Paint not Chalk.....Outside the Box

Here’s a reflection to ponder from Damien Hirst: How could they call it “Arts and Entertainment”? There is not all that much that “entertaining” about making art.

I have been organizing a conference, showing my geldings, teaching pastels, and building websites. Pretty much everything BUT painting.

However that doesn’t mean I am not thinking about painting all the time.

In March I headed to England for the Easter Invitational Art Exhibition at Woburn. This was my second year to be invited (I have been invited for next year too!! YAHOO!). And going back to England to see family and friends is always an eye opener since we moved back from there in 1993. Amazing what has changed and what remains the same.

Happily I did get to some galleries and museums and have come back with some ideas to get into the studio and get to pastelling. (Nothing like a long flight to help cogitate and incubate and hopefully formulate new ideas.)

I found it interesting that the number one draw for a majority of folks is colour to a painting. And if this is the case then it shouldn’t matter in what medium one paints.

The second thing that drew people to my art was the monoprints I had pulled of horses. People enjoyed the motion or the gesture of the horses.

Gathering even more information: bird portraits need to be painted for those that are looking to be reminded of their bird or a bird they have had a relationship with or even seen in their yard.

(I am thinking that might be the same case with many portraits of people too.)

The abstracted pieces of birds seem to be more interesting to people that just want to own and appreciate art…for art’s sake.

Either way is good…and I am just glad to have gotten closer to understanding it. It does change the thought process of composition! Non objective paintings versus portrait paintings require quite different rules for composition.

http://www.nancemcmanusstudio.com/PPT/MORE%20TOOLS%20FOR%20BETTER%20COMPOSITION.ppt

That brings me to yesterday. I have been cleaning the studio for two days…or excavating it as a good friend suggested. I have been brutal in throwing stuff out and really enjoying it.

And as I started to get on myself for not having painted in awhile I had to laugh. “Let me understand Nance. You have unpacked and stored unsold paintings. You have updated your inventory lists and cleaned your studio and that is a BAD thing? Or do you embrace the process and know that you will have a much better studio in which to work?”

I find myself, many times, working in the “OH GOD the movie situation”: Thinking about a painting for 5 days, doing it in one, and taking the 7th day off.

Labels: bird paintings, Damien Hirst, pastel painting

# posted by Nance, Pastel Painter @ 5:25 PM

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Francis Bacon

I am always in such a hurry to “cut to the chase” when it comes to art books. I head straight for the part where the artist talks about process….if I like the image that is.

I started a painting about 2 weeks ago and I know where many of my weakness’ lie which is the reason I paint very few landscapes.

So the first thing I did was to write to, the brilliant, Deborah C. Secor (http://www.deborahsecor.com/) to ask how to avoid my most typical mistake (whilst painting from photos especially): how do I make the trees not look like big black blobs?

Of course she got right back with: Keep the values of the trees much the same as the surrounding values. (Sometimes the obvious just escapes me.)

Then I pulled out John Carlson’s wonderful book (Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting: ISBN 0-486-22927-0 http://store.doverpublications.com/) from 1929 that Dover Publishing has re-issued since 1973 and, this time, instead of jumping to all the tabs I have put through-out the book I started reading: 1. HOW TO APPROACH PAINTING.

It is probably the first time I had ever read the first chapter and I must quote a few paragraphs here because he has summed so much up of what I have been trying to say, and live, so for long:

”It is true that all great works of art are simple (as is a child’s work), but the simplicity in them is not born of ignorance. Real simplicity is engendered by the insight of the artist into the abiding qualities in his motif, and an ability to choose these qualities for his use, omitting the dross. His is a superior sensitiveness, if you will.

But if mere “feeling” or sensitiveness to beauty would produce a work of art, artists would be legion. Such is not our fortune.

Power, whether physical or mental (or “artistic”) comes with the exercising of the God-given faculties. It is difficult to go forward, but the backward slide comes with no effort. Or, to put it differently, when effort is relaxed, we retrogress, whether we will or no. All this does not mean that by mere hard work, or by merely growing old, one can become anything desired. There are men who work and grub incessantly, work so hard that they have not time to see! A deserving but pitiful state. The inspirational and impressionable moments are shut out.

The true artist works rather in great gusts of effort, and in smaller gusts of apparent lassitude. He is not lying about “waiting for some inspiration”. He is in the travail of the dreamer entering into expression.

Now when you see the artist sitting thoughtfully before his blank canvas, don’t call him lazy. Realize what huge gulfs exist between a thing of dreams and the exact science of mathematics. Know that the dream is as necessary to the birth of any idea as mathematics is to the exactness of its consummation. An artist must neither be too dreamy, nor too mathematical. He must dream and he must paint.”

I rest my case………..Happy New Year!!!! Nance

http://www.nancemcmanusstudio.com/ is the new website...have a look!!!

Labels: Francis Bacon, George Carlsen, landscape painting, Nance McManus, pastel painting

# posted by Nance, Pastel Painter @ 12:58 PM