Ruth's Daily Painting: Laura in Blue

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Laura in Blue

This is the second of my two-painting portrait-painting endeavor. It was after this one that I realized I didn't want to paint portraits. However, as I explained in my last post, I do wish that I could do portraits without having to put in the necessary years (decades?) of practice. I don't think there's anything more difficult than portraits, artistically speaking. Not only is the human face immensely challenging to capture in paint as a general matter, but to accurately portray a particular human face requires a perfect mastery of the tiniest nuances. If any detail is off, someone who knows the subject will perceive it and find the likeness lacking. That said, I think that this portrait looks a bit like its subject, my friend Laura. (No. 22, 6x6", on Gessobord, Sept. 14, 2012).

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The Purpose of this Blog

Note Sept. 2013: Everything below was written in late 2012, so I'm writing an update to explain how things have developed. When I started, I assumed that I would continue doing daily paintings indefinitely, but I didn't get much beyond 100. Instead, I took a break, and then started doing mainly larger, slower oil paintings, and a lot of watercolor. I've continued to post the first 100 daily paintings intermittently in order (I think I'm up to #80 now), intermixing them with posts about the larger oil paintings. Eventually I'd like to start adding watercolors. And eventually, when time permits, I want to start up with the daily paintings again! In the meantime, the title is best interpreted to mean doing some painting (or at least thinking about painting) every day!

Welcome to my daily painting blog. The purpose of this blog is to share my paintings (and painting struggles) with family and friends. It is also to share with other painters who are seeking to develop their skills, improve their product, and increase their consistency by daily painting. When I decided to start a daily painting practice recently, I searched the web hoping to find other daily painters who were putting out some bad art occasionally as they worked through problems and learned new techniques. I couldn’t find any! Every daily painting site that came up was from an accomplished — and usually full-time — artist, whose work was practically flawless. Sometimes I would search a blogger’s posts back to the very beginning to see if they had started out with less competent paintings and, through daily practice, worked up to the skill level shown in the more recent paintings. Not at all! They were accomplished artists to start with! I’m sure they did bad paintings when they were just beginning, but those do not show up on the blogs. So I wanted to do a blog that shows the progress that comes with daily practice --- and that means including the unsuccessful efforts.

My Artistic Background

I am not a beginning artist. I have a BFA and an MFA in printmaking (etching), I have pretty good drawing skills, and I did some nice paintings before undertaking daily practice. However, I did not do any oil paintings until about 2007, when I discovered water-miscible oils (I stayed away from oil painting before that out of concern that the use of turpentine would aggravate my asthma). Since then, prior to starting daily painting, I did around ten oil paintings ranging in size from 24"x24" to 4'x5' and about a half dozen small paintings on my own (mostly landscapes), and about a half dozen small paintings in a painting workshop given by Galveston oil painter extraordinaire Rene Wiley. However, these efforts did not yield a consistent ability to produce good paintings or to handle a variety of subjects with facility. In researching daily painting, I realized what should have been obvious: only frequent practice will make me a better painter!

Some Thoughts on Painting vs. Drawing

Since embarking on a daily painting regime, I have learned that having drawing ability does not translate directly to having painting ability. Painting — except for photorealism — is different from drawing because it is looser; even a realistic painting is an abstraction of an image rather than a direct depiction. Painting is all about color and brushstrokes. It therefore involves a whole different set of skills than drawing. I am more likely to be “wowed” by something that is painted loosely --- implying shapes with vibrant light and colors, rather than defining them precisely --- than by a highly realistic rendition.

The Bumps and Starts of my Painting Journey

I am slowly figuring out some of the techniques that accomplished painters use to achieve certain results. This is not just due to daily painting, but also comes from reading art instruction books, viewing art demo videos online, examining the artwork of other artists on the web, or visiting galleries. It is always exciting to have that “eureka!” moment of understanding when you understand how an artist produced an effect that you were previously unable to figure out. Understanding does not necessarily mean being able to do it well, but each of these moments of understanding moves me ahead on the continuum of learning. On the other hand, there are times when I simply cannot understand why I am unable to translate to canvas the technique or artwork I have just studied. I do not regard this as a failure of ability, but as a failure of understanding. I just don’t yet understand how to do it. And “understanding” is both a mental and a physical process. I can advance understanding by thinking and visualizing, but I don’t really “get it” until “it” is manifested in a painting. And that takes physical practice.

The Method to this Madness

I started doing daily paintings in August 2012. The sizes are generally 6x6", 6x8", or 8x8", on Raymar panels or on Gessobord (with one departure to an 11x14" canvas). Since part of the point of this blog is to show progress (or lack thereof), I'm not going to start posting with my current paintings. Instead, I'm going to go back to #1 and go from there. That means that my posts will always be about paintings from a few weeks earlier, unless I manage to catch up!