Shell Games: The Exhibit

I'm so excited! A show of many of my paintins all together. And they look awesome!

You may not be able to tell, but I have reworked this. I added a darker shadow around the shell and at the outside corners. I am trying to make the shell "pop" more and catch your attention. I was also thinking about depth. I wanted the shell to be sunken into the sand a more and there to be a little ridge of sand around it. I also lightened the middle of the shell to give the shell itself more depth, so the center will come towards you. I also added some more darkness right at the edge of the shell. I tried to avoid making look like it was outlined, so I made it intermittent. Usually the place where an object sits on a surface has a thin dark area right at the edge between the object and the surface.

When a painting gets down to the finer details, the changes aren't all that dramatic, but the tweaking ultimately affects the whole quite a bit. It is at this point that I use some glazing medium, usually Liquin or Medium No. 2 (8 parts odorless thinner, 1 part damar varnish, 1 part stand oil). This extra transparent glazed layer is crucial to how the light refracts and resonates. However, once it is used, any brush strokes added later without medium, will look dull and chalky and need some additional glazing on top. So essentially, if your pretty certain of the painting, go ahead and add some glazing to give it some more depth or to shift a color hue in another direction.

It is now time to let the picture sit and "percolate",  and me regain a fresher eye, before I work on it again. It is by no means done. There is a shell at the bottom right that looks like a wad of kleenex tissue!

I've returned to painting shells recently and started a piece with a sand dollar in the center. See below. It is unfinished, but I'm liking it. The colors aren't quite as yellow as in the snapshot and there is more contrast.  It's a little on the "pretty" side. Hmmmmm. Maybe I have a pretty side, lurking.

It's been ages. I was very discouraged this fall and put my creative energy into other areas, but am returning to work now. I am planning a new painting of a sand dollar, partially submerged in sand. I'm a little concerned about the sand color on top of the sand color of the shell and getting bored, after all it is beige on beige, but it's worth a try. I find that going deeply into detail can supersede any tendency towards boredom. Either that or infuse the picture with unnatural colors, and then you might as well just photoshop it.

No Rope

I am thinking about two disparate things in regards to my work which are actually connected in an odd way, the movie “Dark Knight Rising” and the Olympic games. So how is that? It's about effort and trying, support and no supports, and the subtle ways they can play out in the mind. In Dark Knight, the hero of the story (spoiler alert!) is trying to escape a particular prison by climbing up the insides of a well. He has a safety rope tethered around his waist and when he falls, the rope catches him, keeping him from crashing into the ground. He and the only other person who previously escaped also had support people on the ground, people who care, counsel, feed and encourage him. But the key to escaping is, “No rope.” You must climb up without the tether and really feel the need to make that last final leap or face death. In the Olympic games, our athletes, during the competition are like the hero of Dark Knight; they are alone and they must succeed or fail based on their training, strength, concentration and will power. But they, like our Dark Knight hero, also have support people around them, who helped with the training and and a million other things and that made the trip to the games possible. 

There are decision points in all lives where we have a choice to make about the direction we are going in and an acknowledgment of the sacrifices and work that go into that choice. Often I feel like I am at that point. My gut tells to me to cut back on the hours at my day job and go “No Rope,” a motivator for actually making it in the art world. With “No Rope” we do a lot of things that perhaps we wouldn't have done, make contacts, write letters, get out there more, promote ourselves; whereas if we have a day job, or a significant other to support us, what's the point? But another part of me says that I must be free to do what I love doing and that a market mentality makes it un-fun. I would prefer to make my pictures with an “in the moment” state of mind, not a feverish state of work ethic stress. Maybe that's really the way we should be approaching art and life, in a Zen-like balance with the Universe, letting go of the rope entirely, and just walking forward, unattached to our ambition and egos. So, for now, I am walking a line of compromise, with a question rattling around in my head, “Rope? No rope?”

I have worked some more on various pictures, most notably my series/triptych of three scallop shells. I had simplified the background considerably from where it was originally because I felt it was a distraction to the main subject matter. The eye was just too busy moving around. Now however, I got some feedback that  the background looked like either water or clouds rather than linen, so I'm adding back in details so that it looks more like fabric, but stays in the background where its supposed to. I'm adjusting the values some trying to be careful with “lines” and contrast. It takes some playing around and designing, moving folds around, which I'm still working on. I keep seeing things that just don't work design wise and then I change them. I'm hoping that if it “reads” like fabric, the mind will identify it as such and quickly move to the main subject which is the shell. I am enjoying working with fabric and drapery. There is a challenge in getting white fabric to look like white fabric without it getting too "grey" and boring - washing out the picture - or too blue and oceany. I think I'm leaning towards too blue, but I can glaze in some warm tones after it has dried. Thank heavens for liquin!

-Vicky

 

Here are another picture I've been working on:

It looks really washed out in this photo. The original shell had a million reflections in pale hues of green and pink and yellow. I couldn't resist the challenge! All those reflections! Wow!

These are my scallop shells from whence the title of this blog comes. The idea is that there is a  pebble behind one - can you tell which one? I've worked on it more, so the blue shadows on the linen have changed significantly - fewer confusing conflicting lines, especially the central one. I don't want the shadows to take away from the subject and each piece needs to relate to each other. I'm viewing it as a triptych, but I may have to split them up. A hundred years from now, in some retrospective show, long after I'm dead, someone will find this blog and suddenly get the idea to re-unite them. Assuming much here, aren't I?

I don't know as I will do many more scallop shells! The lines! It gets repetitive. I am leaning more towards pictures of multiple shells together. I would like to to a really big one of a shore with the sand and the shells and some seaweed and some water and add something man made to it, like it had just washed up. I'm thinking about one of those tiny ships in a bottle that you get at touristy junk shops, or a message in a bottle. I get those "really?" look when I mention it. But its like doing lighthouses - the execution will make or break it. It has to be really, really honest and straight to work.

That's enough for now. It's summer and I'm camped out in our one air conditioned room with my laptop, fighting eye strain waiting for the spouse to fix my desktop computer (power supply - it wouldn't turn on, dead like a car in zero degree weather). It's the one with photoshop on it! Need to do some editing and color correcting before I can add stuff to my website.

TTFN,

-Vicky