Getting To Know Yourself As An Artist
Very California
I had a whole post written up, focused on my ongoing daily painting, but then the artist Mary Gilkerson died a few days ago. It threw me for a loop, and I just felt like I couldn’t make a post without talking about her for a minute.
I had the privilege of knowing Mary some as a student. I studied notans with her a few years ago. And she’s the one who brought me along into this idea of selling more directly to buyers through my own website. She’s been helping me, answering questions, running zoom meetings I’ve been a part of the last few months, etc. She’s also why I started this daily painting challenge. She died after a very brief battle with breast cancer, so it’s all been very abrupt and strange. She was answering questions of mine on Facebook literally last week!
A Little Bit of Blue
Smith River Redwoods
A Quiet Spanish Guitar
I’ll be rounding out the 75th day of my challenge this coming Friday, and I can’t help but think of her. Mary herself liked to tell the story about how starting daily painting sort of changed her experience as an artist, when she was in a rut. So I know it was important to her. And I’ve found this challenge very liberating so far as well. It’s provided me an opportunity to get to know myself better as an artist, to better know how I see beauty. What were Mary’s views on painting daily? I don’t know. Why is making art so essential? What do we have to gain from the act of pushing ourselves to become better artists? I’m left with a lot of questions. Mary is gone, and so I can’t look to her for input.
Still, if we are to grow as artists, when we have learned what a teacher can share… after that, we must teach ourselves, first and foremost. We must get to know ourselves as artists. When we come upon a question, we must answer ourselves, as always. No one else can tell me what I find worth painting, what I find essential. Only I can do that. And the farther I get into the challenge, the more I see myself up on the wall - my technical tendencies, the subjects I like to paint, what excites me, and what bores me. The clearer it becomes to me just what it is that I find beautiful- something that I don’t think is so clear to us when we are just learning to paint. Or so it was for me. I’ve had to my paint my way into understanding better what I want. Is this what Mary was trying to lead us to? I don’t know.
Lazy Friday afternoon
Early Morning Stroll
Bristlecone Pine
I love the unexpected balance of compositions found in the landscape, exploring light through different hues of green, the hyper-chroma of flowers and how those hues descend into shadow, clouds and their varied edges, and tightly cropped close-up abstracts from nature. I don’t particularly care for painting people (although I love the body as an art object—so… more to explore there). Cities generally bore me, and I don’t know why- is it the stories those spaces tell? or that I can’t see them as larger shapes, the way I so easily do with trees and mountains and reflections?
Looking at the wall as a whole, I see the failures too. I have a tendency, if I’m not careful, of getting too tight, too detailed. I have to practice stopping earlier than I want. Sometimes I use value like a sledgehammer, when the gentler contrast of warm versus cool hues would go deeper, be more expressive. Sometimes the color application is TOO rich.
A Leaf on the River
Grasslands in the Late Afternoon
A LIttle Peace and Quiet
The farther I go the emptier my folders of reference photos become, the fuller the wall becomes, and the more I look at what I’ve done and wonder, “Where to next?” I’ve spent a portion of these 75 paintings creating work I already knew I could paint, clearing out a backlog of subjects. But the most exciting ones were where I was walking on the edge of what I knew and didn’t know— what is called the “Zone of Proximal Development”— that kind of space where you learn because you explore, but you know enough that you can challenge yourself without presuming failure. And now, having pushed these paintings into existence, I feel liberated to explore something unknown. To push farther into deliberate experimentation and failure. To paint things I’ve never painted just to see what I think.
This is my goal for the last 25. When I hit 75 daily paintings, I’ll begin prepping for the “8x8” art collection I’ll be releasing here at the end of the month (more on that next week, and much of it thanks to Mary’s input and help). But I’ve decided to keep going to 100. Is 100 days enough to build a habit? I hope so. It’s a nice round number. Thank you, Mary. I hope I learn what it was you were pointing us towards.