practice like a hobbyist

The idealist in me often thinks I need to have the perfect subject for an artpiece before I begin.

Practice and study sessions erase the stress of all that, and as a result, things actually get done.

As I teach, I paint at the same time.

I paint what they paint--things I would normally have never chosen to paint.

Some smelly salted fish I picked up from the provision store as a class painting subject.

I like the effect on wood, but alas, these days it can be more expensive buying wooden boards than primed canvases.

I like the slowness of pen drawing. But pen drawing can be so unforgiving, like Chinese brush painting, or a performance. It has to be perfect once through. Maybe pen drawing has taught me to be overly cautious with creation, hesitating too long before setting pen to paper, getting cold feet before committing. Drawing over a pencil sketch is never the same; the pen must carve its own line, and if it's forced to follow a pencil line, it simply won't.

Acrylic and oil painting forgives. You can paint over and over, and the more layers of correction, the better. You can paint red hair by instinct, and cover it up with sky. You can tweak an expression, a light source, a posture. It never has to end, and they never have to know how awkward its growing stages were.

It's therapy for me. Therapy for the cautious perfectionist, allowance to play and make mistakes.

Allowance to choose mundane objects and not have to conjure meaning and morals out of a picture.

Allowance to focus on things as basic and miraculous as colour.

The liberation of painting like a hobbyist is infinitely healing.



Back to painting

I've been sticking to the pen and Photoshop for a few years now, almost like I was afraid to try a different medium. But I'd loved painting so much back in school that I took the same painting class for three semesters in a row, just to give myself painting time in the studio. I'd even go back during the holidays to clock in "research hours" for my professor, which were basically spent painting willing sitters.

So I started painting again.

Firstly because I now teach a few adults basic oil painting, and I get to practice.

Secondly because it's important for me to remember why I love art.

Not to create work based on what I think the client would like, or what would sell.

But to enjoy the purity of creation, to paint for painting's sake, and to experiment.

Kind of based on the funny faces I liked to sketch in pastels, but also influenced by Audrey Kawasaki, one of my favourite contemporary painters ever.

Then I did this for k, who requested a portrait. I threw myself in beside him as a bonus.

It's funny--I painted k from a photograph at first, and though it really looked like him (so he said), it also looked too dead. Like a smile from too long ago.

So I did this mostly from memory, imagining him the way his personality is.

The imagination is a lot clearer sometimes.

So this is how I imagine us to be on Saturdays: kind of floating next to each other contentedly, my orange hair colliding into his shock of black hair, everything light and airy.

None Compares

Finally i got to unwrap this: first complete album art. Printed, packaged, shrinkwrapped!

St John-St Margaret's Church approached me to do album art for this 40th anniversary original compilation cd. The brief was simply that the musical arrangements would be pared down, minimal, and devotional.

I started with the concept of stripping away the clutter of manmade life, to find that none compares to God--"None Compares" being the title of the album. So the slipcover of clutter is literally removed to reveal the title and a pure, velvety smooth surface.

The CD, hidden behind a pure white crescent.

Another starting point for the project was a box-collage I did for my mother's birthday. At the start of each of the three sections of the book, I put in this collage, made with individual cutouts stuck in a shoebox and then photographed. I tried to layer it digitally too, but some things just have to be done in the flesh.

The last spread.

One album down, one more to come out of the press!