I am a professional Fine Artist. I make my living from creating art. Do I know what I'm doing? After 50 years I have some idea, at least I can eat, pay my property taxes and buy more paints. Anyway, I'm still at it, still painting and still learning. My parents gave me great advice - listen to people. Jordan and Adrienne, my two advisors, convinced me that I have collected enough from listening to begin blogging. Yet still I question myself as to who am I to be writing a blog, anything I write comes from the people I have listened to or read their ideas in books.
Being an artist used to mean that I didn't have a job. I was the family member who drove across town to kill six ants in my elderly aunt's kitchen. I was the one who cleaned the back end of mom's elderly friend's German Shepard. One or two hours here and there add up and soon I was spending less time doing what I needed to do, which is creating art. I had to learn to say no and give myself a job. A forty hour a week job, with flexible hours to still be able to help kill ants and make Rosie angry messing around under her tail. But at the end of the week, I had to have put in forty hours at my job as an artist. Some weekends I added an additional eight hours. I found to really make it I needed to put in fifty hours or more a week.
I got a question today about going back into a painting. I cannot afford to waste a canvas or an effort so I do go back into an unsuccessful painting. Some paintings that have made the rounds of my galleries I will study and, if need be, I will remove the varnish and make adjustments to it.
Second question: How to keep from getting bored while painting. This one threw me and took some thinking about getting bored while painting. I have never gotten bored so I had to think why I was still excited about painting after 50+ years. I think it is because I challenge myself with every painting, even when I've done the same subject a hundred times. Can I improve the color or the brushwork? do it under a different light? My friend Ron and I did some night scenes of the desert around Taos which was challenging. I returned to that idea with a night scene of where I went camping as a boy scout. That led me to do a night scene of a farm I'd done several paintings of. Doing the same subject over and over again and again with the same approach is going to lead to a boring painting and people will see your boredom in the piece.
Demos & The Clouds I Saw 30 Years Ago
Frustration and guilt fill me when I am asked to demo. I feel those who ask me to demo want to know how I work. The way I work cannot be shown with a three-hour demo. My big paintings take hundreds of hours and so much involves gathering references and finding models. The models for the most recent painting are sunflowers, Mexican sunflowers, and an evening clearing sky. I used photos for this one, photos taken some time ago - like thirty-five years ago for the sky and five years ago for the sunflowers. I wanted something different for my sunflower painting, not a traditional arrangement of them in a vase.
Part of the process of developing an idea for this painting was sitting out in a country garden sketching sunflowers at sunrise, high noon and at sunset. Several trips to these gardens produced very little. The sky was the problem. A high noon sky created a sense of heat and great powerful colors. I wanted more action, a sense of nature, an edginess to add to the scene.
I remember my first photo I took for working from. Took a sunset in which the sky was just clearing after a real wild storm. I'd never seen such a sky and of course, I could not find that thirty-year-old photo, but it was well printed in my head so that would be how I'd have to work. I do not like making small studies, they are always better than the larger piece. Most small studies remain small paintings or sit somewhere in my studio till they are totally forgotten. I had to pull a mummified mouse off one the other day...
I sketched out my sunflowers onto my canvas. The composition and design were well developed in my head. The sunflowers I blocked in, bringing them to a near-finished stage, about forty hours of work over five days. I think of them as the main characters, They are my humans in this piece. My favorite subjects are people I think of trees, flowers and other subjects the same way as I think of people when painting I give these subject the same care I give all my people. I may even do a second painting of the sunflowers changing the sunflowers to a single .person.
Flowers well established, I set about laying in the clouds using the colors I saw thirty years ago. I get quite excited as the piece takes on the look of the vision in my head. Two days of just capturing the sky then back to developing the sunflowers for a couple of days, building pigment, texture as I go. Brush work takes on an importance, color is brought out more and intensity is altered in places. Three bare spots play in my head as I see them as people in the distant. It's my love of people that causes my interpreting these smudges as people. Do I develop them as figures or stay with my original concept of sunflowers alone, waiting for full on darkness? I have to live with this painting for a week or two before deciding on letting the "people" stay.
How do I convey all this with a two-hour demo? I demo for my students every now and then, always telling them this is not how I create my art. It's more just entertainment for them. They like it as we exchange ideas about art. I feel guilty about taking their money when I demo, cause I am showing them how to paint - not create art.
