Fall Still Life (Process and Details)

Something has to be said about patience, space and the careful study they allow. My family was kind enough not to mind my month-long take over of the dining room, and so I transformed it into a make-shift studio. I had done still life studies before, but it had always been a matter of drawing whatever was before my eyes already. A journalistic sort of approach of noninterference with the objects of study. And then of course there had been arrangements set up by the teachers in the past. Setting up your own still life is an entirely different animal. Every single object, material  and color that will end up as part of the painting is your explicit decision. Every shadow, highlight and angle. You aren't adapting your frame of view to the rules of composition, but gardening the composition in its entirety. And then of course, each object will inevitably be infused with personal meaning, even if you aren't going for any sort of explicit metaphor. It took me a couple of days only to set up the arrangement, and on the photos below you can see a couple tripods and a monopod came in very handy for securing the drapery. 

Working on a painting a week after week is a meditative, lulling experience, that transforms your habitual way of looking. Beauty of even the most mundane surfaces becomes overwhelming. Your mind continues to analyze and paint, even when you don't have a brush in your hands. And the boundaries of realism become incredibly vast. That is to say that you become very aware just how determinant your choices are to the look of the painting. It may look "realistic," but what an oversimplification that is. You are still, even within realism, essentially choosing between one abstraction and another. You think about parameters that dictate the optical reality before you, eliminate a great deal and emphasize a great deal. You coerce the paint to conform to the shapes you model, once you know how it moves, mixes and reacts. 

Practically speaking, another thing comes into play: keeping acrylics active and wet for this long is only possible with an addition of a retardant medium. It makes a world of difference. Your brush will glide, the paint film will still dry fairly quickly, but it stays buttery for long enough to actually work the paint layers and not just patch them one on top of the other. This let me achieve the foggy look of semi-transparent liquid in the wine glass and the striations in the horn pipe from Ollantaytambo.

There isn't a doubt in my mind that realism in painting is a mighty force. Considering it a relic copyist method is simply blind. Ability to accurately relay physical reality of objects in your field of vision is only the beginning, and even that is already an inherently intimate outpouring of the artist's mind. Even as a record of the artist's analysis and decisions, a well orchestrated piece cannot escape from being something mystical and elusive--a connection, an address, a plea for comprehension and harmony, a pocket of reality where laws of physics swap partners. Materials become illusions and thoughts become actualities.

Here is a step by step slideshow of the entire four-week painting session. 

Flowers in a Vase (Completed)

Flowers in a Vase (Step by step)

You can tell at this point the leftmost leaf is rather flat. More needs to happen in that green to bring out the convoluted relief. I still have two to three days to put into this. This isn't a situation where you can establish the painting in totality and then bring out detail evenly throughout the scene. The plants wilt before you get to do this, inevitably, and you cannot go any faster with the delicate layering. So the image for now is a bit fragmented. More than delivering exactly what is before you, you are forced to analyze the plant's form - what repeats, what is unique to each leaf, and be able to combine them in a seamless image.

Pineapple

Since the days of art school came to a close, I have been selectively purchasing art instruction books in search of technique advice and some sense of art dialogue. And I mean very selectively. The great internet transformation of all habits made it possible to research art books, as though this were an innovative new gadget one is seeking to buy, not so much a treasure one randomly comes across in a store. A book I found particularly helpful from just about cover to cover is Botanical Portraits with Colored Pencils by Ann Swan. 

Color pencils are a tricky medium. They lend themselves equally well to spectacular realism and spectacular failure. Simply by being the toy art supplies of children or creators of fan art, who have perhaps that genuine spark and love for the act of drawing, but hardly any sense of form yet, let alone exposure to supplies of quality, pencils forgive and encourage grainy unfinished doodling. They are really not ment for that type of sketch though, if one can judge a medium for where it shines at all. I have used them so, for sketching, and provided that the paper surface is not overly toothy, it appeared a worthwhile method to jot down the moment, spontaneously and with some suggestion of color - psychochromal most often rather than realist. It's useful. But color pencils really shine in form building and painstaking reiteration of color detail.

Ann Swan's book made me realize the possibilities, explained the behavior of pencils themselves (soft or sharp point, prone to breaking or not, fugitive of color fast, etc.) and paraded in front of me work that takes this method to the very edge. And so, I finally felt equipped to tackle color space. No need was there to change my hand movements or deal with the beautiful but disarming accidents of water media, or stubborn delicacy of brushes. Here was the same old pencil, just in color.

And here is my first experiment:

It was odd eating this pineapple. when I was finished with its portrait. I had gotten to know it so well over the several days, biting into it felt bizarrely special.

Casa Peruana Revisited

After a long time, I pulled this piece out from the file to see if I can bring it to completion. It seemed too constrained in feeling and empty. The entire shadowed-house region just seemed devoid of life and stuck on as an after-thought. Something needed to flow and give depth to the scene without breaking its slightly-off melancholy. I realized I needed to stop treating the pencil drawing as so precious and just go ahead and paint over it in a messier way, to build some age to the walls, some fractals to the stones and sky.

Noting how much bold lines add to an otherwise perfectly self-conscious form building in my images of trees, I realized that the armature of unfinished buildings that populates Peruvian cityscapes is a perfect candidate for such lines. And to have an etherial sort of plastic bag stuck on the armature, catching wind, like a trashy flag of our times -- I thought that would give that empty region of the picture some breath.

The piece is still far from finished. Unlike observational works that are complete when they are complete, this sort of unearthing of a personal (and far from emotionally dramatic) vocabulary is proving to be an indefinite process. I have some ideas of where to take this next, but it's all sort of amorphous. And there is no turning back: much of the painstaking pencil work is bound to be destroyed. That difficulty alone (I was stupid to combine these materials) made me realize a much better approach would have been a lithograph with color watercolor washes. That is really the look I had in mind, but it took some research to find out that it even exists. For now though I will take this where it wants to go, and certainly away from the awkward pallet. The sky needs more emptiness, the house more context, the bag less pink.

Depression Glass Fruit Vase

 

I painted this oddly green still life in July and I am rather proud to say that this was my first attempt at watercolors since... pretty much childhood. I was actually on point with color accuracy. You can see how the camera struggled with the darks. Still though... the scan washed that accuracy out. I cannot restore the lost subtlety. And who knows what the colors will appear like on the screens, but so be it. I will need to learn to scan in a way that better emulates room lighting.

I am finally becoming interested in the surface treatment and materials, colorfast pigments and archival quality paper. The ease and glitz of digital art, as was once to my great annoyance predicted by James Miller, the head of VCU Communication Arts Department, has left a gaping whole in my self esteem as an artist. Because there is simply nothing there to hold. But now there is such a sense of meditative... balance, of return to self, in working with actual physicality of materials.

So used to thinking of materialism in negative terms, one forgets that it is symbolism that is the issue, while the material is mere reality, naked and direct, assuring one's being. There is much more to say on the matter. Now I feel that I have only cracked the door toward proper painting and its psychology. I wonder if massage therapy has taught me something about form I could not quite articulate before... and am now expressing in a sort of baby-babble...

Oh yes... I cheated. There is some gouache in the drapery.

 

Home. Some thoughts on technique.

I drew this in the summer, and it actually took two days. I must say I'm in love with gradual building of form with hard pencils. It lets you have a steady control of texture and to look very closely at your subject. And unlike working with a pen that quite quickly constricts your use of gesture, every time you step up to a softer/darker pencil you have another chance to work gesturally. It would seem two days on a small sketch like this would suck the life out of it, but to me this looks quite alive.

Maybe it's simply that I had such a soft spot for pen and line work all throughout college that I finally exhausted my use of it of course, but I think there really is something to line drawing process that is stifling. And it's the overbearing contour. No matter how much you try to build sculpturally, you get this containment effect. I still use contour of course. After all I think like a draftsman, not really as a painter: contour line is here to stay. But I am much more welcoming of it, when it's in 2H or 4H graphite. It lets the things you draw breathe.

Casa Peruana (Detail)

If you want to be prolific, my advice is do not start a large drawing/painting in full value scale rendered by 5H, 4H, 3H, HB, B, 2B and 4B pencils. Just get a charcoal stick or something.

Delicate progression in the shadow

Progress or... not?

Well I wanted to take it away from Esher, age it, dirty it up. Then I had to save some areas with paint, now I gotta figure out what next.

Casa Peruana

Here's a piece I am currently working on, in its unfinished form. This is new for me, since I've mostly worked on small scale until now, and this is quite large, and still covered in my teeny-tiny pencil marks. The piece is loosely based on a building I saw in Arequipa not too far from the futbal stadium, but it's more of an impression of South American sprawly architecture, a way of life in which structure of time, of certain alignment, of certain anything exists mid tectonic shift and whose logic escapes me. Also this is my impression of life at such great heights that met me with unshakable breath-stealing altitude sickness.

Colca Canyon. Progress.

Colca Canyon

Working on a piece for Spit'n'Ink Benefit.

Months looking for a job aren't getting me anywhere but deeper into the blues, but just a day at the drawing board, and I get this sketch, a sense that I'm moving somewhere, that my education gave me an incredibly complicated skill, and all I want is to draw more, endlessly.

The Urus living on the Lake Titicaca (Final)

The Urus continue the same lifestyle they had for many centuries, with the exception of recent additions of solar panels for electricity, televisions, radio and bright nylon thread they incorporate into traditional textiles over Nirvana T-shirts. They have always maintained trade with the nearby city of Puno. The islands are constructed from layered earth and cane, and are anchored down. Otherwise, they say, they will float away to Bolivia, and they don't have Peruvian documents to be accepted back.
When a family does not contribute to the community and work, they're not asked to leave their homes. Instead they can take their home with them, cutting off a piece of the island.

The Urus II

The Urus living on the Lake Titicaca

Working on a historical piece for my portfolio. Thought I'd save the original pencil drawing before moving on. Final coming up soooooon.

Alex in Women in Islam Class

I have been working a lot in my thin-sleeved Moleskin sketchbook this semester. I'm not sure yet where it's going, but I'm hoping the art journal pages will eventually compound to a worthy record of the world I get to see.

My goal is 10 drawings a day, although I'd rather do less than fill pages just to fill them. Sometimes, something like this one comes out.

It seems, at least for now, that drawing from observation is something I am most excited about. There is directness of discovery in the line work, which is so hard to retain in pieces that underwent a rigorous concepting process. It's similar to writing where it's best to keep telling yourself you're not really writing yet, just making notes--and then simply to edit them. At no point are you really "Working on the piece" which is such a cramped feeling that so often lends itself to overworked stiff results--or, in my case, paralysis.

Sketchbook drawing is about capturing something around you and within you in real time. So inconveniently, anxiety seems to really charge my doodles with some kind of power. Boredom makes boring drawings.