Creative Reserve

I’ve written in the past about the importance of creating a reserve of materials and ideas. Nothing feels quite so good as a stockpile of great reference materials and sketches. But it’s also important to build a creative reserve. I’m learning that as artists, we cannot continually make withdrawals from our creative accounts without making a deposit now and then.

The artists we work with here at Creative Catalyst have vast creative reserves. Their worlds include attending meetings, entering shows, and visiting different parts of the country. They do not need more visual stimulation. They need time to paint.

Those of us who don’t get out as often must seek out artistic stimulation. Let curiosity be your guide: visit a new shop or gallery, go to lunch somewhere different, or check out new materials. Shake things up. It is easy to get stuck in a comfortable rut. It impacts the freshness of our work. We forget it’s important to have fun, to play, and to explore. If you find that you are hitting a wall, take a moment to think about the last time was you treated yourself to a deposit in your creative account.

Cheers,
Lynn Powers

Words of Caution

The words of caution are, don’t be. As usual, I’m writing this for myself. It’s something I need to hear.

Each of us has only so much time on this earth. Especially in art, any time we spend being afraid of our own inner voice is a waste of a limited resource. Oscar Wilde said it best, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken!”

Years ago, an instructor pointed out that more women than men attend workshops. He then pointed out that more men than women enter shows. He wondered why that was. It was not due to lack of talent. I believe it’s because women are generally taught to be more cautious than men. This caution has spilled over into an arena where it has no place.

It is important to become proficient with the medium. It provides the freedom to think about what we are doing and not just how we are doing it. However, at some point we need to step out on that invisible bridge of self guidance with fearless gusto.

So onward and upward.

A Change of Plumage

I am rejoicing! The Goldfinchs are gold. That may not mean much to most of you but to me it’s an indication I’ve made it through my least favorite season of the year: winter. Like daffodils in the spring, gold Goldfinchs are harbingers of hope.

In winter the goldfinch are safely hidden by their drab plumage of grays. The return of their yellow means my senses can anticipate delightful bird song, color and the sweet scent of flowers. It’s in sharp contrast to winter in Oregon’s Mid-Willamette Valley. The Valley can become a soup bowl of colorless fog. Weeks, if not months, may go by without enough sun to permit cast shadows. Life takes on a two dimensional quality. It would be one big sensory depravation tank if not for the cold. I may be exaggerating, but not much.

This has nothing and everything to do with art. Art is a celebration of both color and the lack of color. It’s experiential and analytical. It helps us feel alive. Like some nuanced painting, there are beautiful aspects of winter but I’ve had to work to appreciate their subtle qualities. I don’t have to work to enjoy spring. Spring is overpowering in its abundance of options. Nothing is subtle. It is high energy and youthful.

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As a spring gift from me to you, please enjoy 15 minutes of bird song, recorded here in our garden on one of those wonderful spring mornings I dearly love. And a special thanks to Susan Bourdet for permitting me to use her image in this manner.

Enjoy!
Lynn Powers

As Long as it Takes

Last week I mentioned that I was attending a workshop. I’ve returned with one more tip: remember that a painting cannot be rushed.

I rush painting for a couple of reasons; the first is my inclination to multitask. I can unload the dishwasher, cook, and talk at the same time, but art takes focus. It’s high time I slow down and give it the focus it requires. I cannot squeeze art between other activities. It deserves its own time and space.

Secondly, I’ve been unrealistic about how long it takes to give thought and careful execution to a painting. This tendency comes from the open studio I attend at the local university, which is only three hours long. I know that when the session ends, I lose my model, so I rush. Rushing only gives me one more mediocre attempt at a painting to slide under my bed. The studio schedule should not dictate my expectations. It would be wiser to forgo spend the time making careful drawing.

Painting is not a horse race. It takes as long as it takes. The only good way to speed up my process is to get more experienced at what I do, and that’s something I’ll have to wait for.

Cheers,
Lynn Powers

Tips

I’m delighted to say that I’m attending a seminar this week. I needed the shot-in-the-arm! Every time I attend one of these things, it brings home the fact that so much of painting has to do with the accumulation of tips. Here are a few helpful tips I’ve learned over the years. Sometimes they make the difference between a frustrating experience and finding my way through of a problem.

If you’re having difficulty drawing, try closing one eye. When drawing a face or figure, a few nanometers one way or the other can distort the final image. Viewing with only one eye helps flatten perception and prevent the spacial shift that comes with two eyed vision. (Use both eyes when evaluating color or value). Also, don’t forget the other two simple techniques for accuracy: 1) visually measure with your arm extended and 2) drop a vertical line to be sure things align as they should.

Look at your painting’s reverse image. When checking your work, you can see it with fresh eyes if you view it using a mirror. This helps us evaluate our work as if it belonged to someone else. If a mirror isn’t handy, turn your painting upside down.

Use a value scale. A value scale helps remind us how dark a number ten value actually is! We may think we are using the entire value range but in reality we are not.

Note the direction and intensity of the light source. If the light source is strong, you have the perfect excuse to plow in the reflected light and color. In addition, the edge of shadows should track to the light source.

And finally, don’t forget to use more than one color in any one area. The mark of a real beginner is someone who, when painting a red shirt, paints it all the same red. They may simply shift the values without shifting the color, or in the case of oil colors, simply add black. At a minimum, everything in life is color impacted by what ever is adjacent to the object and the color temperature of the light. At least slide in a few analogous colors for energy and life.

That’s it for now. Please add the tips you’ve found helpful here.

I’m off to pick up a few more tips. (It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it.)

Cheers,
Lynn Powers

What do you love about art?

Much of my personal struggle is to improve while NOT destroying what I love about painting and drawing. The drive to improve can disrupt growth’s natural unfolding and put too much pressure on everything it touches. For me, the element of play, risk taking and discovery needs to be integral to the whole thing.

We all need to choreograph our own dance, which may include classes and workshops. But I’ve also found it very helpful to remind myself of what it is I love about art, and give it value. To improve without passion and joy is sterile. Art needs to nourish.

So here’s part of my list: I love…

• – seeing something come from nothing
• – hanging out with my art buddies
• – the challenge and thrill if anything comes of what I do
• – the feel of the brush going across the paper
• – colors mingling on the paper

What moves you to create? Link here to add to the list!

Cheers,
Lynn Powers

The Next Step

Like many of you, I’m trying to figure out what the heck I’m doing in my own art. For me, it’s frequently a love/hate relationship. It’s full of choices: Realism vs. abstract; muted vs. powerful; watercolor vs. oil or some other medium. I read about people that are happy all the time with their work and I wonder what they’re smoking, and were can I get it?

I doubt it would bug me so much if I felt I had all the time in the world to explore possibilities, wander until I bumped into the perfect combination of media/style/content by accident. I envy those lucky folks that go to art school and follow a sequence of classes with expert guides.

Life is what it is, and we are lucky to have the luxury to paint at all. And I suppose the next step is all anyone needs to know. It’s all anyone can know because the next painting could take us in a totally different direction. The challenge is to not worry about the long term direction and permit ourselves to be directed by ourselves. That’s one of the reasons why it’s such an adventure.

Above is a close up of my latest effort, “Homeless in Maui”.

Cheers,
Lynn Powers

Visual Memory

Twice in the last week I’ve heard of a practice that at one time would have seemed wildly strange, but now makes perfect sense. Here it is: Draw something accurately that you are not looking at. (It is not blind contour drawing.)

An example of this would be students in a life drawing class that have their model up a flight of stairs in another studio away from where they are working. They were encouraged to put to memory as much information as possible and then return to the easel downstairs and draw.

Crazy? Not really. As artists, we train ourselves to look for visual information. It is as concrete as math. It’s just not left brain.

My folks had an artistic friend in high school that later became a teacher at Art Center in Los Angeles. His name was Reynold Brown. (Reynold was mentor of CCP artist Craig Nelson, and many others.) As a kid in high school, Reynold would go on sketching trips with my folks and never take a sketch book. He would just sit and look around. To the amazement of his friends, when he returned to class he’d paint a complete painting with details others had missed. Later in life he could construct complicated scenes combining the information he’d gleaned over the years, without the need to step outdoors. He had a library of visual information stored in his brain.

Reynold may have been extraordinary with his early ability to do this but it is a skill that can be learned.

I am continually amazed by artists. We can only imagine what is possible given time and focus.

Cheers,
Lynn Powers

Select what’s important

I think poetry is a good comparison to painting. The limits of both art forms do not permit either the artist or poet to describe in detail the minutia of their subject. In fact, the more selective the artist, the more powerful the work. The challenge is to determine what conveys the message most clearly.

I enjoy thinking about which features or gestures best express how I feel about my model. Is the model bold, shy, wise, funny? I try to consider if I need to blur an eye, accent a cheek bone, use strong pure color or pastel tones, etc. This can’t help but bring my own preconceived ideas into play. Consequently, I learn as much about myself as I do about whomever I’m painting. On a good day, the visual image becomes secondary to the emotional expression.

This is the part of art I especially love. It’s also the part of art I think is the most often overlooked. Capturing the visual likeness is seductive. Manipulating technical skills is also seductive. But like the sirens of old, we may find it wise to look beyond their beautiful song to find a more personal direction.

Cheers
Lynn Powers

A change of plans

Things don’t always go the way one plans. I had planned to spend the time between Christmas and New Year to reflect on the past year. I had hoped to start 2010 with some reasonable goals and a clean studio. It was not to be!

On Dec. 26th we were called to get to the Bay Area (California) quickly due to an illness in the family. On the drive home we listened to Malcolm Galdwell’s book, Outliers. The book was timely. It is about what it takes to be really good at what we do. Basically Gladwell says it takes hard work, exceptional timing and some very lucky breaks, even for Mozart and Bill Gates. He proposes that it requires around 10,000 hours of practice, with the focused intent of improving, before one can expect to become exceptional. He then provides examples of very successful people in a variety of areas.

We have our work cut out for us. Apparently unless we’ve done the time, we have no right to whine. Perhaps my lucky break is that circumstances provided me the opportunity to listen to the book in it’s entirety.

I know what I should be doing and it’s not cleaning the studio.

Lynn

The Two Best Things I’ve Learned

I’m wrapping up a year of From Behind the Cameras with the two best things I’ve learned this year about paintings.

The first one is: Do the value study first.
Why? Because if you have a strong value pattern you are three quarters of the way to creating a strong visual image. And there is much more creative freedom in that last 25%. You can go crazy with color, line, shape… all the other elements of design. And you can rest assured that your painting will probably be fine because it have a strong value pattern.

The second is: Trust yourself.
It has been scientifically proven that self doubt occupies part of the functioning brain that might otherwise be put to good use. Plus, it’s the hunches and urges that take us to our own unique creative expression. If we are busy doubting, we cannot hear that quiet little inner voice that is us. Taking risks is part of what makes painting a fun daring adventure. We have to be willing to let some things fail in order to experiment and find our own visual expression. And if we’ve done a value study, our work is likely to be just fine.

That’s it. Have a great Holiday and please take advantage of the one free day on ArtWorkshops.tv. There you can see how many of the CCP artists do their value studies.

All the best from everyone here!
Lynn Power and crew.

Critique Group Tips

When we filmed Polly Hammett in 2004, I was already a member of a critique group. In fact, the group is the very-silent-in-studio audience Polly addresses while painting. It was fortunate to have everyone there. We were able to work Polly’s suggestions into the formal structure of our group almost immediately. We all benefited.

If you don’t already belong to a critique group, I recommend joining or forming one. Here are a few things I believe make a group a healthy, valuable experience.

• Keep membership between 7 and 9 artists. You need to know your members well and understand their goals. More than that and your meetings can take forever. Fewer and you have too much depending on too few people.
• Members should be similarly serious about their art.
• Have regular meetings, once a month if possible.
• Limit the number of paintings to 3 from each member. This permits discussion and not just a show and tell.
• Have a mix of styles and media among your members. You will have a larger variety to insights and points of view.
• No single member should dominant the group. Everyone needs to contribute as well as have paintings for critique, if possible.
• If a member has nothing for critique, they should be encouraged to attend anyway. Their input is important to others.
• It helps if you enjoy one another.
• Everyone needs to take responsibility for the group’s success.

Twice, over the course of several years, we have each formally stated our artistic goals to the group. That helps us help each other achieve our goals. A gift indeed.

One of the principle benefits of a critique group is that participants learn to put their thoughts and feelings about a painting into words and then struggle with the possible solutions. This in turn helps identify the dynamics taking place in our own paintings and makes us become better artists.

There is so much more on this topic, but this is a good start.

Cheers,
Lynn Powers

Dry Spell

Recently I hit a dry spell in painting. Fortunately a very kind email from a reader jolted me out of it. She helped me remember that dry spells go with the creative territory. ALL the artists we’ve worked with have mentioned their struggle.

For me, to be a creative means to tap into that part of myself where words are insufficient. It’s where hidden currents abide. I like to think (actually not think, but feel) that some sort of processing is taking place. Perhaps my right brain is sorting out the year? The holidays? Who knows. But I finally realized the additional stress of artistic expectations only hinders the conclusion of the process. It’s similar to how I felt when I’d have a commission waiting for me.

I understand why so many artists equate their creative process with play. It helps remove expectations. The trick is to balance that with a serious intent to become a better artist. Writing the weekly From Behind the Camera gives me the excuse to observe my own creative process. Ultimately, to write is to struggle to make clear, even to myself. It’s worth the effort. I recommend it.

Holiday Expectations

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why, historically, most big named artists are men. Men have wives. Wives have, well, chores and expectations. This classic role model pressure is even more marked during the holidays. But I want it all. I want the holiday cooking, gifting, decorations, cards sent, painting and drawing. Or at least I want to continue making forward progress in my art. Okay, I just don’t want to backslide. And I don’t want to make me and everyone I love crazy.

Among the elements and principles of design, only a few require more than a pencil and paper to exercise. For me, drawing is huge, as is designing the entire page and value plan. This requires only the simplest of materials. So I am wrapping my mind around the idea of focusing on just those aspects for the next month. It’s what I need to do anyway. If there is time for more, great! And there will be time for more because I am giving myself the gift of a more stress free holiday. That may include more store made food and a shorter shopping list but a much happier me.

So hark ye fellow artists, be ye male, female or somewhere in between, carry thy sketch book and hone thy skills. It all adds to the creative stew.

Cheers,
Lynn Powers

David Curtis

No where on earth is classic Plein air landscape painting stronger than in Great Britain. And, David Curtis is a British national treasure! So much so that when we first approached the British film company to carry their products, we asked why Curtis had no trailers. Their answer was that trailers were unnecessary for Curtis because everyone in Great Britain knew his work. Thankfully, and in part due to our pestering, they developed trailers for each of the six Curtis workshops, three in oil and three watercolor. Now those of us on this side of the pond can marvel at his skill.

Tall and lanky, and totally unassuming, Curtis settles into painting as if it were second nature. Apparently weather conditions don’t effect his work. No teeth chattering while he paints!

I watched the watercolor workshops several times. After he carefully draws his subject, Curtis applies a bit of masking fluid to hold his whites. After the fluid is dry, he moistens the entire paper and works in atmospheric washes. As the surface dries (a minor miracle in some cases), Curtis gets more and more detailed. When the paper is dry, Curtis re-enters his painting and fluidly renders the details that bring his work to an even higher level. He works on an angle, thus permitting the pigments to flow and blend in the classic watercolor way. Curtis does not explain every move, but each workshop contains multiple demonstrations. The viewer is able to pick up a lot of pointers just by watching.

Curtis is truly remarkable!

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