Texture

The description of my show for the Sheen Center says that I will be looking at what God's creation has to say about the city of man. Allow me to use the planter just completed to expound a bit on what I have found. 

Here is the planter. Notice that it consists essentially of a simple, smooth shape adorned with more bumpy designs made of intricate organic shapes. 

Here is the painting I made today. Notice the contrast between the smooth, geometric form of the row houses and the mottled treetops. Anyone see a theme here?

One of the things I have learned - or perhaps just remembered - is that often times the visual communicated visually. Hm. Duh! So, what do I mean by that? I mean that in this case of my residency, I have asked a question by painting it and so my answer, or one of my answers is a visual one. I said to nature, "What do you say?" And, then I painted it. And nature said, "Texture!" And showed me some textures. 

It's not deep, but it's an answer. 

Also, here's a sneak preview of my next sculpture progressing.

And, the sunflower continues to grow. It's got a bud on it!

A Day in the Life...

This is my day today. It represents a typical day of my residency.

Early morning, leave home with a roller bag full of plein air painting supplies.

Walk awhile, looking for a good place to paint and taking pictures of different scenes for future reference.

Settle on a good spot, set up my selling-stand and easel. Paint a cityscape and sell paintings.

Finish a cityscape (or two), photograph it, pack up, and head home to clean up, restock, and pack up for the next day's painting adventure.

And, that's my morning.

Afternoon...

Walk half a dozen blocks to the Con Artist Collective. 

Hang out in the basement where all the messy people work. (There's a gallery and a clean work space upstairs.)

Today, I de-molded the first cast of the planter and then brainstormed the next project. Other days I spend modeling, mold-making, or casting.

When I'm done for the day, I go upstairs to the clean workspace and do stuff on the computer, for instance, posting on my blog. 

Evenings, I go home and take care of my sunflower, the mascot of my residency. He was planted when I first arrived on July 15th. Now he is this big:

Garden Sculptures

Friday, I painted a camel at a playground. It was a large camel sculpture, the kind kids can climb on. A young lady, maybe 12 or 13 years old stopped to watch and talked to me: "What are you doing? I like to paint. That's really good! Can I take a picture?" Then she followed me on Instagram. As much as she may have simply been interested in the fact of someone painting, I have to think it must have also been the camel. There was something compelling about the camel.
Last week, I painted a view of the Elizabeth Street Gardens. There were some sculptures, a variety of architectural elements, and several planters. A garden is beautiful in itself. What does it add to people it with man-made objects? The attraction of the Elizabeth street gardens lies in large part in profusion of these objects. I don't know, but I am investigating the question by making something to go in a garden. It is a simple object, commonly found in gardens. It relates to plants and will incorporate some of the patterns that have emerged in my cityscape paintings. Here is the beginning of that object as well as a few of my cityscapes from last week.

Camel, Sarah Roosevelt Park, 5"x7" Watercolor

Entrance to Think Coffee, Bowery & Bleecker, 5"x7" Watercolor

 65 - 2nd Ave, 5"x7" Watercolor

Also, my mascot, Sunflower is growing slowly and just fine:

Gooey Paste and the Kindness of Strangers

It’s Monday morning. I had intended to write this blog post on Saturday evening as a way to wrap up the week. However, sales at Union Square were going pretty well, so I stayed late. 
I had always heard of the artists selling at Union Square. In fact, my first New York street peddling experience was across the street from Union Square on a chilly February day. I froze. Everyone ignored me. It was like baptism by ice. So, on Saturday, I decided to do it again. I went out early in the morning in search of the artists. A couple of artist vendors showed up, so I set up my easel near them.
All day, people walked by with their bags of vegetables from the nearby farmers market. There were tourists and loiterers too and even a drumming group and a crazy guy (maybe a performance artist or comedian?) running around in a Union Jack bathing suit, riding a tricyle, and shouting at people. Cars and trucks roared by - I was standing right at the curb. Lots of people stopped to talk and a few people purchased paintings. One man even bought me a some small weights for my easel after seeing it blow over while I was talking to a customer. (He was actually that customer.) 
Here are the two paintings from my Union Square day:

 Union Square View from the South, 5"x7" Watercolor

Median Trees, 9"x12" Watercolor

One of the other highlights from the week was painting at the Elizabeth Street Gardens. This is an enclosed, semi-private garden in Soho. It is run by volunteers and open to the public in the afternoons. It is crammed with the most interesting architectural artifacts, flowers and trees. People lounge around reading books or eating lunch. 
Here is my Elizabeth Street Gardens painting as well as a painting of another enclosed garden nearby.

Golden Swan Garden, Greenwich Village, 5"x7" Watercolor

Elizabeth St. Gardens from the East, 9"x12" Watercolor

I also cast my first sculpture. It was messy. Very messy. Instead of my usual blanket mold, I did a 2-part mold, and instead of using concrete, I used Aqua Resin. So, of course, I didn’t know  what I was doing and made a big mess. Imagine trying to make a plaster cast on the inside of a non-stick frying pan that is being held upside down. BUT, a finished 3-D piece did come out of the process. It has blemishes and deformations, but it is a finished piece. I call it Climbing Tree.

Climbing Tree, 18" Aquaresin

For those of you who read my post last week, I was having problems deciding whether to go with abstraction or simplification in sculpting the human figure. I went with simplification. After experimenting with abstraction (and embellishment), I realized that the important thing in this piece is the overall gesture. It’s a figure climbing a tree with a certain gesture/movement. That is the image I want to make. It does not need a lot of detail. So I simplified it considerably and went on with the mold making.

Experimenting with Naturalism 

Experimenting with Abstraction/Embellishment 

Settling on Simplification

And, lastly, Sunflower, my Sheen Center Residency mascot is growing apace. Two of his brethren have been sacrificed for the good of the tribe.

The Sheen Center Artist Residency

This summer, from July 15 thru Sept. 30, I will be one of the artists in residence at the Sheen Center in New York City. The work from my residency will be for a show in January (opening Jan. 18) called Growing Home. The show will be a series of plein air paintings and sculptural reflections on the paintings, all of which pose the question of what God's creation has to say about the city of man.
As of now, I've been in the residency for a week. It's really neat to live here - the Sheen Center is in Soho. My days consist of plein air painting (and peddling) in the morning and sculpture (cast mediums) in the afternoon at a shared workspace called the Con Artist Collective. At first, it was all overwhelming - being here, getting to make my own art all day long, having all of Manhattan and its social and cultural opportunities at my fingertips, having only 2-1/2 months to put together a solo show, and more. A couple of highlights from last week were selling a painting of St. Mark's place to a woman whose father grew up on that street and getting hired (while painting and peddling) to paint a menu board at Burger and Lobster in Times Square.
By now, I'm a bit more settled in and in the grove. The model for my first cast sculpture is nearly ready for mold making, I've got some plein air paintings done as well as having made some sales.
Since the theme of my show involves plants, I planted a little sunflower in a pot the day I started. This is Sunflower, my mascot.

And, here are a few of the paintings from my first week. Check out my instagram feed for more.

 St. Mark's Place, 9"x12" Watercolor

 Rooftop Garden Near Cooper Sq., 9"x12" Watercolo

The Bean Coffee Shop with Sidewalk Tree on 2nd Ave, 9"x12" Watercolor

Having had a week to work on this project, I have come crashing into two barriers. The first is that the them of nature in the city is a theme that has been done. At the same time, it is a rich topic and one that touches many people. It is also very broad. So, I think the question for me involves digging into what is particular to the artistic vision granted to me. For instance, I was pondering this as I was looking for a spot to paint this morning. What stuck me was the shape formed by the orange-tinted rain clouds against distant buildings. That is a very particular observation. And, it's beautiful and worth observing. I may be the only person who stops at the moment to see it, and that is a sight worth communicating. Here is the painting from this morning. Incidentally, it was raining hard. I did the whole thing under an umbrella.

Looking up 3rd Ave by Cooper Sq., 9"x12" Watercolor

 The second barrier I've run into is that the sculpture I am working on right now - a sculpture inspired by my paintings - is impossible for me to finish at a decent level of quality within the time alotted. Mold making and casting is an entirely different process than watercolor painting. For one thing, it's quite expensive. But, once the mold is made, I can cast multiple sculpture. This means that the model needs to be something really worth the money and time necessary to made a mold. My goal is to complete at least 5 sculptures during the residency. This means I need to finish a sculpture every two weeks. My current model is not currently up to par. Eek. I chose to make a composition involving a stylized human figure. The problem with the figure - even a stylized, simplified figure - is that inaccurate proportions and anatomy can be very distracting. The distortion can become the focus of the piece rather than the whatever the focus is intended to be. As far as I can see, there are two solutions to this problem: either simplify the figure to the level at which it is possible to be accurate at whatever my current skill level is or abstract the figure to a degree that it is obvious to the viewer that no naturalism is intended. Simplifying the figure can make it boring, however, and abstracting it can render it absurd. So, I'm stuck. 

Well, I plan on blogging every week or two, so hopefully I'll have some pictures of said sculpture that illustrate how I solved this problem. Until then, it's a surprise.

Last Projects of My First Year

Here are the last two projects of my first year at the Florence Academy. I entered the drawing and painting program at the Florence Academy because I wanted to delve into the western tradition of representational drawing. I'd say, definitely, mission accomplished. It's been a great year, and God willing, I'll be back in the fall to continue the 3 year program.

Desi, Charcoal on Paper, 18"x26"

 Death Mask of Giacomo Leopardi, Charcoal on Paper, 12"x16"

The death mask pictured above is the 2nd of my cast drawings. Giacomo Leopardi was an Italian poet who died in the mid 1800's. A cast drawing is exactly what it sounds like - a drawing of a cast. Here is my set-up.

The plaster cast of the death mask is on the left and my drawing on the right. I draw the cast at exactly the same size as I see it. 

Drawing a plaster cast allows me to learn to draw from life (as opposed to copying other drawing) without the added complication of color. This lets me explore values (black, white, and everything in between) as they communicate 3-dimensional form to the eye. Light effect, hard and soft edges, contours, changing planes, different kinds of shadows - these are all things contribute to the appearance of the mask and require different techniques and perspectives to render. 

What I particularly learned from this cast drawing project was how much information can be communicated by large, simple shapes. However, the subtle details of these shapes must be rendered with precision. Very small changes in shapes and values can make a big different in visual impression - especially when dealing with the human face.

The figure drawing of Desi was a five week pose. This pose with the light hitting the figure from the side allowed me to investigate the play of light along the anatomy of the back. Stephen, my anatomy instructor, says that one of the reasons we study the human figure as artists is that the shapes made by the anatomy of the human body as it interacts with light and shadow are so beautiful. Here is one of the anatomical drawings I made during the year that illustrates the idea of shapes created by anatomy.

Back to Plein Air Watercolor Sketching

After taking a break from plein air painting this winter, the watercolors and easel are back out! Here are my first two watercolor sketches for the spring - urban park scenes. They both depict how man-made things and growing things (as in, plants) combine to create beauty in the city. I like to think of the city as a big garden instead of a wasteland. In places, it is.  

Lincoln Park, Jersey City, NJ, 5"x7" Watercolor & Colored Pencil

Madison Square Park, Manhattan, 5"x7" Watercolor & Colored Pencil

Santiago

Every trimester, students at the Florence Academy complete two long pose figure drawings. This means that a model comes in every day for three hours and holds the same pose over a period of five weeks for each drawing. These figure drawings are essentially "game time" for students. The copying exercises, the 2-hour pencil figure drawings, the anatomy classes all prepare us for the model room long pose. 

This is my second long pose for the trimester. My first pose for the trimester, Susannah, a pose seen from the back, involved depicting the form through the shape of a large shadow and the way that shadow interacted with a thin sliver of light seen on the edge. This pose was seen in full light. This means that the form is communicated more through the shape of the contour and how the contour relates to small variations in value along the planes of the body as they face in different directions. 

Belvedere Torso

The third and final Bargue Drawing for students at the Florence Academy is one of two different views of the Belvedere Torso. A well known fragment of an unidentified sculpture from antiquity, the Belvedere torso copying exercise is infamous in its own right at the Florence Academy. Completing the torso requires mastery of a variety of conceptual and technical tools used in drawing. Observe, for instance, the variety of shadows involved in the torso: cast shadow, form turning away from the light, planes in a variety of relationships to the light source, reflections within larger shadow shapes, and combinations of all of the above. Each type of shadow requires a different kind of description and different types of charcoal handling. So, here's to this rite of passage! Now I get to move on to cast drawings... coming up soon.

18"x26" Charcoal on Roma Paper, Copy from Original Cast Drawing by Charles Bargue

Susannah

Here is the latest 5-week pose from figure drawing class at the Florence Academy of Art. 

When we begin a pose, there is a pecking order for choosing easel positions. Since I am one of the newer students, I got stuck with a back view. It turned out to be a good thing, though. The way the light falls on the model, I ended up with a composition that focuses on the strip of light sandwhiched between the shadow of the back and the shadow of the background. It made for a seemingly simple design but with a lot of complexity in the light shape. I enjoyed it very much.

Black and White

Charcoal is my life. There is black dust everywhere. "Drawing and painting" program evokes thoughts of color. But, my life is all in black and white. I'm not complaining, though. The more limited the means of expression, the more opportunity for the mind to focus on different aspects of expression.
Here is a picture of my most recent Bargue drawing. Charcoal on paper.

Some Beauty to Give

This post does not recount a particular incident in my life at the Florence Academy but represents the fruit of a lot of different experiences. So, while it does not reference school, it relates.

Awhile ago, I had a particular heartache. What that thing was does not matter, but in the midst of this thing, I was sitting on a train, and I remembered a trip to Costa Rica from a few years ago, and I remembered the hills there, on the coast, green in the sun and lush like nothing in the northern lands. And as I gazed on this with the eyes of my soul, there was something inside of me that melted and mended and I was made whole again. It was all very straightforward and rather shocking to me. I was in pain. I saw a vision of beauty remembered. The beauty was balm to my wounds. "So," I said to myself, "beauty heals." 

Yes, yes it does. Since then, I had noticed this phenomenon a lot. My morning walk to school, for instance.. It is (thanks to daylight savings time) always as the sun is rising. Even the pigeons, in flocks, silhouetted against the pale, pink sky make my heart rise. And, whatever is on my mind or weighing me down, it lifts, and something inside of me rises to meet the morning. 

I need beauty. It is not just a perk. Without it, life would be a lot worse than just boring. I think this is true for everyone. Maybe everyone does not realize it, but I think this a universal need. (I won't back that up with any argument. This post would get way too long.) 

But, everyone perceives beauty differently. What moves me may not speak to you. Then again, there may be a handful of people in the world who see what I see and draw life from it. So, then, to those handful of people, I, as an artist, have a responsibility. Because, artists, as I think I have written before, help people to see. 

So, to the people who need the beauty I have to give, whoever you are, I am working on it. Sometimes I get discouraged because what inspires me is so far above anything I can make, and sometimes I wonder if I am even seeing the right thing or digging deep enough to see, but I am working on it. 

On that note, I will leave you with one of my favorite T.S. Eliot quotes. This is from the Four Quartets, Stanza V of East Coker:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which 

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid of the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate - but there is no competition -

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the the trying. The rest is not our business.

And, here are my two landscapes from this week, searching for beauty in the city:

Water Tower over Green and Prince, Watercolor, 5"x7"

The Watchers (Quick Nighttime Sketch), Watercolor, 5"x7"

The Model Room

Students spend 3 hours in the model room every day of class. The model room is a large space with concrete floors, neutral colored walls, and natural light from north-facing windows. We work in silence with breaks every 20 minutes for the model. 

Each of the images below represent the work of one day. These drawings were preparatory drawings for a long (5 week) drawing in charcoal. 

Day 1: Day 2: Day 3:

These drawings show the development of visual understanding of the pose. The first drawing is stiffer and more general in comparison with the third which is more expressive and specific. Each day of drawing is a kind of visual exploration. 

I enjoy this kind of work because it helps me to see more, and that process of seeing more is by nature contemplative. By contemplative, I mean receptive of what is present. Period. In one sense, art is about making things - transforming existing materials into new things. It is an active activity. In another sense, art is about receiving what is present without trying to change it. It is about going deeper, going beneath the surface of things, or going beyond the first impression. 

Most people have two arms and two legs, a head, and a torso. These are ordinary, horribly ordinary things. But, I once heard a teacher refer to the "drama" of a particular intersection in the body, and when she said it, I could see it. Light and dark and tension and resolution and harmony and unity - all the things that make up drama. And this, all this, is usually hidden under our clothes. Seriously, what a metaphor! If we could see for real all the time, it would blow our minds. 

The Arm of Moses as Seen by My Little Girl

Don't tell my classmates, but I kind of like Bargues (copying exercises). Back to animal shapes: I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but I've got more to say. So, one way of breaking down an image and understanding it visually is to find shapes within it - kind of like finding shapes in clouds. "This one looks like an elephant... that one looks like a baby..." This week, I was working on my new Bargue drawing, Mose's Arm from Michelango's famous Moses on Julius II's tomb. I was working my way down the arm, blocking things in using the "seeing shapes" technique. Actually, I was seeing animals. And, I had a flashback. I remembered the downstairs bathroom floor in my childhood home. When I was a little girl, I used to sit there and look and the linoleum and see shapes and creatures and animals. They all had stories. There was the guy with the club. There was Our Lady. I couldn't look at that floor without seeing all kinds of things in it. I thought that was pretty cool - connecting with young part of me and being able to bring it into this new process that I'm learning as an adult. 

Copy of a Copy of a Copy. But, why?

This past week, I finished my first Bargue. A Bargue drawing is an exercise that involves making an as-exact-as-possible pencil copy of one of a series of drawings by a guy named Charles Bargue who lived back in the 1800's. Bargue did a series of drawings of casts of parts of famous sculptures. So, right now, I am working on a Bargue of Mose's arm from Michelangelo's Moses. My recently completed Bargue is of a hand holding a whetstone, but I can't figure out what the original sculpture was.
So, what is the point of this copy of copy of a copy? (Original, cast, Bargue copy, my copy). You've heard the saying, "Its not about the destination, it's about the journey."? Well, it is. It's about the journey. There is a whole process to making the copy that is designed to help an artist learn to see. And see what? Contour lines, shapes of shadows, form turning in space, shapes of half-tones (the grey areas), overlaps, relationships between all of the above, and the list goes on. All of the things I learn while making the Bargue, I then take with me into the model room where I apply them to human figure drawing. And, human figure drawing is also a didactic exercise, the lessons from which I can then apply to future artwork.
Lots of exercises. It's all preparation. Funny thing is that it is easy to get lost in the exercise - and not in a bad way. Even if the main purpose of the copying exercise is to teach me to draw, that does not mean that the product is not also beautiful in a particular way. I have a great affection for my Bargue. I could sculpt the form in space of the 2-dimensional image I drew, and I would know every curve. I have to say that I am much more at peace now than I used to be about things being both exercise and end in themselves. I remember my mother saying that in college she thought that a person gets an education to do something and then they finish the education and then they go off and do it. End of story. But, now she knows that the learning part really goes on forever. (Something like that. Sorry, Mom, if I messed up your words.) So, one of the things that I've learned from doing my first Bargue is that I *really like* representational drawing. It's fascinating and challenging and fun. So, that tells me something about the direction I might want to go, and since fleshing out that direction is part of the point of this blog, I'd say that's a good thing.
Signing off for another week. Thanks for reading. Go out there and see Beauty today.

Hand with Whetstone, Copy of a Cast Drawing by Charles Bargue

Mucking Around with Watercolors

Week five of the first trimester at the Florence Academy of Art is done, and I'm tired. This is a lot of drawing. So, Thursday night, I cut loose a bit and took advantage of the fact that full-time students are allowed to attend part-time figure class and pretty much do whatever we want.
So, here's my recreation: watercolor sketches. It's my attempt to bring some of my own heart in to the stuff I've been learning. In this case, my "heart" is pretty much represented by the fact that I enjoy watercolor. Heck, I enjoy color, period. Down with pencils!
OK, rant done. Bring on week six.