Artsy Fartsy
Ah Summer. Why does it feel like Summer is almost over? It’s not. Don’t worry.
I’ve been painting a lot. I have a studio in Boston and one here in New Hampshire. I sell work in galleries or my studio and work for interior designers on commission (I’m not above painting an abstract for over the new couch). Painting is a very strange thing to do. There are so many styles and opinions that much of what we see we are indifferent to. I liken it to interpretive dancing except when you see a bad performance, that’s it. It’s over. But a bad painting just sits there, daring you to paint over it.
I think the pain of making art, all art, is hard for non participants to understand. It is a powerful struggle to achieve what you set out to do, write, paint, perform, draw. “Happy Accidents” are not dependable (when a mess up becomes a winning piece). And even when, to the observer, it looks as though it went well, the artist can be wholly dissatisfied with what they did. Why? Good question. And the next one would be, why bother? Exactly!
Is it like golf where after sending the ball into the woods a dozen times and sworn you’ve quit, you finally hit that glorious drive or put and you’re back to obsessive devotion? Maybe. There is a high from getting art generally right. And then, it’s over and you start all over again on another project. And then you fail miserably because you’ve gone into it with too much confidence. The Art Gods see your arrogance and smite you and your work. You are a slob. The struggle begins again. Again.
Why paint?
I have painted since I was a kid. My mother is a trained painter with a studio and my father’s mother was a painter later in life. My husband is a very good painter and has had solo shows. My father isn’t so much a painter as a lover of art. He took me to museums everywhere we went and spent time talking about the work with me. Still does! My mother in law was the art teacher at a small school on the North Shore for 30 years. Surrounded by creative people, I came by it naturally and the materials were always around to diddle with.
I loved art in school. In part because the empathetic teachers were in art, and in part because the rest of school was hard for me. Art was a place where I felt unjudged. When it came to art I was always disappointed in myself. I was never pleased with what I produced. I’d compare what I did to the others in class and find fault in my work which put a dent in my enthusiasm for art.
In college I was an Art History major, though I had wanted to be an English major. My friends were generally Classics majors and we all were creative. I took studio arts classes but never fully committed myself to them. I drew on my own, but I don’t remember painting.
Flash forward to my twenties. Money was tight so for the holidays. I would marbleize items I found at thrift stores for presents. Marbelizing was big in the early 90s. I had a feather to make the wisps of color and even got some gold paint to add some zip. The “marbleizing period” is a point of fun for my family. The next year I did some gouache paintings from trips I went on and found frames at a thrift store and painted them some color and gave them as holiday gifts.
By my mid twenties I started to paint at night after work. I’d make some dinner (nuke a Lean Cuisine) and turn on a show (Fraiser) and try to copy a Hopper painting. I actually did this a lot (long social dry spells improved my painting). I got to the point where I liked what I did (generally). I followed my mother’s lead and brought watercolors with me when I’d go on a trip. I still do that. It’s something to do and meditative. It’s also not using electronics, which is super important these days and you can do it until you are a shriveled up old prune.
I went back to school to get my MFA because art became more and more important to me. I’d sit in the pick up line with my pens or charcoal and sketch trees from my car. It’s easy to draw. The key is: don’t be so damn hard on yourself. Pat yourself on the back for doing it at all. You’re not curing cancer by making art, but maybe you’re preventing it by giving your anxiety an outlet? Let’s talk about art and confidence for a minute.
For a lot of kids art gets ruined in lower school. There is always that kid, usually a boy who plays dungeons and dragons, who can draw the apple perfectly. It’s frustrating and hard not to draw something as you see it. So, a lot of kids dump art. What’s the point. I hear from grown ups again and again “oh, I can’t draw” which is baloney. Everyone can draw. But not everyone is forgiving of themselves for not drawing perfectly. Well, no one is so great at anything without a lot of consistent practice, right? The art teacher in lower school needs to tell kids it’s ok to produce a lump. Just keep at it and maybe next time it will look less like a lump and more like an apple and so on. And: it’s ok for it to never look like an apple.
It’s important with art to respect the journey, not the destination. The destination might be a disappointment but the actual doing is what matters. That said, I want to take a knife and slash apart a canvas and throw it across a room when it fails, or when I fail. It doesn’t fail. Strangely, it’s that level of frustration that tends to produce my best work. How messed up is that? I need to take myself to the brink, emotionally to get the best out of myself. I do not know why I am driven to paint. Is the instant gratification of paint on canvas? Is it that colors fire up the cylinders of my brain? That using a brush to paint flowers, trees, mountains is physical and lyrical like dance and I love dance? Could be.
But the thing that I struggle with is the fact that I am producing more physical stuff in a world full of it. It might be pretty stuff or stuff that makes the viewer love the place I captured. But, it’s more stuff. That is why I tend to paint over a lot of work. The other terrible part of art for me is the commercial side, It’s not my thing. But, I will endeavor to get better at it in my empty-ish nesting. Wanna buy a painting? I’ll work on that.
Drawing exercise: Get yourself a black, unlined sketchbook you can take around with you and a graphite pencil, or anything to write with and really look at something. If you're in the car, put the object at around eye level. See where the light hits the object. Squint to see the darks versus the lights. For fun, scribble where the darks are in the sketchbook and look at what you have on the page. Generally, if you draw the darks/shadows, you imply the light areas and the shape emerges. Keep drawing the same thing a bunch of times and find out what happens. No one knows you are doing it, so no need to feel embarrassed. Also, important: don’t destroy what you do right away. Things do look better the next day. Also, less is more and this is a hard thing for me to adhere to. Draw it and leave it alone. Don’t go back and tweak it a million times. Then you’ll wreck it. I do that with painting a lot. Good thing I’m not trying to cure cancer! Although, and this is a stretch, failure is not a bad thing. We learn more from failure than success. But success is a lot more fun.
Why am I so preachy today? Could it be that the youngest is nearly out the door?
That’s all for now.
k
PS, If you would like to see more of my art, here is my web site: WWW.kimdrukerstockwell.com
Thank you Liz! You would know about the Art Gods as a published writer! I'd Leo to hear some others' stories. I need to figure the comment section out...
This is fabulous! So well put. I particularly love the part about trying again after a success and then failing, the Art Gods punishing you for your arrogance. But failure leads to growth and that in itself is a win. Keep going your work is really flourishing, particularly now that the nest is getting emptier.