half moon bay "landscape"

So this how the painting is evolving. I should have stopped after the last post! I can't say that it gives one a feeling of the serenity and beauty that I felt when I drove to Half Moon Bay that day. But I think it captures the despair of the winter landscape, and how I'm FEELING after a week of gloomy weather, agonizing earthquake in Haiti, a depressing defeat in the Massachusetts senatorial race and finally, the Supreme Court's ruling on deregulating campaign contributions. You could say I'm feeling rather frustrated by what's happening around me.

And yet, there is something very calming about going into my studio and just focusing on mixing the colors, and handling the paint. Unfortunately, applying the paint is where all my angst seems to come out! Ah, well.

trouble staying inside the lines

Like I said, I'm not much of a landscape painter. The ill-fated "green painting" devolved into a "landscape" inspired by the mustard field in Half Moon Bay, but alas, that was just too literal for me. So I sanded down the canvas and am now trying to get back to the feeling of the colors, without necessarily depicting the traditional landscape composition of foreground, horizon, sky, etc.

As you can see, I abandoned any semblance of reality. Oh boy. Enough said.

so much for the f-word painting

We drove up to Half Moon Bay to get live crab and the yellow of the mustard plants was irresistible.

The "green painting" (the one that had the unfortunate f-word at its center) wasn't working out for me, so you can guess what happened next. Or maybe not, since I am not really a landscape painter.

Here's a good example of a failed painting. But I'm still working on it, so we shall see what happens.

Bear with me on this painting, if you can stand the pain.

struggle is progress.

I think I am making progress. While it may not be evident in the paintings yet, I seem to have been able to let go of the fear and anxiety about "messing up." I am definitely more calm and willing to accept that there will be good days and there will be very, very bad days! Also, I think the fear and anxiety were partly caused by the fact that I had not painted in a very long time (a couple of years) and I had felt frustrated that I had "lost time" and was now even further behind in ever becoming a "good" painter, a "real" painter, whatever that is, in my mind.

Anyway, lately I've become more at ease with just stepping away, looking at the painting, leaving it alone, looking at it some more, all the while "puzzling" over it and then painting over it. I guess that's progress, albeit at a much slowed down pace.

I've been reading about Willem de Kooning and finding it so enlightening and re-assuring. The book is "de Kooning, An American Master" by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.

I read that he taught one summer at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. On the first day of class, he set up a still life and told his class that they were going to work on that same still life for the entire 2 months. I've had a classes like that and balked just as his students did. However, the one thing he said, that my teacher never said, was, "You will work on it until you kill it. And then you will work on it some more until it comes back on its own." (my italics.)

Whoa. I'm very familiar with the part about working on it until I kill it. That's where the fear came in. I would get to a certain point in my paintings and not know what to do next. I'd be afraid to kill it. I had a lot of paintings that got to that stage and then were abandoned or painted over to start something completely different.

So then I read one of his friends Edwin Denby observed that he would start a painting and it would have a "striking, lively beauty" but de Kooning would look at the picture and say, "Too easy." So a few days later, "the picture would look puzzled...now a lot was happening that belonged to some other image than the first. Soon the unfinished second picture began to be pushed into a third. After a while a series of rejected pictures lay one over the other. One day the accumulated paint was sandpapered down, leaving hints of a contradictory outline ... And then on the sandpapered surface Bill started to build up the picture over again."

Shoot, I do that all the time. I thought maybe I couldn't stick to an idea because I don't necessarily start from a sketch. I start with an idea and then just paint whatever I am feeling at the moment. I figured that wasn't very "correct" but that's how I do it.

Granted, I may never have the technical skills of de Kooning, and still am not CONSCIOUSLY aware of an existential dilemma in my paintings, but suffice it to say, it's comforting to know that Willem de Kooning struggled mightily with his work.

I am happy to say that I am finally more at ease with my struggle.