Julie T. Chapman - ArtBlog

My prior post led me to reflect a bit on my own artist residency experiences, to which I will now subject all of you.

In 2002, I spent 2 weeks in early June in Rocky Mountain National Park as an AiR (Artist in Residence). It was wonderful! There’s an historic old cabin built of stone and logs, circa 1860s, inside the park for AiRs…big wood-floored great room, a huge covered porch outside where we sat every day and watched the elk grazing in the big meadow across the road from us. We rescued a hummingbird from inside the cabin (it was flying against that big window), watched storms roll in, and were amused by a ground squirrel that attempted to climb up on our snack table - while we were sitting there! - on the front porch.

We spent each day as I do in Yellowstone: driving the park roads, taking gazillions of photos. RMNP requires AiRs to give a lecture each week to park visitors (mine was “How I finally got to paint bears”, or something like that), and that the artist donate a piece of work. I painted my first, and so far only, pika piece and gave that to the park. I had great luck getting photos of elk, moose, pikas, and marmots (among other things).

Bottom line: lodging provided, artist pays own travel and food, gives lectures, donates work. A fabulous experience, and RMNP has plenty of applicants each year.

In January 2008 I spent a week at the National Museum of Wildlife Art as an AiR. The museum does two residencies each year: a very short winter one and a month-long summer one. I can’t imagine being away from my studio and business for a month, so I applied for winter. The residencies are open to artists who are either in the museum’s collection or are participants in the annual Western Visions show (only the latter for me). The artist is required to be at the museum 10 AM - 3 PM each day demonstrating, and willing to talk to the public; I worked on a bighorn piece during my time there. Early each morning I was out in Grand Teton taking photos of the gorgeous deep winter scenery, and I’d cruise around again in the late afternoons.

The museum also asks that the artist give a lecture in Jackson Hole High School, which I did, and give a docent lecture. This latter was especially fun - it was a chance to get the docents acquainted with my work and what inspires me, and then we went back into the galleries and I picked out some pieces of Bob Kuhn’s to discuss.

Bottom line: The museum pays travel and food costs, lodges the artist with a museum benefactor, and provides a stipend. You need to be comfortable with constant interruption, repeatedly answering the same questions from visitors, and working under a microscope. The museum staff are incredibly kind and supportive of the AiRs. I stayed in the guest apartment of some collectors of mine who are also museum supporters - the apartment was exquisitely done and luxurious in the extreme. It was like being a rock star for a week!

Sandra Blair, a wildlife watercolor artist and a prior participant in my workshops, recently spent a month as an artist-in-residence at the Montana Artists Refuge in Basin, Montana. I asked her to share her experiences with all of you.

The residency experience at the Montana Artists Refuge was absolutely incredible. I wondered if I would be able to focus on painting on a daily basis for a full month…would I get bored?…would I be lazy? But I found it quite easy to just paint and paint and paint! I was housed in an efficiency apartment so my work was setup on a long folding table right in the apartment. Great big windows with north light! (My first experience with north light and it is addictive!) I’d get up, have breakfast then paint…take a lunch break then paint…eat dinner then paint…read a little then go to sleep. I stayed focused and in the zone so I accomplished so much more than when I can only paint two days a week. I know this will make you crazy just thinking about it (I can just see you rolling your eyes), but I finished one painting (14 x 22”) in three weeks and have the background completed on another. That’s fast for me!…

 

 

Basin Montana is definitely NOT a hot-spot! Tiny, tiny, tiny!!!! Town is about 5 blocks long, no stores, businesses or gas stations…just a bar (of course) with an attached café and a pizza joint. Certainly nothing to distract an artist from their work!

Sandra’s work is very detailed and time-intensive, so this was a wonderful chance for her to do nothing but art for a month.

You can see more of her work at her website. To learn more about the Montana Artists Refuge, visit their website: www.montanaartistsrefuge.org.

I’ll share some of my own A-i-R experiences in a post in the near future (at least, if anyone’s interested).

This was a worthy discussion in my recent summer workshop, and is also a topic I’ve considered in studio solitude.

I take pleasure in both process and product. But most of my zen and enjoyment comes from the doing - drawing, scraping, texturing, layering, lathering on paint - and engaging in a conversation with the piece thereby. Each piece (whether drawing, painting, or something else) is a micro-journey in its own right; none will match the vision in my head, but if I’m super-de-duper lucky, perhaps some will transcend that vision and take me along for the ride.

We are incredibly lucky to be artists - we get to play with great lovely messy art materials! Sometimes, though, we can lose sight of the pleasure of process and put too much pressure on ourselves to create a product . . . and when this happens, we become less like creators and more like factories. This can suck the joy out of one of the highest forms of play, and inhibit our desire to create, our desire to mess about with art supplies and simply Make Stuff. There are times when I piddle around with materials unrelated to my gallery oil paintings, just for the fun of pure creating.

So - what do you do to keep the play in your work?

Every workshop has its own character and personality, which is part of the joy and inspiration for me. One of the things I stress in my workshops is drawing without noodling; a prior workshop dubbed this “no scritchy-scritchy”, and the most recent workshop (June 2008, a few days ago) said “no stinkin’ dinkin’”.

In that somewhat tongue-in-cheek vein, let me offer a no-noodling example that comes from another species: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He7Ge7Sogrk&feature=related. It’s an elephant, actually doing figurative work. I’ve seen some of the abstracts that elephants have produced - this is the first time I’ve seen one produce something representational.

Leaving aside the staggering philosophical implications - which are many, profound, and worthy of deep discussion elsewhere - I want everyone to note that this boy works in a careful, deliberate manner. No noodlin’. No kiddin’. Check it out.

P.S. For a very few highlights from the June 2008 workshop, visit my Workshops web page. The handful of photos shown there represents approximately 0.001% of the 2000+ photos I shot.

It’s that time of year: time for my annual summer workshop. For the next four days I’ll be putting my workshop participants through the wringer - we’ll be starting each day at 6 AM to go photograph gorgeous animals in beautiful northwestern Montana settings, then the rest of the day we’ll be drawing, critiquing, sketching from life, and painting. If everyone is still alive by 5 PM I probably won’t have done my job. Then we all go off for beer and food and we talk art until late at night.

I’ll post a couple teaser photos from the workshop next week. In the meantime, you can either be envious or relieved that you’re not with us in Kalispell.

One of the best ways - if not THE best way - to learn to draw is by doing it from life. I can hear my hapless workshop participants groaning right now, since I have so much fun getting out the cattle-prod and making everyone do gesture sketches from a constantly-moving cougar or raccoon kit or whatever.

If you ask my opinion (not that anyone did), a lack of drawing ability prohibits many artists from realizing their vision effectively and fully. Once you know how to draw, and know the anatomy of a given critter, you know what liberties you can take, and to what effect. Bob Kuhn said that he would tweak aspects of his subject to make it look like what we think it ought to look like.

Or consider Picasso. The work he painted in his teen years was beautifully represented; the man knew how to draw…and then spent the rest of his life going beyond just representing his subjects - he got inside of them, took them apart, twisted them around, to get at other aspects of them.

But back to our topic. This sketch is of my German Shepherd girl, Suka, sleeping on the couch next to me. When a critter is awake and moving, the best I can do is gesture sketches; repose offers a better chance to observe details and proportions. So I have a LOT of drawings of Suka sleeping. I once watched Bob Kuhn sketching a lynx from life; the cat was not moving much, but it certainly wasn’t holding still. Bob developed one particular pose, adding to it when he could as the cat moved about; meanwhile, I was scribbling away doing 40 zillion bits of gesture. Bob’s was a helluva lot nicer. Duh.

So this is everyone’s challenge in the next week: get a sketchbook, a charcoal, and a critter, and go to it. I’ll be flogging my summer workshop with the same thing. We’ll all suffer together.

Ten days until the summer solstice and this is what greeted us this morning! The poor bedraggled plant on the right demonstrates why deciduous trees don’t want their leaves in winter. This is one of those days when I feel like someone in the Duckboy card “Montanans for Global Warming” (a photo of a bunch of parka-wearers huddled in deep snow … the Duckboy images are an especially Montana brand of humor).

Yeah, I know, this isn’t really art related. So shoot me. Next week we’ll be back to our irregularly scheduled program, once I’m done with this spate of agility trials taking me away on weekends.

Someone recently asked how I go about preparing my support for a painting - so herewith, I’m inflicting this on all of you…

If I want to paint on a canvas panel:

1. Cut a piece of MDF (from Home Depot) to size
2. Glue army duck (a smoother, tighter weave of cotton duck) to the MDF with Lineco Archival adhesive (pour on glue, spread it out evenly with a wall scraper, lay panel on sticky canvas, turn it over, run a brayer over the whole canvas surface several times)
3. Weight glued panel under boards and heavy boxes overnight
4. Apply first coat of Daniel Smith white gesso, let dry
5. Sand lightly with one of those handy sanding pads from Home Depot
6. Apply second coat of gesso, dry, and sand

If I’m painting on a stretched canvas, then I just do steps 4 - 6. After all that, it’s time to draw the composition on with vine charcoal; this step can take a while to get right. Once the charcoal outline is done, I spray fix it.

Recently, I’ve started texturing the prepared panel with acrylic modeling paste, if I want a surface that already has some movement to it. It’s loads of fun to paint on, and makes me lather on oils more freely for some reason.

After all the acrylic steps are finished, I then do an underwash of very thin oils to tone the whole shebang.

So why a panel vs stretched canvas? I much prefer the harder surface of a panel for palette-knife paint application, but the MDF-based panels get really heavy over a certain size…plus, they’re only readily available in 2′x4′ sheets. Thus, if I’m considering a 30×40 or similar, it’s gotta be a stretched canvas.

Continuing on the theme from the Rungius post a few days ago, I’m including this entry here and in my Artzine so folks can weigh in on the topic.

With “Wildlife Art” magazine closing its doors, and the mere handful of animal-themed paintings in the 200+ works at the OPA show here in Missoula, I have to wonder: should we even be trying to set wildlife (or animal) art apart from other subject matter? The OPA exhibition categories are landscape, still life, and figurative…which begs the question as to what category my grizzly bear or barrel-racing piece ought to go in. Generally, though, it seems that many exhibitions and auctions don’t try to separate entries in this manner.

Quoting once again from the essay by Kirsten Evenden, written to accompany a recent Rungius exhibition:

This is a concern with wildlife art - that isolating works depicting similar subject matter does nothing to move the tradition forward. Artist Robert V. Clem has said, “…I have been increasingly put off at the extent to which…works involving natural history subject matter are relentlessly categorised as ‘wildlife art’, in such contrast to everything else which seemingly qualifies as simply ‘art’.” Indeed, during his day, Carl Rungius confronted the same issue, “What do you mean, Sporting art? There is only art; it may be good or bad, but it’s still art.” [emphasis mine]

So…where does animal art fit? should it be set apart? what do you think?

Apologies to any rednecks reading. So…how many of you have ever heard this said by a bystander - and intended as praise - for a painting? Why would something “looking like a photo” be a GOOD thing? Possible explanations:

• Many species of animals are generally unfamiliar, so total verisimilitude is expected
• Animal art, as a genre, has heavily emphasized photo-realism (to the detriment of artistic expression, perhaps…?)
• An unsophisticated viewer of art might consider this, indeed, as the highest compliment

The image, BTW, is a rather zoomed-in crop of a recent painting - the kind of piece that one would assume probably wouldn’t be mistaken for a photo. At least, I hope not…