art

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Outtakes

Hello out there, I’m back!  Yes, I took a rather long summer hiatus, but I’m back, ready to work and tell you all about it.   I’m happy to say I have a few projects lined up, starting with two portraits of these adorable brothers.   I thought I would wait to post something until I’d actually started the paintings, but since I’ve been so delayed in getting back to work, I decided to do a quickie sneak peak blog with the photographs I will be using and some of the outtakes.

Big Brother/Outtake 1

Big Brother/Outtake 2

Big Brother/ For Portrait

Seriously, I could write an entire book on how difficult and hysterical it is to take portraits of kids.  I invited them over thinking it would be easy.  I have a great camera, and I could just stick them in a neutral colored chair with some good lighting and click and click until something turned out.  But even with the most delightful and well behaved children (and these boys are really amazing) it is quite a job to get them to sit still and smile and look at the camera, all at once.

But I would really like to think that, despite a dozen blurry photographs, something turned out.  I think I got two images that really capture the personalities of these little men…and a few cute outtakes, to boot.

Little Brother/Outtake

Little Brother/For Portrait

Now let’s see what I can do with them on canvas…

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Self Portrait in Blue

I guess I’m going through a blue period.  Who do I think I am, right?

I started this painting Saturday night and it’s about two hours in.  I know I’ve said this before but I want to keep this one rough.  I don’t just mean unpolished, I mean I’m going to live with the mistakes.  I keep meaning to do this but I don’t. I spent more time on the painting of Tom then I’d meant to.  I was supposed to just hash it out, but I can’t help myself.   I finished his right eye only to realize it wasn’t quite placed correctly and painted over it completely…things like that.

But lets be honest.  This is about more than art.  I want to be unpolished, to revel in it.   Dare I say this on Vida Viva? I am growing tired of certain aspects of Latin culture.  And truly, I believe it’s because I’m in Caracas.  I would never speak this way about my beloved Bogotá.  But this is the land of beauty queens, and, well, we have different concepts of beauty.

However…I was reminded today of Cezanne.  When he started out his career, he went to Paris, and did his best to fit in with the art crowd. He was from a rural part of France and they just didn’t get him at all.  Finally he realized he couldn’t try to be someone he wasn’t and said screw ’em and went back to the country, where he did kick ass work for the rest of his life.  Fine, so maybe that’s the Cliff Notes version of his life, but it’s true.

I always remember this when I realize an external pressure is causing me to drift away from who I really am.  Or at 25 perhaps I should say, who I really want to be.

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My Favorite Face

"Tom" Acrylic background on wood with image painted in oil. 26.5" x 11.5"

This is my favorite face.  You might mistake this statement as a slight to our son, Owen, but on the contrary.  He is the proud owner of a perhaps even more lovely duplicate.   Tom has some strong genes, wouldn’t you say?  You might. But allow me to provide you with my alternate explanation…

I am a painter.  Every part of me is a painter.  Not just my hands.  Not just my eyes.  But my whole body.

I met Tom when I was nineteen years old.  That is when I began memorizing my favorite face.  Taking  it in  nearly every day.  When I was twenty-two, we got married.  Nearly every day became every day,  and eventually I could paint his face with my eyes closed.  Just before my twenty-fourth birthday, I discovered I was pregnant.  I believe this is when the painter in my belly got to work, recreating the face it knew by heart.

And yet, there is something uniquely “Owen” about Owen.  Yes, he does have my ears, but there is something there that is not Tom, and not me.  Something brand new.

My paintings are not recreations of people.  At their best, they are merely “about” someone.  No matter how much command I might feel I possess over my brush, at some point in the process, most often unwittingly, I loose the upper hand for a moment.  The painting has a life of its own, and it goes, ever so slightly, in it’s own direction. Every painting I have ever done has something about it that I feel just happened, inexplicably. Maybe this is part of the process.  Maybe this is what happened to the painter in my belly.

Either way, this is a face I am happy to see two of every day.  Expect to see many more paintings of both of them in the future.

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Monday Pick Me Up-Owen’s Nature Zip

The first time it happened by accident.  Owen was playing with one of those peek-a-boo flap books, and he ripped a child peeking behind a plant clean out of the book.  I thought, that’s a shame, and I taped it up over his coat hooks.  It looked pretty cute.  Before I knew what I was doing I was taping a post card with a picture of a giraffe right next to it. And it looked just perfect.

Later that night I was looking at Owen’s sleeping  nook, the little square alcove in his room that holds his crib, covered by glow in the dark stars. In between that, and his large wooden closet doors, is an odd strip of white wall.  I taped up a photo from our honeymoon in Thailand.  And then I got my idea.  The Nature Zip.  Parents go crazy with all kinds of decorating ideas and murals, many of which I have entertained.  But lets face it.  We are here temporarily.  Painting a giant tree over his crib doesn’t quite seem worth it. But a nature collage on a skinny “zip” of wall, this I can do.

The original idea was to cover the entire area, from floor to ceiling.  Unfortunately, I had to let this go when I realized that Owen enjoys peeling the photos off the wall as much as we both enjoy viewing them from the rocking chair.

Still, the little man seems quite fond of it.

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Work in progress…

As I wrote last week, I am in the process of finishing unfinished projects and painting the many unpainted canvases and wooden surfaces I’ve collected. Here is one of them.  A wooden shelf that’s been sitting in a pile waiting to be painted from Baltimore to Bogotá to Caracas.  So last week I slapped on a layer of gesso followed by a layer of blue acrylic paint and let it sit on the floor a while.  I figured eventually it would tell me what to do with it.

I should probably mention that since I started working on so many paintings at once, and since Owen got tall enough to reach my paints, I rearranged the guest room and am once again I am enjoying a full studio, with paintings spread out all around me.  It really is a nice set up, a room with a view even.  The one exception being the bed….which I have moved to the side and am hoping to convert into a sort of loungey couch to lure visitors into modeling for me. Which leads me to my second point. I recently declared defiantly to someone who was telling me to paint more portraits that I was intent on painting more of my botanicals, only to realize a few days later I had an awful hankering to paint a person.  The thing is, mind you, that there really is a difference between painting commissioned portraits and simply painting people.   Don’t get me wrong, I do love the challenge of painting portraits.  But I love painting people in my own,  more naturalistic hand, letting the basic geometric forms of the face come forward.  This painting, of my husband, is only a few hours in and probably a few hours from finished.  Still, I don’t plan on polishing it a whole lot.