February

This was a very interesting month for me.

For those just tuning in, the last couple of months of 2014 were miserable. I hit the breaking point with Starbucks, and I quit, but even with the light at the end of the tunnel in view I still put aside my art. 

I spent some time getting back on my feet. My pattern is to come off of deep slumps straight into crazy overcommitment, and this time was no different: halfway through January, I looked around and found myself staring down five deadlines and a convention packed into the shortest month of the year. But instead of the blind screaming bullrush I tend to revery to in situations like that, I did something different.

I hit this month like I haven't hit any prolonged period of time since my senior year of college. I was working around 35 hours a week at my day job, coming home, and making art, working deliberately along a do-to-list. With things laid out along a timeline, the usual panic was subdued: it actually felt good working until 12 or 1, even as I got to averaging five or so hours of sleep a night, because I could feel myself making progress. Saturdays were my opportunity to get a whole day in, often thirteen to fifteen hours, and on Sundays I worked for a couple of hours before taking a half-day off. It was awesome.

It was awesome, but listen, believe me when I say I know this isn't sustainable practice. I broke, more than once, and spent a scattering of days doing nothing in order to recharge. Working at the absolute edge of my capabilities meant that when one thing went wrong (having to stay several hours late at work a couple of days in a row) I had a… bit of a moment. I had to compromise, too - I had initially meant to do all five pieces as oil paintings, but it became very clear very quickly that it was an impossibility, and two of the five pieces wound up as drawings. 

But all of them are good, and they didn't exist twenty days ago.

I'm glad to have done it, but I'm glad to be done with it, too. Running headlong like that is exhausting; I have to be on point for every brush stroke. The risk I run when working like this is finishing so drained that I stop making art again - but as crazy as I had to get to hit each deadline, something about working so deliberately and producing pieces I'm so proud of has kept me from burnout at the end of it.

I have a lot of exciting things on my plate for the spring. There's a commission I've been sitting on for literally over a year that I cannot wait to get started on; there's a handful of Silmarillion minipaintings I have planned that might wind up being studies for larger pieces; there's the two Month of Love drawings that are waiting patiently to be done in oils. I've been rolling around personal pieces and projects and now, free from that soul-killing job and a rapid-fire month of deadlines, I'm so excited to get them started!

SmART School, and 2014

So, the last posted blog entry about SmART School was about two months ago. There's a few reasons for that, but the best summary is that of everything I learned in Rebecca's class, the most important one was that I was truly miserable in my current situation and trying to step up the artmaking resulted in me breaking myself.

I mean, I learned other things, too. I think Rebecca finally got the idea and practical application of a finished painting's polish through my skull, and we also worked on color, and shape-thinking, and edges, and pushing gestures and being really thoughtful and deliberate about composition. I did good work.

Sword of Justice, 11"x17"

It's really just unfortunate that the main thing I took away from the class was I needed to get out of Starbucks. I think I needed that wakeup call - I'm a creature of habit, and the day-to-day of work had kind of faded into the background - but I found myself spending my days bone-deep tired and flogging myself through paintings I didn't have the spare energy to care about. No amount of sleep was enough, no amount of espresso could perk me up, and since I was lacking the emotional capacity to engage in my art I was leaning entirely on rote-learned technique and Rebecca's paintovers and critiques.

This was the straw that broke the camel's back, but it's also forced me to look at the wider picture of what I've done with my art in the two and a half years since I graduated school, and it's kind of bleak: while I've definitely improved technically and gotten real milestones under my belt (Spectrum, a book cover, two group shows) I have absolutely fallen off the horse in terms of promoting myself.

There's so much I have to take a hard look at. I need to work faster, and improve on my color thinking, and figure out where the hell I lie in the commercial/gallery spectrum, and work specifically toward one of those two instead of doing my current waffling in the grey area, and promote in that chosen direction. I need to keep myself active in the art community instead of shrinking back away from it every time I'm discouraged. I need to reach back out to mentors who I've gone into radio silence on.

I need to get myself going. 2014 was a year of a lot of very good stuff and also a yawning pit of floundering and not doing much by way of pursuing my passion as if I had any intention of making it my career.

The first step is realizing it. The next step is getting one foot down in front of the other.

So here's to 2015: A new job, a renewed fervor, more skill and more knowledge than before. There are things are brewing; I just need to grasp the will to make them reality.

IMC 2014 (kinda)

I came back from my third IMC almost two months ago, so I think it's time to admit that this isn't going to be a proper post about it: there's been too much time, and too much distance. What this is a post about, now, is evolution - and how miserable I currently am.

First things first: evolution.

The last thing I finished before the masterclass was a crowning testament to rendering as I approach it, which is to say, fiddly and tediously.

I'm proud of accomplishing what I did, but it was also a breathtaking waste of time and effort. In the nine months (minus some time off here or there) it took me just to paint those mosaic tiles, I could have done so many other paintings. But I went ahead and I did what I did, and I think it was important.

Because what I did at the IMC, fresh from most of a year of toiling over one painting's rendering and tiny detailing, was this:

It's hard to see from that image, but that is a painting of brush strokes. I didn't sit and noodle on one square inch; even the hands were done with care, as opposed to obsessive fiddling.

This was not a conscious change I made in my approach. Something clicked during Greg Manchess' lecture: the first thing I did upon returning to my easel was crop the top off the head in my already-approved final drawing, and it went from there. It honestly sometimes felt like my hand making these marks while I watched, bewildered - and for someone whose technique has always had a lot to do with her control issues, it was terrifying.

My little freakout over new painting method aside ("Jenna, it looks good." "I know, but how am I doing it?"), this is a breakthrough almost on the level of that time I was slapped out of some hardcore internalized self-worth issues from college. This is good and this is important and the paintings I have done since the IMC have been faster and better and more confident than anything I've done before.

Which brings us to the 'being miserable' part, actually.

As most people who'll probably read this know, I work at Starbucks. I was a barista for about two years, and I feel pretty safe in saying that I was a good one. For months, I was turning down a promotion to supervisor: I knew that it would be a huge stress jump, and a huge time commitment, and that it would wrest a lot of my focus from my art. But I wound up taking it shortly before the IMC, because the money was good, I knew I'd be good at it, and I was already doing half of the job anyway... and, again, control issues.

To absolutely no one's surprise, the transition wiped me out. Combined with it being summer - which is not only the three months where I am baseline tired, angry, and generally unwell because of the heat, but also simultaneously Starbucks' busy season and invariably short-staffed - the new responsibility and intensity made it an uphill battle to make art.

I was telling myself comforting things about preferring it to a desk job (true, depending on the day and also which desk job), and how it wouldn't be for too long (hah), and how I was fine, really, everything was going well (no). This worked pretty well, actually, until I went to the IMC.

The thing about that week up in Amherst is that, for me, it strips away everything. There's not really any room for anything but the art. It's hard to describe - it's not like it's a silent monastery of pure art-making, not at all, but even the silliest, booziest night spent hanging out in the dorm common room had an underlying connection to art.

Faced with a week of the life I want distilled into its best parts, all of my little white lies and half-truths about being alright were torn away.

I hate not being an artist in profession as well as in practice. I hate having to choose where to spend what time I'm not at Starbucks - I hate feeling like every time I decide to see a friend or, god forbid, take a day off, I am choosing to not make art. I hate being caught in a grey area between two directions which are not mutually exclusive but cannot both be worked toward at the same time, and I hate feeling like I'm spinning my wheels as a result. I hate how I need every painting to be A Step Forward, and I hate how when I sit back and do a study I feel like I'm wasting time. I hate being too exhausted to make art and then spend the time not making art hating myself.

I hate looking at Starbucks and seeing the looming shadow of a career.

I hate looking at art and feeling the niggling doubt: Maybe it's a mirage. Maybe I've just been fooling myself.

Listen: I'm not looking for reassurances or advice. This is the year that I was accepted into Spectrum, this is the year I sold my first major piece, this is a year of a big technical breakthrough. I know that people like - respond to - my art, and there are those who are just waiting for me to hit it. I know I'm young, that I only just this May hit two years out of school, that I am doing a lot of things right.

I know that there are issues here, and I'm getting help on that front.

I'm also doing what I can to throw myself into art in such a way as to make it impossible for me to withdraw. My SmART School class with Rebecca Guay starts in less than a week, and there's the Society of Illustrators Spectrum exhibit opening and then Art Out Loud the day after, and Illuxcon less than a week later. I have projects for myself lined up, and promotions to do.

I'm not actually drowning - but it sure feels awful all the same.

This fall, I'm going to try to be better about posting here, because writing down what I'm experiencing has been incredibly helpful in the past - and looking back over my journey gives me guideposts to steer by. Even writing this, tonight, helps, and while I still dread tomorrow's 3:30am alarm and eight hours of work and exhaustion, I'm not quite so wrapped up in my anticipatory misery.

And I really am excited to show everyone what I'm doing. That doesn't change, even if the path gets harder.

I know I'm tightly-wound, but it's gotten ridiculous

I've come to the conclusion recently that I need to seriously reassess my work habits.

The whole driving myself into the ground thing is not new or different, and I have, I swear, been making progress with it in the past year or two. I know I say 'I'm going to fix this' every time I scrape myself off the floor after a crash; I go on Facebook and post about how tired I am, how much I hate doing this to myself, and maybe crack a few jokes at my own expense. But I was talking to a friend of mine toward the end of my most recent push, and she said something that really made me pause: "It seems like you're, well, a little too proud of being able to do as much work as you do."

And, you know, it's true. The most common theme I hear in others' description of me - the thing repeated most often when I got into Spectrum - is how much of a hard worker I am. It's something I've been proud of for a long time, especially considering this is a skill I developed over years rather than an innate ability. I still consider it a strength, how hard I work, how much I can take on: I went from mediocre to good fast enough that everyone remarked on it my senior year of college.

I think I'm entitled to being proud, given all of that, but the problem is that some point during those four years of 'working hard', it got twisted up.

My junior year, as I've talked about before, was a really rough time; I overcommitted badly, and was constantly either working or hating myself viciously for not working. It planted the idea that if I wasn't busy, I was doing something wrong. It didn't seem like a bad thing, really: by the second semester of senior year I'd leveled up to a degree I hadn't even thought possible, and I was outputting a finished painting every two and a half to three weeks.

But I graduated, and I crashed. It took me months to claw my way out of being depressed and self-loathing: "I was useless; I was a waste of the potential that teachers and role models said they saw in me," I wrote three months after graduating, looking back on the summer I'd just spent barely making art. I was back on my feet properly that winter, juggling projects and once again pleased (proud) at how hard I was working - and then I crashed again that spring, depressed again, furious at my own failings and lack of progress.

I've repeated this pattern so many times that I've gotten good at compensating for them. I don't get depressed any more, not really - I mostly get exhausted, as I drive myself to the finish line on nothing but grit teeth. I stack projects and deadlines and drive myself through 100+ hour weeks between working at Starbucks and art. I negotiate with myself and compromise in order to 'okay' spending time with friends, or on dates; I have very limited time I'm 'allowed' to watch TV or goof off on the internet.

And reading that paragraph over, I have to admit I'm giving myself some narrowed eyes.

Part of the problem is that I do have a lot of work to do (a long way to go), and only so much time in a week to do it. Part of it is that I spent so long being so aware of how mediocre I was, and something in me will always be running from that, pushing as hard as I can to overcome it. Part of it is that habits are hard to break, and it feels straight-up wrong to not be very busy. Part of it is that I do, actually, work optimally with one painting in-progress on the easel, one drawing in-progress on the paper, and one illustration in thumbnail stage or rolling around in my head.

It's got to change, though. I just hate being tired, and the last downswing was nothing but tired, for two straight months. When MoCCA ended, I was flat-out exhausted and still had to show up at Starbucks for another five days straight... but after two days of just relaxing when I came home, instead of going to my studio, I found myself sort of shocked to discover how refreshed I was feeling. I've spent an entire week and a half since ~*not doing anything*~, and I keep laughing at how much of a revelation it is that, as a result, I'm incredibly rested and relaxed.

Going forward, I still have a lot to do, but I am going to have to put some effort into maintenance and care this time around. If we're talking about time and amount of work, I can't afford these crashes and the aftercare that they require; a little less detachedly, I really need to be less destructive in my work habits.

There is a middle road between not doing enough and driving myself into the ground with overwork - I know this, because I see others walk it. I need to find it for myself, because for all of my advancement, I'm at the point where I don't really benefit from a whip at my heels, or self-flagellation.

Groping after an explanation

I've come to be pretty confident in my artistic voice, but when I was recently asked to go past my favorite joke ("I paint sad flowy ladies.") and the usual followup ("I paint the quiet things: internal drama and subtle emotions of the figures in the stories I love."), I found myself going in rambling, vague circles which boiled down to "????"

So, having put some thought to the question, it is time to think aloud (aka write it down), because wow it is hard to pin down.

How do I put my art into words?

There is a definite theme and direction, I know that much. There's something about pain and beauty and  humanity and femininity, and there it is: but how do I actually verbalize it? It's not a 'something', it's a definite thing, but I dance around locking onto it constantly.

There is beauty to be found in pain, in sorrow and grief, and there's beauty in quiet moments, too. My art is about these intersections, and especially in those things in the context of overlooked narratives within known stories, but it's more than that. So many times, women are subjects told about and acted upon but not explored, even when the stories are technically about them. I keep looking at these isolated, simplified figures through the context of their humanity, the emotion I read in their actions and choices, and celebrate their beauty and strength and tragedy (or attempt to).

There really is something arresting about all the things not said, but implied, by these narratives I find myself drawn to. We know Persephone ate the pomegranate seeds, but why, after all those months? We know Guinevere was unfaithful, but what did she feel for the husband she betrayed? We know the girl without hands forged her path from the great unknown, but from where did the strength come to take herself from those places of danger with such self-possession?

I want to ask these questions, strip from them the gloss of storytelling disassociation, but still make sure that these women are celebrated no less for being reassessed as mere mortals - their untouchable nature is not what holds my interest, but their beauty in the midst of their human struggles and weaknesses.

(I think I'm getting close to finding the right words for my art, but it's still quite rambly. I need to be able to speak both succinctly and in-depth about this, and right now I have neither. I feel like I'm circling the point from a height - I'm no longer doing a haphazard fly-by, but I still need to close the gap.)

Shifting gears

I haven't really posted much here in a while, though I've finished two paintings and made huge strides on a third. There's a reason: for the last six or seven months, I've been, very quietly, absolutely panicking about my art.

It was a background noise for a long time, something I didn't even really notice except occasionally, in small ways: in my slow withdrawing from the community, in the the mixed way I reacted to inspiring illustrations, in my flat inability to even make a move in promoting myself, in my difficulty articulating anything about my last two paintings. My art was getting better and better, and garnering reactions that left me speechless, but there was a growing anxiety sitting in the pit of my stomach that made making art hard.

The problem was that I wasn't a fantasy illustrator, and I couldn't reconcile that.

For a while now, a part of me has known that my art wasn't actually the kind of fantasy that would interest the markets I thought I wanted to work in; more recently, that part also figured out that I wasn't even really making the kind of paintings that fit in an illustration portfolio. There's a grey area in where illustration ends and gallery work begins, and many, many artists work on both sides of that blurry line - but every time I read an advice post saying things like 'look at the book covers in your local book store!', or flipped through Spectrum, my anxiety spiked through the roof because my art didn't look like that.

It should be understood that I 'knew' I was a fantasy illustrator since mid-college, and I put a lot of effort into educating myself about and making myself a part of the fantasy illustration community. There's a lot of comfort to be had in an identity - and the unknown is terrifying.

It was hard being rational about shifting gears toward gallery work when I didn't even know where to start, and froze every time I thought about researching.

Through this, I kept painting. It wasn't the mechanical, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other kind of painting that I did when I crashed last spring - this was me closing my eyes on the panic and just... trusting my art. Something had clicked inside when I finished The Long Path, and letting myself sink into Devotional was an experience worthy of the painting's title. Even as I despaired over the endless mosaic tiles of my current painting, it felt right, and the panic fell away.

It wasn't any sort of a long-term solution. But it did allow me to move forward where in all else I was freezing to a halt - and it did mean that I was posting progress.

Travis Louie, who I'd met this summer at the IMC, noticed those posts; he's the one who's given me something other than a blank page to start on. Whereas I was previously working with nothing but the thought, 'galleries????!?', he has given me advice and people and places to look at, and a goal for my portfolio rebuild, and I'm more grateful than I can say.

So that's where I am right now: still painting, but now with a goal. And, you know, that trust in my art hasn't gone away. My life is currently a balancing act, with work and maintaining any sort of a social life weighed against making art - but my art is always there, waiting, and I have faith in that. Transitions are so, so difficult, but between Travis giving me something to go on and that faith I've found, I no longer feel frozen every time I'm not concentrating specifically on painting.

And we'll see how things work out.

IMC 2013

Last year's IMC was a revelation; this year's IMC was a staggering confirmation.

It's always hard to find the words for things like this. So much gets packed into a week, and it's in such a unique context - it's nothing like real life, and very hard to parse once I leave. Beyond that, I still struggle to not feel like I'm boasting when talking about how well my art was received and the things people said to me.

My painting this year way by absolutely no means perfect, and there are are a lot of things I struggled with in the process... but the responses I got from my peers and teachers give me no real chance to doubt myself. For Rebecca Guay to tell me that the emotion is there, for Mike Mignola to compliment me on my composition, for Donato to call the hands I'd just painted good - god, it just kept going, and I sat there shellshocked because I barely know what I'm doing, I'm twenty-three, I graduated last year. But the voice in the back of my head that wormed its way in sometime during college has been rendered by and large silenced: the struggle now is no longer in overcoming the conviction that I'm mediocre, but in believing enough in my abilities not to get discouraged by the uphill climb.

All of the teachers had things for me to fix, places where I needed to push - "You're just so timid!" said Dan Dos Santos, shaking his head, laying in cadmium yellows and reds and oranges into the light on my figure - but the message I got loud and clear is, at this point, I need to take those hours of my ass in the chair and the brush in my hand and keep going. I'm not there yet: I'm missing that polish and fearlessness that I see in all of the art I love. But I look at my art and see something coming toward the surface, and each successive painting is capturing something a little closer to my goal.

In the coming year, I'm planning on taking Rebecca's SmART School class. It's expensive, especially for a Starbucks barista, but I've watched the art that's come out of it and it's frankly astonishing. Two years of the IMC have rocketed my art upwards at a pace I would never in a million years would have believed possible, and I'm absolutely going back for a third year... but if I'm serious about improving, I have to use all the resources available to me.

I don't really know what my point was supposed to be. All I do know is I left the IMC last year deeply shaken by having had the unconscious, deep-seated understanding that I was mediocre ripped from me - and this year I left feeling a little blinded by how clearly I saw the path at my feet.

You guys, I am going to make so much art.

Picking back up

I am, at this moment, working through the end of a collapse.

These things happen to me occasionally. It's a part of a pattern, which is, in turn, part of who I am: I take on things, and take on things, and assure everyone I'm fine, and take on things, and joke about my workload, and take on things - and maybe I begin to incur a sleep debt I can't seem to pay off, and maybe I start finding my social life a burden - and I take on things, and begin to feel hunted and oppressed by the stress, and maybe I start to consider that I have possibly made a bad choice at some point, but usually before that can happen some small thing occurs and I hit critical mass, and I drop everything with a fury.

Ignoring my own limits has, at times, helped me achieve things: I left school with a reputation as one of the most driven students in my class, for one, and during my senior year I soared. But the crash always comes, and it always sucks.

It's often tied to depression, though not always, and I'm not really clear on what the specific cause/effect relationship is. I do know that multi-directional stress, especially when related to planning things, is a huge danger zone; I also know that I can stave off the crash to greater or lesser degrees of effectiveness by paring down my load, but by the time I start doing that it is generally too late and all I'm doing is making the angle of descent a little less steep.

This crash followed the pattern. Multi-directional stress, a large chunk of which had to do with taking point on finding and renting an apartment, and a sleep debt that felt like a black hole, and a whole load of minutiae that by themselves wouldn't have been stressful but which added up to be a monster - yeah.

I'm just angry that this one came when it did. The actual day of the collapse was the day that the Illustration Masterclass assignment email hit my inbox, and I just can't work through the lingering emotional exhaustion to get excited over them. I'm having to approach it using logic, since my actual artistic impulse is currently in the toilet: I'm doing A Midsummer Night's Dream, and within that I am going to paint Titania, because of course I am. I know my palette is going to be cool, and that her hair is going to be dark, and there are elements that have occurred to me as being lovely --

-- but I am thumbnailing from a dead place right now, and it's frustrating when I remember how incredible the rush of inspiration was for Tristan and Isolde last year.

I know with certainty that the spark is there waiting for me to dig it out, but the process is hard.

I have made some poor decisions

 
First: for a painting which was executed in a string of bad choices just about start to finish, I am incredibly pleased by the outcome.

Having said that - this was a long, miserable process of a painting, though for different reasons and in different ways than Holding the Pass was. That painting was too hard, an exercise in fighting through over-ambition and improving the hard way; Tithe, on the other hand, was just tedious.


(oh. its title is Tithe. it finally told me.)

Well - 'just' tedious is not quite correct. It was definitely boring to work on, and it definitely had parts that were finicky and delicate and utterly mind-numbing to do, but so much of what I hated about working on this painting is how poorly planned it was. Oh sure, I did a 'good' drawing - but what I did in that drawing was the figure, and the wicker ball. The dead bird suspended in the ball was a very late addition, which I came to after I'd painted in almost everything else; the strings were thrown in on impulse almost at the end, in a fit of rage at and disgust in how boring a painting it was. That those two things are so important, that the strings are literally the key to make this painting work, and they were afterthoughts -

Yeah, I'm left more than a little stunned at how well it came out.

Relearning lessons is always an… interesting experience, but it's nice to know that I'm past that particular brand of self-flagellation such a thing would have sparked even half a year ago. I was certainly angry at myself as I realized each mistake in turn, but in the past it would have touched off a truly savage bout of self-recriminations and mental beatdowns. This time around, there was, as I said, a fair amount of anger, but there were no spirals of rage or stirrings of deep-seated self-doubt: I knew that I was better than the mistakes I was making, and at each one I stepped up and moved onward, even if it took a couple of days away from the easel to facilitate.

It's startling to realize, but this process makes me think I've taken another step toward earning my stripes. I'm not a 'gifted' artist but I've put a lot of time and effort into being a good painter, and looking at this painting I know I'm succeeding in that regard.

I made this painting come together - I did. The searing spark of inspiration that made Tristan and Isolde flow through my fingers, the bright clear picture in my head that Dawn's Herald came from, none of that was there. I just worked on it, and it wasn't fun or easy, but I took each mistake and bad choice and I fixed them. The bird, the strings at the end: those I'll attribute to that place in my head that sometimes gives me my paintings, but those couldn't have gotten there without the painting itself being there, and it was only there because I made it happen.

There are, as always, things that could be better - better executed, more polished, less generic, just one rung up and it's out of reach for now - but so much is going right here, in the overall sense, that I'm just going to sit here and feel triumphant and maybe a little bit smug at this painting that sat there for a few months and mocked me.

(Next time I paint something this - simple? uncluttered? - I am doing it at least five inches smaller each side, because one of the things I hated about this was how much boring/tedious space there was to cover. Though it was so nice to be able to work on a face that size…)

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.

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.)

Clawing my way up the damn mountain

If Riverdaughter was one of the easiest paintings I've done, Holding the Pass was easily the hardest.

I began the groundwork on this painting seven and a half months ago. Seven and a half months ago! That's absurd! This is an 11"x16" painting, it should not have taken me nearly eight months to finish! But everything about it was hard, and every step of the way was an uphill battle, and for all that this is a painting I'm shocked at being capable of, I earned every damn bit of it.

My mentor on this piece, Tyler Jacobson, threw me a huge challenge when he sent me the assignment. A group of three - a group of three interacting, no less! - and a creature I had to design, and a mountain environment... this was too much, on the same level that the Elf Cleric was too much a little over a year ago, and as before I looked at the mountain I was proposing to climb and then just threw myself at it.

That worked with the Elf Cleric. Not so much this time.

It took two and a half months from getting my rough sketch approved to finish the tight drawing and the first round of revisions on it, and even considering that the IMC happened within that time period, that is absurd. Especially because it then took another month to get the last big revision done - clocking the time I took to do the drawing in at three and a half months.

And, okay, I was depressed during that time too, which is an actual valid reason for struggling with art, but that does not explain why it took another four months to paint the damn thing.

It took a month to get half of a first pass on the board. Then I picked at it for a month before hitting a solid brick wall, which didn't budge until Tyler sent a paintover my way. (note to self: value structure value structure value structure) And through it all, I was in a fury because almost nothing in the painting was happening without a bloody uphill battle - but I couldn't just give up, because even through the ugliest parts of the process I could see how good the damn painting was.

I could see it, but I didn't know how to paint it. I would catch these shining glimpses of its potential, as if cresting a wave in a storm and seeing land - and then down I would plunge again, into the awful morass of how do I even paint mountains, why are they fully a third of the entire composition.

This painting got finished because, for all that it fought tooth and claw, I fought back. Riverdaughter was about relying on the ability I had; Holding the Pass was about gaining the ability I lacked through sheer bloody-mindedness. And I'm proud that I did, because this damn painting, this source of so much frustration and more roadbumps than road, is something I can now call mine.

It is mine, and I achieved something here. I don't mean the technical aspects of the mountains or the interacting figures (though I am very proud of both of those things): I mean that I found a way to make a very not-me assignment into something that fits thematically into my body of work. That frost giant is not a monster being slain by heroes, you see - or, I hope you see. It was my goal to throw the very stereotypical setup into some grey area, if not to flip it entirely, and though it's hard to see my own work clearly I think I succeeded.

And that, boys and girls, is worth the seven and a half goddamn months it took.

Riverdaughter

Oil on gessoed illustration board, 12.5"x23"

For those unaware, the first sketch of this was actually done back in November, as part of my drawing-a-day project. It was just the lady, no composition or environment, but something about that drawing sang: everyone who looked through the book stopped at that page, and I had more than one person tell me to please take it where it needed to go.
And then Jon Schindehette posted the Nymph ArtOrder challenge, and I knew I had a piece.

Everything about this clicked. It is the right drawing, the right palette, the right shape. The reference was right. The color study was right. Every time I sat down to paint at it, it was right. It is most certainly not a perfect painting - I feel a little like I got it to 95% and stopped, which kills me - but I can't emphasize the surreality of feeling a painting like this flowing through me.

This has happened before, but because it's out of my control, it feels that every moment could be the last in which I know how to go forward. After one such moment of fear, though, I sat back and realized that I knew how to paint this. I'd challenged myself with the long composition and large negative space, with the extremely limited palette (cadmium orange, viridian, burnt umber, titanium white, ivory black), with the foreground content and detail, and everywhere I looked, I knew what to do.

It's only really hit me in the last few months that I could consider myself a good artist without the gods striking me down for gross hubris. This past Illuxcon was a big part of that, but there's been that insidious voice in the back of my head that it's a fluke, that Tristan and Isolde was an IMC Miracle - and this painting did a lot to still it. For all that it ran from my hand onto the board like water, for all that I felt like I wasn't in control of the process, this is a painting that I'm as good as. (As opposed to Tristan and Isolde, which I called a 'future painting' at the time because my skills were not actually on its level as I painted it.)

So here's Riverdaughter. It feels good to have it out of my head, a real painting which I can look at and be proud of, a new piece to grow my recently purged portfolio - and a big ol' screw you to that awful part of me which still whispers that I'm not very good.

I painted this: it is mine, and there will be more.

There and Back Again

I don't really know how to talk about this year behind me, so instead I'm going to write a postmortem for the drawing-a-day project I just finished.

Six months ago, I was reeling in the aftermath of graduation and the IMC and a new job and the process of moving to a new apartment. There was a lot going on, and I was very, very overwhelmed: I started the drawing-a-day project I'd promised Iain McCaig I'd do with something like desperation underlying the 'I said I would do it therefore I will'.

I  had... no real clue what I was doing. There was some idea that I should be analyzing every step of the way (as self-reflection has always proven to be helpful for me), but since I started the project in something of a panic I didn't even know where to begin.

For the first few days I copied art and wrote about my feelings and reactions to the originals - and then I spent two months copying photos. It was a bad time for me: I was so incapable of approaching my own art that I couldn't even begin to think about self-generating, and as is pretty much always the case I was too close to even see it, even though I knew something was wrong. Iain McCaig's directions for the project had been a simple "draw what you love" and "draw every day", and I knew the goal was to rediscover the art I loved to make - but it took a long time to even find the path.

When I finally realized that drawing photos wasn't cutting it, that I was focusing on copying things I liked instead of making things I liked, it was... something of a revelation.

I've learned things about myself and my art over the past few months. It's easy to make the jokes about my endless flowey ladies - and trust me, I've made most of the jokes myself - but for all that they make up a significant amount of the project, I've figured out that it's not about them so much as it's about what I use them as a vehicle for.

Emotion has always been at the heart of my appreciation of art. Not the overt, dramatic kind that you see in a lot of things - but the subtleties, the things going on under the surface or behind the eyes, emotion that I could connect with even hundreds of years after the artist who'd shaped it was dead. And that's what my flowey ladies are an attempt at: a channel for these emotions I want to create, especially the theme of melancholy and longing that is emerging in my portfolio.

I could talk about discipline, or how really good structure is for me, or 2012 in general, but I won't. Because I called this project 'there and back again' pretty flippantly, in the same self-deprecating manner I called my painting-a-day project a 'Quest for Jenius' - and it's turned out to be far more of an apt title than I could have ever believed.

Over the past six months, I've been on a journey not to discover some new kind of art to make, but to get back to where I was about two years ago. I'm back there, at once on familiar ground but with an entire new world opened to me: I can see what I was trying to do, fumblingly, with The Narwhal Woman and with Saint Pangea, and I can see what broke to the surface with A Great Beauty and Bramble Weaver, and I am on firmer footing with my direction now than I could have even dreamed of when I graduated.

Which is not to say I don't have a long way to go. The idea of 'there and back again' is to take a journey in order to enable an even greater one to start.

Illuxcon V

Illuxcon was this weekend, and I'm still not sure how to approach the process of digesting it.

Unlike the IMC, which was one solid week of an experience, made up as it was by many moments, this year I experienced Illuxcon in a series of rapid but discrete moments. They added up to something monumental for me - I have a sensibility that's not just in my head but visible to peers and idols and art directors, and while I'm not 'there' yet I am close - but they break down in my head to individual conversations and reviews, and so make the overall weekend harder to parse.

This was my third year at the show. Each time I've attended, it's been important: the first year, when I was a junior, Illuxcon was a weekend of inspiration and encouragement in the middle of the awful pit of thesis that I'd spend the next five months crawling through; last year, as a senior, I felt like a part the fantasy illustration community for the first time. But this time -

- this time each critique focused on polish, on being aware of the pitfalls I was hitting that were holding down the average, on building a consistent portfolio, because the consensus was that the work I was doing was good and very nearly there. This time I hung out with people I privately have always thought of as 'the cool kids'. This time I had conversations with artists whose work has been inspiring me deeply for years. This time, I had a Showcase table that my idols were stopping at to compliment my paintings; this time, one of them nearly sold.

I have not been making art long; I haven't been serious about it for much more than four years. But I have worked hard to make up for the gap, and it's things like the IMC, like this past weekend, that make me feel like I'm not a fool for going to art school in the middle of an economic meltdown, nor for dedicating my life to a field that's notorious for the lack of security it affords.

There are too many people to thank; there is too much inspiration to express. So I guess I'll go back to painting.

Halfway point

Yesterday, I did my 92nd drawing of this project, hitting the exact halfway point in the six month timeline. It's really difficult to talk about What I've Accomplished or What My Goals Are, because part of this project is that it's not terribly goal-oriented: I'm drawing what I love to get back to the root of it, and that's about it in terms of direction. I can already see more confidence and ease in my drawings, and they're flowing (HAH) more easily from me, but what have I really done? I can't say.

This was a very difficult summer for me in terms of my art, apart from the IMC. There were weeks, full weeks at a time during which this project was the only thing that kept me from being entirely without art, and that is sobering at best and terrifying at worst to realize. This is supposed to be my life, and I simply could not create art that wasn't leaning on the crutch of this project.

It's something I need to remember, this comfort I derive from structure and how it saved me from falling away from art. A lot went on this summer: I graduated from school, moved, got a job, and spent a week at the IMC (which was as emotionally exhausting as it was inspirational). I reeled in the knowledge that school was over, and I can't stress enough how hard it hit: the four years I spent at SVA were easily the best years of my life to-date, and formative in ways that I'll be realizing for years to come.

In the depths of August, when the heat was awful and all of my younger SVA friends could talk of nothing but the coming school year, all I could see was my failure. I was useless; I was a waste of the potential that teachers and role models said they saw in me. I was selfish in my melancholy, seeing only my lack of art, while 'all' my friends and classmates were working and succeeding - and to add insult to injury, the one thing I was working on, Holding the Pass, refused to come together, and the drawing taunted me with how good it almost was. It fed into one huge loop, and while nowhere near as toxic as some of the mental black holes I fell into my junior year, it sure didn't help things.

Through this, my project kept going. I drew every day because I had to, because Iain McCaig had looked at my art and believed in the beginnings he saw, because I'd said I would: and through everything, I have. I've drawn on trains because travel was the only free time I could scrape together; I've drawn on 10- and 30-minute breaks at work; I've drawn at friends' apartments because we were hanging out, and I've bailed on hanging out because I've had to draw. I've drawn drunk and I've drawn tired and I've even experienced drawing while falling asleep, and none of this is exceptional except for the fact that it pulled me through the plummet after school.

As far as I can tell, I'm more or less back on my feet: it's fall and I've pretty much adjusted to my new life, and I'm finally painting again. I have three months left on the project, though, and as much as some days I want nothing more than to say 'fuck it' and go to sleep an hour earlier, I'm glad. I have more to do with this, I think.

SVA Life Drawing 9/17

SVA has weekly free model sessions for students and alum, and I am going to be doing my level best to attend as many as I can! This week was the first time I've drawn from a live model in, uh. Five-ish months. So of a three-hour session, only these four poses are really worth showing.

10 min poses

20 min poses

As obviously rusty as I am here, I'm really pleased... mostly because this -

- is what I did at my last model session, five months ago, for the 10 and 20 minute poses.

The change in my linework and markmaking is striking to me, and what's especially interesting to me is the fact that I have my drawing-a-day project to thank for that. The way I draw has changed and streamlined to a point where it's usually actively enjoyable, where before drawing was a needful chore on average - something I was good at but took little joy in.

As far as I can tell, it has to do with letting go, or trusting myself, or confidence, or a combination of all three. The first line doesn't have to be perfect, nor does it have to be feather-light in case it's wrong; I can take as many passes on a shape as I need, and describing form with hatching without hesitation because if I'm wrong I just erase it and try again. I also apparently figured out how to find middle steps between the blank mask-face (+/- placeholder features, like on the middle figure from the old session) and a painstakingly drawn portrait.

Anyway, all of this is just a sort of congratulatory post to myself on improvement, and some thoughts on the specifics and reasons. It's helpful to think 'out loud', and beyond that this kind of post turns out to be a really invaluable time-capsule for my artistic journey. Thanks for reading, if you did!

There and Back Again: Days 54-58

The trick with long projects like this, I've found, is finding some way to stay engaged. It's easy to fall into a routine, into taking the shortest distance between two points, into doing the thing because it must be done - but once that happens, the reason behind the project is lost. Doing a drawing a day for six months is meaningless if, less than two months in, the drawings became static and labored and easy.

It's my responsibility to notice when this is happening and figure out what to change. Last summer, I didn't do that: over the course of the second half of the project, while there were good days, it was a slow grind downhill and the last week or two were of questionable use. This summer, it took me just a week to catch on - maybe because I've experienced it before, maybe because I'm more aware of my own artmaking.

Whatever the reason, when I hit a wall in the days before this, I was able to feel it. Drawing wasn't fun, the project was a chore, and I found myself drawing just to get it over with - and then getting frustrated when the drawings weren't as good as I knew they could be.

After a page that was particularly slipshod and disappointing, I stepped back and realized I hadn't drawn out of my head hardly ever in the project so far - that, while I had been drawing 'things that I loved', I was accessing them through another's eye. And while I was selecting photos that moved me or attracted me deeply, that was really not a problem. But there are only so many photos that hit me like that, and after 53 days, I was down to picking things because they were pretty.

Turning from that to things from my head was like a breath of fresh air.

Day 54:It was so freeing to draw this page. It just... worked.

Day 55: A character of mine - old and pared down by the elements and life. I wanted to see if I could draw from my head with a specific direction in mind, instead of just putting features down.

Day 56: Not much to say on this. The face really makes me happy!

Day 57: And here's the trap I fell into on most of the previous times I drew out of my head: I just doodled. There's no engagement here, no challenge or investment. It's in no way special, or even that pretty. It's an hour of very lazy drawing.

Day 58: So the next day I did this. And while there are very, very bad proportional errors (I have a bad habit of shortening torsos and hips, and then scaling the legs to that truncated core) I did do my best to be an active participant in this drawing. Its flaws are real, but they're not related to not caring, and it's therefore a success in relation to the one that came before it.

There And Back Again - One Month Down

Having finished the first month of this project (and counting), I thought now would be a good time to take something of a step back and look at what I've done and where I'm going. I didn't get much of a chance for forethought when I started, largely because I was caught in a little sliver of a window between the IMC ending, my new job starting, and moving out of an apartment in Harlem and into a new apartment in Queens - so, apart from the beginning post and a lot of notes that I thought I Should be Writing on each page, this project so far has been a feet-first blind jump.

Not that I don't know what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to use these six months to become a better and more confident draftsman, and to home in on what I actually want to be drawing. I strayed, in the last year, and I've known that since the IMC.

What I haven't really been able to parse until recently, though, is exactly how to go about getting back to my roots through this project. Each day, I basically went, "Uhhh, I guess today I will draw... THIS! Because!" and that wasn't, yanno, helpful. Oh, it fulfilled my hour, and I'm not stupid enough to think that every single day out of six months is going to be a Meaningful Drawing Day... but there are a handful of pages where I clearly just had no idea what to do.

And so I doodled. Some of them were interesting doodles! But I've never been terribly good at such things (it's hard for me to do anything when it's a white sheet of paper and no prompts, and it's not a full composed illustration), and my doodle pages were almost always days that I was 'too tired' to do something real.

I've known for a rather long time now that the difference in my drawing between 'with reference' and 'without reference' is, uh. Significant. So it shouldn't have been surprising that when I started pulling my day's drawings from photos, they got not only much better, but more informative: suddenly, I was able to see some of the things I was doing.

When I'm drawing out of my head, I'm not concentrating on anything, it's not challenging any part of me, and therefore it's not teaching me anything. I fall back on the same shortcuts and approximations, use the same angles and expressions, indulge in the same allowances I always do. When I'm drawing from something, though, I have to concentrate, and so I notice things. 'Oh. That's how long a nose actually is.' 'Oh. That's how light falls across a hand, because the hand's structure is like so.' 'Oh. That's where a neck goes.' And on and on and on.

In the last third of the month, I worked almost exclusively from reference - either photos or life - and not only did my quality skyrocket, but I began loosening up in my rendering and exploring new markmaking. And I was choosing my reference based not only on 'is this beautiful to me?', but also on 'is it useful to me?'.

It was the correct choice. At one month and a week and a half, I can say that I am already better at drawing than I was before, more confident and more expressive both.

The really exciting part of that is I still have most of five months left to keep climbing.