Making History: Leaving Marks

"Angel 8"  by Jim Carpenter, 6.5" x 4.5"

The Process Of Aging: Leaving Marks

This painting which I am titling "Angel 8" for the time being, is small. That is, it is small by comparison to what it was a few hours ago.

You may have noticed I've skipped from Day 16 of Leslie Saeta's 30 Day Painting Challenge to Day 21. That's how long it took for this painting to arrive. The original start had  been around for several years, painted blue and 11" x 22." I scrubbed it back and cut it in half weeks ago. In the last five days I must have painted it and then taken the painting back down to the raw paper at least 4 times. This is how my paintings get that aged look that I like so much. Each time I remove paint some elements are left behind - the scratches, the lines, the most stubborn layers of paint embed a history into the paper. 

I don't set out to do this - that is, I don't say, "Ok, I'll paint this and then destroy it 5 times and then finish it." Each pass I am hoping will release the painting. But sometimes that's what it takes.  That and an "ah ha" moment. 

Ah Ha: History Repeats Itself

For me this time the "ah ha" moment came when I realized that maybe the part of the painting I was really focused on was the essence of the painting and that the rest of the painting, though nice, was a distraction. Did I learn nothing from my own blog post on Day 15? All it took was finding mat corners to frame the area and I could see that I needed (once again) to crop the painting and that (once again) the image was exactly 6.5" x 4.5." What's that all about?  

I still like what is left behind of the 11" square. I may be able to use what's left for the next few paintings in the challenge. But what I'm learning from this process - two paintings in a row now - is that when the painting isn't working as a whole and I really like two different sections of the painting that maybe I have more than one painting going on in one space. It is a matter of composition. Sometimes I may be playing with composition and wanting to split the viewer's focus, but it didn't feel right today, and I sensed a need to zero the focus in on one grouping.  

The Ramble: The Challenge To Be Free

The Ramble by Jim Carpenter, Acrylic on Paper, 10.25" x 8.25" 

"The pedestrian is the highest and most mighty of beings...he is happy in the company of his own mind, he wanders detached, wise and merry, godlike."- Tom Hodgkinson

Enjoying The Journey

It is day 5 of Leslie Saeta's 30 Day Challenge. I am one day behind. My focus, however is on enjoying the experience of painting. So, so what if I'm one day behind? 

Here's what happened today. I had a painting that I was developing yesterday for completion today. And I finished it at about 2 p.m. Great! I'd be early with my post today. But there was a problem: I really didn't like the painting very much. Although I think the painting might have found an approving audience, to me it was stiff and empty. I'd have nothing to write about it come blogging time. So, I decided to turn to my old standby of alcohol (the rubbing kind) and paper towels, and I began to scrub it out. Talk about a feeling of being free! I was throwing the painting under the table and starting over. Almost. 

Erasing it was a risk, but it was a risk worth taking. I discovered that I really do love the feel of erasing what isn't working and watching a surface full of possibilities emerge. This painting looks nothing like the other. It's half the size and has 3 times the number of figures in it.  But this is the painting that was on he paper before I knew it; it was the painting that I needed to uncover.

The experience of painting this was easily identified as terrifically satisfying. Although I was not certain of what the painting actually meant, everything I was feeling was telling me that the painting was worth painting because I had really enjoyed it. The meaning would come later. 

"For the creative spirit, the act of walking harmonizes work and play."- Tom Hodginson

Landscape: Go Figure! - Day 2 (or 3?) of the 30 Day Challenge

Ancestral Landscape by Jim Carpenter, 

Acrylic Mixed Media on Crescent Board, 28" x 20" 

"Work and life were intertwined. A weaver, for example, might weave eight or nine yards on a rainy day. On other days...he might weave just two yards before he did 'sundry jobs about the lathe and in the yard & wrote a letter in the evening.' Or he might go cherry picking." 

- Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Idle

Playing Hard

I'm a day late posting my painting for day 2 because I didn't finish my painting yesterday. You might think that "a painting a day" is about making a painting in a day from scratch, a blank canvas, but for me it is also the opportunity to finish paintings that I have been stalling on. I easily have 20 or so paintings in various stages of completion.

For Day 2 of the challenge I chose to "finish" a problematic landscape I started in 2013. Have you ever had a project that you felt you could work on forever and never finish? That is the point I got to with this landscape, I made adjustment after adjustment and just could not get it to balance out. After dinner and a Chi Kung class about "conserving the chi" I decided to go to bed early and just solve the painting the next day, or, if necessary, tear it up and move on to the next painting.

I was reminded of Matthew Daub's rhetorical question: "Why are you so intent on saving a painting?" And his suggestion: "Throw it under the table and just start a new one!" I was ready to throw it under the table. But I also know my own creative process and its time table. For 30 years without fail I would plunge into despair at the end of the fifth week of play rehearsals, convinced that the play would be a disaster. And again, without fail, at the end of the sixth week, I would know for certain that the play was going to work. I experience the same thing with my painting. I get to the point where I am certain that after pushing through the tough spots nothing can save it and I want to throw it under the table. But I also remember that some of my most personally satisfying paintings come from paintings that I destroy first, and then recover. So I pretty much destroyed the landscape in an hour and went to bed at 12:20 a.m.

 Original landscape

 We might call this the "Week 6" phase!

What I woke up to!

This painting is on crescent board and I used various gel mediums and some collage to create a variety of surface textures on it, so I could not lift the paint off the way I usually do on paper. Instead I just painted over it, using a palette knife and later a brush. I began to see some possibilities emerging even then, but it would mean moving away from an abstract landscape into something that incorporated figures. So what else is new?

It was a choice. I admit that I felt the pull to let the figures emerge, even though I didn't know what I would do with the landscape orientation. In retrospect, I see that I still do not easily listen to my intuition. I have to argue with it a little bit. I could write a play.

Intuition: Oh look! There are some nice figures imbedded in there!

Me: Oh, yes. But I am painting an abstract landscape, not figures. So forget about it.

Intuition: Ok. But, the figures are really cool. And the landscape is uh, ok whatever. Follow that path until you get frustrated with it, then block it out, and paint what I was suggesting in the first place.

This painting has all of the things I love to see in my paintings: the immediacy of improvisation, a sense of discovery, the notion of unearthing the remnants of some long lost work of art, the sense of the past always being present, ancestral history, reverence. It may take some doing, but it subverts the notion of "job" and supports my quest for idleness.