Art talk

I realize I haven’t been doing one of the things I started out to do with this blog. I always wanted to write a bit more about being an artist and the thought process and such. Like the hows and whys of picking out subject matter and how your stream of consciousness is affeced by seeing other art or just by viewing nature. I went to the annual “Spring into Art” show on Friday night and really enjoyed seeing the other paintings. After seeing what everyone is working on, I realize that we (each artist) are all on this quest, a mission of sorts. It seems like you can see each person’s progression and their Art is evolving almost like we are different roads but they appear to all lead to the same destination. I’m not trying to get too “New Age” on you, but it seems as Artists, we do share an essential lifetime commitment of exploration, experimentation and discovery. Michel Angelo supposedly said at the age of 87 “Isn’t art grand, I’m still learning”. I have been painting for a long time and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t seem to learn something either a technique or new process or more importantly something about myself.
I found one thing that has always been important to me and that is the use of color and how I react to it. Its not the same as other people, even other artists. Yes, most beginning artist are seduced by color but I have been painting for 27 years and I still love bright intense pure color. There was a time I was almost embarrassed to admit it because it wasn’t the trend to paint with color that wasn’t greyed down and I toeing the line painted paintings like everyone else with these greyed down colors and they were OK and people really did like them. But I asked myself, why do I paint and who am I painting for? Am I painting with my voice or the voice I believed to be mine. We all paint for customers and that is just good marketing, but at the end of the day do you ever just create something that you enjoy regardless of its marketability or if your friends will like it? The Koi are “MY” paintings and sometimes some of the other Lake paintings or nature paintings become my paintings when I allow my intuition to paint. As for many of these daily paintings, they are good exercises for keeping your technique up and are also good for exploration. You don’t have the pressure to make everyone of them successful. If you have been reading this blog for a while you’ll see the good, the bad and the ugly. But since its a daily regime they get posted no matter what.

Nature has always been my inspiration, sitting besides my garden or walking thru the woods near the lake I get energized and a sense of wonder and beauty fill my senses so that I feel renewed. Other artists get this same feeling by being on a busy street in New York or wherever. The colors, sounds, smells and of course the light. All artist love light and the way it shapes things. I think most artists feed upon light, they use it as their inspiration. Since most artists are visual beings everything around them can be inspiration, the creative process is a metamorphisis of sorts.

We take in things, they are internalized and mixed in with a jumble of life experiences and a bit of our personality and a few other influences and out of this something new is created. We call it art