No Artistic rock left unturned.

My studio is my guest room, my workspace, and my fortress of solitude. I'm lucky to have a place to paint and leave my half-finished creations until I can return to them. It's where I do my personal painting, my workspace, and my idea factory. My studio is set up with an L-shaped desk and six file cabinets, cobbled together from pieces from Ikea. On one side is my computer, where I write and edit photos. It has two microphones and an audio interface with a receiver and two monitor speakers for when I do video and voiceovers. The other side is where I paint, with a tabletop easel, lights, and cameras for making painting videos. I pack a lot into a small space, often spilling into the rest of the room, much to my wife's consternation.

In New York, I had an 800 sq. ft. studio/gallery in an 1850s factory building with 20-foot ceilings and large windows. It was freezing in winter and hot in summer, but it was mine. It was an amazing place to work. I did mostly portrait photography and taught workshops there. Painting was about 10 percent of my practice then, the exact opposite ratio of my painting/photography today. My studio is about control. I'm on my own in there. The music, if I play any, is my choice. My subject and the medium I work in are also my choices. I have the freedom to learn, explore, and occasionally crash and burn with a bad painting.

As a teaching artist, comfort and control are what make my studio such a dangerous place. Every week in the watercolor classes I teach, I say to my students, "It's only a piece of paper," or "We learn more from a failed painting than from one that comes to us easily." I find I need to remember to put myself in my students' shoes. After 5+ years of teaching watercolor, I must be closing in on 1,000 paintings and demos. The view from where I stand is quite different from the new student who's been painting for six months and is still getting the hang of a very tricky medium.

How do I avoid feeling like Marie Antoinette telling my students to eat cake from high atop the ivory tower of my studio? It's a good question and one I think more painting teachers should consider. Painting is magic! Not the magic of some all-powerful wizard like Gandalf. There's nothing supernatural about it. It's the kind of magic done by Penn and Teller—an illusion crafted with hours of study, practice, and yes, failure. I don't want my demos or my classes to feel like Gandalf is teaching them. Painting should not feel unattainable. Art is made by people who show up and grind it out every day.

How do I put myself in my students' shoes, then, you ask? Well, I try to put myself in situations that make me uncomfortable—places where I am conscious of every decision and brushstroke, where I feel like an animal in a zoo. This is where plein air and especially plein air competitions come in. When I paint plein air, the walls of my ivory tower are torn down, and I am vulnerable and exposed, which is how I think my students feel. It helps me stay on equal footing with them. Plein air competitions with their two or three-hour time limits really put on the pressure. Then there are the people walking around, watching the artists, and engaging with you while you paint.

I often make this out-of-my-comfort-zone experience even stronger by working with a medium other than my trusty and comfortable watercolor. In these situations, I am not painting against other artists. In fact, I love painting in the same place with others of all skill levels. I don't notice them much when I'm painting, as I get pretty locked in. I do love swapping war stories later about the bugs, the weather, the changing light—you name it. They are in the trenches with me, my comrades in arms. I cheer them on when they win prizes. In plein air competitions, I'm painting against myself and the ever-ticking clock, totally afraid of the air horn that goes off signaling it's time to put down your brushes.

I try to bring the intense feelings that come out in the competition, like "I'm not good enough" or "Why am I even painting?" I often feel these things along with the sun (or rain) and everything that goes with painting outside with an audience. These things are what I try to bring back empathy to my students. It helps me to be encouraging and always find something new in my students' work that they themselves can't see because they are too close to it.

This weekend was the annual Deerfield Beach Plein Air Festival. This was my third year as one of the invited artists. Each year we paint the Butler House, the oldest house in Deerfield Beach. I decided to work in gouache this year. I definitely felt the time pressure, and knowing I am an ambassador of the event as one of the invited artists, I chatted with everyone who stopped by to watch me paint, even though that added to the time pressure. All in all, for a teaching artist, I think it's terribly important to get out of the studio and paint from life as often as possible. I think it enhances my studio work and makes me a better teacher.

Here is my 9x12" plein air of the Butler House.  Gouache lent itself well to this timed event as it forces you think and paint in terms of large simplified shapes.  I would have liked one more hour with it, but all in all I'm quite pleased with it and for the third year in a row it sold at the event.  It's great to sell a painting, but the feeling that I did the best I could i three hours and made some good choices that is priceless.  Next week I'll talk about mediums and when I paint in which one as they are very different from one another and how that affects the approach to the painting process.  Here's a hint in someways it has a great impact on my choice of medium, but also zero impact on the act of painting.  I'll explain my thoughts in next week's post.

Keep Makin' Art!

Carl 

Hi Everyone,

Sorry I'm skipping the blog post this week.  I sprained my ankle over the weekend and am going to rest for a few days.  Look for a new post next Monday at the regular time.

Carl

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

I have to admit that my reserves of hope for the United States and humanity have been in short supply lately. Every time I peer out from the safety of my studio, I hear just enough bad news to dive right back into the studio where I turn up the music and paint. This week, the gift of hope came to me via a bit of a windy road. This year, because I teach popular art classes, the opportunity to judge local and regional art shows has come to me. This raised my profile a bit, and I was approached to be a judge for the art division of the Pathfinder Scholarships started by the Palm Beach Post for students in Palm Beach and Martin Counties. For the past month or so, I, along with two other judges, have been reading the application packets of 35 high school seniors who have been nominated for the Pathfinder Scholarship. There was a lot to read and look at while we did the preliminary scoring. This past Wednesday, we interviewed all thirty-five nominees, and my hope bucket was refilled to the brim. Each student had two minutes to show us their work and give us their elevator pitch as to why they were worthy of the scholarship. My only regret is that we could not give scholarships to all of them. Some of the kids were more polished than others, but they all had a passion for art and where it would fit into their future lives. They were excited for college and beyond. Many of them had a real voice in their art. The enthusiasm about art and the future was infectious. I was asked if I'd return next year and be a judge again. My answer was heck yes! The world is going to be okay with kids like these as our future. Their hope and energy gave me an abundance of hope. The scholarship interviews were like getting a year's worth of the hope I get from teaching delivered in one day.

The other way I get hope is in the studio. The time spent painting relaxes me and allows me to breathe and find my center again. It's the time when I am fully engaged in painting that my mind gets to slowly process everything. My studio is filled with music, no news, and my phone's ringer is on silent. When you find something that recharges you like that, protect it with all you have. When things are really heavy out in the world, I often turn to still-life. They are peaceful and fun things to paint. Here are two pieces I worked on last week. Enjoy.

Keep Makin' Art!

Carl

This is  week six for the new blog.  I think it's becoming a habit!

The cellist Pablo Casals was known for his rigorous practice schedule. Even well into his nineties, he practiced four to five hours a day. When asked why he still did this, he simply said, "Because I think I'm making progress."

I've always liked that story. It resonates very strongly with me. I think any serious creative endeavor is on a lifetime arc of slow but measurable improvement. There are, of course, moments when it all works, and you suddenly level up, but I think that is merely the moment you or somebody else notices the improvement. It's really the months or years of adding miles to your brush. When we overcome a challenge and then repeat it, we absorb that new knowledge and grow as artists.

Just like all of my students, I am practicing and taking every opportunity to keep learning and improving. I think if I felt like I had topped out and couldn't learn, grow, or expand what I am doing, I would shortly lose interest and move on to something else. But being in my twenty-fifth year of painting, I suspect I will be at this for as long as I am on this Earth. You might ask yourself what an artist who teaches 3-4 classes a week and averages 4-5 paintings a week does when he's not working. It's the same as anybody else. I look for chances to learn and grow. I watch a lot of painting content on the internet. Almost every video I watch, I learn something. As I've grown over the years, I seek out artists who really impress me to learn from. Last year, it was the mentorship program with Thomas Schaller, which was life-changing. I watch a lot of videos from Paintable TV as well. They are not cheap but full of great information. This weekend was my favorite kind of thing: an in-person workshop with a great artist teaching a medium that I am just beginning to get comfortable with. This workshop was in watercolor pencil with the great Fernando Porras up in Jupiter at the New Studio for the Visual Arts. Workshops help me advance in a medium quickly, but more importantly, they recharge my artistic batteries and give me new tools I can share with my students. Below are a few photos from this weekend.  What creative pursuit really gets your juices flowing and has gotten under your skin to keep getting better at it.

"Chase away the demons and they will take the angels with them."

Joni Mitchell

Throughout most of my life, I've used my art, both photography and painting, to escape the blues. Some call it the black dog or depression. Whatever you call it, I used my art as a shield to keep bad feelings away. Easing pain or struggle is a powerful narcotic. It became part of my emotional armor. I rarely put those things into my work. My color choices and subjects generally run to happy; maybe I wander into moody once in a while. It's quite seductive to find something that takes the sad stuff and the bad news from the outside world away, even for a little while. This act of putting everything on hold to get that peaceful feeling of painting or whatever outlet you use can be healthy in short bursts. Ultimately, Joni is right; the time you spend ignoring the outside world blocks the good along with the bad. This leads to missing out on good things in life, and you don't get the chance to process what you are feeling. This is a lot like another quote I like: "Wherever you go, there you are." When I was younger, I always came home from vacation wanting to move to where I just got back from. That's the same thing, isn't it? You go on vacation or, even more drastically, move somewhere new, but wherever you go, you are still carrying your emotional baggage that is yet unprocessed. I spent years pushing down feelings and using my artistic outlets to feel at peace. The problem is that unprocessed stuff is never far away. When I let it build up, it definitely finds a way out. Painting especially allows you to hide from feelings because you are so focused on the act of creating.

So what do we do about it? As I have aged and been through the cycle of putting off dealing with my feelings until they pushed back hard, I have come up with a process that works for me. There are a few healthy tricks that allow me to be in the studio guilt-free and use my painting time to think about how I feel. First, throughout the day, I make a list of the things I need to get done. This procrastination through paint applies to our daily tasks and things like business paperwork too. Not getting that done in a timely manner adds to the mental junk and can trigger those down days when it gets overwhelming. So, I look at my list each morning and carefully decide what I need to get done before I can get in the studio and splash paint around. The other thing I have started doing is reading the NY Times on my iPad while I have my coffee or playing NPR for a while before switching to music. I do this so world events are in my orbit. I had stopped getting any news from the outside world, but that has the same effect. Now, before I paint, as I drink my coffee, I ask myself what's going on and how do I feel about it. It can be anything from the outside world (a big scary place, but one I can't ignore for too long) to my feelings about my relationships or events that have happened in my daily life that need thinking about. I find if I can go into a painting session having been intentional about exploring my feelings, that continues in a part of my brain I'm not using. It's the emotional equivalent of loading up your coffeemaker the night before and setting the timer. The coffee gets made while you do other stuff. Sitting with the demons and the angels while I paint feels like a more wholehearted experience. If I hit a snag and the stuff bubbles to the top, I take a break. It's usually a good time to take the dog for a walk or get outside for a bit. That is what I have come up with to help me process the emotional stuff in a healthier way.

What ways have you come up with to process the baggage?

This weeks painting is a watercolor that arose because I was more present in my daily life.  While cutting melon for breakfast the light streaming into the kitchen from the carpet made the fruit glow.  I quickly grabbed my camera and used black cardboard as a makeshift background.  I had my painting subject for the day and a yummy breakfast.

Keep Makin' Art!

Carl