Podcasts and Catch-Up

 This has been a busy three weeks.  We got our second Covid shots (yay!) and have been dealing with a lot of other pop-up issues that have taken a lot of time.  I'm still working in the studio, finishing up a double portrait for a friend and working on a new painting of my own.  I'm going to have some paintings in a veterans' invitational art exhibit in St. Augustine in July, which is really cool.  More info on that later.

Do you listen to podcasts?  I do.  When I'm on the road, even if it's just a run to Asheville about 20 minutes away, I've usually got one playing.  Most of mine, with two exceptions, are about art, history, or the military.  Here's what's on my phone:

For art podcasts:

- John Dalton's "Gently Does It".  John interviews artists, with occasional gallery owners or others involved in the art world.  He generally talks to figurative artists, meaning those whose work is about people.  I've found a lot of very impressive and inspiring artists to follow.  John talks to them about what motivates them, their background, technical aspects of their work, you name it.  A lot of the experimentation that I've been doing over the past year originates in these interviews.  I'll hear something that the artists do that I will then try out in the studio, or I'll see some really cool work and try to reverse-engineer what they did and how they did it.  If you're a figurative artist, this is a must-listen.

- Antrese Wood's "Savvy Painter".  Take everything I just said about John and repeat it here.  Antrese has a warm and engaging personality that really brings out the best in her interview subjects.  Where John has more figurative artists from around the world, Antrese has a few more American artists in a slightly wider range of genres.  If you're a painter, this is a must-listen.

- Michael Faith's "Art Affairs".  This is a relatively new addition to my podcast library.  Michael is another good interviewer.  His focus leans toward young emerging artists, and there's not as much technical discussion as John or Antrese will do, but that's fine. 

History podcasts:

- Mike Duncan's "Revolutions".  I've been a fan of Mike's for several years now.  He did a very long series on "The History of Rome", from before its founding until the end of the western empire.  Then he launched into the "Revolutions" series, which looks at a variety of western-world revolutions: the English, American, French, South American, Haitian, and now Russian events.  Mike has a polished, professional, engaging, and humorous style that keeps it all interesting.  You know the phrase, "those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it"?  Well, it's clear that we know a lot about history, but we repeat it anyway.  I heard about things throughout the Roman series as well as every Revolutions event that are being repeated, in slightly different ways, today.  That's not always a good feeling.  Highly recommend Mike's podcasts.

- The Leakey Foundation's "Origin Stories".  This series explores the foundations of humanity, what it means to be "human", where we came from, and how millions of years of development are still evident today.  There are interviews, recorded lectures, and other very professionally-done presentations.  There have been episodes on what is being learned from a 13-million-year-old pre-human fossil, a single cave in Spain that has over a million years worth of fossils, Denisovans, and a fascinating Carl Sagan presentation.

- The BBC's "In Our Time".  This one has been going on for over a decade.  The host, Melvyn, gathers a few experts in a particular subject together and they'll have a lively discussion about it.  You might hear one about Marcus Aurelius one time, China's Cultural Revolution another, as well as episodes about Thomas Jefferson, the Zong Massacre, coffee, or W H Auden.  It has a huge range of subjects.  Great stuff.

Military podcasts:

- The US Naval Institute's "Proceedings".  I've been out of the Navy for over 20 years now, but I'm still very interested in what's happening in "my" branch of the service.  I just found this one recently, so I'm kinda binge-listening to get familiar with today's issues.  For example, I listened to one that discussed Desert Shield/Storm and its lessons learned, then another on what China learned from our experiences in Desert Storm and how these findings have influenced the development of their strategy.  Hint: it's not good for us.  The podcast covers pretty much the entire range of Navy activities, so if you're interested in maritime operations, there's something here for you.

- John Spencer's "Urban Warfare Project".  This one is hosted by the Army's West Point academy.  Where the Navy's "Proceedings" covers the entire Navy, this one focuses on a particular segment of Army operations.  As a guy who spent time in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent time with Army soldiers involved in house-to-house combat operations, this is of particular interest to me.  Urban warfare is a very tough subject.

Other podcasts:

- Kristi Piehl's "Flip Your Script".  I first learned of this podcast when they contacted me to do an interview.  And I've become a fan.  Kristi is an excellent interviewer.  She talks to people who have seriously changed the direction of their lives.  In my case, it was from a Navy officer to an artist.  Some of her subjects changed their lives very deliberately, while others had a change forced on them by life circumstances.  In every case, these are compelling and often inspirational stories.

- Holly Priestley's "Deliberate Living".  Holly could be a subject for Kristi to consider.  Holly left her day job two years ago, moved into a Ford Econoline van with her dog, and has been living on the road ever since.  She has traveled all over the western United States, generally going north in warmer times and south in cooler times.  She is definitely not homeless, she did this by choice.  Holly's podcasts include interviews with others who are fellow "rubber tramps" in vans or RVs, presentations on how she has rigged her van and makes a living on the road, and loads of other topics.  Full disclosure: Holly is my niece.

So there you have it: my podcast list.  There were quite a few others that have been on my phone over the years but have fallen off for various reasons.  Some just ended, others got boring, and some didn't live up to my expectations.  These, though, are the winners.  Check 'em out!

Development of a New Work

 I finished up a new painting yesterday and already have another underway on the easel.  Thought I'd share the development process here.  Loyal readers of this blog (all two of you) know that I've been doing a lot of experimentation during the 'ronavirus lockdown of the past year.  I've done multi-figure compositions, single-figures, loose painting styles, tight styles, approaches modeled after various artists, and lots of other stuff.  Most wound up in the trash can.  Some of it seemed to work.  

One thing that seems to work best with me is a single-figure composition.  I seem to be at my best, both in the creative process and the finished artwork, when I focus on trying to get the inner character of one individual.   Once there are two or more people, the artwork isn't about them as individuals, it's about the relationships between them.  And when there are a lot of people, it isn't about the relationships (there are too many), it's about some bigger story.  And I just don't seem to be able to create a compelling "bigger story", at least in my own estimation.

Recently, I've tried some different approaches based on observations of other artists' work.  One thing that resonated with me was "simplify".  Simplify the composition, simplify the subject, simplify everything.  Get back to my roots, something like the charcoal and pastel figures I've been doing for the past few years.  So that was the goal in this piece.  Troy (oil on canvas, 24x18).  

First was a simple line block-in to place the figure on the canvas.

Now to check out the large light and dark masses.  I already had the idea that the figure would be darkest at the shoulders and lighter and less detailed further down.

Put in the first layer of the background.  Used a very light neutral warm color.  And had the first round of getting the face to look light it might be human ...

More refinement of the face, body, and arms.  All of this was done in one day.  Now it needs to sit for a week or so to dry.  Anything sooner will lift this first level of paint off the canvas.

So a week later, I went back and worked the background.  It's still a light neutral warm, but it's got more colors in it, and there's a very slight gradation top to bottom.  Next, I brought the face and arm up to a finished level.  Came back the next day and scumbled Van Dyke Brown (which is really Ivory Black plus a bit of Burnt Sienna) over the T-shirt and body, then worked all the edges to get them the way they should be.  A few other tweaks, and I'm calling it done.

... And Still More Experimentation

 After finishing up my last post about the Undertakers II painting, I discovered another interesting artist.  I listen to three different podcasts where artists are interviewed, and one of them talked with Jennifer Anderson.  Her approach sounded remarkably like what I try to do, so I looked up her work.  And it was a "wow".  Very strong technically, compositionally, and emotionally.  She was doing in oil paint something very similar to what I had been doing in charcoal and pastel over the past few years, and what I had tried and failed to do in oil.  These are single figures or faces that carry so much of the sitter's character.  Here's a sample, titled Fragile: 

Here we have a single figure, extremely well painted.  The chair she's sitting on has been reduced to just a few lines, and her environment has been reduced to a barely-modulated flat surface.  This helps focus attention on the figure.  The background has a very slight gradation, enough to tell you that it wasn't ignored.  And the figure has been pushed over to one side.  The fact that it runs off the canvas to the top, left, and bottom results in those edges being fully engaged in the composition.  The large flat gray space to the right becomes important in its own right, and there is a strong diagonal running from upper right to lower left that gives it a dynamic tension.  All together, this composition speaks to me of the young woman's inner thoughts: probably not idyllic, somewhat unsettled, but being seriously considered.

 Here's a comparable piece of my charcoal/pastel series, Astrid #1:

 

This was done in one of our weekly life sessions.  Single female figure, flat background, deliberately not "finished".  It has some of the same characteristics of Jennifer's work, but not all.  The figure is pushed to the side to create some room in front of her face, but not to the extent of Jennifer's work.  In most of my artworks in this series, though, the figure is centered on the page.  I discovered that this positioning doesn't really engage the rest of the surrounding space.  It's just ... space.  In Astrid #1, the empty space is more important conceptually.  It's not something I ever thought about, it just was.  Now I know to think about it.  Another issue is that the background here is flat and untouched.  In many works in the series, it comes across as unfinished or unaddressed.  This was something I wrestled with and never really came to a satisfactory conclusion.

So after looking at Anne Magill's work (see my last post) and Jennifer Anderson's figures, I tried some lessons learned in new paintings.  My intentions: simplify, engage the whole space, simplify, single figure, pay attention to edges, some areas developed while others are flat, and simplify.  Here's the first effort, Natalie:

And the second, Emma: 

So ... success?  I think I'm onto something that I can really sink my teeth into.  What do you think?

More Experimentation

 This time of Covid is giving me plenty of time to experiment with new techniques and approaches in painting, play with new ideas, and generally try stuff that I often don't get to try.  I just had an experiment that, I think, gave me some new tools for my artistic toolbox.  Here's what happened.

I've been working on my family history for many decades now.  Last year, I was sorting through some old photos and came across this one from about 1920: 

The two on the left are my grandparents.  They were apparently clowning around with their friends somewhere over the Hudson River.  What really grabbed my attention, though, was the guy on the right.  In the photo, he's laughing, but with just a tiny change to his expression, he could be crying out.  Remember the Nazi in the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark", the guy whose face melted at the end?  Yeah, this guy in the photo kinda looks like him.  So I thought it would be fun to take this old photo and see if I could make it creepy.  I took a swing at it last year and this was the result:

I titled it "The Undertakers".  I thought the end result was pretty "meh", but didn't really know why.  So I shrugged my shoulders and went on with other experiments.  

Recently, I was looking at the work of a really interesting painter, Anne Magill.  Her paintings are often dark, with a very limited range of colors.  Here's a sample:

I was looking at her artwork and asking myself what feelings they evoked in me, and one of the responses was "mystery".  And then I remembered that mystery was one of the feelings I was trying to get out of "The Undertakers".  So I pulled it off the shelf, set it up on an easel, and compared it to Magill's paintings.  And I realized that, in my painting, I told the viewer way too much.  Too much detail in the faces.  Too much light.  Too much color.  Too much other stuff: cracks in the rock, trees, people.  It didn't give the viewer room to create a story of their own.  So I pulled out another canvas the same size as the first one and transferred the same composition over to the new canvas.  Then I went to work: simplifying the composition (one of the figures and all the trees are gone), reducing the details, reducing the range of colors, and trying to keep the attention focused where I wanted it.  It took a couple of weeks, but I called it done and here it is:

This version is much better than the first one.  I don't know that I'd call it a winner, but I certainly learned a lot from it.  There are several things that I'd do differently if I had to do it again.  Maybe I'll go back over it in a week or two and make some more changes.  But it's definitely closer to my original intention than the first painting.  I'm working on another project right now that uses many of the same ideas, but in a very different way.  We'll see how that one comes out.  Meanwhile, I'm pretty happy to have a new tool in my studio toolbox!

Thoughts on the Second Impeachment

 There's lots of discussion (mostly one-way venting) about Trump's second impeachment. Do it now, do it in two weeks, don't do it, and everything in between. I'm in the "do it much later" camp. I'm basing that on my own experience.

Back in the spring of 1996, I was working on the staff of the Commander of the Peace Implementation Forces (IFOR) in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. We (the US and NATO) had pretty much forced all sides to stop fighting and start talking. They'd been through several years of brutal warfare and all sides still wanted revenge on the others. I accidentally crashed a lunch meeting one time with Bosniacs, Serbs, and NATO, and you could cut the tension with a knife. But at least they were talking.

Two of the Serbians that everybody in the world wanted arrested were Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic (we called them "K&M"). They were wanted for genocide and murdering thousands of Bosniaks. There was a constant drumbeat from the US, Europe, Asia, the UN, everywhere, that NATO should arrest K&M and bring them to justice. "No justice, no peace" - sound familiar? But to the Serbians, both men were heroes.

Admiral Smith refused to go after K&M. His mantra to all of us on the staff was "We're here to establish the peace and stop the killing. We're going to do that. We can bring K&M to justice later."

One day a minor Serbian general took a wrong turn and drove into a NATO checkpoint. They arrested him, which was what our Rules of Engagement required. You would not believe the uproar. The whole peace process came within a hair of falling apart - and this was over a minor "general" who was really more like a glorified militia leader. It took all the negotiating expertise of Admiral Smith, NATO, and the UN, to convince the Serbs to continue the ceasefire and continue the talks. And all this over a minor general who wasn't even well known among the Serbs, much less a hero. Imagine what would have happened if we had snatched K&M at that time. The peace process would have been over, war would have immediately resumed, and thousands more would have died.

Karadzic was arrested twelve years later and the Serbs had no problem sending him to the Hague for war crimes. Mladic was arrested by the Serbs themselves three years later and also sent off to the Hague. Both were convicted and are serving life sentences.

As for Bosnia, it is still taking a lot of work, and there is still a lot of distrust between the factions, but they're working together and haven't resumed fighting. Admiral Smith was right: peace first, justice later.

So I think the situation with Trump is somewhat similar: a dangerous instigator with a rabid fan base, but he's no longer in power. Biden stressed "unity". Let's build unity, get the government functional again, and take care of the country first. Trump's justice can wait. For once, it's not all about him.

A New Wedding Painting

 

I recently finished the only wedding painting started in 2020.  All my plans for the year collapsed in March, along with everybody else's, when the lockdowns began.  Some of my clients rescheduled their weddings to 2021.  Some of them went ahead with their scheduled 2020 weddings, and for those, I canceled out.  Weddings are superspreader events and I didn't want to have anyone superspread to me.  Frankly, I was very surprised at the number of events that were held.  I had more inquiries for wedding paintings in 2020 than I had in any year before.  And I said no to all of them.  That is, until I got a note from Jessica.  She asked if I'd be interested in a virtual wedding.  A what?

Yes, that was right: a virtual wedding.  Their plan was to have an event where they, the officiant, the photographer, and the venue manager were the only ones onsite.  Everybody else, all family members and friends, were to be on Zoom.  Including me.  Well, there's a new idea.

So that's what we did.  On the Big Day, I was in my studio, working on creating their wedding painting, just like I would have been if I'd been at the event.  I had my iPhone set up on a tripod to record the painting's development and share it on Zoom.  Everybody watched what I was doing until the ceremony started, then again for a bit after the ceremony, First Dance, and online toasts.  Very cool!

A day or two later in the studio, I decided that my initial composition was crap.  So I got out my Painter's Emergency Repair Kit (a jar of white oil primer), painted over everything, and started from scratch.  Essentially, I zoomed way in, making them and the fireplace much larger and cropping out all the irrelevant sky, trees, and lawn.  Much mo' better.  I worked up the composition in drawings, transferred it to the canvas, and went to work.  The result is what you see here.

Since I wasn't physically onsite, I had to rely on some photographic resources.  The Old Edwards Inn provided me with some photos of the location.   And Jeff and Jessica's photographer, Abby Byrd, allowed me to use some of her photos as reference.  Without those two, this painting couldn't have happened.  Many many thanks to those two!

I'm really happy with the way this one turned out.  And, best of all, so are Jeff and Jessica. 

Book Report: A Thousand Splendid Suns

 I just finished a wonderful book.  A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, is a novel about two Afghan women.  It covers a period from about 1974 to 2003.  This was the beginning of an incredibly turbulent period in Afghanistan, one that is still ongoing.  It's a period of conflict between traditional ways, changing times, warlords, Soviets, invasions, the Taliban, and Americans, as told through the lives of these two women.  It's not necessarily pretty, but it is inspiring.

Khaled Hosseini is the author of The Kite Runner.  He was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, but has lived in the United States since 1980 and is an American citizen now.  He knows his native country well.  And he  knows how to write.  The people in this story are very real.  I knew people like them during my time in Kandahar.  Actually, I knew people like them in Baghdad as well, and I know people like them right here in western North Carolina.  People are people; it's their situations that are different.  If you're at all interested in Afghanistan, or in people living under extremely tough conditions, read A Thousand Splendid Suns.

K.T. Oslin Passing

 I was all set to make a post about goings-on in the studio until I heard that the singer K.T. Oslin passed away.  What a loss.  I discovered K.T. about the same time lots of other people did: around 1990.  At the time, I was in the early stages of an epic divorce and country music was THE music to listen to.  And K.T. was at the top of her game.

K.T. didn't write the usual first-love songs you hear from popular singers, or songs about her dog or pickup truck or other typical country things.  Her songs are for those of us who are a bit older, who've been around the block a few times, who've won some and lost some, been there and done that, and are still trying to figure it all out.  Songs like "80's Ladies", about three childhood friends growing up: "We've said "I do" and we signed "I don't" and we swore we'd never do that again".  (You really need to see the video on YouTube for this one.)  Or "Mary and Willie", two older single people whose unrealistically high expectations for possible mates ensures they never meet somebody that would be good for them.  And she could be funny: in "Hey Bobby", the protagonist is a young girl who's the one with a car and, with a sly knowing "trust me" purr, suggesting they go for a ride, completely turning the tables on the usual boy/girl storyline. 

Listening to a K.T. Oslin album, you'll hear stories of life's situations that we're all familiar with.  But nobody writes songs about them like her.  Few sing with the kind of personal feelings that she does.  You know she has lived every word of every song she ever wrote.  That's art.  

The paper said she had Parkinson's for the past few years and was in an assisted living facility.  Then she tested positive for COVID last week.  And now a great artist is gone.  So long, K.T., you're missed, but your music is still here, and I'm listening to it.

"Guardians"

Guardians

It's been a bit of a journey, but one of the paintings I mentioned in my last post is finally done. Guardians is the second painting of a new series about a possible future. I'm very disturbed by the division, vitriol, and willful stupidity that is rampant in this country today. I've personally seen what divisions can do to a society: Bosnia's ethnic cleansing, Iraq's division between Shiite and Sunni, and Afghanistan's divisions between the Taliban insurgents and the corrupt government. And I'm imagining what those divisions would look like in this country if we keep going the way we're going. It's not a pretty sight. 

 A big focus for me with this painting, beyond the concept, as in the technical aspects of making the idea work.  I spent a lot of time on the composition, then on the execution in paint: colors, light/dark values, hard and soft edges, cool/warm balance, all with the goal of getting the viewer to see what I wanted them to see, in the order I wanted the different things to be seen.  I think it turned out pretty well.  The subject is certainly not one that people will find beautiful and want to hang over their couch, but that was never the point.  

The next couple of paintings to come out of the studio will be much more cheerful, I promise!

A Work In Progress

 Just because I haven't posted any new work of my own in a while doesn't mean I haven't been busy.  As noted in previous posts, I'm doing a lot of experimenting.  That means a lot of experiments fail and wind up in the trash.  But I'm learning a lot, even from the fails (maybe especially from the fails) and trying to build on that.

At some point, though, you have to stop experimenting and produce something.  I do, anyway.  So there are two paintings underway in the studio right now.  They're very different, which is kinda the way I work.  One painting is a riff on the artist and model.  There's nothing deep or complex there, but I'm trying to apply some lessons learned about putting paint on canvas.  That painting went sideways pretty quickly: I tried too many different new ideas, they collided, and I was about ready to slash it with a knife.  So I covered up a lot of problem areas with white paint and it's actually much more interesting now.  Once the paint dries (white paint takes forEVER to dry), I'll get back to work on it.  Maybe you'll see it here someday.

The other painting is much more complex.  It's part of my series on what could happen if we keep going the way we're going - a cautionary tale, sorta.  It's a wedding, only not like any wedding you've ever seen.  That's all I'll say about the painting's subject for now.  Instead, I'll talk about the process of putting it together.  

I'm using a wedding theme because I've done a lot of wedding paintings for clients and have a ton of reference photos.  I've had a strong idea of what I wanted the painting to say, so I did some very rough sketches to get an idea of the basic composition, including the light/dark areas, the initial focus, and what would be needed to flesh out the story.  Then I went through my stash of images, pulling out one person from this event, another person from that one, a key item from an entirely unrelated photo shoot, and so on.  Then more rough sketches to work through ideas.  I'm pretty crappy at using Photoshop, but eventually I put all these different items into one image.  Then I did a test painting, essentially a sketch in oil paint, and found some things that worked and others that didn't.  More refinement: throw out earlier ideas, bring in new ones, make more sketches.  

One question that I know is going to pop up is, if you're using Photoshop, why make sketches?  Well, because the Photoshop construction doesn't tell you much.  By doing sketches, you see the subtleties of shape, form, light, dark, and subject matter, and you get to understand the total image, and all of its parts, much better.  

I also use sketches in an old-school pre-Photoshop way.  I draw the environment on a large sheet of paper, then cut out the sketches of people and other items from my sketchbook and tape them down on the large sheet.  Then I move them around, put new things in, take other things out and refine the composition.  Should this figure be larger?  What about perspective?  Huh, now I see a line that runs from this woman's arm through that item over there - how to use that?  Should I play up this man's face, or play it down?  I want a particular effect of light here, so how do I get it?  Those are the types of things going through my head.

So, right now, I have worked out the composition for this painting.  I have the environment drawn on the large sheet, refined the drawings of the figures as much as they needed, and have them taped down in exactly the right positions.  Then I laid a sheet of tracing paper on top and drew a grid on it.  It's in the same relative dimension as the canvas is.  That's what you're seeing in the photo.  I'll draw a similar grid on the canvas, then use light charcoal to copy the composition onto the canvas.  And then I'll start painting.  

So that's where we are now.  Obviously, I still have a loooonnnggg way to go, maybe a month or two or three.  And maybe it'll get trashed.  But hey, that's life, huh?

Book Reports

 No, I'm not going to talk about the recent election and unfinished election business.  Too much has been written already.  Instead, I'm going to talk about two books that I just read.  Both are about the Civil War period, and both are very applicable to the country today.

The first is Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.  This is a long (750 pages text plus another 130 in tiny-font references) biography of Abraham Lincoln.  It covers his whole life, with particular attention to his candidacy for President and his handling of the office during the worst of the Civil War.  While we're often told that Lincoln was one of the two greatest Presidents ever, we aren't told that much about what he did.  We read the Emancipation Proclamation, his Gettysburg Address, maybe his second Inaugural Address, and then he was assassinated.  Goodwin goes into tremendous detail about the divisions of the 1850's and who Lincoln was.  He was extremely honest, especially for a politician.  He had an unmatched feeling for what the people of the country were feeling, what they would accept, how far he could or could not push things, and when to make a move.  He was against slavery, but even more, he was for holding the country together.  He knew how to take complex ideas and put them into the language that regular people could understand.  He cared incredibly deeply.  And he was a genius at keeping his Cabinet, his "team of rivals", together.  Many of them had actively run for President and been defeated by Lincoln, and some were actively angling to replace him.  And many of them were at each other's throats.  Yet Lincoln saw the value that they could bring to the country.  He was able to assuage their egos enough to keep them in their jobs and working together.  It was a truly masterful performance.

Compare that situation to today, where our country is again deeply divided.  We're not on the cusp of another civil war, but we need a President to bring us back together.  Instead, we have the most selfish, ego-driven, irrational, and dishonest President ever.  Instead of bringing us together, he's driving us apart for personal political and monetary gain.  He's the anti-Lincoln.  It will take several successors many years to undo the damage inflicted in the past four years, on top of the damage inflicted by partisan press in the decades before.  Do we have a leader of the caliber of Lincoln?  Anywhere?  I don't see it.  But I'll certainly give the Biden/Harris team a chance.

The other book is And the Crows Took Their Eyes, by Vicki Lane.  This is an historical novel based on  events that took place right here in Madison County, North Carolina, in January 1863.  Madison County was split between Unionists and Secessionists.  Many of the Unionists lived in a remote area called Shelton Laurel, while the Secessionists lived in the county seat of Marshall.  After North Carolina seceded, the two sides ratcheted up tensions and attacks, culminating in what is known as the Shelton Laurel Massacre, in which a local Confederate force murdered 13 men and boys.  The book follows five people on both sides of the divide.  Four were based on real people while one was created to tie the narrative together.  Ms. Lane's people speak in the way they would have at the time, whether they were uneducated farmers from the valleys or educated people from town.  She shows how the same event is seen from polar opposite viewpoints, how resentments can fester, how some people can rise above the situation and others fall to their basest instincts.  It's incredibly well-written. 

This book resonated with me for two reasons.  One, it's absolutely applicable to today, when we're so divided and unwilling to reach across to those who believe differently.  Are those on the other side absolutely wrong in their beliefs?  No, they're not.  But we behave as if they are, and if we follow those beliefs to their conclusion, the consequences will be terrible.  A second reason is that some of my great-great-grandparents lived in McNairy County, Tennessee, before, during, and after the Civil War.  McNairy County, like Madison County, was deeply divided.  My family members were very poor farmers on the Confederate side, living on farms outside a small town.  A wealthy Unionist landowner in the town raised a militia that committed a number of atrocities against Confederate sympathizers.  These acts, like the Shelton Laurel Massacre, were so out of bounds that they were condemned by both the Union and Confederate sides.  So this book brings to life the type of situation that my ancestors had to live.

So: here are two books that I strongly recommend.  They're pretty heavin reading.  I think I'm going to pick up a murder mystery next just so I can relax.

Another Pet Portrait

 Last time, I showed you a small painting I did of Soozzee one of our two little Shih Tzus, who passed away about a year and a half ago.  I just did one of her sister, Indy, who passed away just under three years ago.  Both paintings are 16"x12".  

It turned out pretty well, I think.  We'll let these two paintings dry for a bit, then I'll varnish them both and get some frames, and they'll hang here in the house somewhere.  It'll be nice to have portraits of our two daughters always with us.

Pet Portraits

 Say "pet portraits" and I roll my eyes.  Let's just say that I've never had much respect for artworks of animals in general.  Why paint lions or tigers?  About all the dogs and cats I'd seen were over-sentimentalized.  And most of the works have about as much life in them as a doorknob.  So when I stumbled across the work of Jennifer Gennari (on Instagram: @jen_art), it was a surprise.  Here was somebody who took a classical painting approach to her subjects and really made them alive.  These aren't "pet portraits", they're portraits of individuals who happen to be dogs or cats, and they have tremendous personality.  Here's a sample:

 

This is a beautiful painting.  The brushwork is lively and loose, but accurate.  The colors have variety.  The dog has personality.  It's well done in every respect.  And as the former daddy to two Shih Tzus, this particular painting resonated with me for both style and subject. 

As I discussed in a previous post, I'd just done a painting in the style of another artist.  One of the things that I learned was that I didn't want to work in that particular tight style.  Jennifer's painting was much more in the way that I'd rather work.  So rather than copy her painting, I thought I'd try her approach using my own reference photos.  And here's what the result was:

That's my little Soozzee, who passed away about a year and a half ago.  I still miss her, along with her sister who's been gone for almost three years.  (Guess what my next painting will be ...)

So what did I learn here?  A portrait is a portrait, regardless of the subject.  A painting is either good, or it's not, again regardless of the subject.  I really like working in a loose, wet-into-wet manner, where the brushstrokes, corrections, mistakes, and process are visible.  And doing an artwork of a critter can be rewarding.

Looking at Artists: Use of Color

 Scrolling through my Instagram feed today, I came across a post by Teresa Oaxaca.  It's a series of 3 detail shots of a face in one of her new paintings.  Here's the image that I keyed in on:

I have been focusing a lot of my attention on mixing and using rich but subdued colors.  Teresa's not that way at all: she uses rich, saturated colors.  For 99% of artists who try that approach, it results in gaudy messes.  Not for Teresa.  Her colors are vibrant and lively, everywhere.

And it's that "everywhere" that drew my attention.  Let's zoom in even more:

 

Do the blues jump out at you?  They should.  Look along the line between the lighted and the shadowed areas.  This area is called the intermediate zone, transition zone, and a variety of other names.  It's often darker than the shadowed area, which gets reflected light, and it's usually a bit cooler in color temperature.  Here, Teresa doesn't really make it darker.  And she doesn't just make it cooler, either.  She changes the color to a very definite blue.  Look at the lines along the cheek, just above and below the eyebrow, and along the underside of the nose: blue lines!  Now when I've done those areas, I mix some blue into the color, but it's really just been a muted cool dark, and my attention has been more on the warmer reflected light in the shadow zone.  Now I'm going to try some very definite blues for the transition zones.

And the eyes!  Look at that intense dark blue.  It's just as dark as the rest of the eye (which is disturbingly red over to the shadowed side), but the blue just reaches out and smacks you.  That's confidence in your colors.

There are subtle color shifts all over.  The skin color bounces back and forth between a cool red (alizarin with white?) and muted yellow (Indian yellow?).  They're laid next to each other, rather than mixed together, so your eye puts them together to say "flesh color".  

Great stuff.  More things for me to experiment with in the studio!

Studio Experimenting

For the past week or so, I've been experimenting with a different approach and painting technique in the studio.  One of the artists that has caught my eye is Jeremy Lipking.  His paintings have a very quiet feeling to them.  Mine generally do, too, so I wanted to see what I could learn of his approach that might  come over to mine.  

I chose two of Lipking's paintings as inspiration: Canoe and Sagebrush.  

There were lots of things that played into the feeling in both paintings:

- A solitary figure.  Most of his figures are looking away.  This anonymizes them to an extent and the viewers can imagine themselves in the painting's environment. 

- Lots of flat areas of color: the lake in Canoe and the sky in Sagebrush, for example.

- Very sharp edges - the canoe especially, but the blanket and ridgetop in Sagebrush are sharper than they look.

- Use of value contrasts to focus attention.  The figure in the canoe is almost not noticed at first, but the dark canoe against the brilliant light, especially with the sharp edges (even in the reflections) demands your attention.  In Sagebrush, the high value contrast between the light sky and dark head draws your eye immediately.  

- Use of light and dark shapes as compositional elements.  In Canoe, there are essentially two shapes: light and dark, in a horizontal arrangement.  Sagebrush has a wider range of values, but it's basically a T-shape composition, with the blanket against the darker sage, the brilliant red mountain in the distance, and then the light sky with dark head.

- And they're really finely detailed.  These are almost photographically accurate paintings, and when you enlarge the images, you see very fine detail in face, hair, even the texture of the blanket and sage.  

This exercise was "in the spirit of Lipking", not a copy, so I used a photo of one of my favorite models.  It was taken in the studio, but I wanted to put her outside, using a T-shaped composition.  And I borrowed heavily from the Canoe's setting.  Here's how it looked after day 1:

 It's okay, kinda meh.  Alright, a lot meh.  I went back the next day and reworked it:

So what did I do?  I turned her head.  It made it feel a bit more relaxed and it made her a bit more anonymous.  I darkened the hills and reflections significantly, which better matches what really happens around sunset.  I put a lot more yellow into the sky and water to both lighten them up and warm the painting.  I changed the foreground to bring more sky color to the bottom of the painting and to make it feel more real.  I darkened her shadow and worked on the reflections from the robe.  And I reworked the robe for more detail, a warmer color, and slightly darker value to make it stand out against the light from the water.

I learned a lot about Lipking's technique, even though mine comes nowhere close to his.  The sky and water, for example, are built out of lots of small strokes of blue and yellow laid down next to and also dragged over each other.  When two paint colors are thoroughly mixed together, they give one flat color.  When colors are adjacent to each other, your eye does the mixing, but the result is richer.  Kinda like chords in music as compared to single notes.  

Most importantly, though, I learned that I really don't want to put paint on canvas the way he he does.  I like a looser approach, where the individual strokes are obvious from well back.  I get more energy that way.  But the compositional items, like values and colors?  Yeah.  I can use those.

Life and the Studio

 There's so much happening, so fast, these days.  I've felt so overwhelmed with things to comment about that I haven't commented at all.  Which is probably a good thing.  Frankly, though I'm getting more and more worried about the future of our county.

A few years ago, a friend asked if I was an optimist or a pessimist.  I said that I'm a short-term optimist and a long-term pessimist.  In the short term, humanity has a remarkable ability to muddle through.  Crises come and go, things look dire, and then we move on.  But in the long term, the outlook is really grim.  We're using resources many times faster than the earth can replenish them.  Climate change is raising sea levels, reducing wildlife, reducing crop-production land, and changing weather patterns.  At a time when we need united national and international efforts, we're more polarized and divided than I can remember in my lifetime.  And all the trends are in the wrong directions.  

Until recently, I thought that the tipping point would come a few decades down the road.  Now I think we might actually be in it.  Climate change is burning down the West Coast and hitting the Gulf and East Coast with more storms than ever, one after another.  It's warming the Arctic, which is thawing the permafrost, which is releasing more methane than ever, which is significantly worse as a greenhouse gas.  The world's population is still expanding.  The World Wildlife Federation this week announced that 68% of the world's wildlife has disappeared since 1970.  And if you wear a mask in this country, you're a damned Democrat, and if you don't, you're a damned Republican.  And Trump is destroying what little unity is left.

No good news there.  And I don't know what I can do about any of it except take care of myself and Janis.

So, yeah, writing about my activities in the studio seems so out of it.  But it's my refuge of sanity.  Even when I was creating my last two paintings, Say Their Names and Portland 2020, which are both political pieces, they were still cathartic.  Now, though, I'm working on two new ones that have no politics in them at all.  Time to clear my brain.  Yes, I'll post them here when I can.  No, you can't see them now.

So stay safe, try to keep calm, and take care of yourself.

"Portland 2020"

Portland 2020

Oil on canvas, 45"x45"

In my last post, I mentioned a painting that was underway that would address the issue of federal agents, dressed and equipped like combat soldiers, being deployed to deal with Black Lives Matter protesters.  That painting is now completed.

I was against the very idea of deploying these soldiers from the very beginning.  In America, we don't use soldiers against our own people.  Only dictatorships and failed states do that.  The cities didn't want them, but the federal government sent them anyway.  Some argue that they're not soldiers.  But anybody that's wearing Army uniforms, with Army helmets, Army body armor, Army equipment, and Army weapons, is a soldier.

What set me off was the incident in Portland when a Navy vet walked up to a group of these soldiers to talk with them.  While he was doing that, one of them suddenly began beating him with a baton, and another pepper-sprayed him.  This was a totally unprovoked attack by US federal goons.  We don't do that here in this country.  Yet ... these assholes did.

As an artist, this painting is my response to to the Portland attack and similar incidents around the country.  And if these federal agents come to my town, I'll be down there to protest them.

Behind the Canvas

I recently completed the painting “Say Their Names”, which consists of portraits of 13 unarmed black men, women, and children who were killed by police or vigilantes.  This was the first political painting that I’ve done in maybe 15 years.  And I have another political painting on my easel right now.  So what brought this on?

Well, this is a very political time right now.  The country is divided over pretty much everything: right/left, Democrat/Republican, mask/no mask, reopen schools/keep kids home, deficits are bad/deficits are good, you name it.  So people have to take a stand on something every time we turn around.  But one thing that is lost in all the shouting is that the stands we’re being asked to take are never as simple as they appear.

In “Say Their Names”, I am explicitly taking a stand in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.  I think this is important.  For all my life, and for well beyond that, blacks have suffered under prejudices that should never have existed in a country founded on “all men are created equal”.  Blacks have never been treated as equal.  They are disproportionately in poverty, subject to less support in education, have higher unemployment, are discriminated against in employment, have worse medical care if they have it at all, are pulled over by police at higher rates, and are killed by police and vigilantes at much higher rates than whites.  This is intolerable.  It must change.  This is what the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s was all about and it still has not been resolved.  I think the BLM movement and general unrest of the past couple of months may finally be moving the needle a bit in the right direction.  My painting is a way of supporting that effort.

Some people respond to "Black Lives Matter" with “All Lives Matter” or similar phrases.  They miss the point.  Of course, all lives matter.  But when some lives don’t matter as much as others, it’s time to focus on correcting that imbalance. 

And you can say “Black Lives Matter” while still supporting the police.  Yes, there is prejudice and racism built into our society, meaning it’s built into police forces everywhere.  But I firmly believe that the vast majority of our police officers are truly committed to doing the best they can for the citizens they deal with, no matter the race.  It’s only a small minority of officers who are causing the problems.  That small minority should be corrected, or rooted out and dismissed.  The rest of the officers deserve our utmost respect and admiration.  These are people who go to work every day and never know when the shit is going to hit the fan.  They could get killed in a traffic stop for a broken taillight, or gunned down when responding to a fight between a husband and wife.  They put their lives on the line for us every day and deserve our support.

So when I hear the cries to “defund the police”, that ticks me off.  That’s the dumbest idea I’ve heard in a long time, including in the time of Donald Trump.  Our police don’t need to be defunded at all; if anything, they need more resources.  But the resources and police forces need to be better aligned to the missions that they’re having to deal with.  A husband-wife fight doesn’t necessarily need a police officer, it may need a social worker.  So maybe police forces need to shift some resources from violent responses to softer people skills.  But at the same time, these different types of responses need to be tightly integrated.  Situations can go from talking it out to shooting it out in a flash, so we need to have the ability to have a variety of responses available at all times.  You can’t do that if the police departments are defunded. 

One response that has been utilized quite a bit over the past month or two is that of sending “federal agents” into the streets of our cities, regardless of whether the cities want them or not.  I put the term in quotes because these are NOT police officers.  Anybody who’s wearing an Army camouflage uniform, Army helmet, Army boots, Army body armor, and using Army weapons, is not a police officer.  They’re soldiers.  Only dictatorships use soldiers against their own people.  The United States is not a dictatorship, but many of our highest ranking government officials are behaving as if it is.  I remember the Kent State shootings of 1970, when armed National Guard troops fired on a large group of protesting students, killing four and wounding nine.  That was wrong then, and the approach is wrong now.  I will fight any attempt to deploy armed soldiers in my city.  Meanwhile, this issue is the subject of the painting that’s on my easel right now.

So I’m taking a stand in support of Black Lives Matter with my painting “Say Their Names”.  But there are many other aspects to that support that are not covered by just those three words.  And I’m taking a stand against soldiers in American streets with my new painting.  But there are many other aspects of that stance that are not covered in just a few words.

Take a stand.  But don’t let the sound bites define you.

Say Their Names

Say Their Names

Oil on canvas, 36"x48"

"Say Their Names" is finally done.  This painting is of 13 blacks who were killed by police or vigilantes.  All were unarmed.  One of them was killed after this painting was already well under way.  This useless killing is the antithesis of what the United States is all about and it must stop. 

In the back row, left to right:

• George Floyd, 36, was killed by police officer Derek Chauvin.  Chauvin and his partners were investigating a complaint that Floyd had passed a counterfeit $20 bill.  Chauvin had a previous bad history with Floyd dating back to their time when both worked as bouncers at a bar.  Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for nearly eight minutes, choking him to death.  
• Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was jogging near his home in Georgia.  He was chased down by three white vigilantes and shot.  Local police refused to arrest them.  It wasn't until a video of the encounter was released to a news station and an international outcry forced the state to step in.  The vigilantes, Travis and Gregory McMichael, along with Roddie Bryan (who made the video) were arrested two and a half months after the event for felony murder and other charges.  
• Rekia Boyd, 22, was killed by a Chicago police officer, Dante Servin, who was responding to a noise complaint in a park.  Rekia and three others were partying.  One of them pulled out a cell phone.  Servin claimed he thought it was a gun and he fired, striking Rekia in the head.  Servin was eventually charged with involuntary manslaughter but the case was dismissed by a judge.  Subsequently, Servin was forced out of the police department and the city paid $4.5M in damages to Rekia's family.
• Sean Reed, 21, had been in the US Air Force before returning home to Indianapolis.  He was observed to be driving recklessly and led police on a vehicle and foot chase.  Reed was live-streaming the event on Facebook Live to a large audience.  Police tased him and then shot him 13 times.  One was heard on the livestream to say "It looks like a closed casket, homie."  The police officers were placed on administrative leave.

Middle row, left to right:

• Eric Garner, 43, was approached by New York city police and accused of selling single cigarettes from a package without tax stamps.  The situation escalated and one officer, Daniel Pantaleo, put Garner in a prohibited choke hold.  Garner said "I can't breathe" 11 times before losing consciousness.  He lay on the sidewalk an additional seven minutes without medical attention while the officers waited for an ambulance.  Garner was declared dead at the hospital.  A grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo.  Eventually, public pressure forced the city to fire Pantaleo five years later and reach a $5.9M settlement with Garner's family. 
• Freddie Gray, 25, was arrested by Baltimore police during a neighborhood counter-drug campaign for carrying a knife.  The knife was legal under Maryland law.  Gray was loaded into the back of a police van without being strapped in, then given a "rough ride".  When the ride ended, Gray was in a coma with his spinal cord 80% severed at the neck.  He died a week later.  Some of the officers were tried, none were found guilty of any charges, and many charges were dropped.
• Walter Scott, 50, a US Coast Guard veteran, was stopped for a broken tail light by Michael Slager, a North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer.  A confrontation ensued and Slagle tased Scott.  Scott ran from the scene and Slagle shot him in the back five times.  Slagle was eventually convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
• Yvette Smith, 47, called 911 for help in de-escalating a confrontation between two men that involved a gun.  After police officers arrived, the situation calmed.  A police officer, Daniel Willis, called for Smith to come outside.  When she did, he shot her twice with his personal AR-15.  Willis was fired and charged with murder, but was acquitted.  The county settled a civil lawsuit for $1.2M.

Lower left:

• Dontre Hamilton, 31, had a history of mental health issues.  He was sleeping in a Milwaukee park when he was approached twice by two police officers who found nothing wrong.  Shortly afterward, another police officer, Christopher Manney, approached Hamilton.  A scuffle ensued, Hamilton got control of Manney's baton, and Manney shot Hamilton 14 times.  Manney was fired but never charged.  A civil suit resulted in a $2.3M settlement.
• Breonna Taylor, 26, was an Emergency Medical Technician in Louisville, Kentucky.  She was sleeping at home when police executed an unannounced, no-knock search warrant targeted against two men who knew Taylor but did not live there.  Taylor's boyfriend thought the police were intruders and fired once.  The officers fired over 20 times, hitting Taylor eight times.  One of the officers was fired and the police chief was fired after a black business owner was killed by police.  Other investigations are ongoing.
• Aiyana Stanley-Jones, 7, was killed by Detroit police when they raided her home, looking for a murder suspect.  The officer, Joseph Weekley, was charged with involuntary manslaughter.  Two trials ended in mistrials and charges were dismissed before a third trial.  Weekley is still on duty.  A civil lawsuit is in progress.

Lower right: 

• Elijah McClain, 23, was walking home from the store in Aurora, Colorado, when he was stopped by police.  They had received a call about a "suspicious person" and Elijah was wearing a ski mask.  Police wrestled him to the ground, handcuffed him, and put him into a chokehold.   Elijah repeatedly said that he couldn't breathe.  When paramedics arrived, they injected him with ketamine, a sedative.  He went into cardiac arrest and died three days later.  Three of the officers have been fired and one more has resigned.  No action has been taken against the paramedics.  
• Tamir Rice, 12, was playing in a park in Cleveland with an Airsoft pistol, a highly accurate toy gun.  Police officers arrived and, thinking it was a real pistol, immediately shot him twice.  The officers faced no charges, although Cleveland later settled a civil lawsuit for $6M.

Quick Update

I haven't made any posts in over a month now.  Had some health issues that gave me a couple of scares, but they're over with and all's good here now.  Well, getting a lot better, anyway.

I've got several projects in progress in the studio.  One is a painting related to the Black Lives Matter movement.  It's coming along slower than I want, primarily because I haven't been able to work on it as much as it needs.  But it's looking promising.  No, I won't share images right now, but if you want to see some, go take a look at my studio Facebook page, where there are some teasers.

Even though the BLM one isn't done yet, I started a new painting related to the Portland protests/riots and the deployment of "federal agents", all of whom look remarkably like combat soldiers without any identifying tags.  A video of them beating the crap out of a former Navy officer, a Naval Academy grad, made me blow my top.  He went up to talk with them and they beat him with truncheons, broke his arm, and sprayed him with pepper spray.  He wasn't fighting, wasn't looting, wasn't burning, just went up to talk.  These unidentified thugs have taken protesters off the street, often just releasing them later somewhere else.  This is too much like the Nazi Brownshirts, like the "disappeared" in Argentina in the 70's, or the same thing during military junta in Chile in the early 70's, or normal ways of working in China, Russia, Syria, or other dictatorships.  Or you could compare it to the beatings at the Edmund Pettus Bridge that galvanized the Civil Rights movement.  Only dictators, or wanna-be dictators, behave like this.  So, yes, this particular event has really gotten under my skin and I'm going to fight it as an artist: with paintings.

Unless they come to Asheville.  I'll be out there on the lines to protest.  This must stop.  Now.