Music and Art: A Great Relationship

I like to listen to music when I paint and I think the tone of the music I’m listening to has an effect n the painting I’m working on. When I attend a group painting session I try to listen to fast, upbeat music. I particularly favor Third Day, Pink Floyd and Journey. The pace of the music seems to speed up my own painting and I am almost always able to complete the piece in two hours or so. Because the model only poses for a couple hours this works out great for me.

If I’m involved in a more complicated piece that requires thinking and planning I tend to listen to music that is calming and less likely to reach a fever pitch: usually classical piano concertos. The music stays in the background and my thoughts stay focused on what I’m painting. 

When I’m working on still life I can listen to pretty much anything because this is the easiest type of painting. The subject is in front of you, the composition has been worked out by the arrangement of objects and I have the freedom to just paint and interpret on the fly. It’s one of the more enjoyable things to paint for me and I love to listen to singers like Adele and Carrie Underwood when I do these pieces.  The rising crescendos and surprising turns in these ladies’ voices really help me think of ways to make my painting more interesting. Music is similar to painting in many ways. If the song is a lullaby with no tonal differences and a very calming melody it puts us to sleep. If a painting has all soft edges and little value changes it presents us with a calming vision. That’s not all bad and some paintings are intentionally done in this manner.

But I don’t paint that way. I like to have variety in strokes, in color, and in flow. I find excitement in texture and randomness. I enjoy the way a turquoise note plays against a backdrop of orange. Even the words we use for painting can be interchanged with those used in music. Notes and harmony are just two examples I can think of at the moment but I’m sure there are more.

Working with photos is a challenge but also fun if you approach it the right way. I think you need to work from life for at least five years before you can trust and interpret accurately what you see in photos but after that you probably have learned enough to enjoy it. Photographs can’t accurately create what we see with the eye because they sacrifice the values in the darkness in order to include those in the light—or vice versa. The human eye can see many more gradations, although that doesn’t mean we WANT to. Sometimes the simplest painting has two or three values and it is a winner.

I always prefer painting form life but this isn’t always possible so I tend to fall back on my supply of photographs.   I never try to create a physical copy of a photo when I paint. There would not be much point to it…we already have the photograph! Instead I use the photo as starting point and think about what kind of painting I can make. Sometimes this process requires years. I had the photograph I used for this painting stored in my computer files for over a year, in my “REFERENCES” folder. I took the photo in 2010 when I met a beautiful 50ish belly dancer who was willing to pose for a photo shoot. I met her though a mutual friend when we stayed at her home because we had a paint out to attend in the area. She turned out to be a very neat lady who is a physician by day and an accomplished belly dancer in the evenings. Who would have thought?

For this painting I decided to do a few studies. This is an 11” x 14” oil painting that I did to work out the colors for a larger piece. She tried on two costumes for us so I may do another small study to see if that costume works better. Or I may include two dancers! I don’t know—this is the process I go through as I create something. I like to leave my options open.

Now I will critique my painting-- just one more thing a solitary artist working in her own studio needs to become proficient at. The painting has areas of rest and unrest. It has notes of bright color and notes of quiet. There is texture and there is smoothness. The study is a finished painting in its own right but it will (hopefully lead to a larger, even more interesting piece.) There are many things I like about it-- the "S" curve of the dancer's pose, which I intentionally emphasized, the vibrant colors and especially the teal (my favorite color). The palette knife squigglies. :)  Other areas need more work if they are to translate well into a larger piece, but overall the painting does a nice job of creating a mysterious mood for the dancer and we wonder how that tiny little woman can possibly hold that big sword so easily. (She actually did!)

Sword Play

11 x 14" oil on linen

Palette Knife Paintings, Impressionism and Broken Color

I like to use my palette knives when I paint. They really load the paint on and encourage you to be bold! Sometimes if I have an interesting photo I will hone my palette knife skills by trying to do the entire painting with a knife. I don't usually try it with paintings of people but I did today. Using the palette knife causes you to use a lot more paint than you normally would but you also end up with cleaner, purer color and many times, a more interesting painting because the textures and the colors mix optically. It can be a joy to view! Think of Monet and the lily pads he loved to paint. They were not just green, they were fantastic mixtures of yellow and violet and orange and somehow we see them as brilliant and fascinating shades of green.

Art should engage and sometimes you need to step out of your comfort zone for that to happen. We know that is true of life, so why not art? If you ate the same food every day you would eventually tire of it and grow to hate it, even if that food was chocolate. :)  If you go to church every Sunday and the preacher preaches the exact same text and message without varying one sentence you would quickly find another church. The creamy sauce of a perfectly seasoned Chicken Alfredo is delicious, but so is the crisp sweetness of a ripe grape. Different is GOOD and variety is good too, whether it comes in the scriptures we read, the food we eat or the art we make. Creating textures and colors where you might not expect to find them can definitely add interest and excitement to your art, while opening your own eyes to new ways of creating. I enjoyed the entire process of creating this piece so it's likely I will do another, and possibly even a series.

Many thanks to an artist friend, Tim Taylor, for allowing me to use his photo of Maria.

Maria 11" x 14" oil on canvas

 And a few details

Cleaned Up and Previewed in a Frame

Today I spent an hour or so cleaning up the painting of the wine and vegetables. Sometimes things are not apparent until you view them on a screen or from further away. I have renamed the painting Don Bosco with Vegetables because the focal point is really the wine bottle and the glass. The vegetables  are incidental. I darkened the bottle, made the highlight a bit brighter, ran some cooler color over the background to push it even further into the background. Then I corrected a few shapes that were off: the roma tomato on the left, and then the pepper shapes needed more definition. Finally I tried a frame out in Photoshop and it looks good.

I have painted this kind of thing a lot but it never gets old because you can always arrange the players into new positions. The vegetables will always vary, the size will change, the light will be different. Painting still life FROM LIFE- and I need to emphasize, is endlessly fascinating. It would bore me to tears if I had to take a picture of the set up and paint from that reference. I would literally feel blinded. Still life painting for me is all about the reflections and the relationships of the shapes. If I need to move an object or tweak a color to make it more interesting I do it. I'm afraid that if I had a photograph in front of me and I was trying to replicate it, I woudl be just another human copy machine. Remember, painting (to me), is all about what the artist brings to the equation. Why do we value a painting more than a photograph (unless the photograph was taken by Ansel Adams?) I believe it's because the painting is a series of "marks" that are very real and personal and hand-made, for lack of a better word.

I have seen a few artists who will slavishly copy a photograph of a piece of fruit and render a painting that is so photo-realistic it might actually BE the photograph. I am puzzled about why they do this. Is it a matter of challenging themselves to see if they actually can? Where is the drama? Where is the sheer fun factor of "interpreting" and bringing a little imagination into the piece?

I probably wouldn't have had to put so much time into reworking this piece if I hadn't been distracted by the show my husband was watching. I think it's a good lesson about what can happen if you let yourself settle for the mundane. Never be afraid to go back and try to improve a piece. You may surprise yourself. I have become a master re-worker, not because I have so many bad paintings, but because I am continually asking myself "what if?"

So this is the new and improved "Don Bosco with Vegetables"

You can see it in person from January 30-May 30, 2012 at SamB's Restaurant in Bowling Green, Ohio, along with nine more of my paintings. The Prizm Creative Community sponsors a spot show in this location and I currently have eight pieces there, which will be removed to make way for the new ones.

Using Half of Your Brain

OK, maybe I was using more than half, but I think I was pretty much on automatic pilot. I painted this one last night while I half watched a movie my husband had on, so I was really using the "intuitive" side of my brain. The one that runs on auto-pilot.

I love painting peppers and tomatoes but you have to be quick because they don't last long under the spotlight. When I photographed it this morning I was surprised to find it wasn't awful. I may try to go in and clean up the type and make it readable after it dries. And one of the roma tomatoes is lopsided-- that will need to be fixed too.

14" x 18" oil on canvas

\

Rework gets more interesting

If you're like me you have a lot of paintings hanging around that are just, for lack of better words, "no good". You can't sell them. You've tried. You don't want them hanging on your wall. You live in the city and bonfires are illegal. So you recycle the canvas. That doesn't mean you throw it into the trash. No- you sand it lightly (outside) to get rid of the gloss, rub a bit of OMS onto it, then turn it upside down and begin a new painting. The cracks and ridges become part of the new piece and may or may not add some textural interest. It's always a gamble but it's also fun to get out the palette knife and play with your paint. There is less concern about maintaining the integrity of your design--WHAT DESIGN??? And you have a lot of freedom because you're not tied into a tight concept. I like to use one or two photos as "the concept". Here the concept was sous chef and the red brick wall in the original painting becomes the backdrop for the hot cooktop.

One advantage to creating a painting over another painting, and there are many, is that the darks are richer and deeper immediately. Layering oil paint creates interesting color and when you layer cools over warms and vice versa (at random) you can create colors that surprise and delight the viewer. The tactic would not work at all on a "fresh" painting. It's a technique that works best on an uneven and colored ground. And that's exactly what an existing painting is.

Here is the original painting- upside down-- and the final version of "Chef Jeff, the Sous Chef"