Art-The Very Breath I Breathe
I have become a very serious student of life and art. It is interchangeable. It is the very breath I breath. It has become more than just depicting what I see, but what I feel and the understanding of what I am painting. Paul Gauguin said:” It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.”
Art, my art, wakes me up at night, it takes me to bed, and in the morning it is there again while I drink my coffee and meet the sun. It consumes me. Sometimes it is more like a nagging husband or wife that you quiet down by sitting at the canvas and begin to paint, as if looking at it in the eye will make it quiet and happy again.
Here I am at 2:00 am, writing about it. There are those days, I must admit, that I want a divorce....I run away and go to a place where I think I am alone....to think. To measure whether I want to continue as an “artist”. Those moments are fleeting...that is when I realize it is my very blood and it will never leave me. I can not rid myself of this path.
There is no end to the learning and discovery, no final breath, no burial, it is with me always. Life is art. I ask my students “What kind of art do you like?”, “What kind do you love?” “What art moves you?” “Why?” tell me why. I am on a long road of creating art that moves me, and maybe someone else. I recently am on a mission to recreate a piece of art I love, which I created, and I am blown away at my own art, the difficulty that it is taking to recreate this piece. I may not be able to do it. Is it because today is a different day than THAT DAY? What did my art do to me that day that I created it, and why can’t it show up again?
I had a friend ask me one time, about a different piece of art,“What were you channeling when you painted that? It is ingenius.” I literally shrugged my shoulders and said...”I don’t know.” Then I thought to myself, was I channeling something or someone? What did happen on that day?
So what am i thinking at 2:00 am to wake me and cause me to not sleep but write instead? I am thinking about David Kassan, What drives him to be such a great realist painter? I want to be that kind of painter of impressionism. Who were the very best impressionist painters? Why do I like impressionism vs. Realism? Maybe it was because I had this conversation with a student right before I closed my eyes to sleep. I began to open my phone and light up that blue screen and look up the best Impressionists. (Hoping not to wake my husband) Who do you think comes up? Edouard Manat...his student...Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin. I didn’t get any farther than that. I started studying their work, like I have done many times but with fresher eyes and a more skilled hands. Everyday I have more skilled hands! Then I realized...I have become one of them. In a way. Then I think about teaching. What am I teaching? Learning to be an artist is first and foremost a form of discipline. I am currently researching the Effects of Art on the Brain. No, I will not let this brain thing go....It too, is hard to comprehend and has a wealth of information to dissect. I remember, as I am sure you do, when I was told that the average human only uses 10% of their brain. WHAT? That day, another mission, I will use all of my brain!!! I will figure out how to do this! (Joke’s on me, but I haven’t quit trying) I will gather, and have gathered, lots of information, lots of research, and some common sense, and create a blog, a book, describing what ART does to our brain, our psyche, our lives. Here is one fact, Art production has much more benefits than just art viewing. I will save the rest for later. But the reality is...the more I learn, the more I want to teach. Teaching is learning. If I do not teach it, the ability to describe it is lost, and it is like sharing the greatest discovery of life with others. The joy of love with others. If I hide it, or do not let others in...I think it might die. I said earlier that there was no end, but that might be the end. When we keep our love inside. When we are creating, we are sharing; to someone-even if it is our cat. “I am one, may I become Many, may I grow forth”- from an ancient Indian saying (from India). How is that different than when Christ said “Go and make disciples of all men”? How is that different from teaching and having students that want to glean something from the teacher that will feed their insatiable hunger to create? and share? It is not. I will become many, and in becoming and making others, I will grow....this is my deepest desire. Sharing.
We are born creators. The moment we create something and satisfy ourselves or someone else with our creation, for instance a pie, a cake or birdhouse, it makes us happy. It becomes a bit of a drug though. We want to keep doing this over and over to send those endorphins off into our brain, It is like a drink of cold water on a hot day.
So all of this writing to come to the point of assigning my art classes with a specific goal for each class or better each month or a series of 7 classes, as it takes seven times to create a memory. (look it up...) I want to recreate this painting!!!! (back to that). I was studying “How to paint White” at the time. I think we need to do this and copy other people’s paintings. Sargent’s paintings! Paint white flowers, paint white cows, paint white dogs. Let me help you create memories!!! That may be the title.
So I wanted to come back this fall to teach a more disciplined approach to painting. For the impressionist painter, and the disciplined student. I have tried these before, with success I feel.
Painting White- Many shades and colors of White
Painting Figures - from general to specific
Painting Reds - Reds in Shadow, Reds in LIght, Middletone Reds
Colorful Shadows- What color do I make that Shadow?
Painting Edouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere” (original 3’2” x 4’3”) We will only paint it 18”x24”
Painting with a Large Single Brush Only
Painting Trees- Different shapes and breeds of trees
Painting the Rose in different Shades - 7 days of the rose
Painting Clouds - Sunrise, Sunset, Afternoon, Stormy, Many Clouds, Fluffy Clouds, That accent in the sky
Painting Greens Or not - many shades of green
Sketching Process-no paint - using the water color pen with watercolor paper and making small studies
Painting abstractly - painting landscapes or still lifes with abstract forms of color- LARGE BRUSH
Painting after Sargent - We will choose 1-2 works to paint and copy his work in Sections. Breaking it down.
I will also be offering 2-3 times per year a class for people wanting to paint impressionistically whether new or seasoned artists....they will have to take this course before they take the other art classes from me. It will go over my method, and I will only give them two brushes, and 5 paint colors. I am putting a calendar together and it will be on my website.
I have made friends in the artworld that are very successful artists! We all look at their work and want to be just like them. How can I be like them? I even say to myself...I want to paint like that! or add that to what I am already doing. When I talk to them about their work or hang around them long enough, there is a common thread with all of them...they practice painting the same way or the same thing until they “get it”, over and over, with a daily practice. They push themselves out of their comfort zone. I just listened to David Kassan on the online ArtCrit academy, where he and Shana are critiquing work of other artists that are paying him to mentor with him. His comment to one lady from Australia was....paint the same subject matter for two years before you move on to another subject matter. Quiang Huang paints everyday several small studies of how he wants his art to look like. Scott Christensen paints small studies in a notepad he designed over and over, and says he spends 80% of his time in his studio studying art, and playing with his studies. He defines values and colors of values before he works larger. We know Carol Marine paints at least one painting daily of a 5”x7” or 6”x6”. Discipline my friends. I too feel I should be more disciplined. Teaching is a huge discipline as well as painting and to make it easier or more congruent for me, because I have to produce works of art, I have decided to teach what I want to improve upon myself. If it fits in your schedule and way of learning..great!
