Whistler and Lautrec April 8, 2016 20:40
I'm just about finished with the biography of James McNeill Whistler by Anderson and Koval. Although I love his Nocturnes, as he called them, and I think Falling Rocket is a truly great painting (that's it on the left), he was an unpleasant person. Still, I often laughed with identification when I read descriptions of his ferocious doubts and misgivings about his own work. He'd work on a painting for hours and be all happy about it for 15 minutes, "It's GREAT!", bragging all over about it, and then an hour later he'd go and scrape it off the canvas, terrified that someone would see it and think what a crap artist he was. The authors' style is very engaging, so if you have any interest in Whistler, I recommend it. His painting technique is not much touched upon, but there is a lot about the world he moved in and the changes happening in painting at the time, especially the cracking of the tyranny of academic Realist painting.
Because I'm almost done, I had to get the next book ready. This is about Lautrec, who has been a favorite artist of mine since I was a child: "Toulouse-Lautrec and the Fin-de-Siecle" by David Sweetman.
Meanwhile, I've been working on a cloud painting that has just been giving me the business since I started it. Half of it is just fine and went on without a hitch, but the other half holy carp. I have messed with it and messed with it, and it has improved. I have learned a ton about painting clouds and just paint/glazes from doing it. I hope I will finish it this weekend and that after all the time I have put into it, I can put it up. Maybe not on my art site to sell, but at least here. It was meant to be a study, although a large one. I wouldn't mind taking some of the elements and redoing them. I based it on a photo I took of a storm cloud out east of Seneca Lake last year.
I've decided to spend the next year working more on technique, because I feel I need to do a lot of work on that. I did get distracted from doing water studies to doing cloud studies (water suspended in air). I've done 3-4 prior to the one I'm working on now, but I was so displeased with them that I just trashed them. Unlike Whistler, this was not some hysterical self-consciousness on my part but just a decision not to keep works that are junk. Sometimes a person can try too hard.