Confidence, Art and Life

I have a weird attitude. I may be giving bad advice sometimes by coming from a completely different perspective. Or I may be giving good advice where it's needed most. I could be doing both in the same paragraph, depending on who's reading it. So take this as an essay both in general about art and specifically on pastels, because pastel has become my heart-medium.

Pastels are instant gratification. I want to paint it, bang, I do. There it is. Big and bold and visible across the room. I paint small for a pastelist except on very good days but pastels make it possible for me to paint at all most times, because of that speed and power.

This essay is in answer to a forum post where a new friend said something that made me think. I had mentioned I didn't have the space to paint large complex still lifes, so I've been doing small simple studies. I'm drifting into the 6" square format of the Daily Painters and thoroughly enjoying it. This friend compared that to my dipping my toe in the pool, then wrapping the towel around my hips and walking away calling that my daily swim.

Well yeah, actually that is my daily swim. The fact that I was able to do it at all makes it a good day. On a bad day my daily swim would be a two inch long gesture sketch of my cat while he sleeps, something I could probably do without even looking at him because I've done it hundreds of times. He said it was a mystery because other painters with even less space managed to do larger, complex still lifes.

Well, the mystery is solved. I did answer and tell him it wasn't just space but disability. Because he's right. If I was abled, I wouldn't mind getting up and sweeping ALL the food stuff off the dresser, set up a still life, sketch and photo it, live out of boxes for eating for a while till the painting's done (or just work from the photo) and then put all the food back. About like the kind of vigorous housemate who lets the apartment turn into a wreck and then every month or two blitz cleans it over one weekend - and saves time for video gaming overall because that blitz was relatively easy for him.

Heck, I might still live in a place too small for complex still life and just go out to sit on the sidewalk and paint a window display in a shop instead, because that caught my eye. Even make more than one bus trip to get back to the antique shop to do that. There's more than one way to scan a cat.

I adapted to physical disabilities before I knew I had them. This has shaped my attitudes about everything in life and I was constructively lazy for most of it so far. Everything I do to make myself comfortable has an immediate self rewarding effect that I'll actually do more. Someone abled and overworked might find comfort irresistible and prefer to sleep or watch TV or socialize when they could be painting and would enjoy painting if they gave themselves a bit of a push to do it. But someone who's always in pain and usually too tired to live is bored stiff with just watching movies or laying in bed and seizes on any moment when activity's possible as a break in the misery. This is the truth of my life and why I always dive for my Comfort Zone.

It's in my Comfort Zone that I'm able to do anything at all. Add extra challenges onto the logistics of trying to live in my body and chances are I'll wind up using up what little body energy I have in creating the setup or getting out the materials.

So maybe Comfort Zone is a problem like weight loss. Many people are a little over and could stand to lose a few pounds, but you really do not want to suggest that to an anorexic. They might push it to the point of death if you do. It's never a temptation to just do nothing, it's always an unpleasant frustration. I cannot keep the pace of the abled and I find my limits in unexpected and unhappy ways if I don't follow my intuition on what I can do right now, this day, this hour, this weather and what I ate and who said what to me online earlier.

Stress comes into it too. Stress isn't good for people in general, but most people need a certain amount of it to be happy, a comfortable pace. Some people actually thrive on a moderately high level of stress and excitement, depends on personality and metabolism and culture.

Fibromyalgia means that emotional stress, even something like reading the wrong news story at the wrong time when it gives me a shock, will knock me into total exhaustion and physical agony. Crippling pain washes over me. This will also blur my vision, wreck my memory to the point I sound like an Alzheimers patient, leave me forgetting my phone number or not finding something right in front of me. In that state I don't paint well even if I push myself hard and try to paint.

There were some kinds of work I could do in that state but all were left-brained rote activities. The entire 1980s were my "pain robot" years.

That said, I think there's something strange that goes on between attitude and confidence.

I'm continually surprised at how the level of confidence painters have is almost disconnected from their skills. It's not like the best painters beat themselves up more than beginners. It's more that some people are really happy with their own art and others not.

I am usually happy with my art even when it's flawed, because there'll be something about it that I like. I may want to redo it later but probably not by reworking on the same piece. I'll probably apply the critique later to some completely different subject, but if I'm not happy with something I am as likely to be wrong as when I'm thrilled with it.

But I have also got other challenges in life a lot heavier than whether a painting works or whether it's finite perfection. I strive to improve overall so that my worst come out pretty well and someone will like them. I reached a point of liking my own drawings very early in childhood after a long life study of one pet and from there just assumed I'd keep getting better at difficult subjects, but I approach them slowly. I also don't even do them until I've got all the tools I need to do it right sometimes.

But, back to the physical. When I paint, it makes me happy. Especially when I go right into my Comfort Zone and choose a subject with bright colors like a macaw or hummingbird or flower or fruit, or a cat, any cat, a landscape without any other people in it or signs of human habitation where I know I'm not going to get hassled by anyone and can amble through at my own pace without running into those abled hikers with their huge backpacks warbling about "It's only another mile or so" to the water. Better not be or I'm dead. I like to see the water right in the scene.

I like those moments with wildlife where sitting still long enough lets them relax and understand I'm not hunting them, so they wander out and show themselves close. Wild cats especially but most wildlife too. I didn't get to do it often but I have had some moments to remember and love documentaries.

What happened is that because I couldn't run and play as a little boy, I got very good at reading, writing and drawing, the things that were still fun when you sit still for a long time. I did and do lots of little drawings that can be finished before I'm too tired to do it well. I learn a lot and over the past few years have learned so much more than I ever expected, WC is tremendously stimulating.

I get decisive when I paint. A mark is there when I've done it. Removing marks in any medium takes a lot more time and effort than just taking it for what it is and moving on, dealing with it by changing what I do next. That's just a physical fact. Anything that makes it slower and harder to finish a painting means I'm less likely to even manage to do that painting, so my reworking paintings usually isn't cost effective.

I have seen great painters brag about throwing away 19 out of 20 paintings they do. This makes me cringe. I can't count the number of times I hated something I finished, but other people loved it, and then years later I found out why and that what I thought was my worst was actually my best because I'd leaped beyond myself and intuitively practiced a principle I didn't consciously understand at the time.

The thought of wasting that much effort is horrifying too, but on body energy I'm on a budget something like a single parent of five kids working a part time Wal-Mart job. All physical activity takes five times the body energy given my skeleton, that's a limit I had from birth. I took much longer learning to walk than other children and was extremely clumsy being cross eyed on top of it, the eye operation helped but didn't change all of it.

So if I had to cross the room to get more paper, I did so five times. If I have to get out a different box of pastels, I did it five times. If I set up the easel or stand at it, I did it for five times as long and my scoliosis kicks in. Between pain and spasms, I can get too excited and push my back to where I'm stuck with days of bed rest. I have to stop at the first twinge, so slight it doesn't even register as pain, or I will pay bitterly later on.

But maybe for someone passionate and physically vigorous, brushing off a huge piece of Kitty Wallis paper 20 times till they're emotionally satisfied isn't a big deal.

I am currently trying to settle in and rearrange my life to be able to paint more, paint better, paint larger someday. That's a slow process and a good deal of it is a matter of literally rearranging furniture with the help of home care workers. I manage to paint when I can't even take a bath without help, because having help in the bath means I have some energy left to paint the next day. Literally the actions involved in scrubbing my body are sit-ups my back won't tolerate. I can manage two to wash my hair and if it ever gets so bad I can't keep that up, I'll get them shaving my head because I dislike other people washing my hair.

I live on disability for a reason. I'm hoping to get back to painting for a living, or more realistically supplementing old age Social Security by painting on the side. If I wasn't disabled at all, I would have made a good living as a painter probably from the time I was 20 and started getting cash money for little pen and ink dragon drawings. I'd have had the energy to do enough of them and most of all, paint them bigger and colorful and get to enough conventions, do the full sheet starscape and nebula beyond craggy moonscape astronomicals too, live in the sci-fi fandom but drift toward fine art on the side.

It's also screamingly funny to me to look at different art markets like the museums-gallery fine art circuit, the sci-fi fantasy fandom, the graphic novels and murals style of modern art, and see that each one has its own expectations about subject and ideas and "originality" which usually means "Do some old familiar favorite really well and be good enough at this style we can tell it's you without the signature. Share what the dragon or water lilies or mountain goat means to you."

Some people here like tough critique and most of all prefer to see flaws pointed out, because they are tired of compliments and lean toward perfectionist, get disgusted if they feel something's wrong and can't put their finger on why. Or don't trust it if it looks good.

Others blossom under the support. WC excels at both, the critique guidelines here are just broad enough to make it very comfortable for both the tough-critique "exciting challenge" crowd or those that thrive on support and encouragement. I got a lot of encouragement as a kid because sitting still made me get way ahead of any healthy child. I had the time and boredom to do it.

So what works for me may not work for you. Or it may work well for you. Please don't throw away your paintings! Just sell them to other people who like them, they may be right, they sure are for themselves and it'll make them happy. Let it go and use the money to get more paper. Remember that your worst is still way beyond what a lot of people can do at all and they'll still love it as much - just as they do still love the one they bought a decade ago that's not as good as what you do now.

There are always better painters. It's open ended. If you're up in that range you're already so specialized in your own style that the others that great are doing things you'd never think of doing, and so there's something cool to learn, including what you'll invent tomorrow. Or what happens when some chemist creates a new pigment or manufacturer an entirely new medium. There is more to learn about painting even in one medium than any one artist could learn in a human lifetime or even a dozen lifetimes because all of us are also always inventing. Art is not a zero sum game.

I think some ideas, like ranking it best and worst, are bad when applied to it because it gets so subjective and holistic. Your personal taste is going to apply to all of it and so does that of your buyer or gift recipient. Your skill at communicating with those art viewers is only going to increase, though sadly physical illness, pain and injury can reduce it. But that can be worked around. Skill can compensate for lost capacities.

I might get more detailed again if I got prescription glasses. Or I might not because I'm coming to enjoy working loose and concise. It's all fun.

What's the point of this essay? You have to judge for yourself. It's real obvious to me now that yeah, I don't do things the way other people do. What's easy for you is nearly impossible for me, but some things that would be hard for you are stone easy for me. I've had one major still life painting planned for almost a decade now and may well paint it someday - little by little by little and without actually owning any of the objects. It involves an expensive wooden sideboard, a lot of lovely crystal and glass, a mirror and a beautiful white cat sound asleep in the middle of it. Which of these things is going to destroy all the others? Guess!

If I had that stuff I sure wouldn't pose the cat in the middle of it but I may get good enough at planning paintings and rendering those objects to put it together entirely by design, capture my Siamese in the right pose, work out the reflected colors on the white fur and remember the exact hue all of it gets in the mirror because the slightly greenish glass cools everything. It'd be a fun painting. It won't be watercolor even if it'd work in watercolor because Getting Older is not going to make me more capable of stretching a full sheet of watercolor paper. Its most likely going to be pastel on sanded paper. It won't be realism. It will be impressionism.

It's simultaneously going to wow with its beauty and shock you with the thought of all that broken glass a moment later, make you want to reach in and gently catch the pitcher, pick up the kitty fast, if I do it right you will have about a 50-50 chance of saving the situation provided you know cats and that cat trusts you like your cat does. I could remove Ari from a pile of breakables on a good day and I'd move the at-risk pitcher before removing him - in that direction in case he decides it's Rowdy Cat Play Time.

But that's the fun of it. I see that paintin gin my mind and slides of it in watercolor, in oils, in oil pastels, oil sticks, oils by painting knife, pastel realism, pastel impressionism, all different ways, exist where you can't see them. And someday I'll have the skills to do it. Then sketch. Then get to work on it about once or twice a year till it's finally done. Not something I can live on, but it will get done or I'll die first. And that's how my life is shaped.

Know yourself. Know what you do and what you don't and why. Stop beating yourself up. Neither you nor your art has to be perfect. Perfection only exists in finite unliving things and art that's too perfect isn't, because good art has and shows the imperfections in life. Compensate for your barriers and weaknesses, play to your strengths and do what's right for you, because that's also where your style comes from. Past a moderate level of skill, others who know you can tell it's yours before you sign it.

10 Tips for Daily Sketching

Pen and watercolor page of art supplies and ivy leaves

from my current Stillman & Birn Zeta art journal

I've done daily sketching or art for years, been interrupted by events like moving or health crises and then picked it up again many times. So I have some tips on creating and keeping the habit. These are ten things I learned that worked for me:

1. Post your progress online somewhere that others can see it.
2. Paint the subjects you love.
3. Keep going back to favorite subjects over and over.
4. Set out your favorite supplies visibly to inspire you.
5. Use supplies that give fast results if you only have a few minutes.
6. Work small and simple as a default if tired or something interferes.
7. Try gesture sketching, timed gesture sketching or thumbnails.
8. Don't stop if you miss a day or even several. Life Happens.
9. Date and save all your sketches.
10. Display the newest and best to self and others.

1. Posting the goal to a goals thread somewhere online is a public commitment. I use the Goal Post monthly thread on Pastel Talk forum at WetCanvas.com, an online art community that I'm active in. Everyone posts a monthly goal and then posts progress whenever they do. I put Daily Art or Artish on my monthly goals. Cutting mats or organizing supplies counts. Then when I do the day's art, I post that day's success. I do post more often than most of the participants because of that, but it reminds me to do it. We comment on each others' goals and sum up at the end of the month. I count off how many goals I achieved and some months attain all of them.

This could work anywhere online, especially with a small low resolution image of the day's art. I'm starting to post again to Rob's Daily Painting even if it's a sketch, which I neglected for a year due to sickness. Reviving it, I'm starting to get readers again. If you put the images online, people will comment and say something nice to encourage you. If you use an online community, make sure it's a friendly one where comments are positive. If your Facebook or posting site gets trolled, use a blog or community that's positive and well moderated. It works best if most comments are supportive critique or compliments.

2. Draw what you love. What you sketch most often will become easy. Even if it's a difficult subject, drawing it over and over will give you some fast improvement. Daily sketching of something you really like will result in a level where you like your drawings and from then on it stops being as much of a challenge. I love cats so my default for a number of years has been "draw my cat." It doesn't have to be just one subject. I also do small still life objects, pebbles, dead leaf once in a while, clear glass marbles, anything that looks cool to me. I collect little things that look cool to have something handy and interesting to draw.

Doesn't matter what it is, why you want to draw it or if you can draw it well. Keep doing it and eventually it'll get into your comfort zone when it always look good. If you hate it in the first place, forcing yourself to do it will discourage you from drawing again. I hate doing shoes, toothbrushes, soap bottles, appliances, the sorts of subjects that if I rendered it perfectly it'd look like I drew it for an ad agency to sell the product. Things that make me daydream about being out in the woods are much more likely to make me feel like drawing again. They're almost as serenity inducing as being in the woods. So don't draw what aggravates you. Draw what you wish you could draw so well you'd love to frame the drawing.

My cat Ari and his catnip carrot in pastels, rough sketch

3. Keep doing those favorites over and over. I started doing my cat asleep because he was holding still and I hoped it'd be easy. I was so wrong.. until after a dozen of them it did start to get easy and after five years of this, I'm now something of a cat expert when any animal reference comes up. I do big cats well because I studied my personal hairball producer so much, that surprised me in a good way.

These two are very closely tied. It's hard to make myself draw something I hate over and over enough times to do it well. I never wanted to be able to render a soap bottle invitingly with markers in order to sell an idea to an ad executive, I wanted an art journal full of feathers, stones, water droplets on leaves and twigs and glass bobs that was breathtaking good like the ones I admired. The more I do this, the more this actually happens. The more improvement on my favorite subjects, the faster they get into my comfort zone. 

Sometimes things that are really tough, like clear glass marbles, can turn into a quick and easy "OMG that looks so real" Showstopper that gets a lot of comments when I post it too. So pick things you really want to draw well and then keep trying. Pay more attention to progress than perfection until perfection just jumps off the page and throws it into the "Easy" category.

4. Set out your supplies right in reach and easily visible. I used to keep my Pitt Artist Pens set open and handy next to my computer, now I've got Tombow brush pens nearby. Also pocket watercolor sets, water brush, tin of watercolor pencils, pastels sets. One pastel set has a transparent lid so I can see all the colors in their tempting array. Anything organized by spectrum color tends to be very appealing and make me want to paint and draw in color whether that's colored pencils, either sort of pastels or the pan watercolors set. Keep them clean, organized and tempting so they're both easy to use and draw your attention.

5. Use supplies that give fast good results if you only have a few minutes. I'm disabled and might only have a brief window of feeling good enough to do anything in a day. I miss days because I might not be able to get out of bed. What I do to get around being sick works the same way for people who are just busy. Here are what evolved as my favorite sketch supplies.

I use a lot of different sketch mediums but they fall in two categories. Small, clean and no setup for journals: pen or watercolor pencil, pocket watercolor pan sets, Niji waterbrush, very soft B pencils, brush tip pens like Tombow or Pitt Artist Pens. Pigma Micron pens are great and waterproof, but the watersoluble Stabilo ones let me shade by pulling color out with the waterbrush. 

My other sketch supplies are bold - oil pastels, charcoal, soft pastels and Pan Pastels all give me bold results very fast on 9 x 12" sketch paper. Drawings big enough and colorful or dark enough to see across the room. If I want to work big I use something loose. Small, I use bound journals.

6. Work small and/or simple if tired or anything interferes. As described, I use very detailed rendering mediums like brush pens, pen/watercolor, watercolor pencils etc. in bound journals. If I feel like doing detail I literally do something very small - a life size clear marble or two and get it perfect. If I want to do something bold and don't have much time, it's one pear in charcoal and white on brown paper that looked good across the room. It doesn't matter which way I go - I keep the subject simple enough to do it well in the particular way I feel like. 

I like to change up the medium I use so as not to get bored doing the fruit from my lunch over and over. That keeps the exercise from being dull, but I am still drawing pears regularly in season and those marbles look cool in pastels as much as in watercolor realism. You might prefer to choose one sketch medium and stick with it, but when things are tight, draw something so simple and easy it won't take much effort. Go ahead and draw around a coin or use a ruler to start it if you want a perfect circle or straight line, because those tools are there for a reason. With enough practice you'll eventually do freehand lines and circles well even if you usually use them.

Of course sometimes I've got more time and feel good so I'll do a serious pastel painting in more than one session or fill an entire page or two with good pen/watercolor realism instead of just doing one marble. This is what to do on the days you've only got five minutes and grab the pocket sketchbook and the ballpoint you were using at work to sketch a pebble or your coffee cup. It still counts! Let yourself do as much or as many as you like, just set the minimum so small and simple that it's hard to fail.

Charcoal and white pastel pear on brown paper.

7. Try gesture sketching, timed gesture sketching or thumbnails. This relates to the above. I might sometimes do a full realist glass marble but it's also okay to grab a black and a gray brush pen, look at a photo reference and try to do a 2" square thumbnail sketch creating a composition of it. Or do a fast gesture sketch of my sleeping cat curled up, almost a spiral with a foot and two ears sticking out. I started doing this because various classes advised thumbnailing serious paintings to plan them. It helps composition to do that whether you do the painting or not. Practicing thumbnails will improve your more serious sketches. 

Timed gesture sketches are good to train yourself to believe you really can draw something well when you've only got a five minute break on a really long day. I learned that on the fly at a life drawing group. One model said "I'm going to start with a few short two minute gestures" and got up to do a dozen poses with a two minute timer. i went crazy trying to draw her. If I didn't finish, I just went on to the next one. To my surprise, by the end of those gestures I was drawing her a lot more accurately and I finished her fifteen minute pose before the time was up - because I'd blocked her in that fast after the warmup. Everyone got better sketches of her than the rest of the models.

So I tried it again with my cat and discovered I didn't need the timer. He rolls over or moves at least every two minutes even sound asleep. I started drawing him as one of my favorites a few years ago and that made all other animal drawings easy by comparison. Most of all, it didn't take many two minute cats before I could always recognize him and his pose with them. They don't have to be big or detailed, just try to get the pose. 

This gives your hands proof that you really can squeeze in at least one drawing during a break and it means those quick drawings will come out decent enough to motivate you to keep doing them after relatively few tries on the same subject. The reason is that you pay more attention on each try. What you see in the subject is cumulative. Practice at it means being able to do it on the fly and get the essentials of even new things on the first go. 

8. Don't stop if you miss a day or even several. Life Happens. I have multiple disabilities and can't even keep up activities of daily living let alone earn a living. If I could only work one or two days a month and can't predict which days those are, I'd have to get a month's income per painting and be able to complete it within an hour or two to live on my art again. Not likely. 

But people juggling long work hours and stress in emotional relationships, other commitments, other good habits like exercise can also have their schedules randomly interrupted by other people. If you get used to drawing on your break at work, the day the boss wants to socialize all through your break it didn't happen and then you forgot. Life happens. 

So let it go. Don't do perfection. Do progress, the next day do it as if you hadn't missed a day. Or several, because that was friends in from out of town or some romantic something - love can soak all available time and energy in life whether that's a happy long weekend off at the same time or a three day argument about the budget. 

Missing a day or several is going to happen, but it's easiest to build up to where those are rare by not worrying about them. Count instead how long you go between them and find out what interferes. Each day is its own. Each success matters. Losing a day is just luck, it's not breaking a promise to self. But each day you get it is a reward, something cool, a treat for yourself.

Because the more you do it the better your sketching is and the more often you go "Wow I didn't think I could get that so well, it was just this goofy little sketch but it came out awesome." Those happen, more and more the better you keep it up.

Robin in pastel pencils from June

9. Date and save all sketches. This is proof to yourself that you're keeping it up, which is a real achievement. As soon as you accumulate some of those, you will start seeing real improvement. Count those successes. Every now and then look back to old ones and see how amazingly far you've come since last month or last year or a few years ago. I have been doing well for a long time but I've seen more improvement than I thought I could have - because the better I get, the more I can see that I can improve. I draw better than I used to but not as well as I will - and dating sketches is constant tangible proof of that. I sketch things now that I used to think of as impossible and occasionally get it on the first try.

10. Display the newest and best to self and others. I post my sketches on Wetcanvas and am back to blogging and posting them on Facebook too. That's "yes I'm succeeding at my self set goal" and also gets compliments. At home I look through my art journals when I pick them up, get happy about the good pages, think about improving on the ones I'm not as happy with. Most of all see the improvement. When I finish one there are a lot more good pages than I expected.

In a lot of movies, a character who can draw will have a wall of sketches to show the viewer what he's good at. A primate researcher has a whole giant cork board full of realistic gorilla expressions and full body poses, you know he's the gorilla scientist. Hannibal Lecter filled his cell with beautiful views of Florence and you knew he was a genius with an eidetic memory before he opened his mouth. The movies do that to give a lot of information fast. 

I always wanted a wall that looked like that, full of good sketches that told anyone who came in that I can draw well. It's there. Because I'm me and love color, most are in pastels so it's not quite Hannibal Lecter's somber view, it's this blazing garden and fruit stand and nature preserve with my cat here and there making my room a lot more colorful. It's a constant reminder of my skill and who I am - everything in it meant something to me and the style is naturally the kind of art I like most. 

If I have to take down all of it like I did once for the exterminator who insisted bugs hid behind paintings (there wasn't even one), I just start over on the blank wall and recreate it with new sketches. It always looks better than the last time I did the Sketch Wall because practice does that. Instant feedback and identity reminder. I sketch all the time. I do daily art. I'm good at this thing, especially at the subjects I love. It also makes me want to do more. When it's full, I take down the worst of what's up to put up the newest. That means my very best stay on the wall for months and maybe years, but anything flawed rotates into the portfolios and storage boxes for me to go through on spring cleaning and go "Wow, didn't realize I still that. Dang, I really improved. Oh I can't believe I used to draw like that. It's so easy now."

It's constant proof of success. Small incremental success is addictive. These are the things that worked for me.

Drawing at the same time every day is something I could not do because weather is random and my disabilities flare sometimes for reasons I can't even detect. A pressure change can leave me comfortable and energetic one minute, answer the phone, talk two minutes and blam, nap attack and I don't wake up till it's the next day. Or my wrists and hands hurt too much to hold a pen. So that's pot luck. i have to seize the moment and draw whenever I can to keep it up, count it done when it's done.

That is one strategy and doing it the same time and way every day is another. Both are habits, I just happen to have the particular disabilities that break any habits I have at the slightest disruption. Use whichever works. Use whatever of these get you going and ignore any that don't. We are all different and you're the one person in the world that knows most what motivates you or not. 

A failed trial is just that, a success is something you achieved. Small daily successes are good for both your drawing skills and general outlook in life. It's a human thing that's all too absent at most jobs, but art is the one thing that you can never really run out of ways to do something cooler and more interesting. It's also the one thing in life that the more you do it your way, the better you get. Style is something that just happens like handwriting, skill is what makes it visible to everyone else. But very few kinds of activity leave positive, tangible results and improvement every time you do them. It's incredibly satisfying to get to the point something that looked crazy difficult is part of the "easy stuff."

Red clear and blue catseye marbles in pen and watercolor from Zeta journal

__________________

Do you need to Loosen Up?

Underpainting for a pastel still life that could be an abstract painting as is.

That's a serious question, by the way. You might be hearing something I did from friends who critique, especially if you're fond of certain mediums such as colored pencils, oil painting, some styles of acrylic or watercolor or graphite drawing with a lot of fine detail. "You could loosen up and start getting more painterly. Less is more."

Lot of good that comment does when you don't know which details to leave out!

There's a good reason to learn detailed, accurate drawing, realism in tone, value, color, texture, everything. Even to follow a photo reference slavishly with great and loving care, measuring everything twice with a grid or the "tick marks" method (choose dramatic key points like eye corners, mouth corners, edges that turn or change shape, make a dot on the dark side and follow the edge of light and shadow or hue change with a flat or shaded area of rendering.) Or you trace carefully and then render.

Realism and photo realism are a crossroads.

For some artists, they aren't just a crossroads. They are the destination. These artists go from very carefully copying and following the photo in archival art materials, scaling it up or down (especially up) to taking their own photos. Their photos get better and better till they become photorealists. To become a brilliant photorealist, you need to learn accurate rendering AND good photography, have an eye for the image that's going to look even better enormously larger than life and master one or more mediums that can render it.

One noted photorealist was so careful about hand rendering from his photo reference that a critic complimented him for including a JPEG artifact - a light-color effect that was a side effect of using a high resolution digital camera before rendering the powerful image as a very large mural. Gee. Pixels the size of small brush strokes might actualy work, you know? Pointillists have been doing that since Seurat, who predated digital photography!

Maybe that's you! Maybe that's your style and who you are, while everyone who's trying to encourage you to more expressive, visible strokes and broader strokes, conciseness, simplification and so on is leading you on a path not yours. This happens. Your style grows out of who you are and what you love. If you really like to see realism so good people think it's a photo - you can also get so good at rendering life drawing that people think you had a photo reference when you did it.

You could wind up like the great graphite artists who wrote several of my drawing books and copiously illustrated them with trompe l'oeil graphite realism. Black and white photo thumb tacked to a piece of wood with a bit of chain dangling off a push pin, an old shoelace, a few keys, a button with a pin stuck through it... maybe a chandelier crystal... a still life in the vertical. In graphite it looks like a photo of the stuff.

But it's actually better than the photo, unless the photographer is a truly spectacular artist and photographer. The eye can capture nuances the camera can't. You have binocular vision and hands. The camera is monocular and distorts things. It has limited memory compared to you, the human artist. There was fantastic realism in the Renaissance when the only camera was tracing from a camera obscura. You can get the proportions that way or grid or learn to eye them by long practice and lots of sketching. Many ways to scan that cat.

That's where I thought I was going with art back when I was primarily a colored pencils artist. I loved colored pencils realism and still do. It still delights me to see realism done well. It's wonderful and you can do things with it that cannot be done with cameras.

The people who do it for the movies, or illustrators like James Gurney, can turn that kind of realism into a camera to carry inside your head. Dinosaurs can strut with ornate howdahs on their backs and steampunkish colorful people coexist with them to talk to them. Rockets soar and vampires sweep through the night, flower fairies come up in your garden, all myth and legend are yours to paint.

From there some artists stylize and follow this or that style of illustrator. They may go in the direction of comics (or start there) whether Western or manga. They may want to create illustrations or study commercial art for a good job. It's a good use for it, as good a use for art as any. The Sistine Chapel was a high paid illustrator doing a story the patron wanted told in the cathedral!

But head toward Fine Art and someone's going to say "You ought to loosen up."

Maybe that's you. Maybe you look at a Chinese painter's three stroke koi and gasp in wonder, because ink just exploded into as true a likeness as you'd get in some forty hours of straining and measuring and checking. Maybe you look at the Impressionists and want that crazy light and color streaming through your work... maybe there's more than one style that appeals to you. But one thing's for sure. You are not there yet and afraid to take the plunge. It's a scary plunge.

Because one of the best ways to get accuracy is to choose a detail like the size of one eye and measure against that to get the proportions of the nose, the placement of everything else, width of the mouth, side of the face, top of the head, everything. Do that carefully and you will have the likeness, especially with tone rather than line.

This is where "too perfectionist" comes into it. It's a matter of word choice. Seriously.

Until you master realism to the level you are satisfied with it - you, not your art teacher, your parents, your spouse, your friend, the gallery guy, the critic, the artist friend who thinks you could loosen up - there is a natural frustration at every single proportion error or rendering error of any kind.

You might have a beautiful, expressive, gorgeous painting of a vase of flowers that everyone loves. Someone paid you a lot of money for it. And something about it gnaws at you. Because it was the curve of the bottom of the vase sitting on the table, an inaccurate ellipse, that curve was more shallow than the curve of the top of the vase but it's farther from eye level. The illusion breaks, it doesn't look real. The curve of the ellipse is rigth on one side but wrong on the other. And no one cares but you, because, the bottom of the vase is down at the bottom of the picture and you sensibly didn't give it a lot of contrast to distract from the main subject. The composition's fine. It's that stupid ellipse curve again, even after you read about ellipse curves and did exercises and tried to beat it into the stupid little animals at the ends of your arms that they go this way not that way.

Believe me, I have done that one when I knew better. Knowing better comes way before your eye knows and you can see that's what's wrong. You might think the vase isn't shiny enough or the loose stroke for its highlight is too distractingly ugly or the shadow isn't shaped right... but it's the dang ellipse curve again.

Or you got the ellipse but the shadow looks wrong, because it isn't the same direction as the light on the flowers. There are a thousand different rendering tricks to get realism and accuracy. When you master all the ones you need, you can go on to try to simplify what you paint.

It's also very vague to say "Simplify it and leave out what isn't important."

Yikes! You have to decide what's important or not! Oh boy! How do I tell people what's important or not? Maybe the viewer likes trees more than clouds and I should get the trees right, maybe they like the green one between the orange ones more than the orange one, those blobs don't look like foliage, how do I know how many leaves to put before the whole thing looks like a piece of leaf-stamped cloth instead of a clump of foliage. How did that impressionist actually do a blob just as blobby as mine and it looks like a tree?

Uh, you have to learn a bunch more tricks for that simplification too. Like the one about "Contrast draws the eye" and "Bright colors draw the eye" and low contrast and dull colors belong around the edges and in the backround. You need to learn a bunch of staging tricks to make the scene or person or animal look real - and they are not all about getting the shape of the nose right. Some of them work even if you get the shape of the nose completely wrong and paste it on the side of the face like Picasso, which is why he's famous and we're not.

It's hard to break the rules until you know the rules. On top of that, it helps to know why the rule is there so that you can break it on purpose to get attention by doing it exactly when and where it works. Making the exception to the rule a thing that makes the painting exactly what that one should be.

It leads to purple grass and turquoise in the leaves and pink in a blue sky. It leads to visible broad strokes that carry meaning and a swirl of paint or pastel dust that somehow gives the impression there is a living, moving fish gliding through water that's real even though it was three splashy strokes with a soggy brush. Or three or four pastel strokes dashed in.

It's being able to change the photo plausibly. Take a photo of an old person and make a picture of the teen they used to be. Take a photo of a winter tree and dress it with foliage in summer rain. Art is visual fiction. It's not the same thing as what you paint, no matter how accurate your realism - and the best realists are using all the same simplification tricks as the concise loose painters.

They just do it with a different choice of tools. The edge of the cork board in the trompe l'oeil painting hasn't got as much contrast or interesting objects and there are pointers leading back in to get you looking at the clear push pin and the shiny keys. So go ahead and draw clear push pins in your art journal. Sketch birds from photos including blurry wings if the bird was moving. That will actually work in a painting too. Sketch and draw things from life whether it's junk on your desk or what's outside your window while you're doing something else.

Paint. Lots. Practice. Read books, take classes, read articles, try anything and everything. Only you know when you've had enough realism and want to leave the crossroads for the direction that's right for you. You might abandon it fast for a primitive style as you develop exactly your stylized way to draw grungy unshaved characters or wide-eyed doll-faced mermaids.

You're you and style is something like your handwriting. You have it whether you plan to or not. The more skilled you get at drawing and painting, the easier it is for anyone else to recognize your style in everything you create.

I change around what mediums I use fairly often, especially from among those that fit in my lap on sick days. It may depend on the weather exactly what medium I do, because some days I've just really got to get it done in five minutes or I'll never get back to it. Others I might have a whole hour. Others I might spend all day or several sessions to finish it - that's disability setting limits. One of the best Impressionists I ever knew was legally blind. She painted what she saw, literally, and leaped right to color and light because for her the world was that colorful blur that makes sense. The details that distracted me to perfectly rendered petals and stylized awkward leaves weren't there in her vision.

How tall you are affects it. How you feel today. What you like in art. What you like to read. What you like to eat and whether you have an allergy to any solvent or to pastel dust. Whether you love tramping around in the snow painting plein air in the mountains or you need to stay in the car to paint that winter scene.

And of course what you like to read and who you love and what you think of life and the world and your loved ones. Most of all what makes you happy or angry or sad, your feelings come into it. If you love something, spending fourteen hours gazing at it and slowly going over it in Prismacolors realism is a day well spent, a happy one. If you don't have the patience for it any more, like me, it's because something interfered to make that less fun - like chronic fatigue. A bit too sick and I don't want to paint any more. But when I was one stage less disabled, Prismacolor realism got me sitting still happily for a dozen hours at a time and the results were very textured, detailed, colorful and rich.

I loosened up, partly for love of Impressionism and partly because I now need magnifier glasses to see my previous level of detail. As a child I did inch wide drawings with a 6x0 Rapidograph and they were accurate if it was a subject I had enough practice with.

Be you, learn, enjoy and know the crossroads after you leave it. There's a point at which it stops being very hard and becomes something you can trust. It came for me more than once, subject after subject. Earliest was sketching my pet white rat in pen, I developed a good pen texture for white fur (outlined with little dashes that went the direction of the hairs), dotted lines for the pretty little pale nose and muzzle, outlined big dark eyes, outlines where the crease of the ear made a line, a slightly broken line for his tail and accurate tail gestures. I learned how to do his tiny knuckles and claws. It was practice and observation, so drawing from life is probably the best way to get there - but reading and looking at art and classes are good too.

There's more to learn about how to paint and draw than any one person can do in one human lifetime. More gets invented every year and you'll make discoveries or rediscoveries. That's what it is, it's not a zero sum game. It stays challenging and fun because you'll always keep getting better, moving from the crossroads in the directions you want to go. That's the key to a strong personal style - just be you and work in the mediums you love, subjects you love, ways that you love.

If that's realism, more power to you. If it's loose or abstract you will get there when you do, and you are the one more than anyone who knows it. You couldn't have convinced me to give up realism for impressionism in the 80s, but here I am doing it and loving it - and still going back to pen-watercolor accuracy every now and then because I still love that too.

Pacific Wave

Above is the best ocean wave I've ever painted in my life. It looks very detailed but I did it in ten or fifteen minutes without hesitation, without planning, just looked at the reference and made decision after decision to change it. I paint better than I used to but not as well as I will. 

Next week or month or year that'll happen again and maybe I'm ready to paint waves from life - they don't hold still for painters the way photos do.

Passion and Fear

Have you ever felt afraid to start on a blank surface, hesitated after getting a good sketch down on it or paused from panic halfway through a good painting? You're not alone. Fear of painting or drawing, whether it's fear of starting, fear of continuing or fear of showing it to anyone is common. I'll scare you one step farther. It has some basis in reality and isn't just an irrational phobia.

It's socially acceptable in the Western world and especially in America to mock artists, either in general or specifically.

We're held to an unreasonable standard by the public. A common point of view is All or Nothing, the attitude of your typical alcoholic gets picked up by people who had no connection with substance abuse. "No one can make a living at art." Superstar or Nothing - you're either Picasso up in the million bucks for a sketch price range or your work is worthless and you should spend your time doing something productive like watching television.

Yes, I'll make fun of the mockers.

If you listen to everything they say, they'll come out saying that when you add up all of what they said. The fact is, they won't pick on you for spending all evening playing video games, tweeting or watching television. A lot of "Normal People" have no creative outlet at all. A sizable number of them are lashing out because a long time ago, they had dreams of becoming artists or musicians or writers and got shut down by exactly that social pressure.

This is environmental. It's a work hazard. It's not just you. Don't put yourself down as a wimp because your feelings get hurt when people attack you socially and disrespect your work. You're taking up an avocation or profession that gets flamed everywhere by anyone not in it.

If that isn't enough social risk, within it a tendency toward snobbery, elitism and trendiness rejects good work on arbitrary grounds of style, subject and conformity to a different set of expectations. Copy the style of a 20th century avant garde master with even the slightest variation, like using a different photo reference, and wow, you're So Original. Even though what you did is entirely derivative.

I've seen that end of it more than once in circles where the money gets very big.

So what does that make you, friend?

It makes you brave. You're standing up to some real outside pressures that wouldn't be there if you studied chartered accountancy or devoted all that energy and passion to calisthenics. Some activities are socially acceptable. Others are not. Art and the arts hold so many intrinsic rewards that if you let go of other people's opinions and paint for the people who like your paintings, you can build a glorious life. One that's an exciting adventure!

I chose my whale painting to illustrate this one because it's out in the middle of the ocean, no shore in sight, seeing one of the largest creatures on earth dance with those waves and start to dive into its natural environment. Live large! Be you! Paint with passion!

Today's essay was prompted by a forum discussion where a friend posted this link: Fear Art Quotations. Right near the top, one of them jumped out at me as a theme that demands to be written.

Fear melts when you take action toward a goal you really want. - Robert G. Allen.

Why is that one so important, when the page is full of beautiful, heartening quotes? Because it's not just morale. It's literally true.

Fear and excitement are exactly the same physical state. Both of them are an adrenaline surge in your body. Adrenaline readies your body for Flight or Fight - but modern life in any industrialized country has its greatest risks in ways where throwing a punch or running away are bad ideas for how to deal with it. You can't beat up the landlord if you're about to get evicted. Running away when the boss chews you out will get you fired. Running away if someone makes fun of you at a party is what the bully wants! You'd get laughed at again for running away.

To face social challenges, you need a clear head and a strong heart. You need to be articulate, expressive, most of all confident enough not to lose your head and start shouting or acting aggressive. Assertiveness wins hands down in social conflicts, especially in the long term. It's not just more ethical, it's more effective in a functional sense. It will draw more positive people into your life and more opportunities open up.

So what can you do with all that anxiety? Anxiety specifically is a crippling physical and emotional pain that comes from being cornered socially where neither fight nor flight will do you any good at all. You become inarticulate because back in the Pleistocene, you would not have stood a chance trying to talk down that Smilodon fatalis who wanted to eat you. You had to throw rocks at it, run away or both.

Our bodies are still living on an African savannah, chasing some animals from dinner and running away from bigger predators. But we painted in those days. Some of those paintings are so breathtaking that to this day, without any cultural context, we stop and stare in wonder and awe, we buy prints of them to hang in our living rooms. Or copy them as murals, as one Arkansas artist I visited did. Her living room was gorgeous with Lascaux horses galloping everywhere on earth toned walls with clear areas where her horse paintings hung.

Copy a cave painting on your wall to remind you who you are.

What you do is human, it goes back much farther and deeper than professions like programming or accountancy or retail sales. It's something innate to you. You have the capacity for it, most of all if you love it.

The best way to blow off that anxiety is to put a great big canvas on your easel. Pick up a big brush. Paint what you love. Don't even do it to sell, though it may come out wonderful and command a high price later. Do it for your heart.

Dance around painting and stepping back to look at it. View it from different angles. Mix paint. Splash it on. Work hard, physically, make it something wonderful that grows with every stroke. Fall in love with it again.

When you read that adrenaline as excitement, you have released boundless energy to do something about it. If you do dry mediums, get an 18" x 24" pad of newsprint or cheap recycled paper and do charcoal gesture renderings. Swing your arm from the shoulder. Move around. Put some music on and paint or draw to the rhythm of the music.

Work up a good sweat and then look at what you accomplished. It's probably better than you'd have done if you just curled up in a chair scared to do anything and wibbled in a little sketchbook.

I have physical disabilities especially for standing and walking that make it impractical for me to dance with my art. But there are still physical activities I accomplish to turn anxiety into excitement.

Yesterday I faced an Art Jury for the first time in my life.

I went down to the San Francisco Arts Commission once-a-month Street Artists Program screening. You may recall from my first post that I used to be a street artist. I know the business. I did well at it until my health crashed partly due to some very bad economic decisions like moving too far away from my setup areas and dragging too much heavy stuff in a cart to improve my display.

I might never have been homeless if I'd gotten medical insurance and phoned up the Scooter Store back in those days. I'm glad I did though, because now I'll be doing it in San Francisco where it's not seasonal. I can do it year round with good sales in all but the Holiday Season. Guess when I'm starting up? Now. Yep. Swinging into the Holiday Season. Whatever I do in December and November is going to be the low end of the year's results from Street Artist work.

What I did to fight my fears was paint and sketch. I cut mats for all of my paintings. I cut back boards for all of my paintings. I sorted through all of my stuff to find the postcard size Top Loaders so I could display my example pen and watercolor postcard painting of Golden Gate Bridge. I forced myself to leave some works unfinished so that I'd have "Six unfinished examples." I read all the rules over and over, to make sure that I got everything they wanted to see into the bag when I left.

I even sorted what I was doing so that my tools, materials and paintings all fit in one rather light weight messerger bag in an organized way. At the last minute, this last week, I replaced my absent 48 color Conte set with a 24 color Conte set just so that I'd have my favorite hard pastels in hand to do an example in front of them.

When I went in, I was almost an hour early because I allowed for Paratransit to run late taking other people to their destinations. So I got to see other Street Artists get screened before it was my turn. They included jewelry makers, a musician selling CDs, crafters doing fabric art and ceramics as well as other visual artists doing wall paintings.

I saw a good third of them get disqualified and told to change something in their wares or have some of their works thrown out because they didn't fit the rules for the Street Artist Program. Some of them were rejected completely, others just got only some of their works qualified. The musician was also a producer and discovered that he could sell only the CDs that had his vocal or instrumental performances on them, not the ones his friends did that he was promoting. That's how the program works.

It's strict because it gives preference to artists who sell their own works. Period. That's the point of it - to give jobs to San Francisco artists and crafters. That protects me from someone who buys art wholesale at a pittance from other painters and has it shipped to San Francisco to sell. I agree with those rules.

I was also dead scared that the Screening Committee would throw out my paintings for lack of quality. Tell me to go back to art school and try again when I had salable works. Everything I did was original and none of it was even collaborative, other than my using photo references with the permission of the photographer. About half of my paintings were from WetCanvas Reference Image Library, where member artists share photo references from around the world.

When I got my table, I got up and ran around the table laying it out. I moved paintings, set three of them vertical against the wall and spread the rest out in a good dynamic arrangement on the table where together they formed a good composition. I spread out my prints in an appealing display with each of three prints laid out in a flattened stack so that at a glance, the jury could see those were the prints. I have high quality photo prints.

They had to pick up the prints and compare them to my original ACEOs to see that yes, those were prints but original artwork in the same style was sitting out next to the prints. One of the Committee members asked about my prints.

"Do you know that you have to label these prints as prints, to the buyer? What kind of prints they are..."

"Yes. Look at the back. I read the rules and made little inserts with what kind of print it is, my name and contact information."

She flipped it over, looked at my insert and laughed with relief. "You read the rules." She turned to the rest of the committee. "He read the rules! One of them read the rules!" They all laughed.

I was in, that fast. They mentioned that it gets windy out on Fisherman's Wharf so I should tie down my art or put it into a prints rack that my buyers can flip through. I certainly will, as soon as I get some sales and go purchase a good lightweight aluminum and canvas prints rack to go with my vertical display. I'll probably invest in some larger photo prints, mat them and put them in the prints rack.

I walked out in a happy daze, floating on the compliments of the screening committee. Every one of them liked my paintings and was impressed with them and with my presentation. I knew I could do this. The last big question is pricing, which I might spend $4 for a scouting trip to find out what others are charging for similar paintings before I price mine. I'd like to make the price dead average for size, style and skill so that price isn't a consideration - not bargain basement so the buyers think my work isn't any good, not overpriced so they say "I can get one this good at that other artist's booth."

I can't count the number of times these past three months when I looked at what I had and how much still needed to be done to get ready for that screening and thought "I'm nuts to do this. I failed at it in New Orleans. Why am I torturing myself with this? I should give up."

I felt that way mostly on sick days when I couldn't get up and do something toward making it happen. My biggest moments of courage were on bad nights when I fought myself not to post online "This is too much for me physically. I'm going to give up and stick to selling art online, I can't do it." Everyone would have accepted this, I do have physical disabilities and they did get the better of me last time I held this career.

Before they did, it was the happiest time in my adult life. Bar none, it was the best job I ever had. I loved it. Unless I went out too sick to sell anything, I had fun doing it. I looked forward to going out, setting up and getting real cash on the spot from buyers.

I got on the horse again. That's the courage part.

So when you feel those fears, do something physical toward making it happen. Sketch big. Paint big. Move around and sort your supplies if you do small format art or ACEOs - there's nothing like putting all your colored pencils, pastels or oil pastels sticks in chromatic order for giving your eyes the visual treat that makes you want to paint again.

Cut mats. Sort your paintings and mount them. Varnish finished paintings. Do the physical work of your art, whatever your medium, because that will burn up the adrenaline in your system and leave you the happy glow of physical achievement.

Or work on preliminary works if you have some reason that moving around isn't practical. Intense mental concentration can do the same thing with an adrenaline burn. On sick days I'll work out things that need to be done sitting down too - like researching those rules and checking my preparation to make sure everything fit the Screening Committee's strict requirements. When I do value thumbnails to prepare for a painting, I'm more confident about how well the painting is going to turn out because I know it'll have a good composition.

Every time I've done that, it's worked and made for a better painting. So mental effort is almost as good as physical for burning up the adrenaline. You will feel better emotionally and physically if you pour the energy of your anxiety into action of any kind toward reaching your goal.

That's just how we humans are built. It's why some people go from couch potato to Mr. Universe or get into a smaller dress size. Why dull calisthenics can give people so much satisfaction that they devote their spare time to working out. Nothing builds confidence like a long string of small daily successes.

Feed yourself those and you have facts to answer the naysayers. Reality is never as bad as the pessimists would have it. Plan for the worst case, the best case and results in between. Almost all the time, reality will hand you results comfortably in between, non-extreme, more or less what you'd reasonably expect.

The best therapist I've ever known, Roland Tolliver, once told me "You're overconfident about 10% of the time. That's a healthy balance. It's what they recommend for a top salesman."

So when you're terrified, make an effort. Do something to make your dreams happen, they're not dreams when you start working on them. They're goals. Little goals add up one by one and accumulate to become big goals. Don't lose sight of having some dreams too - getting into major San Francisco galleries or having a one man show at a good gallery is out in the "Dreams" category because I haven't moved toward it yet. But I made a good start yesterday with the Street Artists Program screening.

Last point. When someone criticizes your work, look at the criticism carefully. Take it apart, judge it critically. Is it useful? Is any of it going to improve your future work if you take it seriously? How much of it is worthless, information-free insults to your style, your subject or your personality?

Accept compliments uncritically. Just thank the complimenter, even if you don't agree. They're entitled to their opinion and may see something in the piece that you don't. I can't count the number of times I smiled and thanked someone who thought a quick sketch was better than my finished paintings only to discover, through classes and mentoring with better artists, that the compliment was true. The sketch was livelier than a stiff, overdetailed painting.

So look for real, useful information in the compliments, especially when they come from better artists whose work you admire. Either is as likely to be true, but paying more attention to compliments will keep you happy and motivated with that 10% overconfidence that can carry the day on charm.

Now that you're done reading, if you feel encouraged and motivated, grab your sketchbook and use that feeling. Seize the moment. Your art will improve every day you do it even when you can't see that!