This last summer I really set aside art for a few months. I was pretty burnt out, and didn’t feel the desire to be painting. After such a busy (but in many ways exciting) spring, teaching a workshop with the CWA (yay! a real art-goal for me that I dreamed about at one point), making videos, painting for submissions to shows (which I didn’t get in to- boo!!), and working on articles for the International Artist magazine (yay!)… well, I was pretty overcooked. I just began to wonder what it was I was aiming for with my painting. I felt like… I had sort of taken a certain approach as far as I could for now. I didn’t want to get more realistic, but I didn’t know how to be more abstract. And, as I’m sure everyone knows, its depressing getting rejected when you’ve poured yourself into a piece for a show.

So I stopped.

Summer came, and I worked on other projects- a long gestating picture book I’ve wanted to do, family time, comic book shopping with the kids, trips and camping, picking up Proust again, and a little, eensy-weensy dab dab dabbing in fine art. By the time late July came around, it had been almost 3 months since I’d really sat down and painted. That’s a loooong time in an art life, to me at least. So long, I even sort of lost the itch. It was a grind to get going. I often (deliberately) leave a painting unfinished at the end of a day of painting, like a little bread crumb trail for me to catch on to, for the next session. That’s a very useful tool for me, mentally. Once I get painting, projects I’m half through excite and interest me, but when I haven’t painted in a while, the engine gets cold. You’ve gotta start from scratch.

And that’s why I dove in to some abstract/semi-abstract work. Experiments and such.

I like working abstractly, or trying new experimental methods just to see what happens, because it helps me just… get paint on the paper. It helps me explore. Perhaps that was a bit of what I felt like I was missing last Spring— exploration, not knowing what’s going to happen. So, without further ado, lets get into the some of the fun, nitty gritty, messing-around-in-the-sandbox sort of paintings I did.

Stout Grove Gates, Jedediah Smith SP

The first of the set, and perhaps the most like older work. I started this on site, but had to stop after the sketch and the most basic of first initial washes, because I was getting devoured by mosquitos. LOL. When I came back to it months later, I wet the back, and started in on the front. What was fun was that I just kept going, and let the wet, juicy dribbles do their thing. More than just letting go of control, the goal was almost to activate a loss of control at times, and then ride the wave and see where it took me. Little paintings like this are great, because if I screw it up I don’t care. That' allows for a lot of room to play.

Muir Woods Light

A few weeks later, I did this one. I thought I’d just try an entirely different method and see what it created. I wet the back, but left the front dry. I grabbed my little reservoir liner (which has a tiny point and a big fat belly) and started at the focal point (the white light at the upper 1/3), working my way outwards. That brush paints either pinpoint specific or very abstractly. The farther out I got, the more I painted wet into wet. I was just trying to use more of the white of the page, and not hold on to so many hard edges to share the details.

Untitled Bouquet

For this one, I painted big. It’s a full sheet. And I had such a blast doing that painting with just the reservoir liner, that I decided to do another painting just using a specific brush. This one was a huge 4” wide stiff flat, with final follow up with a small 1” flat. I wet the whole front with water, and just went to town. What a kick painting with a flat. I’ve seen watercolorists do it (James Gurney comes to mind, or local artist Barbara Tapp), but have never really done it myself. Lifting was a breeze, as the brush is stiff and synthetic. And a whole new set of marks got made. Starting with the entire paper wet was also very compelling, as it forced me to loose up.

Gold Dust Hills, on Yupo-

Looking East at Dawn, on Yupo-

I’ve tried Yupo paper before, with middling success. But I recently discovered the work of Lena Gemzoe, and I thought her approach to abstract landscapes would work well with Yupo. It involves either very thick applications of watercolor to dry paper, or soft, wet spaces that area just glazes. You can see her work here on Youtube- Lena Gemzøe - YouTube. This painting is primarily painted with a credit card and a spritzer gun, with occasional streaks or pouring with a mop. And spittle. Hahahaha. Spittle is a very useful painting tool. Really. :)

"Nature Won’t Say No” & “Don’t Forget the Forget-Me-Nots”

What’s also been fun is to see some of this approach sneak it’s way into some of my more recent “representational” paintings. Just doing a straight rendition is not particularly appealing to me right now. I want more play. Here’s two examples-

Both of these were really very wet, very loose pieces before I dropped in those key elements that decoded the composition- the foliage of the little plant and the rocks in the dry creek bed in the first image, and, of course, my kiddo and the forget-me-not splatters in the second. The pieces are straining against being abstract more than the used to. I’m not sure if I would have approached these subjects this way a year ago.

And that’s it. For now, anyways. It’s been very interesting to play again- just trying different brushes, paper, approaches. Doing things differently. It’s the only way, as I see it, to keep growing. I hope others are experimenting too! It’s one of my favorite ways to teach myself.

Summer Art Experiments!