New Artworks

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

Amy #11

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

Amy #14

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

Jennifer #4

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

Jennifer #5

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

Troy #5

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

Karen

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

Insight Into Making Better Art

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

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

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

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

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

I have a lot to learn from these guys.

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

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

Passwords

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

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

Who the hell are they kidding?

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

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

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

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

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

The Embody Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figures in Charcoal and Pastel

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

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

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

Amy #9

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

Amy #11

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

Amy #14

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

Jennifer #1

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

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

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

HB2

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

Representative Presnell:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is stupid.

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

HB2 is WRONG.

Repeal HB2 now!

Skin Tones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Series

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

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

Amy #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amy #7

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

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

Experimentation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creativity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.