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I believe that art enriches and informs our lives everyday in many positive ways. Sharing those experiences, whether as an artist or as an appreciator, is part of the pleasure. I welcome your comments and hope you find something of value: a laugh, an insight, a new idea or just a happy moment. Enjoy art!

Friday, April 12, 2013

Best Laid Plans

We were chatting the other day about how art styles mirror personalities and it made me think of a piece I am working on.

Backstory: I love making plans (probably one reason I find plein air painting difficult: it demands immediate decisions and execution).  Whatever it is I enjoy the process of imagining, sketching, laying out and trying different ideas.  Doesn't matter if it is a vacation or a painting, I tend to lean towards the same routine. 

More backstory: My painting group has a show this summer at the King Center for the Performing Arts themed "Black and White and Read All Over." I've done a few pieces for it but my favorite idea was to be about the demise of the newspaper (the answer to the riddle) and rename it "Black & White and Dead All Over." I wanted to use the black and white of papers and a representation of the press from long ago contrasted with today.  My work is at a standstill and this is where we planners experience a slow agony interspersed with panic attacks.  Things are not coming along as my plans visualized.  Gulp.

Heres a detail of the 36 x 24" piece....I like this part well enough and enjoyed collecting the newspaper mastheads to build a NYC city skyline (more like the 20's than the 2000's).  I have actually considered cutting the board to use only this portion!  I want a little more resolution for the bottom half of the work.

I share this because I get the impression that some people think painting is all fun and relaxing...and many times it is.  But this junction is not fun....I have to stare at this until a brilliant idea (I'd settle for an average idea at the moment) comes my way and I can finish this up...in two weeks or less!!

So the next time you visit a gallery or a museum and enjoy a painting, take a minute and try to decide if it "flowed" for the artist or did he have a few moments of agony?  Was it something that came together as he had intended or was it a coincidence of happy accidents.  In my heart I know the agony ones allow the flow to happen more frequently...but the planner in me always has one eye on the clock and that definitely heightens the challenge.

P.S. While doing my research on newspapers I discovered that my "clever" name has been used several times.  A documentary has been released on the subject that you can read about here.

6 comments:

  1. If the American newspaper dies, how will we keep paint drips off the floors? And how will we ever line the bottom of a birdcage???

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  2. The paint drips are of concern, dare not place the iPad down to do it...you've raised quite the issue here, Kirk!

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  3. I like the piece, Cindy. I think you need just a little piece of interest in the foreground, maybe even a shadow coming up from the bottom to break it up a little. :-)

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  4. Just get some medium and a dark color and "antique" the bottom and corners to give it depth and draw the eye up.

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  5. I like it too and know you planned to finish the bottom as Carol suggests. Love the name even though it's been done before. It happens frequently in book titles too. Apparently there is nothing new under the sun (hey, that's been used before too!)

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  6. You said you wanted to contrast the way we got news in the past with the way we do today == maybe your newspaper boy should be holding an iPad or a smartphone of somehow reference his Twitter account. I love the use of the mastheads as the skyline and the newspapers as the ground; particularly the "Newspaper Death Watch" headline.

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