BYOB Painting: Changing Perspectives

I had made my way to class uneasily, as I had left my sister Emily at my house with day 2 of the stomach flu and my 3 year old daughter, Hope, at home with day 2 of the stomach flu and my 21-month-old Quinn, who had held up so far. I felt very guilty but I also felt greedy. I didn’t want to miss the lesson. Sylvia was going to teach us about how to paint rocks and I didn’t want to fall behind. I managed to get 1/2 of class in, where she gave most of her instruction for the day. Then I got the text message, picture included, that Quinn had succumbed to the virus.

• Mixing Cadmium red and Burnt Sienna gives you a bright peach which you can use watered down for sunsets.
• The first layer of paint is also called “the ground” of your painting
• When making rocks think of drawing a 3d box in an organic shape
• The rocks with have 3 color values: light, medium, dark.
• Draw rocks then add water on top of them, could also paint water first and then on top again.
• Look at artist ‘Stewart Shells?’, a New England painter that does houses. We will be doing houses soon.
• I copied the name ‘Stewart Shells’ but all I am bringing up is images of ‘stuffed shells.’

After I painted the rocks I packed up and went home. I thought it could be a fun activity to pull out some canvases for my family to paint while I was finishing up the landscape. The baby was feeling so sick all he wanted to do was to sit on my lap which made painting difficult but because I was feeling greedy I didn’t stop painting. Then…he threw up…two inches away from my canvases. Hence my disgusting title punch line goes here. Bring your own barf painting class at my house. We kept painting. I was happy with everyone’s work. My favorite was my daughter Maria’s mimic of my sister Emily’s Giraffe and sun painting.  It was nice to be at home, changing my perspective and relaxing (minus the vomit) at the kitchen table painting with my family.

 

 

I was somewhat happy with the landscapes when I decided to put them aside. I did not intend to create a cartoon or dreamlike landscape, it just happened. I wish it did not happen. However, I see my skills progressing. The sunset in the painting to the left was the first most successful sky I have painted since I started the class. I left some of the orange underpainting shine through instead of coloring the whole sky in blue, I was happy to incorporate that bit of wisdom from the teacher.

I enjoyed making simultaneous paintings with differing perspectives. It let me focus on different qualities of the rocks and nature. The large tree stump started out as a lump of trees that I hated and so I decided to turn into one large close-up tree. That changed the entire perspective of the painting. I’m happy with that compositional choice.

This brings me to Chapter 3 “your creative DNA” of Twyla Tharps book The Creative Habit. She talks about how people have a disposition to certain perspectives in artistic ventures. I would say that these two canvases represent some of my own dispositions. I like to focus close on the individual and then pull back to see how that individual fits into and influences the larger community.

Last year, I strangely found myself actually getting paid for specific choreography work. It’s so challenging and maddening but enlivening. For example, for the Jerome Robbins piece of the Gym scene in West Side Story, it’s about 8 minutes long and there were 50 kids on stage dancing to Bernstein’s complex musical composition that changed, styles, rhythms, and feelings.  The hidden blessing in it was that I had some time to get familiar with Jerome Robbins, who Tharp mentions a lot in this chapter. I found that his dramatic and personal approach to dance and character is in-line with my own many of the times. I love how he uses dance to continue the story and I tried to be true to that with my choreography. The other challenging choreographic commission was for my daughter’s school Pan-American dance recital. I had to choreograph unfamiliar cultural dances for 5 different classes of different ages. This year I’m trying to stick to theater but I do have one Quinceanera coming up! So all this choreography lingo is getting me fired up. Thanks Twyla!