Consulting the oracles

 

 

Looking for guidance in confirming and developing my strengths and apparent style, I consulted…not exactly an oracle, but a promising local artist-teacher via a 12-hour on-line workshop – 6 weeks, 2 hours a week, 10 participants, "personal attention."  The stars seemed in alignment when my self-made pad of studio scrap paper (noted recently in the great puppet entanglement) revealed the headline:  INSPIRING EVENTS.

 

Alas, the times were out of joint (or maybe I should have used tea leaves?) and this workshop was *not* an inspiring event. After three teeth-gritting sessions, I declined to Zoom in for the rest of them.  Fine.  Now what?  Back to Square One.  We'd been asked to write down what we wanted to get from the program, and the only thing to do now was to – go get it for myself.

 

I had asked for help in addressing my perennial tendency to work in a very flat, linear fashion – vs. a more painterly style with more volume and subtlety in colour handling.  Okay.  Here's my new plan for the next two months.  I'm going to work this through step by step, modelling each of my paintings on the different and distinctive style of a painter I like. The jury will be out until 4-5 paintings are complete.

 

Painting One:  Broad expanses of intense flat colour.  And who best to exemplify this but American artist Alex Katz, still going strong at age 93!!

 

I "met" Katz on the recommendation of a very kind local artist who accepted my request to critique my works back in 2017.   And then I learned that my cherished friend A, who has been ahead of me our whole lives long, knew and loved his paintings.  When I visited her on my Historic Trip to the East a year later, she took me to the significant collection of the Alex Katz Foundation at Colby College in Maine. 

 

 

Wow!  I hadn't realized that so many of his paintings were huge.  And thanks to Colby's sophisticated website, you can tour around the whole collection.

 

I got excited again about Katz as I considered possibilities and selected an interesting male face as my model. 

 

This should be easy, right?  Just define the tones in the planes of the head and splash it all down.

 

Hummph.  NOT easy.  In fact, a close-up look at Katz's simplicity shows an extraordinary sophistication in the delineation achieved with just 3-4 tones.

 

My own early stage had entirely too much going on.  And really – I'd have done better to select a model who looked straight ahead.

 

 

Maybe it would have been easier if I'd worked on a larger scale.  Yes, here he is, the real deal – Inspirational Elderly Artist at Work.

 

However, rather than sacrifice a studio wall, I pressed ahead on my 11 x 14-inch canvas.  As I considered who to invite next to my Homegrown Workshop, I started to think of my subjects as art students (the perennial guests, who allow for plenty of quirks and wackiness) waiting for their works to be juried.  In that vein, here's the final version of "The Jury is Out – Alex." (copyright 2021)

 

 

 

This is getting a little eerie, but when I inspected the scrap paper I'd been using for brush-wipes, I found another message.  Had I already struck gold with a Dream Design??

 

 

Games people play

 

 

 

What are these people doing?  They're a little gang I met up with at Summer Camp way back in 2011 (ten years ago!!!) – and they mostly play quiet solo mind games, dreaming the impossible dream…kinda like me.  I've often thought as I'm working on a painting that it's like a challenging game…Is this the right move?  Can I bring this off?  Is too much going on here – or not enough?

 

When it gets into game strategy, there's nothing to match chess – a game I was never very good at although I love the pieces, the more fantastically designed, the better.  A year or so ago, a school friend (notice I didn't say "an OLD school friend") sent me a wonderful photo of her husband and grandson deeply absorbed in a chess match – using the family's classic Staunton pieces, which were also the choice of other serious players I've known.

 

I did a quick sketch from her photo and always wanted to do more with this twosome.

 

Coming across the photo again about a month ago, I decided the time had come.  But seriously:  It would be utter madness for the likes of me to attempt both figures, the chess pieces, and the chessboard in perspective.  How about just The Husband…and the chessboard?  Let's try that with a quick splash of paint.

 

Well….this might work.  At a cross-continental distance and sight-unseen (by me) the grandpa is a pretty handsome dude, suitable for the cornerstone as it were.

 

Then I literally went back to my drawing board to prepare some templates for the six representative pieces that would fill in the meditative space on the right side of the canvas.

 

Here's the preliminary plan with cut-out pieces:

 

And here's the midway point with colours established:

 

As I cleaned up one day, I thought again that some of my best works are the Accidental Abstracts created on the palette.

 

 

Okay, here's the final version – in which I couldn't resist showing the possible directions each piece could move to place The King in checkmate.

 

Because my friend and her husband are one of those grey-haired couples who just keep on being **Too Sweet** together, I've titled the painting, "Dreaming of His Perfect Mate." (copyright 2021)

 

This time, let's invite 20^th century American artist William Faulkner to have the last word.  He was writing about writing but this applies equally to art – and maybe even to chess.

 

"Get it down.  Take chances.  It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good."