The Process: Day 2

Day 2. Started late around 1 PM and that is not good. The light is best from 10 - 4 and I should never be anywhere else during those hours. But my neck was extra tight so I walked up the mountain and over the other side for an extended 2.5 hour hike. It was good -but oh so humid. I was soaked through when I got back, took a freezing shower, had a salad with my heirloom Green Zebra tomatoes and hit the studio.

I started by adding another background layer of goldens and reds. I lightened the cone of grace that Flannery is standing under. I just needed to get the gist of how that will look so i can figure out the overall color balance. The cone of grace will need several layers to hold the detail of drops that will come later.

I could not live without Golden Fluid Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold; it is the most indispensable color. QNAG adds a warmth to any color it overlays. It will take a lot of paint (a LOT of paint) to get the background where I want it but that can come later. Today I needed to deal with Flannery's face and that was what most of today was about.

I did the classic green shadow underpainting. Frankly, I havent done this since college. This is the kind of thing that can get me panicky and abandon the process, but I worked through it and all the weird awkward stages to follow. Note how the drawing is kind of skewed and asymmetrical. I tend to leave those lines and fix them as I paint; I try not to have the image be too perfect because its this very wrongness that gives a final painting its unique character. (I think)

I painted about 4 layers of different colors to create the flesh tone of her face. You cannot just squeeze out a tube of flesh colored paint and call it a day because it just doesnt have any life to it. I use a mix of flat and slightly shiny paint - it looks weird now but later when I varnish the painting all the layers will "come up" and it will look deep. Rich. Make sense? I mean that you can look down into the painting and see all the layers but it still reads as a fluid surface. See how crooked her eyes are? I'll fix that in a minute. Its hard to see the importance of that halo of lighter yellow until I get her dark hair painted. Right now the whole thing looks pasty and bland. Note how deep into the lines of the Flannery drawing I take the background color. That is critical for nice clean edges. Painting is a discipline where you are always thinking back to front and trying to plan for later by laying a foundation early.

Flannery's hairline is to die for; the illustrator in me loves the lack of ambiguity. You just do not see this kind of hair anymore. I really like how the left (our left) looks - Im going to have to fix that right side but its going to take some real skill to overcome that dark with the light. I used a ruler to measure the distance from hair to shoulder line and its still off. So thats something to be corrected as well.

The face is very rough here but I know that the super refined work is days away. I just need to have her look back at me for the rest of the painting because the connection with her eyes is what every other thing that follows has to sync up with. Literally, the peacock, the pond, the trees, the leg braces, the cloud - all of it must be in service to those eyes.

* describing this process is a challenge*

There is barely enough room for me and the board (40x40) and the paints to fit in here. But both Trout and Koby tend to lay in here all day. Its too hot and humid for them. They mostly lay around in the summer. I took them to the waterfall on the break around 4. Some times the chickens come in too but they have a tendency to fly up and land in paint. I just wave my dry rags around at them and out they go.

I added the eyebrows and that was very important to the look of Flannery. That mouth needs work - not alot though. I couldnt have her smiling a big wide smile so this is the face I am going with. I need her face to look a bit more relaxed and that is going to mean doing something with the smile line shadows. But not much! Too much is too much and letting go is as important a skill as any other aspect of painting. Im happy with the dress detail. I was working from a vague photo so I am sort of guessing here - the vibe is about right and that is good enough.

I thought about my mom while painting this. She was the one that taught me about how the upper lip is darker due to the shadow and that light hits the middle of the lighter lower lip. Its absolutely true. She was a good artist, and drew women's faces beautifully. Most of the day I was trying to figure out how I was going to work in the leg braces that Flannery no longer needs. In my original drawing I thought it might go something like this:

How's this for an impressive preliminary drawing? grherhahahaha! I saw her tossing the braces away and then I noted how damn big a peacock is. You are not going to stand in water holding a bird that heavy in one arm. Not even in my fantasyland. Now I am kind of seeing a Frida Kahloesque device where they might be bound in ribbon or something sort of floating away...we'll see.

This might give you an idea of how large the piece is. It is hard because typically, I spin my paintings around and work from every direction. I paint upside down a lot. Its a great way to work for some reason I can see certain things more correctly that way. But not being able to move the painting around is making it a bit more difficult. By Thursday, I will have to get it on the wall because standing back away from it will be essential to getting the final work right. Im not sure I can stand back far enough. Everything has to "read" from a distance and in case the work is hung higher. (This presumes I actually get IN the show)
I will probably have to move outside which is problematic as bugs fly into the paint all the time when I do.

Flannery is standing in water so I really dont have to paint her legs very well. Yay! I just have to have the suggestion of them beneath the water color. Same goes for how the part of her dress is submerged - it should just read as slightly darker than the water color. Koby's paw print is still very visible, but it will disappear by tomorrow. This is the end of the work day - its getting too dark and the lights make too much reflection which makes it hard to see what the paint is doing. Natural light is the only way to go. It really is.

You can get an idea of how that works here although this is just the first of may layers. This water will have a lot of life: it will have concentric circles radiating from Flannery as well as light waves and tonal variations. The water will take hours. Hours and hours. And I need that dress to look floaty, so that is an engineering problem for tomorrow.

I put up a little motivational poster for myself. Like I said, Ive won a prize in this show before, but I would like to win a MONEY prize. But even if I dont, Im kind of stoked that I am painting a real person -however stylized. I havent done that in a long time and its a fun challenge.

Tomorrow: making beautiful water, more back ground, and laying down the peacock's first layer. Thanks for joining me!

The Process: Day 1

Okay I said I was going to take a hiatus, but instead, I am going to post at the end of everyday this week to show the process of making a painting. I have been thinking about Flannery O'Connor a lot lately and had a vision of her standing in water. Then I went to Aunty's blog and she had a post about Flannery and I took that as a sign to go ahead and paint the vision.

 I am doing this painting for an upcoming national juried show; the deadline to submit a CD with photos of the painting is this Sunday. That's the deadline to just get in the show. The actual show is in October. Im motivated by prize money and achievement. Painting a person is kind of out of my realm, but I plan to maintain my surrealist approach to the challenge. Today I picked up the wood substrate from my friend J.T. and gessoed it. It is 40x40 which is pretty big for me. My strategy is that by having a work that is close to the size limit, I can get on the 'big wall' with the good lighting. I printed out some source material and did the drawing. I have had the vision of how it would be for a long time, so when it came time to draw it flowed pretty well.

Koby, of course, stepped in the wet gesso and I plan to do nothing about it. This footprint is in the part of the painting that will be water. The composition is Flannery at Andalusia standing in the pond holding one of her beloved peacocks, whose tail flows into the water with the design of the feathers becoming very large in the foreground. Above her, the eye of God breaks through a cloud and rains down grace in golden drops. It is a kind of baptism. Ive tried to work in having her leg braces (a result of having Lupus, which is what killed her) falling away or maybe being at the bottom of the pond - because they are not needed anymore.

Right now, I am waiting for the first layer of the background to dry. Its a very rich layered golden yellow with the edges going deeper with an overlay of transparent red. There will be a lot of blues in this painting so this golden background will be critical to warming the final art. I leave my drawing kind of dark so I can see what I am doing and paint a little over the lines to make sure I have good paint coverage where colors meet. I can always make corrections later but I tend to have a fairly tight drawing before I pick up a paintbrush. At the end, the textural stuff and last minute flourishes that make the surface sing are added as needed. But that would be on day 5 or six.

I hope you will join me this week to see how this painting develops. Suspense! Will I make deadline? Stay tuned.

Tomorrow I will probably work on Flannery's face a little bit because if I can't get that right, or to a point where I know it will be right, all the other labor will be wasted time.

* Yesterday, J.T., my friend who prepped the wood for this Flannery project, brought his wife over to get the painting he traded me in exchange for painting the outside of my studio. I think she was really excited to get it, and know that he feels it was a good trade. It is a 24 x 24" painting of a "Rain Deer". It looks Indian (as in Hindu) to me. I just finished it on Saturday  - a good warm up for this week's work although what I am planning is more restrained and controlled than this piece:

Guinea Hen

Guinea Hen. Oil Pastel on Paper 22x30"

Folk Fest 2009

  a favorite at Alcove Arts by Sergio Mora

Betty and I went on our annual pilgrimage to the Slotin Folk Fest looking for affordable new pieces to add to our respective collections. Very quickly we realized that things had shifted slightly; many of the dealers and artists from last year were not present. It is a curious situation. The mission statement on the Slotin website states that this festival is to promote the art of mostly rural, untrained, self-taught artists who dont have access to traditional art venues. With a booth fee of 900 dollars its a bit difficult for those authentic artists to exhibit. And the hall was chock full of MFA's and, looks like, anybody who can pay the freight to get in the show. 

I saw a lot of what i call "style memes" there: God help the artist that gets out a unique vision because next year there will be copy artists. You can just see that whatever sold well has been examined and then art is made to fit the market. Then there are sellers in there that mystify as to how they could have been included as folk art.

Back to the art school people: this post is not a dig on them. while i would like to see more self-representing self taught artists at this show (most primitives are represented by dealers and their work is very expensive), i am delighted with the trained artists' work.  Many of them are finding their way back to a pure expression. William Skrips said it best when he detailed how he had worked to undo all the training and instruction that he had received from Art in America style giants at his NYC art school.


I think he has been successful. His assemblages are simultaneously raw and polished and infused with some hint of classical art; in some of the pieces i could feel my mind traveling to a pieta or crucifixion stone or odd-wheeled contraptions you might find in a Bosch painting.

             the raggedy fabric, the nails, the bondage wraps and anxiety grimace on this piece are perfection.

I met Karl Mullen last year and loved the work. I wasnt disappointed this year. He remains a favorite at this show, representing the best of the primitive totem people drawings. The drawings are on large paper -like 40 x 60 - and are drawn with a combination of powdered pigments and wax crayons. But what he does to the paper really makes the surface sing; he coats the pieces in walnut oil which makes them appear and feel like heavy animal skins. A true outsider artist from ireland his resume reads like a traveling jack-of-all-trades just like a folk artist of old might have been. His subjects are musicians and kings and circuses and figures from another time that you know from intuition or memory rather than actual experience.

 Mullen's frenetic line work somehow portrays a 

figure with a look of slightly melancholic introspection

I found Randy Tobias early and picked out a new piece. I love Randy's work; his take on classic southern religious vernacular is my favorite of the clay work. Randy is a real outsider artist: he doesnt even have a website for me to link to. or a dealer. he can still be found at the "Turn n Burn" clay weekend where potters come out to a certain highway in north georgia to sell their wares by the roadside.


Angels, devils, snake-handlers, parsons, empty-souled demons and hybrid face jugs in amazing glaze combinations are shelved like a police line up.

Some of the figures remind me of characters in popular culture, for instance this angel with a red glaze stigmata is a dead ringer for Yoda.


some of the "preachers" reminded me of the weirdo preacher in Poltergeist II who is actually Satan in a terrible transparent pale corpse suit; you could sense there was more to what you saw on the surface. In the end, i chose this piece to keep the one i bought last year company:



there was so much to see and my notes were poor. i cannot tell you who made this lobster girl; she was quite small and secured inside an abalone shell. there was a table of these small sculptures that i liked and i regret now i did not buy this.

Betty liked this wire dress. It was one of many dresses at the show: dresses of wood and bottle caps, dresses of tin and wood, dresses of plaster - many dresses by many artists all without any flesh to fill them out.

The guys from minivan (They call themselves minivan because they travel around the country to show selling work - out of the minivan) were back and they had, once again, one of the strongest exhibits in the show. The always seem to have their pulse squarely on the collective zeitgeist with edgy works made with and on unconventional materials - perhaps the kind of salvage all of us will employ someday in the post land of plenty america. In the image above you can see what i mean: people in struggles; fights; parachuting "out"; surviving; falling.

Casey McGlynn is my favorite of the minivan artists. This little red pig is a good example: he has written "the living piggy bank" on the painting which is so absolutely correct in an age where money is precariously teetering on the verge of having no value at all. His work is very personal and narrative with messages scrawled into available spaces around the figures. His interest in playing the guitar is evident in the portraits of players and he continues with a vocabulary of animals interacting with people. The surfaces of his paintings are richly layered and messy but still surprisingly clear.



Anthony Pack continues to delight: i bought a piece last year: a paprika man that flies over my kitchen like one of those indonesian spirit protectors. Anthony is out of Kansas City and did his time at Hallmark before finding his way to this:




Each figure is infused with amazing personality and life and his craftsmanship is King. He is the best of the kitchen gadget junk sculptors - and there were quite a few at this show.

I liked Steven Chandlers drawings on plywood. He calls them Georgia Red Mud paintings. They are very much in the style of early southern primitive artists only more linear.



*note: steven chandler visited this blog and left a comment about his video on the show. . its an interesting look at folk fest from an artists POV with some undeniable damning evidence of another artist's goat painting that was copied (exactly-like a stencil) from Stevens original work; which addresses the issue of the increased copy cat situation at the show. if you are interested in art and commerce and what is "folk", check it out.

Overall, this show remains one of my favorites of the year. I subscribed to Art in America in a two for one deal when i ordered it for a friend as a gift; and rarely saw work within those pages that i actually wanted to read about, much less liked. I could say the same thing about some of the shows at the name brand galleries in town. At this show its fun to see the favorites but theres always that chance of finding something really good at an affordable price and the possibility of seeing an artist emerge fresh before a dealer gets a hold of them. I wish that somehow the pricing could be dropped on the booth spaces and that the dealers could be kept out. With an honest jury, the show could be restored to its earlier manifestation: that of a tent revival of outsider art.

in the night garden

i couldnt sleep
so i checked on the hen
she was awake
so i opened the pen
and took her with trout
out into the night
to visit the garden
by the brilliant moonlight
passed through tall darkness
of whispery pine
then the field opened up
its color sublime
my shadow stretched long
and i was E.T.
a nightjar called softly
from the sweet gum tree
a cool photo filter
colored the world
around the moon
a planet swirled
was it jupiter or saturn?
i still dont know
i but know where
Ursa Major will show
but half of her faded
the sky like blue jeans
constellation bisected
by blinking machines
under the stars
and beneath the sunflowers
nothing is wrong
the sweet life is ours

*22x30 oil pastel drawing of Trout and Easter in the night garden
CLICK for extra large view.

illustration: fall bouquet

i thought you might find it interesting to see the drawing -and then the final art at the end of the day.

Here is the basic final; its needs a lot of finesse -clarity of line and precise edges. the vase in particular needs attention. i chose a milked down ultramarine for the background which reflects the way the sky tends to deepen in color in fall. then i shifted the ultramarine a bit in the hue slider to a purer pyrole blue.

with almost all my illustrations, i will put the image in photoshop and look at areas in extreme magnification to see what needs further attention and to try on new colors. i really like this khaki background. its unexpected. but if i go with this color, im going to need to bump up the intensity of the yellow spider mum. it should go to a browner yellow at the tips. that would look good.

i also like this warm buttery background. maybe a bit warmer still -but not more yellow. i was thinking about adding some faded textural layers on top of the flat color; possibly linear insects barely perceptible. but, im finished for the day. time to go let Easter have some free range time. Trout is already at Chickory with V -so its just me and the hens tonight.

garden taxonomy

a page from my sketchbook. click it for large view.

back in the woods!