At the studio an art session was offered for the kids in the neighborhood. One child showed up. She was welcomed and then given a ten foot roll of paper on the floor, markers, crayons, pencils. She was happy for an hour.
I decided to give myself a play day. Warmed up with graphite mark-making session, then my fav – a charcoal portrait, then got the acrylic paints out for experiments. A tight poet laureate, Donald Hall, and a loose idea of a horse’s back.
A post on Facebook declared that Picasso created about 50,000 art works, of which 100 today are known/valued. The point of the post was that art is a numbers game – and not every thing you make is going to be quality, revolutionary, evanescent.
But you/I will have made it.
I regularly put stuff up that I’ve made – but not framed – I put it up with blue painter’s tape. I’m looking at it, I’m thinking about it, but I see it all as practice and learning. It’s rarely a finished product.
That being said, I can also still get moody – up-moody or down-moody about the process, my stuff. Helps to notice that, and remember that the critical mind cannot make a damn thing.
chairs, oil, 9×12 inches
Painting a variety of Christmas cards this year.
Spent from 10-5 pm today in a class called “Expressive Figure Drawing” at the Miller School of Art. We had a wonderful model and lots of interesting challenges.
Here we were looking for the mass/gravity center of the model:
Here we were drawing then painting her face on top of a random collection of negative spaces
I’ve been told I naturally see “space” and it’s harder for me to see a flat painting. And I’m working hard to understand what that even means. Alberto Giacometti was a painter, sketcher and sculptor. He was good with space. My assignment: do it like Giacometti.
Giacometti:
me
"Not knowing how to do it is part of knowing how to do it." - Leon Kossoff 