Breck Girls

This morning at the easel I was thinking about my grandmother, whose birthday was last week. (She would have been 104.) I have a few tools from her paintbox: a ground-down scalpel that I use constantly--for scraping paint off the canvas, digging out hard paint from a tube, cleaning my nails--a sweet little yellow pocket knife, a couple of magnifying lenses. When I was ten I spent a summer with her in Louisville, a thousand miles from home. One of the things we did together was copy the pictures from the Breck ads in pastel. The exercise probably left me with a peculiar idea of feminine beauty and lasting insecurity about my hair, but I did learn a lot about handling pastel and the proportions of the head, and most important, how to be serious about making a piece of art. Thanks Gram.

(The image is from 1963 and I'm certain it's one we copied. I found it in the Smithsonian archives, here.)

Another Drawing

Trying to organize and figure out storage for artwork, I came across this one from an unexpectedly productive session three years ago. Although the foreshortening always throws me a curve, it's an angle on a reclining pose that I've chosen over and over again. I think it was about 30 minutes.

"How can you tell she's not dead?"

Not really the question I wanted to hear about a painting in progress.

I hope I haven't simply put makeup on the corpse.

New Photos of Work in Progress

Last night Chris set up and photographed everything I've been working on lately. It's amazingly easy to let a pro do it, though we still need to work out some issues of glare and reflections, especially on wet paintings.

This one above (Meeting Street is the working title) has been my problem painting for months and as you can see its troubles are still not solved. It's 16" x 18" on linen.

I posted earlier stages of Martha and Sarah in July, but Sarah's face wasn't right, not a good likeness, not elderly enough, so I worked on it several times without improvement and then on Monday decided her whole head was out of proportion and painted it out. Not dry enough yesterday to work over, so here it is, in progress.

Second version of Nap continues. For me a 24" x 28" painting takes more thought, requires more energy, and, well, uses more paint. I have trouble with that estimate: I put out too much for small pictures and never enough for larger ones. And though I hate to be wasteful (I hear my mother's voice), I really hate not having enough of a mixture. Were I a more rational painter, it would be less of a problem.

I'm still finding things to interest me in this series of images. This one is currently called "Coy Nude with Bedsheets (and Cat)," but only because that's making me laugh this week.

Last pose

Figure drawing last night was some of the best fun you can have with a pencil--yet very tiring too. (This was the final pose, so difficult, but still the best of my efforts--20 minutes, pencil on Ingres.) Lots of new people, very focused and serious but apparently all enjoying themselves as well. The model was lovely, and though the room was crowded it seemed to work pretty well for everyone. A buncha one-minute poses, some 10-minute, a couple of 20-minute. I'd probably prefer longer poses once I felt I was up to speed, but they're harder on the model and need to be more well-thought--if you've got a bad start, or a bad spot in a crowded room, you can't just hope for better in a few minutes. I look forward to the next session.

Like taking vitamins and exercising, drawing is a habit I should develop. Pencil--line--has become foreign; I kept wishing for a brush. I could barely consider composition, line weight and fluidity in the rush to get the figure down and fairly correct (the far leg above is obviously--now--too long). Practice will help. Being in a group puts me on my toes, but I also become a little conservative, not wanting to fail in public.

Nap II WIP

This is a second--and larger--version of the earlier Nap, about 24" x 28", oil on linen. Working on chroma, value, texture. I've a long way to go, but I hope that at least the photographs will soon be better. Here's the rough beginning of this this painting, burnt sienna and ultramarine blue.

And this evening will be my first time with a new figure drawing group. I'm eager to meet some new artists and hope to get something useful from the drawing, though after dinner has never been particularly creative--or even active--for me. It should be fun.

Martha and Sarah WIP

This is from an old photo (I guess that's obvious, eh). In this and the other current WIP (to come) I'm trying to work a controlled low-chroma palette with fairly compressed values. This one started with a burnt umber wipeout, still visible in places, and continued with a monochrome underpainting to establish the drawing and composition. For the underpainting I laid out a string of raw umber and white, values 5 through 8, to keep the painting fairly high-key, though I later added some darker (v. 4) accents. It's 16" x 18" oil on linen.

More on Simplification

"To simplify something accurately, you've got to understand it deeply."  --Thomas Friedman, quoted in The New Yorker (11/10/08)

Blue Ridge Artists' Materials

This morning I had a treat: a visit to Blue Ridge Artist's Materials, an artist's oil paint manufacturer here in Asheville. I'd always been curious about paint-making, but I'd never gone farther than mixing up some simple pigments with a palette knife for my own use and information. Blue Ridge is a one-man show. Eric Silver, the paintmaker, is a really nice guy, easy and pleasant to talk with, and knowledgeable and conscientious about his work and his business. It was really kind of thrilling to talk to the paintmaker about what I use and why, what I like, what I don't, how different colors work in my palette. I admitted to being a total paint slut, but mostly about earth colors--so it's not as expensive an addiction as it could be. Eric wants to expand his range of natural pigments--the ochres and umbers and siennas that curl my toes--so I hope he'll keep me in mind as a tester or just as a fan with an opinion. I'm looking forward to a productive two-way relationship with him.

Blue Ridge oils are wonderful.  I got my first order a couple of weeks ago and used many of the colors to finish up the the first two paintings in the current black slip series.  I'm delighted with them.  What a lovely consistency, creamy but not weak or loose.  Really a joy to paint with.  The Flemish white was a bit of a mystery to me--I guess I expected something thicker or heavier, that would require amendments, but it seems like a great mixing white unmediated and that's how I've been using it.  Today Eric let me play with additions to the Flemish white.  Adding his walnut sun oil really does thicken it right up; it's almost magical.   A tiny bit of stearate paste made it creamy; mica powder, as well as thickening it in a dry way, added a nacreous quality.

I generally use a low-chroma palette of mostly earths, and Blue Ridge's natural earths are very good, too.  They have that little bit of grittiness that reminds you where they come from and also seems to give them a specially interesting visual quality, especially when amended with just a bit of medium.  I'm still figuring out where the hue of the natural burnt umber will fit in with my palette; it's lighter color deserves a spot.  The raw sienna is fabulous; it reminds me of Doak's (old) raw sienna and so it's incredibly useful for me.  The raw umber is also perfect for me, very cool and gray.  The hue of the yellow ochre is lovely, not too orange or brown or acidic. 

And then there's the Florentine Lake, what a color.  A vibrant almost alizarin, but a bit more violet.

With an order over $100 Eric sends a free tube of Cobalt Violet Deep.  CV is such a weak tinting but expensive pigment that you feel you don't get enough bang for your buck... but it is a beautiful color and useful in many ways if you're not stingy about using it.  For shadows, to lower the chroma of a yellow, as a spot of violet just for the loveliness of violet.  

Green Hill Winter Show

For the past few days I've been visiting family in Asheville, after delivering paintings last weekend to Greensboro for the Green Hill Winter Show, which opens on December 6. The four on the left are the ones. The little one on the right, along with at least one other small one, will be at Carteret Contemporary for Thanksgiving weekend.