Progress

The last time I showed a shot of this painting, it looked like this:

I've spent the last few days ripping into the face, among other things. It's not a pretty process but, then again, when is it?

  

In that last shot I've killed the elusive something I had in the one previous - but it's good to have solid work getting done, and the beauty and joy of oil painting is that I can come back into this in a couple of days and work into the foundation I've laid. I'll spend the time it takes for this to dry working on the other parts of the painting and cataloging the face's flaws for the next pass.

Also, the title has changed from 'Precious Burdens', which was very on-the-nose, to 'The Messenger'.

MoCCA mini-paintings

These were very, very self-indulgent and also very good at reminding me why I haven't worked on canvas of any sort in over two years. The square ones are 2"x2", the others are all 3"x5"/5"x3". I will be (hopefully!) selling them at MoCCA this weekend - come by table A25 to see them in person! We have candy.

Discipline, for the nth time

One day, I might actually learn this lesson, but for now, real discipline escapes me.

(I know I have to qualify that, but hear me out. Things like the painting- and drawing-a-day projects took discipline and I'm not going to pretend they didn't; however, the painting-a-day was an ultimatum with myself (to make the technical improvements I needed within the short window available, or to give up oil painting entirely) and the drawing-a-day was... complicated, but can be boiled down to a combination of a dare with myself and the fact that I made a promise. It's different, in my head.)

Parenthetical paragraphs aside, I know I'm not entirely lacking of drive. I have work-ethic and a fire under my ass, both related to being mediocre for most of my artistic life - but I don't believe I have the sort of discipline that I need to make that final push into being a professional-level illustrator.

I'm close and I know it, but specifically: I need to learn how to make myself do the sort of drawings I need to be doing.

This was touched off more than two weeks ago. As I mentioned in my last post, I've been trying to write this thing for a while, but... well. Here's the drawing I did for Pecious Burdens, now being called The Messenger:

Pretty good, right? I did that entire wicker ball! Aren't I so goo-

No.

 That is a shot of what the painting looks like right now. It's not the eye I'm angry about - that's a matter of losing the drawing as I painted, and it's a simple fix - but what's in this painting that wasn't in the drawing. The bird in the wicker ball came in hugely late in the process, and given that the ball and its contents are the thematic anchors I think I am justified in being furious at myself there; beyond that, I completely neglected to include in my drawing the figure's body as seen through the ball, which is one of the main things that will sell its presence.

What this means is that I've had to come to a dead stop in my painting twice now in order to draw out something essential. I should know better - I do know better - and I embarked on on such a simple piece with the specific knowledge that I'd have to sell every single inch of it as close to perfectly as I could.

Instead, I am hacking through things that should have been solved before I even put the first stroke down on my board, and I am disgusted.

It isn't really surprising to me that I've taken so long to write this post, as every time I thought about the painting still sitting on my easel I felt the anger wash through me. With no deadline and nothing to gain by forcing through it, I decided to step back entirely and let things take their course: this is a painting worth finishing, and worth finishing well, and I can only do that with a clear head.

While I'm over this latest stumbling-block in the current painting, the problem underlying it won't go away until I've put a lot of work into it. I got the memo halfway through senior year that I needed to solve everything in the drawing before I even started the painting, and for some reason I keep not doing it. Holding the Pass took so long in main part because this was the drawing I went in with:

Nothing but the figures are solved, and not even completely - I wound up entirely redrawing the swordwoman's arms entirely halfway through the painting. Having fought though that awfulness, I swore I'd learned my lesson, and I honestly thought I had: the fact that I drew out the wicker ball was a point of real pride. But all I need to do is look at what Donato does for his drawing to see how far I have to go.

Donato's drawing for Fortune and Fate

That drawing is for a pretty simple painting, but look at this - everything is there. And while it is sometimes defeating to look up at the masters for a measure of how far I still have to go, in this case it is very necessary. I need to get myself into the habit of doing drawings like that for every painting I attempt; I need to build in myself the discipline. 

I'm hoping that this is the time where it starts to sink in. I'm good enough at this point to be able to pull a good painting from a less than acceptable drawing, but I am not good enough to make it a smooth thing, and I know there are points of quality I'm losing in the process.

I can't afford to be doing anything less than my best in my art right now: I'm in an uphill struggle and losing my momentum over and over pushes the goal line further back each time. I have two more paintings ready to go into the sketch phase, and the only thing I can do at this point is turn the full force of my dissatisfaction on both of them. With enough care, I can turn out two drawings worth my time, and the paintings that will come of them should be beautiful, if what's in my head speaks true.

In the mean time, I'll finish The Messenger in spite of myself. It'll be worth the time, though I wish I didn't have to use that as my only motivation to get back into it.

Drawing at the Met

I'm working on a new post, about discipline and preparedness and overcoming disgust in oneself when it becomes apparently those things are absent --

-- but since that's taking a while, here are some drawings I did at the Met yesterday.

 

I am really usually not so successful with these types of studies. Perhaps I just hit the right way to render, and the right size? The top one is the length of my thumb, the bottom one a little bigger.

Hey look a dragon

This needs another pass and some better post-work in Photoshop, but the contest ends in, uh, an hour, and I have work in the morning. I am pretty happy with this overall!

Imposter Syndrome and teaching

As a lot of my friends and acquaintances know, I recently got greenlit for a class I proposed to a small Staten Island art center. (I got the notice several hours after writing the last post, because the universe apparently enjoys giving me whiplash).

It's hard to reconcile the degree to which I want to (and the ability I think I have to) teach, with the sort of seething Imposter Syndrome that I get every time someone looks up at me. I have some very passionate opinions about the education of budding artists, as well as some ideas about how I could have been better served when I was one - but I simultaneously feel like it's the rankest hubris imaginable to present myself as an authority of any kind. I'm twenty-three, I have no idea what I'm doing, and I'm supposed to stand in front of a group of highschoolers and act like I have something worthwhile to say?

Well, yes. I do have things worth saying to them. My job is not to pretend I'm a font of wisdom but to talk about my experiences, which I do believe are worth sharing. (The point is moot, anyway: the class has been approved and included in the brochure just sent off to the printers, and while I haven't signed my contract yet it's not like I'm not going to.)

What I want to do with this class is get the students started on thinking about their art. As I put it in my proposal:

There are so many strong opinions as to what good art is, especially once one gets to a college-level art program; since many students coming straight from high school have never had to think critically about what their art is, it's easy for them to lose sight of it along the way because of this. I know that's what happened to me.

I'm not so delusional as to think that it's within my power to fix this singlehandedly. I do think, however, that a highschool-level illustration class that focused on each student's personal artistic voice as well as the medium of illustration would do much to start the thought process at least.

That's still a big thing to attempt, but, you know, it's not really anything different than what I've been doing with those friends of mine still in school who come to me for advice. This does not of course stop me from losing it when I think about the reality of standing up in front of three to eight students and having to teach them things, but it means that every time I sit down to work on my syllabus, I realize I know what I want to happen, and even have some ideas about how.

I have a couple of months before this is an actual thing in my life as opposed to an abstract concept in the future, and I'll probably record the experience here for posterity. Because I do want to teach, as a real future goal, and this is the first real step in that direction.

Same song and dance

My art is making me want to punch walls.

Don't get me wrong - I know the two paintings I just finished were huge steps forward for me in a lot of different ways, and I actually like both. I'm very very proud of them and the growth they represent; pruning down my portfolio as savagely as I did was especially rewarding when they slotted in like I'd planned it that way; I have momentum for the first time since spring semester of my senior year of college, and what I'm working on now really excites me -

- but I feel like I'm stuck. My pieces are good, but they're not good enough, and the polish they need is simultaneously so close I can see it and just out of my reach.

It's the 'almost there' that's killing me. Every single portfolio review I've gotten since Illuxcon in Novembers, from ADs as well as artists, both in person and online, has been a variation on that theme. And I know it's true, apart from the weight of so many experienced voices lending it credence: I'm so close to it that I'm beginning to stumble across it over the course of the paintings, in unrepeatable little moments of things clicking together. There is one square inch of Holding the Pass, for example, that is finished to the level that I'm struggling to reach right now, and I'll be damned if I could tell you what I did or how.

As much as I hate my own whining, there's a reason I'm taking the time to write it down and share it. This type of hissy fit has historically been the herald to my big artistic advances, and recording it helps to take out of the loop in my head and calm me down some. I know this is me struggling at the end of another plateau, I know that all I need to do is keep working and be more aware of my artistic decisionmaking, I know that the way out is through...

It just doesn't make it any easier to read email after email that tells me that I'm almost there.

(It also doesn't make it easier to accept that I'm no longer a student, that I'm a peer, and as a peer and not a student my place in asking for critique has shifted under my feet after over four years of doing it.)