Eclipse

This was a small commission that I banged out over the weekend for a coworker. (I know, I know. How many times have I sworn I'm not doing any more commissions for friends? I still hate them and I still haven't learned to say no or even negotiate a fee upfront.) There was a deadline on this as she plans to give it to a friend as a birthday gift and that immediately set the media as watercolor as I am constitutionally incapable of completing an acrylic painting in a reasonable amount of time. I love my acrylics, but can't stop messing with the layers. With watercolor, there is a point where you are just done whether you want to be or not and even if the impulse is there to "Just tweak this one little bit," it doesn't work and I just have to keep my hands off of it.

So, as something I did with only a couple of days to think about and one day to work on, it's not bad. I'm not thrilled with it, but I'm never thrilled with the commissions as they are always about capturing someone else's vision rather than my own. (Tomorrow is the dreaded moment when I hand it over and find out if it is even close to what she was hoping for.)

I should just adopt my toes as my formal signature

"Broken" is now completed, photographed, signed, and hung on the wall. I am tempted to paint over the signature and attempt to resign it. Are there pens that will write on acrylic? I have always had difficulty signing with a brush. (And, yes, my toes are probably visible in the original unedited photograph of every single one of my paintings and could probably serve as a de facto signature.)

I'm really pleased how this painting turned out. I don't just mean the finished image; I mean the whole process. Remember that earlier post where I called this one the angry painting? I just surrendered to it and turned this into a big narcissistic exercise in art therapy. In the end, I reigned it back into whimsical But even the whimsy doesn't deny the original anger, it's just twisted slightly. My mood when I started it was, "This is what you did to me. Are you happy now? Do you see how broken I am?" And my mood when I was done was, "Oh, yeah, you think you broke me? This was just my chance to let all the poison bleed out with the tears and I still have all my pieces to put back together."

Have I told the story of the art teacher who told me my kind of art is "best kept between the artist and their therapist" and should not be inflicted upon the general public? He's probably right, but he also painted really boring landscapes, so I kind of don't care.

a belated update

The point was just brought home about how sporadically I've been updating when I had to look up my password to my blog so I could post this.

The weather has finally cooperated to allow me to take photographs outdoors. Hence, that excuse is finally gone, but I'm still a bit unmotivated in the web-updating department. Last night, I got just one painting uploaded to my website. I plan to do the rest this weekend.

This is "Blocked". I'm not sure why I keep coming up with dumb names for my paintings when I generally tend to hate puns, but when a name pops into my head that's what I go with.

I don't have much to add. I get much more wordy when I'm talking about older paintings because there's the nostalgia factor of "Oh! I remember that! I was doing thus-and-so when I painted that and was going through a whole such-and-such theme. Yadda, yadda." When it's current stuff, all I can think to say is, "Here's the most recent one. It's ... um ... a painting."

the angry painting

Well, "the angry painting" is actually coming along quite well and I've decided to name it "Broken". (Seen here in the center of the photo, upside down.) "The Sun King" is almost finished. I'm about to repaint over "Sparkle/Pow/Spark/whatever-I'm-calling-it" and start again. The fact that I kept changing my mind on the title is probably a sign that my subconscious hasn't been happy with it and now that it's "done" it is not what I wanted. I do like the texture effects that I've built up so none of it has been wasted effort as all the work I put into it will still be evident in the finished painting. "Ascension" is taking its sweet time; shimmer effects require so much tweaking. There are also two more in-progress pieces that I've recently begun which aren't visible in the photo. So, that's the basic wrap-up of how things are going in the studio. (All of which would be going so much faster if I weren't devoting 50+ hours a week to a "real" job and thus a large part of me continues to resent the realities of money.)

As I said, "Broken" is coming along quite well and I've made peace with my muse. When I examine previous paintings, it's pretty clear that I use art as a cathartic form of therapy, almost a kind of physical praying. The process of putting something on canvas drains it out of me. I'm not saying that all my issues are magically resolved in a single painting, but I clearly go through artistic phases where I produce pieces of longing/loneliness, then anxiety/fear becomes a theme, then I'm on to curiosity/contemplation, et cetera. And in the end, I feel a sense of completion. It's how I know a piece is done. It's not so much about some artistic standard of what the painting should look like. It's an indefinable sense that I "got it" or didn't, with the "it" being the thought that inspired it. No matter how many people praise a painting, if I look at it and know that I didn't "get it" I will have to try again with another work.

Thus I have to admit that it's fitting that the largest canvas that I've ever painted is turning into the angry/hurt painting. I don't deal with these emotions well. My version has always been sulky/defensive, which aren't moods that accomplish very much. Anger is at least ... productive. (And memo to my muse: peace/love/forgiveness might be a nice change of scenery after this, okay?)

I have always been old

This is contradictory, but I have always been old and immature. Old, tired, worn out, drained, and empty. Immature, childish, dumb, shallow, and emotionally stunted.

I have this old sketch that I did when I was fourteen. Would you have guessed I was only fourteen when I drew this self-portrait? I've spent my whole life being mistaken for much older than I am. How does the Indiana Jones quote go? "It's not the years; it's the mileage." I already had a lot of mileage by fourteen. (Mileage and baggage both.)

And now I'm forty and as old as I (used to) look and yet it seems evident in the recent photo that, deep down, I'm still a brat.

My Muse is Not Happy

I've been mainly goofing off today. I'm always in an odd mood on Valentine's Day. Although likely doomed to eternal spinsterhood*, I still have a wistful fondness for the holiday. If nothing else, it means that there will be Half Price Candy Day to celebrate tomorrow. I made a point of finding a red sweater (please note the matching red socks) to honor the day. (*My attitude problem has an attitude problem and I really shouldn't be inflicted on others.)

For Valentine's Day, I tried to focus on my own true love by spending the day in creative pursuits. I painted in the morning, edited photos in the afternoon, and then got distracted by the Internet in the evening. (Two out of three ain't bad?) I'm going to go paint some more this evening before calling it a day. The odd thing is that I pretty much had to stop this morning because I got "in a mood" and I'm a little afraid it may return if I get out the paints again. I just started a new piece (still untitled) and it instantly became an angry painting. I'm not sure if the entire painting will continue that way or not, but it spooks me a little because it is my largest canvas and is thus going to take a good long time to complete and I'm not sure I want to deal with my anger for that length of time. (And while I can almost lecture myself about how it's not good to bottle up my emotions and that I know I have been angry about a lot of things for awhile now and clearly it's time to get it out on canvas ... another part of me rather likes my emotions all bottled up as they get me into less trouble that way.)

I just started two new paintings in the last two days. One is on the smallest canvas I have and it is fairly whimsical. The other is on the largest canvas I have and it's angry. Why couldn't my muse have gone the other way?

Updating Website

Today has been devoted to getting my website switched over to the new domain name and making sure all the links still work. I also changed the formatting just because every time I update the website, I feel compelled to change how it looks. I've updated the main page and all of the "gallery" pages and next I need to update all the "attic" pages as well as updating my "about the artist" page. (No matter what I write, it always strikes me as pretentious so I'm never happy with that one.)

The new website (at least when it's all done) will be entirely graphics based. I decided that we've finally reached the point technologically where you can assume people aren't accessing your site with the really old dial-up modems. I'm not saying there probably aren't still people out there using them, but if they are they won't be surfing an art site which is clearly devoted to images.