I recently showed some collage pieces at a local gallery. I made these at a workshop this past Autumn and I have to say there was something very exciting about making art out of such bare and simple materials. Just different computer papers and heavy body acrylics. I even framed them with cardboard and heavy watercolor paper (one was made from the top of a pizza box, shhh).

I wrote the curatorial statement: "Don’t think. No ideas, no plan. Create an artwork by playing a game and following the process. I almost said “by following the rules,” but when you do your best to work within the limitations of the rules (process) and there comes a moment when it feels absolutely necessary to bend the rules and start composing freestyle- that’s when the magic happens. That’s when I’m ready to think and to have a plan. "

"The process allows the brain to design without thinking about it, to design with only one’s instinctual, accumulated knowledge of design. Without the cognizant effort of good taste or creating something new, it becomes much more possible to do both. "

"Start with abstraction and try to create a door: a few big shapes that serve as an entryway to the composition. Visual rhymes or patterns can create movement or energy to move across the piece. To find these, make a move and then make another one. Move back and forth, both looking and inventing, until the magic happens and you know what to do in your conscious mind. Once I’ve captured something that moves my eye around and holds the square, it’s time to start again. To start again with a new composition in conversation with the previous one because it asks the same questions." Sheri Hansen 2022

“A shape needs to hold and to be held: it can’t just sit there.” Ken Kewley

Still out here pushing around paint with these non objective pieces. It's quite strange to me to see this as my work 🤔 You see the whole time I was completing my fine art degree (which goes back awhile by now of course) and painting oil on canvas I never made a surface like this. I always painted representationally and would not have been able to arrive at this surface traditionally. 

Digitally, I wonder if it is the speed of building up the marks that just makes it all feel so much more achievable for me? If I am bored I keep carving shapes and if it is muddy or unpleasing to me I just push it all back to unity and go further from there. Additionally, the ability to parse apart the black and white from the color is magnificent. I created this about 60% there in black and white before I added color. And when I add color by blending layers over top I feel like a mad scientist, for real though. Other people's paintings? Sure. My old paintings? Definitely. Photos that I filter? Throw it in. And then I paint over top just as I would normally, but all this other stufff helps me create ideas, I guess. 

And I've realized I really do love this process it's spontaneous and very forgiving, experimental and completely inconsequential when it bores me, but for the first time in awhile I really wish this was about 60in wide stretched oil on canvas. 

Any thoughts on how it has parts that are blurry and they sit on top and almost hover above the sharper bits underneath? When I zoom in to 100% I like it and am curious about how it will print. I could see this as an endpaper for my picture book and as an approach to texture for some illustrations. That's what I might ask about IRL if anyone would like to comment.   

I had such a nice time painting at sketch club, I thought I'd share. Now, don't get me wrong, there are many unresolved shadows and edges, probably some issues with tonal hierarchy and just general polish of the textures- but- it was an under two hour sprint while chatting so I'm alright with that. I did a few minutes of polish from memory because the guitar silhouette was extra jagged and the antler shadow was 0% softness. But this sort of practice is the exact way to skill build with process, finding brushes that work or trying out new approaches, and especially prioritizing what needs to get done versus what can wait. I probably spent more time painting and smudging color on the guitar than the drapery, flowers, and grapes combined. I enjoyed painting the surface of the wall as well, so at least some parts of it looked cared for even if the drapery looks, eh, provisionary. 

Painting this brought to mind this other little study I did about a month ago of a lion's skull. The lighting in the reference was the exact opposite and I spun the thing around so it could sit like this on the surface. I used some adjustment layers to envision the lighting and painted this little thing. Definitely would feel better about it if I could have observed this exact thing for about two hours even if it were over Zoom, but you do what you can right? :)

I worked this week on a nocturne scene and a copy of Joon's skull shrine scene. For my concept I took inspiration from a wytch character I wrote about awhile ago. A character associated with the deep north and the seas. I found this killer picture of the night sky and that comet (? diagonal line?) streaking across the sky and that diagonal got me to thinking of these other diagonal shapes. Pretty soon I realized that this was feeling right for my character. 

Now, I normally wouldn't just include an image in my painting in this way like a backdrop. I suppose I did alter and stretch this image to fit my design's needs, but I still feel a little sacrilege just letting a picture and it's jpeg artifacts sit out there in full view 🤷‍♀️ I'm sitting with it, and trusting the process, haha. I'm mostly happy with this, but I will probably revisit the little glowing white triangles and the large boulder shape before I decide to include in on my portfolio page. Idk, there is something I need to either change or accept, but I'm not sure yet. 

 

I created another non objective painting this past Sunday. Balance and exploration of color were top of mind as always, with the addition of trying to figure out what I mean when I say that I want my work to feel a bit more like paint. Yes, it's edges, but it's also process and the duration of time that I like to see in the material narrative.  It's a bit like when you remember the feeling of a dream, but not necessarily the content of what happened. 

I like all these colorful dashes and how they hover over top of the more neutral, but related, colors. I like that they are contained in a grid structure even as they still feel immediate and intuitive in their energy and hue changes. Even as I write this I am remembering a series of drawings from my MFA that these are totally reminding me of now. That connection won't be obvious to most ;) More of a note to self there. 

I just like looking at these marks and exploring what is there. I want to wield them like a style, something with more depth not just left to right shallow-ish space. Let's see what happens in the next ones. 

🤷‍♀️ I like it ✨

Friday was my last day of teaching Digital Observational Painting for the summer session at PCA&D! This is probably my favorite course to teach: the digital tools have so much potential and I always learn something new myself through the process. I started with a challenging little monochromatic grouping, including this reflective metallic cup. Trial by fire I guess. I remember learning to render in paint with a set up of white eggs and white styrofoam cups and that seemed challenging to me at the time. I have such a short amount of time to teach, so I go right in with a bit of color and temperature from the beginning. 

I don't always make use of these solid flat color shapes, but I started to enjoy how they sort of punctuated all of my other marks.  This was a fun still life to photograph for class because my lit candle really was that close to the spray painted black box top 😆 Wouldn't have been able to work from observation of this one even if we were back in person.

My colleague always included a grapes still life in his Intro Painting course and it's great to see the works that comes from it. It's a bit of an advanced concept to separate out local color and value from the effects of lighting on an object, but probably best to just jump in and begin. This was a great image to experiment with brush work and texture on the background as well to generate some visual interest in the trompe l'oeil format.  I might try to back light them next time, that seems like a good next move.

Like most painters I like to study reference by painting it, or making a study. I'm not really trying to invent my own ideas at this point, just identify the major relationships of tone, color, perspective, and potentially story or something about what the focal area is. I opened Mapcrunch today to find a quick reference to study, something simple that I could study in an hour or less and focus on simplifying. 

And of course Mapcrunch beamed me to an extremely visually complicated place. But there was an archway and I love archways. Also I've never known too much about this place, the old city of Jerusalem, but when I looked it up to see if this gate had a name I learned that this city has many more gates, each with interesting stories and names associated. So, with the real fear of an intense research-based side quest looming, I minimized the research tab and, for now, have just focused on the painting ;)  

My one hour study was allowed to balloon to just over two because this was challenging in a good way with a good sweep of perspective, tight tonal relationships, and new brushes to put to good, and hopefully visually interesting, effect. While painting this I tried not to zoom in too much or often. To me, that is one of the definitions of a study- not getting too into details. Edge quality is in bounds and important, but anything that needs to zoom to be really appreciated or painted is out. So, probably about 6 x 8" on the screen while painting. 

While trying out some new brushes today I began a little non objective painting. No plan, just making one move in response to the previous one. I'm starting a new book project and need to develop the visual style. So I was looking for brushes with that in mind. I'm trying to replicate the look of a painting surface with textured support and some dry brush just skimming across the uppermost surfaces. That's not something I've just passively come across digitally, I think I need to develop a way to create that, or else work both traditionally and scan in paintings to assemble digitally.

Usually i'm thinking about balancing the colors and the shapes. 

And then I wanted to interrupt this painting a bit and used some transforms to disrupt the structure. This process was slightly reminding me of Gerhard Richter's squeegee paintings all of a sudden. 

I've been playing with bevel and emboss to create relief texture within the individual brush strokes. That's an idea from artist Jama Jurabaev and it's fascinating to try to control. I started there with my new brushes, and used lots of techniques for painting and selections to try to create a surface that reminded me of heavy dry brush surface. I'm not completely sure that I've found something I like for my specific project, but it's certainly an interesting place to start.  

I started to think of this process as a digital monoprint. While monoprinting is really similar to painting, there is something that happens in the press and it can bake the surface together in a way that is different to straight painting. That slight bit of process that takes some of the image out of my direct control reminded me of the bevel and emboss settings on the layer style. I'm going to call this digital monoprinting and I'd love to hear opinions on that ;)

I've been participating in a plein air painting challenge on Instagram this month. So far, it's been only en plein air in spirit because I have been working digitally indoors from photo reference (Just go with it). I've been studying some reference from the New York Botanical Garden of single flowers bunches, or views of the ground like this one. In a way it's a completely new approach to plein air because when I go out painting I find myself looking for some interesting effect of the light and then painting the scene as quickly as possible so I can get to capturing the lighting effect. 

But these references have mostly been tightly cropped and with completely flat lighting. So I really need to visually interpret what I am seeing, and usually bring some sense of organization other than the spotlight effect of direct lighting. The challenge, from my perspective, is to get bored enough with just getting the representation of the motif right or working, that you have to find another more specific way to entertain yourself with making the piece. Something like a specific moment where two colors come together, or maybe allowing the paint to feel like paint for like 75% of the piece and then snapping into detail and representation and sharp edges for the the remaining bit.    

It's really difficult for me to just allow a painting to feel unfinished, or under-rendered. I really enjoy creating textures and form in paint- usually that is the logic I use to make my next move. But at the same time I am trying to find a way of creating some looser and more painterly marks in my work and then allowing them to remain and not painting over them in time. Having those looser passages feels like a faster moment in the painting. Like a place where it is all just holding together in balance effortlessly, rather than meticulously. So this has been a really helpful practice with just that thinking. 

This little view of leaves started to feel like paint that I enjoyed looking at and actually reminded me of work that I was doing back during my MFA degree.  There is something here that I am trying to bring along with me for the future works. The challenge goes all throughout April so there is plenty of time to join in #pleinairpril. 

In 2d design we study the visual elements that make up an artwork and the principles that organize the composition. Then we try them out by making simple non objective designs. We analyze existing artworks such as poetry, music, and painting to see what elements and principles are making them work and if we can use some of those same combinations to create new original design. 

How can we visualize the structures and emotions of poetry and music? How can we understand the existing visual structures of artworks to engage with that same visual language? I wanted to really lead the students through this process to show them exactly how I might analyze an existing artwork with the intention of learning what makes it work and theorizing the process of how it might have been made. 

I started with this painting by Caleb Taylor from a recent exhibition of works at Haw Contemporary in Kansas City, MO. This is a very direct one to one example since it is a non objective painting being used to create a non objective design. I have my visual observations on the list on the right. It’s just observations of what I see. Then I used that observation to create an original design, looking for subtle opportunities where I can make a move that feels different from the source material. I have a lot of fun trying to get in another artist’s head and I don’t have a practice of non objective drawing and painting so it’s an interesting change of pace. 

My design based on an existing artwork :)