What a frustrating dichotomy we artists live with.

We’ve all heard the words: “I love your work.” “What kind of work do you do?” And then there’s the actual word, “Artwork.”

Yet, the common (mis)conception is that artists just play their days away, making pretty pictures (or whatever their chosen art form is), and living a fun and carefree life. They are the envy, or disdain, of all the people who actually “work” for a living.

Fact: we love what we do. What’s the saying? “If you do what you love, you will never have to work a day in your life.” But it doesn’t necessarily follow that the opposite of work is play.

Is our work just play? Is our play work? I know, for me, this is the hardest work I’ve ever done. It might look like just a pretty picture, but I have to have a vision, and I have to make my vision a reality. I have to draw on everything I’ve ever learned, everything I’ve experienced, seen or felt. Every brushstroke is, in some way, a decision – expressing a feeling or a thought. It’s all-consuming, it’s a challenge, it’s a risk, it’s an experiment. My best paintings come when I risk the most, and they are often when I have the most fun.

But is art play? Simple answer: No.

People see only the end result: the piece of art in a gallery or show, or the glitzy opening parties, with wine and hors d’oeuvres and people in fancy clothes. Lots of fun!

What they don’t see is the unglamorous stuff, the “dark side” of our art: the hours it took to complete the paintings, the application forms we had to submit for the chance to be juried into shows, the countless miles we spent driving around to the photographer or to the framer, the care it took to get our work to and from the show or gallery without damaging it! Yeah, it’s pretty glamorous alright (more like a pain in the butt!).

Yet, in the day-to-day realm, we all have friends and family, who still think that we just play. For example, a relative of mine envies me, because I just hang out in my house and “paint beautiful paintings all day.” And I have friends who want to chat on the phone, but, sorry, I can’t paint when I’m talking on the phone. They don’t understand why; after all, I’m just painting. But when I paint, I am totally absorbed. I can’t even listen to music that has words, for crying out loud!

I was painting the other day, when a neighbor stopped by to get something. I came to the door, wearing my Starbucks “painting apron” and my purple nitrile gloves. We chatted for a little while, and then I told him that I had to get back to my painting. He said, “Oh, that’s what you were doing.” (Do people think these paintings just appear out of thin air?) I guess he figured that I spend my days doing dishes – you know, the apron and the rubber gloves… Actually, since I work at home, that is part of my job, too. And the laundry and the grocery shopping and the cooking. And plowing the driveway when it snows…

Even my husband, supportive though he is, says things like, “You get to play tomorrow,” referring to any activity in which I paint, rather than do my office work. Yes, it’s enjoyable. Yes, it’s fun. But, no, it’s not play. I have to concentrate and expend huge chunks of my self during the process. It takes a lot out of me. It’s intense. It’s draining. But there’s nothing I’d rather be doing.

So it is with us working artists. We cannot not do our art. It is our passion; it is what completes us, makes us whole. We are empty without our art to fill us up. We strive to make each piece better than the ones before it, to constantly grow. The real art is to make it all look effortless, easy – like play…

Let us not forget that an art masterpiece is proclaimed to be:

A WORK OF ART

And now you know why.

It’s official, hell has frozen over… After 15 years of trying landscape painting, and hating every moment of it, I discovered yesterday that I love landscape painting!!! How could this be, you ask?

The short answer is that, at the invitation of a friend, I signed up for a landscape-painting class with him at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado. The long answer is that when I first got his e-mail I totally ignored it. After all, I hate plein air painting – the heat, the cold, the wind, the bugs, the sun, etc. And landscapes bore me (the only thing that interests me is what I call “intimate landscapes,” which are little scenes). On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, the only way I might be interested is if I could paint with a knife. I hate lugging all that paraphernalia for cleaning and using brushes: medium, turp. container with turp, lots of brushes, and gobs of paper towels. And besides, there is one landscape artist whose paintings I LOVE – Louisa McElwain -and she happens to paint with knives, big knives.

The teacher, Marsha Wooley, said that I could paint with a knife, so, two days after the registration deadline, I finally quit dragging my feet and signed up for the class. It was official then, no backing out.

Our first homework assignment, due Friday, was to take some colors and change them to the color of the sky at the horizon. My week was so hectic that I finally squeezed in my homework at 11:00 Thursday night for my Friday morning class.  Good start. I soon discovered why I should have squeezed it in on any other night but the last night. You see, there was one teensy problem that I forgot about: I still had no lights in my studio – they had been removed for recent drywall repair and painting and still hadn’t been reinstalled! I had to do my painting homework in the nearby bathroom, squished between two sinks. I couldn’t even find a proper paintbrush in my dark studio. That will teach me.

But, I digress. The homework exercise taught me some valuable things that I had never learned before, namely, the color of objects as they get farther away from me, toward the horizon. I knew they got lighter, but I never thought about how the color actually changed. So yesterday, the class set up on a hill, with a great view of the mountains. We looked like we were having a parade.

For the first time, I had a purpose while painting a landscape, and it was interesting. And it was the first time I’d tried painting a landscape with a knife. Instant happiness.

I used a small canvas – 8 x 10 inches. After all, I was probably going to hate it, but I ended up liking it! When I showed the painting to my husband he said, “You use a lot more paint when you use a knife.” He didn’t say it, but I knew he was seeing dollar signs. I said, “Actually, you probably use less. The only difference is that with a knife, all the paint goes on the canvas and you see it. With a brush, most of the paint is stuck in the bristles and gets wiped off on a paper towel or washed off in the turp.” It’s amazing, the brilliant things we come up with when challenged. I can honestly say that I am looking forward to my next class.

This will be my “Paint the Color Green” entry. I have things to say about the Earth-safety type green, but that will be on a later post. For now, I want to talk about the difficulty/fear, that many people have of painting the color green. I admit, I was really bad at it when I first started in watercolors. I had no clue what to do, and it was always a hit or miss (usually miss) proposition. Either I headed straight for my Sap Green or my Viridian. Sap Green was usually pretty good, but the Viridian was almost always disastrous.

What finally helped me was – well, actually, there were two things. One, I found watercolor artist Jeanne Dobie’s fabulous book Making Color Sing.  On page 25 she had a much-needed chart for mixing greens. Two, I decided to make an exercise of painting a “green” painting. I looked out our sunroom windows and painted all the greens I saw. To this day, I still call this my “green painting.”

That being said, it wasn’t until I discovered Daniel Smith’s Quinachrodone Gold (I’ll call it QG) that I finally found true happiness. You cannot go wrong mixing greens once you have this color. Here’s a quote from Danial Smith’s website:

Everyone’s favorite, Quinacridone Gold replaces Raw Sienna and adds versatility with its glazing and mixing capabilities. It is an excellent low-staining golden yellow pigment that can enhance any mixture.

Try glazing an old “failure” with Quinacridone Gold to begin a rescue operation.

Highly durable and extremely transparent, all the Quinacridone colors excel in vivid clarity and intensity.

It can be mixed with any of the blues with gorgeous results, resembling real-life greens. But it really shines when added to greens, those greens that were never quite right on their own. Mixed with Veridian, that difficult color, it finally looks realistic. My favorite blue, Phthalo Blue, when mixed with QG, becomes a vivid, WOW green!

A friend told me a couple of years ago that there is a shortage of Quin Gold now, because of those new metallic orange-y colored cars that are so popular. I think they have caught up with the demand now. Give it a try and let me know how you like it.

Now that my website is almost finished, I can continue with a feature that I started a couple of years ago, before my website and blog were deleted by my previous web designer. I had started to talk about some of my paintings – how I did them, what my thinking was, etc. If there are any of my paintings that you’d like to have explained, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll just pick some at random.

Since spring is finally here, I’ll start with my painting Spring Fling, originally titled “In Celebration of Drips.”

This was done on a full-size sheet of Arches 140-pound watercolor paper. I wet the entire sheet first with fresh water, using a brush. Working horizontally, I laid in light washes of turquoise, then gold, then pink.

I let that dry, and then I wet the paper again. This time I started laying paint on vertically. I mixed my colors with lots of pigment (not much water) and ran them down the paper in stem-type motions. When I did the last one, on the right side, I finished it with a horizontal stroke across the bottom, toward the left. This gave all the other paints a place to flow. I had the painting on an easel, so everything wanted to flow down.

Once all of that dried, and working now on dry paper, I took some more paint and a fairly dry brush and painted on some stylized flowers from my imagination. I put extra water on the ends of my stems and let them drip off the page.

I was asked what it means to tone my canvas and why I do it. The mechanics of toning a canvas are to take some paint and mix it with huge amounts of paint thinner, and then brush it all over your canvas. This should be very thin. In fact, I often take a paper towel and wipe the entire canvas to make sure that there is no thickness of paint when I’m done. Now, the why:

There are two reasons that I do it: 1) it takes the fear out of starting a painting on a new, stark-white canvas; and 2) it leaves a color that will show through if your paint doesn’t entirely cover the canvas in spots. I sometimes deliberately leave holes in my paint so that the “underpainting” will show through. This unifies the painting, visually.

Then the question arises, “What color should the underpainting be?” Well, it’s mainly personal preference. However, here are things I think about when I am deciding what color to use.

- What is the overall color or “feel” that I want to emit from my painting when I’m finished?

- What is a color that would look good if it accidentally showed through in my painting?

- What color would look cool if I deliberately left flecks of it showing throughout my painting?

Here’s one where I toned my canvas with a pink underpainting and let the pink show throughout the painting:

Sometimes the color I choose is a neutral cool or warm color. Sometimes it’s a contrast color. For landscapes, I have often used a yellow ochre wash, with maybe a tint of another color here and there.

In the end, it really doesn’t matter what color you choose. Try a color that makes you feel good inside!

I wrote about this last year, but since it was deleted I will repeat. I was tired of having my paints dry up on my palette between painting sessions, so I devised a system that works beautifully for me. Using this system, I left my paints for a month last year, and they were still fresh when I returned!

In a nutshell, here’s my system. I bought a cheap plastic bead-storage case at the hobby store (about $2 at Hobby Lobby or Michael’s). I filled the wells with my oil paints, and this became my new “palette.” Now, when I’m done painting for the day, I cover each well of paint with water. The oil and water don’t mix, so the water stays on top and provides a barrier to the air. When I’m ready to paint again, I simply pour off the water and start to paint. Super easy! Here’s what it looks like:

Just flip the lid back while you paint.

If just taking my paints out for the day I would skip the water, because these cases are not watertight (that’s my invention that I’m hereby claiming the rights to!).

I went downtown today to paint with friends and work on my new painting, “Walking Midnight.” This one is very special. On my daughter’s birthday last August, we went to the stable and I took pictures of her with the horses all morning. The photo I chose to paint was one of her walking beside one of the horses. I couldn’t see it very well in my photo, so I went to the library to look for a better horse photo. I finally found one that I liked and used that horse’s silhouette.