Painting In One Hour Stints

Yesterday a friend asked me how I decide what to paint.  I didn't really know what to tell her. Do these images really just come to me?  Are simply the result of the casual image logs I make through my bias filter throughout a day?  Is there something I want to say and therefore come up with an image? 
I think that it has been the latter for me at times; in my political and suicide paintings I used that format pretty directly.  The past several years for me though, ideas and images have seemed to form more closely together making It increasingly difficult to tease apart, and answer questions about my decision making.
My most recent work (shown here and in progress) is the closest piece to contain more of a  separation between idea and image than any of my work over the past several years.


I don't know what comes first but goes something like:
Idea: How do I feel in this space?
Image: Still life of anything for a pink color study.
Idea: This is a special place that should be recorded.
Image: Cathedral ceiling surrounded in pink.
Idea: The transition of a space from Nana's home to my studio to Kevin's home.
Image: Contrasting styles and patters and emphasis on color transitions.


My studio rhythm reflects this back and forth.  I usually paint for about 45minutes to an hour and then spend about 20-30minutes looking at the piece while allowing myself flip back and forth between my questions and concerns about what is going on.


So still, I have no answer for my friend and I guess that is fine, but I would really like to work that out so that I can have a more fruitful conversation about this with my students.

Practicing Studio Practice

Back in the studio.  Working there on a piece for a friend and from home on a piece for me.  Here are a few shots of the evidence to support that information:

organization.

prep.

(partial) mess.

happy hand

too bad it is probably letting tons of horrible chemicals into my boddy.

work in progress.

Zombies

Things I'm into right now:

• Zombies

Missing Mandible Melvin
Acrylic and Oil on Canvas
20 x 16 inches

• The Walking Dead (Zombies AAANNNNDDDD COWBOYS?!!)

• Paying so much attention to these things that I have dreams (not nightmares) about the Zombie Apocalypse (widely know  as The Z.A.)

I just received my first issue of the magazine New American Paintings (which, let's be honest, at almost 200 pages and a high quality binding... it's a book.)  They consider it an experiment in art publishing and it is in my opinion the most important publication on modern painting in the States (and it is all put together right here in Boston!).

Anyway, I was psyched to get into this edition and see paintings from Summer Wheat bringing some of my favorite things together, Zombies and Painting.  If she could work a cowboy in there somewhere I'd really appreciate it, but I'm satisfied for the moment.
Wheat has pushed Zombies into the lead for me in the ongoing Zombies vs. Vampires debate.  I'll recheck the issue when I see some amazing Vampire paintings; maybe something raunchy relating to Sookie and Bill could win me over...

Moldy Brain Eater
Acrylic and Oil on Canvas
20 x 16 inches

Preacher
Acrylic and Oil on Canvas
72 x 96 inches

Not entierly convinced that Preacher is Zombie related, but these are the three paintings presented in New American Paintings so let's just go with it.

Summer Wheat is 35 and originally from Oklahoma City, currently living in Brooklyn. You can check out her website here.
This is what she has to say about her work:

"I don't describe my work as "abstract" painting.  I see it as failed representational sculpture, and I love its failure.  How can I make paint three-dimensional?  How can I depict a subject matter that is more than its form?  These are the impossible questions that push me to abuse the purity of paint and uplift the awkward moments in human life.  My paintings are full of messy human content: dorkiness, disappointment, humor and loss.  They are impersonations in which the emotional content overwhelms the physical.  Fascinated by vulnerability, I exalt in the incomplete."

Degas and the Nude

Saw the Degas exhibit at the MFA a couple times and know what is awesome there? This piece:

After the Bath, Woman with a Towel

The show closed on February 5^th, but happily, this piece is owned by the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard so anybody in the Boston area can go and visit it there.

The drawing was done with pastel on blue-gray wove paper and is 27 7/8 x 22 9/16 inches.

There is so much color, it is hard to even get the full sense of it from just seeing the image, you really need to go and visit it.  Completed somewhere between 1893 and 1897, I was unprepared to see such vibrant colors used so long ago.  It really does feel like long ago, so much in art has happened since then, but really, it should be no surprise.  Wikipedia says that the first time the French word “pastel” was used was in 1662. It is so hard to get a true feeling of time over the course of history.  Anyway, bright color just seem like such a contemporary idea, what a refreshing thing to be wrong about.

I was also impressed by all of the vertical and horizontal lines going on in Degas’ drawings throughout his work.  So much structure, it aligns with the industrialization that was going on at the time I suppose, but it speaks to pixels now.    


Other pieces I loved:

After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Chest
Made around 1890
Pastel on tracing Paper
The Courtland Gallery, London

Woman at her Bath
Made around 1895
Oil on canvas
28 x 35 inches

Woman Seated on a Bathtub, Sponging her Neck
Made around 1895
Oil on paper
Musee d'Orsay, Paris

The show also had many pieces by other artists who served as both inspirations and peers to Degas.  One of the pieces that I just have not got enough of yet is a painting by Picasso.

Nude on a Red Background
Oil on canvas
Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris