Equilibrium

I believe I'm approaching an equilibrium in my current work... which is not good.  

For a while, there had been an imbalance in the way I mix my colors.  I'd be applying pure colors on the canvass or paper and mixing in other hues along the way before laying down another color on top of everything.  That served me well before, as resulting works turned out bright and quite interesting to look at.  Some turned out too red, or too orange and that helped in adding a sort of “drama” into the painting.

  

This morning, I noticed that I have been applying a graying mix of burnt umber and red, and large areas of my current painting was looking ever so muddy.  Though given I'm still applying the middle layers of the painting and I haven't painted the highlights in just yet, I can tell that this piece will look gray in the end.

I have to consciously break this equilibrium.  I have to force myself to drop in the yellows and reds even at this early on, just so as to get into a sort of mood or rhythm (call it what you may) which will dictate how I feel about the work and therefore affect how I go about the work later on.  Ok, that sounds a bit convoluted, but that's how I perceive it.

The thing is, I'm torn between two tendencies as I work on this piece.  One side is analyzing constantly the edges, and taking note of where gradients should be placed, and what color should be applied as an underpainting for the highlights.  The thinking can get quite tedious at times.  The other side just wants to apply whole blobs of paint with nary a care in the world.  It wants me to squeeze out my reds, blues and yellows out their tubes and with a small well filled with linseed oil, just go about mixing the colors in the canvas itself.

I'm aware I can't and shouldn't do the latter.  That can only be executed successfully after years of experience with oils.  Every step I'm taking now is calculated, else, I might end up wasting this canvas – and of course, the paints!  Oil paint is expensive.  One small tube cost Php 170 already – and that price is for the regular colors like burnt umber, ultramarine and such.  But even as I said that, I still try to “let loose” because doing so pleases me in a way.

If I stay over at the analytical side, I'd be bored.  If I go over the other side, I'll mess everything up.  If I stay in the middle, I'll end up with a "gray" piece of work.  What a trilema!

I've learnt a lot from this canvas.  I hope I don't ruin it.

Details and Impressions

I've been somewhat lethargic these past few days, but I've always made it a point to work on some drawings or my current painting even for a few minutes each day.  The painting above is going along well, albeit painfully slow.  I've just ran out of burnt sienna and I can't progress with the face or the arms wrapped around the little girl. Come to think of it, I'm running out of blues as well.  

I should have listened to an online article I read recently about starting on smaller canvases first.  This work doesn't have that much details to show to merit such a large area.  Perhaps half the present size of this canvas would have sufficed, making my life easier, and saving me a bit of paint as well.

I wanted to do an impressionist rendering of the man's shirt and pants, blurring the folds in the process, but I'm having difficulty diverging from painting wet on dry.  For one, I have no idea in controlling streaks of colors to produce shades and highlights.  When I think of wanting to warm the painting, I'm still thinking of applying a thin layer of yellow later on, rather than applying the yellow along with the other colors as I paint wet on wet.  

It's sort of scary, to work wet on wet.  I still keep memory of a very early attempt at painting in mind.  When I was a lot younger, and after a number of visits at the NSW Art Gallery, I was captivated by the Gallery's impressionism collection.  I remember even buying a publication that showed and commented in much detail Pierre-Auguste Renoir's works.  I wanted to do something like that, and in a fit of assiduousness, I went about stretching my first canvass, applying primer and finally  painting.

With nary a preparatory sketch and any form of reference in hand, I started drawing in shapes onto my canvas and without a trace of trepidation, started applying in large blobs the cheap acrylic paint I bought from a school supplies store.  It didn't take long before I finally manage to muddy a lone tree and grayed the dress of a young girl.  Also, it didn't take long for the muddy paint to dry either.  After a few more attempts at rectifying the mess I have done, I finally covered the whole canvass with primer once again, only to find that an outline of a girl and tree could be seen as a relief on the primed surface.  Disheartened as I was, I tore off the canvas and ended up sulking for a few days.

For this painting, I also wanted to render the face and arms with significantly more details to allow it to standout against the feathery background.  It's almost the same concept in photography when you'd focus on a subject and render everything else in front of and behind the subject blurry.  But rather than mimicking the effects of optics in a photograph, I wanted to feather the background here using impressionist strokes  and raise the subject by being more exact with facial details.

It's one thing to say it, and quite another to do it.

That's one of the reason why I'm blogging right now – I have a need to concretize my ideas which for the meantime I cannot transfer onto a canvas because of technical inadequacies. 

Even as I work on this painting, I have a few more that I am developing in my mind.  Whatever I learn from this present one, I will have to apply to my later projects which I think is far more technically complicated, and more symbolically rich.

The thing is, I developed this little girl painting when I couldn't satiate my interest in photography.  With only a camera phone in hand, I had to make do with VGA resolution pictures and very poor dynamic range.  Then, the only thing that mattered was composition, framing and an aesthetic subject.  Communicating anything deeper was not in my list of priorities.

But having worked with photography for so long now, I have come to realize how difficult it was to communicate symbols in a picture.  Such things get lost in the clutter of details, and even if you manage to isolate it, the way we have been trained to look at photographs make us dismiss these symbols and assume that their presence in the photo is accidental.

In painting, no element can be accidental.  For one, the painter had painstakingly painted that object and integrated it into his composition.  With so much work put on an element, the viewer must certainly ask:  why?

Hardened Tubes of Paint

A cursory look at the painting I'm working on will tell you that the piece is in danger of getting stripped from the frame and shoved into a bin. But I remind myself to be patient and if the work turns out “that” bad, then I should at least try to learn something from the debacle.

I've had this unfinished work for ages – maybe around half a decade. After painting in the washes as guide, I stopped to allow the paint to “dry” before proceding with the second layer. From that moment on, I began to harbor doubts if I had the ability to push through with the work. Before long, I was finding all the excuses in the world to stash the work and hide it from my sight. The consequence of all that self doubt is that I stopped painting altogether. I've even blogged about this same frame almost four years ago: 

http://flickofdaswitch.blogspot.com/2005/10/unfinished-painting.html

Talk about harboring some intense self-doubt! That's one heavy emotional baggage being dragged there.

Though it's childish to blame inanimate objects for errors in your ways, I can't help but feel that this frame had acted as a barrier that prevented me from painting all these years. It's really been that long that I had to throw some paint tubes away as the paint had hardened inside their tubes! The ones I can use, I have to cut with a bit of white spirit first just so that I can load the brush with it.

As I restarted work on this frame, I found it annoying that the lessons I learned in using watercolor and oil pastels were intruding at the work at hand. I was reminding myself to be liberal about squeezing paint out of their tubes, and stop scraping the leftover film of paint on the palette.

I really should be painting right now than writing. Really. But I thought it would be good if I just stand back for a moment and try to internalize what I have learned last night. Holding that brush with a daub of paint at the end felt awkward. As I made my strokes, I was reliving the lessons I learnt in art class from Mr. Cummerford, more than a decade ago.

Ahh... during the final weeks of my senior year in high school, we were given access to the art rooms after school hours. Whenever Mr. Cummerford would leave the rooms all to ourselves, we would make our way up the roof and light up cigarettes and engage in some deep and thought provoking conversations about our artworks drying in the rooms below us. Though I've quit smoking and really hate the habit, I am thankful for such memorable and fun memories I have of other smoker-student-artists. We'd sit there admiring the yellowing sky as it filters through the leaves of gum trees above.

When Mr. Cummerford ushers us back into the rooms, he'd crinkle his nose and ask if we had been smoking. We'd simply say we were all up in the roof trying to find something that will inspire us. He'd nod and go about looking at our progress with our works. Try doing that in economics! Smoking within school premises can actually get you suspended.

First Post

Hi!  My name is Ian.  I also go by my internet screen name "suntoksabwan" in various websites.  I reside comfortably in Antipolo City, Philippines, where the temperature is on average around 34C balmy and humid.  That should put things in perspective.

I decided to come up with this blog to talk about my art and the process by which I would arrive at finished works.  By all intent and purposes, this is a creative journal.

I intend to be as honest as I can in trying to justify the placement and choice of elements in the paintings I am working on, as well as talk frankly about the motives behind the work itself.

I am not a professional artist.  I can barely come up with a finished work - even a pencil drawing, every month.  I'm not masquerading as an expert or even at least someone who knows what he is doing.  I simply want to talk about how I ended up with my art - which I think is the most undeniable proof I can leave behind to show that I have seen, felt, wished, wondered, imagined, introspected - existed and walked this earth trying to find my place in it along the way.

I don't have a large body of work.  I've sold some pieces and squandered the money to buy more rolls of canvas and brushes.  Right now, I have two stretched canvas staring out at me from the dining room, and about 8 sketches and schematics of ideas for future works.  

I am not at all comfortable with my skills just yet, and I am hesitant to touch brush to canvass lest I end up ruining a perfectly primed surface.  But then again, those rough sketches (really rough sketches which I think I am the only one who can decipher an image from) are annoyingly calling out to me.  

Every now and then, I'd lumber towards the dining table, throw open a sketch book and imagine my sketches in color, smile, and then be reminded of the hands given me...  close the sketch book and walk away with a heavy heart.

Though art brings me joy, many a times it ushers in despair into this life of mine.