Over the weekend, in an effort to distract me from smoking, I cleaned out my studio. Well, I call it my studio but it is actually the dining room of our tiny apartment that I converted to a relatively distraction-free area that I can draw or assemble the mixed media art stuff I do. In the past few months, it became infested with clutter and junk and random board games and Lego Harry Potter sets. My studio was an unusable space for anything other than storage.
With considerably more energy than when I was slowly killing myself every hour or two, my studio became my number one priority to get back in shape. The cleaning went surprisingly quick, even with me stopping every so often to marvel at a found piece that I never finished or the papercraft Caveman Robot that was half-assembled or even my favorite metal barrel pencil returning home to papa. Then the canvas emerged.
Several months ago, I had bought a one foot square stretched canvas on a whim while shopping for various art supplies. I had acrylic paints left over from an old art school project and figured that since the canvas was on sale, why not? It is worth a try. All artists have to paint to be taken seriously, right? And didn't every one of my art teachers have a hint of revulsion in their voice when they talked about illustrators? So I bought it and promptly forgot about it.
Until it turned up in my cleaning. Immediately, my brain began turning about what to fill it with. A solid image started to form so I grabbed my favorite pencil and sketched it out, even going so far as to do a color guide for it. Maybe I should explain what kind of stuff I like to draw or sketch. My style got pegged in school as "pop art" or "surrealistic" but I truthfully do not see it that way. I like to take a mundane object and make it huge or focus on a small section of it. I do use still-life on a consistent basis. Toys, robots, and candy figure prominently in almost all my pieces but lately I have been fascinated with drawing toy stuffed animals in strange situations. My teachers called my work "whimsical" on several occasions and were pushing for me to try my hand at children's illustration.
So this piece was to be an offset toy rabbit head smiling while floating in space. Here's a picture of my sketch:
I like it. It is goofy, which is ultimately why I do anything in life.
Tuesday was to be my Big Painting Day and I was excited. The thrill of doing a new big piece. Whoo, man. I love that. There was extensive research, too, with blending and using different mediums and thinning out the paint. The idea was solid. The execution... Well, after about six hours of painting, I had a finished piece. And I was not happy. Maybe I just needed time to stare at it and roll it around in my brain. Let it simmer. So that is what I did. Stared at it. Turned it around. Tried it from different angles. Nope. Okay, maybe I am just tired. One shower and a cup of coffee later, there still was no connection. Alright. This is not the first time I have been initially unhappy with a piece. Maybe time is what I need.
After a couple hours, I reexamined it. And I HATED it. More than any piece I have done in the last ten years. At one point, there might have been thought of burning it. There is usually some aspect of a piece I can grasp, even if it is just for learning experience. There definitely was a lesson here: I hate acrylic paint. Can't stand them. It just feels like I am back in grade school messing with poster paints. I should have just thrown glitter over the wet paint. At least it would be shiny. I also learned something about myself from this: I have absolutely no desire to be a painter, at least not with oils or acrylics. Charcoal and pastels work just fine for me, even with the limited usage they get from me anymore, but that always feels like fingerpainting. Think I will stick pencil, pen, and ink for now. The black/white contrast thing is always appealing. Besides, my next big project is to be a series of pop-up book pages and who ever heard of a painted pop-up book?
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