Once again, I've let months go by without posting. It's not like I've been painting up a storm. In fact, it's quite the opposite of that. I had a photo of my granddaughter making an extremely ugly face. I thought it would be a fun painting but in the end it made me question what I am doing with my painting.
I've noted that I need to paint more in order to improve. That remains both true and undone. The cloud piece above was done August 19, 2021. The street scene below was done August 30th. That's not too bad but I didn't paint again until mid-October. I seem incapable of treating my sketchbook as a sketchbook. Instead, I labor over images as if they were to be hanged in a gallery.
And the longer between paintings, the less confidence I have. I look back at some of the paintings in this blog and have no clue how I would approach them again. The answer, I know, is to just do it. I just need to put some colors on a palette and paint something. Anything really. Maybe I'll try painting my version of the work of someone else. The painting below was done from one by Min Ma. But instead of slavishly interpreting it, I added mountains and a huge cloud of my own. But the brilliant autumn hues of the trees and their placement came from Min Ma.
I gave up on this one on December 1st. I gave up trying to achieve a likeness and just went for a creepy face.That should have made it easier, but my heart wasn't in it. In my head, I was working on painting I had deemed a failure. And so, because I'm not in school and there are no points being awarded or subtracted and because I sit here, a stone's throw from my 70th birthday, I stopped. Life is indeed short and the creation of art should be fun or at least rewarding.
I have one last page in the sketchbook. I fully intend to finish it this week, this year. Then what?
I have another sketchbook. Same size. Filled with great paper. But I'm thinking of working outside the book, so I can play with different shapes and sizes. Nothing bigger than 9x12 inches - because that's the size of my watercolor pads. But what of subject matter.
I can now look at a landscape or a depiction of waves crashing on a beach and marvel at it. I've always enjoyed a good magician/illusionist and I've come to realize that these paintings are magic tricks. On a two dimensional canvas, an artist can depict depth, a far off horizon or a portrait that seems sculptural. Where there is no light, the trickster portrays morning, sunset, night or harsh green fluorescents. But the younger guy inside me would walk by with no appreciation. He was all about content, images of fantasy and science fiction.
But a couple of times, I did both. In the case above, I was painting an ordinary alley and asked myself what it might be like if Godzilla was strolling through town in the distance.
I'm thinking that I'd like to play around that sort of thing in the future. Continue practicing depictions of the real world but adding a fantastic element. One of my early ideas when I started these sketchbooks was to create a classic piece of Western art, cowboy on horseback, but have him guiding a heard of cattle-sized bees.
Maybe I'll use the sketchbook for preliminary studies of the larger paintings. You know, like in a sketchbook.
Or I might explore painting my cartoon characters, old ones and originals. If I get back to writing again, I might want to illustrate my stories with paintings.
No brownie points either way for doing all of this or none of it. I definitely need to keep up some sort of creative expression to keep me going.
That's it for now. One this Boxing Day of 2021, I wish you a happy holiday and a wonderful New Year.
-- Tad