Free Art, Strange Land

Sometimes I wish I was more free in my art like David Choe. I feel like I have these two fighting daemons inside of me, one pulling me towards realism and the other toward complete abstraction.

I want to make great art. I want to become a household name. But I also want to be myself. But to become famous now days all you have to do is be shocking in some way and get your name in the news. The art seems secondary.

I often feel that some artists use gimmicks to get in the news. One guy is now making art blindfolded, we are to believe that will take him out of the equation, ignoring the fact that he is still consciously moving the pencil. Another guy uses body waste like blood, feces, urine, and even placenta. Some other guy performs stunts such as protesting against breast feeding or putting a confessional on the back of a bike and riding around town in a priest's outfit. (The media always falls for this, and amazingly it's splashed across the headlines.)

I sometimes wish we could move forward to a time of art without gimmicks.And then sometimes I think that the gimmicks while not adding to art, at least add something interesting to life.

This other world of art feels like an unexplored land but upon arriving everything is familiar. It's sad in a way. We struggle to push our limits, the way we think, and the social norms, but all we end up doing is shining a flashlight into a corner we haven't looked at. Everything was already there, we just decided that we'd turn our head in a different direction.

Salty Encroachment

No More Painting on That Wall

(photo from New York Times)

I just thought this was a cool article about the end of an era.

My brother was a graffiti artist so I know first hand how much talent and work goes into it. We never had anything like this building in our city. I think it is awesome that a place like this existed and hope that somewhere in the future there will be someplace for free expression like this again.

Why You Should Own A Gimp

1 Job security. When you don't want to go to work you can force your gimp to go in your place.

2 Low maintenance. A gimp only requires one outfit and his room is a wood box at the foot of your bed.

3 Companionship. When you're feeling lonely you always have the gimp to keep you company.

4 No nagging. When you're tired of hearing your gimp talk you simply close the zipper on his hood.

5 Stress relief. When you are feeling frustrated you have a willing subject to whip.

6 Cool factor. Nothing says you're the coolest cat on the block like your own personal gimp.

7 Cash flow. If your short on cash you can rent your gimp to all your friends.

8 In with the Hollywood crowd. You now have an excuse to invite Quentin Tarantino to your place.

9 “I was with my gimp.” When the police knock on your door you have an alibi.

10 Cheap labor. When none of your friends show up you always have someone to help you move.

Killer on the Road: Part Four

We're now starting to see an almost completed painting. You can see that I've fleshed out the furrows by blending black into red until it looks like it is supposed to. What you may not notice is that the lines of the furrows on the right side of the road have been changed in direction.

This is the problem that I was talking about at the end of part three. In the sketch, the shape of the enclosing rectangle is slightly taller which gave enough room for the furrows to flow off the right, but with the narrower shape of the MDF I had to repaint the furrows to go off over the hill and into our imaginations.

After this was resolved, I had to blend in the gray. First I had to cover the ends of the rows with white to provide some sort of barrier between the gray and the red. Then I had to add the gray, being careful to not pick up too much black. But everything kept mixing together anyway, making a muddy mess. I needed a solution and I ended up diving right in and pushing lots of paint around, smearing the gray over the red and the red over the gray until it looked right. Sometimes you have to bold while painting and take risks. Luckily this time it worked out. (Sometimes you end up scraping it off with the knife and starting over.)

So after the fields were done, I had this bright white road down the middle and thought it needed some dirtying up. I used a brush with some dark grey and black on it and scumbled it around a bit in the white. This seemed to work but it was a little too dirty. I went over it again with white, which brightened it up, but still let some of the darker color show, adding some texture to the blank road.

In the second photo you can see the only thing I added was the fence. This called for a thin brush that could carry a lot of paint. There's only one brush for the job and that's the liner brush.

The liner can be tricky since it has a tendency to go out of control and will loose paint at the tip first which means you have to press harder bringing side of the bristles down to finish the stroke, but this also means that you usually end up with a thicker line since the hairs of the brush start to fan out. Once this happens you need to reload the brush with paint which means twirling it through a big gob of thinned paint until all the bristles line up and it is back to its original shape.

Once you get the hang of it, it's not that bad, you just have to watch what you are doing and know when it's time to reload. So after I slapped in the fence it was time to let it dry for the final stage.

I still need to paint the figure on the road and put in my signature finishing touches. This will be much easier to do when it is dry. So for now, part five is going to have to wait as we watch the paint dry.

(To be continued.)

Killer on the Road: Part Three

I've put two photos on this one so that there aren't so many parts to this post. From here on out things go pretty smoothly.

I want the fields to contrast with the sky but part of them go under the city so I take some left over gray from the buildings and use it to get the general shape of the land. The sharp eye will also notice that I added some more sky to the left side of the city since the land was going to dip down right there.

Then I took a step back and realized that the buildings looked flat, so I used some lighter and darker paint to put some streaky details in the buildings. I liked the looks of this but it still needed some detail.

In my other paintings I usually put in lighted windows to show someone is home, but in this one I thought leaving them out would be better. But after standing back and looking at the painting I realized that the city wasn't alive yet and needed the windows. I mixed up a light orangey color that seemed to fit with the other colors. I took my small liner brush, and using just the tip, put in some windows in a grid pattern which brightened things up.

In the lower picture I started to add the color to the fields. Since I already had the gray there, I wasn't sure how they would mix together.

I often wonder what people think of artists. Do they think that they get this complete idea in their head and then just go about putting it on canvas like a paint by number? Or do people realize that there are many, many steps and decisions that are performed while the painting is taking form, and that the artist probably has as much foreknowledge of what it's going to look like as them. When a painting is finished, I'm usually as surprised as anyone else as to how it turned out.

Well anyway, I use the red to help define the final shape of the road. If you look at the gray on the left side of the city you will see a sharper drop off than later on in the red. I didn't like the way the road didn't quite look as if it was getting smaller with distance, so I rechecked my sketch and sure enough that part needed to be flattened out and the drop off placed further down the road.

After that, I started putting in the furrows of the field. I knew that I wanted them to fade into gray at the ends but at this point I wasn't too concerned with them. As I learned in the next step I should have been thinking harder about how I wanted the final painting to look.

(To be continued.)

Killer on the Road: Part Two

Yes, that is a partially completed painting on a jerry rigged easel. Hey, if Albert Pinkham Ryder can paint on the back of a chair using shoe polish for paint and Picasso can draw on a table cloth I can certainly use a home built easel. Plus, it only cost ten bucks, while a good store bought easel would cost over $100, and fancier ones require a mortgage. Money I'd rather spend on paint. (But if you feel sorry for me, feel free to donate some green to the get Brady a real easel fund. Or better yet, buy some art.)

Okay, on with the painting. Yes I know this is a little further along than a blank newly primed chunk of MDF but I got to this point before I reminded myself that I was going to do this post. After wrapping my mind around the shape and size of my surface, I laid out my paints. I paint mainly with primary colors plus black and white. Working with a limited palette does two things. First it teaches me how to mix any color, and secondly it makes sure that my colors will all work together and I won't have an unusually contrasting color that doesn't fit with the painting as a whole.

My paint of choice is Alkyd. Alkyd is a resin modified oil paint that makes all the different colors dry at the same rate. If you've ever painted with oils you know that some colors can take weeks to dry, like white. With Alkyds I can paint quicker and not have to worry about storing a wet painting for months, worrying if something is going to smear it. Alkyds also have the advantage that they are usually dry to the touch within a couple of days.

I've been thinking about making a red and grey painting for weeks, so the first thing I do is brush a large red splotch across the board about where the sky should be. Next, I fill in the top with black and begin roughly mixing them together on the surface. After I get it looking like I want it, I take a fan brush and lightly, with super fast wrist action, blend the whole thing together to remove some of the brush marks of the coarser brush.

At this point I have to decide where the city is going to be and the white area behind it. I use my palette knife to scrape away the sky area where I want the white and use a paper towel to wipe as much red paint off as I can. (Painting is extremely paper towel intensive. I go through a roll on just about every painting.)

Next I have to paint in the white, but through experience I know that it will turn pink if I just use straight white from the tube. So, to make the white stick to, but not blend with the red underneath I have to mix it with a little bit of paint thinner. After gingerly applying the white paint over the red, so as not to dig into it and make pink. I end up with an arch of white against a red and black sky.

I'm not exactly happy with this but I push ahead and grab a small clean brush and use it, and several paper towels, to scrape away the white paint as I block in the shapes of the city. Then I mix several colors of grey, some with a little blue, some without, some with some blue and yellow. Then I paint the basic buildings.

When I get to this point I want to figure out where the road and fields are going, so I take some white paint and rough in the general shape of the road. But that white arch is annoying me.

So I take a big flat brush and start to blend the arch. This is not an easy task, since on one side I have very wet buildings, that if I run into will make the white grey or the buildings white, neither one a desirable outcome. And on the other side, I have a red sky that is also wet and threatening to make it a pink arch. I finally come up with an almost Cezanne type brush stroke of dabbing that makes the arch blend in with the sky, and yet remain white behind the city. And yes I did have to go back and fix the buildings a couple of times.

I'll continue this next time since this has gotten way too long. This had several steps in it, I expect the other posts to be far shorter.

(To be continued.)