Category Archive

I have finished this painting, or rather, I’ve stopped working on it. It’s not totally unsatisfying, but I couldn’t get the precision either of line or of color with acrylic paint. Joy and I went to the Kehinde Wiley exhibit at the De Young today, and aside from the beauty and gut-punching power of his art, I was also looking at the oil paintings and saying “How does he DO that?” His lines are razor-clean and his shading looks both impossible to do without a brush and also like no brush hairs can ever have touched that surface.

I will learn more about painting, I’m sure, and develop more control over the brush. For now, I loved working with oil pastels so much that I’m going to make another painting of the roses, same size, with that medium.

It’s a heart-thumping kind of game: I pulled off the tape that was holding this in place, put away the pastels and other materials, signed it, and propped it up, all while averting my eyes. Then I left the room and came back in, glancing over at it from the doorway, as if I had never seen it up close. I wanted to see if the magic had worked, and to a pleasing extent, it had. Scrawls, strokes and dabs of oily sticks on paper were transmuted into light on water.

Just as some ink paintings are called drawings, making this felt like painting even though it was done with a dry medium without brushes. I think I’ll paint the same scene tomorrow.

The moment I saw this picture, taken by my friend Nancy Palmer Jones, I said “I want to paint that!” Nancy said, “Go for it!” I want to document the stages, because it’s so heartening to remind myself how the painting went from blank to visual gobbledygook to “hey, that looks like something” to “that’s it!” So I’m putting the original photo at the end of this post, to show the painting getting closer to the model.

The painting is acrylic on paper, about 8×10″. I haven’t taken a painting class since high school, so for even the most basic questions, such as “Should I work from dark to light or light to dark or what?” I have to ask friends or Professor Internet. Professor Internet gave me a fairly consistent answer, but then I forgot what it was, and once I’m painting, I am too impatient and impulsive* to interrupt and go look again. So the first stage turned out to be me laying down blocks of color, mostly midrange, with some darks put in and the paper left blank for the lights. Here it is:

Today I was even more flummoxed about what to do next, feeling a bit like I was just coloring. I did not want to color. But my drawing instincts took over and I found myself doing what I would do with a pencil or charcoal, except with a brush. After today’s hour or so of my getting more specific with the lines, shapes, and colors, the piece kinda sorta looks like the petals of a rose:

I might not get back to it before leaving on our long trip, a week from today. I’ll bring a sketchbook and some pencils, of course, plus a few markers and colored pencils. Painting and other projects will resume when we’re home.

The original:

*Autocorrect tried to change this to “intuitive. ” Aw, thanks, Autocorrect!