Metaphor

"Organic/Inorganic"  10" x 8" ink and watercolor on 140 lb Fabriano Artistico rough paper

On a day when I was feeling particularly laden with the sad news that a close - very close - family member has cancer (which makes three significant people in my life battling the disease), I wanted to paint, but was too exhausted to think too hard.  I decided I would let my subconscious control, and the above painting resulted.

At first I thought it was going to be an abstract piece, but representational elements intruded.  It became a pictorial metaphor:

Invasion.
Injustice.
And vulnerability.

A flow of rocks severing a vein-like stem.

I was surprised at how letting go resulted in the near-perfect representation of my feelings.

Funny how the mind works, isn't it?

The Dream, The Doubts, The Key

10" x 8" watercolor on Fabriano Artistico 140 lb hot press paper

I. The Dream:

I had a dream a few nights ago.

I was standing beside an easel. My online artist friend Linda (L.W.) Roth of the "Out on a Limb" blog, was about to show me how she paints on canvas. She put brush to canvas, and as she brought the brush down I heard a musical sound.

I heard a sort of sing-song, "PNT-ING!"

The sound was coming either from the brush or the paint itself as she executed the stroke.

"What was that!?"

"What, yours doesn't do that?" she asked.

She put more paint on her brush. Then, watching me out of the corner of her eye, she brought down the brush again.

"PNT!", it rang.

Without lifting the brush from the canvas, she pulled the brush back up to finish the stroke.

"ING!"

I was speechless.

Just then, I heard another sound.

"##!"

I jumped. Looking towards the sound, I saw another online artist friend, Hallie, of the "Arting Around in SOVA" blog, standing next to an easel with one of her paintings on it.

"@@!"

The sounds were coming from the painting itself! Hallie was doing nothing at all.

I asked her about it and she yawned and said, "yeah, they do that every now and then. Don't yours?"

And that is when I woke up.

II. The Doubts.

The painting at the top of the page took many mornings, in the hour before work, to do. I parked across the street from these two storefronts in South Miami, and painted in my car, en plein air conditioning. I'm not one for quick watercolors. I layer and layer.

In truth I was disappointed at how it turned out (although my brutally honest family seemed to like it).

After painting the reddish-brown jewelry store, I read Frank Eber's stark reminder that I should not "try to do too much" with the watercolors. I felt it was already overworked but I had invested time in it, so I continued with the picture and finished it.

Then I sailed far afield in the world wide web and felt that everything I saw was better than what I had done. I had a crisis of confidence. That's when I had the dream.

So I searched further and discovered the SGVA blog which has short posts containing art quotes, definitions, and tips. I found a Wolf Kahn quote there:

"The practice of art should have an effect not only the public, but even more importantly, on the artist himself, by enlarging his sphere of freedom... Each picture is valuable only insofar as it contributes to this development, because it enables the artist to go on in a freer, larger way to his next picture."

And I had learned a lot from this picture. I had struggled with perspective. I wrestled with values, with changing light and shadow, and coordination of color. I successfully inserted a figure in the scene that I had sketched from life in my Moleskine. And I worked a bit larger than my usual.

I found this quote at the SGVA Blog too, by Ira Glass:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.

Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work... It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

I was cured.

III. The Key.

We are a family of artists. We endure the same struggles and enjoy the same intrinsic rewards. We have the joy of seeing - really seeing - the world, and then attempting to portray it our own way. Knowing this helps me through the rough spots.

I am constantly reminded of this connection because of two consistent resources that I've been dying to share. You may know about these already. But maybe you don't. And if you don't, you are in for a treat. So here they are:

A. "Artists Helping Artists". This is the only internet radio show that I know of that is by artists, for artists, and addresses artist's concerns, hopes, and desires. There is an emphasis on marketing, but also many featured artists. It is inspiring and enlightening to listen to this show and Leslie Saeta is a creative, knowledgeable and personable host. The easiest place to listen is here, where you can find all past episodes too. I usually listen in my car! The blog to accompany the show is here.

B. Subscribe to "Robert Genn's Twice-Weekly Letter". It's free and arrives in your e-mail. It is always a good read, with useful tips for artists, and the personal experiences and anecdotes of Canadian artist Robert Genn. You can subscribe here.

Art talk comes to me! What can be better?

You needn't thank me. What else is family for?

{pssst..I was given some blog awards but I need to gather the paparazzi anyway, so next time..)

My Love Letter to Art on the Occasion of Our Anniversary

14" x 14" acrylic on canvas

My Love Letter to Art on the Occasion of Our Anniversary:

My Beloved,

It's our anniversary.  It's hard to believe that it's been 3 whole years.


You and I flirted on and off, of course, before we finally became serious on March 15, 2009.


As a child I drew all of the time. Doodles were in all of my margins at school, and cartoons of aliens were everywhere. I knew my true love then. I forgot later, I know. But you forgave me.


At age 7 I won my newspaper's weekly children's art contest! Then in 1973, the Watergate trials were on tv. We had only a rudimentary idea what was going on but loved to draw all of those nefarious faces, didn't we?


One year in junior high school, they had a "patch and motto" contest. My design for the patch won first place in the school. But they sent the second place winner on to the county contest. That student's idea was better than mine, they said, although my art was the best. I was crushed.


I drew in pastel. I played with calligraphy. I loved pen and ink. I did a mighty impressive pastel of my brother, and some pretty good drawings on scratchboard. I was 14 or 15. 

A pastel of  my younger brother done when I was 15?

If only we'd stayed together. But I was young - I was confused, and looked away from you. In college at times I forgot you altogether.  I thought I was too old for you.


After I graduated we had a tentative liaison and I dabbled in oils, and then acrylics. But I didn't do much and knew even less, and had a marriage and then a family to tend to.   I didn't take you seriously.


But you were always whispering in my ear even if sometimes I forgot to listen.


Finally, in 2009 we caressed. But would it last? It had never lasted before.


Friends we have never met saved our relationship; I am sure of this. Our first acquaintance was Janey of Janey's Journey, a very special artist to me. You can read in this blog's very first post about what she did for me, if you'd like - about her innocent question. That was the beginning. By my second post, I'd met Raena. [Check out my joint blog with Raena, 2'nFro].  And soon thereafter, the Everyday Matters Group and artists all over the web.

A mildewed scratchboard drawing I did at about age 15

I discovered that there are no folks in the world that are more generous than artists. They share their knowledge, their techniques, their struggles. I have learned so much from them - am learning so much every day - that I am now almost as good as I was at fifteen.


I must confess, that my wife knows of our affair of the heart. She says all I think about is art, art, art. And it's true, I am smitten. But we could never be, you and I, without the artists I feel so blessed to have met and am still meeting every day. They care about us, you know. This blog has just passed 200 followers!


To properly summon tears for the occasions, and since I am a guy and of course do not cry, I have painted onions. This is only the second time that a painting on actual canvas has appeared on this blog, but it won't be the last. I love impasto, and have missed it with watercolor. And I love the immediate rich colors.


I am newly reacquainted with acrylics. I believe that this painting was able to happen only because of what I have learned from my online friends. [I will now never believe that watching the Cooking Channel can't help you to learn to cook!] I was visiting my mother, and she and I painted together. We found two onions in the refrigerator - one had been there a very long time!  It was a delightful afternoon that you shared with us.


So here we are, beginning year four, and our relationship is renewed again. I am working on another painting in acrylics that is far more complex than this one - and so far so good (fingers crossed). I am truly excited about it, and hope I can get it to the end without ruining it. But even if I do [ruin it], I know you will be there for me, and this time I won't leave you.


I won't ever leave you.


Now pardon me, while I have a good cry.


Yours forever,
Dan

Two for the Road

5" x 9-1/2" watercolor on 140 lb. paper

Deadlines, Deadlines. The other day, Terry Miura asked at his blog, "Are you waiting till the last minute so as to set yourself up for failure and cushion your fall with the excuse, 'I just ran out of time...'?"

No! I answered.  Absolutely not!  I knew that I finally needed to complete his Cityscape Challenge.

His challenge is posted here - to paint and simplify a scene using a random street in San Francisco as a reference - and from the moment I saw the photo I was intrigued by it.  One reason for this is because Frank Eber does this kind of scene all of the time in watercolor (see his New York streets here), and his goal and Terry Miura's goal is the same:  SIMPLIFY!  And both are very successful at it.  If you visit their blogs, you too will be the beneficiary of their generously-shared knowledge.  And witness to their great art.

Of course knowing is not the same as doing and the most successful parts of this picture were where I actually paid attention and tried to follow their learned advice.  In the least successful parts I would not only forget to simplify, but would also forget what medium I was using - I was practically scrubbing the paper in parts, with watercolor!  Don't know what came over me, really.

2-5/8" x 9" (lol)

It might be that I've been working in acrylic lately (I can't wait to show you.)  Might be that I shouldn't start painting after hours of yard work.

Excuses, I know.  But I can't help myself.

I set up my paper to draw a big swath of buildings on the side, and decided, for the composition, and to humanize the picture, to place a man crossing the street on the page.  With the buildings, though, I really lost it - simplicity out the window (er, out all of the windows.)  So I sat staring at the completed piece, not really satisfied, and suddenly I saw two much better pictures were I to simply to cut the page vertically, just so.  And that's what I did. On the right is the other picture, cut from the left.  So that the first picture that you saw on the left, was on the right, and the second picture that you see on the right was on the left, capisce?

So that's about it.  No poetry, no witticisms, nothing particularly clever to say  today.  Sorry about that.  This picture left me high and dry.  And I had to meet that deadline.  If 99% is simply showing up, at least I did that.  And I left having learned a thing or two. 

'Till next time..

It's Not Easy Being Green

5" x 7" watercolor on 140 lb Fabriano Artistico rough paper

South Florida.

A quiet walk outside is disturbed by a tumult of squawking.  A company of parrots traverses the sky.

Three lanes of traffic on US-1 come to a halt as a peacock casually crosses the road.

A car dealership on Bird Road (I kid you not), first thing in the morning before it is open is sprinkled with pepper - hundreds of nondescript black birds called grackles. They loudly perch in groups on every car, every surrounding wire, and along the rims of bordering buildings.  Every day I suppose the employees must rewash the cars if they are ever to hope to sell them.

In Miami, a white ibis, with its orange decurved bill, visits our home so often that my wife has named it.  When he appears we call for our son Matthew and stand together at the window, watching, as the ibis strides across our yard.  He is "Commander", his bearing so proud that it must be so.  Sometimes he brings his army - ten or twenty other birds.

After dropping my son off at a weekly Saturday activity, I'd drive to a spot  in downtown Davie, Florida, where the branch of a tree would extend along the shoreline of a canal.  There every week, without fail, a white ibis would stand.  I like to think it was the same bird week after week.  I sketched him and painted the surrounding trees and the leaves on the branch.

The next week, when I returned, the branch had been cut. The ibis was gone, the beauty of the spot diminished.

This also is South Florida.

This little page had a few incarnations.  A few months ago I sat in the backyard of my sister-in-law's house in central Florida, and sketched the stylized sun that was hanging on her fence.  I then attempted to paint the fence, in yellow ochre, and was not at all happy with the result.  I tucked the paper away.  Then, when I saw the ibis, I decided to put him on the same sheet.  I paint the trunks of the trees and then the leaves in the middle of the page and the leaves were so tedious that I quit.  I put off doing anything more with the page - again for weeks (if not months), not wanting to deal with the leaves.

But then I saw master watercolorist David Lobenberg, at his blog here, and his loose treatment of leaves, and I thought - voila! (because that is how artists express excitement - voila!) - and pulled out the page again.  I had done this before - why not here?  Not all of the leaves had to be so exacting.  I began covering the page with a wash and then the impression of the leaves and grasses from memory.  I was surprised at the richness of color and the depth.  It was enhanced by the yellow ochre underneath I think.

So there you are:  a Florida story. 

6" x 3" watercolor on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico extra white hot press paper

A few days ago, from a distance, I spotted some more Florida wildlife.  Retirees.  In their native habitat.  A lucky find, I think.  Ah, South Florida, with so much to offer.

My Most Valuable Critic has complained that my last three pictures (the two in this post, and the one in the last) look too similar. 

"They are so green", she said.

"But they are outside", I replied.

"But they are so green," she said.

"Then you can consider this to be my Green Period!" I replied, brandishing my beret, then tilting it smartly on my head. 

And what, I ask you, could she say to that?

A Watercolor and Haiku

watercolor on 3-1/2" x 7" 140 lb Fabriano Artistico hot press

Along the path
Pigeons gather to be fed--
The house empty.

Art Noir

Ink and watercolor in large moleskine

You may think as you read this post  that it is about literature and not about art.  But it's all about art.  Be patient with me, and the art will come, I promise.  I just want to share some gems I have found along the way.

I admire good writers for much the same reason as I admire good artists - their ability to create worlds or to reflect this world in new and personal ways.

Every November I go to the Miami Book Fair International to hear author after author reading and discussing their works. During the last festival I was excited that Robert Pinsky was scheduled to be a part of a panel.  He is an amazing poet, a former Poet Laureate of the United States and recipient of many awards.  I think his poem "Shirt" is a masterpiece of writing, and love the way in which he reads it.  (You can hear the poem here being read by him, and can follow along with the words if you'd like.)

Ink and watercolor in large moleskine

I'd seen various writers speak during the day, some of whom would require tickets because of crowds that massive auditoriums could not accommodate. I had trouble finding Mr. Pinsky, though.  On the verge of giving up I finally found him and the rest of the panel in a large white tent to the side of the fair, near the entrance.

There were 20 people inside the tent at the most, maybe less.  The vast tent was nearly empty.  Massive blowers were running during the whole presentation, for air conditioning I suppose, which made it very difficult to hear.

The panel consisted of some writers represented in a book called  New Jersey Noir.  All of the writers and most of the audience members were from New Jersey.  I am not from New Jersey, of course, which made me something of an anomaly.  I also differed from the other audience members in that I was busy sketching Mr. Pinsky and the other accomplished poet on the panel, Gerald Stern.

I have not yet read the book - I plan on doing so.  Apparently, though, Joyce Carol Oates, the compiler of the collection of works in New Jersey Noir defined "noir" in terms of crime and New Jersey's colorful history of mayhem and murder.  Robert Pinsky disagreed.

And this is where I did a double-take.  When he started talking, I thought I was listening to an artist.  He talked about how the world around us contains not only what we would think of as classic beauty.  A representation of the world in that way would be incomplete.  Before I go on, I do not remember any of his examples except one (half of my brain was sketching and I took no notes); that single example was that the authors had to fight the big blowers to speak in the tent we were in - that was part of the overall sense of place and time that we were experiencing.

A building has cracks, discoloration on its walls, uneven texture, the creak of un-oiled hinged doors opening and closing, the musty smell in the hallway, the dim lighting in one corner, the bright light in another.  A paper may be taped to a window at an uneven angle.  It may be torn or bent. A person may have hair unevenly strewn, one eye closing further than the other, hair in the nostrils, and puffy cheeks.

There is the ordinary with the sublime, the everyday matters -  it is the fullness of the picture, warts and all, that is worth conveying.

The podcast "99% Invisible" had a short episode on the sound of escalators - how they were part of the soundscape of Washington:

“There’s a secret jazz seeping from Washington’s aging Metro escalators - those anemic metal walkways that fill our transit system…they honk and bleat and squawk” -Chris Richards, “Move along with the soundtrack of Metro’s screechy, wailing escalators” The Washington Post, 01/14/11

It is our role as artists to notice these things.

You can hear the episode here if you'd like.  It's worth it.

Or during my trip to Georgia Tech in Atlanta, one of my favorite finds was this plaque on the tiled wall behind the toilet in the bathroom:

I have never, anywhere else, seen #1 and #2 referred to formally.  Have you?


Mr. Pinsky's remarks reflected my view that Imperfect is far more interesting than Perfect, and, as far as I am concerned,even more perfect than Perfect -  more complete. 

Mr. Pinsky is a poet, but he thinks like an artist.  He is an artist in the broadest sense, and I am sure it is true. A writer is an artist, a musician, an actor - all of these are artists.  I would prefer, however, that they classify all of these folks under a different heading, so that I can actually find material about artists and not about mimes, for example.  A pet peeve of mine.  I will look for a podcast on artists and find a band, for example.

We are as alike as we are dissimilar, we artists, whatever creative engagement we may have.  Check out, for example the fifth member of this band.  (If you can't stand the wait, she first appears at 38 seconds).  This is how it should be, don't you think?

Perfect imperfection indeed!