The Road to Mixed Media June 9, 2024 20:10 2 Comments

 About six months ago I decided to go ahead and experiment with using watercolors to make abstract paintings. I knew that they were not traditionally used for abstraction, but it was precisely that fact that attracted me. Watercolors didn't have the baggage that oil painting has (for me) with respect to abstraction. I did a couple of paintings back in December 2023 I was very pleased with (<--this "Lanterns of Hekate", and this --> "Roots"). 

I really liked how these came out. But it bothered me that they were both monochrome. I've always had problems with color use. I addressed this by using limited palettes. Some were even classical palettes, such as some listed by Tad Spurgeon's  fabulous book, "The Living Craft" (which I highly recommend for painters, especially oil painters). A limited palette really helped me, and I researched which pigments were recommended for blending with other pigments, leading to many happy years of paint nerdiness--and better color composition in my paintings. I got to really enjoy, for instance, using "vibrating" colors, even just relying on pairs like blue and yellow (my favorite) to add interest to my paintings without getting lost in a candy box of all colors everywhere. 

But the truth was I really liked monochrome, especially black and white. I just wondered if other people liked such paintings. Wouldn't they be considered drab or even deepressing?

Well, not everyone considered them drab or depressing. A customer bought both of these paintings less than a month after I completed them. That encouraged me to go a bit farther with monochrome paintings. 

That same month I began a much larger painting than usual that I worked on for a couple of weeks. I had in the past flirted with using automatism in my painting, but this time I went whole hog, using it over the entire painting instead of in patches here and there. I started with some Daniel Smith's Lunar Black, a highly granulating paint, and just slapped it on the paper, not trying to paint anything in particular. 

When the paint dried, I began picking out a subject I had only very rarely painted--an interior. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed doing that. I also brought forward a large number of small weird shapes and figures in the paint and ended up with a mostly monochrome painting with a rather dark and spooky atmosphere. The only color I added was yellow, and that was in the form of colored pencil, since I couldn't glaze over the granulated black paint without destroying the granulation. This was the first time I combined colored pencil and watercolor, and although it worked well, I felt a bit weird about it. Would I be looked down upon for this combo? Did using it mean I wasn't a "serious" artist?

I was very happy with the result, but once again I wasn't sure what people would think of it. I got plenty of positive comments on it, but no one purchased it.  So I held back on the monochrome stuff.

Then something happened to me. A big part was attending an active shooter training session at my synagogue in February. My synagogue, another right over the border in MA, and the JCC in Providence all experienced bomb threats in which the caller (no, not an  immigrant) informed us that since WE were killing Palestinian children, he was going to kill OUR children. They caught this guy, but he wasn't the only one. And he was far from being the only big-mouth Jew-hater in the world, and right here, where I lived.

Something in me changed forever on October 7, and that combined with the various reactions around me, of people I'd considered friends for years, and then the bomb threats and the training session (of which we will have more), made me determine that I had to find a way to deal with the darkness that was pressing in all around me and that was pulling me into despair and fury. I thought maybe monochrome, especially black and white, would be a good way to handle this emotional darkness. Let the poison out, as Fernando Botero said about his 80 paintings of men being tortured at Abu Ghraib by American forces in Iraq.

So I decided to try going with monochrome and see how it panned out. The next painting came a week after the active shooter training session. I called it "Garden Fairy," although it is the complete opposite of the usual New Age bland Tinkerbell. I have never put it up on my site, although maybe I will do it now that I feel much warmer towards it. It functioned as a kind of gate to freer painting. This began with a plan to paint an old woman in a huge sunbonnet, but rage took over as I slapped mars black paint on the paper. The image arose like a demon in a sorcerer's triangle. 

I knew right away that this painting was important for me as an artist. It was ugly, but in a powerful way. It represented my own rage at the circumstances me and my people were being subjected to, but it also stood for my protective spirit. I was glad it did not incorporate any political imagery whatsoever--because I have never wanted to be a "political" artist. That is not my gig, even though I enjoy much political art. This painting was definitely monochrome, but it was also an expression of my own raw feelings, which I had basically never incorporated into my art. 

I have never been an emotional painter. I have used my art to create places I would feel good about escaping into. When I got depressed, I could not paint. 

So this painting of rage was seismic to my art. It united my interest in monochrome and my exploration of Surrealist automatism into an instrument of my emotions. Since then, I have continued to work in this direction and to tap into my subconscious for imagery--to allow the darkness to pour out. IMO, the paintings I have made since this one are some of the best I have ever created. I look forward to creating many more scenes of a dark world--dark, but not without hope. 

Landscapes November 3, 2021 19:15

Lately I've been wanting to paint landscapes, so I went through my reference photos looking for likely suspects. I have tons of photos I've taken over the years, but every once in a while, I find a photo that I'd like to use as a reference that isn't mine. I collected all the landscape photos I wanted to try painting, all of them my own, except for this one photo that featured an abandoned church where rough, thick boards had been nailed across the windows. This hadn't stopped someone from ripping off one of the front doors, which was lying in the long grass out front, and the cross from the steeple was missing. It reminded me of cults, which so often arise, create havoc, and disappear. So I thought it would be good to paint.

Even though I was actually able (for a change) to create some straight lines in drawing this church (and appropriately curved lines, like the swayback roof), I could see pretty much right away that something was terribly. wrong. The church looks like some kind of toy plunked down next to the massive trees. And even though the trees are only roughly sketched out, to my mind they are far more artfully done than the church is. Not good.

 

This morning I got back to it. It is much improved, I think, even though it is far from finished.  

I did a couple of other different things with this painting. For one, I decided to give the Classical Landscape Palette that Tad Spurgeon outlines in his book. "The Living Craft." This is a terrific book, by the way, for all sorts of reasons. But one of the things that have inspired me is his list of different sorts of palettes.

I've always had problems with choosing colors. In the past, I wanted everything, and that meant that my paintings were often jumbled. I discovered limited palettes in watercolor, and I learned a ton from that and felt like I did find more image cohesion that way, but I also kind of went overboard and got to the point where I was using just 2-3 colors (including white) for my paintings. Only recently did I decide to go back to trying a lot of colors.

But even so, I still felt I hadn't conquered the color chaos. I considered trying some of the palettes in the book in the past, but never got around to it. Lately, though, I've been feeling more serious about how I paint, so I decided to actually try one of the palettes. I chose the Classical Landscape Palette because it offered a lot of choice without being overwhelming and it includes a lot of fast driers, always a consideration for me:

Yellow:
Nickel Titanium Yellow
Yellow Ochre, Golden Ochre, or a mix
Raw Sienna Dark or Transparent Mars Yellow 

Back to oil painting April 28, 2021 17:00

I've been thinking about doing oil painting again. I've missed it, especially the ability to blend and to glaze easily. I love working with watercolor on the watercolor ground, but it limits what I can do because it lifts so easily.

OTOH, oil paints take a while to dry. I used to deal with that problem when I had a separate studio by having several paintings going at once, like five. There would always be something ready to work on each day, and it helped me learn how to paint faster. 

So this morning, I pulled out my oil painting carts and cleaned off all the tubes, which had gotten quite dusty, and the brushes, which were thick with cat hair (miss you, Blackie!) and dust. I used packing tape to easily clean the brushes and sorted through which ones seemed redeemable and which weren't. I also got rid of some that I knew I would not ever use, like the fan brushes and some grainers. I chose the cleanest ones to work with and put the brushes that had gotten stiff from old oil to soak in some citrus solvent. This is the only time I ever use solvent.

Since I'd forgotten a lot of what I knew when I last used my oils, I decided to use the walnut alkyd. This does speed up drying, and I remembered using it a lot in the past. But I forgot that it gave me a headache. I still have that headache 6 hours after finishing painting. So lesson remembered, and I will throw that stuff out.

I do usually paint oil only, no solvent, and typically have used walnut oil, although I've finished some paintings with a layer of sun-thickened poppy oil instead of varnish. It looks nice, doesn't yellow, is easy, and has no solvents. I've always wanted to try making my own paints with poppyseed oil. Nostalgia for a world I never knew, I guess. But I do own a few tubes of Blockx oil paint, which is made with poppyseed oil instead of linseed oil or walnut oil.

At any rate, I began working on a painting and quickly got frustrated, mainly because I forgot to oil in before starting to paint. Oh well. Another wonderful thing about oil paint is how easy it is to wipe off. I did that three times before I got anything that I thought was worth working further on. It's pretty terrible, but it's a start. 

My apartment is a loft, so there isn't a lot of room to store wet oil paintings, but I thought to put them  on top of the light fixtures I use for my mandrakes with a little fan blowing on them. The fixtures get warm but not hot, and this is out of the way. I can definitely put four paintings on the fixtures if I want to keep a good rotation of dried paintings going. Just not sure if I will enjoy the smell of the drying oil. It's not toxic or anything. I just don't like the scent. But at least now I not only can have all the windows open but I also bought an air purifier for a different reason, and that should help too.

After I got done, I broke out another canvas and started looking around in my cart to see what I had stored in there, and I came across mediums I'd bought in the past and not used. One of them is Siccatif de Courtrai. This is an 19th-century medium that contains lead and manganese as paint driers. I got spooked by lead in the past, in particular because in the past I often resorted to using my fingertips to blend edges of paint, and I know lead can be absorbed through the skin. So I never used the stuff.

But now I thought it would really help me to give it a try, since it is alleged to dry walnut or poppy-based paint in 8-12 hours without the wrinkling it might cause in the presence of linseed oil. If I could get a painting to dry overnight, that would be great. 

I have a ton of walnut oil on hand--I bought a gallon a while ago--but I also have some poppyseed oil. So I'm going to try oiling out with that plus one drop of the siccatif. It's also recommended that one drop be added to each glob of paint the size of a quarter. 

AND I ordered some gel finger cots, which I can use instead of my bare fingertips if I can't resist doing that.

I also see Tad Spurgeon has a new edition of his vastly wonderful book on oil painting, and that's on my list now too. I've got an older edition but would enjoy seeing what he's come up with since then. Looking forward to making stuff.