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.

Back In Time

I've been going through a period of looking backward.  No, not at my own artworks, although that's a good thing to do from time to time.  No, this has been a period of looking way back in history.  There's been an odd confluence of three unrelated things that all seemed to hit at once.  They are, in no particular order, a podcast, a book, and a TV show.

The podcast is "Indiana Jones: Myth, Reality, and 21st Century Archaeology", by Dr. Joe Schuldenrein.  He's a professional archaeologist.  His podcast is a series of interviews with other archaeologists about the work that they're involved with.  It runs the gamut: new studies of the Battle of Little Big Horn, what really happened in the Maya collapse, excavating the ruins in Chaco Canyon, a community-involved dig in Baltimore, how state Departments of Transportation handle archaeology, and on and on.  He's been doing this once a week for several years, so there are a ton of things to listen to.  Archaeology has always interested me, and it's great to hear some of the fascinating stories of things that are going on today.  One of the things that many of the guests have brought up, independently of each other, is that people throughout history have been very good at adapting to their particular situations, be it desert, swamp, forest, cities, complex and stratified civilizations, or whatever.  I think that contemporary people tend to be a bit condescending towards people of earlier times - the attitude that "we're so much smarter now and know better".  Well, no, we don't.  We didn't live in those times and cannot possibly internalize everything it meant to be, say, one of the tribes that built the pueblos in the American southwest.  Hell, we have a hard enough time with people of other cultures in the here and now!  But by and large, people within a culture of a particular time and place are often very well adapted to it.  And people throughout history are smart.

Which brings up the book.  I read "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.  He's generally thought of as a science fiction writer and one of the best at doing serious research to support the details in his books.  While science fiction usually entails some time in the future, "Shaman" is actually set about 33,000 years ago in what is now southern France.  It was during the Ice Age, when the glaciers extended far south and Neanderthals co-existed with early humans.  The book picks up the story of a young boy at puberty and follows him as he is trained to be the tribe's shaman and grows into a young man.  What struck me was how smart a person had to be to survive in an environment like that.  You had to know how to find materials to make your own clothes, make fire, find food and water, find or make shelter, deal with different types of animals either for food or to escape, make weapons, interact with other tribes, manage the petty intrigues of any small society, and on and on.  A modern man like me wouldn't last a day.  Robinson is a really good writer and puts all this great detail into a compelling storyline.  Well worth the read.

Finally, the TV show is "Barnwood Builders".  It's one of the Discovery channel's real-life series, most of which are excruciatingly bad.  This one, though, is pretty good.  It follows a team of West Virginia guys who dismantle old log cabins and barns and repurpose them into new homes.  Fortunately, the "new homes" bit receives very little attention, and the focus is on the old structure.  We often think of log homes from the 1800's as crude structures built by people who didn't know any better.  Not true at all.  The homes were often built from trees that had grown right there on the property, and they put them together in very ingenious ways.  The logs may look rough-hewn, but the notches are often precision-made so that the structures are stable.  Foundations may look like random stones, but they're actually carefully sourced, cut, and placed to provide a solid base to build on and to protect the wood from bugs and critters.  Roofs overhang a certain amount to make sure the rainwater runs off.  Sides are often covered with planks fixed to battens, which keeps the water off the logs and provides a bit of air circulation to help insulate the cabin.  All of this was done with hand tools.

Now I'm a guy with a few modern tools like electric drills and saws, but I have zero woodworking ability.  I made my first big easel back in the early 80's and it looks okay, but it isn't straight, and if you tighten down all the screws, it warps it all out of shape.  These old frontier guys did better with their hand axes.

So what all this is getting to is that our predecessors were pretty smart people.  They had to be, to survive and thrive in their worlds.  Just because we live in a higher-tech world does not mean we are one lick smarter than they were.  We just have higher-tech toys.

Feedback

This evening, I received a note via my web site.  It came from somebody that I've never met.  It made my day.  Here is what he said:

I just wanted you to know something. I was asked as an assignment to pick my favorite art piece. I chose your piece Warrior. I am a vet myself, a former Scout. This piece spoke to me in a way I have never experienced. I have never been one for paintings, honestly. This one brought me to tears. It is a symbol of what Americans have forgotten. A symbol of why freedom is not free. I honestly don't know why you painted this particular piece but I wanted to thank you for it. I needed a wake-up call and it has been received, sir. Keep doing what you are doing and I may buy one someday if I can afford it. HA. I wanted to compliment you on your outstanding painting anyway. The impact your work has had on me is nothing short of ball busting. I've slipped into a time in my life where I have felt it is okay to complain. Seeing Warrior reminded me of the constant sacrifice our servicemen and servicewomen make daily and also reminded me that people don't appreciate it. 

Again, thank you.

"All gave some, some gave all." 

Warrior

Oil on canvas, 60"x60"

This note just blew me away.  I painted Warrior during the heyday of the Iraq buildup.  I wanted to remind people that wars have consequences, and if you want to go to war, you better have a damn good reason that justifies all the hurt, pain, death, and destruction that's going to come out of it.  Not many people were thinking of that then.  Now, with all the publicity about PTSD, traumatic brain injury, the collapse of Iraq into fighting again, and the near-collapse of Afghanistan, people are very aware of the costs of war.

I've seen the effect that this painting has on some people.  I've seen people walk away from it because it hit something too deep inside.  And I've seen people just glance at it once and move on.  That's life.

On rare occasions, though, I get something like this note.  This lets me know that my work has had an impact on somebody.  It's a powerful feeling.  

I consider Warrior to be the best painting I've ever done.  Maybe it's the best I'll ever do.  Even if I never do anything else, I know that I've done one thing that's good.

Putting On a Workshop

This past weekend, I held the first artist workshop in my studio.  It was about drawing portraits.  It went really well.  Five people participated, ranging from complete newbie to fairly advanced, and they all seemed to come away with new skills and capabilities.  And we all had a heckuva lot of fun.

Planning for this event took some thought.  I started advertising it in December, long before I had an idea of how it should be taught!  Nothing like committing yourself to a course of action to spur yourself into figuring out how to do it.  My basic course of action was to start with the basic structure of the head, then to discuss the various features, and finally to do several exercises to tie it all together.  I'd scheduled the workshop to run for two days (Saturday and Sunday), for 3 hours each day.  Was this too much?  Not enough?  I didn't know.

But I need not have worried.  Learning how to do portraits is a life-long endeavor.  No matter how long a workshop is scheduled for, it won't be enough.  There's always something to work on.

I put together a handout for the students that discussed my major points and gave them some illustrations that were cribbed from the interwebs and other places.  My approach was to show the "standard" structure of the head: normal proportions, features, and shapes, as well as typical things to look for.  The upper lip, for example, has three parts: the tubercle, which is the dip or V-shaped form in the center, flanked by two wings, while the lower lip has two wings with a central furrow.  Once the students knew what the standard structure was, they could look for the individual differences in their particular subject.  Their model might have a very thin upper lip with almost no tubercle that protrudes slightly over a slightly more full lower lip with short wings.  We discussed this same process for the shape of the skull, eyes, nose, mouth, chin, forehead, ears, neck, and hair.

Some of the illustrations I used came from fine art: drawings by old masters, or from "how to" portrait courses and books.  But some came from a genre that many might find surprising: caricature.  Why?  Caricature is just an exaggerated form of portraiture.  A good caricature is instantly recognizable, even though it is completely unrealistic.  The artist has to be able to look at the subject and determine what features are different from the "standard" head and face, and then exaggerate the difference in a way that is convincing.  If a nose is just slightly bigger than normal, the caricaturist makes it BIG.  But something has to give: if the nose is big, something else has to be small to compensate.  The eyes, maybe, or the jawline - something.  And the differences have to be those that anybody can see.  The typical fine art courses don't say that - they typically take a "draw what you see" approach without talking about the tradeoffs like caricaturists do.

The artists in the class understood all that.  As a result, we had a good time talking through the issues and drawing each other.  Every one of them was doing a better job at the end than at the beginning.  So I'd say it was a success.  I came away with a laundry list of things to change for the next class, but the structure of the class turned out to be sound, so the changes are in the details.

I'm running a different workshop next week.  It will be on mixing colors.  I stayed away from painting for years because I didn't understand anything about color mixing.  Eventually, while taking a painting course at Maryland Institute College of Art, I learned a very logical and easy-to-understand method for mixing up the colors I needed.  We'll discuss this in the workshop and do a lot of experimentation.  Interested?  You can read more on my web site and sign up there as well.

So I'm having fun teaching, and I'm going to do more of it this year!

Another New Year

All my New Years are good.  The fact that I have another New Year means I'm still going, at least for another day!  As the saying goes in the Navy, it's "another day to excel".  Another day to spend in the studio, or on my consulting business, or on projects around the house, whatever needs attention the most.  Another day, period.

My goal for this year is to focus less on my consulting business and more on my studio.  Specifically, I want to teach workshops in my studio, find at least one new gallery in a larger market, and do a lot more artworks than I did in the past year.  Sounds like some reasonable goals, but they're all going to take a lot of work.

Speaking of artwork, I just repainted a studio landscape from earlier in the year.  "Clouds over the French Broad River" (below) was a study of the way summer clouds glow in that brief moment right at sunset.  

It was an okay start, but there were a number of things that didn't work.  The blues and purples in the sky and in the reflections in the water were way too strong and overpowered the reds and oranges in the clouds.  The line of trees was too flat and unconvincing.  The shoreline in the lower left was too bright and drew attention away from the clouds.  The trees on the far right were just flat.  So, basically, everything needed to be repainted.

Here's the revised version.  The clouds have been changed to extend the crimsons and magentas further to the left.  The colors in the sky and water reflections have been toned down quite a bit and don't dominate the clouds.  The treeline has been changed and feels more like a real riverbank now.  The lower left corner has been darkened and the trees on the far right have been reworked.  All in all, it feels much better.

In addition to reworking this painting, I've destroyed three others.  Two were failures and I just painted over them.  Now I have two more boards ready to throw paint on.  The third painting was one of my old political satire paintings.  I had recently started to update it to address some of the political events of today, but realized that I didn't want to go down that particular road again.  So I stripped the painting off the stretcher bars.  I'm going to rework the frame and stretch new canvas over it since I've learned a lot about making better canvases in the last ten years.  Actually, there are several other large paintings on my storage rack that are just begging for the same treatment.  And when I get done with all of them, I'll have several new, large canvases ready for some kind of new effort, as well as several old canvases that will make a good bonfire.

Bring it on!

Politics

I try to stay away from politics on here.  This morning, though, a friend sent me a note about last night's political debate.  Here's what I replied:

I can't bring myself to watch these debates.  I'm for Bernie - he's consistently been discussing things that I think are important, and in ways that I think need to be said.  And he's not named Clinton.  Hillary's a political machine and O'Malley is in the peanut gallery.  But the Democrats, at least, are having civil discussions about substantive issues, which is more than can be said for the ongoing train wreck that is the Republican party.  

The Republican party is just destroying itself.  While that's good for Democrats, it's bad for the country.  We need responsible, civil discussion about the issues, with creative ideas, from the conservatives.  I know that there are some smart people with good ideas in the Republican party, but they're being run over by the lunatics.  Maybe the party needs to split in two, with the Tea Party wing in one and the moderates in another.  That would diminish Republican chances for winning national elections in the short term but would marginalize the freaks and provide a way forward for those who think governing is more important than posturing.

To me, it's pretty clear: the Democrats will nominate Hillary and she'll beat the pants off whichever fringe candidate is sent up by the Republicans.  The Senate might go back to the Dems while the House will stay Republican.  Hillary will prove to be a reasonably competent President but will be viciously hated by the right wing, so much so that the anti-Obama hate speech of the past seven years will seem like a kumbaya sing-along.  And their hatred might prevent them from coming up with a viable candidate to run against Hillary in 2020.  

The legacy:

Eight years of half the country hating Bill Clinton ...

Eight years of half the country hating George Bush ...

Eight years of half the country hating Barack Obama ...

Four to eight years of half the country hating Hillary Clinton.

I'm tired of all this hate.

Looking Ahead

The end of the year is one of the times when I take stock of where I am, where I want to go, and how to get there.  (The other times are the other 364 days of the year ...).  As we approach the end of 2015, I've been thinking about the balance in my life between the studio, my consulting business, and responsibilities around the family and home.  Now I don't see my family and home responsibilities changing, so any re-balancing will have to come between the studio and consulting business.  And what I'm looking at doing is taking time away from the consulting biz and spending it in on studio business instead.

This is a kinda big deal.  My consulting business has been doing pretty well for the past three years.  I've got a few clients that have routed a good bit of work to me.  It's been fairly lucrative and has paid for my studio activities.  The cost, though, has been in the lack of studio time.  I've written about this before - it's the primary reason the painting Cinderella's Seamstress took six months to complete, for example.  This lack of time, and lack of day-to-day continuity, has resulted in a scattershot approach to studio activities.  The balance has been good financially but less than productive creatively.

Changing circumstances are making this a time to reconsider that balance.  Looking ahead, I see that changes at one of my clients means that I'm not going to be doing nearly as much work for them.  So I will have to do a lot of marketing and outreach in order to develop new clients to keep the same income level.  My heart's not really into doing that.  I enjoy the work - it's interesting, challenging, and always something different - but it's not my calling.  Meanwhile, the economy in general is picking up and many artists I know are seeing increases in sales, teaching, and related activities.  If I have to do a lot of marketing and outreach anyway, I'd rather do it for my studio business.

To that end, I've been doing a bit of work already.  My online presence is growing.  I've had an Etsy gallery for a while that features drawings and other small works.  Recently I added a gallery on Saatchi Art.  This one has larger paintings.  I've added a sales section on my website that has both artworks and workshops.  And I've established a presence on Instagram (search for @skiprohde).  In addition, I've reanimated my newsletters and my life drawing sessions.  

Going forward, I'm looking to do more art workshops.  My first is scheduled for January 9 & 10.  This is a portrait drawing class that will be held in my studio.  Details about the class are on my website and you can sign up there as well.  I plan on doing many more throughout the year, with a goal of at least one per month.  They'll cover a variety of topics.  I don't know what they are yet as that will depend on what people tell me they want to learn.  What would you want to cover in an art workshop?

I've got other goals for the new year as well: more juried, solo, and group shows as well as more gallery representation.  It's ambitious.  I'll be the first to tell you that I'm not very good at marketing, but I have to get better at it, one way or another, so that's where I'm headed.

Figure Studies and Re-Working

I've been working on some figure studies lately.  They've started in the life drawing and painting sessions that I'm holding in my studio.  This one was a straightforward exercise at first:

This is actually just a detail of the initial night's work - I'm not showing the parts I messed up!  Subsequently, we had the model come in for another couple of hours and I was able to make some improvements on the figure.  After that session was over, I started making some other changes as well.  I'll post the completed painting when it's done.

Last week, we had a new model, James.  He has a very interesting face, so I did a portrait of him:

James

Oil on panel, 16"x12"

This was largely completed in one 2-hour session.  I came back to it the next day to make a couple of very minor corrections and sign it.  I'm really happy with the way it turned out.

One other project that was on my easel this past week was reworking an old painting from my political satire series.  I did it ten years ago as a comment on the immigration debate.  With all the current flap regarding Donald Trump and his infamous wall ("a beautiful wall ... it'll be huuuuuuge"), my old painting needed just a few tweaks to make it current again.  So I pulled it out and started painting.  And then I stopped.  Why?  Well, to do good satire, I have to get really angry and then stay in that angry stage.  I was certainly angry, but I really don't enjoy it.  Also, the end result is very time-sensitive: wait a few weeks or months and the subject is overtaken by other flaps (scandal, another shooting, the budget, you name it).  So all the anger and all the work that goes into a satirical painting is old news in a very short time.  Not worth it.  I've got better things to do.

Reality Is Stranger Than Fiction

Yes, we've all heard that reality is stranger than fiction.  It just hit home again today.  Ten years ago, I made "Pleasantville", a satirical painting about the American obsession with guns.  Here 'tis:

Most people understood that it was satire.  There were a few who didn't, though.  That always seems to happen with satire.

Today, though, I've been one-upped.  A GOP lawmaker in Nevada, Michele Fiore, posted her family's Christmas card on Facebook.  Here it is:

Yep, every one of them, except the infants, are toting some pretty serious hardware.  Even the 5-year-old in the middle.  Because nothing says "Christmas" quite like a high-powered arsenal.

Underneath the photo, she wrote: "It's up to Americans to protect America.  We're just you're ordinary American family."  Umm, no, Michele, you're not.

I posted this on both my personal and studio Facebook accounts a little while ago.  My personal account is only open to my friends, most of whom are pretty reasonable (there ARE exceptions!).  The studio account, though, is open to the public, and some of them have left very ... interesting ... remarks.  Take a look.

Studio Developments

I've got quite a few things going on in the studio these days.  Unfortunately, I don't have enough time in the studio to get 'em all done!  I'm making progress, though.

My "Faces of Afghanistan" drawings are on exhibit in Mars Hill University's Weizenblatt Gallery through Dec 11.  It's a nice, intimate gallery.  We had a good opening reception and I gave a talk to an art history class about Afghanistan and art in a combat zone.

This past week, I finished a commissioned painting.  It turned out pretty well.  I can't post a picture of it here because it's a Christmas present.  Maybe in another month ...

Beyond that, I have several paintings in progress or in the queue.  One is a portrait that I just can't get to work.  It's a good painting, just not of that specific individual!  I'll keep trying for a bit, but might have to start fresh.

There's a landscape painting that's been staring at me for about two months now, telling me to finish it up.  I kinda like it so far, but maybe not enough to dive back into it.  Doing a good job with this painting means that I have to get my head back into the same place it was when I had the initial vision and started slinging paint.  I might have moved on.  If so, then I'll slap some oil gesso over it and have a clean panel for something else.

Ten years ago, I did a series of political satire paintings.  Almost all have been on the shelf since then.  Political paintings are very much tied to a specific time period, and most of them are no longer applicable.  Recently, though, the subject matter of one of them has come back to the fore.  So I've pulled it off the shelf and am re-working it to make it current and to make it a better painting.  Political satire, though, is not a pleasant topic for me.  I have to get really pissed off about something to come up with the satirical angle, and I don't like being pissed off all the time, which is one of the reasons I quit doing it ten years ago.

This fall, I've been doing open life painting sessions.  We're having a mix of models: male, female, clothed, and nude.  Here's one of the most recent results.  These are fun sessions - we've got a good group of artists who come and work, and all the models have been interesting to work with.  I need to get one of them to come back soon.  I changed a few things after the session and need to finish it up, and I have an idea for another painting.

Lastly, I will be mentoring a young high school student over the next few months.  She's got the talent and, apparently, the drive to be a good artist.  My mission will be to help her find her way.  I love doing this sort of thing - working with young art students really charges my batteries.

So that's what's going on in the studio.  Except none of it is happening today - this is Thanksgiving, so I'm hanging out around the house with Janis.  We're having a great time doing not much of anything.  I hope you and yours are having a great Thanksgiving today as well!

"Thank You For Your Service"

"Thank you for your service."  I get a lot of that these days.  Frankly, I don't know how to respond.  Why thank me for my service?  I didn't do it for you or anybody else.  I did it for very selfish reasons.  I joined the Navy because it offered exotic places like Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, as well as surface ships, submarines, and airplanes.  Any one of those things was better than any other job available when I was graduating college, like being an assistant manager in a Pampers plant in southeast Missouri.  It wasn't altruism that brought me into the Navy, it was the prospect of seeing and doing some really neat stuff.

I stayed in the Navy because they kept giving me cool things to do and great people to do them with.  I got to drive ships and lead teams of really sharp people.  I went to some amazing places (Japan, Korea, Philippines, Kenya, Singapore, San Diego, Australia, Hawaii, Panama, Washington DC, Honduras, Norway, England, Scotland, Belgium, Bahrain, Italy, Dubai, the Netherlands, Germany, Diego Garcia, Bosnia, and Guantanamo Bay, to name a few).  I was put in charge of a cutting-edge technology development program where we literally were inventing the technology as we went along.  I led and managed two overseas field sites.  I went to sea on a battleship and, during a gunnery exercise, watched a 16" shell as it flew for miles toward the target on the beach.  I went to sea on submarines four times.  I managed a set of operations during one brief war (Desert Storm).  I met my wife.  I worked with some of the sharpest, wittiest, most capable, and most driven people in the world.  Later, several years after retiring from the Navy, I got to work in Iraq with the reconstruction effort, and then in Afghanistan to help build their governance capability.  In all of this, we had a mission, a purpose, something that was much bigger than just making a buck.  Cool stuff, all of it.

And people thank me for this?

I have to admit, I have been extremely lucky.  I wasn't drafted to fight a brutal war, even though the draft was still ongoing at the time (I had a high draft number).  I've never personally been shot at, that I know of, and never been in a firefight.  I did lose a couple of friends to an IED in Iraq and a sailor to a motorcycle accident, but those aren't things you thank somebody for.  No, I just had a wonderful career doing fascinating things with great people.  I couldn't have asked for more.

There are many, many others who have not had the same experience.  The ones who have visible or invisible wounds, both from combat and everyday operations.  The ones who lost their families because they were gone all the time.  Many service members paid a really high price for their service, and those are the ones you should legitimately thank.  Not me.

So when people say "Thank you for your service", I'm thinking that they should be saying something like, "how the hell do I get some of that action?"  I know how to respond to that question.

Online Updates, Improvements, and Messing Around

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on improving my online studio presence.  A good online capability is crucial for successful marketing these days.  I gotta admit, I am the world's worst salesman and marketer.  I will talk somebody out of a sale.  Salesmanship is just something I never, ever, got the hang of.

But it was time to take a look at what I had and how it could be improved.  I had several things going already that were kinda/sorta okay: the web site, the studio Facebook page, this blog, and an Etsy site.  Each required some attention and there needed to be some additions.

The web site came first.  It was just okay as it was.  The home page was up to date but didn't have a whole lot of information and wasn't laid out well.  The individual pages for different series of paintings were not visually compelling.  There was no information about purchasing or commissioning anything.  All that needed some work, so I took advantage of Weebly's capabilities,  templates, and drag-and-drop features to spruce things up a bit.  The home page now has a LOT of information about recent and upcoming events, along with links to other places where my work can be seen.  And it makes much better use of the available real estate on a computer screen.  I also tweaked the pages for the different artworks series so they are more visually interesting.  Finally, I added a section devoted to purchasing art.  This included a page with links to Etsy and Saatchi, as well as a page where art could be purchased directly.  All the marketing experts say that if you don't make it easy to buy, people never will.  I've certainly proved that over the years, so it's time to try a new approach.  So take a look and let me know what you think.

The studio Facebook page was pretty good.  There are a lot of images on there and it's updated several times a week.  That's good.  But it still didn't have a large reach, especially considering it's been active for several years now.  So I tried an advertising campaign and it actually worked out pretty well.  I need to go back and take a look at the campaign, figure out lessons learned, and do another one.

Etsy isn't that great a site for visual artists.  It's a crafts-oriented site where the average sale is under $20.  That may work well for crafters who do a lot of inexpensive stuff, but not for visual artists whose work often entails many many hours of labor.  Despite that, there are some really good visual artists on Etsy.   Don't believe me?  Check out the list I put together on figurative artists.  I've got about 30-40 small works listed there, like figure drawings, quick oil sketches, photos, that sort of thing.  I've had a few sales.  You really have to market Etsy hard to get any traffic since there are thousands of others on there, and with the low price points, it's hard to justify.  Still, I'm there, and I'm going to push it a bit through the end of the year and then re-evaluate.  There are a few other artist sites that may be better for me.

One of the biggest of those is Saatchi Art.  I used to have a page there many years ago, but never pushed it and never had any traffic.  It eventually went into hibernation.  An American company bought Saatchi Art Online in 2014 and has aggressively expanded its capabilities and growth since then.  So I reactivated my account and built a new page.  There are just a few paintings on there now and more will be added.  One of the neat things about Saatchi is that they will also do open-edition giclees from the photos we provide.  Pretty cool.

I've been doing a newsletter for a number of years.  They come out aperiodically, just a few a year.  Email marketing gurus say that newsletters should come out much more often.  I don't want to spam people with too much information, and occasionally there's not much to say for a long time.  But that's an excuse.  I decided to step it up and send out a newsletter at the beginning of each month.  I sent one at the beginning of October and another yesterday, so I've got a string of two going!  The newest took some work as it was significantly revised to be more inclusive and informative.  If you're interested in getting these newsletters, go to my web page and you can sign up on the Home page.  Or send me a note and I'll add you.

Instagram is another site that I finally joined.  I'm using it strictly to promote my studio biz.  I post once a day (max) and have been very slowly building up my number of followers.  If you're interested, look me up: @skiprohde.  And follow me.  I can say a lot more about Instagram, but that will be a separate post.

So that's what I've been doing to improve my online presence.  It's taking a lot of work.  Once things get started, though, they get easier to update.  Got any thoughts on what else I should be doing?  Or about what each of these sites needs in order to be improved?  Let me know, I'm looking for advice.

Cinderella's Seamstress

Cinderella's Seamstress

Oil on canvas, 48"x48"

A couple of days ago, I finished my newest large painting, "Cinderella's Seamstress".  This one is about the backstory in everything that's beautiful.  Those beautiful things don't just appear by magic: they require a lot of dedicated, hard work by some creative individual.  Often, the work is done alone in a small shop or studio that's a far cry from the glamorous scene that it's meant for.

I've written about this painting in earlier posts.  I started sketching the initial ideas back in April and the basic idea was quickly settled.  Then I had the model come to my studio.  She really is a seamstress, quite good, very accomplished, and a helluva hard worker.  I asked her to come in her working clothes.  She did and brought along with a few accessories.  The leather tool pouch, for example, is what she wears, and it's stuffed with sewing supplies, scissors, and other tools.  Her grandfather was a carpenter and this was his tool pouch back then, so she has this great reminder of her family tradition of making things.

Amy came ready to work.  She brought along her manikin and used a scrap scarf from my studio to whip up a "dress", tacked stuff up on the wall behind her, and we did a lot of studies of her interacting with the manikin.  Oddly enough, the pose I finally decided on was only about the third or fourth one she did.  Although we did a bunch after that, none of them had quite the energy that I was looking for.  So her pose and the position of the manikin were locked in right at the beginning.

Almost everything else, though, changed, and not just in the details.  I had been looking at one of my favorite painters, Jerome Witkin, for inspiration on how to put this narrative painting together.  I couldn't make it work.  Witkin's paintings have an intensity that just didn't fit with my approach.  My paintings are generally quiet and fairly contemplative, so I started looking at another favorite artist whose paintings are also quiet and contemplative: Johannes Vermeer.  I studied his paintings, looking at how he arranged his people in the room, his use of large spaces and small, busy areas, the lines leading the eye around the painting, color of light on the wall, and so on.

Analyzing Vermeer's artworks to see how they work is one thing.  Trying to put those principles to work in a new painting is something else.  I went through many different compositions.  The window was originally on the right, but that put the light onto the seamstress and backlit the dress, and that wasn't right.  An ironing board was at various times behind, to the right, to the left, and in front of the seamstress and dress - sometimes as a visual device to connect the woman and manikin, other times as a visual barrier to establish distance.  A large poster was briefly on the wall.  The window was once more prominent, but it implied that you could look outside, which was not what I wanted the viewer to do, so now it's just barely indicated to provide a logical source of light.  The director's chair came in as a way to help guide the eye around the painting.  The "dress" she made in our first session didn't really work, so I found a photo of one that did, then bought some shiny blue fabric and mocked up the dress on the manikin.  And on and on.

When working on a complex composition like this, I will do sketches of everything - the seamstress, manikin, director's chair, and so on - then cut them out and move them around on a large sheet of paper to figure out how they need to relate to each other.  I'll draw some things in several different sizes as things come forward, backward, or turn.  Once I get something that works, I'll do a value study of the whole thing to look at the arrangements of lights and darks, then move things around again as necessary.  If it passes that test, then I'll transfer the composition to gessoed paper and do a color study.  The first several color studies resulted in me going back to square one and reworking the composition from scratch.  But finally the composition that you see above came together.

The next step was to prepare the canvas.  I built the frame and stretched the canvas.  It's polyester, more or less the same stuff used in sails, so it's extremely durable, much tighter than cotton or linen, and won't rot or mildew.  It's the same material that museums use to re-line old master paintings when they're restored.  I gessoed the canvas and then toned it with a coating of cool gray.  To transfer the composition, I drew grids on the final drawing, drew equivalent grids on the canvas, and copied the major outlines.  And then it was time to paint.  I built it up gradually, in multiple layers.  There was a good bit of adjusting going on - the director's chair turned out to be too large, so I had to shrink it quite a bit, for example, but mostly it was minor detail stuff.  The painting took a couple of months because this is a good-sized canvas and I wanted to take my time and do it as well as I possibly could.

And there it is.  Finally.  Done.  I feel pretty good about the way it turned out and am looking for exhibition opportunities for it.  And I'm already thinking about my next painting.  Haven't started the sketches yet, but there are a few ideas floating around ...

Landscape Painting

Clouds over the French Broad River

Oil on canvas, 30"x40"

For the past few weeks, I've been working on paintings for the upcoming exhibit, "Of Time and the River".  It's a fundraiser for RiverLink, which is a non-profit in Asheville that has been working for years to clean up the French Broad River.  They've done a great job: the river is much much cleaner than it has been since this was Cherokee territory.  Now there are river rafters, kayakers, and parks and greenways all through the Asheville area.  All this takes money.  Artists are happy to help, since the river is a great source of inspiration for artworks.  Another thing in RiverLink's favor is that they treat artists as professionals.  Rather than asking us to give them stuff that they can auction off at ridiculously low prices, they partner with us very much like galleries do.  And as a result, they get much better artworks that are worth higher prices.  Win-win-win.  I'm going to have seven works in this event.  Six are paintings and one is an etching.  Several of the paintings were done specifically for this show, including the one above, which I just finished and signed today.

This painting was really tough.  I wanted to get the rich glow of light in the clouds right at sunset.  So in July and early August, when the clouds really pile up in late afternoon, I made several trips to local spots where I could get a good view of both the clouds and the land and river below, right at sunset.  I took my sketchbook and my camera, making lots of notes about color variations, cloud shapes, reflections, the way the land looked, and so on.  And I took a couple hundred photos.  Sunset is such an amazing thing: it creeps up on you slowly over 45 minutes or so, and then wham, the light and shadows change so fast over about 10 minutes, and then it's over.

The next step was to do a lot of color studies to try out different ideas and compositions.  As the saying goes, the best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas.  Most of them wound up in the trash, and the initial study using the idea of clouds reflected in the water looked nothing like this.  But trial and lots of error finally came up with the basic composition you see above.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I started in on this canvas and immediately ran into issues that hadn't been clear on the small studies.  One was that the cloud kept growing until it was this huge monster.  Oddly, the bigger the cloud, the less remarkable it was.  The technical reason was that the yellow and orange cloud dominated so much of the canvas that it was no longer a focal point.  By shrinking it, it became a warm center of interest in a large cool-colored canvas.  A second problem was color.  When dealing with clouds, you're dealing with almost pure color.  It's not muddied like paint is.  So to get that pure color, I was using my purest paints.  That lead to over-saturation.  The blues were BLUE, the purples were PURPLE, the greens GREEN, and so on.  It was hideous.  I had to mute the cool colors somehow without muddying them up, while leaving the warm colors in the clouds strong.  I tried layering colors, and that worked in the clouds but not in the sky and purple clouds.  So then I tried using the purest complementary colors to tone things down.  For you non-painters, that means mixing a bit of orange into the blue for the sky.  Blue and orange are on opposite sides of the color wheel, so as you add orange to blue, it becomes less BLUE and more muted.  At some point, though, it becomes gray and then a muted orange, so you have to walk that fine line of mixing.  So, bottom line, I spent a lot of time working on the blues and purples, toning them down enough so that the yellows, oranges, and reds in the clouds really popped.  I'm not convinced that I hit it right.  It still looks over-saturated (especially in this photo), but it's as good as I can make it now.

The process, though, was both very challenging and a lot of fun.  You might not have thought "fun" if you heard me cussing at it, but once things started happening, it really was fun.  I want to do more paintings of clouds, and the river, and reflections on the water.  Each one of those subjects has a lot of subtleties that I had to deal with in this painting, and they're going to need many more paintings before I can begin to understand them.

Success Story

In the early summer of 1996, I was in Sarajevo as part of the NATO peacekeeping forces.  I was at the headquarters and we had pretty much free rein to go around the city.  Actually, we were encouraged to.  Our boss believed that we were there to bring the peace, and that meant doing peaceful things, like going out to restaurants, shopping, and talking with locals.

One of the places I went was the library.  Before the war, this was a big, beautiful building that held irreplaceable documents, books, and artifacts dating back about a thousand years.  But sometime during the war, Serbian forces surrounding the city heard that military forces were using the library's basement, so they shelled the building and set fire to it and everything inside.  A group of us visited it one day and went inside.  It wasn't safe, of course - the building could have collapsed at almost any time.  Years later, I made this painting of the scened from just inside the front door:

Over the years, I've wondered what happened to that building.  I heard that they were trying to restore it, but hadn't heard anything else.  Until today.  Bosnia has completed the restoration of the old library and it is now reopened.  Here is what the library looks like now, from the same viewpoint:

Fantastic.  Just fantastic.

Truthiness in the Republican Debate

You don't listen to a debate of Presidential wannabe's and expect to hear a lot of the truth.  As the old joke goes, "How do you know when a politician is lying?  When he's talking!"  And debates these days are more about macho posturing than honest, substantive discussion.

So last night was the Republican presidential debate.  I didn't watch it as driving nails into my forehead would be less painful.  Political junkies suffered through it, though.  One of the more interesting junkies is Politifact, which fact-checks everybody's statements.  They published a report today that showed the number of statements each candidate made in six categories: True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, and Pants on Fire.  It was interesting to go through their data.

Being a bit of a geek, I decided to do an analysis of each candidate's answers and find out how they scored on the truthiness continuum.  For each "True" statement, they got 5 points; for each "Mostly True" they got 4 points, and so on, with 0 points awarded for a "Pants On Fire" answer.  Then I added up their points and divided by the number of statements they made.  The result was an average score of how true their statements were.  Here are the results:

Bobby Jindal: 3.44 (ie: about midway between "Mostly True" and "Half True")
John Kasich: 3.28
Jeb Bush: 3.26
Rand Paul: 3.07
Chris Christie: 3.01
Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham: 3.00 (this is the "Half True" level)
Mike Huckabee: 2.65
Scott Walker: 2.62
Carly Fiorina: 2.55
Rick Santorum: 2.34
Ted Cruz: 2.11 (this is about the "Mostly False" level)
Ben Carson: 1.57
Donald Trump: 1.54 (halfway between the "False" and "Mostly False" levels)

Very interesting.  Remember, this is only a measure of how true their statements are.  It doesn't consider whether they actually believe the nonsense coming out of their mouths.  And it doesn't consider a lot of other things that have to be taken into account in choosing our next Supreme Leader.  All it indicates is how true their statements might be at any given moment.

I find it very interesting that three of the top four candidates in the current polls are at the bottom of the truthiness scale.  What they're saying is mostly false, but the Republican base loves them for it.  What can you expect from people who watch Fox News?  They're raised on falsehood, and seem to know quality falsehood when they hear it.

Another interesting thing is that Bobby Jindal is at the top of the list, but he made very few statements (9).  I thought that maybe keeping your mouth shut would be a good way to score well, but then, Ben Carson made even fewer statements (7) and scored only a tick better than the biggest liar, Donald Trump.

So there you have it.  According to Politifact, about half the Republican field scores in the "Half True" or better side, while the other half don't, and three of those are in the "Mostly False" or worse category.  Including most of the leaders.

It will be interesting to do the same analysis for the Democratic candidates, if the national party ever lets them have a debate.

Plein Air Painting

With fall setting in, we have a window of really nice weather, perfect for going outdoors and painting onsite.  Today, I went out to the French Broad River.  This river runs through western North Carolina and into Tennessee, eventually flowing into the Tennessee River and then the Mississippi.  Here in Madison County, the river flows through the Appalachian Mountains, and it can get pretty spectacular.

If you're wondering how a river can cross the mountains, it's because the French Broad is one of the oldest rivers in the world.  It was here before the Appalachians were created 300 million years ago.  When the mountains grew, the river was already cutting its way through them.  That's one hell of an old river.

I went scouting yesterday to find some potential painting locations.  I found quite a few, actually - turnouts along the road where I could get down to the riverside.  Today, I left the dogs at home, loaded up the truck with my painting gear, and headed out to the first one on my list.  It's a gravel turnout only big enough for one car, with a very steep climb down the bank.  At the bottom, there's a flat area where people have built a fire pit and apparently had a couple of parties.  I set up my easel looking downstream and went to work.  After about an hour or so, I had one painting that turned out okay.

Then I turned the easel around so I was looking upstream and painted another.  It turned out okay as well.

I didn't sign either painting.  I need a bit of distance from them to do an impartial evaluation and modify as necessary.  That may happen tomorrow.  Or later - I may go to another spot on the river tomorrow instead!  Gotta take advantage of the great weather while you can, y'know?

Instagram

I recently set up an Instagram account for the studio.  Yes, I'm late to the party, but I'm not an early adopter of anything.  Hell, I still paint, by hand, with oil paints and brushes made from hog's hair.  That was trendy maybe 600 years ago.  Meanwhile, Instagram has only been around for five years.  I've still got another 595 years to go!

I started looking at Instagram after hearing an interesting discussion of it on a podcast.  (Podcast - that's so ... 2000's ...).  Instagram sounded like a great way to find new artists and to get my own work in front of new eyes.  So I jumped in last month, got an account, and starting poking and posting.  Not too much - one post a day is my max.  I found quite a few artists on there that I knew already.  Then I found out about this thing called "hashtags".  That opened the door.  I looked at what other artists were using for hashtags, poked those tags into a search, and started finding a lot of really good stuff.  And a lot of crap.  But hey, that goes with the territory when you're wandering around in a non-curated environment.  (And in a curated environment, too, unless you choose your curator carefully).  Then I started applying appropriate hashtags to my own postings and people started finding me.  Cool!

I'm still trying to figure out what works best for me.  Initially, I posted completed and signed artworks from a variety of series: paintings, life drawings, the "Faces of Afghanistan", and so on.  I've also added a few other things: shots of my palette (who's interested in that?  other artists) and detail snaps of works in progress, for example.  And I'm playing around, seeing what happens if I edit an older post, stuff like that.  So far, I have not yet crashed Instagram.

This system seems like a complement to my web page, studio Facebook page, and blog.  Instagram gets an image out to a wide audience quickly.  My studio's Facebook page is a running collection of artworks, interesting posts that I've found somewhere, and random comments.  My web page is like my professional portfolio.  Think of it as me with a jacket and tie, with a resume and business cards handy.  And this blog is a way for me to record things that I may find interesting and that only three people in the world will actually read.

So if you're interested in seeing my Instagram posts, you can find me at @skiprohde.

Automotive Deep Clean

I'm in the middle of doing a deep clean on my truck.  This is something I do about once a year for each of my vehicles.  It's a long, hard, pain-in-the-ass procedure, but it helps keep the cars looking good.  I got started doing this over 20 years ago and now it's a habit.  Sometimes I have to wonder if there's something everybody else knows that I don't, because in the 15 years we've been in this neighborhood, I've only seen a neighbor washing his car once, and he didn't even bother to wax it.  No, most people just run their cars through the local car wash and hit the "wax" button, if anything, and that's enough for them.

Not for me.  My cars gotta last, and that means they gotta look good and run well.  A good wax job will help the paint last longer, and painting a car is expensive.  You can buy a helluva lot of wax for the price of one paint job.  Since I'm a cheapskate, I figure it's worth my while to spend a little bit of money on the right stuff and then spend the hours necessary to do a decent job.

So what's involved in an automotive deep clean?  For me, five long steps.  First is a good wash.  Then there's the cleaning.  Then the polishing,  Then the wax.  Finally, the ancillary stuff: windows, windshield, tires, and interior.

The first step is a good wash.  You can do this at your coin-operated car wash, but I always do it in my own driveway with a hose and a bucket of automotive-spec cleaner.  That way, I go over the whole car and get a good idea of what needs attention.  

But this only gets the surface dirt.  It doesn't get the bugs off the front, doesn't get the tar and tree sap off the sides, nor the water burns off the top and hood.  If you run your hand over the finish, you'll feel lots of little bumps.  All that stuff should come off.  To do this, I use an abrasive cleaner that I get from an automotive paint store.  It's not as abrasive as rubbing compound, but it does have some grit to it.  Professional detailers will use this stuff with a high-speed buffer, but I don't.  It's too easy to burn through the paint.  Instead, I use a small terrycloth towel and go over all the paint by hand.  Rub it on like wax, and rub the tar and tree sap and other imperfections until they go away, and then buff the surface with another terrycloth towel.  I do this on the chrome as well.  At the end, it should be squeaky clean.  What you've just done is remove all the old wax, tar, and everything else from the surface of the paint.  

The next step is to polish it.  Many people think wax makes the car shiny, but it doesn't really.  The shine comes from a very smooth paint surface.  However, the surface of a car that's been on the road for a while isn't really smooth.  It's actually got high and low spots, tiny abrasions, and other nearly invisible imperfections.  That's why it squeaks when it's squeaky clean.  When we use a polishing compound, it is specially made to fill those tiny imperfections, so when it's buffed down, the surface of the paint is as smooth as it can be.  Again, the pros use buffers, but I use terrycloth towels to apply the polishing compound by hand and then buff it down.  I only do this on the paint, not the chrome.  At the end, the surface is very smooth and not squeaky at all.

The next stage is the wax.  This is really to provide a protective coating for the paint surface.  Use a carnauba paste wax and apply it with a damp application pad, then buff it down with yet another terrycloth towel.  I wax the windows (not the windshield) and the chrome as well - all that stuff is shiny and needs something to keep the bugs and tar from sticking.  

Finally, there's the other stuff.  I scrub down the tires and wheels to get rid of all that brake dust.  If the tires have raised white letters, I'll go over them with a scrubber.  Then the tires get a spray-on tire treatment that makes them a shiny black.  The shine doesn't last long, but the treatment puts some silicone on the tires to protect them from the sun and weather.  As for the windshield, I use Rain-X.  It makes rain bead up and run off, to the point where you don't need the wipers on the highway.  Wax does, too, but Rain-X lasts longer under the wipers.  On the interior, I wipe it down with Armor All cleaner, but not the "protectant" as it leaves a slick silicone feel that, to me, is just slimy.

And there you have it.  Way too much work (maybe 8 hours total per car), but it keeps my cars looking pretty good.