But sometimes paintings just happen. Ajax on the Kitchen Floor (24 X 48 inches).

Think you have a tough job? Join the military. Here is my new desktop, made from a photo of a jet engine at the March Reserve Air Force Base, Airfest 2088. The Airfest is a type-o-rama of warnings and designations. This one seemed like just what I needed during the last days of the CaliforniaAuthors relaunch. Val and I have prepared a nifty Flickr picture gallery of these desktop images, suitable for use in your high-pressure job situation.

Visit the Flickr gallery, and if you see an image you’d like for your desktop, click the “all sizes” button above the image and download it to your computer. These images are available under a Creative Commons License, so download and enjoy!

On the M&M visit front, boxes of beef arrived at my door today. Grass-fed, aged steak from the Hearst Ranch in central California. A gift from Michelle! Let the feast menu-making begin!

]]> http://thenitenote.com/2008/04/18/know-when-to-fold-em/feed/ 2 http://thenitenote.com/2008/04/10/the-field-trips-and-the-find/ http://thenitenote.com/2008/04/10/the-field-trips-and-the-find/#comments Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:40:41 +0000 kate http://www.thenitenote.com/blog/2008/04/10/the-field-trips-and-the-find/

I’ve seen lots of paintings in the last few weeks: three juried group shows and an exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art. It’s been good; it sent me off on my current realist exercise and it’s been sort of encouraging. I feel a happy understanding of the language of paint. It is good to let the varied work speak to me in all its crazy dialects; to bring new story lines into the eternal internal narrative about technique, subject, palette, brushwork, surface, history, culture, love, death … Beyond critique or comparison to my own projects, it is just good to see the decisions painters make, the revelations and the disappointments.

Of the 90 or so paintings I’ve seen recently, here is one of my favorites. At 28 She Discovered She Had a Vulva by Todd Davis. I saw it yesterday at the California Visual Artist group show at the airy 2nd City Council gallery. I am thankful Todd gave me permission to post this little jpg of the painting, but it can’t do the actual painting justice. In fact, most of my favorite things about this painting are invisible in this image. First of all, the original is large — 48 X 30″ — and the surface is lush, laden with knife-loads of white paint, sometimes scraped away to reveal the dark ground, sometimes painted on, or sensitively incised to create the figures. So, in person, it is at once painterly and graphic — a sensation enhanced by the restrained and rich color palette. Yeah! That’s the way I like it.

Plus: It’s a very nice nude. The subtle modeling continues the dance between drawing and painting, between 2-D and 3, between being in and being on the background. She is anonymous, provocative and beautiful to look at, a L’Origine du monde.

And: I like the icon-ization of the ubiquitous, lowly-yet-jewellike pigeon, a theme that runs though the artist’s current work. From his website:

Todd’s work explores the ambivalent relationship between the pigeon and the public — sometimes aggressive, sometimes indifferent — and evokes, whether blatantly or furtively, those same dynamics that play out between people. The pigeon is a parallel to what is decidedly “other,” those around us who have been overlooked, loathed or merely tolerated. Todd is drawn to urban wildlife, environmental issues and underdogs of all kinds. Pigeons, in his mind anyway, embody all of them.

I don’t worry much about cracking the cypher of a painting. I don’t worry too much what a painting is “about” as long as it is also “about” paint — which this one certainly is. I avoid reading prosaic “artist statement” placards at exhibitions. In the moment of meeting a painting, I am less interested in what the painting means, than what it means to me. Thinking about the pigeon in At 28 She Discovered; perhaps any shocking discovery kills something, decides something for us, and ambivalence is at last extinguished. Or maybe only the death of one part of ourselves can offer us insight into the Big T Truth. Maybe the pigeon is an extraneous penis. Maybe the story was something the artist overheard in a bar … maybe … maybe it doesn’t matter; I like this painting.

Another fine Davis painting, Shopping Cart — which shares much with my favorite — took second place in this juried exhibit. You can see it here. Both are nicely priced around $2000. I got the distinct feeling that these will soon be bargain prices for Todd Davis’ work and I wish I had the extra cash to snag one. Then I could enjoy “the find” permanently.

]]> http://thenitenote.com/2008/04/10/the-field-trips-and-the-find/feed/ 0 http://thenitenote.com/2008/04/09/theres-no-reset-button/ http://thenitenote.com/2008/04/09/theres-no-reset-button/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:53:34 +0000 kate http://www.thenitenote.com/blog/2008/04/09/theres-no-reset-button/ Sigh. Spent the whole morning resetting my still life. That’s right. The still life lesson of the day: still lifes must be absolutely still. It seems that over the week since I set up the still life the first time, things have moved around just enough to make my original drawing seem off. Now, this is something I might try to roll with if I was just painting any old still life, but because I am using this one to learn a very exacting color mixing and matching process, the ever-so-slight change in the lighting blows the whole thing.

Okay, suck it up and reset. Tape everything down. Mark the floor with the positions of table, chair, box, lights, easel. Put a new canvas on the easel and start again. And heaven help the Rottweiler that bumps the table.

I spent the afternoon mixing medium into color — sitting on the back porch, listening to Miles Davis and thinking, “this is the best goddamned job I’ve ever had.”

I know I said the curation of the recent portrait exhibit at the Long Beach Museum of Art fell flat, but the paintings themselves left an impression on me. I found myself thinking a lot about the high level of technical performance required to create the hyper-real portraits in the the show. So when — while checking The Night Note’s clustermaps stats — I saw a little hyper-real portrait of a girl staring out at me from the Google Ad stack, I took a second look. The text said: How to Oil Paint DVD. Top world realist teaches simple method. ANYONE can learn.

ANYONE? I clicked through and landed at thecardermethod.com. There was a lovely realist still life, one that I would certainly be proud to paint. I hit the play button. The video pitch was aimed at encouraging prospective buyers who had never made a painting before; the salesman extolled the method as requiring “no talent.” Hm.

But it also talked about some cool tools that painter/teacher Mark Carder had developed: a little color checking tool that helps your eye focus on specific colors and a proportion-measuring tool used for sketching. These reminded be of Old Masters tools like framed-grids. He’s also developed his own slow-drying medium. I thought I might be able to make some use of these tools, even if I did have a little talent. I clicked around the site and saw some clips from the DVD. Carder was teaching the basic method of training realist artists to paint what they actually see not what they think they are seeing. I started to think that working though the program might be a great exercise for the “back to basics” work I’ve been doing. So I bought the package.

It turned out to be full of good old-school practical advice about studio lighting, still life set up, paint mixing, canvas stretching and toning and other basics. It also detailed a painstakingly exact process of color mixing and painting, one that requires patience, because it is a tedious way to work. But the process is about slowing down and remembering (or learning) how to see and — while I am going to do a few still life paintings using the method — the real payoff will be in how such intense “seeing practice” plays out in my work to come.

In the meantime, I’ve set up the studio with a simple still life in a light-control box and I’m beginning work on my first Carder Method still life. The configuration of the lights, the box, the easel and the chair — which must stay in exactly the same positions during the one to two weeks I’m working on the painting — have swallowed my studio space and that has us living in a little corner of the room with our big TV. [pix above] So I am very dedicated to getting this done and re-configuring the studio back to its old sunny self. I’ll let you know how the school work goes.

Below, the first canvas with pencil work.

For a post script, click

PS#1: There are people who say using tools and processes like the Carder Method is “cheating.” To them I say, working artists know better. Go learn more about art and artists — who have and always will be technologists at heart. Then come back and we’ll talk.

PS#2: If you click around Carder’s bio stuff, you will see that he painted an official portrait of George H.W. and Barbara Bush — eeeeyew! I’m trying to get over that, though, I mean an artist needs work, right? And, besides, what business is it of mine? (But, eeyew)

Here’s his post from New Orleans; he’s in LA right now!

I’m glad someone took up the challenge to do this; I think it’s important work, as you can tell by how I categorize it.

Wow, things are suddenly so busy here — only time to bang out a roundup.

Doing: With Val’s hot, under-the-hood stylings, I’m redesigning a new and streamlined CaliforniaAuthors [sketch], with a simultaneous rework of thenightnote [sketch]. Also: I’m still on board with Claudio, helping him with the lightning-fast launch of his dream practice. While he works with other designers on a corporate image and web presence – because I swear, I am not in this buisness anymore – I’ve put together an interim web presence for him. Also: I’m working with Lynette and the Louisiana Creole Research Association on their corporate ID and site. Val at Work is still on the easel.

Field Trip #1: Long Beach Museum of Art exhibit “About Face: Portraiture Now.” The museum touted the exhibition as a show of artists who “defy modernist conventions of abstraction and non-representational imagery to produce breathtakingly beautiful and incredibly realistic human portraits.” It is true that the show contains the work of some very skillful artists who have produced some very skillful and occasionally beautiful and insightful portraits. But — with only a few exceptions — as a group, they touch on only a small part of what today’s representation of a real human figure can be. There was just too much super-slick photo-real work in the show. Made me wish for a Lucian Freud — something “incredibly realistic,” but something more about paint. Believe me, I am in no way knocking John Nava, who has a couple of pieces in the exhibit and whose famous super-real genius is scary-good; I’m not down on any of the individual artists in the show. It’s just that “Portraiture Now” is much more that what is hinted at by this collected group — it is the collector, the curator, that leaves me dry on this one. One long smooth note, hit repeatedly, turns the individual achievements into a monotonous hum.

Still, it is always good to see and think about art and I am glad that I went.

Field trip #1 sidebars: A) I went to museum on the first day after the vertigo cure and while walking on the pedestrians-only sidewalk in bluff park, I was buzzed by a man on a bicycle. He startled me, and I tripped and fell. He didn’t stop. It was weird, after a week of being obsessed with falling, there I was on the sidewalk, looking up at the perfect blue sky. Then I got up and went to the museum and I was pretty thankful that it was so easy to do. B) I ran into Lynn and Blair at the museum, colleagues from my long ago Orange County Register days. They said they were enjoying retirement and they looked it. It was nice to see them.

Field trip #2: Val and I took a trip downtown to go to the Superior market on the hunt for cool Mexican and Latin American food ingredients. We got different kinds of peppers–fresh and dried, some yummy sauces jarred in tall thin drinking glasses that will be great for having a cold cerveza with our home-made enchiladas, also some fresh tortillas, crema, and empanadas from the bakery. Yum.

Something for you to look at: Enjoy an existential moment at Garfield Minus Garfield.

Just purchased: New lights for painting (woo, up to 1000 watts of day-stretching light) …

… and a set of round bristle brushes. I usually work with flats or brights. (Here’s a comparison.) I’ve enjoyed experimenting with the rounds, which load up great and seem to encourage more gestural brushwork. I was inspired to get them when watching Duane Kaiser’s little time-lapse painting videos.

Up next: Taxes — barf.

Thank you! to everyone for all your kind comments during the vertigo days.