I pushed the Rosemary Mahoney drawing as far as made sense to do before moving on to the next stage of the painting, the actual painting process that is. I had a lot of fun with the drawing and decided to really give it some attention so that the drawing itself could have been a completed work (It of course couldn't have been because of all the grid lines that were exposed, but it did have a nice aesthetic).
I ran some passes of cheap transparent gesso over the drawing to seal it in so none of the blue pen ink I drew in muddies my color later in the painting process. I would only note I experimented with this entire “pre-production” part of the work, the idea of using a basic ballpoint blue pen and tons of gesso would have seemed a very strange way to start this painting just last week. But anyway that’s how it began and I’m feeling quite good about it all. The painting I am recreating is so unbelievably loose, confident and fresh that I need to bake that into my own process from the very beginning if I am to do this Rosemary Mahoney piece any true justice.
After those processes were done I took the painting out back and knocked it all down with a pink/orange wash of oil paint very thin with Gamsol. I did this to establish this punchy warmth under painting while also killing all the white space and knocking the drawing (and the grid lines) further back one more notch. The painting is very very cool, it's a very grey-blue color. My thinking was the warm undertone has the potential to play off the cool blue painting in a few areas in a very interesting way.
Tomorrow I will begin blocking in the portraits. Everything will probably go downhill from there at least for a few days. There are about five portraits and they're all very small. This initial painting was 30 x 48 inches and my master copy is half that, 15 x 24 inches. So these portraits are really like one inch by one inch. Which is typically a bit of a nightmare. This too is the reason I spent so many days on a meticulous drawing, so that when it's time to lay in paint I have all my parameters set so ideally if I abide by my drawing I should be good on the drawing and tonal front. Obviously I know better than to expect that everything will go according to plan but I mustn't overwork this painting. The next entry will possess more of a full result of how the block-in goes. Ideally one big pass to block everything in followed by a second pass to tighten values and color and then that will be it. Again, this painting can't feel nor actually be too overworked.
Tomorrow after this painting gets worked on I am participating in a live painting event downtown (I never cite the actual names of organizers, artists and venues etc. in these entries). The theme of the event is 80’s night. Magdalene helped me with my theme, I will paint a Michael Jackson Thriller related composition. Without her help I would really not know what to paint in the least, my conception of the 80’s is pretty poor. I probably would have gone with the late great art critic Robert Hughes or something and completely alienated myself from the community. I use the term “community” here quite loosely. I'm already sufficiently alienated from at least the mural painting “community” here, at least many of them.
They’re not my people fundamentally. They're not not my people but the mural painters I've historically spent the most time with here in the city aren't. I don’t feel like they, nor anyone else, really approaches the medium of the mural with any sort of real thought, frankly speaking. No one is “trying to solve a problem” or approaching the wall with a conception of art history or expressionistic intent. Its all just the same commercial type renderings painted right off the phone onto the wall with a gazillion dollars worth of Montana 94, blah blah blah. There are some legit technique-heads out here but there are very few “real artists”. There are some but many of them don’t innovate anyway.
I wasn't planning on going down that avenue, I guess that brings me to my larger point which is the idea of going back to school and fully removing myself (at least psychology) from this hustle art vibe is profoundly freeing. These people aren't my people, and hustling art (or whatever) is not my thing nor am I any good at it. This website, www.shopoilpaintings.com, is pretty much the extent of my hustle. I’m a painter damnit, I don’t want to paint some stupid 50 Cent portrait to try and get him to share it on Instagram because he just moved to Houston. That’s so lame. I don’t have that hustle in me. I’m old enough to have been able to turn it on by now if I innately possessed it. Chances are 5 or 10 years from now I’m not going to have it either.
I studied art history to improve my own art. To situate my art, my art theory and my understanding of the conceptual undertones and context of the history of painting to allow me to push the boundaries (to the extent that's possible) in the year 2023, 2024, 2025 etc. etc. Within that pursuit I found a great love, admiration and appreciation for the study of art history and that is what fundamentally informs my decision to go back to school and study it professionally to elevate my capacity to work within the world of these ideas. All while continuing to solve my initial problems with being a painter in 2025, what is possible? What is moot? What is worth doing, does painting continue to hold any value in our cultural conversation? So on and so on. This foray into academia will only make me a stronger painter. I will be a great painter, I know I have that capacity within me. And my deepest most intuitive sense is that there are still real boundaries to be pushed within the realm of painting (potentially most especially in the world of mural painting actually). And that's what I aim to do. And to bolster that with a more robust understanding of the ideas that informed what came before can't hurt either.
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