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’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.

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.

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.