Last week was pretty much a fail as far as painting and drawing was concerned, couldn’t focus and get myself down into the studio. Saturday I started building a structure for the first painting in the series and gessoed a sheet of paper to do some colour studies with paint. Was thinking about materials and decided that given my studio schedule that I would give alkyd resin a try again as a glazing medium in order to maintain the luminosity and viscosity of oil but speed up drying time so i don’t have to wait days/weeks for layers to dry.

Monday and tonight I work on CMYK gradient studies in paint. Out of practice with the brush and feel of oil. Struggle to do the 10% value without adding white. I experimented with making a transparent paint with marble dust and glass dust. I can use this as a base and add tiny bits of pigment to be able to do transparent layers of the tints.

Is there a benefit to layering colour? Optical mixing on the canvas as opposed to pure pigment or mixing the colour on the palette? Will the layered colours have the luminosity I am hoping for? I want there to be a depth and luminosity in each chunk. Pure or mixed colour may have more saturation but I can see it just lying flat on the canvas. There is something more interesting in the layered translucent colours. A subtlety.

I keep thinking tonight about creativity. Questioning myself if this disciplined process, doing these color studies as opposed to going into a painting straight away, is somehow less creative. a way for me to hide from being creative because I am scared. Scared of failing of not being creative. I’m not even sure what that means exactly, inventive? I also keep coming back to reminding myself of Sonny Rollins blowing horn out on the bridge, or Coltrane practicing arpeggio after arpeggio over and over in order to enable his ability to imporvise on stage. Hours and hours of practice. There’s this voice in my head that keeps telling me that art and painting are different. That you just step up to the easel and do it and if you don’t or you can’t then you are not an artist or not creative. I remember having similar feelings when I was young in elementary and middle school. It’s why I always was convinced that I was not an artist. It’s a big part of why I gave up on architecture in high school. That somehow creativity and art flow naturally and don’t require work. And since it doesn’t flow naturally for me I’m not a real artist. Just someone trying too hard and just not getting it. That’s what I’ve been thinking about tonight. That a real artist wouldn’t do these studies. Even though I’m having fun. I’m enjoying the challenge. It’s certainly not all that interesting for someone to look at. But it’s that kind of craftskill that I love to struggle with and try to perfect. There’s nothing intellectual or theoretical about it.. It’s just layering cyan and magenta prismacolor to create a tone map. There’s absolutely nothing inventrive or expressive about it. It’s just rigorously mechanical. In many ways it’s actually more mentally challenging to work on the study than it is to actually build up the tones.

The question that comes to mind is would I do these colour studies if there wasn’t a utility? I keep telling myself that it’s practice for analyzing an layering comyk tones to create the colour values when I get to the paintings. but if there wasn’t that goal or reason would I still do them for the hell of it? Does doing the studies necessitate that I go on and do the painting in order to justify the time and energy put into these drawings? Maybe they help provide the motivation and energy to work through to completion with the paintings?

Cyan and Magenta layering

Stopping a little earlier than I wanted to but I can really feel my concentration wandering as I am getting more tired. Finished the yellow gradient and started the black. Can see my pace and comfort with the tones is picking up beginning to know wha the tone is based on the fill of the square. Not that there is dot gain with the coloured pencil but the subtle texture/grain of the drawing paper picks up the pigment of the prismacolor. For 100% I make sure no grains of paper show through. As the tone lightens more paper shows through and I can recognize almost the percent of paper for the corresponding tone. I imagine this will be more important as I increase in size. It’s different than stepping back, observing the colour and adjusting the tone based on the relation of one pixel to the next. Note quite sure ho to put it into words yet.

Again the mechanical/disciplined process worked for me. Not sure where it is headed. Which is an emotional challenge to be ok with and not get anxious or force something. Started thinking about working on a full piece while simultaneously doing the colour studies. Idea was to warm-up. Jump around, combat bordem. Though I may just be getting ahead of myself and wanting to have a “finished” piece. A real “work-in-progress” as opposed to just surrendering to the process and focusing on one piece at a time. For now I’m not going to change anything.

I was talking with a friend of mine last night about abstract landscape painting and I came across Raquel’s work this morning. What I find interesting in this work is how all the slabs of yellow paint sit at different points in space. I really get a sense of the interrelatedness of all the strokes, textures, and colors in developing the spacial tension in this piece.

Raquel Mazzina / Jaune / 122 x 92 cm / oil on canvas / http://www.arthousegallery.com.au

Raquel Mazzina’s work is an exploration of the artist’s emotive response to landscape. Topographical appearances are left behind, concentrating on the light, atmosphere and spirit of place. This intuitive and emotive approach results in a sensuous and luscious painterly surface. Her masterful use of colour conveys the seasonal changes from Autumn to Spring. {Read More…}

It’s been a busy six months outside of the studio, but I did still find time to paint. Here are the fruits of my labors as I finally got around to posting images of my work from this past fall and winter! I put down the oil paints for about 9 months just working in watercolour, mostly large format.   I was focused on pushing the medium of watercolour to its limits and discovering its expressive potential. Playing with the transparencies and opacities of different pigments through building up and washing off layers upon layers of paint.

gordonfraserfinearts.com

Last week, I dropped by Sundaram Tagore Gallery to see the Ho Sook Kang exhibition. Her paintings are built up with teeny tiny gestures, marks or dabs of colour really, that when viewed as a whole capture and communicate a sense of movement and elemental power.

I wasn’t familiar with the artist before seeing the show, so when I got back to the computer I check out what the gallery had to say. Here’s an excerpt,

If abstract art is the consummate means of communicating what Kandinsky famously called “internal necessity,” then it is a matter of the quality of inward depth in abstraction. In American action painting it means enacting raw feeling, implying that the instincts in which it originates are uncontrollable, while in Kang’s Orientalist action painting it means refining feeling, so that it is brought under ego control and stabilized, and can be aesthetically contemplated, that is, incorporated into the conscious self and used to fertilize its growth and understanding. The goal of Kang’s Orientalist action painting is self-consciousness not self-expression–more particularly, the transformation of self-expression into self-consciousness. If American action painting is informed by avant-garde primitivism–the climactic statement of the “noble savagery” that Gauguin pursued–then Kang’s action painting is informed by the Oriental ideal of meditative calm, holding its own whatever emotional and social storms threaten it. {Read more…}

While the academic in me would argue with certain turns of phrase in this piece and the implications/assumptions of both action painting and the “Oriental ideal of meditative calm,” it did get me thinking about a couple of points of comparison. First, in American gestural painting we often find that the expressive gesture functions as metaphor for an individualistic or atomistic conception of the self. Kang’s paintings seem to point to a different conception of the self, one that is more holistic. In her work, the individual gestures function together as a whole to create a unified abstract image. Second, it got me thinking about the Confucian/Classical Chinese idea of the “Doctrine of the Mean” (chung-yung) and so I pulled out one of my books and Wing-Tsit Chang had this to say which I found interesting.

In the Analects chung-yung, often translated the “Mean,” den;otes moderation but here chung means what is central and yung means what is universal and harmonious. The former refers to human nature, the latter to its relation with the universe. Taken together, it means that there is harmony in human nature and that this harmony underlies our moral being and prevails throughout the univers. In short, man and Nature form a unity. {Read more…}

I never seem to make it over to the New York Studio School’s evening lecture series…and always come across the highlights somewhere after the fact. We have Harry over at Daily Gusto to thank for reminding us of Pat Lipsky‘s talk last week and this example of her lyrical abstractions. Also with Ellen Phelen’s recent comments on beauty still fresh in my mind, it was nice to read this little bit here,

Ms. Lipsky, whose work is mostly abstract and geometrical, gave a cool and elegant defense of painting as the formal practice of creating beauty. She quoted Mark Rothko, saying, “An expression of beauty is an expression of rightness.” {Read more…}

Pat Lipsky, Spiked Red, 1969

(via Daily Gusto)

The are more wonderful recent paintings posted on her website. I am particularly drawn to the cold light of two paintings Dowager and Colbalt.

Always a big fan of Robert Motherwell, as he supplied the name for this blog, I came across this video interview of Motherwell via Hrag Vartanian, posted by Timothy Buckwalter over at Paintings and Drawings. I’m listening to it now talk at length about colours and Matisse and lots of other things. It’s amazing how he jumps from earth colours to coca-cola to wine to kraft cheese all in one breath!

(via Paintings and Drawings)

This comes from Fallon and Rosoff in part 3 of a report from Asia announcing the opening of the new contemporary art museum in Bankok. Scrolling down the post, the colours of this Richard Tsao painting jumped out of the screen and slapped me in my face on a slumbery Monday morning.

Another artist concerned with the yearly flooding is Richard Tsao who uses water based colors to tint his flooded studio and then sops up the color with paper.

A quick google search for more information dug of this great photo of Richard Tsao in his studio as well as some clothing designs via Asia Society

Richard Tsao in his studio

There are also some great monoprints over at Art Projects International and a bunch of other work and this other great studio shot over at ChinaSquare Gallery. Uhmm….can I just say, I’d much rather be there than here in my cubicle in front of the computer!

Richard Tsao's Studio