America, where gimmicks trump genuine achievement

When people talk about artist Scott Wade's dirty pictures they are not referring to the salacious content but to his preferred medium, grimy car windshields. I have to admit this is an amusing idea, particularly when the subject is the reinterpretation of a renaissance masterpiece like Boticelli's Venus.

But browsing through his site, one eventually has to confront a question like this: Aside from the choice of medium, how good is he as an artist? In this country it sometimes appears that we value cleverness over actual achievement, wit over work.

Maybe Marshal McLuhan was right. The medium is the message.

The sketchbook project

The Sketchbook Project, as it was called, invited artists to fill rather small, modest sketchbooks and submit them to a traveling show. I did as requested and to my surprise the show traveled quite a bit this year. Perhaps you saw it in one of the following venues:

Atlanta, GA, Art House Gallery;
Washington, DC, Museum of Contempory Art DC;
Philadelphia, PA, Chris' Jazz Café;
Boston, MA, Laconia Gallery;
Chicago, IL, Antena Gallery;
Chicago IL, Art Source Gallery;
St. Louis, MO, Soulard Art Market;
Brooklyn, NY, 3rd Ward Gallery;
Atlanta, GA, Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA);

The Art House Gallery is all about staging large participatory exhibits like this. Their current project involves having as many artists as possible fill a handful of tiny canvases which are then exhibited mosaic style in the Atlanta airport.

Fun stuff.

Finished... Again

This little yard-side scene was up the road from where we stayed on Little Cranberry Island in Maine at the end of May. The top image is a reference photo I took for this painting. The finished painting is 24 by 30 inches, oil on canvas.

Although I signed this painting and considered it finished more than a week ago, I just went back into it and added a bicycle to the porch. It's an illustrative detail that may not add anything aesthetic, although I like the way reds and greens play off each other in this painting, along with the complimentary relationship between the maroon and the yellow. But I liked the addition of the bike for some sort of story-telling quality that the detail adds.

And as you can see from the reference photo, I chose to change the color of the shed in the background and lose the bush in the center.

My favorite art books

A number of artists I know collect how-to-draw books and books on anatomy for artists. When asked by other students at the Art Students League, I am happy to recommend the books by Joseph Sheppard, an American painter and sculptor who now lives and works in Italy.

If I am not mistaken, Sheppard was a student of Reginald Marsh. (I believe Sheppard is about 79 years old now.) You can see that there is a liveliness to Sheppard's rendering that seems to have derived from Marsh. But although Marsh taught anatomy and figure drawingand painting, he is not remembered today as a great anatomist. In fact, one instructor at the Art Students League recently recalled that Marsh was fond of saying to his struggling students, "When in doubt, add more muscles." That may be apocryphal but it seems like something Marsh might have said.

Sheppard's figures are much more convincing and accurately rendered. In the 1970s he realized that the anatomy that artists need to learn has very little in common with what doctors and biologists need to learn. Sheppard created a number of books on drawing the figure and, in them, he sometimes uses the term "surface anatomy," meaning the visible clues to anatomy that will be most valuable to an artist.

His drawings, some in pen and ink and others in white and dark chalk on toned paper are works of art that are as enjoyable as art as they are informative and demonstrative.

Yet another book by Sheppard deals with the painting techniques of the old masters. In this large format paperback, Sheppard takes his readers step-by-step through the techniques of Durer, Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio, Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer. It's fascinating to see how, in each case, the demo painting ends up looking somewhat like the work of the master being examined while nonetheless showing Sheppard's irrepressible animated style as well.

Most of these books are still in print. They are far and away the resource books I value most as a painter.

Smaller sea shell this time

I fear I may be better at starting paintings than I am at finishing them. Or maybe it's just that I have a tough time starting just one painting and working on only that one until I finish. I like getting a number of them going at once. That way if I stall out on one there is always another work in progress on which I can keep working.

Even when I worked in the much faster medium of watercolor I worked this way, sometimes getting as many as seven different paintings going at once. With oil paintings you can just put them aside, for months or years , before coming back to them.

Sometimes the stalling out lasts for months, sometimes for more than a year. The last large one I did (see post headlined, "Finished") was one such case of stalling out. I got stuck in the drawing stage and put it aside for some time. Begun in April, put aside for two months. Then I was able to move it along but still avoided the most complicated and, I thought, tricky part of the painting (the part where the large shell holds the smaller shells. Once I got down to it, it wasn't so difficult and after drawing that part in monochrome on the linen the painting moved almost too fast.

The above painting is more an interior than a still life, which is rather uncharacteristic for me. But I did a drawing of a similar dining room chair (another dining room and another marriage, actually) nearly twenty years ago when my sons were very small, in part because even then I really liked the curvy lines of such chairs.

The blue under-painting will serve as a complimentary color to the surface and true color of the wood and furniture which is more in the orange/brown range.