Julie T. Chapman - ArtBlog

…that popped into my email recently.

The first is that the Autumn issue of the Wildlife Art Journal has now been posted. (The 5 questions I asked my good friend, British sculptor Simon Gudgeon, are part of the issue). By the way, I forgot to announce it in my November Artzine, but you can also find the 5 Questions/5 Answers that Andrew Denman asks me in the autumn issue as well.

The other note is that North Light / F+W Media is offering a seminar on photographing your artwork this Tuesday, November  17. For those of you who find the topic intimidating, or have always gone elsewhere to have your work photographed, this may be a quick and fairly inexpensive way to learn about how to do it yourself. (I talk about this in some of my workshops as well).

…or go home.

At a recent workshop, a young artist asked me what she should paint to get into a gallery in Jackson Hole. I was perplexed by the question; she was asking specifically whether she should paint a bison, or a bear, or something else.

Her question really needed answers in several different dimensions, so here goes:

1. First, you gotta paint what you love if your work is to be exciting to both you and collectors. As we’ve talked about in this blog just recently, animal artists tend to be completely bonkers about animals, which is A Good Thing. I’m so inspired by my reference material every time I go through and look at all the beautiful horses, the big bison, the lithe cats, the pouncing coyotes, the corvids with chutzpah and the swans with grace, that I can hardly choose what to paint next.
2. Secondly, doing one painting of a particular subject to get into one particular gallery almost certainly would not work. Galleries want to see a body of work with some consistency in style, showing knowledge of your subject. (They also want to know that you’ll be a good business partner with them - so be sure you know how to handle framing, consignments, collectors, shipping, paperwork, etc etc etc).
3. If - like this artist - you’re very early in your career and still not sure what or how you want to paint, then take the time to develop and grow your skills. Compare your work to the best; be self-critical.
4. And finally, we come back to something we’ve touched on before in this blog: have a vision, have something you really want to say about the subject matter, and pursue that with passion.

For some reason I’m in the mood to write about this. So - my top tech tools:

• Adobe Lightroom: if you’ve been to a recent workshop of mine you know that I absolutely, positively cannot imagine living without this tool. It is the be-all end-all for cataloging, organizing, and applying darkroom functions to my tens of thousands of digital photos. I have LR 2.x; I notice the 3.0 beta is now available.
• Adobe Photoshop: essential for final edits in cropping, color-correcting, resizing, and exporting images into at least a dozen different formats, not to mention messing around with (moving, resizing, etc.) image elements when I’m playing with a composition.
• Email: I can’t imagine living without a fairly powerful email tool! MS Outlook allows html-formatted emails, so I can create my Artzines in nice table arrangements with pretty fonts, pix, etc. Now that I live on a Mac, I’m limping along with Apple Mail, which (sadly) lacks the power and functionality of Outlook. Looking forward to when Apple mail isn’t so limited…
• yousendit.com: this is my tool of choice for uploading large image files to send to galleries, magazines, my licensing agent, etc.
• Web design: I do my own web design - formerly with Frontpage, now with Dreamweaver. Not for the faint of heart; if you’re not technically inclined, go to one of the providers of full web designs for artists, or of template-based websites.
• Macbook Pro: this beautiful machine goes everywhere with me - workshops, photo safaris, etc.
• External hard drives: I have 4 right now - a 500 GB portable that’s powered by USB and pretty much lives attached to my laptop; two 500-GB Gtech practically bulletproof things; and a new 1 TB drive. All my photos are backed up in at least 3 different places, hence the need for lots of drives.
• Large LCD display: my reference photos are displayed on a 27″ monitor next to my easel. (I *wish* I had the $$$$ to afford a nice big Apple Cinema display! someday…)
• And of course…my pro digital camera and lenses - my bread-and-butter field tools.

This leaves aside things like word processors, desktop publishing tools, and spreadsheets - but I figure those are ubiquitous enough that they don’t need mention.

Anyone else? chime in!

Recently I was forwarded an email which I excerpt below:

Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approx. 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.

4 minutes later: the violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

6 minutes: A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes: A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.

45 minutes: The musician played continuously.  Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace.  The man collected a total of $32.

1 hour: He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities. The questions raised: in a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

I found the story fascinating, and checked it at several online sites to verify its truth (eg, Snopes). Not only is the story true, but the WashPost reporter who covered it received a Pulitzer for the article.

What a sobering thing - that we might not perceive beauty in an ordinary, daily context!

My own past experience has taught me to be careful about the company one’s artwork keeps; when a piece I know to be good is hung with average county-fair art in a whitewashed cinder-block building, that piece dims…as though one good work of art cannot entirely overcome the mediocrity around it. Or think of your own perceptions walking into a gallery: if you see only quality work at every turn, you think the more highly of all of it. But as soon as you see something sub-par, suddenly the rest of the work feels more ordinary.

As a cynic I once knew used to say, art is worth only what someone will pay at a garage sale for it. Think of those legendary garage-sale finds we sometimes read about - the Picasso or whatever - sold for a few dollars, now worth millions.

What do you think?

I’ve been out of the (studio) saddle for a while here, due to traveling to Seattle to (a) do awards jurying for the Parklane Gallery show, (b) give a painting demo at the show, and (c) lead a 2-day mini-workshop while I was there. Tired? yep!

However, I wanted to let y’all know that I’m going to change the emphasis in my Feb 2010 workshop a bit and get us more into color and paint. WHOOHOO!! Scared? yep! but I’m looking forward to the chance to put together new exercises for this, AND to see what results from the artists who attend! It’ll still be fast-paced as usual (ie, we’re not going to sit around working on the same painting for 3 hours - you all know me better than that), but hopefully also stimulating in fresh ways as we discuss color and apply it to the exercises.

If you have questions, visit the Workshops page of my website.

If you have more questions, email me.

If you’re excited, call Triple D (406-755-9653) and give them a deposit.

I hope to see you in February!

My annual trip to Jackson Hole is, as noted, a wintercount of sorts for me. One of the most important parts of the trip is the afternoon I spend cruising the top galleries in Jackson, both representational and contemporary. Every time I do this I’m convinced anew that EVERY artist has to renew herself regularly, preferably through Seeing Others’ Artwork - whether through visits to galleries, museums, other artists’ studios, whatever. I’ve come away from visits to fine-craft shops all fired up with color and texture and the desire to mess with same.

Here are some of the notes I made in my sketchbook after Fall Arts Festival:

• Zhaoming Wu: beautiful, luminous, dissolving lights/shadows
• Rocky Hawkins: texture, abstraction
• Tom Gilleon, John Nieto: big negative areas worked with color and texture
•  Jeff Ham: giant, bold, colorful work (Jeff had 8′x10′ canvases in progress - drips, spills, color everywhere - on the walls at Mountain Trails Gallery)
• September Vhay: daring, clean compositions (September is a good friend and she’s been carving her own path and voice for a while, and I admire her for it)
• The thrill and satisfaction of color that is not tied to reality

The first thing I painted after this trip:

My annual trip to Jackson Hole is a winter-count of sorts for me. It’s 3 solid days of events - artist breakfasts, receptions, dinners, parties, and the Quickdraw - stretching from 8 AM to midnight every day. I can count on lack of sleep, standing up for hours, and being completely stoked from conversations with collectors and other artists. Observations from this year’s event:

• The Western Visions show at the museum (National Museum of Wildlife Art) was moved into new galleries this year, instead of being confined to the long narrow hallway which became so packed with people at the evening events that one had to turn sideways to move around. The pieces showed off beautifully in the gallery spaces - one could stand back and appreciate them from a distance.
• The show seemed lightly attended, in comparison to past years (though perhaps it was because we weren’t all sardined into the King Gallery hallway).
• The show overall felt *extremely* conservative - as if the submitting artists were sending in solid work with saleable subjects, but taking no risks. Many pieces did not sell. I am very grateful that my miniature did, as it stood out for being rather different, which made me anxious. I had two 6×12 unframed cradled panels, each with a reclining paint foal and a very abstract background, as my “piece” (see above).
• My sketch at the Western Visions sketch auction also sold, but for half the price of last year’s sketch (this seemed to hold roughly true overall for the sketches).
• For ONCE, the Quickdraw morning dawned clear and lovely! In 2007 and 2008 I was huddled under a canopy with cold rain pouring around me, painting with gloves on. It was scrumptious to have sunshine and festive viewers and not worry about snowflakes on the canvas. During the Quickdraw auction, prices seemed soft; animal/wildlife works brought higher final bids than landscape pieces. Here I went the conservative route - meaning I painted a drippy bear - and was delighted to have my 24×12, rather unusual composition go for above retail. My husband Paul runs interference for me during the actual hour of painting and reports out afterwards; he said there were probably a thousand photos taken of the back of my head (one assumes they were photographing the painting in progress), and that there were artists watching who wanted me to verbalize why I was making the color choices I was. (<snort> No time in one hour! come to a workshop and I’ll talk about it there).
• I always cruise the main galleries on Saturday afternoon; Jackson has seen some contemporary galleries move in recently, and I find these extremely artistically stimulating. Muse Gallery was having a show of Milton Avery / Richard Diebenkorn / Helen Frankenthaler; what I found most interesting there was the work of the twin brothers Doug & Mike Starn.
  There’s a new gallery in town - Altamira - in a newly rebuilt space just off the square. It’s a *fabulous* gallery space, and they’re showing Tom Gilleon, Rocky Hawkins, John Nieto, and Amy Ringholz, among others. Wonderful, eye-popping stuff.

So - Jackson Hole, September 2009 in a nutshell.

So I’ve finished up judging the initial round of entries into the Parklane Gallery show (Kirkland, WA) and I wanted to share with you all the notes I took while jurying (I also asked that these notes be sent to all entrants). By the way, it took me a number of hours spread over several days, and sleeping on my decisions between times, to finalize my choices.

The diversity of styles and subject matter - including some very original treatments of subjects not commonly seen in animal art - made jurying this show an enlightening and gratifying experience. I was delighted by the boldness many artists showed in their choices of colors and motifs. By the way, dogs, cats, horses, and roosters were heavily represented in the submissions, for some reason.

If your work did not make it in, please consider the following:

Photography of your work - A few of the images submitted were very small, making it difficult for me to evaluate the works thoroughly. Other pieces were represented by photographs (murky, skewed in the frame, blurry, or with extraneous background) which showed the work poorly. It is important to make sure that your values and colors are represented accurately, especially if you have large white areas in your work - unless you shoot with manual exposure, your camera can make these gray.

Quality - some of the work was not yet mature enough for exhibition; when evaluating your own art, take care to compare it to strong work by top artists. More generally, pieces really had to stand out in some way to be included, and all the elements in the piece had to work together and be of the highest quality, because there was plenty of very good art submitted. There were some interesting, original ideas that didn’t get in, and frequently it was because of a little weakness in drawing or values. In addition, there were paintings that had some good things going for them, but aspects of the pieces (often settings or backgrounds) needed to be treated with the same care as the main subject(s).

Quantity - I juried the show ‘blind’, so the images were simply numbered (not named). There were many artists who submitted more than one piece, which was clear from their style, and I would very much like to have included several of their works. However, since I could only choose 40 (I compromised at 41) pieces for the show, I was forced to make some extremely difficult choices. The organizers also specified that each artist could be represented by only one work.

Originality - there were many pieces that were solid works of art, and I hated to exclude them. But the work that got in not only met the foundation criteria for any good work of art (I discuss these elements in my workshops), it stood out in some way - usually by exhibiting an originality in some aspect that was appealing, striking, humorous, or thought-provoking.

A special note on the more abstract and experimental pieces: I enjoy and study abstraction, and it shows up in my own paintings. In the absence of good drawing - which abstraction often stylizes or abandons - the composition and values must compensate and be quite strong. Alternatively, some of the experimental work was highly original and appealing, but showed a little weakness in drawing or composition.

I cannot emphasize enough that there were MANY fine pieces that could not be included due to space limitations, and I agonized at great length over my decisions. Thank you to the artists for submitting such interesting work, and to Parklane for giving me the honor of judging this show.

…and a hell of an adventure. We spent 4 days packing in, camping, riding, and packing out of the Great Bear Wilderness (part of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex), which is the vast wild area south of Glacier National Park. Notes of interest:

• It is very difficult to take photographs from the back of a moving horse.
• 15 miles in the saddle at one time can make the butt sore, along with utilizing various muscle groups in ways they don’t normally get.
• Advil and Vanquish really help with butt soreness.
• For reasons I don’t quite understand, heart-attack food and wilderness go together. (We ate breakfasts that consisted of french toast and half a pig’s worth of bacon, or biscuits and gravy, or pancakes and sausage…).
• Draft mules can carry simply amazing amounts of stuff. Not only that, I watched with admiration as each mule carefully maneuvered its high’n'wide panniers or packboxes to miss all the trees crowding the trail.
• A good saddle horse is worth a lot when you’re back in the wilderness.
• Horses and mules get awfully fresh after 2 days of lazing about on a high-line with occasional turns loose in the meadows and forest. (Pack string rodeo is disconcerting, to say the least).

Our hosts were Jay & Kim Diest; Jay has spent half a lifetime packing for the Forest Service in northwestern Montana and living in the wilderness while so doing. His vast experience with stock, campcraft, knots, dogsledding, hunting, and packing is humbling, and he probably represents a dying breed. Jay had stories galore and we clamored for more.

A study in contrasts and irony: this is a wilderness airstrip which Paul (my husband, and the guy on the red roan) had flown us into when we owned a bush plane.

 You better have good steady stock when you’re riding a scree slope like this one.

I’m still sorting through the 1100+ photos that I took, and feeling a bit let down to be back in civilization. Though that first hot shower after being in the back of beyond is always damn nice…

Heading off tomorrow on a pack trip into the Bob Marshall Wilderness (known to Montanans simply as “The Bob”), a large chunk of pristine western Montana running south from Glacier National Park nearly to Helena, mountainous and full of wildlife and solitude. I hope to have a couple photos to post on my return.

In the meantime, if you didn’t see it in my Artzine, do please check out the new online Wildlife Art Journal, being edited and written by Todd Wilkinson. The articles are breathtaking in variety and scope; I believe Todd will be publishing this four times a year. Probably best it’s not more often, as the issues are extremely rich in content. It’ll take me several weeks to explore all the good stuff in Fall 2009. I’ll be the next artist in the “Five Questions” series, which is currently featuring Susan Fox and Andrew Denman.

And since this post really is a bit scatterbrained in nature, here’s a photo I took this morning. Nature in most of its forms fascinates me (well, except for mosquitoes…and maggots…). Being an animal artist means getting to act like a kid around all kinds of wildlife: