how I paint

Really, I'm a painting machine. I'm so horribly efficient that most everything in my life gets turned into art. This is how I make a painting: I take all the things I love in life and do them. This entails a) seeking a balanced healthy life, which includes a lot of time outdoors on trails; b) looking around; c) trying to understand the world; d) documenting it with jotting down some notes and take a few photos as it goes by, and rather carelessly; e) messing around sometimes with paints.

I get so distracted with activities a, b, and c above that this is what every other shot looks like on my camera roll. 

I get so distracted with activities a, b, and c above that this is what every other shot looks like on my camera roll. 

Waters of March

"Aquas de Marco" by Antonio Carlos Jobim

A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road
It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone
It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun
It is night, it is death, it's a trap, it's a gun

The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush
The knot in the wood, the song of a thrush
The will of the wind, a cliff, a fall
A scratch, a lump, it is nothing at all

It's the wind blowing free, it's the end of the slope
It's a beam, it's a void, it's a hunch, it's a hope
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the end of the strain, it's the joy in your heart

The foot, the ground, the flesh and the bone
The beat of the road, a slingshot's stone
A fish, a flash, a silvery glow
A fight, a bet, the range of a bow

The bed of the well, the end of the line
The dismay in the face, it's a loss, it's a find
A spear, a spike, a point, a nail
A drip, a drop, the end of the tale

A truckload of bricks in the soft morning light
The sound of a shot in the dead of the night
A mile, a must, a thrust, a bump,
It's a girl, it's a rhyme, it's a cold, it's the mumps

The plan of the house, the body in bed
And the car that got stuck, it's the mud, it's the mud
A float, a drift, a flight, a wing
A hawk, a quail, the promise of spring

And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the promise of life, it's the joy in your heart

A snake, a stick, it is John, it is Joe
It's a thorn on your hand and a cut in your toe
A point, a grain, a bee, a bite
A blink, a buzzard, a sudden stroke of night

A pass in the mountains, a horse and a mule
In the distance the shelves rode three shadows of blue

And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the promise of life in your heart, in your heart

A stick, a stone, the end of the road
The rest of a stump, a lonesome road
A sliver of glass, a life, the sun
A knife, a death, the end of the run

And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the end of all strain, it's the joy in your heart

Drafts in Spring

I caught a whiff of spring in the air, and with it a longing for how it felt to paint at the ranch. Here, some words in honor of the horses, 

The boys jostle in their harnesses,

spring warming their shoulders.

From their stalls, the young lady whinnies and the old man withers. 

Their driver steers their impatience.

In response to his calm, there is a flicker

 when containment is entertained.

But we are all too eager at our bits,

muscles, poised to work,

rippling motions under thick coats

kids punching in the the lunch line. 

Grandma Moses, even Picasso failed to inform me

of the flesh, its intent and warmth.

You Need to Be Vampires

Jerry Saltz's 10 Tips for Art Students

New York magazine senior art critic Jerry Saltz recently discussed his impressive career with a packed room during a talk hosted by the MFA Fine Arts department at SVA. Although he has been writing about art since the early 1980s and is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, Saltz was a long distance truck driver for over 10 years. While driving through Lumberton, North Carolina, he realized his life couldn’t get any worse, that he really loved art, and decided right then to pursue his dream, he told the crowd. He has no degrees. During the very witty two-hour talk, Saltz discussed everything from dealing with artistic demons to the importance of pleasure and the effects of cynicism and envy.SVA Close Up reporter Blessy Augustine attended the talk and compiled this essential list of Saltz’s aphorisms on surviving a life in art.

1) Pleasure is an important form of knowledge.

2) Envy will eat you alive; cynicism will eat your work alive.

3) Cynicism simply thinks it knows the truth. It is Republican in character. It believes in certainty; the art world believes in paradox.

4) You have to have doubts. It’s okay if you look at a Rembrandt and go, “It’s kinda brown.”

5) Art critics cannot make or break an artist. Believe me I have tried.

6) You need to be vampires who live in the city with your fellow artists. And stay up all night together.

7) Be in contact with artists all the time. If you don’t, your work will die because you will wake up one day and think you know it all.

8) You need one dealer, one critic, two curators, and three-to-five collectors to be a successful artist. Can you get 10 to 15 people to like your work? You don’t need to be part of a big system.

9) Everyone is sincere. Even Jeff Koons. He’s kinda weird and speaks like a Teletubby but even he’s capable of creating the flower Puppy that made me so incredibly happy. It was like The Beatles.

10) Demons will speak to you till you start working. Then you have newer demons. Work with them. Work. Just work. Or don’t and…

"I would feel I had wasted my life if I didn’t try"

Synchronicity offered on Mutu's heels, this article in which painter Frank Auerbach has wise words for me in recognizing failure and moving onward. 

“He says the obligation to take account of the art that has gone before carries two demands: ‘first that you attempt to do something of a comparable scale and standard, which is impossible; second that you try and do something that has never been done before, that is also impossible. So in the face of this you can either just chuck it in, or you can spend all your energy and time and hopes in trying to cope with it. You will fail.’”

Eating at Wangechi Mutu’s Table

I found this article incredibly satisfying- like eating someone's amazing home-cooked meal for my soul:

“Everyone should understand as much about the past as they can possibly get in their heads. As the voices of their culture and their communities, artists in particular should know as much as possible about what has happened prior to their own existence. It’s a way to stand out as the voice of the present, to pay homage to what has happened, and avoid repeating and recycling the mistakes that have already been made. It’s also a way of remaining in touch with your own humanity, and with the humanity of others whom you don’t know.”

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/book_report/wangechi-mutu-akademie-x-53414

Unfurling

Tight buds tip the bare limbs of the Chestnut trees along Putah creek; their smooth boughs pull up into puckered green.  Spring waits, holding its breath.  

The passage below resonated with me this week as I painted a series of images of my dog in motion for the Natsoulas Gallery BARK show next month.  I was drawn to a few photos I took of Moses as he was alerted to the house's front windows.  His young body twisted and tightened from a playful lop into a purposeful, masterly stride.  

The first two paintings came easily, speaking of hitting a stride. Though this is new territory for me - attempting to narrate moving flesh and bones- so I'm far from expertise or mastery or any great confidence in the idea that there is a Great, Grand Usefulness to my work, all of which is credited in the following description of a person's blossoming. What I do identify with in this passage is that, when I do my best painting often there a sense that I am opening myself, I am connecting to ideas and energies that are inclusive of me but also bigger than me. I become more open to the world, sensing a confidence to be there more freely, to take it in and participate in it without feeling entirely overwhelmed or overtaken.  Even in the face of a challenge or new experience such confidence and connection is grounding, offering me the feeling that I am at the right place at the right time. 

May this be my spring. 

 

Something about her. Something over the week had grown and flowered, something hibernating in the canyon had come out into the sunlight and liked what it saw. Hard to explain.
...No doubt there was expertise, an easy competence that needed no thought, a return to a hard won usefulness that make her to me seem bigger. I don't know taller, broader, a planet with more gravity than it had before. That was part of it. Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves. Love that. But it was something more too. As if the arrival [here]... as alien as it was from anyplace she had lived before... as if it were an arrival she had been preparing for. For a long time without knowing it. Maybe. I don't know. Seemed that way to me. As if part of her relaxed, as if there were a shucking of some old skin. A husk of herself that had been a barrier I hadn't even been aware of. And in the sloughing off, she opened and flowered. Corny, huh? Not really. Magical. I mean to watch a person let go of something and flower. 

from Heller, Peter. "Dog Stars". New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. 309-310. Print.

Motion

My second painting goal for the new year is to continue exploring the idea of motion.  How, in a still image, do we represent the more common experience of moving through our scenes? If you think about all the paused videos we encounter as thumbnail images on our various social media sites, or even how our camera phones are now taking brief videos with each photo, seeing action and expecting it from a 2D space will be all the more common.

I also think that exploring place will give me a buoy as I flounder in the rougher waters that figurative work is for me.  So, here I present the underpainting for a piece based on an evening coming home from the Capay Valley. We'd spent a lovely afternoon with friends, and I left them with the desire to not be leaving at all.  As I wistfully watched the miles roll between, I also watched the storm barrel over the mountains and drench the place we'd just been. This, dedicated to the joy I find in the "McSchneidly" family. 


One Woman Down

This week I took the plunge. I'm diving into my new series: women and windows.  Another time I will explain why I'm drawn to this pairing. But most immediately, my challenges are physically intimidating: How do I get models? How do I help the models and myself survive the exposure? How does one paint a body? How will I paint them so they speak my words, my feelings? Will my abilities to represent both of these things contribute any thought to the world?  

But then again, painting is turning out to be one of those things that I'd rather do badly then to not do at all.  And, I have to say, I'm also looking forward to the laughter. Are we agreed on this? Any time naked bodies and learning are entwined there's going to be some humorous stories to take away. 

So, my first strokes in these deep waters confirm my ideas that THIS whole thing is going to be a challenge. Nevertheless I'm swimming out. Roethke said, "I learn by going where I have to go." It's my IEP.

Degas inspires me with: "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things." May it be so.  

I decided to show my very first attempt just to be humble, to make visible how "you do not have to be good".  And also, I hope that we can all see over time that I will at the very least get BETTER.  I do, after all, have some pride. With that lowering of expectations, may I introduce the process of getting down my first woman. 

2016-01-12 12.02.58.jpg



On the New Year: "to make and end is to make a beginning"

I wriggled haphazardly onto the hook of T.S. Elliot's work, held out by lines of the expert fisherman* Peter Heller. With hindsight, I may be able to tell you I recognized the lure, a titillatingly tied fly that I bit on like a hungry, small fry. But it doesn't matter, both men's work make for mighty fine meals. I swallowed Heller's hook, line, sinker and the caboodle, and gladly got reeled up into the fresh air of the Four Quartets. And it's my own prompt drowning that I mean to imply, for what else does fresh air do for a fish? 

Nevertheless, it was a great, small and short death. You know how it is, to bite into a slice of your own heaven: with some degree of unconsciousness, you pull off the shelf your favorite book or movie, despite the dizzying array of choice; or before you even realized you yourself punched their numbers, you sigh with the pleasure of hearing your friends' voices on the line; or after setting off for an adventure you find yourself setting foot on your favorite, familiar trail. Sometimes we are our own Rupelstilzkin's; we spin and weave our own gold, or at least we know where to find it in a place, or with a love, buried in wonderful words, soaring in music, seen in a painting, I dare suggest.  When you go into such a Counting House,  of course you go in expecting something good, but you always come out bearing a treasure of such weight that even you are surprised. 

Well this was my latest haul.  

In The Painter, Peter Heller quoted four lines from Little Gidding, the last poem that Elliot meant, with its salvific themes, to summarize his Four Quartets (1942). But Little Gidding also works to summarize and outline an exit strategy from my own late year. Sure, it's already 2016 but still I'm in need of some summary of What Just Happened and some perspective on the Days to Come. 

The last two months alone of my 2015 were so full: the opening and closure of the Skylines series; both my children's birthdays; the Paris attacks; the most recent tallying of mass shootings for the year in the United States alone- that are never far enough from my front door; holding my son through long days and nights as he was the sickest he's ever been in his short life, doing the same a few days later for my daughter; my choice to rearrange over half the furniture in my house and and all its inhabitants to establish a more secure studio area for myself; then pulling on, what I'm finding to be the dregs of, the Skylines themes to complete the last few commissions; finally, there were these little blips called The Holidays which required some gift wraps and bubbling drinks, and allowed for an amazing get-away and all-too-swift return thanks to an ambitious jet-stream.  

But regarding the Days to Come and my work specifically, what am I looking at? The emotions that pulled me all last year to the Skyline images are lingering but taking on new forms, and ironically there's some anxiety over moving on from them and seeing what they'll become. I handle transitions about as well as my kids. They're a bitch. Yet there's a welling up of hope and excitement as I approach this new year and new work.  I know it's all a tidal system: the ideas come and go, as does the peace; there's a shifting and pulling but the waters' wells are deep, and dilution happens ever so minutely; sometimes turbulent, some times green; sometimes blue, sometimes serene; and with the storms roll up new shells, weeds, even corpses. 

Speaking of weeds and corpses, if you are one of my local friends, you'll be sharing my sights of all the deadheaded grasses along the canals and the bare-limbed trees, some left behind by the drought. These days we luxuriate and dare to hope with the rain and chill, but still in amazement afresh since just weeks ago we were languishing in the dry heat and bleating electric road signs for water conservation (where have THOSE gone, by the way?); the return of spring we anticipate fairly shortly, and perhaps gladly already. Like the landscapes around here- the way the land and sky holds the heat or retains a frosty coolness- we are never far from one season or the next. So too, the visiting joys and sorrows of one year alter their form and knock again. Like Girl Scouts' cookies and their order forms.

So, it's with a wiser-Scrooge-like nod to the latest events and expectations of repeated themes, that I offer you these excerpts from Little Gidding to tempt you into looking up it up in its entirety for yourselves. 
 


Midwinter spring is its own season

... When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, 

... In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing

The soul's sap quivers...

...If you came this way, 

Taking the route you would be likely to take

From the place you would be likely to come from, 

If you came this way in may time, ...

...It would be the same at the end of the journey, 

If you came at night like a broken king, 

If you came by day not knowing what you came for, 

It would be the same, ...
... what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

... Either you had no purpose

Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

And is altered in fulfillment. ... 

But this is the nearest, in place and time, 

...If you came this way, 

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season, 

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. ...

... In the uncertain hour before the morning

Near the ending of interminable night

At the recurrent end of the unending

...I met one walking, loitering and hurried

...I said: "The wonder that I feel is easy, 

Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak: 

I may not comprehend, may not remember." 

And he: "I am not eager to rehearse

My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten. 

These things have served their purpose: let them be. 

So with your own, and pray they be forgiven

By others, as I pray you to forgive

Both bad and good. ...

... For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

...See, now they vanish, 

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, 

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. 

Sin is Behovely, but

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well.

If I think, again, of this place,

And of people, ...

... All touched by a common genius,

United in the strife which divided them; 

If I think of a king at nightfall,

... And a few who died forgotten

In other places, here and abroad, 

And of one who died blind and quiet, 

Why should we celebrate

These dead men more than the dying?

Who then devised the torment? Love. 

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make and end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

.... We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time. 

... Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always-- 

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well
 

*For whom fishing, is a particularly fitting metaphor, if you read his work. 

On Being Good

To Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" I do not need, nor should I,  add anything more than these words by way of encouraging all of us who set out to do what we love.  May it be a salve to our doubt, a buoy to our faith.

 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes, 
over the prairies and the deep trees, 
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, 
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 
the world offers itself to your imagination, 
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
In the family of things.

 

 I may suggest that her words are even better when read by Mary herself. 

On Truth & Honesty

It's been over a year of painting a lot of wires and sun-related skies. Now, I'm ready to do some naked people. I mean, ready to paint them. I mean ready to paint images OF them. And a few other ideas are in my mind. It's not that I feel that I've conquered the wire + sky business, but more a matter of needing new scenes. "As the world turns", I'll be exploring similar ideas but with new images. That's all it will come down to most likely.  But last week I found myself sweating under my hair net trying to whip up another batch of dawn/dusk and protruding pole combo with trees on the side.  Not to say there wasn't joy in yea ol' journey, but working on this piece took some particular, peculiar concentration. It's a curve ball thrown in the game to do something I love, but with ambivalence. Maybe like agreeing to a coffee with an old sex-object?

Lullabye, in progress. The underpainting. 

Lullabye, in progress. The underpainting. 

Lullabye, in progress. Mid-way through it got a little too winter-bare scary and cold. I liked this version quite a lot, but didn't want this sadness to go live with the paintings' intended family.

Lullabye, in progress. Mid-way through it got a little too winter-bare scary and cold. I liked this version quite a lot, but didn't want this sadness to go live with the paintings' intended family.

I conjured up some pretense in the end, letting there be a more brilliant, warmer color and precision to the silhouetted set of trees and softening the grasses along the tracks. Lullabye. 2015. Oil on Panel. 24 x 36 inches. sold.

I conjured up some pretense in the end, letting there be a more brilliant, warmer color and precision to the silhouetted set of trees and softening the grasses along the tracks. 

Lullabye. 2015. Oil on Panel. 24 x 36 inches. sold.

I've already told you about reading "The Painter".  Here I offer an excerpt from a scene in which the main character, Jim Stegner, a professional painter and his girlfriend are considering the "trend" of southwestern paintings that typically include blue coyotes.  This scene speaks to my current feeling about having painted wires and sunrises/sunsets for over a year.  It also illuminates a bigger idea of why I think some things/relationships/stories/images work and others do not: our ability to empathize. Finally, I like this passage because I simultaneously nod along with Jim and laugh at him along with Sofia, his girlfriend. She starts off here:

"Look, look you big lug. This one. Stand here. No, here. Close you eyes. Now imagine there had never been a blue coyotes in the world. There was water, there was darkness, there was the Void, and then the Word and then there was a blue coyote! Voila!"
She poked me. "You can open your eyes now."
"Oh, sorry."
She was sort of right. To me. It was a good painting. That's probably how it happened for Heberto Nunez-Jackson. He painted the first one out of the Void and it was really compelling and he did it again and it was also pretty good and he got addicted to that relationship with Creation: him, the darkness, the coyote, blue. And the red moon broke his own heart one day. I got it. And then you have a habit and all you ever wanted in the world was to feel this thing about what you create, and then presto your coyote paintings begin to sell like hotcakes. And the people in the ski lodges and big adobe houses who buy them don't really care if their blue coyote has a hundred cousins, maybe they actually like it, it makes them feel part of a trend, a phenomenon in art that is repeatedly reinforced. And so everybody is happy.
"What do you think?" she said, standing before [the painting] and gesturing with her hand like a game show model. "The only, the first. Look! The composition, the color. It's really good. How is it different than a thousand of your Diebenkorn Ocean Park paintings?"
I looked. 
"It just is."
"Ohhhh, snobbism. I never, ever thought I'd see that in Jim Stegner."
"Not a snob. I believe in truth. Which is also excellence, by the way."
She narrowed her eyes at me. "You mean raw, clumsy honesty is the same as excellence?"
"I didn't say that. Truth needs excellence. Honesty is not the same same truth."
"Huh." She frowned, willing, maybe, to give me the benefit of the doubt for at least a split second.
"Truth needs honesty, but that is not all it needs."
"Speak."
"Well, an artist can be honest in her rendition of say a hummingbird, in how she sees it, in her application of technique, but she may not be true to the bird."
"You mean in skill?"
"In skill, in her ability to see. To really see the bird. To see the bird as it bears its spirit forward into the world. In empathy. When all of that is there you can feel it. It knocks you over."
"Huh."
"There is something in even this coyote, this dawn of the world Genesis coyote, that is not true. He did not see into the heart of the coyote. And so I reject it. That is not snobbism."
"Huh." She smiled at me. She said: "He speaks, who knew? He's sort of a guru."
"You didn't think I had opinions on art?"
"Pretty much I just saw you as a sex object," she said.
"Hah!"

Heller, Peter. The Painter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. 229-230. Print.