Clear The Clutter For Creativity

I am definitely in an obsessive phase where I must shed old stuff and finish old business. Hence the recent studio/old art purge, and a resultant sudden creative burst. The purgative effect is entering my work. Looking at old, failed paintings with a new eye and seeing solutions, some solutions have boiled down to Fix or Toss (this bad painting broke in two over my knee with a satisfying snap). I’m pulling paintings out of frames and making long-wished-for changes. Do we sense a metaphor here?

Besides the Painted Bunting Variations, to be finished by the weekend, I’m remodeling the following:

a large watercolor of a pair of Barred owls;
a small acrylic of a Black-faced ant thrush and
a large pastel/graphite of a Double-toothed kite

I expect about a day or two’s worth of work on each. After which I can breathe again. And move on to new things.

Barred Owl watercolor, 16″x27″, this one never quite worked. Pulled it out of the frame. Am trying to save it.

It’s a nocturne, and I never liked the greenish cast in the sky. First thing I did was lay in a nice wash of Indanthrone Blue and Cobalt Violet.

The owls had some anatomical/perspective nastiness, and required much lifting of paint to change shapes. I also softened edges and too-tight feather rendering, simply by washing lightly with a clean wet brush. These images show a mid-phase, lifted and reshaped but not yet restored. Just looking at them here, I can see some further corrections will be necessary!

This acrylic, 11″x11″, is also not working. It’s a Black-faced Ant thrush, my favorite tropical walkin’ bird with an easily imitated whistle which can lure it out of the woods for a little cross-species duetting.

I “fixed” this in Photoshop, pushing things back and pulling things forward using mauves and blues where needed. The bird is now emerging from the deep gloom and walking off the edge. More metaphors.

Double-toothed Kite pastel and graphite, 20″x26″. Drawn from life amid the light-gap vegetation of Barro Colorado Island, where it perched, posed, then pounced on a lizard climbing a tree trunk. I like the piece but there was always something amiss with the drawing of the breast and barring. Too flat. The tail has problems, too. Much to address here.

“Fixed” in Photoshop. Soon to be fixed in reality!

The Bunting, Painted

Up Jumped Summer-Painted Bunting in Cannas. Strong light, warm colors, tropical fervor- Oklahoma!

Here is Painted Bunting v1.0; for all intents and purposes he’s done. I am letting him sit overnight to percolate and so that I can get a look in the morning with a fresher eye and check for corrections. I still am working on the String Bean Bunting (almost done), and the Daylily Bunting is resting on the table as well. That one requires a different color palette, so when these two are done, that one begins.

Detail from painting. Some kind of fancy bird, eh?

I wish I could have days like this all the time- I worked on five paintings simultaneously and finished three. That’s efficiency! I felt so good I pulled an old nocturne of two Barred owls from its frame and with some judicious application and lifting refreshed and renovated it. I spent about an hour fixing bad anatomy, bad perspective, overly tight brushwork, edges so sharp I got a paper cut just looking at them, weird color choices and so on. The piece is over 12 years old, so I have some sort of (lame, temporal) excuse for all the plain badness. I’ll post it later.

The spray bottle got a workout today. Note that I label every color, or I’ll forget what I have in the palette. I use a large plastic palette with deep wells and a central flat mixing area, and squeeze out an entire tube of watercolor paint into each well where it dries into a cake. It gets rewetted with the spray bottle every time I paint.

Right after New Years I celebrated by tearing apart my studio, which is by now a yearly rite, and threw away four trash bags full of awful drawings and horrid paintings generated by me over way too many years. What a rush, what pleasure it was crumpling and tossing! How liberating it felt! Everything is now nicely organized and clean and spacious, and I even found a few relatively decent unfinished paintings, including this one I couldn’t resist finishing up. Finished up today, in fact, and titled as follows…

“Throw Back the Little Ones”- Koi and Snowy Egret, watercolor 21.5″x15.75″

Also finished today is a cottontail bunny, commissioned by a gentleman in California who is giving it to his young niece.

Sweet Geraniums- cottontail rabbit, watercolor, 10″x8″

It seems to be time for me to clean up, chuck out, and take care of old business. I recommend it to anyone who is looking for a sense of closure and completion, or who thinks they might be having their mid-life crisis, sans red Ferrari or worse. Now I can begin something new and fresh. Where this goes is anyone’s guess. But, dang, I hope this keeps up- I might get something done if it does!

Color Mixes and the Secrets of Warm and Cool

I keep a journal of notes on my watercolors so I can look up mixtures and procedures. Also experiments, like the one I did on 10/17/97 :”Painted with food- coffee, wine, spices, eggs, salt, soy sauce…the only rules are: it can’t go bad, and it can’t attract ants”

One of the satisfying things about painting (as opposed to drawing) is how fun it is to play with one aspect of color: warm v.s. cool. There’s a particular push-pull that happens when you consciously use a warm color against a cool one. The warm comes forward and the cool moves back. Sounds so simple, right? It’s sometimes hard to get a concept under the skin until you do it ad infinitum (or ad nauseum, depending on your Latin). So I have to remind myself it’s a tool to be used. Use a warm reddish up against a cool blue and the plane turns under, like magic.

My old favorite brush: Winsor Newton series 680 One Shot 1 1/2″ flat, nylon bristles. You can load it up and it keeps a pleasingly sharp edge. I just ordered a new one, by the way.

Working today on the Painted bunting I played with simple color mixes in watercolor. Very satisfying indeed was the mixture of Brown Madder Alizarin together with Indigo Blue. Each grays out the other a little, but it’s a rich gray. When you skew towards more BMA, the mix is a warm beef color. When you lean into the Indigo, you get a deep blue-gray with hints of plum. The mix is all up to you; balance them any way you like. I used these two colors alongside another excellent mix: Ivory Black and Transparent Yellow (Winsor Newton). The black and the yellow put together produce a clear luminous spring green. Being transparent it can glaze without clouding the color below.

The Canna Bunting

In my left hand I keep a bouquet of brushes, each dipped in a different mix, and one large filbert loaded with clean water. This way I can switch to warm-cool-warm-cool and get that push-pull going. The big flats cut back and forth into each other’s path like a pair of razor blades, each color straying into and intensifying the other.

This is the Beanpole Bunting version.

I’m working on two paintings at once, putting one aside when it stops looking fresh and hopping into the other one. To add to the fun, this morning my friend Cindy called and told me how much she liked the version with the daylilies, so guess what? I pulled out that drawing and transferred it to watercolor paper, soaked and stretched onto a board where it waits for its turn in the queue, too.

Yet another version: the Daylily Bunting.