Let It Go!

Let it Go!

We missed a good chance to win some money from AFV this past week. All it would have taken was a short clip of me decorating the Christmas cookies I made for my grandkids.

I was placing the tiny white sugar balls on the cookies with a pair of tweezers when the cuff of my shirt caught the lip of the jar. Had I put the cap back on? Heck no! 

What followed was a wave of tiny white balls rushing to the edge of the table as I yelled S^*%! They moved faster than the Israelites running through the parting of the Red Sea!  Trying to stop those balls were like trying to herd cats.  My husband came tearing down the hall coming to see what had torn such emotion from my lips, when I cautioned him to not step into the dining room. One look of the floor told us both we had had a snow storm of immense proportions. White balls were everywhere!  Suddenly I started to laugh….the idiocy of the situation was full in my face. How could I not laugh? I let it go.

I drew a parallel this morning as I was driving into town to get the one package I sent off this year. The care I had taken with the cookies was painstaking. The time was spent hoping to make my family and friend’s holidays a bit brighter, one bloody ball at a time. Sometimes painting is like that. You agonize over an edge, a stroke, a poorly drawn form, a seemingly false color value in the wrong place. The problems with some paintings just do not give you peace, even at night as you lay there thinking what on earth could you have done to have made that painting better. The stroke by stroke replay can leave you tossing. So when you view the painting in the morning you are determined to fix it or kill it. The painting, that is. Because by then you have deduced that the problem with your sleep pattern is not the too bright moon, the too late dessert, that last cup of coffee, no. It is the obsessive nature of a painter who demands from themselves that which their mind sees, but that their hand is not yet capable of producing. We all paint masterpieces in our minds.

What is the healthy direction then? What resolution is there for this obsession?  I have decided that it is to do the same thing as I did with those fugitive white balls. Throw it/them away. If I cannot improve it…..I can destroy it. Thereby keeping my sanity and maybe finding a new way to work. By not placing a label of precious on the thing, it has abdicated its power over me. I become the one with the power to create, refine, change and if desired, to destroy. Let it go. See no work as precious.

The cookies are done. Decorated with all their little doodads intact. The frosting has hardened and set…

The cap is on the jar of white balls. Tightened down. Twice.

Merry Christmas and a Blessed Season to all.

Concentrate On One Thing At A Time

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My kids sometimes call me Dora the explorer. Why? Because I often seem to go off in tangents, forgetting what the heck I was doing. I really think it’s that my mind works in flashes. The more insistent the flash, the more brilliant and beckoning it seems. So off I go. Then comes the fall back to earth. I experienced this when we held a paintout weekend in Hillsboro NM last week.

I painted, very patiently and logically the light on three old building remnants. One was a shed, one was a crumbling jail wall, and the last was the arch of the old courthouse wall, the only indication of what is reputed to have been a gorgeous building in Hillsboro, when it was the county seat. All are working their way to being vague memories. Relics is the title I gave this small but intricate light study. It is pictured below. An 8x10, it is small, but full of information.

Relics
Oil 8x10 Available

Finishing the piece I started to pack up my gear. Then Dora’s head popped up! Behind me, aglow with light were absolutely glorious wildflowers! Their passing would definitely not leave relics of their time in this world. They demanded to be recorded. So back out came the paints. What resulted is a small 8x10 painting that I call Morning Glory. It definitely was. Not only that, painting it served to loosen me up after so very carefully painting the crumbling walls and the arch of the courthouse.

Morning Glory
Oil 8x10 Available

This fall back to organization and reality can be tiring in its emotional intensity, or on that rare occasion, insightful and insistent to the point that it MUST BE obeyed. 

I used to be organized, logical, methodical, and I think, totally boring. Not so anymore. I wear purple far more. My white hair makes people a little more forgiving than they were when I was the same age and dyed it. I think my lifelong admiration of the greeting card character Maxine has caught up with me. (Watch out world). So, creatively, I think flashes are good. Liberating, routine smashing, creative, and even desirable.

Squirrel??? Where???

Did She Really Say That?

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I cannot be the only one who plays back conversations in their mind. I often know after the fact, EXACTLY what could have been said in reply. But how many of us play back what the other person said and wonder what they truly meant?

I am talking about taking classes and workshops. I have read too many books about art to list here. Lots of positive self-help stuff, because as most artists, I am plagued by wondering if anyone really appreciates what goes into painting. Especially plein air which I liken to painting on steroids, or the Olympics of painting, for the sheer effort that sometimes can be required. I have read what not to take into the field, but figure there’s a reason why I drive an SUV. I am not a backpacker, hiker or any of those young buff type advocates. I am looking at the looming end of my sixties with a real appreciation of being able to do this at all. Physical things take longer to bounce back from. Heck I don’t think I bounce at all anymore.

But I do take classes and workshops. I truly try to grasp with both hands what the teacher is getting at. I will try anything, go anywhere, if I think there might be a breakthrough at the end. There’s lots to learn and my time to learn it does not stretch out limitlessly. Nobody’s does. So even if it’s well after the notes have been taken and reread, that when I am standing in the shower, soaping up my head (or whatever), that when a revelation hits, I stop and think. Gosh I’ve even gotten goosebumps standing there all wet. But I have come to realize that not all of it sinks in. It’s often like watching runoff after a drenching rain. The earth is parched, but the water runs off. Likewise, my mind is hungry, but only able to take in and digest what it is ready for. But there are times when you are ready… times that stand out as that AHA, I’ve finally gotten it, moment.

• Do Thumbnails – Yes I mean you! At least three variations.
• Use a limited palette – That means learning EVERYTHING that primary colors can do.
• How many greens can you mix? How many variations and temperatures are there in one color family?
• Tone your board with an overall tone – NOT brilliant orange

Twisted Oak Winery, Sunkissed

That’s what happened when I took my first Kathleen Dunphy workshop this past April/May. I saw how wise counsel, trying it all, and saying “what the heck” can get you. It’s not the vast number of paintings I did (I only did three, and of those would only show two). Rather, it’s the willingness to fail, to throw caution to the wind and try everything she suggested, that brought me the best return. Everything she said I had heard before, read somewhere before and never really accepted.  I figured if it works for her, what the heck? I am so glad that I left my stubbornness at home and really listened. I feel that there is real substance in this approach for me. I am going to give it a good try for a while and just see if there is a difference at all in my work.

Soul Refllections

Here’s to growth. It’s not just for kids you know.

Winter In New Mexico - Southern Part

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This February has been more like Tucson than Silver City. We are so very much higher, and cooler. So it is with surprise that we experienced 72 degree days this month!
Perfect for plein air painting! And no snakes yet!

My friend Gay and I went 'sploring on down the road in the Mimbres Valley, just East of Silver City. What we found was an area whose accessibility was determined by the rate of flow of the Mimbres River. Many people live on the far side of that river and rely on four wheel drive, lifted vehicles. Some leave a car on the city side to get out and do routine things like shop or get gas. We didn't have one of the aforementioned vehicles, so we stayed on the tame side. But we still had views that were varied and just downright gorgeous.

The motif

I started my piece by rubbing a tone of a violet all over the board. (I have been watching Shana Kuntz" new video). Its great for making you think and start a little different from your normal starting point and method. Its that thinking differently gives you different results thing. I love the friendship of violet and greens, not to mention the love of yellows for violets, resulting in some of the most rich offsprings possible. We were at riverside and the water was so noisy that we couldn't hear each other talk unless we yelled. Somehow that just was gauche.

The block in

Locals drove their monster tired trucks by ever so slowly so as not to dust us. Who says locals are indifferent to their surroundings? Its so nice to have such a kind and thoughtful welcome.
We painted until we got the sense that we were both starting to dink around with it. For me that is the moment that I think " I can make it better if I just do this", and then the last stroke kills all sense of immediacy - it kills the " I am there" moment. I wish I had a guardian angel who could break my arm before I do that.

In The Shadow Of Cooke's Peak

This was what resulted from one of the nicest days in the sun, with a lovely breeze and friendly people. Mimbres Valley is rapidly becoming one of my favorite places to paint.

He Did Not Have The Time

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The air blew out of my sails this morning. Somebody I knew, though not as well as I would have liked, is gone. Saim Caglayan posted this morning that Ken Auster is no longer with us. Click here to see his work.

About 15 years ago, I called Ken in his Southern Ca studio just to tell him how happy his paintings made me. I could not, nor did I think I would ever be able to afford one, but just seeing them made me happy.  When I told him how I had a visceral reaction to the paint quality in his work and the simple happiness of being alive in his lighting, he was absolutely tickled. The man was gracious to a fault as I interrupted him that foggy morning. I could feel the smile in his words.

Due to the fact that I was working over 50 hours a week, keeping a house going and watching over my aging mom who was living with us, taking a workshop was not going to happen. So I talked to him and bought his first DVD. It was one of the first art lessons on disk I had ever bought. I have watched that lesson over and over. I tried a month of using his limited palette, and could not figure for the life of me how that alizarin crimson got onto my skivvies! The fact that he used an ironing board and wax paper for a palette was typical of somebody who painted with passion, who could not afford being distracted by the small stuff. That small stuff just got rolled up and stashed in the bin. There’s a lesson there. I told myself I had time. After all, he was younger than me and I knew where he was.

Seeing Ken at the PACE conventions made talking to him very easy. He remembered who I was, that crazy artist lady who lived in San Diego County and loved his work, and who tried to paint. I asked him why he had not done a DVD on painting cities, streets, buildings. I had emailed him requesting one too. He replied that he had said all he had to say, and he smiled. Not true. In the past two years, Streamline released the second of his DVDs. Subject, city streets. When I saw Ken after that, I told him that I was thrilled. For someone who cannot get to a workshop for either time or money constraints, a DVD is the next best thing. I could do that, after all, I still had time to get to his studio and take a workshop. 

This morning brought home the fact that we do not have a promised tomorrow. We have today. So to my artist friends I say, take that workshop. Go the distance.

It never occurred to me that Ken did not have the time.

Should the two links above not work for you, just go to www.kenauster.com