tend to spark memories rather than tell a full story.

It is natural for me to paint these subjects because I love painting and I love food. I plan on doing paintings of candies and cakes but I also will detour a bit into some of my own experience by doing paintings of sushi. More precisely kaiten sushi, which is common place in Japan and yet appearing more and more in other countries. Kaiten sushi is not just about the food but also the experience of waiting for just the right plate of food to work it’s way around the conveyor belt to your grasp. Just as much as I enjoyed the  experience and taste of a corn dog at a county fair, I enjoy the almost roller coaster like journey of the kaiten sushi.

Recently I became a Facebook user. And through an old friend whom I haven’t seen since grammar school. I was “introduced” to his mentor, an artist through Facebook. As it turns  Kevin Williams and I did cross paths at an art competition while in high school. Yesterday he made an interesting post on FaceBook that drew me into his profile. Listed as his favorite book is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan.

As it turns out I had purchased this book years ago while browsing a book store. The pages are now slightly yellowed and the the book remains as of yet unread.

I have only read the preface and up to page three of this book and already feel inspired to write something about it. The author speaks about her own creative journey as a writer and a teacher. And how she used to use alcohol as a way to access her creative self. Cameron goes on to write about how she creates after she learned not to depend upon alcohol.

I learned to get out of the way and let that creative force work through me. I learn to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping . . . I didn’t have to be in the mood. I didn’t have to take my emotional temperature to see if inpiration was pending I simply wrote . . . By resigning as the self-conscious author, I wrote freely.

At times in my life I have experimented using alcohol to help stimulate my creativity which has an obvious price to pay. But even more destructive yet more successful was my attempt to dig into my emotional past and use sadness and despair as my vehicle for creativity. Each of the methods did garner a degree of success but at a prices I don’t often want to pay. I decided a while back not to depend upon these crutches and I use other methods to get where I want creatively. Sometimes my new methods work, sometimes they don’t but I am anxious to delve further into The Artist’s Way to see what else Cameron has to say on the subject.

Below are sketches that I did on a train New Year’s Eve. The subject of bison seems to be presenting itself to me a lot lately and I am trying to see what I can make of it. Below are a couple of sketches where I was randomly sketched hoping to stumble upon an interesting image or angle. I am still searching.

Today is the final day of my seven day self-imposed challenge to produce a piece of art each day, and post it here whether it was good, bad or ugly.

I have posted some art that I am not very proud of but it is all part of the process of eventually creating good art.

Yesterday I wrote about a friend and artist Victoria Rose Martin. She responded with another challenge of which I have used as inpiration on this final day of my challenge.

She writes:

Self doubt can be such a thief of talent and time. And I love that line about “the bison on the wall is someone else’s magic”. You must remember there is a market for EVERYTHING. . . . By the way I am stealing that line about the bison and making a piece about it. Hey, how about that as a starting point for you? A bison. What comes to mind for me is images of Lascaux or something inspired by Edward Curtis. Or in my case some crazy little bird person with horns? I don’t know but it sounds fun and I can’t wait to see what you do.

On a final note: this process of creating art for seven days straight has done more for me than I expected. I have gotten my groove back and reclaimed my mojo. This piece represents my seven day creative journey, starting in darkness and moving into creative explorations that are represented as a cave a painting with elements or symbols of each day’s work.

From Art & Fear:

Today almost no one feels shored up. Today artwork does not emerge from a secure common ground: the bison on the wall is someone else’s magic. Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and contradiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward. Making the work you want to make means setting aside these doubts so that you may see clearly what you have done, and thereby see where to go next. Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself.

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Yesterday I stumbled across Victoria Rose Martin’s name on Facebook, an old friend and extremely talented artist that I knew from my time at the University of Miami. We lost touch years ago, but I have always greatly admired her beautifully sculpted ceramic work. But after I friended her on Facebook, I became increasingly self-concious and hoped she didn’t find her way to my blog to see that I have strayed from fine art and that I am now posting art here that is not always of the greatest quality (my Creative Calamities).

She responded to me with such word of kindness, encouragement and a real faith in my talent as an artist that I began to feel that I that I have wasted so many years not developing the talent I have been given. Today I feel like I have passed a cross roads in my commitment to being an artist.

Below is a quick study that I did tonight from a photograph I took of the singer Key Appleseeds.

Back when I was in graduate school studying painting, my studio was in a large open area, so anyone with access to the building could see my work in progress. More often than I care to admit other grad students would tell me how disappointed they were to see that I had destroyed a beautiful work of art. They say they would come in one day and see something they really liked only to come in the next day to see it destroyed. At my insistence they began to leave little notes saying they like a piece or simply to stop because it was done.

When I paint, I am often confronted with that question . . . is it done?

As I have grown older I tend to have a bit more restraint when painting. I am not sure that is necessarily a good thing, but it is what it is. So, the painting I have chosen to share today is a piece that has been hanging on my wall for about a year and a half. When I stopped working on it I couldn’t say for sure if it was done or not, but I didn’t want to destroy it in haste. I think about 6 months ago I decided it needed more work. So today it gets a facelift.

From  Art & Fear:

“The development of an imagined piece into an actual piece is a progression of decreasing possibilities, as each step in execution reduces further options by converting one — and only one — possibility into a reality. Finally, at some point or another, the piece could not be other than it is, and it is done.

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I wrote that first bit before I began working. When my wife saw me pull the painting off the living room wall, she screamed, “Don’t!! I like that painting and you always go too far!”

I painted anyway. But that being said the changes that I made are very subtle and I am sure I was more careful in an effort to avoid an upset spose. For the most part I only used yellow and white. I now realize the yellow areas in the carp didn’t work because it was mostly made up of a single layer of thin paint, while the other areas of paint had a much richer build up of color. If you look closely you can see the changes but I think they would only be obvious if one were looking at them with the naked eye.

I consider myself lucky today because subtle changes satisfied my eye. Quite often one small change progressively leads way to big changes.

I’m still flipping through this wonderful book Art & Fear looking for good excerpts. I just may go on quoting it all week!

From the book:

Artists don’t get down to work
until the pain of working is exceeded
by the pain of not working.

— Sephen DeSaebler

That is how things often go with my personal art until I find a groove, but I am hoping this challenge will help me get my groove back.

Today my wife and I finally made it out to take our Christmas card photo. On the way back home we stopped off in Bryant Park. The place was bustling with people ice skating, shopping for unique Holiday gifts, sipping on hot chocolate and enjoying the holiday atmosphere and fresh snow. This little space was oddly empty so I took a picture. I tried to make something more by re-creating the image in acrylic paint and a permanent black marker but I think the photo that took a few moments of my time to notice and snap the picture is far more interesting even though the work on paper took a couple of hours.

Today is day two of my self imposed challenge to do some hands on art for seven days straight and show my results here . . . good, bad or ugly.

I dug out a painting that has been sitting untouched for more than a year and threw some fresh paint on it.

The concept to just do lots of work with the focus being on output brings to mind one of my favorite books, Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Art Making by David Bayles and Ted Orlando.

Here is an excerpt that I think is appropriate to my challenge:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality,” however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

I have heard about the Feast of Samhain for years (pronounced Sahween) from a single person. There is a long history of this Celtic tradition of which I don’t know the details but I am sure I have been told.

Every year as Halloween nears a good friend of mine, the Scottish born, John Cornell talks of his favorite holiday of the year.

He prides himself on being dubbed an “emotional zero” but every year on Halloween he makes sure to be home with glowing carved pumpkins on his stoop and  a large pot of candy for the costumed children revelers that come calling for candy .

This year I had the pleasure of sharing in his Halloween’s Eve pumpkin carving ritual, of which he states without his ritual, Halloween would not come.

The evening at his home felt more like a Christmas Eve than a Halloween’s Eve. A few friends gathered and watched the master carve pumpkins while keeping warm in front of his glowing wood burning stove. He did not sketch a face on the pumpkin and he did not use a fancy pumpkin carving tool, just a large pointed knife with which he carved pumpkin after pumpkin. Watching him was like being at a ‘happening’ in the 60s. It was performance art at it’s best. A few cuts here and a few slices there and his pumpkins came to life in the cool autumn air.