Poetry Wednesday - Time

Time

Time that fickle wave

Washing over us

Constantly changing flow

Creeping forward

Keeping awaited days

Just beyond our reach

Rushing forward

When we wish to savor

The Moment.

Tim that so fickle song

Doing the Minute Waltz

On decades of memories

Replaying a fleeting smile

In three part harmony

Launching us forward

Pushing us back

Today

Yesterday

Uptempo.

Time so fickle and so familiar

Haven't we been here before

I went to bed today

And awoke in yesterday

My love still alive

Beside me in bed

Forever gone

Lost in time

Come again

Oh so fickle time

Let's begin again

Once more with feeling

Just those moments 

I thought so unimportant

Forever etched

In instant replay

At the most ackward

Moments

Time moving against the flow.

Time oh fickle river

Moving us ever forward

Along life's river bed

Dancing on the surface

Eddies of memory

Backwaters of impatience

Don't leave me here

Adrift

In memories

Of shorelines past.

J. Binford-Bell, September 2010

Artistic Vistas and Treasures Labor Day Tour

Studio looking natural

There is another Artistic Vistas and Treasures Art Tour this Labor Day weekend. I should be in a flurry of cleaning up and making snacks for the event. But I did that for the previous tour and only one couple showed up. So this weekend whoever comes gets a working studio. I am spending this Friday on the garden and not my studio.

I do plan to bake some cookies, have cheese and crackers, and some iced tea for whoever does drop in but no special fuss. I will be painting so at least the time is not wasted. I have several works I am anxious to get back to which I have shoved to the side to do gardening - which is an artistic venture of another sort.

Three new works

And my new garden creation in progress. I thought of doing the garden when people were expected at the studio but I get really, really messy. Not that I don't get messy painting. Hopefully this weekend proves me wrong and I have loads of visitors and some sales.

Artist Trading Cards????

The mania of artist trading cards hit about the same time scrapbooking took over a large section of some art supply stores. I have this folder of things to put in a scrapbook but I have never done anything with i and certainly not in the grand manner of the hobby of scrapbooks. I filed artist trading cards in that same "useless information" niche in my brain. It didn't help that an "artist" I didn't like promoted them in our guild.

Artist trading cards are miniature works of art about the same size as baseball cards. The ATC movement (yes, it is called a movement) began in Switzerland in 1996 when it was promoted by M. Vänçi Stirnemann. The movement has been fanned by Hobby Lobby and other craft and art stores that sell supplies for ATC's which were once done with the scrap around your studio. There are now rules for ATC's.

Artist Trading Card collage

 

 

 

ATC holder

And assemblages of ATC's into larger "works of art" which are even framed and hung, which I think is against the ATC rules. And there are definitely supplies to be had for the artist that wants to get fully into the movement. A quick Google search turned up cards precut and ready to use, a book to put your swapped cards into, a book on how to do artist trading cards, a workshop on the form, swap meets, and an exhibition!

Actually I think they lost me on "rules." I am not much of a rule person and most artists I know don't like rules. We bristle when we have to read the guidelines for submission of entries to shows and exhibits. I briefly was considering ATC's when they were touting the swapping of them between artist friends but frankly I don't want cards from my artist friends; I want full sized pieces of their work.

Still there is some interesting whimsy exhibited in these cards and I wonder just how many of the artists have used an ATC as a study for larger works. So setting the rules aside can any of my artistic friends engaged in this site the creative growth aspects of this? Has it freed up your color choices? Let loose your compositional restraints? Opened a door to other themes in your serious work?

When things go wrong

I have been working on this new version of an arch at Natural Bridges National Park which I did quite successfully before. But on this one lmost everything has been going wrong. I wanted the area of the background and foreground with the yellows and pinks to be the focus but the busy sky was distracting from that. Everything I did to highlight the arch as a frame for what I wanted the focus of the painting to be just increased the "fight." All the values in the painting were too much the same and fought for the attention of the viewer.

If you use oil or acrylic you can just paint over everything you don't like. Water media is a bit different. But the makers of the watercolor canvas I use say you can "lift" of the color. And with some colors this is truer than others. Blue is one of those that likes to hang around. But before I stripped off the canvas and applied new to the stretcher bars I wanted to play with my mistake and see what would happen. Mistakes can be a valuable learning experience.

This is the canvas with the sky scrubbed off - or at least down. You can see how a more subtle sky puts what I wanted to focus on more prominent in the composition. If I end up redoing this painting I think I will go for a pink sky.

With more tidying up and then a general wash over the sky area with pink I feel I am at a point where time spent on the arch and distant plateaus will not be a wasted effort. The painting is by no means done but I am at a place where I can again work on the arch. I may never be satisfied with it but I have learned a lot from this mistake.

If I take off the canvas and begin again I will know better the direction I wish to take this subject.

Poetry Wednesday - Waiting

Marcus C. Bell 1953-2010

 

 

 

Waiting

Always waiting for you

Me always early

You always late

Pretending it wasn't so.

So why rush now

To this unspecified destination

Beating me to the finish line

While I wait for you to stop the race.

Waiting again

Will I always

Think of you

As time passes without you.

You will never show up

Never arrive as I always feared

Dreading the call
That never came.

Always said I'd leave

And I did

But never far enough away.

You beat me at last.

Now it is your turn to wait

Hope you are better at it than I

Because I don't plan to rush.

J. Binford-Bell August 2010

In Memory

Art Sunday - Practice, Practice, Practice

There is an old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall, famous performance center in New York. The punch line is practice, practice, practice. The same can be said about the visual arts. Claude Monet, for instance, painted the facade of the Rouen Cathedral 31 times.


"I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even." Claude Monet

Don't worry, I am not going to post all 31 but just Google Images for Monet's Rouen paintings and gape at the variety of them. Then there are his waterlilies and and his hay stacks. And we have just those he didn't paint over or toss in the canal in frustration.


I think of Monet and his cathedral when I again choose to paint Park Avenue at Arches again. Or try again to get that magical feeling I knew when I stood before a particular mission church in New Mexico.  All "so that you can understand its way". I play with colors and will do a painting over in different colors seeking something elusive at times. Monet played with light.


One theory bantered about as a reason for the impressionists movement was the advent of the camera. It could record Rouen Cathedral or those waterlilies precisely in black and white at the time. But it was a rather "lifeless" medium - or lightless. Monet was painting the light on the facade of the cathedral. And some of his attempts got close to pure light.

As an artist I have to wonder if he was ever satisfied with his paintings of light and if not which of the 31 attempts of Rouen he liked the most.

Color Studies

Reverence for the Dawn

After the sketch many painters do studies or color sketches. These color studies can go anywhere from a few splashes of paint on a scrap piece to canvas to blocking out of colors on a small version of the sketch to small finished paintings of the projected bigger piece.

When I was beginning work on the above painting: Reverence for the Dawn whose finished size is 26 by 62 I did two smaller paintings which were 10 by 24. These smaller studies were the same proportions as the proposed finished painting being done as a commission. And in addition to the benefit of making my mistakes on a much smaller scale it allowed me show the patron choices as to color.

Reverence - a study

 

 

Worship - a study

I like the smaller painting approach for a couple of reasons: One, I take the painting more seriously and two, the finished color study is sellable in its own right. In fact Worship has already sold. BTW while Reverence was the chosen study for the larger painting I changed the color of red for the sky. Studies are just that - studies or tests.

My normal color studies tend to the splashes of paint on scraps of canvas as when I was preparing to do the triptych below.

Tres Cruces Triptych

 I pretty much knew what I was going to do with the churches because of years of painting them and having decided already on the direction of the source of light. What needed to be worked out was the transition of the sky from full sun to evening dusk. I did this on scrap strips of canvas I can never bring myself to toss away. They are too small for a painting but great for testing colors, blends of colors, new mixes. Not all colors play well together. And it is possible with a felt tip pen to make notes on these informal canvas swatch color studies. If I was truly organized I would paste them on a scrap of board and put them in a folder or loose leaf notebook for future reference.