Year Long Canvas #13 – The Knowing That Comes With Darkness

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

YLC #13 copyright Jo Ann Brown-Scott, not yet titled

Another quote from Rumi, 13th century poet and scholar – Everyone does this in different ways. Knowing that conscious decisions and personal memory are much too small a place to live, every human being streams in at night into the loving nowhere, or during the day, in some absorbing work.

For those of you who have been following this saga – thank you. I wish I could provide you with startling changes on a weekly basis but that seems too ambitious. It is a gradual, relatively slow, often not-so-eventful journey that YLC and I share. She is far more patient than I. She has everything to gain and nothing to lose. I, however, agonize over each and every change and although I often say that the canvas tells me what to do, sometimes she is maddeningly silent.

But today, no question about it, she screamed at me for drama.

The purple sun that many people took an instant “shine” to (pardon the humor) and that I was so in love with 2 weeks ago, now leaves me cold – a shocking thing for a sun to have to admit. So I have made changes to that upper left corner of the composition….and the sun is obliterated. No more sun flares, no more daily rising in the east and no more celebratory, spectacular western sun setting to garner applause and clinking of wine glasses in that corner of the composition. Maybe I over-reacted – but maybe not. I just cannot mourn every single thing that disappears. I believe that even the art Buddha would agree.

We still have the other sun however – sitting all fried-eggish behind the horizontal slats – that one I still like….but probably not for long.

So purple sun has been replaced with approaching night, if that is how you choose to interpret it. It amuses me sometimes to see a landscape behind the slatted lines, sun above, colorful hillside village below, suggestive of Mexico perhaps – Puerto Vallarta – and now night on its way, but I am not so hung up on that image that I am going to preserve it forever. If I had to make a prediction, I would say the final result of this painting will be totally non-objective and wildly abstract….because I am heading in that direction already. I am yearning for less whimsy and more drama. I will end this year with some serious art.

See the little black parts I added in a few places along the lower far right side? Very small but important. See the magenta coming over on top of the new black area? Also very important – because you cannot just add a huge black area and not integrate it into the composition. It has to work well and mesh with the other colors. See the scratch marks in the new black? I wanted a texture – not just solid dead black.

It is not even mid-summer yet, and still a long way to travel. If you have the time to go back into my archives and re-visit the first couple gestures made on the naked YLC, then you do realize we have come a long way, speaking as an evolutionary reference. This journey won’t be over until March 10th, 2015 when I can let the YLC retire so she can just hang out on some wall in peace. When that day comes I guarantee some glasses will be raised at some type of crazy-art celebration.

As of today, I am really looking forward to that. It cannot come too fast for me.

Year Long Canvas #11, and a thread of artistic wisdom.

Posted on May 20, 2014 by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better. Sydney J. Harris

Today’s last class was bittersweet, since many of us are not attending any classes for the summer, and although 3 months is a freeing and enticing stretch of time it is also a deep void to fill. And filling the shoes of Homare Ikeda ( http://www.homareikeda.com ) is an impossibly tall order – he is a gifted instructor; wise yet playful, firm in his experience yet always open to new ideas, serious about his art yet secure enough to be whimsical at times, free spirited yet always grounded in the process. Having access to the mind of the master on a weekly basis will be greatly missed.

He spoke to us at the beginning of class about artistic dedication and what a luxury and privilege it is to be able to afford the time and have the talent to paint well. Not just to paint but to paint well. He said we are truly fortunate and should never take it lightly. He said, in so many words, that we should not squander that privilege. We should not deny it or disrespect it or take it for granted. It must be honored and given expression. But he was careful to add, after several minutes on that subject, that with summer at our doorstep, he had one final assignment for us….

We were instructed to PLAY. We were told that our summer must be spent in a sort of artistic abandon – we should give ourselves the freedom and the fun of being loose, experimental, random and playful. We should absolutely have fun this summer. We have been given permission and instructed to do so.

Well alrighty then. I am all for that. Hope I have not forgotten how….to relax, to play and be silly. To be young again in spirit. To make stupid mistakes. To learn from them. To make other mistakes. Then to occasionally create something brilliant, born of enjoyment and fun.

When the class began I had not been inside a classroom, as a student, for several decades. I had just come from 3 years of teaching mixed media to adults in northern California, moving back to Denver after 6 years away, and I felt very strongly that it was time to get my own mojo working again. To paint with serious intention and dedication. To find a class and an instructor that were a good fit for me. To see if I was on the right track as I began the next chapter – the remainder – of my painting career. It was either luck or intuition or both that drew me to Homare’s class. His assignment to me of the YEAR LONG CANVAS project was, in retrospect, perfection. It demanded that I slow down, take my painting to the level of a meditation, think more, sometimes think less, TRUST myself more and promise that I would follow the process through until it was time for it to be over. I still have a long way to go, and I don’t enjoy painting in really hot weather, not even in air conditioning. I would love to take the summer off, not from painting entirely, but from painting any more on the YLC. But I will not do that.

In spite of the assignment to PLAY for the summer, I have the YLC here staying with me 24/7 in a corner of my studio. I am her vacation retreat. September will come soon enough and I will have to take her to class with me and reveal what has happened to her over the summer break. Think how it might feel to have to read a great book over the time of an entire year – when you are dying to race ahead to the end but you have to pace yourself and allow only a bit to be revealed at a time. What if babies took 12 months instead of 9? How about a year’s worth of working on the same recipe; refining and tweaking and altering until you lose your bleeping mind. A year is enough time to fall completely in and out of the creative mood at least a dozen times – alternating love/hate feelings – and each time you have to find a way to get yourself geared up and hyped up and ready to move forward again…..only to lose that momentum and speed and focus again and again and again.

Of course there is a much larger life lesson here about CHANGE. We hesitate to make changes in our lives based upon fear – fear that the newer will not be as comfortable or as satisfying as was the previous status quo. Fear that we have moved into the unknown at the total expense and obliteration of the known – fear that the life changes we are about to make will not work out and we cannot go backwards and get back again to where we were. It is my personal experience, however, that carefully considered change usually does bring improvement and enhancement with its evolution, and the result is better than expected. This is based upon knowing myself and trusting myself.

So this week I have done just a little work on the canvas and maybe you will notice it and maybe you will not. A slight bit more of purple was added in strategic areas – in about the 10 o’clock area, if you use the clock guideline. Also just a little more of it at about 4 o’clock, drifting over the orange. The purple was added for balance. Next time I work on her I will be gutsy-er, and if you are bordering on boredom, have faith, big change will come. That will be painful but no guts no glory. And I am supposed to trust that the glory will be reincarnated as a new idea every bit as successful and appealing as it was before. I love the quote I have included in this post about CHANGE – and another quote I heard once that says that to request no change at all requires great change in itself!