thinking/feeling about my bi-coastal condition

I’ve said this before: I learn by doing (where doing is pronounced in one syllable). In learning how to paint, I am keeping Jylian Gustlin’s protip in the forefront of my critical mind:

Make art as much as possible to find your voice. Play as much as possible; don’t be too serious. Combine everything you learn like a soup — play, relax and paint. Mistakes are a way to bring the image into focus and to find your way to the finish. If it doesn’t work, it’s not finished.

Huh. If only. “Connection” is the painting I started right after the “You tell a story; I hear a story” canvas. But before I was through (although I may not be) with that one, I made this one:

I’ve had this feeling my whole life

Some of you will recognize the template figure from the workshop days. Somehow, its limitations become a starting point, a way in, a way to overcome the dread blank page (or in this case, canvas). So the current plan is to do a series of paintings in this format —hand cut painted papers, stenciled figures — to make an interpreted set of major arcana tarot cards.

Here are the first two layers of the next piece. I think it will be The Lovers.

The Lovers, 19 January 2012

Oh, and here is the somewhat reworked very first piece, the ugly duckling, which is still not right and most likely never will be. I would paint out almost the whole canvas, especially the face, but Mr Speed says that’s the part he likes best. So much for art by committee.

This is tale of the ugly duckling…

Finally, I have to tell you how stabbingly difficult it is show this stuff. I feel really, really exposed, not at all put together, kind of raw or innocent, like in a dream when you think you’re doing one thing, and then you find out it’s not that at all. Curious, and a bit harrowing. I want to improve my craft, find my ‘painting voice’, and make what pleases me. Maybe find out what I have to say in the process. You don’t have to pretend it’s good or that you like it. But! I hope that by keeping you apprised of my progress, by being less afraid to suck publicly, that you, too, will be moved to try something new, make art of your life (again).

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” Isaac Asimov said that. So when Mr Speed requested an “art piece” for his Crimbo gift, I got to thinking.

I thought, cut and pasted and painted off and on for most of November, part of December. Mr Speed was banished from my office/studio, what with a secret work-in-progress going on and all.

I got the words for the piece, a lyric from one of his songs, early on. “I tell a story; you hear a story.” Soon after that, I knew the story I hear is about the distance in me between east and west coasts. Cut. Paste. Paint. I’d get so far, be almost done, but then I’d somehow lose it, and it would be ruined. Very often, I soon realized, it is because I really don’t know how to paint, even though I am an art school dropout.

So I’d let the piece moulder for a few days and loathe myself, then see a solution, and carry on. Layer after layer, scraping, assessing, trying something new, listening for completion. It became a thick palimpsest of thinking through my fingers.

Finally, it was the day of receiving, and it was time to give it up and away. I hate the final piece, but loved the process of getting there, and learned a lot. Mr Speed claimed happiness.

The next day, I began a new canvas, building on the thoughts and experience of the previous one. I remembered some stuff I used to know. I ruined this one a few times too, but brought it back a little more successfully. Progress! It’s not done quite yet, but I don’t hate it. I want to cannibalize the first piece for its now-rare and dear ceramic letters, to make for Mr Speed something truer. I have finally gotten his consent — if I document the first one. Really well. (The light is crap now, but that’s a cruddy shot of the first one as a placeholder.)

Then, typically, I went a little crazy, and ordered a tabletop easel and some better-quality paints. I started another canvas. It makes me so happy to see it, and it’s ever so much easier to work on an easel. I’ll keep you apprised of my output. Thank you for your indulgence.