I Have Been Painting Finally

Artist at Work January 15, 2010

I have so many of these pictures of my work table with paintings in progress that I have decided to start labeling them with dates. This is my first such picture for the new year.

As those frequent readers of Creative Journey know I generally work on anywhere from four to six canvases at a time of varying sizes. This is due in part to drying time for the liquid watercolors on canvas. But the paintings will share the same palate and ergo be a "set." I don't sell them in groups but I have had customers buy them in a group because they go so well together. These all share the same colors of blues which in this run includes cobalt blue. Not a blue I have used before a lot but it seems to be very good for the type of clear winter skies we are currently having here.

And these are all canyon pictures. Next round is churches. I am working on the sketches and transfer of drawings to platform while I am waiting for paint to dry. The drying period is particularly important for poured blue skies. There is masking to be removed and the next round of color is laid up close to the edge of sky. If the sky is even a bit damp it smears with removal of masking and leeches into the canyon walls.

In any group of paintings I am working on there are those that get out in front of the others. And it is generally the smaller ones. These two canvases below are 10 x 18, a relatively new size for me. I have worked that size vertically in my paintings Of the Valley and Spider Rock.

Mesa Arch and Landscape Arch

The painters of old were very fond of doing studies. These were generally smaller works on cheaper materials to study a new color combination or subject. With the market very good at this time for smaller works to fit on walls if not within budgets a study might as well be a painting. But if they don't work I simply take off the canvas and re-stretch new canvas on the bars.

In the first picture there is a framed watercolor on the left shelf which was one of my first water color renditions of Landscape Arch. I have it out to provide a perspective to the new version on the right in the lower picture. I have also done Mesa Arch before but when I was working more in browns and grays. I currently really like where this one is going but there is a lot of white to be filled in still ergo a lot of room to mess it up.

The higher center painting in the opening photograph is the painting I am doing of the sketch with the face in the arch posted here before. Meant to be a self portrait but we will see how honest I am about that.

My Roots - You have come a long way, Baby

Cities of Gold

Watercolor and Ink on paper

At lunch Tuesday with my artist friends Katherine McDermott, Jennifer Cavan, and Julia Margaret we chatted about our roots and the directions we had taken to arrive where we were. Not that where we are is the final destination. Artists should continue to grow though there are any number that achieved a degree of success and then froze their style at that point. But most artists continue to explore their limits and so there is a progression of styles.

When I was majoring in art at the University of New Mexico I fell in love with watercolor. Oil smelled and was impossible to get out from under fingernails, pastel became this colorful dust cloud that followed me about, and acrylics just never would do what I wanted them to do. It was not in their nature.

After college my day jobs got in the way of my art and I transferred to photography as a creative form of expression. And textiles. But I still dabbled in watercolor creating art for my own apartments and houses. But when I returned to New Mexico and my creative life I by happenstance fell into making masks and did that as a profitable business for 15 years. Until the summer of 2006 when a falling garden shovel almost totally severed my little finger of my right hand. Pins and cast and physical therapy sidelined my 3-D work which definitely required two hands. And so I painted. First with my left hand and then tentatively with my right as the casts got smaller.

The above traditional watercolor with the addition of ink as the Chinese do is still one of my favorite works. I keep it on my wall at the top of the stairs to see it daily. It is a mile post in the development of my current style. It shows the love of my cliffs and canyons and the beginning of color for the sake of light: portraying a scene as you remember it.

It would be interesting to take the sketch for this piece and do it again on canvas in the style I have since developed.

Poetic Journey - Just One of Those Days

Just One of Those Days

I had one of those days

Of which of late there have been too many

A morning too full of reality

The need to be real and present

Too imperative.

The child in me wanted to run away

Down some White Rabbit hole

To the other side of the looking glass

Erase myself like a Cheshire Cat

Goodbye cruel world, so long

You just think Alice used to live here.

The canyons of my mind called to me

Whispered of places

I would rather be

Trails I would prefer to walk

Away from this boring reality

Away from here to just anywhere.

I tried to be strong

Kept on keeping on

Promised myself an escape

To the Mad Hatter's Tea Party

When all this worldly stuff was done

Just me and fantasy.

I had one of those mornings

That stretched into a day and another

One of those weeks I am increasingly less fond of

Business demanded my undivided attention

Behind me the White Rabbit called.

I'm late

Oh, so very late

I have this date, my child cried

With my muse, my paints

To dream and create.

I had one of those days

Oh, I pray them to soon be over

For if not I will just tiptoe away

Like it or not

I'm late.

(c) J. Binford-Bell

I went looking in my computer files for a specific poem to re-post but did not find it. Then began thumbing through my journal to see it it was there and never posted. Couldn't find it. Maybe I dreamed up writing it. But I found this one which also does not seem to be on my computer. I haven't a clue. But this one (with some tweaking) seems to describe my life of late.

Shorelife 

Never On Sunday 

Intelliblog

Do you have a poem to share with us? Leave us the link to your blog page.

Time for a Creative Escape

Received some of my first fair/event invitations this week and it dawned on me with alarming clarity that I have not actually finished a painting in the new year.

I have an artist friend that is trying to post a painting a day on her website. I want to say she works with a media that allows that - oil pastels and so that is easy.  But I just have been feeling too fragmented to give my attention to creating anything of beauty.

Oh, sure, I have done a sketch there and a transfer here. Stretched a new canvas. Plotted out some ideas for the heralded triptych I want to do. But my life has been taken up with depression and worry and getting documents in line for the upcoming court date - January 20th. The real world has taken center stage, and well it should really because if I lose my house then I lose my studio.

But working creatively does relax my spirit and recharge my energy. So my goal is to force myself into the studio this weekend. There will be nothing I can do on the legal list of documents to round up. I have done well this week to fill the holes per my attorney's list. The weather will be sunny and in the 40's so the studio will be light and warm. I began this post today with photograph I want to render in paint. It was in my file of art ideas and I noticed a couple others there that excite me.

Monday I need to go back to the "real world" but I think a weekend creative escape is past due.

Poetic Journey - My Spot in the Sun

Was going through photographs of my aspect of finishing the studio after I let the contractor go and found this from the summer of 2008. The three plants in the corner have gotten larger and now share their space with more plants. The tomatoes on the right were a noble experiment but blocked too much of my sun. That is in a huge part what the studio is about - Sun and the warmth it provides as passive solar to the rest of my house.

This poem is about the sun in the studio on a winter afternoon.

That Spot

In the midst of winter

Seeking that spot

Vying with the cats

And dogs

For that treasured warmth

The fleeting spot in the sun.

The angling sun

Still low on the snow-capped horizon

Shines coolly outside my windows

But graces our winter days

With illumination and warmth

Sun Spots on the tile

Pools of warmth on the chairs

Plants hugging window sills

For their spot in the sun.

The circles of light move

As the sun traverses the treetops

Dogs inch across the floor

The cats change chairs

I inch mine around

Unwilling to relinquish

The warmth of its touch on my shoulders

A gentle mid-winter's day

Of chasing sunspots

Across the room

Warming chilled bones and muscles.

Oh, to be a gecko

On a sun-baked outcrop of sandstone

With naught to do but bask

In that so warm spot

Of winter sun.

(c) Jacqui Binford-Bell
January 2010

If you have a poem to share for this week's poetic journey please leave a comment here or on Facebook with your url. We are a multi-blog event.

Nicholas V - Epiphany

Shameless Self Promotion

 

One of the concepts (epiphany moments) which came out of the New Year's Eve meeting of creative minds I blogged about was self-promotion and how that varied from marketing. Up to now I have centered my efforts (never as extensive as my creative ones) on marketing. This I did largely through participation in higher and higher end shows. As they are also the ones which cost the most money, last year's economy brought a lot of that to a screeching halt. I had finished and opened the studio and I thought it would take up the slack of the three fairs I dropped. NOT.

I had not totally grasped consciously that I had to also replace the promotion those fairs gave me for the cost of entry. Fairs are not just an exposure to a market but they also have websites and brochures and postcards and advertising which promotes not merely the event but the artists juryed into the event.

I did spend a lot of effort last year with networking and posting blogs and links that got me high up on the list of mentions in Google. But blogs and websites are still not as effective promoting yourself as articles in magazines. And here comes the Catch 22. I have worked as a freelance writer and am master of the query letter but magazines don't want article written by the subject. Pen name? I do have one which I have not used in a while. Or do I ghost for someone willing to submit in their name? Or do we as artists promote each other? Or do I approach my friends in the media on a personal level and say, "Hey, how about me?"

Yesterday, while still mulling over those questions, I sat down and developed a "game plan" for 2010 to promote my studio. Obviously I am going to have to spend some money on advertisements. The art tour I belong to is set up to do out of my immediate neck of the woods but is that enough in the height of the art season? I win prizes for my work and I need to really capitalize on that.

How have other artistic readers of this blog dealt with these issues? How do you shamelessly self-promote?

Creative Conversation

 

I spent New Year's Eve in the company of creative people with very creative minds. And it made me realize how very special the salons and academies of France must have been to the Impressionists like Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Matisse. The synergy and movement that was created by sharing a meal, an idea, a goal, a technique.

Oh, I am sure it was not always wine and roses. Perhaps often entirely too much wine. And the lead used in paints at the time may well have been a contributor to Van Gogh's madness. But would they all be so outstanding had they painted in isolation scattered across Europe? Do we know them all because they belonged to a school of art? The same salon in Paris?

Katherine McDermott, painter and owner of Artspace Gallery and Jessica Duke, jeweler, and myself were there with "support staff" and emerging artisans in their own right. It was not the wild and crazy party we were more familiar with in our youth. It was more like Monet's Luncheon on the Grass and less like Manet's Luncheon on the Grass. We spent time talking about the sixth anniversary of Artspace Gallery just celebrated and the original ten artists that were first exhibited there. The five which have gone the distance thus far and the changes (progress) we have all made in our own personal creative journey.

It all began with trying to form a guild of artists to work toward having a coop gallery or venue to display our work. That group, Northern New Mexico Artists' Guild, ultimately failed. We got bogged down with personalities and the business side of trying to put together a non-profit organization that could apply for grants. But friendships were formed and ideas hatched which have lasted. Recently, one of the original people in that group, suggested that perhaps our mistake was trying to be too organized and what we needed, and should look at getting started, was just an informal group that met once or twice a month for Luncheon on the Grass or in our studios and seek only creative conversation.

I would say it sounds like a plan but artists don't do well with plans per se but we love the spark of a good idea nurtured over a table of good food.