Volume

As you can probably tell from the drawing below, I am still struggling with faces, feet and hands.

                                                                                                     Seated Nude

                                                                                                     Charcoal On Paper

This was a 20 minute drawing done in Wednesday night's figure drawing class. The class is four hours long. We begin with one minute drawings, really just long enough to get a gesture of the pose. Having to rough in a gesture that quickly is great because it gets your brain out of the way. You don't think about it because there is no time to think, no time to second guess. There is barely enough time draw.

After the one minute gestures we move on to two minutes, then five, ten, and twenty minutes. As you increase the amount of time the amount of detail increases, as does (hopefully) the accuracy of your rendering. The other thing that increases your accuracy? Volume. Doing a shit ton of drawings.

In my Tuesday evening painting class, the instructor asked me if I was having any particular issues while working on my piece. I mentioned that sometimes I had problems with paint consistency, having either too much or too little solvent on my brush, making the paint either too thick to spread evenly, or too thin to cover adequately. He said there was no magical formula, that you just had to learn to feel it by doing it. Volume. Doing a shit ton of paintings.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. 

So the goal for myself is three drawings and one painting, outside of class, per week. I will try to show some of that here.

Peace in yer crease.

Job Search: Part Two

I continue to look for a somewhere between part time and full time job. Last week I sent in a resume and cover letter for the first non theatre job I have applied for in about 20 years, a position at The Phillips Collection. As I move more to studio art, is there a better place to work than an art gallery?

What I struggled with the most was figuring out how to frame my skill set and experience into terms that would make sense to someone who knew nothing about theatre. What does being a theatrical scenery, lighting and projections designer mean in real world terms? How about production management?

I put these questions out to the Facebook hive- mind, and got a number of useful thoughts. My friend V, who has recently made the same transition out of theatre, was very helpful. She looked over my resume and made suggestions, and sent me several versions of hers*.

As the job search goes on I am also working on ideas for the set for Oedipus I am designing for Catholic University and a bit of production management for a project at Georgetown University. And of course drawing and painting.

Peace in yer crease.

* I have been overwhelmed by the support and encouragement I have received from so many of my friends. It has been truly humbling.

At The Moment What I Love About Oils Is What I Hate About Oils

I took this rather blurry photo with my iPhone last night in class:

                                                                                  Untitled
                                                                                  Oil on canvas board.
                                                                                  20" x 16"

The current layer of color was brushed on top of a greyscale painting done last week (which I forgot to take a photo of before starting to paint yesterday). I continued to poke at the painting for about 40 minutes after this picture was taken. It's one of the great thing about oils. Because of the extremely slow drying time* you can continue to manipulate the image for hours. Really until you are too tired to hold a brush anymore if you so choose.

And one of the worst things about oils (at least to me at the moment) is that you can continue to manipulate the image for hours if you so choose. Knowing when to stop can be difficult and it is possible to make the painting worse if you are not careful. In theatre you know when you have to stop working on the art; when the press sees it. I am finding it harder to make that determination with painting**.

* I read recently that conservators do not consider an oil painting completely dry until between 60 and 80 years after it has been completed. Which means I will more than likely be dead before any canvas I have done is completely dry.

** I am not the only one. One of the works on display in the Degas/ Cassatt exhibit at the National Gallery Of Art is a painting by Degas that he would not allow to be sold because he wanted to rework it. He did so for years and it was still in his studio at the time of his death. 

Job Search: Part One

I am looking for a day job. In thinking about how to go about this search I thought it would be helpful to try and prioritize what I would like the ideal job to have. I have categorized this list into three categories.

Must Haves. Things that a job has to have going for it because it's part and parcel of why I am looking for a one to begin with.

Would Love To Have. Things that would make a job attractive, such that I would be willing to make slightly less in order to get them.

Unicorns That Fart Glitter. Things I would love an employer/ situation to offer but I am certainly not expecting to find.

Must Have:
Based in DC and Metro accessible. I have really cheap rent and don't want to move, and I don't have a driver's license.
Financial Solvency. This may seem like an odd thing to point out, but I don't want to go to work somewhere that is going to shut the doors in three months and force me to start this painful process all over again.
A regular, predictable schedule that has some flexibility. Some evenings and weekends are fine as long as I can do things like take full semester classes.
Above minimum wage.

Would Love To Have:
Somewhere between Part Time and Full Time. 32 - 35 hours a week would be ideal. Is there such a thing as 3/4 time?
Health Insurance. I would like to stop paying out of pocket.
Something in some way related to the arts, but not something I am thinking/ stressing about after the end of the work day.
Not having to be on my feet the whole work day. I don't necessarily want to sit behind a desk all day, but some time sitting down would be nice.
Paid Vacation/ Holidays.
Double the current minimum wage.

Unicorns That Fart Glitter:
Dental and optical insurance.
50k+ per year.
Never having to deal with the general public. Ever.
An actual unicorn that farts glitter.

If anyone knows of anything, please feel free to pass it along.

Peace in yer crease.

Faces, Feet & Hands. ARGH!

I went yesterday morning to the Saturday life drawing session with Washington Drawing Center. Both the Saturday morning and Thursday evening sessions are three hours with a single pose, for the insanely low price of $10/ session. The downside is the pose and lighting are generally worked out by committee. Still it is a great resource and I am glad to have the opportunity to work with a model at all.

For the first time since I started attending, I did a single 18" x 24" drawing while standing at an easel. I haven't really drawn anything on that scale in about 15 years. It's a lot of surface to cover with a pencil.

                                                   Seated Nude. 

                                                   Graphite on paper.

It turns out three hours was not really enough to get to a more finished drawing. In my ideal world I would have spent another two hours with the model. The model's left side, arm and breast are a little mushy and I would have liked to clean that up, as well as fill in details about the background.

But mostly the reason I would have liked more time is I am still struggling with are the face, feet and hands. That's probably clear in the above drawing given that I did not draw the hands at all and only one of the feet. And the one I did draw is still not proportioned correctly, even given the foreshortening.

However, even despite it's flaws, I am happier with the rendering of the face than I have been with any of my previous attempts. The nose is still off, and the jaw line is too angular, but it's the first time I have been able to get eyes and lips to look like they belong in a human face.  The thing is I am not really sure how I was able to do that. I spent the last 40 minutes of the session working and reworking just the face. The eyes and lips seemed finally to just come about by accident. That is a little disconcerting.

So my next thing to really work on is drawing the head and face. First to make them look like a person. Then will come creating an actual likeness of the model.

After that it's on to hands and feet.

Peace in yer crease.

What's Next?

I obviously have not blogged in quite some time. I am getting back to it partly because of some thoughts the writer and artist Austin Kleon shares in his book "Show Your Work" about when and how you should begin promoting your art. One of his ideas is that you should find a forum with which to share with the world, if not the actual work you are doing, at least some information about it. A teaser of sorts. He suggests the use of a blog, and since I already have one I thought I would experiment with the notion while I begin to make the transition out of theatre.

I suppose I should backtrack a bit.

Over the past six months or so I have begun pursuing studio art, drawing and painting as a means of expressing an artistic idea rather than the more utilitarian purpose I have used them for in the past. i.e. the illustration of a dramatic idea. In January I started attending life drawing sessions offered by the Washington Drawing Center. In March I began to experiment with oil painting. I spent six days in Florence, Italy at the beginning of April, much of which was spent taking in the breathtaking painting and sculpture to be found there.

In Italy, everything sort of clicked and I realized it was time to really take the plunge and step away from being a freelance theatrical artist. I immediately felt better. I returned to the US and began to hatch a plan.

So why the change? That requires a little bit more backtracking.

2013 was a pretty crappy year which saw either the loss or near loss of several loved ones. Among the many things I took away from all that trauma was a desire to have something that I did not feel so impermanent. I don't have kids, in fact have never wanted to be a parent, so when I depart this world I would like to leave something behind that lasted beyond a six week run and the vague impressions left in the memory of the audiences who saw whatever I had done. Maybe that's ego. I don't know.

Another part of it honestly stems from my frustration about getting less and less work as time goes on. Unlike theatrical design, I can choose when I pick up a paint brush. I don't have to wait for someone to hire me in order to have a means of expression. This is a double edged sword as it is also then my responsibility to do it, independent of deadlines.

But I think the largest reason is simply wanting to exercise more control over the artistic expression. I don't have to filter my ideas through anyone else, I can just do what seems best to me. This is probably also a double edged sword.

So what am I working on now?

I am tying up two theatrical projects that will be presented this Fall. I am taking summer classes in painting and figure drawing through the continuing education department at the Corcoran. I continue to go to life drawing sessions throughout the week. I am reading a lot. I am plotting a trip to Amsterdam this Fall.

And I am looking for a little more than part time job so I can get a predictable income and schedule, put some money away for graduate school (more on that later) and pay for more classes and hopefully a studio space that is not my apartment.

There will hopefully be more posted here, and I might even share some photos of drawing and painting I am doing. Although I am still a little self conscious about doing that just yet.

Peace in yer crease.