Around Painting.

I had to clean a portion of the house the other day. I removed all the gessoed panels from the dining room, scrubbed the gesso splatters from the floor and sequestered all my stretching hardware and tools into a neat corral on a victorian marble top table. It looked like a dining room again. With the exception of the large oil painting resting on the sideboard and the bucket of gesso nestled in a planter, you'd never know the dining room is actually a prep room.

After that I continued working in the studio. I threw away paint rags away and made sure jars of medium were out of my footpath. Things were getting out of hand. I swore I'd never work with oil and acrylic in the same spacetime continuum...and yet.

I have mixed feeling about my racing slick panels. I've done this before- the slicks, but I forgot how labor intensive it is. I alternate between glee and anguish. After working with natural colors for a few years, I switched to a hi-fructose palette for some of the work. I wanted to experiment with my watercolors on a larger scale and not on paper. I'm also working on 3-4 types of painting in the studio. If you were to ask me why I am working like this, I'd have to say it comes from a sense of urgency,  though while looking at my statements, it's obvious that I'm also simply telling my truth in painting. I was reminded of that the other day while writing a blurb for a painting that was inspired by the writings of John Ruskin and his "truths" in painting.

Nice gainer, yes? Just wait for my dismount.

I'm closing in on show titles.

The semester ended today. A few of my students thanked me. Unrelated, a couple of weeks ago, a woman I know from LA contacted me wanting to know if I could tell her about my process-my motivation for working in the studio. She had been having trouble getting in the studio. It's rather simple for me: I'm driven. I love what I do. It's challenging in a good way. It's also my vocation, so I show up every day. I suggested she read Art and Fear, a book that discreetly made its way around the graduate studios a long time ago. I pulled it off my shelf to get the author's name. As I picked it up to place it back on the shelf, I opened it randomly to page 83, paragraph 3.

"The corollary here is that the greatest gift you have to offer your students is the example of your own life as a working artist."

Fancy that. The last day of school year. I must have read that years ago because I modeled my approach to teaching on my practice as a working artist. All in all, a nice piece of symmetry as I wrapped up that chapter.

Yesterday: The studio is a wreck. This is good.

I'm actually supposed to be updating my bio and writing another artist statement, but right before the dog and I hit our respective meditation cushions, I was in the studio and had one of those embarrassingly over the top I HEART painting moments I get every now and then. I'm still newly enamored with having finally married my watercolor practice with my painting-painting practice, I have 38 kitchen sketches completed, and out of left field, a painting of a skunk I just started. I proceeded to revel in the elasticity of my painting practice and how that even after 30 years, painting is still wide open for me. This is what keeps it fresh.

And never underestimate the power of a jar of fluorescent paint arriving in the mail. Instant bling.

May Day

a recent to-do list on the back of an unopened envelope:
dog tag
soy creamer
sandpaper
bank depo
a long distance telephone number
a measurement for a cross brace
list of paints to order
notes from a dharma talk
a sketch of how to suspend something from the ceiling
more measurements
a patch of pointillism
a rough sketch of how to suspend something from the ceiling
sit tonight 6:30 pm
9am soy creamer
sand
guns to c.
2 thumbnail sketches
upcoming decisions:
attend a 1-day meditation retreat
or
attend an invitation-only luncheon/reception/press day for local artists involved in the convention center collection
The meditation retreat is winning so far, but professional obligation could win out. I used to view these things as a dress-up break from the studio but....
decisions that settled themselves due to new deadlines:
rent studio in the desert this summer
gave way to
stay in town and make work for 2 solo shows that overlap this fall.
I've been working for 2+ weeks prepping supports for the above shows. I'm almost done building and sanding the panels for one show. The panels are gorgeous in their own right, but whoa. I finally took a break from gessoing and started painting on one. Holy cow. And thus...



I'm also having a déjá vu about this- the whole thing-the show, the gallery, the work- as though one day these particular paintings were an inevitable. The other show was pushed up a few months, so no pressure, but I need a show title and some other things in 2 weeks. Technically, and I do mean technically, I'm running the gamut of painting techniques and pulling from all my MO's and experimenting with new ones.

Some good changes/challenges are ahead. I've made a decision abut something which I have to trust will be for the better, even if currently it makes me a bit nervous.

“Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float." -Alan Watts.

Back in LA, the 20 watercolors I did as part of the LAX installation are in place- details and announcement forthcoming, and PRECOGNITO and INCOGNITO at the Santa Monica Museum of Art are May 9th and 11th respectively. This year's piece is one of my favorites. Meow.

cropped teaser image, I need to find the whole image....

And so it goes. All paint, all the time.

The paint line seems to be predominant

21st Century Meditations on Daily Routines. #vine

As if painting still lifes and domestic abodes isn't enough, I've decided to make room for vine.

(Roll your mouse over the top left corner of the vids to turn audio on or off. )


Drip


Dear Plant, 


Precision, F*ck

Séances. Weekends, and by appointment.

Join us for our evening Canvas Levitation events.

Not all museum cafes are created equal.

I asked for a ceramic mug instead of taking the paper cup she handed me, but it only went so far in redeeming my afternoon snack.

Timing is everything.

“A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.” 
― Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

Occasionally I hone in on some superstition thinking it a coincident. For instance, every now and then I stay up late, work past midnight, sleep late and wake up to emails or messages about sold work and think, " I should sleep late more often." And on more than one occasion I've gone out of town to return to similar good news in my inbox and think, I should go out of town more often. Logically I know that leaving town, or sleeping late have nothing to do with selling work or invitations to exhibit, (okay, so there is a direct correlation with leaving town and being invited to show) but I still enjoy a little magical thinking every now and then. 

Before I left town I was mentally paring down my possessions to a tidy sum like 200 or something insane. After I came back, even more so. Meanwhile though, I am splitting my time between the paint studio and the watercolor studio in preparation for some shows. 

Spring is good. 

The last sketch.

Flight leaves at 12:20p out of Dusseldörf. No time for watercolor. Here are some sketches as a group.

Wednesday Day 5: Ramagen, Bonn

Highlights from Wednesday Day 5: Woke up in Bonn. I did a watercolor sketch of the view out the window.

Took the train to Ramagen to see the Hans-Arp Museum. Had coffee at the museum cafe. The museum was designed by Richard Meier. There was a Winter Impressionism show tied in with a bit about climate change. I'm still figuring out  how I feel about he motivation behind this. Corporate ploy, educational gimmick. or interesting juxtaposition? Matters not. It was lovely. Cameras were not allowed. I spent about (insert lost amount of time) doing quick sketches of about half the works in the show. No one noticed anything out of the ordinary.

Lunch back in Bonn at a vegetarian cafeteria. I'm beginning to lose track of the order of things. I think we stopped at AIB next and then through a graveyard on the way to the Auguste Macke House, and the Kunstmuseum.  Unfortunately the cafe was closed for dinner by the time we got there (6pm) so it was marzipan torte for me. The museum was open until 9 pm.

gardens/gravesite

California: The Huntington Beach surf cam at the Hollister Store in Germany. 

 Gabriele Münter.  

vintage Polke

Ackermann

Oehlen

Rauch

Tuesday Day 4: Brühl, Cologne, Bonn.

Tuesday Day 4: Woke up in Bonn. I did a watercolor sketch of the view out the window.

Jane has meetings all day, so I'm on my own.

Train to Brühl.
Max Ernst Museum. I am the only person touring the museum at that time of day. There were 4 guards and me. It was raining, wet, and cold. I could not have been happier. At lunch at Chez Max, the museum cafe, I had a moment of bliss acknowledging that this was my life as an artist and at that moment it was perfect. Exhibitions come and go, sales help fund the work, reviews create a sense of critical success, but eating carrot and ginger soup and having a cappuccino surrounded by wilting tulips in a warm museum cafe on a cold wet day in Brühl was Nirvana.

Schlösser Brühl. Rococo castle. Over the top Baroque. I was forced to tour the castle with a group of high school students from Italy. It took over an hour with the guide. I listened to headphones explain the rooms in English. It was fairly empty with very little furniture. Opulence was never so cold.

 I missed the train to Cologne and had to wait on the platform. 

Cologne/Köln. I could have gone back to the museums. I could have explored new museums. I could have had another cappuccino at a museum cafe, but by 3:30 pm I felt pressured to fill the role of the American Consumer. I speed-raced window shopped in the center of Köln, until I got lost and had to find my way back to the train station to catch the train located by The Cologne Cathedral.

The cathedral is the largest Gothic church in Northern Europe and has the second tallest spire in the world. This was to be my landmark, but  the shopping district in Cologne city center is so dense that I could not locate the spire. I finally made my way back to the tracks, took the train to Bonn,  met Jane at the statue of Beethoven and found refuge at the First Flush tea room. I should have spent the remainder of the day looking at art. Window shopping made me grumpy.