Today I’m pushing through the first pass of the painting I was describing yesterday. This painting is part James Ensor's Christs Entry into Brussels in 1889, part Matisse’s The Red Studio, part Houston Zine Fest, and part my own still life floral painting momentum.
I was describing my intention to loosely paint through the entirety of the painting as a first pass before making any make-or-break judgements about the future of the painting, and that is what I’m doing. However, as I rightfully anticipated, this first pass is quite tedious.
In the James Ensor painting that makes up a large portion of the background behind the flowers, there are probably almost 50 or 70 figures alone to suggest. Not to render, but at least to bring to a sufficient enough resolution that they read as people. This will be important for an adequate reading of the picture in its final form.
Last night, something interesting happened in the studio before I went to bed. I was brushing my teeth and puttering in the studio while I did so, the light was off in the studio, and from the window, there was a very distinct shadow being cast over the bottom of the painting.
The shadow was almost exactly the shape and position of where a shadow would be cast by the drone. The shadow is in the foreground from the bottom left of the oil painting, falling over a portion of the flowers. I outlined it in Sharpie on the picture and have been incorporating it into the picture while I paint the flowers today. This could be the x-factor that this painting needs in order to be something special.
My hope is that this shadow will create an interesting, contradictory illusion that will make the picture interesting. Let me do my best to try and explain it: The drone will be rendered extremely flat, in fact, it will be painted with acrylic paint and will cast a very small drop shadow over the Ensor painting to hopefully reinforce the paper/collage-like quality of the overlapping background references. The contradiction will come when that same paper-flat drone will now be casting a secondary shadow, a cast shadow, over the flowers in the foreground. I believe that if these elements are painted adequately well, this illusion will at the very least be interesting.
I give a responsible amount of credence and gratitude to the fact that this specific shadow with this very specific shape was cast right on my painting in this very specific spot that I had to implement it in the picture. Because, after all, as I discussed yesterday, a picture like this is all about taking chances and trying my best to create a type of painting which has never before been made. This is the true job of the artist. Anybody can acquire the requisite skills to render the natural world in paint, but not everybody can completely devise a new way of seeing.
Speaking of divine intervention, like in the case of this late-night studio shadow, I did find it quite interesting that over the weekend, a certain public art enterprise, which I worked with many years ago, contacted me out of nowhere to give me a small bit of work. In this case, it's the timing of the message that I find to be most interesting and deserving of some extra attention. I recently quit my office job, which had nothing to do with painting, for many reasons, but one of which was the fact that I have a newfound clarity that I absolutely need and must find a way to make it as a professional artist and painter. There is no way but this way. This project, shopoilpaintings.com, is one of a few new projects aligned with this life-or-death goal.
The contractor that reached out to me over the weekend called to say that a design I made years and years ago recently got selected to be painted by some Houston municipality. I haven't spoken to this contractor in over two years. This design was submitted probably three years ago, and I just quit my job in order to pursue the opportunity to be a working painter. Needless to say, a little bit of money goes a long way right now, and I am grateful for the opportunity. It's probable this will not amount to anything more than this one job right here, but I do ultimately perceive this as a little nudge from the universe to keep going, that I am on the right track.
The last little nugget, as it pertains to today’s oil painting diary, is that I have been reading art history and theory again, which I very much need to be doing. I am revisiting a classic entitled Shock of the New by Robert Hughes. I initially discovered this book/series as a seven or eight-part series he did for the BBC on the modern art movement that came and went throughout the 20th century. I loved the series so much and found it so immensely valuable for my understanding of the last 100 years of art history that I bought the book that expanded on the video series.
Anyway, I am in the first chapter, which corresponds with the first video titled “The Mechanical Paradise” about the turn of the 19th century and discusses the modernist implications of the construction of the Eiffel Tower and artists like Cezanne and the Cubists - Picasso and Braque.
Late Cezanne can be a hard figure to understand, especially in his role as it pertains to the greater modern art conversation. I’ll use these last few sentences to try and explain what was so revolutionary about his late work:
The motifs in his paintings were not just apples or mountains (although they were the literal subjects); the motif underlying his work was about the experience of seeing altogether. The ambiguity and relativity are baked into the act of seeing and experiencing. His paintings did not communicate “this is what I see” but rather “is this what I see?” and that is one of the reasons why he is often considered the quintessential modern artist.
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