Art Demonstration

A few days ago, I gave a presentation and demonstration on my plein-air techniques to the Asheville Urban Landscape Project.  the AULP is a group of artists in the Asheville area that get together periodically to make some paintings.  During most of the year, they do landscapes outdoors and, in the winter months, they'll do figure sessions.  They also bring in accomplished local artists to do demonstrations of their painting styles.  I was honored to be asked this year.  Previous artists have included Richard Oversmith and Mark Harmon, so I was in some very accomplished territory.

I chose to do the demo at the Asheville Botanical Gardens.  This is a beautiful park-like area adjacent to UNC Asheville that shows the great biodiversity in western North Carolina.  About 25-30 people showed up.  I set up my French easel, gave a talk about the equipment and materials I use, and then started on a small painting of the gazebo.  I'd paint a few minutes, then talk a bit about what I was seeing, deciding, and doing, and answer questions whenever they popped up.  Some of the topics that we covered:
- using a neutral gray palette rather than a white one
- selecting and using a limited number of colors (one red, one blue, one yellow, along with burnt umber and yellow ochre)
- toning a canvas with a color before painting
- deciding on a composition: where the focus will be, the major light/dark areas, and areas of strongest color
- blocking in the composition with burnt umber
- building on the block-in with muted colors
- accentuating the focus areas with stronger colors
- reacting to changing light that can completely change the focus of the painting
- recovering from mistakes (actually, the whole process is one long recovery period, isn't it?)
- deciding when enough is enough before it becomes too much

The crowd was very engaged and asked lots of questions, which is always a good thing for me.  We had a good back-and-forth.  Here are some photos from the session:

A working artist is quite the fashionista.  Here's my sloppy self talking about the really exciting topic of the advantages of using a gray palette to lay out your paints.

Doing the initial block-in.  I was setting the horizon line in the upper third of the panel and the gazebo at the left third.

 Here's what I was looking at.  A little while later, the sun broke through the clouds and lit up the grass in front of the gazebo.  Changed everything.

And here's how it turned out ...

Muscatatuck

I spent last week up at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in Indiana.  I was part of the team that trained a group of US government civilians heading to Afghanistan for a year.  Last month, my role was as a mentor for a team of students.  This time, I was what we call a "subject matter expert".  This meant that I worked with our Afghan role-players to ensure that the training events were well coordinated, the role-players had an idea as to how the students might react, and the events went off on schedule.  It can be a nerve-wracking job, but it's a lot of fun.

You could think of my role as the director and stage manager of a play in which only half the participants know what the script is.  Yes, there is a script: we have very definite goals in mind for each event.  These goals are increasingly complex as the training progresses and build on previous events.  In the first event, the student teams meet a local Afghan official.  It's a basic meet-and-greet.  The students are informed on very short notice of the meeting and have to learn something about the official, try to figure out what his interests are, prepare the meeting room as best they can, and determine which team member is going to fill each role.  Then they have to do the meeting.  It usually goes well, but it can go south in a hurry.  Last month, the official asked my student team about Donald Trump's veracity (a very realistic question as many Afghans watch American politics).  One of the students replied that "all politicians are liars".  This, to an Afghan politician.  Ooops!  Fortunately, the other team members helped the guy recover from his faux pas.  That's why we do this training: put the students in a safe environment where they have to put their training into practical use, and where mistakes aren't going to result in permanent damage.

Our Afghan role-players are wonderful people.  Many of them were driven out of their homes by the Soviets, or warlords, or the Taliban, and are eager to help the US rebuild the country.  Some were diplomats, some were officers or soldiers in the Army or Air Force, several were police officers, others were businessmen, teachers, village elders, scholars, and farmers.  One was a smuggler.  One has gone back to Afghanistan and put his life on the line three times as an interpreter with US forces.  Most have lost family members - wives, husbands, parents, sons, daughters, or other close relative - to the fighting that has raged in the country for 30 years.  Many still have family in Afghanistan.  I won't post any photos of them as that might endanger their family members still in-country.  But they have an amazing dedication to this job.  They bring insight, intelligence, and wit to their interactions with our students.  And, as one who was trained by these very same people five years ago, I can tell you from first-hand knowledge that their efforts are invaluable.

Outside of Muscatatuck, these men and women get little respect.  They are treated with suspicion because they're Muslims and Afghans.  They get told to "go home" way too often, even though many of them are now US citizens.  Extra attention and pat-downs in airports are a given.  Yet they still continue to show up, every time, to train people heading to Afghanistan.

So the next time you hear some idiot condemning all Muslims and Afghans as terrorists or worse, tell them to sit on it.  I work with Muslims and Afghans.  We are damned lucky to have them!

Taborets and Palettes

One of the things I do when I visit another artist's studio is study their taboret and palette.  It really gives me an insight into how they work.  Mechanics will check out another mechanic's tool set and shop layout, and for an artist, it's the same exact thing.  I get a lot of good ideas that way.

A taboret (pronounced "ta-bo-ray") is basically a table next to the easel that holds the artist's stuff.  It's a combination workbench and tool chest.  If you look in art catalogs, you'll probably notice that they're often fancy, made out of wood, and very expensive.  You won't find one of those in my studio.  I use a rolling tool chest that I got from Sears.  They still have a similar one in their catalog.  Mine is basically a steel 5-drawer unit on heavy-duty casters with a plastic top.  I tossed out the fiberboard top insert that came with it and replaced it with thick coffee-table glass for use as a palette.  On the left side, I added a shelf from scrap wood.  There's a recess in the top where I keep my mediums and the brushes I'm currently using.  I've got some small cardboard boxes attached to the back that hold my full selection of brushes.  Here's what it all looks like:

I'm right-handed, so I position the taboret to the right of the easel.  The wooden shelf holds the paper towel where I scrub my brushes.  Next to it is the recess.  From top to bottom you'll see the jar that holds the brushes in current use, then the large jar with dirty solvent (I use Gamsol), then a small jar with clean Gamsol, then a small jar with my medium (50% Gamsol, 50% linseed oil), and then a small jar with Liquin when needed.  To the right of the recess is the glass palette.  For me, this provides a natural flow, and I've been doing it for so long that I can't change now.  Some artists would want the palette to be as close as possible to the painting on the easel, but that hasn't worked for me.

Regarding the unused brushes, they're arranged according to size: small 0's to 2's to the left up to 12's on the right.  That way I can quickly find the size and shape I need.

The glass palette has to be backed with something so you can see and evaluate your paint.  Many artists use a white background, but I use a medium gray.  This allows me to see how light or dark the paint is.  If you use a white palette, then everything is darker, even a light yellow.  A medium gray background lets me get a good idea whether the paint is light or dark enough, and also whether it's strong or muted.  

The other good thing about glass is that it's easy to clean.  When I'm done for the day, I scrape off all my used paint, then wipe it down with Gamsol to clean it even more, and finally wipe it down with alcohol.  This removes all the remaining Gamsol and paint and leaves it clean enough to eat off of.

I mentioned earlier that I position the taboret to the right of the easel.  When I'm working from life, I position my easel so that it's just to the left of the subject and the taboret so it's just to the lower right of the subject.  This results in a small vision triangle and I can shift quickly from subject to painting to taboret, compare the paint mixture on the taboret to the subject, and back to the easel.  When I'm just drawing, though, I have the easel to the right of the subject, since I'm right-handed.

So that's how I set up my easel and taboret.  How do you set up yours?

Figurative Paintings: Alla Prima versus from Photographs

A previous post talked about painting landscapes from life versus from photographs.  Many artists, especially the hard-core traditionalists, say you should never work from photos.  Other artists copy photos in so much detail that they've spawned the Photorealist movement.  I'm not in either of those camps.  I find that photos and life are complementary: there are things that come with working from life, and there are different things that come with working from photos.

In working from life, I'm really open to the person in front of me.  I see their natural posture, the way they move, how they speak, their manner, their personality, their humor, and their humanity.  I see the way their clothes hang on them, the way their skin is different colors in different areas, and get a 3-D sense of how their body is formed.  When I'm drawing or painting a person, I'm trying to get a sense of who they are as a person.  You can't really get that from photos.

There are limitations, though.  A person can't hold a pose for very long.  They need to move every so often, which interrupts the process.  Then they never get back in exactly the same position.  The result is that a painting done strictly from life is an average of many poses.  Also, the more interesting the pose, the shorter the time they can hold it.  If you twist your torso 90 degrees, for example, you're going to un-twist over the next few minutes.  Think you can hold it for 20 or 30 minutes?  Hah!

Another limitation: time.  The person being drawn or painted has a life outside the studio.  Sitting in one position for hours while I mess around on canvas is not an option.  As an artist, I have to respect that.  Furthermore, a professional model is paid by the hour.  That rapidly gets quite expensive.

So: working from life has some good aspects, and some limitations.  Just like everything else in life.

Photos have their own characteristics.  For one, the subject can hold the pose forever without moving.  That's pretty valuable in itself, particularly in those cases where the pose is difficult or impossible to sustain.  Since the subject isn't moving, the artist can focus on important things like the structure of the face.  It's often the little details that I catch: the way the shadow of the jaw falls on the neck, for example, or the dip of a lower eyelid.  Things that would be easy to miss in working from life because the subject is always slightly moving.

On the flip side, photos are flat 2-D representations.  When you and I look at something, we see it in 3-D because we have two eyes that provide depth perception.  That matters a lot more than you might think.  When I'm painting an arm, for example, I need to know what that arm is shaped like, so I can convincingly paint it so it appears to curve toward you or away from you.  Photos don't give you that information.  Also, photos don't tell you much about the person.  They give you an image of what that person looked like at a specific moment in time, but you can't interact with that image to find out who they are as a person.

Given all this, I find that working from life and from photos are complementary.  I see things while working from photos that I can then look for when I work from a real person.  When I'm with a person, I can learn a lot about them, and carry that into later work from a photo.  The lessons learned flow both ways.

When I'm working on a large painting of a specific person, I use a combination of both in-person and photo techniques.  I generally have the individual come to the studio.  I'll have my camera set up on a tripod near me with a remote to take the exposures.  We'll talk and I'll be taking photographs like crazy.  We'll move the individual around, move the lighting around, have them stand or sit or whatever, and I'll continue to take photos.  I can shoot a thousand pictures in an hour.  Sometimes I'll do some sketches, sometimes not.  By keeping the camera to the side, I can engage the individual in a discussion.  The camera is not front and center between us, so much of their camera shyness goes away.  We just talk. Meanwhile, I'm punching the button on the remote to take photos like crazy.  That's the great thing about modern cameras: you can shoot a thousand photos and not break the bank getting them developed!

What this does is give me a lot of exposures, all with controlled lighting, along with a sense of their personality.  I can then choose which photos to use to create the story of that person.  Often it'll be a combination: the position of the head from this one, the expression in the eyes from another, the hand from a third.  Since the lighting is pretty much the same, this is pretty easy.

I really don't like working from snapshots.  It's common for figurative artists to have people ask them to do a portrait from a snapshot.  Hey, it's easy, you've already got the image, right?  Well, no, it's actually pretty hard.  The person's expression may be great, but the lighting, pose, environment, and color will be terrible.  And if they give you a bunch of snapshots, they're all taken at different times of the day or year, lighting is completely different and usually very harsh (flashes on mobile phones are NOT good light sources!), clothes are different, and so on.  No, it's much better if I take my own photos, thank you very much!

Okay, so this has turned into a tome.  Time to wrap it up.  Bottom line: working from photos and working from life are two different, and complementary, things.  Each can bring information to the table that the other can't.  Just don't rely exclusively on one!

Scottishisms

People in the UK are so much more creative with their words than we are in the US.  This is especially true with insults.  A few days ago, Donald Trump stuck his foot in his mouth again by saying that people in Scotland were ecstatic over the vote to leave the EU.  That, of course, is not true, as every single district in Scotland voted to remain.  The Scots, no fans of the Donald, were quick to reply.  Here are some of their terms for him:

- Witless fucking cocksplat

- Tiny-fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon

- Incompressible jizztrumpet

- Ignorant fuckmuppet

- Utter cockwomble

- Polyester cockwomble

- Hamster heedit bampot

- Weasel-headed fucknugget

- Leather-faced shit tobogganist

- Cock-juggling thundercunt

- Touped fucktrumpet

- Bloviating fleshbag

- Weapons-grade plum

- Clueless numpty

- Mangled apricot hellbeast

Now if only our own political commentators were this creative ...

Landscape Painting: Plein Air versus Photographs

I got some questions today about this painting of the Grand Canyon:

South Rim Afternoon

Oil on linen panel, 18"x24"

I painted this one in 2014, several months after visiting the Grand Canyon.  I was only there for too short of a time: we drove there one day, walked around the south rim a day, and then drove back.  Not nearly enough time - the Grand Canyon is such a mind-blowing place.  As an artist, as a rock-hound, as a hiker, as just about anything, a person could spend days, weeks, or months there and never get enough.  I took several hundred photos that day with the intention of seeing what I could do in the studio later.

One thing that inspired me was an exhibition of paintings by a bunch of artists who had spent a week or so at the Grand Canyon sometime prior to our visit.  These paintings were awesome: almost all were plein air, done right there in the Canyon, and they captured the light, colors, and moods perfectly.  I was in awe of what those artists could do.  So, after I got back home to North Carolina, I tried my own versions in the studio.

And failed.  Miserably.

I am primarily a figurative artist, not a landscape artist.  For years, I avoided landscapes because I wasn't any good at them, and I wasn't any good at them because I avoided them.  Kind of a self-reinforcing circle, huh?  But landscapes, done well, have immense power.  Additionally, when you're In The Moment, painting a landscape that's right in front of you, you're alive to the world in a way that you're otherwise unaware.  You see shapes and colors and things that you would probably miss.  And you're trying to capture it all in paint, which is a hopeless proposition, but so worth it anyway.

After a bunch of failed efforts, I eventually came up with an idea for a carefully-considered approach.  I relied on several photographs taken in the same general area, worked up a composition, and figured out which area would be the focus (the cliffs on the right) and which areas would play supporting roles (the more distant canyon).  This painting was the result.  I was fairly happy with it.  Now, after a couple more years of experience with landscapes, I'd do it a bit differently, but still, it falls in the "okay" category.  Not a bad early effort.

That's the background for today's blog post.  The first question that prompted this post was, "Do you paint plein air?  Or do you use a reference photo?"  Generally, I prefer to paint plein air.  Being out in the open, in front of whatever it is I'm painting, makes me aware of the wide range of colors and shapes, as well as the smells, sounds, and feelings of the place.  I have to work fast to capture the feeling.  When it works, it's great.  It doesn't always work.  Kinda like golf: when you get that perfect drive, it's a great feeling, but then you flub the next several shots and maybe even wind up in the water hazard.  That's life.  That being said, here's an example of a plein air painting that I think turned out fairly well:

Harvested Hay

Oil on linen panel, 9"x12"

This was done about a half mile from my home last fall in mid-to-late afternoon over about an hour and a half.  What caught my attention was the swoop of the tan part of the field, where the hay had been cut, next to the green of the grassy area, and bordered by the rich oranges and browns of the surrounding hills.  For me, things clicked pretty well with this effort.

But I can't always work from life.  Sometimes there's no time, or I need to paint a large work.  (Ever tried to do a 30"x40" landscape from life?  Some people can.  Some people can build a car in their garage, too.  I can't do either of those things.)  Sunset paintings are an example of something that are extremely difficult to do from life.  The light at sunset changes so fast.  You wait and wait and wait and then THERE'S TEN MINUTES WHEN IT'S PERFECT and then POOF it's gone.  So last summer, when I was trying to do a painting of these beautiful summer clouds at sunset, I went out and took a gazillion sunset photos over a period of several weeks, and then used a bunch of them to do this painting:

Clouds over the French Broad River

Oil on canvas, 30"x40"

This thing kicked my butt.  I wanted to get the beautiful range of reds, oranges, and yellows of the clouds right at sunset.  As it turned out, this painting was all about light.  (Well, duhh ...) The real colors in the clouds are pure light, but I was trying to capture them in paint, which only reflects a part of the light and is really muddy and dull compared to the real light in the clouds, particularly once you start mixing colors.  But when I used stronger and clearer paint colors, then I wound up with an unbelievably gaudy mess on the canvas that was not nearly as bright, clear, and subtle as the real thing.  Eventually, I toned the sky way down so that the clouds could have a gentle range of reds and oranges while still popping off the canvas.  Did it work?  Well, ehh.  I probably need to do a lot of smaller studies for a while to understand the process before wrecking another canvas.

The second question was, "I really want to start landscape painting and I'm wondering if you can get beautiful paintings like this if you are using just a photo."  Well, thank you for that vote of confidence.  I think the answer to your question is "yes" but there are some qualifiers:
   - You have to paint plein air, from life, in order to understand what it is you're looking at, and to know what's missing from the photo.  Photos are a good reference tool, but they are very limited.
   - DON'T COPY THE PHOTO.  You need to know what it is that you want to say with your painting, what the focus is.  That will tell you what to stress and what to go lightly over.  If all you're doing is copying the photo, then you should just take the photo to WalMart or wherever and have them blow it up into the size you want.  Painting is something else altogether.
   - Go to the library or used-book store and find some books on landscape painting.  Get one and try some of the things the author says.  Then get a different book and try those things.  Then another.  Get something like Plein Air Magazine and copy some of the paintings in there.  Don't try to invent it all yourself.  Thousands of artists have gone down this road already and some have written down their lessons learned, so take advantage of them.  Not all of their approaches will resonate with you, but keep trying new stuff and eventually you'll figure out a way that works for you.
   - Take a class from a plein air painter.  You'll learn stuff you'll never learn from a book, because you'll have somebody experienced looking at your work and giving you feedback.  And you'll be seeing other students wrestling with similar problems and you'll learn from their experiences, too.  And you'll have fun.

Dang, this turned into quite the tome, didn't it?  I could write something similar about doing figurative paintings from life versus from photos.  Maybe I will ...

Afghanistan Training

This past week, I was up at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in southeastern Indiana.  I was part of the team providing training to a bunch of Defense Department civilians who are headed to Afghanistan.  They're going over there to support the US effort by doing things like managing base operations, carrying out logistics support, providing oversight of various projects, maintaining base infrastructure, and coordinating with the Afghans.  These are all critical jobs that have to be done, and they're better done by civilians than by military.

Muscatatuck is a really cool place.  I wrote about it in a blog post back in 2013, when I first went there as a trainer.  Read the blog post for a more detailed description of it and to see some photos, or you can go to the Wikipedia page for a lot more.  The short story is that it is an old campus-like facility that has been turned into a training center for all kinds of operations.  The military uses it for urban combat training, FEMA and other agencies use it for disaster training, and my group uses it to train people heading to Iraq and Afghanistan.  Lord knows who else uses the place, but locals are used to helicopters, all kinds of emergency vehicles, and loud noises at all hours of the day and night.  Fortunately, it's pretty remote, so the noise doesn't bother too many people.

My role this time was to be the mentor for a team of eight students.  They went through several days of intense, immersive role-playing, in which they had to work with their military escorts (themselves undergoing training), plan for meetings with various Afghan officials, carry out the meetings, work through an interpreter, respond to changing circumstances, figure out what's going on both overtly and behind the scenes, and perform as if they were really on the ground in Afghanistan.  They had all been through a couple weeks of classroom training and this was their time to put it all into play.

I've been blessed to have a bunch of really sharp people during all my training sessions and this time was no different.  There weren't any egos in my group.  One individual was a very senior guy who had run large organizations.  Another was an executive secretary who was pretty junior.  The rest fell somewhere in between.  Yet all of them were active participants in the planning.  The secretary's input was just as respected as the senior guy's.  And they pulled together as a team: when somebody tripped up or went blank, others jumped in to fill the gap.  It was great to see.

That's not to say they didn't make mistakes - of course they did.  But that's almost by design.  This training exposes them to the thousand shades of gray that comes with real operations, and so we discussed all their decisions and actions in quite some depth so that they could understand some of the second and third-order implications of their actions.  This is where it gets real.  Americans in general are problem solvers: we identify an issue, make a decision, implement it, and move on to the next one.  Except it's not that simple, and the decision or the implementation may have consequences that were not expected.  Our goal was to get them to think of that.

As a mentor, my job was to guide them along by asking them how they would prepare for a meeting with, say, a district governor, what kind of things they should know, where they might go to find things out, asking what they learned after meetings, asking how their lessons learned tied in with their greater mission, and so on.  I never gave them the answer, just raised the questions.  And this team always - ALWAYS - took the ball and ran with it.

It was great.

So I'm happy to be a part of the training team again.  This is so much fun and so rewarding for me.  I really get a kick out of helping people learn new stuff, particularly when it's this important.  I'm looking forward to doing it again!

Commission

I recently finished a commission.  I was contacted by somebody who wanted a "portrait" of her parents' house, to include her parents.  This was an interesting assignment for me.  Since the house is nowhere near here, I needed a lot of photos of it.  My client was, fortunately, able to provide quite a few.  I worked up a couple of compositions in sketches and, after a bit of back-and-forth, we decided on the approach.  Then it was time to get to work.

Although I was working from photographs, I wasn't copying them.  No single photo showed everything I needed, and different areas were kinda/sorta covered from different vantage points.  The focus of the photos was generally on the spectacular flowering bushes and other features, and usually from the viewpoint that showed them best, which was never my chosen viewpoint.  And, as you can see, there's a LOT going on in this yard.  To work out where everything was, I had to make a map of the front yard, using all the clues from the photos.  Once I had that, then I was able to determine my viewpoint and accurately place the house, trees, and flowers.  Then it was a matter of creating something that worked as art, as well as being accurate.  So here's the finished painting:

The Williams House

Oil on linen panel, 16"x20"

I knew that the house was going to be the primary focal point, simply because of the straight lines, sharp edges, and dark shutters and door.  But I didn't want it to overpower everything else.  The yard, particularly the flowering bushes, was the secondary focus.  So I made the house fairly small and near the top of the panel.  The flowers were strong reds, pinks, and whites.  To make them pop out, I had to play with the greens surrounding them, which generally meant changing the light/dark values of the greens as well as muting them.  The grass was different: I decided to make that a stronger, warmer green, and make it look almost like a carpet rolling back to the house.  This connected the foreground to the house and provided a nice swooping movement to guide the eye into the painting.  Finally, I put in the surrounding foliage.  I kept it as simple and muted as possible, just enough to read as trees and foliage, and to provide an environment for the primary interest areas to strut their stuff.

Right near the apex of the swoop, I placed her parents.  They're small enough so that they don't become the focal point, but large enough so that they are recognizable for who they are.  Had they been any closer, the painting would have been about them, with the rest of the painting serving as support.  As it is, it's about their home and their creations in the yard, with their figures serving as a supporting element.

Reading back on this, it sounds as if I did this by painting the house, then the plants, then the grass, and so on.  Of course, that's not the way it happened.  I worked up a full-size sketch, transferred it to the panel, then blocked in the house and everything else in one go.  Then it was a matter of developing, adjusting, smoothing, and tweaking over several sessions, keeping all the stuff I wrote about in mind the whole time.

All in all, I'm happy with the way it turned out.  More importantly, my client is, too. 

New Artworks

I've continued to develop some new figurative works in my charcoal and pastel series.  There's still a lot to learn, particularly about how much to develop the figure, knowing when to stop, and how much is just enough without being too much.  Most of my paintings fall into the "too much" category, so the more I can learn about when to stop, the better.  In my last few posts, I haven't shown you very many of these works.  Time to do a little catch-up.

Amy #11

Amy has a beautiful back and you can tell that I spent a lot of time developing it in this artwork.  I may have taken it a bit too far, but so what?  I was able to restrain myself with the rest, though - notice that the skirt and (especially) the feet are only roughly indicated, which keeps the focus on her back.

Amy #14

I really focused on stopping early here!  Amy's face and shoulders are developed, but beyond that, almost nothing.  This is one of my favorites of her.

Jennifer #4

Jennifer is a lovely woman with very sharp features.  She has modeled for our life drawing group as a portrait subject several times over the years and is always fun to have in the studio.   In this piece, her pose gives her body a natural, compact shape that anchors the sharp focus on her face.

Jennifer #5

All the previous images in this series were done on light paper, usually with a warm tone.  I thought I'd try doing some on dark paper.  My first few tries wound up in the trash can, but this one came together pretty well. I really like the pose and the glow on her face and shoulders.

Troy #5

This one captures Troy's personality.  Think Robin Williams meets George Carlin, and that's what Troy's like in front of the camera.  Again, I kept things to a minimum, focusing on his face and hands.  Everything else just plays a supporting role.

Karen

Karen is the wife of an old friend of mine and I was really honored when he asked me to do her portrait.  This was a challenge, as he provided me with a bunch of snapshots to work from.  While they were great snapshots, they were extremely hard to use as source material.  The lighting, poses, environments, and clothing were very different in each one.  I used all of them to create a natural-looking pose with believable lighting and clothing.  Not easy.  For anybody thinking of asking me to do something similar from your snapshots, the answer is NO!  I love doing portraits, but I need to control the entire process!

Insight Into Making Better Art

My long-time readers (all two of you) know that I've been working on a new series of artworks.  They were inspired by the figure drawings and paintings of Mark Demsteader.  To recap, Mark's figure drawings are really powerful, with very high value contrasts (meaning that almost everything is really light or really dark).  He focused on one small area, usually the face, and the further away from the focus area things were, the more simply they were rendered, until they were just contour lines.  The effect was to make the drawings very dramatic and the figures mysterious.  In his paintings, Mark brought very subdued detail to the faces, but the clothing was abstracted piles of bright impasto.  It's a different way of achieving a related effect.  Here's one of his drawings so you can see what I mean:

I took this concept and played with it, trying to see what I could learn from Demsteader and apply to my own work.  One of the things I discovered was that leaving lots of spaces unfinished was very hard for me to do.  I always want to clearly depict much more, so reining things in early is difficult.  When I do it, though, it usually works well.  While I could get decent black and white drawings, there seemed to be something missing.  So I tried adding just a touch of pastel color.  Boom!  That did the trick.  I've continued doing these drawings and have learned that putting too much pastel on there is as bad as putting too much detail into the drawings.  Restraint is the key, along with the appropriate level of accuracy in the drawings.  Here's one of my works:

The only color here is in Troy's head, shoulder, and a little bit of the arm.  Everything else is either blank or black charcoal.  This kind of thing really intrigues me: how to get something dramatic, strong, composed, and restrained.

I recently stumbled across a young Swedish painter named Nick Alm.  He's a phenomenal painter.  While many of his paintings are complex interactions of multiple figures, he greatly simplifies things, much more than you would think at first look.  Here's one of his paintings:

Look at how he focuses attention where he wants it and your eye fills in the rest.  The woman in white is the key figure.  Her dress and the tablecloth form one shape that's the brightest in the painting.  Her black hair contrasts with her light skin and the light background, calling attention to her face.  The two subordinate figures are both medium values that blend into the surroundings.  Neither has much to call attention to them: little color, little value contrasts, few details.  Now look at the background.  It's just the canvas tone: raw sienna slammed onto the canvas.  You don't get much more basic than that.  And the shadows along the bottom of the painting?  It's one shape, little more than a black brushed loosely over the canvas tone.  Alm's approach is related to Demsteader's: use detail, color, and value contrasts to focus attention where you want it, while simplifying the rest to as little as possible.

I have a lot to learn from these guys.

A couple of days ago, I was listening to an interview with the painter Quang Ho.  He's an American of Vietnamese origin, and is another phenomenal painter, as well as a teacher.  In this interview, he discussed a new technique he was using.  Basically, he was painting in black and white, then when it dried, he was putting color over it.  Now that's a very traditional approach, but Quang was talking about making the drawing simpler, with only two values (black and white) or three (black, white, and a middle value).  Once that dried, he said that it only needs a little bit of color to really make it pop.  That sounds like my approach with the charcoal and pastel figure drawings, doesn't it?  

So it has been an interesting few days.  It's like the universe is pounding on my head, saying NOTICE THIS!!  I've been working on a new approach, and suddenly the lessons from that are reinforced by very different and fantastic artists.  Okay, I'm listening ...

Passwords

The world woke up the other day to the news that hundreds of millions of Yahoo, Google, and other widely-used systems had been hacked, and user names and passwords were posted on the Dark Net.  Since I have several email accounts that use Yahoo and Gmail, it meant changing passwords.  Now, the companies that market computer services are always very cheerful and glib about things like this.  "Change your password often!  It's easy and fun!  It makes you sexually attractive!"

Except, of course, that reality is quite a bit different.  First, you have to come up with a new password.  Security geeks will tell you that the longer, the better, and you should have a mixture of capitals, lower-case, numbers, and special symbols.  And you should never use the same password for more than one account.  And it shouldn't have words, birth years, names of your pets, or other easy-to-remember things.  And some sites require passwords of a certain length.  And you should never ever write them down.

Who the hell are they kidding?

Okay, so first I sat down and created a list of potential passwords.  I used a common trick of coming up with an 8-15 word sentence and then using the last letter of each word in the password.  Some of the letters are turned into numbers or special symbols - an S might become a 5, for example - and special symbols are sprinkled in here and there.  This gives me a password that might look like this: Co6^gD@md4#.  And then I (gasp) WROTE THEM DOWN because my memory is for shit.

Then I started logging into my accounts and changing the passwords.  That part wasn't too difficult.  It meant looking up the old password in my 3-ring paper binder (not connected to the interwebs, so try hacking that, Anonymous), changing the password, making sure it worked, and changing the password in the binder.  Then I had to go into all my computers (3), iPhones, and iPads to update the passwords there as well.  Very time-consuming and it took hours to go through them all.

The tricky part came with the emails associated with my two websites - one for my art, the other for my consulting business.  Spammers have long since found my email addresses on those sites and I get literally hundreds of invitations a day to enhance my manhood, refinance my house, meet dozens of beautiful women who are dying to have sex with me, or earn a tidy commission for handling million-dollar inheritances for kindly widows in Nigeria.  My web host is incapable of screening them out.  Instead, I use Gmail to retrieve the messages, and Gmail has been exceptionally effective at doing that.  The problem is, for some reason Gmail and my web host do not play well together.  Oh, they say they do, but not at my level.  The issue lies with my web host.  They are not really focused on small fry like me, they're designed for companies that have dedicated and trained system administrators that can understand words like "domain" and "DNS settings".  That is not who I am.  So every time I go in there to make changes, I have to plan on a day to re-learn the system, make the changes, then spend a considerable amount of time troubleshooting the reasons that the changes f'd everything up.  After making the changes yesterday, I still haven't gotten everything figured out yet.

I could switch to another web host provider, except that would mean doubling the cost of my web presence and having a lengthy period of trying to transfer sites, reconfigure computers, and suffer through interrupted operations.  So I keep it as is.  I'm a cheap bastard and lazy to boot.

And I'm not looking forward to having to do this again anytime soon.

The Embody Project

Last week, I had the opportunity to work with Erica Mueller and Trey Scott.  They're partners in the Embody Project, a photo and video exploration of people and body issues.  I won't tell you any more than that, except to say: go look at the project's web site, and spend a lot of time there.  It's good stuff.  Erica is a professional photographer and Trey a professional videographer.  They bring their highly-developed skills to this very heart-felt project.  I was highly impressed just looking at their web site, so the opportunity to work with two pros was too good to pass up.

Erica wanted to do a photo session with an artist's life model.  She needed a working artist's studio and some artists to draw the figure.  My studio was certainly available and so were a couple of other artists.  We gathered there last Thursday.  The model, David, is a really nice guy who turned out to be an outstanding figure model - very experienced, very good poses, and lots of material to work with.  When we set up the studio, our mission was to allow Erica and Trey to get the best shots they could of artists working from the figure.  Our own drawing experience was in the "nice to do" category but it was not the purpose of the session.  One of the things Erica noticed during setup was that the spotlight on the model was very warm, while the supporting lights for the artists were very cool, almost blue.  As you'll see in her resulting photo, this actually turned out for the best, as it provided a conceptual break between David and the artists.

When we actually got moving, it was intense.  We did ten 1-minute poses.  I was working with vine charcoal on paper, Tebbe was using pencil, and Mark was doing oil on panel.  David, the model, kept time in his head, and moved from one pose to the next quickly and seamlessly.  Ever done 1-minute life drawing?  You gotta move fast.  Get it down, get it right, keep moving, because it's gonna be over in a few seconds and you start a new one.  I compared it to being on a ski slope when you're in over your head but committed, and your only option is to ride that slope and stay on your feet.  Here are a couple of my sketches:

After a short break to discuss the next steps, we did a couple of 10-minute poses.  After those short poses, ten minutes seemed like forever ... at least until the time was up, in which case it was way too short.  Again, it was intense.  Draw quick: time's almost up!

Through it all, Erica and Trey kept shooting.  Erica must have taken a thousand photos.  Trey had his camera going constantly, sometimes on the tripod and sometimes walking around.  I'd be working away and out of the corner of my eye would see a figure and camera moving slowly around us, peering over our shoulders or backing out to take in the whole scene.

And then it was done.  We stood around discussing the experience and started packing up.  It took a while.  Anytime you have a shared, intense experience, it takes some time to come down from it.

From the thousand or so photos that Erica took, she has posted one, along with David's own thoughts.  It's really good.  You can see it here: embodyproject.com/david-usa/.

Figures in Charcoal and Pastel

I'm continuing to do my new figure series using charcoal and pastels in a very sparing manner.  It's not only fun to do, but challenging.  I'm working in a different method than what I've done for years.  Even though I've been making these artworks since February, it's still not second-nature yet.  Every piece requires a lot of thought.  And a lot of restraint, since a critical part is stopping long before I want to.

So far, this series seems to be working really well.  The first dozen or so were of Amy, a wonderful model, done from photos taken in my studio.  I'll continue to do artworks of her, but now I'm adding other people.  I've had Troy in the studio for a photo session and have done one artwork of him.  Troy was a hoot to work with: point the camera at him and turn him loose and the next thing you know, he's rolling around on the floor or climbing the walls, sounding for all the world like Robin Williams.  I've also done a photo session with Emma, a lovely young woman with a very different presence than Amy.  And I'm going to do a session with Jennifer, Troy's wife, in a couple of weeks.  Pretty soon, I'll have enough material to keep me busy for a long time.

So here are some insights into some of the works done over the past month:

Amy #9

I had asked Amy to take a "defensive" pose.  She came up with a bunch of them that said "frightened" and "vulnerable".  She seems to be a natural method actor.  This is the only artwork I've done from those photos so far, but I will go back and do more later.  In this piece, I kept color to a minimum and tried to focus on her hand, shoulder, and upper back, using the tension she expressed to tell the story.

Amy #11

In this piece, I developed her back, but left the skirt, hands, and feet relatively undeveloped.  The warm colors of her back contrast with the cool gray of the paper and the turquoise of her skirt, and the diagonal pose with the center of interest offset to the left provides a quiet dynamic to the composition.

Amy #14

Here, I pushed the minimalism much further.  Her face and shoulders are strongly drawn in heavy black compressed charcoal and light warm pastels, while the rest of her is indicated by little more than contour lines.  I wanted to capture the delicacy of her posture.

Jennifer #1

This is one I did from life.  Jennifer posed for our Wednesday night life drawing and painting group.  This pointed out a number of things that I have to think about.  One is that, when I work from life, I'm much more literal than when working from photos.  A photo sometimes (not always) provides some distance, both physically and conceptually, that enables me to make artistic decisions more easily.  When something or someone is in front of me, I sometimes (not always) feel like I have to record what is there, regardless of how it looks in the artwork.  It's funny: with this series, I can look at a photo and make decisions about how to do the artwork quickly and easily.  Other times, a photo demands that I copy it without question.  And sometimes, when working from life, I can change things around on a whim, while at other times, I'm locked into what I see.  In this case, I had to fight to keep from putting too much detail into the hands, dress, couch, and feet, and to keep the image very simple.

Another thing it pointed out is that a live pose that has to be held for a long period of time will never have the immediacy of one from a photo.  Here, the model has to be in a position that can be held for 20-30 minutes at a time, and repeat it multiple time.  This is why most paintings from life have a very still or quiet nature.  A photo, by contrast, captures a particular moment that does not have to be repeated.

So that's some insight into what's going through my head when I'm working on this series.  It's new territory for me and a lot of fun.  I hope you're pushing yourself into some new territory as well, no matter what it is that you do.  That's how we grow!

HB2

North Carolina has become the butt of the nation's jokes over the passage of HB2.  This is the law that requires people to use public bathrooms according to the gender on their birth certificate.  I just sent another letter to my state representative, Michelle Presnell, urging the repeal of this law.  She has proven to be somewhere to the right of the Tea Party and apparently has all the intellectual capability of a gnat.  Still, for better or for far, far, worse, she's my state representative, and I have to tell her what this pissed-off constituent has to say.  So here's what I just sent her.  If you're a North Carolina resident, feel free to copy this and send it to your representative as well.

Representative Presnell:

You recently passed HB2 and praised it as a common-sense bill.  I have to wonder what pharmaceuticals you’ve been taking if you think that bill meets the common-sense standard.  HB2 has far-reaching implications that go way beyond saying who can use which bathroom.

HB2 allows government officials to discriminate against LGBT people.  Government officials are required by their position to serve ALL the people, not just the ones they like.  This was settled in the 1960’s over race.  LGBT issues are the exact same thing.

HB2 allows businesses to discriminate against anybody they choose.  Again, this was settled in the 1960’s.  Apparently, Republicans weren’t listening.

HB2 limits how people can pursue claims of discrimination for almost any issue, not just over LGBT issues.  It limits discrimination claims over color, national origin, handicaps, race, and religion, among other things.  If you’re discriminated against in North Carolina, well, too bad, our Republican leaders don’t care.

HB2 prohibits a city or county from setting a minimum wage standard for private employers.  This is government meddling in the affairs of cities and counties.  You don’t like Washington meddling in North Carolina affairs; you shouldn’t meddle in local affairs, either.

HB2 requires people to use public restrooms according to the gender listed on their birth certificates.  Can you explain exactly how you will enforce that?  Maybe this is your idea of job growth: hire guards to sit outside all public bathrooms in the state to check birth certificates!

HB2 violates federal Title 9 law, which prohibits discrimination in all school programs.  NC schools rely on hundreds of millions of federal dollars.  How will you replace those funds when they disappear because of HB2?

HB2 addresses a problem that DOESN’T EXIST.  Until Charlotte passed their symbolic law, nobody had any issues with going to the bathroom.  Even Columbia, Charleston, and Myrtle Beach, all in super-conservative South Carolina, have passed laws similar to Charlotte’s and have had no problems.  Not only that, but Governor Nikki Haley has rejected calls for a law similar to HB2 and is welcoming all the business that North Carolina is losing.

Meanwhile, at last count, HB2 has cost North Carolina at least 900 jobs (400 in Charlotte, 500 in Asheville), plus income associated with several concerts, and is jeopardizing future opportunities such as the NBA All-Star Game, the NCAA’s men’s basketball tournaments in 2017 and 2018, the CIAA basketball tournament, and ESPN’s X Games.  Meanwhile multiple business conferences are being moved elsewhere and the Asheville Convention and Visitor’s Bureau is beginning to see cancellations from both businesses and tourists.

This is stupid.

HB2 is bad policy.  HB2 is bad politics.  HB2 is illegal.  HB2 is killing business.  

HB2 is WRONG.

Repeal HB2 now!

Skin Tones

One of the questions I get a lot is, "what colors do you use for skin?"  The answer, of course: it depends.  It depends on the subject's skin color: the colors used for a light caucasian will be very different than an Asian or African-American.  It depends on the light source as well: the light coming in from a north-facing window is a different color than the direct light from a tungsten lamp.  It also depends on the colors of the things surrounding the individual, as they will reflect their colors into the skin tones.  And it also depends on whether you want to bring the skin tones forward (in which case you'll probably use stronger hues) or push them back using more muted colors.

The majority of my subjects are caucasian or similar, so I'll address those colors here.  The basic composition of most of them is a red of some sort, a yellow, a good bit of white, and maybe a bit of blue to tone them down.  Within these limitations, there are an infinite variety of possible colors that you can mix.  For reds, I've used cadmium red light (a bright warm red), alizarin crimson (a cool red), and terra rosa (a slightly muted, slightly cool red, and my current go-to color).  For yellows, I use yellow ochre (a muted yellow with both red and green components), cadmium yellow (a bright yellow in light, medium, and dark variants), and lemon yellow (a light yellow, leaning slightly towards green).  For whites, I prefer flake white or Cremnitz white.  Both are lead-based and have a slight warm tone with a rich feel to them.  You just have to be careful because they're, well, lead.  Another white is Flake White Replacement, which is really a combination of titanium and zinc and provides a very similar white without the toxicity of lead.  Titanium white is a strong, cold white that gets a bit too cold and chalky for my tastes.  As for zinc, I never use it.  Used alone, it's too brittle and can sometimes react with other chemicals.

So those are the colors I've been using for years.  Here's an example of how they look in an alla prima figure sketch:

In this exercise, I used primarily terra rosa, yellow ochre, and flake white replacement.  The light in my studio comes from daylight-balanced bulbs, which is slightly blue, so you'll see a touch of ultramarine blue in some of the shadows as well.  When accentuating colors, I use a touch of cadmium red and cadmium yellow.  These stronger colors don't show up well in photos, but in person they make some skin areas really come alive.  You can see it in her cheeks and lips, for example.

I don't use cad reds and yellows everywhere because a painting needs larger areas of muted color in order to make the small areas of strong color stand out.  I typically use strong colors in the focus areas only, and more muted colors like terra rosa and yellow ochre everywhere else.  When you realize that 90% of a painting is really a supporting area for the 10% focus area, it makes sense.  If you try to make everything a focus area, then the eye gets confused and you can't figure out what the painting is about.

Using this selection of colors has its disadvantages, though.  I've never been able to make very pale or muted skin tones with them.  You've seen the people I'm talking about: people that have extremely white or muted skin colors.  Many redheads, for example.  We had a redhead model a while back and I tried to paint her with my usual colors and failed miserably.  Trust me: flake white replacement is NOT a skin color by itself!  So I've been frustrated and trying to figure out just how people like John Singer Sargent or George Bellows handled those hues.  I think I may have found an insight into a workable approach.  Recently, I discovered a Swedish painter named Nick Alm.  Most of his figures have very pale skin tones.  I downloaded a few images of his paintings and took them to the studio.  After some trial and error, I found that using burnt umber (essentially a dark muted yellow) and Prussian blue (a greenish blue) and a lot of white gave a soft green, and I could then mix in just enough red to get a pale skin tone.  So rather than taking a red and yellow and toning it down to get a muted skin tone, I was taking a light green and then adding enough red to make it into a pale skin tone.  A very different approach for me and it seems to be working.  I copied one of Alm's portraits and here's how it turned out:

This approach seems to have some promise.  I'm going to continue to play with it to see what it can do.  I won't call it "the" answer to realistically showing muted skin tones, but it's certainly an interesting option.  What do you think?

A New Series

The experiments that I wrote about in my last post seem to be paying off.  I've hit on a way of working with the figure that results in fairly dramatic images.  They're getting really positive reviews from most everybody who sees them.  After so many efforts that completely fail, and others that result in maybe a comment like "oh, that's nice", it's good to hear somebody go "Wow!"

My last post had an image of Amy done in charcoal and white Conte crayon.  That didn't seem to be strong enough, though, so I got out the pastels and went to work.  The color added that extra bit of oomph that was missing.  Here's how it turned out:

Amy #1

What I'm doing here is upping the dramatic elements of the image.  The lights are lighter and the darks darker, and the mid-tones are greatly reduced.  The color is restricted, too: it goes primarily in the face, with some in the shoulders.  The dress is just a black 2-D shape.  There's no background at all to distract from the figure.

I've continued with these artworks and now have a total of seven done in charcoal and pastels and one in oil paint.  They all follow the same approach.  And they all work, to greater or lesser extents, and as a group, they really look good.

So here's one of the most recent pieces developed:

Stage 1: I sketched in the face and head with vine charcoal.  It was important to get the shape of the face and the shadows at the very beginning.

 Stage 2.  I've roughed in the outlines of the body.  This took quite a bit of work as the arms and hands didn't seem to be cooperating with me … in fact, the hand in this photo is still messed up.

Stage 3.  Here's where the compressed charcoal comes in.  Compressed charcoal is much darker than vine charcoal.  It gives a rich velvety black.  It's also very soft and tends to fall off the paper.  The dark areas are all tied together: the black under the arm, the shadow on her back, and the dark of her hair are all one shape.

Stage 4.  Now for the pastels.  I've started putting color in her face and shoulder.  This included a strong red on her cheek in an area that had been black before.  Reflected lights can be really beautiful.  Often, a shadowed area on a figure will have a really strong red from reflections off nearby lighted skin.  In this case, the light was coming from her shoulder.

Amy #7

And here's the final piece.  The face was reworked with pastel and charcoal quite a bit.  I used pastels to bring some color down her arm and into her chest and hands, but very sparingly.  It's really easy to have the color take over and go everywhere (trust me on this one).  By keeping the pastels to a minimum outside of the face, it focuses attention there.  Everything else plays a supporting role.  

So what's next?  Well, I'm going to do a lot more artworks like this in charcoal and pastel.  I'm getting to understand the subtleties of this way of working.  One subtlety is that all of these charcoal and pastel pieces are against a light background.  Trying to make the figure light against a dark background doesn't work, at least not when you're slamming charcoal onto a light-colored paper.  So I'm going to do some oil paintings of the figures against (or blended into) a dark background.  Once I get a grip on how that works, then I think I'll be able to use these new approaches on some paintings that have been in the back of my mind for a while.  They're stories about people, but my normal way of working would not have told the story very well.  This new way of working might.

Experimentation

Winter seems to be a time when I do some experimenting.  Sometimes it might be materials or subject matter, but this time I'm trying a new approach.  I've written about Mark Demsteader before.  His subjects are mostly single figures that are sharply and dramatically lit.  The focus is typically on the face, with a secondary focus on neck, shoulders, and hands.  Move away from those focus areas, and the drawing is extremely simplified, down to the point of having the body indicated simply by two contour lines.  It's a drawing style that grabs your attention.

And it's very different from mine.  I have a section of wall in my studio that's covered with figure drawings.  Just looking at them, you can't tell which ones were done in 2001 and which were done in 2015.  There didn't seem to be much/any development and few of them grab your attention.  Don't get me wrong, the ones on the wall are good, it's just that they're all done in pretty much the same way.

So I decided to see what I could learn from Demsteader's technique.  I don't want to make a lot of Demsteader look-alike drawings, but rather, I want to add some new tools to my drawing and painting toolboxes and then use them for my own work.

To set the stage: here's one of his drawings:

Pretty good stuff, huh?  You can see what I was talking about earlier: the primary focus on the face, the high value contrast between lights and darks with very little in between, and the bare minimum of drawing outside the focus area.

I copied a few of his drawings to get a feel for his approach and then tried my own versions of it.  Here's one of my first attempts:

It's a start.  Too much going on in the hair, still a lot of mid-values in the face and shoulder areas, and the hand is messed up.  Another effort using the same model:

This is a little better.  There's less detail in the hair, fewer mid-tones, and higher value contrasts.  Another try with a different model:

I'm still fighting the mid-tones.  My head says "no", but my hand puts them in, anyway.  And there's way too much definition in the face.  By taking away detail, it should make the figure more dramatic while still leaving her a recognizable individual.  "Should" doesn't mean "will", however: I went back and reworked the drawing and it turned to crap.  No, you can't see it.  But I tried another drawing with one of my favorite models:

Much better.  More dramatic, more contrast values, a bit more mystery to the subject while still being a specific individual.  The drapery could be handled better, but we're getting there.  Now for one more try:

Now we're talking!  This is overall a much better drawing.  The composition is interesting, with the dress being reduced to a flat black S-shape.  Lots of diagonals give it a dynamic characteristic.  The focus is still on the face, but she's more anonymous now.  The mid-tones are almost gone, with just enough to give some volume to the head and shoulders.  And the drawing is just better all the way around - it was one of those that was basically working from the very first stroke, even though some areas gave me fits.  And it's not done yet: I'm going to add a bit of color (just a touch) with pastels to give some more life to the face.

So I'm excited about this.  It feels like I'm finally internalizing some of these lessons.  I'm not thinking about them quite so deliberately and the drawing is coming along on its own.  That's the way you want it to be.

So where do I go from here?  Well, some more drawings.  All of them so far have been attractive young women because they're a lot more interesting to me than ugly old men.  Hey, I'm a guy!  But I'll do some self-portraits of my ugly old face with this technique to see what happens.  I'm also going to migrate this technique into oil painting.  That's not as easy as it may seem, but I'll do it.

Further down the line, I have a couple of paintings that have been in the back of my mind for a while.  My normal painting approaches didn't seem adequate for what I wanted them to say.  This kind of approach might.  So once I get comfortable with the process, I'll look at tackling them.  

Creativity

The interwebs can occasionally give you a cool surprise.  I'm not talking about a funny kitten video on Facebook, I'm talking about something that reaches out and grabs you.  Such a thing happened to me yesterday.  I was searching for something and came across a mention of the singer John Prine.  He was pretty big when I was in college back in the mid-70's.  Songs like "Sam Stone" and "Hello In There" were powerful stories about ordinary people.  My friends and I listed to him a lot.  And then I went away to the Navy and got into other things and didn't hear much about John Prine for years.

So yesterday, his name popped up on my computer.  It was the old "cool, hadn't heard of him for years, wonder what he's doing now?" kinda thing.  So I clicked on the link and several things happened.

First, I watched a video about creativity.  It featured several ordinary people doing really creative things.  Then it got to John Prine about halfway through.  The host/interviewer talked with John about his songs, where they came from, how he put them together, and what it meant to perform them.  Fascinating stuff.  John's approach to music is similar to my approach to painting: we both find meaning in the stories of ordinary people.  Neither of us is interested in glitz, glam, a big show, or fame.  (A damn good thing on my part, since I have none of that, but John has a good bit of well-earned fame among those who like a powerful, well-crafted ballad).  It was great to hear the backstory on specific songs and hear his discussion of the creative process because it was all stuff that I could relate to.

John's had a hard time: he fought cancer and the surgery took a big chunk out of his throat.  But it left his vocal cords.  They're a bit mangled, but still there.  He's still touring, too.  I'd love to see him in person.  He was here in Asheville three years ago, so maybe he'll come back.

Oh, and the video?  Here 'tis: http://thetellingwell.org/episode-8/

A second thing that happened was that I discovered an interesting site for thoughtful, well-told stories.  The one with John Prine is just one of many such shows.  The Telling Well is host to quite a number of forays into what it means to be human.  Youngsters in school bands, experiences in volunteering, stories of faith and redemption, what it means to have a new start - these are stories that we can relate to.  Great stuff.  Go look.  It's at thetellingwell.org.

And the third thing that came out of that click: I just went on iTunes and bought the John Prine album that I listened to back in college.