A Dawn Every Day

2nd Artist Self Portrait in Oil

stepped back into oils this year as well as learning to do portraits

I don’t know if this will cure in time for the April 1st art show but I was very happy with my efforts. This took a few hours and three different days. Each day offered a layer and different inspiration a different bit of poetry as will as an opportunity to give details some depth. 

Teaching myself to take time with it.

Self Portrait of an Artist, Oil, just completed so it can dry 11″x14″ 

not shabby for a first attempt after so many years away from oil paints

Mary Heilmann: Inspiration | Art21 "Extended Play"  

I’ve been looking and learning more about color. It started because I wanted to get the tonal differences so that some subjects looked more 3D, to get more depth in landscapes, and to learn how to direct the eye. 

But it is also spring, and I’ve been doing a lot of landscapes with found in nature colors, so hookers green and ocre yellow and browns and tans are providing a base as I paint animals in a forest, so now I’m looking at artists and artwork with bright pops of rainbow. And lots of PINK, a “pigment of our imagination.”

I love that quote:

“Pink, it is a pigment of our imagination.”

While I don’t understand it fully when it gets into the math and science of color theory,  the idea of something being because of the internal workings in our brain, versus what we are really objectively seeing, is fascinating. Especially as a creative married to someone and surrounded often times by people dedicated to “reality” and what they think they have objectively taken in. 

I mean, who could argue if on a clear noon day they were asked if the sky was not indeed blue. OF course it is blue.  But which blue? How about a lot of different blues, just like shadows aren’t grey to black, and my skin is not white and there truly isn’t anyone with pure black skin. 

But how often are adults still grabbing crayon colors from the 8 crayon box in their thinking of color? or anything? 

Well, of course if we were to start teaching color we have to start talking about basics.

But humans are by nature lazy thinkers.

So if they can make something a habit, they will, and so they dont get overly excited if asked “what color is the clear noon day sky today?”  

It’s blue. 

Just blue?

Oh, I don’t have time for this. 

So color isn’t just color. There is a spectrum.

Live is full of spectrum. 

But as an artist, I know our instinct is to get into the habits. We are driven to form habits by our internal workings.

We need systems to take over and to only think but a little because our internal workings are saying “save your energy store your energy because the hard lean times may come.” 

But who wants to be a blueberry on a clear noon day just accepting the sky is blue, just blue.

When even in the sky it shifts and changes and and constantly challenges us, “am I really just blue? or am I a spectrum of blue?”

For the sake of sociability, yes, I will declare: 

What a beautiful clear blue sky!

But internally

...what blues are in the sky today! 

And if I want to get maybe magical or surreal:

...what blues are in the sky today! how like a disco ball do they all sparkle in my brain!

Ironically, today the sky is grey. :) Which grey? A spectrum of grey! And if I was god and mother nature combined, it would be an infinitely number of greys ...

so... that’s all I got to say about that.

A Dawn Every Day         Artist

I was very fortunate, not only did I get to experience my first professional gallery art show at the Glen Eure Gallery, but I was awarded the “Excellence” ribbon. This was the 27th Annual Artist Self-Portrait show. So not only do I have a professional line to add to my CV for experience, I now also have and award I can list. So very grateful. I’m hoping by the end of summer I will have something else to share as a professional development, but I’m going to sit tight and see how things progress. I’m taking lessons for the first time in my life to address the skills I wish to improve or hon. The art teacher is also an accomplished artist and teacher at a local college with her own studio. I’m largely self taught, having public school classes and then an elective painting class in college. 

For my entry, I was to title it “I Am …” fill in the rest. So I titled my piece “I am She.” In part the title comes for the Elvis Costello song about loving a complicated person who is both ups and down and a hundred different things within the measure of a day.

But what I wrote in the description was this: 

Although intended as my first painted self portrait from a photo of me in front of my first large 

completed painting after 10 years, it was transformed by the influences I felt around me: favorite 

artists and artwork, family life, hikes around the waterways that I love,  as well as the intruding 

anxieties of raising two children while living life in an unstable, beautiful, dangerous world. 

So a lot was left out specifically and there is a lot going on in this 4’ x 3’ acrylic on stretched canvas. So in an effort to get better and more comfortable talking about art and specifically my art, I’m going more in detail here. 

First it is a painting of me in front of a painting, but instead of standing in my studio, I’m standing in the marshy brackish sound. In the top left corner is my son running in the SUN with our new rescue puppy, a german shepard golden mix we all named Harris, short for Harrison. His father’s name was Herman, and so we went with a name beginning with H. And he is handsome. So the beach and the sky and the water are exciting and vibrant and colorful. Even a pair of dolphins are in the waters off our neighborhood’s little beach down the street we visit almost daily. Over my shoulder behind me is my daughter exploring the shallows on the sound with a staff of driftwood she had found. In the distance the clouds are pretty but are tinged rusty by a wild fire or slow burn. As you look down, the marsh grass if full of life. And I could have depicted more than I have done here. There is a red winged black bird with a nest in the tall straight branches of some wild brush. Below her are other birds but also a snake winding it’s way through. The snake is both prey and predator like the birds, as snakes are easy meals for the talon armed raptors. People are so wary of snakes, it was an easy and obvious pick to insert some danger. But more danger, more subtle, is the vine and trash snagged around my ankle. Sometimes walking you can trip in vines, but also ropes, wires, plastic mesh, and more trash that gets caught around the edges of the great filters, our marsh. My rescue cat, named for where she was found, Salvo, is standing behind me warily stalking dragonflies, butterflies, birds in the wild flowers.  And in the water is the moon reflecting. I, as an artist a mother a woman, I  am over the moon, but also wary and pensive and poised where ever I find my feet or my mind. My dog is still a puppy asleep in my studio, but also like a sleepy sand dune protecting some marsh from the crashing waves at my feet. Behind him is the old inherited chair I use as an easel. It is a bottomless chair from times gone unrecorded, and my painting of the waves crashing into retaining wall rocks has sprouted an osprey nest. The osprey nest has two fledgling osprey show are spreading winds and opening mouths, almost as if I am their mother and I myself have two fledgling older children. Their movement has dislodge some sticks and the waves in the painting while not real are threatening to them. So this is my anxiety of uncontrollable danger imagined near my fledgling. . 

There are touches of bronze and gold, and another favorite song, Fields of Gold, by Sting, is written in the grass. 

Colors found in nature are intended as impressions of real nature. Colors not found in nature are emotional: anxiousness, excitement, admiration, passion, and fear. 

Ok, I have indulged myself as much as I can bare. Although driven to create art with a sincere desire to share with the world, I am also uncomfortable as I was raised to be small and quiet and serve others. So even time in my studio, while driven to establish and spend time there, feels like a guilty pleasure or an act of selfishness. Probably why I’ve created and then tossed so many previous creations and attempts. But we shall stay the course now. 

Thank you for any time you take with this. Much love to you and yours.