Studio Progress

Welcome to Sarajevo

Oil on canvas, 24"x30"

My painting Welcome to Sarajevo is in the "Mayhem" juried show in Arlington, Virginia.  "Mayhem" is this month's exhibit at Gallery Underground in Crystal City.  The theme is mayhem and chaos of all sorts: conflict, domestic strife, burnt breakfast, rush hour traffic, you name it.  My painting is a quiet mayhem, the aftereffect of really violent actions, so it will be interesting to see how it is received.

Welcome to Sarajevo was an important painting for me.  It marked a shift from my political satire series to something that I hoped would be more significant.  The satirical paintings were fun to do, but there were two serious issues with them.  One, they required that I get really angry about something, usually about politicians who were running the country into the ground.  Getting angry was key to getting the vicious, snarky, and cutting commentary that came out in the paintings.  After a while, getting angry was just draining, and I needed to get away from it for my own sanity.  The other issue is that satire is very time-sensitive.  I found that a lot of the works were irrelevant after several months.  The issues changed, people left, and suddenly a painting that I worked on for weeks no longer had anything to say.

So I started the "Meditation on War" series.  War is, unfortunately, timeless.  It will always be with us in one fashion or another.  The paintings focus on the aftermath of combat, the things and people that are left.  The works were initially a counter to the rabid pro-war drumbeat that was part and parcel of the Iraq invasion.  If you want to go to war, you ought to think about what the consequences are going to be.  People die.  People get hurt in ways that affect them for the rest of their lives.  Stuff gets torn up, often stuff that can't be replaced.  Incredible amounts of money and resources are wasted.  And it always goes on for longer than you think it will.  I'm not anti-war or anti-military: there are times when we really do have to go to war to stop something worse from happening.  Desert Storm was an example.  But wars we don't have to fight shouldn't be fought.

It looks like I'll continue to do paintings for this series for quite a while.  I just started a new one today.  Didn't really mean to, but there it was ...

Yesterday I finished and signed the painting about my friend Pete, who was a Marine in Viet Nam.  It's done, finally, the first in my new series of paintings about survivors.  Now I need to come up with a title.  And also yesterday, I painted over the other artwork-in-progress from the survivor series.  It wasn't going anywhere except downhill.  Gotta start from scratch on something I've been working on since September.  It will get there, I just don't know how or when.

DC Visit

I had a business trip to Washington, DC, last week for some meetings related to my consulting business.  I drove up on Monday - drove rather than fly because flying is no fun anymore.  Driving, at least for trips of up to maybe 10 hours in the car, is much more enjoyable.  No TSA screening, go at your own pace, no delayed or cancelled flights, much more comfortable seats, nobody with a cold sitting next to you (unless you take them along, in which case, it's your fault), stop when/where you want, big choice of places to eat, the scenery is much better, it takes about the same amount of time once you include the drives to/from the airport and waiting time, you have a car when you get there, and it's much cheaper all the way around.  To me, it's a no-brainer.

I had meetings on Tuesday through lunch, and then had time to myself, so I hit the National Gallery of Art.  It's one of my favorite places in the world.  And, of course, they were in between exhibits.  Not only that, but the East Wing is undergoing renovation, and everything there is closed.  Dang!  But the regular galleries in the West Wing were still open, so I wandered through them.  As usual, I had my sketch pad with me and made a lot of quick sketches with notations.  To me, a good art museum is a great learning tool.  I see how the really good painters created their works, and I can try to transfer that knowledge into my own.  However, I find that I keep re-learning the same lessons.  Here's what I noticed this time:

• Accurate but loose drawing.  The masters make it look easy: their brushes quickly describe the form.  Their proportions are spot on, the brushwork is loose, and it looks like it was effortlessly done.  Right, just like an Olympic figure skater's moves are effortlessly done.
• Small areas of strong color against large areas of muted color.  At least until the Impressionists, this was true, especially for people like John Singer Sargent and James Whistler.  The muted colors provide the setting for the richer colors to sing.  Actually, this is a good metaphor.  Think of a music band: most of the musicians are providing the beat, the underlying melody, and supporting vocals, while the singer or lead guitarist (or whoever) works their magic.  Bright color against more muted colors does the same thing.
• Most edges are softer.  This is a subtle thing that most non-artists miss.  Look at the edges of the forms and most edges are soft, or slightly blurred, and some are lost altogether.  The hard edges will be found where the painting's center of interest is.  Our eyes are drawn to brighter colors, harder edges, and higher value contrasts (light/dark contrasts).  So artists use more muted colors, softer edges, and lower value contrasts in the supporting elements, and the opposite around the focus.  I try to as well, but my natural tendency (like most people) is to try to delineate every individual thing very clearly.  So this means harder edges and more detail and development than is usually needed.  Save that for the main item.

Here's a clip from my sketchbook.  I found Rembrandt's self-portrait and found it incredibly moving and powerful.  In my opinion, one of the finest portraits ever painted.

This is a typical set of notes from studying a painting: a quick sketch, some identifying information, and then notes on what I see as to how it was painted.  In this case, the painting was done with muted colors and soft (or lost) edges everywhere except the face, which was richly colored and done with thick swirls of paint.  Rembrandt's focus was on the eyes.  They were the most defined section of the painting, and the sheer intensity and humanity in those eyes is astounding.  Here is a man at his rawest: capable, vulnerable, successful, and a failure (he was financially ruined at the time of this painting).

I saw artist easels in most of the rooms.  Man, I would love to be able to spend time in there, making copies of some of those paintings from the real thing rather than a photo in a book!  The difference is huge, even in a high-quality reproduction.  The real thing has subtleties that you just don't see in a reproduction, I don't care who makes it.  So what would I copy?  Rembrandt's self-portrait.  Anything by Sargent or Whistler.  El Greco's "Laocoon" or "View of Toledo".  Velasquez.  A good Raphael Soyer.  A dozen others ... and those are just the ones I saw that day.

On Wednesday, I had another business meeting in the morning, and in the afternoon I went to the Museum of American Art.  More drawing from amazing paintings.  A painting by John White Alexander of a woman backlit in front of a window was stunning in its handling of light.  A huge, mural-sized painting by Thomas Hart Benton was complex, carefully structured, and full of life.  A Sargent painting about knocked me out.

Needless to say, I was a happy man!

So that was DC.  Next I went to Baltimore to visit my aunt and cousin.  We had a great time, as always, and I love visiting with them.  While I was there, I went down to Maryland Institute College of Art, or MICA.  I was a student in MICA's continuing education program back in the mid-90's.  Now, three of my fellow UNCA students are teachers there.  One of them, Paul Jeanes, invited me to come talk to his class.  As I've noted here before, this sort of thing really energizes me.  I focused my talk on how my work has developed since graduating, including how it was affected by my Iraq and Afghanistan deployments.  The students were very interested and asked lots of really good questions.  Only a couple of them went to sleep.  I wound up talking with them for far longer than planned, but we were on a roll, so it was all good.  And I got to see one of my teachers from way back when.  Michelle LaPerriere is still teaching there, and it was really wonderful to see her again.

All in all, a great trip.  And now, four days after getting home, I'm still not caught up on all the work, home, art, car, and other things that have been lying in wait for me.  Maybe next week ...

Lots of Shows!

When shows come, they seem to come in bunches.

Right now, I've got two paintings in a curated exhibition at Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, TN.  The show is "EQUAL: Modern Family in Contemporary Art".  My two contributions are Pleasantville and The Dancers:

Both of these have been around for a bit.  Dancers was painted in 2003 and Pleasantville in 2007.  Both have been sitting on the rack in the studio for too long and needed to get out in public again.  The exhibition is pretty good and one work in particular knocked me out.  Laura Chenicek's tiny piece No Matter How Hard I Tried is easily described: it's a small broken eggshell that has been sewn back together with silk sutures.  As an artwork about the fragility of relationships, it is extremely powerful.  Click on the link and take a look.

I'm in another show that opens tomorrow at the Fine Arts Museum at Western Carolina University.  "Remote Sites of War" is a curated 3-man show featuring my drawings from Iraq and Afghanistan, photographs of Guantanamo Bay and military training by Christopher Sims, and photographs from Palestine by Todd Drake.  It's quite a strong show.  The museum director, David Brown, arranged all my drawings on one wall:

I really like the effect.  There is a definite rhythm to the layout and it kept pulling me along.  I went down there today to speak to a history class about my experiences in Afghanistan.  Rather than just talk about pictures or events, I tried to talk about the complications and contradictions behind simple images of people, with the message that they need to be aware of unseen complications in their own lives.

So I'll be back at Western tomorrow for the show's opening, then again on Monday to speak to two other classes.  I really enjoy these talks.  

And I learned that I'll be in another exhibit at the end of the month.  My painting Welcome to Sarajevo will be in the national juried show "Mayhem" at the Gallery Underground in Crystal City.  The show will run from Apr 28 to May 31, with an opening reception on Friday, May 2, from 5-8 pm.

So there you have it.  I've been busy as hell with a lot of other things, too, but they can wait for another post.  Meanwhile, if you're in western North Carolina, go see the "Remote Sites of War" exhibit at WCU.  And if you're in the DC area, go see "Mayhem" at the Gallery Underground in Crystal City!

Mark Meadows Follow-Up

Back on March 2nd, I wrote a post titled "Mark Meadows and the Ukrainian Crisis".  I had received an email-to-the-peasantry from Meadows, my congressman, in which he lambasted President Obama for his handling of Russia and the Ukraine.  Like most of his fellow Republicans, Meadows called for more forceful and imaginative leadership.  I wrote a note back to him, asking him what, exactly, he would do.  Boots on ground?  Air strikes?  Something else?  Frankly, I never expected to get a reply.

Well, I was wrong.  He did reply today, 26 days later.  Or one of his minions did, anyway.  In an email, he laid out the forceful and imaginative leadership that he would provide.  His actions were:
- a House Resolution that "condemned the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity by military forces of the Russian Federation."
- Boycotting the G-8 summit in Sochi.
- Convene a G-7 summit somewhere else and expel Russia from the G-8.

Yes, that's pretty forceful and imaginative.  It also mirrors what Obama has done.  Well, Obama can't pass a House resolution, but he worked with the EU, NATO, and the G-7 partners to boot Russia out of the G-8 and convene an alternative summit.  He's also got the Secretary of State and State Department diplomats worldwide working on isolating Russia, imposing increasing levels of sanctions, and shifting Europe away from Russian sources of oil and gas.  In other words, he's doing far more than Meadows ever thought of doing.  So much for Meadows' diatribes.

The United States is not in a position to take hard military action.  It would be stupid.  Frankly, the Ukraine and Crimea do not rank very high on American strategic interests.  It makes little or no substantive difference to us whether Crimea is ruled by Russia or the Ukraine, and it is not worth one single American soldier's life to try to change it.  We can, and should, bring pressure to bear on Russia to quit behaving like a thug and more like a respectable member of the international community.

Over the long term, however, Putin's actions are only going to hurt Russia.  The Crimean economy is in the toilet and will require significant economic support from Russia.  International sanctions are having an immediate impact now.  Most of it is psychological: the Russian rich are seeing their country losing its economic standing.  The longer-term impact will come from the international community's negative views of the country.  Who wants to deal with a thug?  Those former Soviet-bloc countries who have established ties to the West see a rising Russian threat, so they're going to establish closer ties to the West as protection.  Meanwhile, the primary Russian exports are natural resources: oil and gas.  They're not making much money of their intellectual capacity.  That's a description of a third-world economy, not a world leader.  And Putin is to blame.

In the short term, Russia will beat its chest and roar at the world, but it can't really do too much.  In the long term, the Russian bear is pretty sick, and Dr. Putin isn't providing it the help it needs.

So Meadows and his friends in the House will squawk like hawks.  They really don't have much, if anything, to add to the debate.

Life Drawing, Short Poses

I go to several different life drawing sessions around Asheville.  There's one, on Monday evenings, that is unique in that it consists entirely of short poses.  By "short", I mean one to two minutes, with maybe three 5-minute poses at the end.  If you've ever done life drawing, you know that's not much time.  You have to work fast and get it right the first time.  If you don't, well, just wait a minute and start a whole new one, because there's no going back.

Here are a few drawings from Monday's session.  We had one of my favorite models, Amy, who is a beautiful young lady and really good at twisting herself into great poses.  This was a very fun session.

I've put these four drawings up on my Etsy store - have a look!.

Etsy Shop

Ever feel like you're one of those performers who get dozens of plates spinning on poles?  And you're running from pole to pole, trying to keep all those plates spinning without crashing to the ground?  Yeah.  That's me.  Between my consulting work, trying to make progress on the "Survivors" paintings, taking care of house and car maintenance, going to life drawing sessions, working on my taxes, yadda yadda yadda, there seems to be a net negative amount of time in the day.

I know: waaah.  I'm whining.  Deal with it.

One of the things I've been working on is setting up an Etsy shop.  It finally opened last night.  Here's the link to it:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/Metis21Studios

There's not much there yet.  Heck, I just got it set up, give me a break!  I'll eventually have original paintings, drawings, etchings, pastels, watercolors, photographs, as well as lower-priced prints and cards on the site.  It'll take some time to get it up to full speed.  But it went live about 11 pm last night and already has a number of people who've "favorited" it.

They advertise that setting up an Etsy shop is easy.  Well, kinda sorta.  Stepping thru the setup process is easy.  Stepping thru the process while doing a professional job the first time around is not.  I looked at a lot of Etsy stores to figure out things like presentation, shipping, policies, price levels, what to say, what not to say, what to have photos of, photo preparation, what tags to use, you name it.  Then I had to learn how to get what I learned into my store.  Then I had to learn how to change it when the first try was unsatisfactory.

But I got there.  I think.  It looks pretty good, although a bit sparse for now.  I'll continue to prepare more new items and post them.  Take a look and let me know what you think.  I'm always, always, open for constructive comments.

Mark Meadows and the Ukrainian Crisis

My congressman, Mark Meadows, is a Tea Party leader.  He sends out "weekly" reports every once in a while, especially during election season.  Most of these emails boast about Mark's supposed great deeds of the week and attack Democrats for not agreeing with him.   The latest is no different.  Mark is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and attacked the administration over Ukraine.  He stated, "Unfortunately, the Obama administration continues to demonstrate a lack of leadership in refusing to address aggressors around the world. In my role on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I will continue to monitor this situation alongside my colleagues and encourage our nation to stand against Vladimir Putin's dangerous power grab and clear disregard for international laws."

I just sent him a note about that.  Here's what I said:

"I just read your weekly update in which you criticized the administration for its handling of the Ukraine crisis.  Can you tell me what, specifically, you would do?  Your words were a vague statement about "standing against Vladimir Putin's dangerous power grab and clear disregard of international laws".  How is this any different than the Administration?  Would you intervene militarily?  Would you launch air strikes against a nation with first-rate anti-aircraft defenses?  Would you put boots on the ground in a hostile country?  What, specifically, would you do?

With the election season coming up, the answers to these questions are extremely important.

Regards,
W. E. Rohde"

I'll let you know what he says, if one of his staffers ever bothers to answer.  I'm not holding my breath.

Update on the New Painting

The composition is now blocked-in.  Now to let it sit for a week or so to dry enough to support layers of glazes, scumbling, and painting over the top of it.  

New Painting Underway

For the last couple of months, I've been re-learning and re-inventing how to put paint on canvas.  The way I was painting last fall wasn't expressive enough nor (frankly) good enough for my new series about survivors.  It was too timid, careful, and overworked.  So I put the series on hold while I figured out a new approach.  And now I think I have one that's appropriate for at least the first piece.

This new painting is about a friend of ours who was a Marine in Vietnam.  He was in some brutal battles and carries the physical and mental scars to this day.  When he told me that he's still fighting some of those battles nearly every night, I knew that was going to be the focus of this painting.

Getting from the concept to the composition was a long process.  I went through piles of drawings, trying out different ideas and combinations of ideas.  Then there were several color studies to wrestle with lighting, values, and color combinations.  All the while, I was working on a new (for me) way to put paint on canvas.  Eventually, I came up with a composition that best expressed the basic idea:

Color Study for "Pete"

Oil on paper

Last week, I built, gessoed, and toned the canvas.  Today was the day I finally - FINALLY - started putting it all together.  Here it is on the easel, with the color study and drawings next to it.  

And here's a detail showing how it sits on the easel right now:

Detail of "Pete" in progress

Oil on canvas

I'm really happy with the way it has started.  Once I got warmed up, getting this part roughed in was a lot of fun.  Now to keep the momentum going, stay loose, and not overwork it.  

Colors on the Palette

As I wrote about last month, I've been trying to revitalize my painting techniques.  One important aspect of that is the feel for color.  I haven't been happy with the way I select which colors go on the canvas - I've been too tentative and too literal, and that has carried over into the way the final painting is perceived.

So a while back, I got an instructional DVD from Robert Liberace.  His portraits had really struck me with their liveliness and energy and I wanted to see if I could pick up on that.  Liberace uses a much larger selection of tube colors than I do, and he uses the colors in very imaginative ways.  So I added some new colors to my palette, played with them in some small paintings to test the concept, and learned some new stuff.  But his colors and techniques are not something that I can fully follow.  Besides just being different artists, my color vision is not as sharp as his.  It's common for men to have some color perception difficulties, and I suffer from that.  You know those color tests where they show you a card with lots of colored dots, and you're supposed to see the number?  I've never passed that test.  But the funny thing is, I can mix up paint to match any of the colored dots.  My difficulty is in seeing differences in adjacent colors when they are the same light/dark value.  That's kinda important when you're a painter, particularly one who uses a wide spectrum of colors.  So while I learned a lot from Liberace's video, I will never be able to match his color sense.

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a workshop with the painter Steve Huston.  He considers himself a tonalist painter and uses a more restricted palette of colors with many standard colors like ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, and burnt umber.  But where Liberace would pull in, say, violets and greens and rose, Huston relied more on controlling the light/dark values and only slightly adjusting the basic color.  It was a very different approach.  Both artists, though, have very lively brushwork, and both have very similar approaches to the initial block-in and early refinement stages of a painting.

This evening, a friend of mine posted a link to a blog post about Anders Zorn.  Zorn was a Swedish painter, a contemporary of John Singer Sargent, and painted in somewhat similar style.  What was really interesting is that Zorn primarily used an extremely limited palette of yellow ochre, cadmium red medium, ivory black, and white.  That's it.  Yes, he used some other colors, like cerulean blue, on occasion, but normally he just used those four.  Yellow ochre is a muted yellow, cadmium red medium is a strong but controllable red, and ivory black is a cool dark blue.  So all three primary colors are included, only with very muted versions.  I'm going to have to do some color charts using those colors and see how they turn out.  For a more in-depth discussion of the palette and how it works, see Michael Lynn Adams' blog post.

I thought I'd seen a similar palette before, and after a bit of looking, I found it.  Odd Nerdrum, the great Norwegian painter, gave a portrait demonstration in New York a couple of years ago, and he used yellow ochre, Chinese vermilion, Mars black, and titanium white.  It's almost the same as the Zorn palette.  Nerdrum's painting style is very different from Zorn's - it's more closely related to Rembrandt's - so the end result is very different, but it's interesting that two painters who are so damn good use such restricted choices of colors.  Nerdrum's demonstration is described in Matthew Innis' blog post and is well worth reading.

One other artist with a limited palette came to mind: Lucien Freud.  Looking at his paintings, you can see that he relied heavily on earth colors (yellow ocher, burnt umber, burnt sienna) with limited use of brighter colors.  I wasn't able to find a technical discussion of his actual color choices, though.

So my plan of action is to do some color charts using the Zorn/Nerdrum colors and then try some portrait studies.  I'm thinking that a restricted palette could be helpful to somebody who's color-vision-challenged like me. At the same time, the color techniques that I learned from Liberace would be good things to have in the back pocket to use when necessary.  And the only way to find out if all that is true?  Try it out!

Catching Up

The weekend after my last post (about the radio interview with Marilyn Ball), I took an online workshop from the painter Steve Huston.  I'm struggling with finding an appropriate style of painting for my new "Survivor" series and Steve's work appeared to offer some ideas.  The workshop was hosted by the New Masters Academy (NMA) in Newport Beach, California.  This was their first foray into streaming a live workshop.  The workshop was scheduled for 8 hours a day for 3 days.  I wasn't sure about how useful the workshop would be, especially since I'd be at home on my computer instead of slinging paint in the studio, but decided to give it a go anyway.

As it turns out, the workshop was very valuable.  Steve talked a lot about drawing, building the figure, composition, painting techniques, and much much more.  He did demos from a live model, and the NMA staff posted photos of her so those of us online could draw as well.  She was a lovely young lady whose poses, unfortunately, were the most boring and uninspired that I've seen in a long time.  Maybe I'm just spoiled by the outstanding group of models here in Asheville.  But Steve's thoughtful discussions and demonstrations were invaluable.

As this was the first time the NMA had done such an event, I expected to see some glitches, and there were.  But they fixed them quickly, and by midway through the first day, everything went extremely well.

The NMA is continuing to develop more online workshops, and they already have a lot of recorded courses online, by Steve and others.  I was impressed with the group.  Take a look - you might be, too.

During the next week, I went back through my notes (22 pages of them) and sorted them into something that would be easier to use and follow.  And I spent a good bit of time in the studio to try out some of the ideas.  Lots of other stuff was happening around the house, so I didn't have time to update this blog.  But I have a lot of things to share from that workshop.  I'll do that in my next blog post.

Then last weekend, my uncle passed away.  He was 87.  He went into the hospital for some relatively routine heart surgery (as if any heart surgery is "routine"), but then had cascading complications that couldn't be stopped.  On Monday, I drove down to Corinth, Mississippi, to attend the funeral.  Despite the circumstances, it was great to see my cousins again.  We haven't all been together in one place in over 35 years.  Like many families these days, we're widely scattered: Colorado, Tennessee, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, and New Mexico (where my sister, who wasn't able to attend, lives).  There were spouses and children that I'd never met.  We spent long hours together, talking and catching up, telling stories on each other, getting to know those we just met, and sharing the grief of losing my uncle.

My uncle, by the way, was an amazing man.  He was a scout for Patton's army in World War II.  Subsequently, he earned a bachelor's degree from Ole Miss, a law degree from Tulane, and was a Rhodes Scholar in Cambridge, England.  He could've written his own ticket at any big-league law firm anywhere in the world, but he returned home to the small city of Corinth to practice there.  He was a leader in the First Baptist Church, a lifelong board member of the YMCA, coached YMCA baseball for over 20 years, served as the attorney for a variety of local government organizations, served as Director of the Chamber of Commerce, taught Sunday school, and was President of the school board.  At the same time, he and my aunt raised four wonderful kids.  I remember him as a very gentle man with an easy laugh and all the time in the world for us kids.  Uncle Jimmy will be missed.

After the funeral, I went to Memphis to visit my parents' graves.  I also visited with Persi Johnson, my first art teacher.  Persi is pushing 90, but her mind is as sharp as ever, and she has lost none of her feistiness and wit.  Visiting with Persi was a treat.

It's kinda sad, isn't it, that sometimes it takes a death to make us realize that we really and truly need to take the time to be with our close friends and relatives more often.  I had been meaning to get to Corinth and Memphis for years to visit with Uncle Jimmy, Persi, and my cousins, but never got around to it.  Now it's too late to talk with Uncle Jimmy again.  But I can still talk with my cousins.  And I will.

Radio Interview

Last week, I was interviewed by Marilyn Ball for her Speaking of Travel show on WZGM 1350 radio.  I'd never been interviewed live before and was a bit nervous.  Some of you have had that experience: suddenly a microphone is right there in front of you and you're speaking to God knows how many people, and all you can think of is "...uuuhhhh ...".

Marilyn, though, was a great host.  She quickly put me at ease and it felt like just the two of us sitting around shooting the breeze.  Only with a couple of microphones between us and an eagle-eyed producer watching the clock.  In Speaking of Travel, Marilyn talks to people about their experiences traveling around the world.  She asked to interview me because I'd been an artist, then gone off to Iraq and later Afghanistan, and come back to be an artist again.  I mean, doesn't everybody do that?  No?  Okay, so I'm a bit odd.  Perfect material for an interview subject.

The interview aired on the radio this afternoon, and the podcast became available here.  It's 20 minutes long.  Have a listen!

Looking at Artists: Steve Huston

I love it when I find an artist who knocks my socks off.  Today I found just such an artist: Steve Huston.  This image of one of his paintings-in-progress showed up on one of my friends' Facebook pages today:

Haul (in progress)

Oil on canvas

© 2014 Steve Huston

The vibrancy and strength of this work-in-progress is really impressive.  You can feel the weight that this guy is putting on the line, and feel the push in his legs.  Every line is correct, yet every line is vigorously done so that each has strength and character of its own.  

Once I got over the immediate visual impact, I looked at how he might have done this.  I believe that he toned the canvas with a muted yellow.  Hard to tell from a jpeg image, which almost certainly looks very different on my computer than it does in person, but he might have used yellow ochre and/or orange with a good bit of white to mute it.  Then he let it dry completely.  Next was to rub a muted red wash over the whole thing (maybe a terra rosa toned down with a green?).  The torso was then drawn by wiping out the highlights, and the jeans and shoes drawn with a brush and a very dark, almost black, mixture.  The torso, head, and hair got some additional paint added to establish solidity and color.  So now I'm going to give this approach a try.

Then I looked up Steve's web page, starting with his paintings.  Turns out that almost all of his paintings have this sort of strength.  His subjects are frequently working men, like construction laborers, heavily muscled in a working-man way (as opposed to bodybuilders with their exaggerated physiques).  Others are club fighters.  A few are females.  All have great energy and presence.  

In addition to his web page, Steve also has a Facebook page.  Go take a look and see for yourself.  This guy's good.

Learning How to Paint ... Again

Back in early December, I wrote about starting a new series of paintings about survivors.  This new series is kicking my butt.  As I mentioned then, at least some of the paintings require a very different way of painting than my normal style.  That style is kinda quiet and descriptive, and lets the subject matter carry the story.  That approach doesn't work here.  My survivors are people who've been through some really bad, often violent, situations.  You may not know it if you ran into them on the street - they're regular people doing regular things, but it underlies who they are today.  So painting them in a regular style completely misses the thing that they've survived.

I've been working on some oil studies: small-scale paintings of the compositions of the first two subjects in this series.  The point was to see what worked and what didn't.  My basic compositions worked well, with just some minor tweaks.  But how the paint was applied was all wrong.  It was tentative, careful, and way over-worked.  The paint itself gave no indication of the depth of the underlying story.

And while I was at it, I realized that my color-mixing, color-choosing, and basic painting skills seem to have gone downhill.  I've been too busy lately with my consulting business and it shows.

How to fix that?  Well, I've talked with other artists about their processes, particularly some who work in a manner that I think is more appropriate to these stories.  I've tried to get some idea of how they work, to see what can be applied to my series.  And I'm copying some other paintings, trying to get the flow of the paint, and feel it right down in my muscles and not just in my head.  Painting is something that you need to internalize to where it's almost automatic, so you can think about the important things and let the thoughts and feelings flow through your arm and through the paintbrush onto the canvas without interruption.

Last year, I got DVD of an alla prima portrait demonstration from Robert Liberace, an exceptionally talented artist.  I reviewed the DVD and wound up copying (more or less) his demo as a way to understand his color choices and to loosen up my own paint handling.  Here's what I came up with:

No, I'm not claiming this is great art, it's a copy of somebody else's work.  But this exercise was really useful as a learning tool.  There's another artist that I've been looking at and I'll copy one of his in the next day or two.  Meanwhile, tonight I went to an artist talk at UNCA and came away with some other ideas on what I can do to help get the effects needed.

I'm frustrated that I've been trying to get this series started for months now, and haven't even put a brush to the real canvas yet.  But there's no sense in doing that until I have a good idea as to how to proceed.  Patience, grasshopper, patience.

Life Drawing Again

Last night, I went to a life drawing session at David Lawter's studio in Asheville.  David's Monday night sessions are unique in this area.  All the poses in this 2-hour session are short.  Really short.  We start with 1-minute poses then go to 2 minutes, and end with 5 minutes.  Most other sessions around here start with a 5-minute pose as a "quick" warm-up.

I find these short poses to be a heckuva lot of fun.  They're a challenge: you have to get it right, right away, because there is no going back.  Before you're ready, the buzzer has buzzed and the model is on to a new pose.  Deal with it!

Our model was Amy.  This young lady is a real live-wire.  She looks like Marissa Tomei and is bubbly, energetic, creative, and so much fun to work with.  These short poses really suit her.  She squirms around until she's contorted into some really difficult position, and then holds it like a rock.  The short poses let her get into incredible positions that are really impossible for anything longer than five minutes.  So the combination of short poses and Amy's creativity meant that we had two hours of some really challenging drawing.

So here are a few pages from my sketchbook:

Can't wait for next week!

Lost in Translation

Janis was going through some old memorabilia and found a lot of stuff we'd completely forgotten about.  One of them was an article that I'd written for my last Navy command's newsletter.  I was stationed at the Naval Security Group Activity in Misawa, Japan, in 1998.  And yes, that was my official photo - don't you just love the Harry Potter glasses?  And that stern look.  What a faker!

Most officers tried to write "inspirational" op-ed pieces that nobody ever read.  I just said to hell with it and wrote about whatever caught my fancy.  This particular piece was about how both the Japanese and Americans butchered each other's languages.  Here 'tis:

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One of the neat things about serving overseas is that we get to murder somebody else's language and they, in turn, get to murder ours.  Both sides seem to do a pretty good job of it, much to their mutual amusement.

When I first arrived in Misawa, I was entranced by the names of the cars.  Where else but Japan could you find a real Bongo Wagon?  For those of us of "a certain age" (that means us old folks), bongos conjure up visions of half-trashed VW Vans with flowers painted all over them.  Another great name was the Toyota Super Casual.  Not just regular ol' laid-back casual, mind you; we're talking comatose here!  For me, the overall winner was the Nissan that featured "Viscous LSD".  Where's DEA when you need them?

Car names were only the beginning.  As I wandered around off base, I noticed more and more interesting phrases in the most unlikely places.  T-shirts and the backs of jackets seem to be especially creative.  One individual wore a jacket emblazoned with the proud logo of the Pony Tail Growing-Up Club.  A rakish-looking guy in the Misawa airport had a jacket which proclaimed "Motorcycle racing is a dangerous sport.  Requires great skill and courage.  Every one should enjoy it."  Yep, let's get Grandma out there on a high-powered Kawasaki and let 'er rip!

Sometimes the Japanese don't seem to be 100% sure of what they're selling.  In Yokosuka I ran across a trendy little store called the Boutique Something.  Another time, right near the New Sanno Hotel in Tokyo, I spotted the No Concept Shop.  I've heard of truth in advertising, but this takes honesty to a whole new extreme.

Food items can get very interesting.  You know how sales people will set up a little demo table in a department store and give out free samples?  I stopped at one of these once and the young lady spent five minutes assuring me that her samples of "Calpis" weren't what they sounded like.  And as if getting used to eating raw fish isn't challenging enough, there's a restaurant out in town that features "live curry".  No, thanks; if it ain't dead, I ain't eatin' it.  However, most restaurants here in Japan seem to subscribe to the motto that I saw in one: "We make happy time".  Yes, they do.

As entertaining as their fractured English is to us, our mangled attempts at foreign languages are, by and large, much worse.  I recall, back in my ensign days, sitting under (yes, under) a table in the Yokosuka O'Club joyfully singing along in four-part disharmony a song I later discovered to mean "wait a minute please, please, please, wait a minute please, is that right?"  No wonder the Japanese cleaning ladies (who were trying to get us to leave as it was well past closing time) seemed to think we were nuts.  It sounded a lot better then, after six or eight beers, than it ever has since.  Not that I've gotten any better with age.  Last summer I had to make a short speech in Gonohe and, to show my respects, I tried to give it in Japanese.  Hah!  My speech had only one joke but they started laughing as soon as I opened my mouth.  I'm still not sure if I advanced intercultural relations or gave them a serious setback.

In all these mis-translations of each other's languages, I've noticed some common trends.  Americans are more action-oriented in their phrases ("Just Do It"), while the Japanese are more passive ("Experience your outdoor life").  I guess this goes back to each other's cultures.  Americans will ride a roller coaster until they puke.  Japanese will sit in a Zen rock garden and watch bonsai grow.  Both will go home thinking there's no better way to spend a day.

And for each of them, they're absolutely right.

Robert Genn on Life's Purpose

I subscribe to a twice-weekly artist newsletter from Robert Genn.  They talk about a lot of different things: the painting process, the business side of art, the spiritual side, you name it.  The newest is a really powerful and well-written one.  I'm going to quote the full text here.

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A few years ago, Adam Leipzig attended his 25th reunion at Yale University. At Yale, he had been a theatre geek and literature major. Mingling in the party tent that summer evening, Adam listened to complaints about emptiness, wasted years, and general confusion about life's purpose. He concluded that eighty percent of his former classmates were unhappy with their lives, even though most were now in positions of power, were prosperous, and had ticked many of life's trophy boxes. In contrast, the twenty percent - the happy Yalies - were arts and history people, and those who had studied subjects for the joy of learning. Adam posited a theory: Happiness is having a purpose. People who are happy, he found, know five things: Who they are What they do Who they do it for What those people's needs are And what they get out of it  Amazon.com lists 151,928 book titles about finding life's purpose. It's a going concern. But life teaches that if we make others happy, we're taken care of. Somehow, our most important needs are met on a level that cannot be matched by acquisition or achievement. Focusing outward is the key. Creative people, in particular, often stumble when asked, "What do you do?" Some find the question confronting, or downright troublesome, especially when between projects, or if there's vagueness about professional status. Many others do something else, something they feel is not the thing that defines them. Still others believe they're not yet ready to identify with the title "artist." The word itself is as loaded as a mid-summer's Ivy League mixer for the middle aged. Adam suggests that you need only answer the last question in his formula: "How are the people you're doing it for transformed by what you do?" This holiday season, if you happen to be mingling with the other eighty percent, you may find the question "What do you do?" unnecessary. More valuable will be, "How do you do that?"  _________________ If you like this article, you can find more at the Painter's Keys website.  Go take a look.

The Act of Painting

Robert Gamblin, of Gamblin Artist Colors, periodically sends out notes on technical issues and random thoughts.  One showed up in my in-box this morning and I thought it was particularly good.  So here it is, in its entirety:

"Dear Artist, We simply call it painting, but actually there are two distinct parts to this art that stretches back at least 30,000 years to the caves of southern Europe. I’ve always spoken about every painting having two lives, the one it has as while coming into being through our efforts in the studio, and its next life that begins when we step back from the easel and say, “it's done.” Our culture, for understandable reasons, tends to focus on the finished product; there are no museums devoted to the process of making a painting. At this Holiday time, I want to celebrate the act of painting.   After having supported artists’ processes professionally for the last 34 years I feel unequivocally that the most important aspect of painting is its creation. As much as I love interesting paintings hanging on the wall, for me, this isn’t as important as the creative process itself.  I think that making a painting is one of the most intricate things we do in our lives. The mystery of creativity requires us work with our head, our heart, our hands and our intuition. All of it comes out, brushstroke by brushstroke, though the luscious intensity of oil colors.  It should be not be a surprise then that you feel so good while in the flow of a painting session. In that state you are pounding on all cylinders. They talk about a “runner’s high,” well there is certainly a “painter’s elation.” I feel it often.  And by painting over a number of decades the rewards to one’s life are immense. You achieve a life-long dialogue with yourself around what it is like to be a person in this world at this time. In oils you are creating a record of your life that will endure for centuries.  What a great privilege to be born and living in a time and place where we can pursue our art. That is a lot to be thankful for. And, from all of us at Gamblin, thank you for bringing our materials to your painting process, it is a privilege to be there. /S/ Robert Gamblin"

Survivors Series

Don't know if I've discussed this before, but I'm working on a series of paintings about survivors.  This is an outgrowth of my earlier series, "Meditation on War", which explored the results of combat.  I found that series to be worthwhile, but a bit of a downer.  The general theme of the paintings was "bad shit happened here".  After a while, focusing only on the bad shit got to be a drag.  I wanted to work on a theme that was more optimistic, but still dealt with some heavy and important stuff.  The answer came during a life drawing session in which our model was a woman who had survived cancer.  Her body was ravaged with the removal of her breasts, surgical cuts everywhere, and no hair, but her spirit was strong and cheerful.  I've seen the same sort of strength from wounded soldiers and others who've survived serious incidents.  This looked like a theme that I could work with.  And I thought these stories needed to be told.  Right now, I'm working on three stories.

One is of a woman who was brutally raped.  She has gone on to rebuild her life, serve in a rape crisis center, and focus on making the world a better place.  She's given TED talks, written prose and poetry, gotten married, and raised some wonderful kids.  Her attacker was eventually caught.  He had viciously attacked another woman and is now serving a life sentence.

The second is of a man who was a Marine in Viet Nam.  He was in some vicious battles - the kind where two squads start up a hill and only six guys make it to the top.  The kind of campaigns where you spend over two months fighting in the jungle and never even change your skivvies.  He went on to a successful civilian career and raised four smart daughters, two of whom are now in the military.  But he's still going up that hill many nights.  

The third is a man who was on the Bataan Death March.  He's 93 now and as sharp as they come.  Not just sharp for his age, I mean sharp, period.  He refuses to be called a "hero".  He came out of the Japanese prison camps, returned home, got married, built a small business, and raised three kids.  Now he's in a VA assisted-living facility, speaking at schools and churches, active in many social events, and probably has a busier calendar than I do.

So now I have three strong stories to tell.  I'm trying to figure out how to tell them.  I don't want to just paint portraits of these people.  Portraits are fine, but they don't tell the "survivor" story.  Other things need to be included in the picture that speak to what they've gone through.  This calls for some creative compositions, of adding, subtracting, and rearranging things until they come together.  Even the way the paint is applied is important.  And that's what I'm struggling with right now.  

I've got basic compositions worked out for the first two paintings, know what will be in them and how the'll be arranged.  My normal style of painting, though, is going to be lacking, I think.  My style is pretty quiet and descriptive and doesn't, in itself, convey much emotional turmoil.  This is fine in paintings such as "Warrior", in which a quiet and understated approach makes the impact of the loss of the soldier's legs more powerful.  

Warrior

Oil on canvas, 60"x60"

But these three survivors have stories that are not visible.  To see them on the street, you'd have no idea that they'd been through such experiences.  I need a way of painting that is energetic and turbulent in its own right.  I think I've found an example of an artist whose style provides that energy.  So I'm going to do a number of small, experimental paintings, where I'm taking the basics of his approach and trying it for myself.  It's kinda like trying on a new suit to see if it fits.  And it's got to be the right suit: just as you wouldn't wear a Brooks Brothers outfit to a track meet, the painting "suit" has to both fit me and be appropriate to the task.  I don't know yet whether it will do either.

So there's only one thing to do.  I'm off to the studio to sling some paint.

Ancient History in the Rocks

I've been getting a bit more interested in geology lately.  Yes, geology.  Rocks.  The whole idea of how our world evolved, how mountains rose up, went away, and rose up again, with continental plates moving around and grinding into one another, just fascinates me.

I recently read an interesting book titled "The Rocks Don't Lie".  The author, David Montgomery, originally started out to debunk the belief that the world is only a few thousand years old and that all the mountains and everything else were sculpted by Noah's flood.  Those beliefs are, of course, easily contradicted by hard science.  But as Montgomery developed the book, he became more focused on how the back-and-forth between the science of geology and the beliefs of religion actually developed and informed each other over the past few hundred years.  The science that came out of this shows that the Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years, not just a few thousand.  The science has also shown how our landscape has developed, and continues to develop today.

This was on my mind during my recent trip out west and to the Grand Canyon.  Since the landscape out there is relatively barren of trees, it is easy to see the big picture: big tilted plains, miles-long cliffs where fault lines have broken the surface, canyons where the layers in the rock are plainly visible, extinct volcanos, and lava fields that look like they were laid down last year.  The Grand Canyon itself is an incredible sight, but really, there's interesting stuff to look at wherever you go.  What's also really cool to think about is the same type of layers that are so clearly visible in the Grand Canyon are also below your feet right now.  Our landscape has not been static over the past 4.5 billion years, it has been continually changing.

A while back, I was reading about when and how the Appalachian Mountains were formed.  I knew that these are really old mountains, much older than the Rockies, and that at one time they were supposedly even more spectacular than the Rockies are now.  But what was really surprising to read was that the Appalachians didn't just rise and then be eroded away.  No, mountains have risen here at least twice.  One range rose beginning about 480 million years ago.  It gradually eroded almost completely away and this area became an inland sea.  The current mountains started rising about 66 million years ago.  That, to me, is amazing: plains to mountains to inland sea to mountains again.

I don't have to go very far to see indications of this history.  I just walk out my front door and look at this rock.  We've done some landscaping with river rock that was quarried not far away.  This one was part of the pile.  I got to looking at it one day because it was a bit odd-looking.  I realized that it is actually a rock within a rock.  The white part is an igneous rock, meaning that it was formed from molten rock.  I don't know what it is, maybe a type of granite.  But it was formed under tremendous heat and pressure, meaning it was formed deep in the earth.  Then the land rose until the rock was exposed on a mountain.  It broke off and landed in a stream, where it was eventually rounded into a river rock.  You can see that the edges are all rounded off.  From there, it wound up in sand.  Eventually, the rock and sand were buried under many many layers of other sediments, until it was deep enough that the pressure turned it from loose grains of sand into a rock.  Then the land rose again.  At some point, the sandstone, with the earlier river rock buried inside it, broke loose from a mountain and fell into a stream again.  The stream smoothed it out and rounded the edges.  And then it was picked up by some guys and brought to our house.

Millions of years of history, right here by my front door.  Cool.