No Artistic rock left unturned.

This morning, it feels like 42 degrees in South Florida. It's chilly, but nothing like what my friends up north are experiencing with the blizzard. Stay safe, friends, and I suggest staying home to paint.

This week, I will answer the question I get most often from new students: Do I need to be able to draw to do watercolor? Sadly, the answer is yes, at least in general, and from my point of view, it's an absolute yes. Why do you need some drawing skills or at least a way to get the image onto your watercolor paper? Well, that's due to two things: firstly, watercolor's unforgiving and often unpredictable nature, and secondly, the difficult nature of correcting mistakes in watercolor. There are, of course, watercolor artists who can work in a direct manner with no drawing. I am not one of those artists. Working light to dark goes against how our brains work in general. The great Tom Schaller calls watercolor a subtractive medium, meaning every mark and wash you make takes away from the light in a painting. Things go wrong in watercolor, or at least not as you expect them to. Watercolor requires me to be fully present while I paint to deal with what the paint and water are doing. For me to be present, I need a roadmap, and for me, that's a drawing.

Often, this leads to two more questions from my students: How do I get good at drawing? Just like how you get to Carnegie Hall... practice, practice, practice. The other question I get asked is: What can I do while I get good at drawing because I really want to paint in watercolor? I get it; watercolor is alluring and has a look all its own. The good news is there are things you can do. You can put a grid on your reference photo and the same grid on your watercolor paper to help you see where the lines belong. You can trace or project your image on the paper. There is good news here: all of these activities help your eye-hand coordination, which eventually helps your drawing. Watercolor generally goes dark over light. You can't find your drawing by going back and forth, light over dark and then darker light. Watercolor is a tricky medium to learn, but very satisfying as you start to improve and get more control over it as a medium. I'd argue you don't get more control, just more of a sense of how it will react. Don't let this stop you from taking up watercolor it's a great hobby, just plan on drawing or transferring your idea to the paper.  You don't want to be figuring out your values, mixing colors and responding to the paint and water all at the same time.  That makes watercolor next to impossible and you won't have any fun.

This is a typical watercolor work flow for me from sketch to drawing to early washes to finished painting.

Keep Makin' Art!

Carl

“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” ― Robert Frost

Replace the word "poet" with "painter," and that sums me up and wraps it up nicely with a bow. My whole life, I've known that what I am is an artist. I'm not saying I'm great at it. I don't think that is even the point of it. At a very young age, maybe four or five, I knew this. There was a peacefulness that came over me watching my mom paint in her basement studio or in the eerie red glow I associate with watching Dad, a real master of his craft, working in his darkroom. My first real sense of joy came at the age of seven. Mom signed me up for pottery camp with a woman in our town who had her clay studio in a cowshed and her gallery in an old barn she converted. I remember days of digging through the giant pile of rocky clay in the shed to mix our own clay and the thrill of throwing pots. Those long summer days were broken up by breaks where we kids would run through cornfields and see who could jump the farthest off the giant haystacks. I remember falling asleep at home on those long summer nights after supper and a good scrub to get the evidence of the day's life lived with wild abandon on that old farm. I often had a fine coating of clay and straw everywhere. Mom often had me sit in the back of the station wagon at the end of the day until she could get me clean. That sleep that came as the summer sky darkened in the Hudson Highlands to a chorus of crickets was some of the best sleep of my life. At that early age, I knew I was an artist. Seven was probably the year it became apparent I was different from the other kids. Sensitive, empathetic, and way too worried about what the neighborhood kids would think or call me. These were hardened, crusty kids, almost all of them children of New York City cops and firemen who had started their young lives in the Bronx or Brooklyn and were dropped into a life with Winslow Homer painting for a backdrop. I'm not talking about the Homer of the man in the rowboat facing the raging sea. I mean his earlier work painted at the bucolic Houghton Farm in Mountainville, NY, a mere three or four miles from where our development was. Imagine those paintings of kids in period costumes on farmland that I love so much, but replace those kids with the Bowery Boys... I'm giggling at the absurdity of it, but that is the confluence of my young life. Those New York City tough kids turned our wooded mountain into something that my brain remembers being like "Lord of the Flies." At that intersection of wild mountain laurel and hooligans on bikes is where doubt found its way into my little artist brain. It's a lingering voice in my head that it took until my fifties to silence. The effects of those bullies laughing and on occasion beating me up left a nagging critic in me that I could not shake, and it affected my decision-making for a long time. I chose photography over painting at an early age because it was more acceptable. I told myself it was okay because photography was still art. Put a pin in that thought of photography as art. I have opinions about that I'll explore in a later post, for now, I don't want to lose my thread. Even in college, three hundred miles from the little neighborhood trolls, the die had been cast, and the voice followed me. I was an art major in college but kept dropping my studio classes at the halfway point just before the first critiques were scheduled. My inner voice kept shouting I wasn't good enough to be a painter. I made my way through the world as a photographer and a pretty good one, but always saw it as a consolation prize. Every award and accolade a reminder I wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing. Fast forward twenty years, one night on vacation on Cape Cod, I broke my toe and was hobbled a bit. Getting down to the beach from our house was about fifty steps. So I picked up a brush and tried watercolor to pass the time. I was once again hooked on painting and felt like the seven-year-old me jumping off haystacks and throwing pots with wild abandon. Over the years, the balance shifted from ninety percent photography and ten percent painting. Now it's reversed; I mostly take photos for my painting. I now know I will paint for the rest of my life. It's who I am. I could not run away from it forever. I will keep painting and teaching. It turns out teaching painting is as satisfying as painting for myself. Do I have any regrets, you patient reader who has indulged me this far may be asking yourself? No, not really. All of my experiences have added up to make me who I am today. That said, I'd like to take those thirty years I wasn't painting and tack it onto the end of my life. If I have enough time, I may just get good at it. I used to fear bad paintings. The mere idea of one could cripple me. Now that I have accepted that I am a painter and it's how I walk through this world, I deal with the occasional clunker differently. I have been painting nearly non-stop for six or so years, and I see the arc of improvement. I also remember that a hitter in baseball who averages getting a hit only thirty percent of the time is destined for Cooperstown. The only critique I need to please is me. I also recognize that I can have a painting that is both a good idea and a bad painting. Let the painting go and try again.

The payoff, dear reader, after reading my account of how I've gotten here and slayed a few childhood demons with my keyboard, is this. Here is where the title of this post comes into play. I process the world by painting. I cheer for the painters who can take the world as it is and convert that into commentary or protest with their brush. I'm rarely that guy. When my carefully curated news diet of NPR and BBC World Service seems too bleak, my subject matter always returns from still lifes and portraits to nature and landscape. It quiets my soul to paint a place or thing in nature that has moved me. If I'm successful, they move you too, but my painting's primary goal is to talk me down from the news and remind me there is good to be found in the world. I suppose if I could be a Tolkien character, I'd choose Samwise, but he's an honest-to-goodness hero in the guise of a gardener. I suppose I'm more like Radagast the Brown. He was a wizard who cared for the creatures and trees in his patch of forest. This I know. I am a painter, and a painter is me. My wish for you is that you discover who you are meant to be in this world and you pursue it with the abandon of a seven-year-old leaping off giant haystacks covered from head to toe in mud and clay.

About the art: Roseate Spoonbill - For all of its politics, division, and crazy people, Florida has a giant place of quiet beauty. Myakka River State Park, near Sarasota, is one such place. It was there I found this spoonbill and photographed it. I found the photo recently when looking for subjects I could teach my watercolor students with. I started it in class and had to finish it the same day at home. It's a lovely little painting that brought me some peace while I painted it. Now I must restart it so I can finish it with my students tomorrow.

Keep Makin' Art!

Carl

Note: This week is purely an art post. I didn't want to mix these foundational ideas about painting with the outside world. Today, I'll stay in the studio, music turned up, working on some paintings.

You might find it odd to start a blog for painters with a quote from a musician, but I don't think it is. What he's talking about is abstraction. Don't worry, I'm not trying to turn you all into abstract expressionists. To me, all painting is abstraction to some degree. You're taking a scene, dream, memory, or news headline and distilling it down to the important bits you want to convey. If the word "abstraction" haunts you from an art history class in a dark college classroom years ago, don't worry. You can replace it with "simplification" if that makes you breathe easier.

Getting back to Miles Davis, what he's really talking about is editing out what's not important to your narrative. Leave some space for the viewer (or listener) and emphasize the important bits. In a way, he's talking about contrast and the center of interest in a piece. A well-placed pause can make a new phrase even more powerful, similar to making a high-chroma color look more saturated by having grayed-down tones near it. If you want to get stronger at composition and editing a scene down to just what's needed to tell the story, I recommend plein air painting. Having a 180º view in front of you can be daunting, but arranging and simplifying what's in front of you is required. You really have nowhere to hide. You just have to figure it out and tell your story; after all, as painters, we are storytellers. It's a big moment when you look at something and say, "I could arrange it like this," or "I could use these colors and borrow this from over there." To me, that's the moment you are an artist. As a teacher, I love when students say, "I have an idea; I could do this instead..." It may be brilliant or a disaster, but either way, those are the first steps toward finding your own voice.

This waterlily is one of my favorite paintings I've done. It is simple and spare, with nowhere to hide in technique or detail. It clearly says this is about the feeling of the morning light on the pond that morning. The black negative shapes are there to direct us and give our eyes a map for moving around the painting. The subject matter was less important than wanting to portray the light of a summer morning on the lily. I painted this one in gouache (opaque watercolor); the thicker, gloppy paint helped force me to simplify the way I wanted to.

How do you approach a scene when something about it screams paint me!  What are your next steps?

Keep Makin' Art!

Carl

Inspired by my good friend, the fantastic artist and amazing human, Lola Jovan, I've decided to commit to writing a blog post every Wednesday. Lola's blog (you can find it here: https://www.lolajovan.com/art-blog-lola-jovan) drops each Monday. I rarely start a week without reading her thoughtful posts. As soon as I pour my coffee, it's the first thing I read. Each week, I'll post a piece of my art along with my thoughts for the week. I hope my posts will be as uplifting and inspiring for my readers and students as I find Lola's.

Loxahatchee National Wildlife Preserve
Plein Air Oil Painting
10x10"
Contact me for purchase info.

In today's polarized world, where people shout their 'truths' at each other from across the divide without listening, it's good to be reminded that communication requires time, patience, and a willingness to listen. It's good advice I needed to hear, and funny enough, the message came to me from the painting above. How did a painting teach me to listen and keep an open mind, you ask? Well, this is one of my first plein air oil paintings from a few years ago. At the end of my three-hour session at the preserve, I hated the painting and was almost ready to give up on plein air. I saw it as dull and muddy, not what I wanted to paint. It was a far cry from my watercolor work, which always has happy, strong colors. I saw this painting as a failure and tucked it away in my studio. Fast forward a couple of years... I was going through old paintings when I found this. Now it knocked my socks off! Seeing it with fresh eyes, I realized it captured winter in the Everglades wonderfully. Its lower contrast and grayed-down complements really let the atmosphere shine through. I now see it as a much more sophisticated painting that beckons with a whisper, not a shout, inviting the viewer to linger and really contemplate it. I'm really glad I did not gesso over this one and repaint it. I'm not nearly as brave as Lola, who repaints older paintings at the end of each year. I admire the practice and the commitment it takes, but I sure am glad I did not offer this one up as a sacrifice to the muse. What I learned was that it was not a bad painting. I simply was not ready or capable of hearing it.

This year, I have added a new artistic hat beyond painter and teacher. I started judging juried art shows for different organizations in South Florida. I see it as a big responsibility, one in which I have to mentally prepare myself to review work and award prizes to people with artistic sensibilities, languages, palettes, and ideas that can be different from my own. The tools I am using in my role as an artistic judge are allowing me, at least a little, to hear the words and ideas of others whose ideals and ideas are different from my own. I think it makes me a more complete person. It certainly allows me to enjoy art that is different from my own more readily. This month, I continue in my judging journey. I am one of the judges for the Pathfinder scholarships awarded to high school seniors based solely on merit. It is an honor and a responsibility I am taking very seriously. The payoff is that it is restoring my hope in this next generation of artists. I look forward to seeing what they do in the future. To finish this post, I'm sharing the words of one of my favorite poet-philosophers, the great John O'Donohue. This quote reminds me to be open and ready to receive others' ideas and approaches.

"What you encounter, recognize, or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.

When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface, and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace."
—John O'Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace