Back to where it all started. Over Labor Day weekend we vacationed down in Pacific City, Oregon. The Oregon Coast is one of my favorite places to visit. It also happens to be where I did my first plein air painting on a similar trip three years ago.
I was in Phoenix, AZ over Memorial Day weekend and was able to do a few paintings. I really like painting palm trees.
A while back, while I was working on a Space Monkey drawing, I had the realization that I was drawing manifestations of my anxieties, and that I sometimes end up visiting this character during stressful times.
The painting itself I tried to render in a style reminiscent of vintage sci-fi book covers (and obviously Dune inspired). In any case, it’s reassuring to see someone who won’t back down in the face of insurmountable obstacles.
I sculpted a little maquette of the sand worm so that I could get the lighting right.
I was fortunate to travel to Israel for a 10-day tour of the country. On the trip I did some skething and a few painting studies.
One of my goals this year was to complete 100 small paintings, which I finished this week. 💯
I’m experimenting with the Zorn palette, which is limited to cadmium red, yellow ochre, black, and white. It’s surprisingly versatile.
For this painting tried something new by priming the surface with black gesso. The others were done with an orange underpainting.
8/100. 6” x 6” gouache study of the old tool shed in our back yard. I used a limited palette of burnt sienna, titanium white, ultramarine blue, yellow ochre, and chromium oxide.
I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past few weeks trying to figure out a focus or goal for my art this year. I think I’ve settled on getting better at painting. To that end, I’m trying to complete 100 small paintings this year. These are the first few. They are 6” x 6” acrylic or gouache.
Back in Colorado.
For Thanksgiving we were in my hometown of Grand Junction, Colorado. I got a few plein air painting in while there.
I had the pleasure of attending a plein air landscape painting workshop with Mike Hernandez this past weekend in Langley, Washington on beautiful Whidbey Island. I learned so much, my head is still spinning.
I love the Oregon Coast. I painted this on our recent trip to Pacific City. 8” x 10” on watercolor paper.
We had the pleasure of taking an Alaska cruise earlier this month. Gouache 8” x 10” on watercolor paper.
I save (hoard) plastic milk caps to use for little paint mixing cups. To keep them from drying out while I’m doing a painting I store them in a sealable container with a wet sponge inside. They’ll keep for a few weeks this way.
It may be 4/20, but this isn’t what it looks like. It’s a homemade airbrush cleaning chamber. I gorilla-glued the neck of an olive oil bottle to a Trader Joe’s sauerkraut jar. Inside are pencil shavings and wadded up napkins for absorbing whatever is sprayed in. Why pay $20 for something when you can spend 100 hours making it yourself?
One of the most difficult things about doing any kind of art is the constant self-criticism. You’re attempting to create art, not just because you find joy in the process, but because you enjoy a particular form of art and want to participate in it. But because it’s something in which you’ve already cultivated some level of taste, it’s frustrating that your own attempts don’t meet this level. It’s a learning curve that a lot of people, especially with something like mastering a musical instrument, never get past and they end up giving up.
And so even if you find yourself progressing in your craft, it’s hard to look at old work (up to and including last week) because you only see its flaws. It’s tempting to want to go back and just clean up that one little detail. That’s one of the drawbacks I find with digital artwork. Unless you do something dramatic like trash the working files, there’s no way to close a work off from future tinkering.
But it’s important to resist the desire to tinker with past work. For one thing, you can use it to gage your progression, and so each work can exist as a kind of stepping stone. And if you go back and modify these, you’re robbing yourself of a valuable snapshot in time. It’d be like editing your childhood photos so that they look more like you do today. It’s also symptomatic of a misaligned mindset, focused on the past. Unchecked, it can lead to a death spiral of continual editing because it will never be good enough, and there will always be some nagging little detail that you could have done better.
This form of obsession is not limited to the domain of artists. The world of computer programming is littered with examples of successful developers who created a very popular initial version of something only to scrap it and start from scratch building an improved version two. But the new version is never completed because the developer becomes so bogged down with a quest for perfection.
At this point I’m obliged to mention George Lucas, the epitome of tinkering with past work. Contrast that to his friend Steven Spielberg, who’s had a much more successful and prolific career, always moving forward with new projects. Several years ago Spielberg flirted with the Dark Side when he made the Special Edition of ET, which featured a computer animated version of ET as well as editing certain details to make them more PC. Fortunately he has admitted that this was a mistake and vowed to never modify his films again:
I’ve resigned myself to accepting that what the film was at the time of its creation is what it always should be for future generations. I’m no longer a digital revisionist.
As with life, there are no do-overs. You can only try and learn from you're your mistakes and apply that knowledge toward the future.