Julie T. Chapman - ArtBlog

Any of you ever find yourself in a place where you have loads of painting ideas, but the quantity of them almost paralyzes you? I have tons of good material, lots of sketches for paintings, yet I’m getting into this self-critical mode in which nothing is quite right, or perhaps I worry that it won’t turn out as well as the idea. (NO painting ever quite measures up to the idea, BTW - but some transcend it, which is always a joyful occasion).

And speaking of ideas…I’m in a pensive mood at the moment (no doubt due to the above) and, while I have topics to blog about, none of ‘em is floatin’ my boat right now.

SO - this is your chance, dear readers, to tell me what you’d like to see me post about. It’s wide open - go for it.

Just a quick post this week, time crunched (agility last weekend in Spokane - we finished Suka’s Excellent Jumpers title - and travel for a commission over the next few days)…but wanted to share some terrific online art resources that I’ve discovered lately. Then again, maybe everyone already knew about these except me.

Art Scuttlebutt (www.artscuttlebutt.com) - run by the ArtCalendar folks. While it offers many of the features of the magazine, what is especially useful: a search mechanism that lets you check on shows, galleries, etc to see what other artists have experienced. I used the feature just this week when I received an out-of-the-blue gallery invitation from a NY gallery I’d never heard of. Turns out the gallery is a “pay to play” arrangement, though they don’t mention that in the email solicitation - but plenty of other ArtScuttlebutt artists had experience and advice about them.

Wet Canvas (www.wetcanvas.com) - a forum with gazillions of artists posting about their work in a huge variety of categories. Worth a browse for ideas or techniques.

Empty Easel (www.emptyeasel.com) - this gets my enthusiastic vote for one of the most useful art-oriented sites on the web. Besides how-to and review articles, it has an incredible wealth of information about selling art online. I can’t even begin to touch on the range of topics covered at EE, so I won’t. Go check it out - it’s worth it.

What other good artsites are out there?

So reading all these books on contemporary art gets me juiced up, and I’ve been messing about in a rather experimental fashion. Specifically, I’ve been slathering whatever’s left on my palette at week’s end onto 11×14 pieces of Yupo, and doing so with no particular intention aforethought. Yupo is sheet polypropylene, blindingly white and amazingly slick. (It also comes in a translucent form, which I haven’t yet purchased - but think of the possibilities!). Oils slide around, lift off, and can be manipulated in fabulous ways. You can see all the places I’ve scratched into the paint surface on this piece.

I’ve also been working into the paint surface with a graining comb - loads of fun! and messy. Only drawback is that oils take forever to dry since Yupo is a non-absorbent surface; I’m even using goodly quantities of Gamblin G-Gel in the paint, which usually sets up fast on a canvas.

So - comments? Have I gone off my rocker? Time for the padded cell?

What spawns this post is another library book (in this case, “Contemporary Women Artists”, by Wendy Beckett - Universe Books, 1988…30 years ago contemporary, anyway) celebrating Post-modern artists of the female persuasion.

There’s a piece in the book titled “Dark Green Painting” by Edwina Leapman, 168×183 cm (about 4 1/3 x 4 3/4 feet) which is pretty much what you’d expect: a dark bluish-gray-green surface with, possibly, some slight variations in hue (hard to tell) and texture (also hard to tell). Here’s a fragment of what the author says about the piece:

“‘Dark Green Painting’ can certainly hold the attention for a long period…there are hidden colours, an elusive pink that only reveals itself to the attentive eye; there are almost imperceptible brush movements, soft clouds that seem to drift to and fro on the surface and to swim up gently from the depths. Unforced depth is Leapman’s special gift. She has said: ‘The surface is both above and below’, a very profound observation… Alan Green, a Minimalist painter…has said of Leapman’s art: ‘Each work exists as a demonstration of human frailty…their strength lies in the doing. These paintings actually have to happen…the time actually has to be spent and mistakes actually have to be made.’ ….if the making of a work demands such ascetic concentration, it is not surprising that this manual prayer, as it were, soaks deep into the canvas.”

There’s more, but this seemed enough for our point.

So. If this same critic were to confront one of my rodeo or grizzly bear paintings, would she be in such raptures of bemusing description? (I’m guessing not). Which begs the question, is non-objective art - with no particular center of interest, and no drawing or other skill required besides manipulation of medium - perhaps more engrossing for a viewer? Does it allow for more interpretation on the part of, and therefore more involvement by, the viewer? And, ultimately, does that make it more worthwhile, or give it more longevity?

I’ve been promising a look at my library, so herewith commences the first in a sporadic series of posts about my propensity to collect art books.

At some point, I’ll take a photo of the whole shooting match (whenever I can get off my lazy butt to do it) and show everyone the large amount of shelf space in my studio that’s dedicated to books.

In the meantime, I’m starting with Da Man, Da Master. I have 4 books of his total - I don’t know if there are other Kuhn titles available - but could only find cover images of 3 of them online:

1. The Animal Art of Bob Kuhn, (no cover image available online) published 1973 by North Light, and apparently written by Kuhn himself. Mine is softcover. Has LOADS of his life sketches, arranged by topic (lots you’ve not seen elsewhere: dogs, apes, camels, cows…) along with natural history notes and his own drawing notes. Also has several pages on “the making of a painting” and his approach to same - invaluable. Then pages of sketches plus paintings and more of his charmingly informal information that an artist would appreciate more than a collector. The color and quality are not great, but this is as close as it gets to a Kuhn “how to” book for other artists - he even has compositional diagrams and drawings show he achieves some painting effects. I wouldn’t give mine up for anything.
   Cover: two bull moose in an Alaskan landscape
2. The Art of Bob Kuhn (Masters of the Wild series), Tom Davis, published 1989 by Briar Patch Press Inc. Sections of text and B&W photos (Kuhn’s family, Kuhn on safari) give personal and artistic history and philosophy (and plenty of that), and also include working sketches and life sketches. These sections are interleaved with plenty of gorgeous reproductions of Bob’s work, with a fair amount of story about each piece. Another of my treasures.
   Cover: “A Stillness by the Pool”, Bob’s amazing study in red and orange of a tiger over a kill
3. Wild Harvest: The Animal Art of Bob Kuhn, published 1997 by Chuck Wechsler (Sporting Classics, Wildlife Art Magazine). Much more a typical coffee table book, this is almost all color plates and the artist’s commentary on each. Absolutely wonderful as a compendium of some his best, but doesn’t replace the others.
   Cover: “Lair of the Cat”, a cougar painting that won the Prix de West purchase award
4. Bob Kuhn: Painting the Wild, published 2002 by the National Museum of Wildlife Art. This is a nice little softcover catalog that accompanied the retrospective exhibition the museum held for Bob that summer (2002). Has about 20 pages of monograph covering his history, style, approach, and so on, then about 40-50 pages of color plates. The museum may still have some of these books in its gift shop - worth a call to find out.
   Cover: “Pas de Deux”, a snowshoe hare and red fox in a winter landscape

I’m working my way through a massive library find, Artoday by Edward Lucie-Smith, which attempts to survey modern art from 1960 to the late 1990s. It’s an enormous undertaking (the book, not my reading of it) and both interesting and thought-provoking.

F’rinstance … I perceive a bias on his part against representational work. Maybe he didn’t mean it, but quotes like these are hard to interpret otherwise:

“…an entirely studio-bound painter who depicts only what he sees…his work has no flights of the imagination.” (on Lucian Freud), or

“…seems like a fairly limited theme.” (on Realism), and

“This loss of stylistic direction … has led to a compensatory emphasis on content rather than style.” (on the 1990s New York art scene)

The last quote in particular struck me - is he saying that style really should matter much more than content? This doesn’t help me understand why people like some of the Expressionist stuff from the mid-20th century - I can’t forgive how deliberately raw, childish, and sloppy it is, and can’t look any further.

I spent a few hours at the Yellowstone Art Museum when I was in Billings about a week ago; YAM focuses almost entirely on post-modern Montana artists. Some challenging stuff in there, or just plain odd - although there are also Deborah Butterfield horses, and I really love her work. Why are plexiglas cubes filled with crumpled waste paper worthy of a museum? Or giant canvases with no discernible object, subject, or center of interest, and crudely rendered? For that matter, there’s a Montana artist who is well-known in this area (and in NY, I think) who has made pencil outline drawings of horses that look like a kid did them. I’ve seen these drawings humbly framed and offered for sale at $1200.

So am I just a philistine?

P.S. there will probably be more to say as a result of reading this book…not least of which is that it’s leading me down some interesting experimental paths.

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.