Blue

    I'm calling this Blue, for now.  So far, it is the only drawing of this series on this color of paper. 

    When I was traveling last summer, I saw some wonderful drawings by A. Durer done with charcoal on grey or blue paper. It had been a long time since I had worked with the technique, and it made me want to do it again. 

    I also wanted to loosen my mark making and invite randomness into my process. Since this drawing, I've tried (mostly) to let the randomness happen. When it does, I feel the most free.

    

 

Trane Sighting: It had been three months

A dream image from about a year ago.

This was the image that convinced me that pastel pencils had real possibilities for mixing color. I was so surprised by how much using them felt like painting.

 

Studio Visit

This is the current state of my drawing table. It looks a mess, but I actually know where all those pencils belong.

    My new drawings are all pastel paintings, and these are the two kinds of pastel pencils I am using. One is the Cretacolor brand and the other is Stabilo CarbOthello. Both are amazingly soft, blendable colors. I can paint with these in much the same way as I can with acrylics on canvas, but this is much faster, and not so precious.

 

Love, Loss and Drawing in the Age of AI

I've just about made up my mind to start posting again. 

For a little over a year, I've been on a journey of healing and recovery from a devastating loss. That loss, as well as some of my recent experiences in other cultural traditions, has changed pretty much everything.

Before this all happened, I was very concerned with the fast growth of AI, and its methods for culling images from the internet. As my dad would say, I think the horse is out of the barn with that issue, and it's really the way of the world now. 

Before all this happened, my life was open-ended, with vague expectations of how it should unfold. Now, there are definite ways in which it will not unfold. I wouldn't have chosen this path, but it has forced me to look at the paths that are left to me.

Now, I'm more conscious of what I will leave behind, and what my life will have amounted to.

Posting here will be some sort of proof. I don't have any enthusiasm for marketing, but it would be nice to know that my work can be found, if someone were looking for it. Even if they are only robots.

I have not been idle in my absence. At this point, I have nine new drawings to share, all in a fairly new medium for me. Working on them has been part of the process of folding this loss into my life on the way to creating a new one for myself. It's a painful process, but I have hope that one day I will again find some joy.

Pro tip: if you know someone who is grieving, give them a nice box of colors and some paper. It works wonders. That and a nice furry companion. I now have a tribe of five of them :) This is Miss Ripley, the Sprite.

For My Shining Star

 

Myth Makers

    I'm very lucky to be a part of this gallery show at the Ferris Fine Art Gallery. The other two artists are my good friends Kathleen VandeMark and Carrie Weis. My new painting is in the show, and when I get a good photo of it I will post it here. It was a big push to finish it in time, but it felt like good workout. Doing that cleared my easel, and now I'm enjoying considering the possibilities for the next one. 

Happy New Year.

     

 

I might be having a moment

 I've been at work (both at school and at the easel) because, even though things are crazy busy,  I have a show opening to be ready for on January 9th, so this is no time to snooze. I do have something to post, or will soon. However, I've run into a snag that I will have to resolve before I share my new painting.

     All semester, I've bumped into articles about A.I. apps like DALL-E and others that will create art for you based on verbal prompts. This means that anyone who can string some words together can access the skill to make an image that illustrates those words. The image is compiled by the app's access to images that are part of art history as well as popular culture, the news and whatever other source of images it can access. It is my understanding that DALL-E and similar apps are limited by programming with a standard of ethics, so that images not in the public domain would be inaccessible to them. So far so good.

   But now, I've heard of a new app called Lensa that has not had the proper upbringing, and it considers any image on the internet fair game and gives no credit to the originator of the material. 

   I have always wanted to share my work and information, because that's what art is about. Sharing is one of the ways we grow. But, geez. If my work is going to be scattered to the winds and diluted by all the other work that is available to the apps, then I'm not sure I want to join the party. I have to decide about it before I share more work.

   I have a feeling that A.I. art will change everything, whether individual artists want it to or not.

Dream

Last night I dreamed that a powerful, nefarious woman took control of a group of women, and through some sort of magic, merged them with cats. And then, she poured acid over one of each of their arms, melting away the flesh but leaving their bones intact. I can still hear their screams of surprise. Before I joined the group, a sad woman gave me a cup of her tears to drink. I think that saved me from their fate.

As always, studio time is welcome and at this point is also necessary, as I have agreed to participate in a gallery show in January. I have a new painting in progress that I hope to finish in time. When it starts to quicken, (it is close to that now) I will post it here.

 

In the Zone

We're sailing into the 9th week of school, and this is the first time I've posted. It has been a whirlwind, composed mostly of work and family time. Today, I played hooky from grading and was able to enter the Zone for the first time in a long time.

    It's a good thing, too, because I signed on for a gallery show in January, and I've got some work to do to be ready. I spent today on this one, working on the setting and figuring out how to puzzle those wings together so that they might possibly fit in that space. It has always helped me to see the problems when I post them here, and that strategy hasn't failed me yet.

 

Signs of Life

Believe it or not, I'm still alive. And working, if only in baby steps.

These are photos are from this year's volunteer pumpkin patch, grown from a shove of two Halloween pumpkins down the hill after the first frost. We'll see if they have time to become pumpkins. The flowers are huge. If they make it, they'll be ding dong daddies.

In other news, the experiment in varnish glazing was a failure. I'm sanding and applying thin layers of paint to try to overcome that particular moment of errant experimentation. Pro (or novice) tip: if you try putting clear layers between layers of paint, don't use a spray varnish. It doesn't work. The alternative would be to use a brush on version, which I am told is very difficult to apply evenly. It still sounds like a great idea, but I'm not sure I'm up to the fuss. So, I am abandoning it. Maybe it would work better in oil.

The good news is, I still sort of like the painting. Which, these days, is at least something.

 

Pencil Thief

 

Alas

During our yearly drawing session at the river, my excellent friend Molly told me about how Maxfield Parrish used to get those glowing effects in his paintings by layering transparent glazes between layers, so I thought I'd try it with this new image. It's not working so great, because the paint isn't absorbing into the surface well enough and is pooling up. I may have to sand that area down to make this canvas work.

 

Life Skills

I know it seems like I've been lazy, but I have actually been up to a few things besides recharging. The first picture is my first attempt at mortising for a hinge. Not so good.

The second one was much better. I did five in all, after combining a few YouTube videos into

a process I could manage with the tools that I had:

Once again, I feel like my carpentry skills are lacking, and I should do something about it. I think I am going to look for a teacher.

 

New Kitten

How she tucks me in:

 

Calling it

Well, I have another couple of images I want to work on, and knowing my recent record for not finishing things, I tore into this one yesterday, and I'm willing to call it done. The ellipses continued to haunt me right up until the last minute. If I start making noise about doing that again, I hope some kind soul will remind me what a pain they are.

 

Mistakes were made, but I learned something

I think I'm going to call it on this little print, because I'm realizing that the roofing tin I"m using will never allow a brighter value. It's easy to scratch into, and some mistakes can be smoothed out, but I don't think I'll ever get the value range I'm looking for. I've started another print on a steel plate leftover from my Solarplate days. In the meantime, I might try to add some color to this one with Prismacolor colored pencils. The buckets of blood will look much better in red, right?

 

All the elements

As far as I can tell, all of the elements are in, although I still don't know exactly what I'm going to do with the blue squares. It's all still pretty rough. I'm remembering the time my prof told me that my work looks terrible until it doesn't. Truth.

 

A little dark

A lot of people have been asking me how I am spending my summer. Apparently, trying to relax and recover from a tough year isn't the answer they are hoping for. They always look so disappointed when I say that.

    Journeying inward is what I'm really doing. That usually involves studio time.

    I'm working on the plant painting, and I like it so far. The changes I make from day to day would look pretty small on screen, so I'm saving it up until more happens. 

    In the meantime, I've been combing through my sketchbooks for images to develop into little dry point prints. This one comes from a dream, or nightmare, actually. Up until now, it didn't seem like a good image to take any farther, but today, since so many things in the world are awful, this one matched the feeling I get after reading the news.

    I'd like to march through my sketchbooks and make drypoint of all the images I've ignored for one reason or another over the years. I've already started this one. Because I'm usually so detail oriented, I'm trying to loosen up and let the image develop with fewer tools and more work with my eyeballs and hands.

    I promise the next one won't be so dark.

 

Organizing Space

There are still a few elements to go...

 

The long and short of it