sketches from life

I'm taking a short break from work on a painting for class (due tomorrow! Yikes!), and I thought I'd come share a few things that I've been learning and working on lately. Namely, painting with encaustic.

Our last project in painting was to paint a small panel with encaustic. For those of you not familiar with the term, encaustic is basically painting with hot wax. It's mostly beeswax and pigment, and can give some really vibrant, beautiful colors. It's a very different medium, though, from anything else I've worked with, and it was really fun to experiment with it.
When painting with encaustic, you have to keep all the paints in liquid form by keeping them hot, so all the pots of color are kept on hot plates or griddles, and when you paint with it, it sets up very rapidly, since as soon as it begins to cool, it hardens and becomes more opaque. That being the case, you have to work pretty fast. What is fun about it, too, is how easily it takes to things like collage, transfer, and building up texture or layerss. You can incise lines into thick layers of wax and fill them with color, you can scrape away layers to reveal what's underneath, or you can attach globs of warm wax to build up semi-sculptural aspects on a piece.

The pieces we did were small, and mostly, I believe, just for the experience of working with the new medium, but it was really fun to play around with. People who know what they're doing with the medium can really do some cool things with it, too. It's also interesting to note that encaustic is incredibly archival and will last for incredible lengths of time as long as it is not exposed to enough heat to melt the wax. We know it has been in use since the time of the Ancient Egyptians, who used it to create mummy portraits. Cool!

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.                         -Thomas Merton

I just began reading a book called Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, and even as little as I've read so far, I've really enjoyed it. It has already made some very good points. For instance, it talked about the struggle in continuing in art, and not quitting. They rightly recognize the fear behind most instances of quitting. Basically, it's a fear of failure. That's common. It's human. But it's also dangerous.

We allow fear to stop us from accomplishing anything. We let ourselves get distracted by what's going on around us. We become discouraged when other people are doing better than we are. We call it an inability to comply with deadlines or to work under certain conditions, or sometimes we simply contribute it to laziness, but what it boils down to is a fear of failure. The book makes a very good point about this -- one which I've recently come to realize myself as well: that when we label ourselves as artists, we identify ourselves with our art, and therefore, a bad piece of art translates to mean that we are bad artists. We become so closely identified with what we are creating that if once we fail, it instantly means we are a failure. But that's not true!

As a young artist, still trying to figure out what I have to say and where I'm going with all of this, I am right there in the middle of a lot of what this book is saying so far. Basically, art is scary. It makes you vulnerable. Creating art is like opening up a bit of your soul for people to look at, examine and criticize. It's a bit unnerving sometimes if you are still figuring things out. But that's part of what makes it so exciting. It really is an adventure!

Artists don't get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working. - Stephen DeStaebler 

I did warn you that my "sketch of the day" was not likely to be a daily thing, and you can't say I didn't tell the truth. But I'm not giving it up completely! I have a sketch for you today, and I also have some clay projects to share as well.

Hello there! Happy Tuesday. I hope your day was pleasant. Mine was pretty good. Less productive than it should have been, but oh well, it happens. I was struggling with ideas (or rather, the lack of any idea at all) for my drawing project during class today and didn't get much work done as a result, but I think I've come up with something interesting now. Stay tuned to see if it pans out. I'll wind up posting about it in a week or so when it's done, I'm sure.
Ok, well time to continue from the last post. There are still several more paintings in the series!
Let's jump right in.

Phew, it's been a crazy week or so. Projects had piled up on me and I wasn't able to get around to sharing! But thanks to one of those projects, at least, I have some fun things to share with you, readers. One of the projects that had me so busy was a painting project for which we had to paint nine small, 1'x1' canvases or framed panels. Going into it, I was concerned by the number of them, and the rather short time we had to finish the project. However, it is now one of my favorite projects we have done. I feel like I learned quite a bit, and really had some fun playing around with things that I've never been brave enough to try before.

The assignment required that for the first small painting, we started by responding to a part of our last painting (for me, that was the large Janet Fish still life). For the second painting, we responded to the first small one in some way; for the third, we responded to the second, and so on and so forth, so that it was like a visual game of telephone in a way. My final series wound up looking a little bit on the random side, the connections being more conceptual than visual, but that's okay with me. I wanted to use the project to experiment and stretch myself. I wanted to try new things and play around with mediums.

I painted all of them using acrylics and acrylic mediums, which in itself was a stretch. I've gotten so comfortable with oils that going back to acrylic was a little irritating at times. I really wanted to play with the various acrylic mediums that our professor had shown us, though, so it was worth it to me to put up with the acrylic paint in order to allow for the experimentation!

So, enough talk, let's get down to it! The first few paintings in the series: