The Paper Crane

The weather has gone from bad to worse — yes­ter­day it alter­nated between snow, hail and then rain! Per­fect time to hide away in the stu­dio and cre­ate.  And if your art prac­tice got away from you dur­ing the hol­i­days (or even before) and you need some reminders of what you already know but some­how for­got, Read on!

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I feel like I am return­ing to paint­ing after being gone for awhile. We have all been there…And I have def­i­nitely had some frus­tra­tions with get­ting back in. Here are some of my approaches that have helped recently.  These are extremely sim­ple suggestions …

1. Go into the Process. Explore the mate­ri­al­ity of what­ever your work­ing with.  And try some new medi­ums — whether its adding wax to oil paint or try­ing egg oil emul­sion.  Focus on the tech­nique.  And try to get your thoughts off of mak­ing some­thing ‘good’.

2. Give each can­vas or panel a cri­te­ria. Espe­cially impor­tant if you are unsure of the best way to visu­ally rep­re­sent an idea and are only get­ting so far with draw­ing.  Try 4 — 5 sur­faces each with their own cri­te­ria on how to struc­ture the piece mate­ri­ally — i.e. stain back­ground and the objects in the fore­ground very lay­ered and built up.

3.  Have some “cheap” mate­ri­als that you won’t worry about mess­ing up.  Paper of course but also those pre-stretched, ges­soed can­vases can really be freeing.

4.  Have a lot of mate­r­ial to work with so you don’t over­paint before you have a chance to let a paint­ing rest and dis­tance of time to actu­ally ‘see’ what is and isn’t working.

Half-way in on a paint­ing and stuck ?

* Try Col­lage.  It is a way to fig­ure out new paint­ing struc­tures, com­bi­na­tions, mate­ri­als, col­ors, etc.  Paint things on afore­men­tioned paper or pre-stretched can­vas and cut-out and tape to “real” paint­ing to see if some­thing works.

* Color Prints.  Is there a cer­tain area that needs to be resolved ? Print out a dozen color prints of that paint­ing area and tape what­ever your heart desires to these or draw­ing on it directly, etc.  This prac­tice may gen­er­ate a num­ber of com­bi­na­tions that could be future mate­r­ial as well.

Your stu­dio is a mess and you just can’t get motivated ?

Invite some­one to come to your stu­dio / home for a crit.  Con­sider some­one that is not a close friend.  Sched­ule a week out.  And believe me in that week fol­low­ing up your stu­dio will be clean and you will have made more work then usual.

What are you good at?

this is extremely valu­able.  Find out in a crit what your strengths are.  Email a cou­ple recent paint­ings to an old pro­fes­sor and ask or some­one else you respect.  I recently emailed a pro­fes­sor I had 10 years ago and I never once since grad­u­a­tion asked her any art ques­tions because I real­ize we are adults and sup­posed to be fig­ur­ing out for our­selves.  Any­way, I allowed myself finally to ask her some tech­ni­cal ques­tions about col­lage and in that response she told me my strengths.  My work has evolved since under­grad and grad (luck­ily) so it is some­thing to be reminded of from time to time.  Now that I know what is work­ing and what isn’t — I can think of how to use what is work­ing in new ways  (new to me).

What is your practice?

Come up with your own prac­tice — include quick ways of explor­ing ideas in addi­tion to processes that take longer.  I had a cou­ple years where i was piece-mealing 4 part-time jobs together and exhausted at the end of the day work­ing for a cou­ple hours on one sin­gle paint­ing —–for months.  Need­less to say, I did not pro­duce that much dur­ing that time and did not evolve ideas that fast.  Draw­ing is an obvi­ous way of get­ting into a flow of work­ing.  If it bores you to do it, try meet­ing up some friends with sketch­books in a cafe once a week or so…also, i have strug­gled with how to rep­re­sent this idea of mine and have not been able to fig­ure it out through draw­ing or paint­ing — so now I am actu­ally going to make a sculp­ture of it and then do draw­ings of the sculp­ture or paint from the model if it turns out good enough…

This may be obvi­ous but use ‘high energy’ for big­ger moves — start­ing a paint­ing, impor­tant parts tech­ni­cally and ‘low energy’ for less crit­i­cal activ­i­ties like cut­ting things out for col­lage, pho­tograph­ing in progress work (by the way, i pho­to­graph every ses­sion i have), writ­ing down ideas, draw­ing etc. If you work a lot dur­ing the week and are tired — con­sider low energy work all week and then the week­end do the high energy until you can carve out more time for your practice.

Form an art ‘club’ or crit group

A few friends of mine and I used to meet once a week for a crit group.  It was a nice mix — 2 film­mak­ers, per­for­mance artist and writer, and painter.  very moti­vat­ing if you have the right group.  It is also very nice to meet with peo­ple who work in dif­fer­ent media/areas of art.  I think it is impor­tant to find peo­ple you enjoy hang­ing out with (as well as trust and have opin­ions you respect) or you prob­a­bly won’t actu­ally do it or main­tain it.

Apply for a Residency

I can rec­om­mend Rag­dale Res­i­dency in Chicago.  Out­stand­ing but go for a month not two weeks.

What­ever you do, just do it.  The artists I know that are doing well — work A LOT on art.  it just takes a lot of work. I know we all know that.  Just want to bring that to light again because it is easy to get frus­trated with progress.

And I leave you with a  Samuel Beck­ett quote — Fail bet­ter.

Good luck!

S

If you want to send me any in progress or recent work pics I would love to see them.  nes­bit­sarah (at) hotmail.com.  Below some of my own stu­dio shots.  Also, would love to hear your prac­tice, strate­gies, and so on.

Posted by Sarah Nesbit on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 6:07 am. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.