fbpx

Tag: why paint

Posted on

Top ten questions for artists

A Woodlot of her own, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I’ve written about why we do art and about the artists’ statements we all loathe. Targeted questions sometimes help us think through the bigger issues with greater clarity. I hope you can use these questions for artists as a jumping off point for your own thinking.

  1. What inspired you to create this piece?

    The answer for me is always:
  • The idea fascinated me;
  • It was a challenge; or,
  • I thought it was beautiful.

How would you answer that question about one of your paintings?

Best Buds, 11X14, oil on canvasboard, $1087 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

2. What is your creative process?

My painting process is outlined here and here. This is the same process I teach, so it’s straightforward.

For areas outside my discipline, I start by learning the technology. For me, this is hands-on and spatial; for example, I’d rather work with a printmaker than read a book or watch a movie about lithography.

What is your working process?

3. How do you come up with your ideas?

I have more ideas than I could ever execute, and when they’re still rattling around my head, I’m always convinced they’re the best ideas ever. Are you ever short of inspiration? If so, how do you deal with that?

4. What materials or techniques do you use?

I’m conversant with oils, watercolors, acrylics, pastel and gouache—in fact, with most two-dimensional art forms. Drawing is personal for me. I wish I knew more about 3D art, and particularly about building things.

What is your preferred medium? What medium would you like to spend more time with?

In Control (Grace and her Unicorn), 24X30, $3,478 framed, oil on canvas, includes shipping in continental United States.

5. What is the story behind this piece?

There’s sometimes a very simple answer, such as with In Control: Grace and her Unicorn. Sometimes there’s no story at all.

Can you articulate stories for your paintings, or are they less tangible?

6. How long does it take you to finish a painting?

This is the most-commonly asked of all questions for artists. The only proper answer is that made by James McNeill Whistler during court testimony in 1878. Whistler was asked by a lawyer about the stiff price he had set for a painting.

“Oh, two days! The labour of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!”

“No;—I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.”

The Servant, oil on linen, 36X40, $4042.50 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

7. What are you trying to convey?

I suppose if you must ask that, I’ve failed, but if it’s in an artist’s statement, I’d just say my work is a pale imitation of the glories of God’s creation.

What are you trying to say in your work? Can it be reduced to words?

8. Do you have any upcoming projects or exhibitions?

It’s good to have something in your future. I’ll be at an opening in Camden on Tuesday, and then there is Camden Art Walk for August-October. Meanwhile I have three workshops remaining this season. And I’ll be at Sedona Plein Air in October. There are also a few one-day plein air events scattered in there.

If your calendar is overbooked, you’ll burn yourself out, but if you aren’t working toward a goal, you may not be working hard enough. If you’re not yet advanced enough to be showing regularly, a class or workshop is a good way to hold yourself accountable.

9. Why are you an artist?

I’ve been an artist since I was old enough to sit up. I’ve been lucky enough to be a professional artist for the past 28 years. I tell people it’s either that or greeting at Walmart, but in fact I do it because I have a pressing need to communicate. How about you?

10. How do you handle criticism or feedback about your work?

In that it’s morally wrong to crush the skulls of your enemies, I’m forced to be philosophical about rejection. The more it happens the better I deal with it, but at times, I admit it’s painful.

Usually I just kvetch. How about you?

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Posted on

Does surrealism work in painting?

Winter Lambing, 48X36, oil on linen, $6231 framed.

I slept through most of Halloween, meaning I missed one of America’s key spending holidays. My fellow citizens were expected to lay out more than $10 billion on—what, exactly? Candy? Fake spider webs?

“When you think of it, all the world's great stories have an element of the supernatural,” my student Mark Gale told me recently.

Ravening Wolves, oil on canvas, 24X30, $3478

It’s a thesis I’ve tested against my own taste in literature. It’s there in the Homeric epics, where the gods intervene in human affairs in very human ways. All the books of the Bible are about relationship between God and man. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a fantasy about cosmic justice. Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope wrote within the Victorian understanding that God is ever-present. Kurt Vonnegut (if you didn’t read him at 20, you had no heart) was an atheist, but wrote in the supernatural. Haruki Murakami is a modern-day shaman. Even dystopian novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World are about malign power beyond the merely human.

Apparently, contemporary readers feel the same about magical realism. Fantasy literature is one of the great successes of modern bookselling.

The Harvest is Plenty, 30X40, oil on linen, $6231 framed.

The supernatural, in the form of religious painting, is the foundation of western art. We invented painting largely to explain the Bible. Now that almost everyone reads, religious art no longer serves that purpose. But we can see its power in works like the Ghent Altarpiece.

However, magical realism never made the leap to modern painting. Surrealism was a minor mid-century phenomenon that was rendered superfluous by moving pictures. Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dali were probably its greatest practitioners, but neither had any profound impact on art history. Surrealism lives on in the work of Frida Kahlo, but Fridamania is probably more a cult than an art movement.

This is a disconnect I feel strongly. I’ve been a Christian convert for about thirty years. You’d think I could express that through art. However, I’ve had little success. The exception was a series of paintings I did for a solo show called God+Man at Roberts Wesleyan’s Davison Gallery in 2014. It was hardly a cutting-edge idea or treatment, even if the paintings themselves are good.

All flesh is as grass, 30X40, oil on linen, $6231 framed.

Part of that is the crushing weight of sixteen centuries of great religious art. There is nothing that I can say about the stories of the Bible that hasn’t already been said by hands and minds trained to the task.

I’ve argued that this is enough; that in Creation we see God. But that’s starting to feel like an insufficient argument. Is landscape enough? If not, how does an artist start insinuating his or her higher thoughts into the work?