Second painting in the Taiwan series, based on a photograph. My husband and I stayed at a guest house with lots of cats and a couple dogs, one of which had a broken leg. Most of the time she was tied up so she couldn't hurt herself, but when she was let off the leash she bounded everywhere on three legs and jumped all over us.
The picture doesn't make this as obvious as I'd like, but the dog was sniffing at the John Grisham novel in my hand. When I'm staying somewhere that offers a book collection, it is a semi-voluntary tradition to pick up a thriller and stay up late skimming it from front to back.
Artistic note: the value study shows a relatively even distribution of values, but in the workshop where I finished the painting, another student pointed out that the middle third of my subject photograph was actually much darker than the rest. I did my best to fix this in the painting, and I think it looks better for it. The macro distribution of values is something I'm trying to look out for now, and it's remarkably difficult.
I'm enrolled in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, and a couple weeks ago, my Little and I went to the MIT Museum on their Free Friday. They had a couple of special activities set up. We missed the bottle rockets outside because it was a billion degrees, but we took part in one to build the tallest structure we could from 40 paper cups. I took a photo, and painted it later at a watercolor workshop.
It totally got me that when I said I wanted to take a picture, my Little assumed this pose, which I associate above all with "Walk Like an Egyptian" by the Bangles in the 80s.
This picture is 4'x3' and, despite my intentions to make it quick, took around 3.5 hours. It's one of my rare attempts at washes; I was far slower than I wanted to be, and the cups look like melted plastic, but I'm happy with it!
The first of a series of paintings based on a trip to Taiwan that my husband and I took in March. This one is of Taroko Gorge, near Hualien; that's me on the rope bridge not looking at the camera, because faces are hard to paint.
This painting has a lot more white in the interstices than I'd like, but in order to fill it all in I'd have to dedicate several more hours to attending to each rope segment. Laura taught us the technique of washing over sections of the painting with very dilute color before we start, and later paintings benefited from this a lot.
Things I'm happy with: the vertiginous bridge perspective, the contrast, and my blue hat. (I was sitting in class one day with just the blue hat painted, the actual hat hooked over my chair and my blue backpack on the floor next to me, and Laura walked up behind me and said, "You like that color, don't you?")
I picked this shot from Taroko becaues it was dramatic and fun to draw, but this moment on the rope bridge did not particularly stick with me. There are two things that dominate my memory of Taroko: the evidence everywhere of Taiwan's complicated and lopsided relationship with the indigenous peoples there, which reminded me very much of America's relationship with Native Americans and basically made me feel slightly uncomfortable the whole time, although obviously not so uncomfortable that I was unable to tourist it up; and a man at a coffee stand far up a trail, who I hope will make an appearance later in this series, complete with face.
A few days ago Laura held a Paint Night at Aeronaut Brewery, bringing paper, paint, palettes, brushes, waterproof Micron pens, and pictures of houses and bicycles.
I decided this painting was done when I accidentally turned the cyclist's arm gray. Zombie cyclist on retro bike admires Somerville triple-decker!
Ten of the same mug, an exercise from the first day of Watercolor and Ink at CCAE with Laura Quincy Jones. I enrolled in part because I've seen her art around town and in the Somerville Scout, and I'm pretty excited.
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Through most of the class, I felt grumpy and like I didn't want to be there. This had absolutely nothing to do with the instructor and everything to do with my state of mind relative to painting: I'm going through a phase where the thought of making myself pick up a paintbrush makes me unhappy. But once we got into the exercise, a switch flipped and I got a lot calmer. I had similar experiences throughout most of Dan's course, too.
All of this reminds me of a passage that stuck with me from The Mindful Way Through Depression. Google Books helped me unearth the exact wording:
Another meditation teacher, also a writer, recounted how he almost had to chain himself to his computer each morning to ensure that he would get far enough into his writing for the words to begin to flow.
Much as I spent a great deal of my career (while working for software companies!) harboring the idea that most good software was produced by heroic guy programmers working solo in garages, I also carry an image of paintings as being done by artists for whom painting is their natural state of being, what they gravitate to automatically when they don't have to do something else. There are certainly people for whom that's true, but also many for whom it's not.
Someone else in my life pointed out that the activation energy that we sometimes have to invest is part of the work, and not, as I tend to automatically see it, an obstacle that we do the work in spite of. I like this reframing. (And I did not expect a sketch of ten mugs to draw all of this out!)
This is based on a headshot of Morgan Freeman, but ended up being perhaps even less recognizable than faceless Anna Kournikova was. (It's also about 1.5 layers and a great deal of stubble short of being done.)
That said, given what a random accretion of layers this seemed to be while I was painting it, I was pleasantly startled at the end of class to find that it does, in fact, resemble a face!
In February 2008, halfway through a ten-month stint teaching English at a middle school in Guangzhou, China, I was invited to an awards ceremony hosted by the Guangzhou Foreign Experts Bureau. Since I spoke almost no Chinese at the time and was generally fairly clueless, I had, and still have, no idea what these awards were for. They gave some speeches, called up fourteen people and gave them all Friendship Awards, then showed us National Treasure 2. I am not kidding. Here's how I summarized the movie at the time (bear in mind that most of the audience was probably not familiar with the details of the American Civil War!):
The premise is that Nicolas Cage's great-grandfather gets accused of masterminding the Lincoln assassination, when really he had died to keep the Confederacy from getting their hands on a secret Indian city of gold, so Cage goes on a Da Vinci Code-like treasure hunt to clear his name (it gets dumber).
This SIM card backup device was one of several gifts for attendees (another was a book called "Trees and Flowers of Southern China"). It was a neat device and I did use it to back up my SIM contacts a few times, but the best part is that it’s emblazoned with the name of the bureau.
Why did I opt to paint this? Well, I am signed up for the Whole Life Challenge with some other people from my gym. One component of the challenge is a per-week "lifestyle practice", and the practice for this week is Use It or Give It Away. I'm clearly never going to back up my SIM card again, but I didn't want to discard this device with commemorating it. (Actually, I may still be unable to discard it! I think it might meet Marie Kondo's spark test. Looking at it and recalling this surreal-for-me experience makes me happy.)
And also, I am feeling sort of art again. We'll see how it goes.
Some details about this painting:
It's big! The paper was 9x12 (see below). This is the reverse of the my accustomed painting:subject size ratio.
I made the screen color by mixing sap green with Winsor violet, and I am apparently some kind of LCD color-matching savant because it is perfect. I learned about the pairing from this site, where I can only spend a few minutes at a time before becoming overwhelmed.
The device has a neat diagonal symmetry to it that I had trouble conveying.
My current CCAE teacher, Dan Moynihan, uses mostly rounds, and after envying his collection and technique for a while, I went out and invested in a bunch of Winsor round brushes from sizes 4 through 14 (14 is pretty big). This has been a fantastic investment for painting larger pictures -- the larger round brushes hold a lot of paint! I still don't know how to get a consistent wash (I might need another wash brush for that), but they are great for both covering lots of area and doing some precision work.
This ballpoint-pen Cassandra was the centerpiece of a card for my brother, who works on the distributed storage system of the same name (yes, it was hilarious!). She's based on the painting by Evelyn de Morgan, which currently decorates the top of the main Wikipedia article for Cassandra.
I'm proud of her dress. I went into a trance while listening to a podcast, and suddenly all these folds!
Hello, rhino! Dan Moynihan brought in a billion pictures from nature magazines for us to choose from. This is based on a photograph of a rhino even higher-contrast than the painting ended up being.
Some thoughts from this class:
High contrast makes things pop. This class I avoided the pictures of coral reefs undulating in fifteen different shades of bright pink and went for the one with really obvious light and dark patches.
Dan gave us on tutorial on fast backgrounds, which I put to use. I was unable to avoid a lot of blooming, but the painting looks complete.
I feel like I have more trouble with paint control and maintaining an even texture than when I first picked up a watercolor brush over a year ago.1 Looking at a booklet of John Singer Sargent paintings at the start of class may have exacerbated this feeling.
Despite not feeling very art lately, I recently picked up The Artist's Color Guide -- Watercolor, by Hazel Soan. On the theme of values, she says:
In figurative painting, gauging tone is more important than matching hue because the representation of light and shade (tone, or value) is the code by which we interpret the colored patterns on the paper as being three-dimensional forms and spaces.
She goes on to talk about color consistency within a painting, and demonstrates her point with a lot of absurdly gorgeous paintings that each only use a handful of colors. My tendency runs towards using every color on my palette in an effort to match what I'm painting, and I'm now convinced that this is not the right approach for me, at least right now.
She also addresses the "tinting strength" and "staining properties" of practically every shade in the Winsor & Newton professional spectrum, and it's overwhelming. Most of the rhino is (Cotman) Payne's Gray, and I still couldn't tell you what the tinting strength or staining property of this pigment is. Hmm.
My back squat has been plateaued at the same weight for about that length of time, which has led me to theorize that it will follow a pattern of punctuated equilibrium. Maybe I'll suddenly move forward on both squats and painting simultaneously. ↩︎
Continuing the theme of the last few posts1: two two-year-olds!
The first picture is Sadie at the playground, with her father and me standing by. Sadie had tried twice to climb down this ladder, and each time had ended in some kind of awkward combination fall-rescue. This time, she ran back up the slide -- slides, in Sadie-world, are bidirectional and full-duplex -- and tried again, facing inwards instead of outwards, and succeeded.
The second is me and Abby practicing Abby squats in an ice cream shop (six reps unbroken!). My ability to jump up and down with a twenty-five-pound weight doesn't usually do much to make other humans happy, but in this moment it was the only skill I needed.
A couple of artistic notes:
These pictures share a scaling flaw: I accidentally made both toddlers disproportionately giant. This happened despite, in Sadie's case, me asking her father for her height and getting out the tape measure to remind myself how far her head comes up my legs. (The answer is definitely not way past my waist!)
Abby is watercolor, Sadie is ink and Tombow brush markers with a watercolor background. Both are 2.5"x3.5". Abby's shoes light up with the glow of a white gel pen (I learned this trick from Laura Sfiat).
The Abby picture looks much more washed-out in reality. Usually I aim to color-tune the scanned image closer to the way the original appears to my eyes; in this case, letting XSane run free with the contrast was a clear improvement.
And with apologies to the half-dozen 007-themed Tumblrs that have followed me since this post. ↩︎
Branching out into a new medium: Color Wonder markers. I picked these up for my friends' daughter Sadie after the leaf incident. They live in the shell of the Buckle Turtle, who comes with us on all of our train journeys from daycare. (A brief word of praise: Buckle Turtle is awesome. In addition to the six buckles, it has a zipper pocket, some numbers and shapes for camouflage, and a head that can be crumpled back into the shell, which meant that over time Sadie came to learn the phrase "Squish its head". It came from Buckle Toys.)
As noted in the earlier post, these markers don't really mix -- I guess that would be a lot to ask, given that much of the point is that they set immediately on contact with the magic paper -- but you can do terrible glazes with them.
I also got to watch another artist at work: on the train, Sadie went to town after convincing me that enough people had disembarked to allow for getting the markers out (”not busy train now”). She described this piece to me at some length, but unfortunately my grown-up ears comprehended little and the only detail I can pass on to you is that the brown mark is a park.
We went to Spectre today, and it inspired me to paint a frame from the opening chase in Casino Royale, which remains my favorite of the recent Bonds. This unexpectedly turned into one of the best (albeit tiny) watercolors I've ever done! It is 2.5"x3.5" and took an hour or so.
I discovered I really wanted to write about the bones I have to pick with Spectre; they're below the cut and include mild spoilers.
My report card for Spectre goes like this:
7 out of 10 for solid Bondness.
-1 for poor use of Monica Bellucci. This is probably unfair: had I not happened to see a Spectre listing that gave her top billing, she would have been an unexpectedly welcome cameo, instead of an anticipated main character who never materialized. Nevertheless, my expectations were let down.
-1 for (this goes back to Skyfall, but I haven't forgiven it) having Miss Moneypenny start out as a field agent and abruptly become a secretary (I recall the justification being something like "I'm not cut out for fieldwork"). Really? She wouldn't become an analyst? Or a handler? There's some more bitter commentary to make here that I'm eliding. I'll stick with: I don't know much about the spy industry, but there seem to be more customary desk jobs for retired field agents to take. Also, did anyone at MI6 talk to her about her decision to leave the field? It seems like they might want to hang on to a good field agent who is not a traumatized wildcard. (Admittedly, keeping her as an agent might have made it hard to keep her in the plot. As a friend pointed out, Bond doesn't hang out with other agents much.)
+2 for Miss Moneypenny being excellent, having a plot role, and twisting other frustrating Bond/Moneypenny tropes. This made it all the more weird that they shoehorned in the secretary thing (M forgetting her birthday?) instead of making her an analyst or whatever.
- General malaise for dramatic age difference in Bond romantic partners.
+ Relief for the movie being way more upbeat than Skyfall.
On Monday, my friend Cheesy received a series of whiny IMs over the course of several hours that went like this:
78 emails to go Still 44 emails 22 emails left Augh
Mysteriously, when I asked him what to draw that night, he replied "Our lady of the overflowing inbox" and added "Water metaphors encouraged" and I was instantly smitten with a plan.
The mail reader on my screen is the text-based Unix client Mutt, which denotes unread messages with an "N".
"Good to Great" is there because I was given a copy on my first day at work. I have complicated feelings about it -- #1 being the premise that "great", regardless of whether you go on to attach a precise, stock-based definition to it, is a good way to breathlessly describe any corporate entity -- but positive enough on the whole to enshrine it in this piece. Also, it's been floating from cube to cube of mine for more than seven years!
Melodramatic as this is, it is very much an expression of affection for my workplace, even if I do get a lot of email. For the sysadmins out there (and anyone else juggling many things), one book I recommend a zillion trillion is Time Management for System Administrators -- without it, the woman in the picture would be floating along a tide of email into the Massachusetts Bay.
