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Slogging through February

2/18/2013

Well, February is the month that I always question my sanity. About living out here on the edge of civilization, on this windy damn hill, in a drafty old farmhouse. The weather was just dreadful last week, for the most part. Windy, cold, spitting snow or ice balls or rain or something. Backstage in theater they make the sound of thunder with a piece of sheet metal snapped like one is dusting a rug. That’s what my roof sounds like in a 40 mph wind. It’s hard to sleep. And lack of sleep makes me nutty. Keep that in mind when you see the work coming out of the mental pipeline a few weeks from now!

Seasonally, February is the “dark before the dawn,” though. The thought of spring keeps me hanging on, and in summer I NEVER question why I live here. And actually, I’m pretty happy to be here in the winter, as long as the wind’s not blowing. And I’m not running out of firewood. And the car is not leaving me stranded on the highway. I’m not a fan of emoticons, but this is where the frowny-face goes.

On a more positive note, I took six finished landscape paintings down to Jean & TJ Tremmel’s WareHouse Gallery last week, I am appearing there as a “guest artist,” for an undetermined period of time. Rockbridge area residents, if you haven’t visited their gallery yet, you really should. They have constructed a really unique space on the first floor of their historic old warehouse building to show the work of the resident artists and potters and the occasional guest. You can find them at 302 McLaughlin St in Lexington (across from Rail’s End, right next to where they parked the train station when they moved it), or on Facebook as WareHouse Gallery Art Pottery, and they will have a website up and running soon. If you drop in, please tell them I sent you. Maybe TJ will be marginally less crabby next time I show up unannounced [just kidding TJ!!].

Abandoned House (8"x10", oil on panel, 2013)

This is one of the paintings I have on display at the WareHouse Gallery right now. I took a major risk to get the shaky cell phone picture I used as the basis, driving south on I-81, sun in my eyes, trying to take a picture of something on the other side of the road. A house I have always been fascinated by, a modest little farmhouse slowly being subsumed by Autumn Olives in a cowpasture. I just love the raking light this time of year. What I really like in a landscape is often a very fugitive moment, lasting only a few minutes or so, something that would be pretty hard to capture plein-air.

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Exercise vs Exorcise

2/11/2013

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As I get started painting again, I’m thinking of the two types of paintings I’m making, and the different motivations I have for making paintings. The most simple motivation is just the sheer joy of smearing that greasy stuff around on a surface. (Must be something Freudian about that, arrested in the anal stage or something! Read more)

To gratify that urge, painting anything will do. And I might as well paint something that will earn me a little money to pay the electric bill. Plus, it’s good exercise. Last winter, I just made some landscape paintings, done from photos (mostly very bad photos taken by me, but occasionally very good ones taken by Glenn Rose) that were very good practice at seeing. I’d been making up landscapes to go around my broken-up goddesses, and actually having something to look at was quite an education. So I call them, “Exercise.”

For me, exercise doesn’t remain satisfying for very long. In the physical sense, I like to have real work to do (splitting wood, working in the garden, or at least going for a hike) when I exercise, I don’t like “gratuitous” exercise (like walking on a treadmill.) In making art I have a great urge to be didactic, or narrative, or to get right down to it, to vomit up the contents of my brain onto at canvas (or sometimes upon a piece of mud). So that kind of painting I’m assigning to the category “Exorcism.” It satisfies the need to expel the images that are haunting me. It doesn’t much cross my mind whether anyone else would want to look at it or not. Sorry! I’m not thinking about you! I’m thinking about me! It’s all about ME!

So this week I’m posting some pictures of something I’m working on in both categories, and from now on I’ll just label them “exercise” or “exorcise.” Salud! and stay warm!

Striped Field 1 [8x10", oil on panel]

Striped Field 2 [8x10", oil on panel]

Two summertime paintings. I’ve been thinking about them since last time it was warm. Was that about 10 years ago?? Examples of “gratuitous exercise.” Though they make me happy, thinking about warm weather. (Why does February seem like the longest month??)

This painting below isn’t finished! I’m just posting it to give you an example of an “exorcism” type painting.

The Burr in my Mind [32Wx48H oil on canvas]

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Picking up where I left off

1/31/2013

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I had a busy summer! I haven’t gotten into the studio since … I can’t even remember. Was it April? Whew! What exactly, you might ask, have I been doing with myself?? Well… I was trying to earn a living, fix my crummy old house, and play farmer at the same time. Biting off way more than I could chew. Also: I got something like walking pneumonia, my dear aunt and my mother-in-law both died, my father was in the hospital and then in the nursing home, I broke up with my man friend, and injured my knee pretty seriously. And the damn bathroom! It was the project from hell. It’s still not finished, but I decided to can it until spring, so I could go to the studio.

Here’s some of my former herd of goats, and some of the sheep. After I injured my knee, I realized I couldn’t really play farmer and paint and work on the house and earn a living at the same time. Something had to get crossed off the to-do list. I kept a couple of milkers, and some of the sheep. We’ll see if I can handle those and get something else done.

I hope to be posting regularly, at least until summer comes and I’m too busy again. Next week I’ll post some images of what I’m up to in the studio.

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Renovations

1/31/2013

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Here’s me gutting the horrible 1950s era badly-designed and poorly-executed bathroom. A job I probably would have postponed a little while longer had I known how bad it was going to be.

Thanks to Steve Richards for the consulting work (and helping me get the sill replaced in a hurry when the skunks realized they could come right in!) and Glenn Rose for running the jackhammer, which in no way could I have done, and Roger for coming by and helping me with the sheetrock on the ceiling, which I could not have done by myself, either.

Here’s the ginormous black snake that had been living in the walls of the bathroom for years. I hope I didn’t scare her off entirely, but she just wasn’t welcome in the wall anymore.

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Water pictures

4/18/2012

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One of my interests/obsessions has been to try and paint water. Not paint with water(color) but paint a fair representation of water. It’s very challenging – water moves, it’s either transparent, translucent, reflective or all of the above all at once.

Our experience of water is complicated by the changing focus of our eyes. One can focus on the surface of the water, on the bottom of the pool (if it’s visible) or on reflections in the water, which might be nearby trees or as far away as the sky. And a representational painting is a moment frozen in time, with no changing focus. That’s an issue with a normal landscape painting, too, whether you’re aware of it or not.

As you look out at a view from a hill, for instance, as you look at the mountains in the distance, the trees close to you (if you pay attention to them at all) are fuzzy. But as your eye rolls around (it actually jumps around) your brain stitches together a smooth, focused narrative of what you’re seeing. And in a painting, as opposed to a photograph, all those things are in focus at the same time, because that’s how we perceive them. So even the most boring representational painting is abstract in this regard. So a pool of water represents a special challenge, because one has to balance different focal lengths to portray one’s experience of the pool.

Blah blah blah. All that to explain why, when I get bored painting pictures of scenic views of the mountains I am obsessed with trying to turn out a picture of water that is satisfies what I see, feel and know about water. I haven’t made one yet that I am really satisfied with, but the works above are a couple of recent attempts.

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Back after my leave of absence

4/12/2012

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sunlit walnut

Well. It’s been an eventful six weeks or so since I last posted anything. I was trying to post something weekly, and things were just too hectic there for awhile. There was work (of the kind that pays the bills) and baby goats and lambs to catch, and then udders full of milk to keep up with, and the taxes to be filed. My first time doing them for myself. Thanks for the help, Larry.

Also, the weather was beautiful in March! Warm and sunny, things blooming too early, grass growing! It was too much to ask of myself to be inside at the computer or even in the studio. I moved some big rocks, planted some fruit trees and did some long-postponed landscaping work.

I won’t bore you with the goat baby pictures here, if you want to see them, go to the Facebook page. The painting above is one of my favorites from the winter painting blitz. There’s a spot on Turnpike Road here in Rockbridge County that has a great view of Green Hill, so I often stop there and get out on my way home. This time, the sun was just about to set, and over the hill on the other side of the road was this beautiful walnut tree in a pasture, and the angle of the light was just stunning. I took a very bad picture with my cell phone, and came home and made this painting very soon after. Sometimes less information is better – I’m not inhibited from making up the details or enhancing the color, trying to re-create what I experienced. If the picture is a good one, it competes too much with what I remember. Memory is a very slippery thing.

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Time crunch coming soon

2/29/2012

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Looking upstream @ Roaring Run

(Leap Year!) Unlike the 1%, most of us have to make a living. It’s almost time for me to have to spend way too many hours cranking out t shirt designs for the summer festival season. Realistically, it’s a relatively innocuous way to make a living, but that doesn’t keep me from griping about having to put down the paintbrush and pick up my graphic artist costume. I wish something I love to do actually made money – all my other interests are also noteworthy for being not very lucrative: gardening, farming, being an amateur naturalist. Do investment bankers love thinking about money? Perhaps everyone dislikes what they have to do for money. Maybe if someone was standing at the studio door, tapping their foot and waiting for me to finish a painting so they could pay me for it, I wouldn’t want to do that either? I AM awfully contrary.

This week’s piece is several months old; I did this on deadline for a RACC auction (that’s Rockbridge Area Conservation Council). I did enjoy painting this, so maybe that disproves my worry of the previous paragraph. Actually, I had in mind donating another painting entirely, but that was not going well at all, and after spending weeks trying to make it work, in frustration I turned to this one, to take out my frustrations on it. After just a few hours, I knew it was better than the one I’d been working on for so long. So Be It.

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More landscapes!

2/24/2012

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This is my house from the end of the road. A beautiful fall day.

These are starting to seem more like a habit than a warm-up. I might have enough for a show by summer. But it’s almost time to start the money-making season again, so who knows how much I’ll get done?

I have about 8 paintings going right now, I hope I get them finished before the summer busy season. Plus the goat kids will be here in about 3 weeks. That’s always a distraction. Well, I can always post pictures of cavorting kids instead of paintings. That might be more interesting anyway.

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Winter weather at last

2/15/2012

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frosty crow

Well, this past week we finally had some “normal” winter weather: teens at night, 40 mph winds, and a little frost. The plastic crow that Cindy gave me years ago got a heavy coating of frost one morning as we went from warm and wet to cold and windy.

In honor of the cold and dismal weather, I present you this week with a view from my window to the west, a view of one of the willows and my neighbors cows on a cloudy day.

willow in winter

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Other work

2/8/2012

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I realized as we were working on the website that it is titled “Paintings and Other Work”, and I don’t have anything other than paintings in my online galleries. I will try to rectify that soon.

In the meantime, here’s an image of a little clay sculpture I did a couple of years ago. This is one of the few clay sculptures on which the glazes turned out like I expected. I have a lot of trouble with ceramic glaze, it’s not WYSIWYG. I’ve kind of given up trying to glaze my clay pieces and now I’m just painting them.

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