The Jealous Artist

  I should have more accurately named this blog, the Jealous Artist, because I can be moved quickly and often to a state of deep, lingering envy.

  I came back from a week in Maine yesterday reasonably happy that I’d made some hard-won progress in my battle with perspective and liked that I’d done two paintings of chairs quite outside my comfort zone. 

 To be honest, I don’t have a comfort zone with my art but there are levels of angst - a painting of heirloom tomatoes in a row, for instance, making me feel less I’m-a-loser-why-did-I-ever think-I-could-do-this than a rendering of a complicated chair at a breakfast table.

 

 At any rate, I met last night with the artists I’m sharing an annual October show with which we call alternately Six Women Painting or Five Women Painting or one year, Five Women Painting and a Guy. There was the normal decision-making that goes on with these things – one of the six decided she didn’t want to participate causing a name change, re-division of the expenses, postcard re-design, but I sympathized. I understand self-doubt.
  I have a harder time with success.  So, what woke me up at 3 a.m. this morning  was learning at the meeting that one of the artists was accepted in a prestigious gallery and another was publishing a lovely calendar of her art which she's already sold 150  copies of after a mere mention on facebook.

    They deserve these triumphs, I feel, not because they’re lucky but because they know how to paint a chair correctly.

 

Behind every pizza parlor

The pizza joint down the road

I do not have a comfortable relationship with plein air painting – mainly because it’s not comfortable.

 I have listened to more than one plein air artist talk about painting outside every day of the year and this is not in Southern California but New England.

They say rain requires good quality umbrellas to clip onto your easel and to battle snow storms you need a copious supply of hand and foot warmers, triple layers of clothes, gloves with the finger tips cut off.

  If gusting winds threaten to carry you to Oz, just convert your car to a studio and carry on.

  Bushwhacking into the woods or over the dunes with easels, chairs, tables, food, canvases, paints, brushes, waters, solvents, palettes, camera and everything else I forgot to list is a walk in the park.

 It's not. I did this for four days in a workshop on Monhegan Island in Maine.  We were so scattered over that island the instructor couldn’t have found us if he wanted to which he didn’t.  He did, however, stumble upon me on the last day at a picnic table near the inn where we were staying.

Albeit there was no vista of crashing waves, craggy rocks, sailboats heeling out in the ocean, but I didn’t have to trek far, a bathroom was relatively near by and I had a table and the canopy of a huge maple tree.  Did I mention the sleet and that I paint with acrylics?

 “What are you doing HERE?” the instructor was aghast.

  Good question when Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper and all the rest of the artists who achieved Monhegan masterpieces did not settle for a picnic table when just over those two or three steep hills in the far distance was a precarious perch above the roiling sea.

  Yet, a picnic table without a view does not have to be the lot of the lazy painter. Yesterday, I spent the afternoon behind the pizza parlor a half mile from my house. I’m not assuming that the edge of the parking lot at most pizza joints ends as this one does in a tangle of pickerel weed in bloom and a stream that bends obligingly off into the fuzzy distance. 

Behind the pizza joint

There was not a too-cool-for-school instructor, but there was a six-year-old who wandered over with her grandfather. I told her she too could sit in a beach chair on the bank of a river and paint a picture in her lap if she wanted to.

That possibility seemed to please her because she picked a cardinal flower and put it in my cup of dirty water as a gift. 

   

From my skewered perspective

My friend Pam on the tracks

This is not the easiest thing to confess.  I can’t draw perspective.

I can get around this rather striking deficit because I paint in a flat style and I paint in a flat style because I more or less experience life with my nose pressed right against the window pane.

  Everything is big and vibrant and fills the canvas and there’s no room for a lot of foreground, background or sides of buildings.

 But, you’re always going to smack into your drawing shortcomings eventually, and that happened to me when the little painting group I’m in decided last week to render railroad stations and the tracks that run by them.

 This would seem a subject matter pretty easy to sidestep – arguably very easy to sidestep, but the Essex (Connecticut) Art Association is having a juried show at the Valley Railroad in Essex and all art submitted must depict an aspect of this enterprise.

 A locomotive under full steam seemed a lot more daunting to render than the tiny train stations in the picturesque towns the tracks pass through  so we set up opposite one of these little guys recently.

 Aside from coming narrowly close to being flattened by the train as it unexpectedly wheezed by filled with tourists craning to see why four grandmother-aged women were putting themselves in harm’s way, there was no way to avoid perspective. Given the requirements of the show, it was pretty necessary to make the one-room, 100-year-old building look more or less like it looks.

 It was really hard for me. It’s an awful painting and though I took pictures, measured , held my pain brush parallel to I’m not sure what and scanned a couple of books on perspective, I couldn’t get it right and finally took it a critique night.

 There, Ishita, the artist doing the critique,  – an artist, by the way,  who does non-representational encaustic paintings and collages - gently explained perspective.

 This caused me to talk Joyce, another artist who gives occasional workshops in perspective, to schedule one next month. But, I couldn’t wait that long so I took my horrible painting and a blue magic marker to Joyce a couple of days ago.

 Right now, I could photograph my painting laced with Joyce’s many blue lines, but I’m too embarrassed.

  That’s not fair. I’ve plunged this far into confession, I might as well wallow. Here it is:

Back under the tent

My sister Sarah in our home away from home

Back under the tent

I once made key chains in the shape of Volkswagen Beetles.  I used my mother’s jigsaw and cut out the cars, painted them yellow, red, blue or black, added windows, a door, tires and headlight details and threaded key chains through a drilled hole.

 These I sold here and there including a couple of times under a tent at a craft fair with my sister who was specializing at the time in Maine shore birds painted on collected pieces of driftwood. I borrowed on this concept and did some wildflowers on found wood scraps and also made toddler dresses from fabric end pieces as well as purses from spent oriental rugs.

 This was four decades ago and crafts as a career especially under a tent folded fairly quickly.
 So, when my sister Sarah and I were invited, on the strength of our shared website, to peddle our art in a tent at the Yarmouth Maine Clam Festival this July, I could have been more enthused.

But, for the sake of old times plus a love of clams and Maine, I acquiesced. 

On a late July Thursday evening, I arrived on our allotted scrubby plot to help erect a borrowed tent with more parts than an advanced erector set with my sister and her husband Bill. Nearby, carnies set up their rides and cotton candy and lime rickety operations while in the near distance, ringing a parking lot, were dozens of vendor booths promising every culinary take on the clam imaginable.

 It was not promising.

 Only, it turned out to be really fun. Yarmouth is a lovely town even layered over with a 47th annual clam festival that turns out to be a beloved civic event that attracts loyal and friendly organizers, artists and festival goers.

 Going from show to show all summer and for some artists, all year-round, is the way they make their living.  We met artists in their 70s who are kept spry by traveling with their tent and art from Maine to Florida and back.

 We learned a lot of tricks of the trade, too – like you should sit on a tall chair at the outside corner of your tent so you can see eye-to-eye with your customers making it harder for them to turn to their companion and remark, “Our dog could do a better job.”

 We learned you shouldn’t clutter your tent with furniture and obstacles that prevent clear access to your art and you shouldn’t overly chat up the people who stop in.

 So, on a rickety card table we removed along with its tablecloth, from our décor, I painted a vase of day lilies – also removed from our little home away from home. I used acrylics and a small gallery-wrapped canvas and stuck the finished piece in the show immediately. 

 It didn’t sell but other paintings did. We made friends, ate fried clams, and we’re doing it again next year.

Welcome to the Life of an Insecure Artist

 Last View, 12x30, acrylic on gallery wrap canvas, copyright 2012, Claudia Van Nes

click here to view this painting on my website

I only regularly read one artist’s blog. Robert Genn. He’s generous with his information and lives in British Columbia which is so far away from Connecticut he poses no threat as a competitor.

There are better reasons he’s out of my league but the excuse of geography is easiest to accept.

 I’m pretty sure reading other such blogs would only plunge me deeper into the  pool of insecurity where I dog paddle most all the time.

I might though read a blog like this one I’m starting about a 67-year-old artist who woke up this morning with the intention of doing a quick painting on a small, oddly shaped gallery-wrapped canvas of a bridge over the Connecticut River.

This afternoon between 2 and 5 pm is when artists can bring their renderings of rivers to the Lyme Art Association for its next themed show, plunk down the entry fee and wait for the self-addressed stamped envelop to be returned later in the week checking whether the art was accepted or rejected by a juror.

I live on the Connecticut River with a straight on view in the distance of the picturesque East Haddam Bridge so have a plein air situation in my dining room. I should be able to rip out a painting of what’s constantly in front of me by 2 p.m. But, I stopped myself  because every time I do the scene it’s an epic struggle. The early morning spurt of confidence that this time it would be easy shriveled up and the burden of  a half-finished rendering of the East Haddam Bridge and all that big expanse of murky water under it and changing sky above was too great.

All this was not helped by three phone calls in rapid succession during the span of time I had not yet altogether abandoned my plan. My sister in Maine had good news from a possible buyer who found her through our shared web site. Not only that, she’d gotten another call from a wedding planner who also found the site and wanted Sarah’s paintings to decorate the barn where a client is getting married.

You can say, “Weird request.” You’d  be right, but on other hand, a bride with a wedding consultant is not a poor bride nor probably are her parents and their friends. I did rally encouraging support.

Likewise, for the second call with another artist, Joan Cole, who just got back from a Maine trip with two other artists she’s having a show with in October. She’d done 17 paintings in one week.

I then talked with one of the other artists on that trip, Jan Blencowe, to ask her to help set up this blog I’m composing here. She has her own blog and reads many others. She’d done in that same week’s time, 25 paintings of crashing waves and clam beds and dense stands of balsam trees and mountains fading into magnificent skies.

Yet, despite the self-pity, I see behind my computer the pane of glass in a large window where a cardinal pecked unrentlessly for three year through three brides, three nests in the laurel that brushes the window, three hatchings of baby cardinals before he succumbed.

 Noble Bird, 4x6, acrylic, copyright 2012, Claudia Van Nes, click here to view this painting on my website

  One of the paintings I did of my demented avian companion is in a show now. I placed him in a more tropical-looking scene because well… because being an artist I could do that.