Showing posts with label arting around. Show all posts
Showing posts with label arting around. Show all posts

07 May 2020

The Paint By Number Life Preserver

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The first real post on art in ... well, a while.

For a while I was going great guns with the series from 50 Small Paintings, and was thinking I beat the wall that I usually run into when I try to kick my artist game up to the next level. To be fair to myself, that next level was in sight.

Then I hit number forty-five and ... the engine sputtered, died, and wouldn't start up. The picture is that of an elephant, and it just kind of mocked me. And then I couldn't do it. Then the pandemic hit, and all its psychological centrifugal forces. And just like, that, my habit pancaked and I fell into the hole of too much Candy Crush Saga (we do what we do), too much Facebook posting.

It's a touchy road back, but I started blogging again. Didn't have that much to say, so I made it a sorta-daily photo blog (quite a time to do it, what with Covid-19 reshaping our world). And then, I got out the PBN.

When I started really hitting the freestyle acrylic paintings, I left a last PBN just-started. Isn't It Romantic, a Dimensions Paintworks joint, a fanciful Venetian scene full of saturated color. Well, I didn't have anything but the basic urge left, so I pulled that out, got out the paint pots, and got back to work on it.

It's feeling good, and it's confirming a hypothesis I've long had. It occurred to me that that, like repetitious workouts, when you hit a rocky spot in the road artistically, keeping the motions moving is sometimes enough. I started late on becoming an artist, I wanted to keep going, I need to remain prolific ... but then the old executive dysfunction kicks in and the inertia returns and you just scroll and hit the space bar in social media too much. 

Over the last two days, I've been mixing paints out of the PBN kit, filling in numbered and lettered spaces on the card panel, and getting the sheer joy out of just the physical act of painting which, I think, is at least half the thing of it for me. It's pleasant to work, it's pleasant to work on art. It, in and of itself, is a nourishing thing.

So, I'd suggest to anyone like me who's aspiring to an artistic life to have thier own version of paint-by-number for whatever media they're working in: something that just makes them follow instructions but makes them get out the media and work it, just for the sheer somatic joy of creating an artwork even if there's no particular creativity involved in it. Just working the media is bliss, even if a limited sort.

It's the sort of lesson that may have come late, but at least it came to me. I owe it to myself, and certain others, not to quit on myself now, like I have so very often before. Some motion is better than no motion, and doing something half-assed is better than not doing it at all.

And I'm thinking I can do that elephant painting, maybe this other brush I had here will do the trick.

I'll keep y'all posted.

25 April 2020

The Brain Fog Rolls In

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I've seen a fair number of people react about their reactions to the changed psychological landscape of the pandemic. So little is available; so many people are staying home, by requirement or choice, and we're having to MacGyver structure into lives that, by employment or routine, have had structure provided them; old lingering dreads have blossomed into new stark terror or opportunity, depending on what you had going on when the balloon went up, three-point-five seven million hundred five thousand weeks ago.

We habituated art supply stores, the library, and Powell's; books and art. Those are our treasures. Being in these places recharged; we are now, with respect to the psyche, running on stored charge. It's dilating our psyches in a way that's still difficult to define, but I feel its tectonic effects on the head.

It arrives usually around 9:30 AM or a little after. I have gotten home before 8:00 every day; and with no other reason to go out, I have all this time to do art, right? Except I don't. It settles in heavy, kind of like an umbra, the feeling of a dark gray cloud; I become drowsy. What animation I had toward creating anything is displaced by this at a 1:1 ratio. Yesterday ... in my studio I have this low desk we call the kneedesk, and it's next to the drawing board where I was turning out a minimum of one acrylic painting a day, and I sat at it trying to write in the diary, and I laid my head down on the desk, and I don't know how long I napped there, but when I next opened my eyes I found that I felt as though I had been asleep a very long time.

I have, for aeons now, been a 3rd-shift worker. This puts its own color and shape on the biological processes that regulate ones' diurnal cycle - you wind up struggling against them but you can usually work out a sort of detente. This is an unwelcome guest that invites itself. And while I can't exactly say how, I know it's because my intellect has been cut off from exterior power, and it apparently consumes a great deal of juice, because I go low about the same time every day.

Like many people, I'm giving myself the guilt about not grasping the opportunity I have, but there's also a movement I see that reminds us that this all is not normal, this is like nothing we collectively have ever experienced before. Maslow would have it that we are on the lower levels of the pyramid, so what you have to do to get through the day is entirely proper.

But I do want to use the time. Increased blogging helps. Writing this prolix har-de-har helps. Diarizing helps. I also have a small book about small meditation practices-to-go by Jan Chozen Bays at my side and there's some things I can try here too.

So I'm evolving a way to deal with a changed environment and an attempt to find a new, if temporary, equilibrium. I guess I'm impatient that I can't do it instantly. Perhaps grasping that observation will help me help myself. And help me get that painting of the elephant done.

Five more works in 50 Small Paintings. Just five.

In the meantime, a day at a time. Steady as she goes.

And so it goes.

24 March 2015

[Liff] This Is How You Coffee Cup

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This is an oooooooold warhorse.

It's been with me since the mid 80s. I got it, under some distressed circumstances, in Seattle. I think I've owned it now for about two decades.

Since I still aspire to authorhood, I'll relate a quip a friend of mine once evinced:

"Where is a writer when he doesn't have his coffee cup?
He's looking for his coffee cup."

You may replace he with she and writer with artist, as the context and circumstance dictate.

Here, friends, is that cup:


It's five inches high, and about five inches wide at the base. It's august volume holds about 21 ounces of liquid; back in the day, I was a much more avid coffee drinker, more of the two-fisted variety, who thought nothing of draining one or more Mr. Coffee-carafes' worth per day.

Today, where once I drank my coffee with unrestrained gusto, I more approach it with the constant sip. I will sometimes leave a few dregs of coffee in the bottom of the pot. But the mug is still with me.


You only really find one truly great one. The maker of this much, a California company called Bearly Surviving, apparently has gone out of business some time ago. Smaller versions of this same design are available only on places like eBay and from collectors. For a price. These big mamas, the 21-ouncers, are even harder to find than that.

Vanishingly rare. You can't replace 'em, you can only repair 'em.

But there is nothing I don't love about this cup, even though it be shattered and put together again. As a matter of fact, when, at last, it dropped to the floor and broke, I made sure every piece was accounted for and kept them … for a span of years. Eventually the right glue came along.

I don't worry too much about it leaching into the coffee … after all, I rarely fill it to the brim any more, and when I do, which isn't often, it doesn't stay that full for very long. Mmmmm, coffee.

The cracks are a badge of honor, of service, really. When something like this stays with you this long, it's more than a favorite. It goes beyond being a fetish, and even jumps over talisman.

By now, it's achieved totemic proportion. And you don't jettison that, friends, unless you have to.

Go ahead, have this quirk. You're an artist.  You're entitled.

30 May 2014

[art] Step One: Dream Big

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Our text is The Artist's Guide, by Jackie Battenfield. The homily should become apparent, I hope.

Dreaming big has always been somethingI've done really well. But effectively? Nope. I always go into something, like my two stints at Community College, thinking that if I just do my lessons with enough diligence and sheer sincerity, the rest will take care of itself. In as much the last course, at PCC, despite me graduating in graphic design, has gotten me exactly no closer to my goal of working in the visual arts than I was when I started (never mind how long I've been trying to figure it out), just working hard and earnestly, apparently, don't cut it.

That's a sad thing. The way I was raised, you worked hard enough and honestly enough, the way opened for you. Wouldn't be the first thing in life that turned out to be a bit of a lie (yeah, that's a harsh word, a sharp judgement, but sometimes you have to call it the way it looks. Life makes little hypocrites of us all, I've become convinced).

So, welcome back to the beginning. I've begun again so many times, I should rename myself Finnegan. Ahhh, Square One … we meet again. But what other alternative do I have than trying to figure it out again? Otherwise, I'm already dead … just waiting to be buried. So, we turn the puzzle on its side … for the however-many-th time it is, and try to figure it out again.

On page of chapter 1 on The Artist's Guide, then, we see this:


I always have done this. But maybe I need to try another time, and vary the angle of attack.

Dream big? Okay. Nothing I feel confident to put down on paper just this moment, but what's the best way to dream?

Today, why … I'll sleep on it.

[art] The Desk, Between Ideas

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Where I try to come up with things. My 'studio' is in the basement, in a finished room that is outfitted as an office. It is made with a perma-desk and a bunch of cabinets and is a very fine place to just exist. Happiest place I've ever been able to call my own.


The two books open before us are, foreground, the everpresent diary, and background, the book The Artist's Guide. I'm going to use it to help guide me toward being a working artist, which is what I should have been going for all along.

I'm going to be sharing bits of this journey in days to come, time to time. Some details in the next missive.

We're going to try to get serious. Not just arting around any more.