goals for drawing with sala wong:

1. learn to speak more eloquently during critique,
2. become better at drawing without contouring,
3. develop better contouring skills in ink - !!,
4. draw better in general,
5. develop better ideas,
6. draw faster.

merry christmas

I've been nominated for a scholarship from the department of art which means I need to have three images submitted to be considered further, so I need to find some really good ones, or create some. I need to grab my art supplies from Fairbanks tomorrow and paint, and I need to draw while I'm at work in the labs this week.

I have noticed that painting this semester has made me better at drawing. I wonder if drawing and printmaking will make me a better painter.

drunk sketches

haha

pienture (summary)

3 of 4 (unfinished)

I think I learned a lot about painting this semester. After taking into consideration the time it takes early in the semester to get supplies and the time it takes to build canvases and gesso them, I think I would have liked Nancy's assignment better if she had decided on a total of 6,000 square inches instead of 12,000. If it were an advanced class and I had paint and brushes etc. in my possession already, then it might have been different. If I had started painting in August instead of in September I would have totally finished all four of them.

Perhaps I interpreted the assignment the wrong way though? This is totally possible. I think about what I have done all semester and I think, what? Why? It makes me think I'm totally weird. Why have I been painting still-lifes on a 30"x40" canvases all semester? Why did I decide to paint in as high of detail as I could given my skill level? Could I have perfected such technique more efficiently if I had done smaller scale paintings? Perhaps smaller paintings would have been more cohesive to each other too. I feel like there were issues in painting that I wanted to delve into and couldn't because I had to complete the assignment. I also decided on a totally ridiculous composition of weird items to paint. I might have just made it a little too complicated. With all that said, perhaps all of this was the perfect way to go?

I think about what someone looking at these paintings might think. I think about how the perspective is off because of various viewpoints on different days--that makes me think about Cézanne, and then I think about how critics claimed he was unschooled because he didn't paint in correct perspective. It wasn't that he couldnt, he just didn't. Whether he didn't want to, or because it served greater purpose to the composition to vary perspective, whatever, he made the choice. The perspective in my paintings isn't off because I can't make it right, its off because I am lazy haha. My lack of care for perspective is my personality coming out in the painting I guess, but I don't know how I feel about that. I don't want my viewer to think I'm unschooled, or even that I'm lazy hah (despite the fact that I am sometimes). I also think about how I totally disregarded what I was seeing sometimes and depicted things partly from nature, partly from my head, and how that affected what I was painting, it flattens the image for sure, makes objects appear fabricated.

In the begining Nancy said to aim for something we didn't think we could do and I didn't think I could complete four large-scale, high detail (eehh, naturalistic perhaps) still-life paintings. I succeeded in not being able to complete it haha, but I definitely see a positive progression in my ability to paint throughout these four. I don't think they're any good as a whole, but I can pick out parts that are wonderful.

Another thing that I realized is that I'm really an awful painter right now and so I need to paint more. I can paint OK because I can see really well I guess, haha, but my brain doesn't exactly know how to make my hands manipulate what it knows onto a canvas. I think I am more unlike Picasso, and more like Braque. Painting is love/hate, but so much more love. The good days make it easy to endure the bad days of simply standing there staring at the canvas not having any idea what to do. When I can't paint I'm thinking too much. The trick is to think a lot before one starts and keep that in mind, then just paint don't think, and afterward reflect on the disaster haha. Eventually I will just know and effort will be minimal. Is it really a learned thing? Does one learn to paint well? I guess, I don't know.

good quote

Henri Matisse, Self-Portrait in a Striped Shirt, 1906

Matisse believed that color harmony should be directed towards the same principles as those governing music: "I cannot copy nature in a servile way", he wrote. "I must interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. When I have found the relationship of all the tones, the result must be a living harmony of tones, a harmony not unlike that of a musical composition."

hanging with Mr. Cooper

I've been awake far too long.