Tag Archives: Year-Long Canvas Project

Year Long Canvas Week # 10 – Reprieve

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

snow SNOW DAY

The YLC has had nothing new added since last week due to a freakish spring SNOWSTORM in the Denver area and the mountains, making a commute into the city for Monday art class a crazy idea even for me. It was freezing cold; the snow kept coming down, and what began as a slushy rain on Saturday turned more syrupy and thick and then serious by Sunday. On Monday morning it had snowed all night, gotten much colder and morphed into black ice on the highways and a total accumulation of about 7 inches south of Denver where I live and 24-36 inches in the foothills and higher country. The skiers are nuts with joy; the highways up to ski altitudes are clogged with people ditching work and Arapahoe Basin will stay open until June, they have announced. Here where I live, today is better with just cloudy skies, temps in the 50;s and snow nicely melting off all roads. By the weekend we’ll be into the low 80’s.

Oh I know, I could have worked on the YLC at home, but I like to “do her” during class because the energy is so palpable and positive you could cut it with a knife in that classroom. But I also, yes I do, I really really do, like her so well the way she is that I used the “snow day” excuse to give her a reprieve until next week’s class. That’s legal and I made an executive decision to let her rest. I need to think and carefully calculate what will happen to her next.

I actually spent the snow day re-working an old 18×24 inch canvas that I had stored in a closet, and I am pleased with what happened. Often the best work I do is giving life-support to old compositions that I became so disgusted with at some point that I shoved them away into a closet, letting them rest and slip into an intentionally induced art coma. Not as punishment but to give us both a time out, allowing frustrations to settle down. Taking them out, months later, breathing oxygen into them and seeing them with new eyes is usually worth the effort. So yesterday I did that and the attached photo is the finished composition.

?????????? Mixed Media painting titled WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN, copyright 2014, Jo Ann Brown-Scott

This painting surprised me. The places that are re-worked and covered up with new ideas amount to about 3/4 of the finished image. Only the orange area is original and untouched. The decision was what to cover up and what to enhance, as is usually the case. If you zoom in you will see that there are some shapes delineated with black ink, almost like boulders and stones falling. The orange area has a definite sun, and a sunset type of glow. You might choose to interpret this as a literal landscape with some kind of rockslide and a sun setting above a horizon but that would be the easy way out.

I prefer to think of it as a slide, a break, a tumble of some “LIFE” issues happening in a chaotic rush of action placed in contrast with the permanence of the sun rising and falling every 24 hours in a constant and reassuring event that tells us all that some things never change. The sun will come and go, regularly alerting us that life goes on. Thus the title – WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN, life continues and hope endures. That’s my story on this one.

 

 

Year Long Canvas Project, Week #9 – Risk Taking

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

her2 Before – some gray wash added in the lower area

??????????  After  – more gray wash and the big gutsy move, copyright 2014

 

My relationship with the Year Long Canvas (YLC) continues, and she has a mind of her own…so when she speaks to me I listen.

Monday’s class was rather different and fascinating for me.  At the suggestion of my instructor, Homare Ikeda, I reluctantly covered a large portion of the lower portion of the painting with a gray wash. He loves gray washes – he uses them a lot in his own work. In the hallway outside our classroom is hanging about a 4ft x 4 ft Ikeda painting, and there is a large gray square area in the middle of the painting that dominates – obviously at some point he thought the painting would look better and work better and be more balanced if he grayed-out this portion of the composition. I cannot show you a picture of it because I would be violating his copyright, but the remainder of the painting is busy – complicated and playful – with zigzags, polka dots, squiggles and other childlike gestures done in various colors of paint. The gray area is not the focal point – it throws the emphasis to all the outside areas of the painting which are the focal point. Very unorthodox, to do that – but that is typical Homare Ikeda. That is precisely why he is who he is. See his paintings at http://www.homareikeda.com

So, we agreed it was time to simplify, and what has become the focal point and/or the STRENGTH of the painting (the multi-colored busy-ness in the middle area of the right side of the painting) is NOT the place to do that, so it seemed logical to use the wash right where I used it. Painting is often a series of additions and subtractions – you try something on the canvas and either it enhances the painting or it does not. And it might enhance the painting during many hours of work sessions and then suddenly when you do some specific thing to the other parts of the painting, everything changes and the area you enhanced no longer enhances. After cautiously spreading the gray wash over the bottom, I liked it – it made everything else stand out by comparison and it concentrated all the action more effectively on the focal point. So I continued the gray wash farther up the left area of the canvas, covering up even a larger percentage of the canvas with it. The purplish-blue in the upper left was grayed as well. Then I decided I liked the  path of stark white so I whitened it up even more – taking it more prominently from lower left across and over toward the mid-right, which gave the focal area more punch, because the white contrasted so nicely with all the bright colors there.

I was surprising myself – I was going forward with something I thought I would not really like and finding out it made everything better. Gray is not a fav color of mine, but it did what it was supposed to do because it is so neutral. The advantage of gray is that it does not conflict with much. It is merely gray.

So while I was on a roll I decided to create a sort of something-or-other to look THROUGH, right on top and over the surface of the focal point, as if you are seeing all that focal point action behind it  – and instead of doing an obvious window with a square-ish frame I decided to do a series of slanted parallel lines almost suggestive of venetian blinds, right over the top of the focal point – the reason being to give it more importance! Anyone viewing the painting would feel that they were seeing through the lines to a special scene or image – and since it already had a round sort of blurred fried egg shape like a sun, perhaps I was suggesting that the view was of a landscape with a colorful hillside village underneath the sun, seen from behind open venetian  shades. I thought it might give the painting a quirky twist – a mysterious turn of events.

Well it seemed a risk worth talking, so I used turquoise lines in a non-square-ish, somewhat distorted way, and I drew them right on top of my focal point. YIKES YIKES YIKES I kept thinking as I did it – this is either going to be great or it is soooo not going to be great.

When I showed it to Homare he was very, very pleased – big smile. And my work for the day was done.

I would so love to leave the YLC this way and call her done….I would title her “Seeing Puerto Vallarta” …… but that is not the challenge, is it?

Year Long Canvas Project #8

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

 

her2 Year Long Canvas Challenge, Week 8, copyright 2014, Jo Ann Brown-Scott – untitled

Time flies when you are having fun – here we are at week 8 – about 44 or so to go. (for you new followers thank you so much for coming aboard, and please refer to my archives for an explanation of the Year Long Canvas Challenge).

And as of now, she has totally lost her original identity. The old “year-long” as we remember her is nearly gone. She is in the witness protection program hoping for an entirely new start.

Yesterday was CRAAAzy. She took off out of the blue and left me in the dust….the canvas I mean. I believe the mood in the classroom was partly responsible – people were laughing and talking as they painted, and some were  actually told to dial it down and be quiet. But see what good energy was unleashed as a result? Silence is over-rated.

She has gotten a life of her own. My head was spinning. I was out of breath, trying to keep up with what she was telling me to do….yelling at me! Commanding me.

She is all up in my face about wanting to be FREE.

She told me that last week’s additions were pretty much OK  but she wants more – she wants to have it all.

Color, line, rhythm, movement, sensuality. Mystery! A message! Is she asking me for calligraphy….???

So what is all that going on in the left-center of the composition? All the shapes, and the dots and the compartments of color and black? Even a couple or three triangular flag shapes….HUH?

I believe it has something to do with the week I have had – a week of LIFE issues, the kind everyone has – and all the compartments I place them in. There was a death, the announcement of a pending birth in the family, a bit of drama I will not go into, a health thing, an amazing dream and even more. I watched a cute kid in the park flying a kite – a flag? I see the whirl of the wind in the composition – and chaos. It is all a big Rorschach image – you see what you want to see. And if you are not seeing anything much at all except bold color, that is also just fine.

So I had fun in class yesterday – my esteemed instructor, Homare Ikeda, likes it and he and I both threw out some suggestions – I tried a couple of them in this newest incarnation and covered one up already. Three steps forward, one back.

It is almost May and I am trying my best to be carefree. So far it seems to be working.

Year Long Canvas Project #7 – Time for a Bold Move

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

721class  before   orange  after

Yesterday afternoon was gorgeous outside – spring in all of its SPRINGY glory. I wanted to take a walk and go play in the out of doors. But I attended my usual Monday art class. When I arrived I can’t say that I was really into a painting mood, but I know from experience that when your mind is NOT fully engaged and you are thinking about other things, it can actually work to your advantage. You don’t over-think – you don’t question yourself – you have kind of a WTF attitude. That can bring a looser approach and a less contrived work session. But in spite of that mood, class was stimulating, energy sapping and intense – but in a good way. Some students were painting for upcoming shows. Some were painting the same kinds of things they have been painting for months now with little variation. Others were doing fascinating work that I greatly admire. A few were barely painting at all…

In some future post I will talk about the situation in an art class, any art class, which predictably involves some students who aspire to paint as precisely like the instructor as they can – they want to be clones. They do not or cannot bring an original idea or concept to the table. (On second thought I will just leave it at that, because I don’t ever want to make a habit of bashing other people’s work…)

I set up camp. I am working on 3 canvases now at the same time, but the Year Long canvas has gained a reputation and people now know it by name, and they stop by to visit HER each week, checking on progress. I am assigning it a gender now, don’t ask me why. I just don’t like calling the canvas an “IT”. The first photo at the top of this post is how the canvas looked at the mid-point of yesterday’s class, with new work done in several areas. The changes made include the subtle definition of oval shapes in the upper right with a wash of pale peach tones and in the center area I defined 3 oval shapes in the Naples yellow, then another larger oval to the left of that. Why? Because it was time to begin some definition…some type of direction defined by shapes. No, I do not know where I am going with it just yet. Then I whitened up the slash of white that runs from the lower left across the center toward the upper right. I also added more purple tones to the upper left area, overlapped some areas with additional turquoise. I am improvising – abstract expressionism is all about improvisation. The paint does speak to you – it tells you what to do next. You learn to read what the paint has said, either in its texture, tone, shade, shape, color, or line.

At that point my instructor stopped by to offer his input. I told him I felt that the painting needed some type of bold move – a big jolt – for these reasons:

1) the art needs something unpredictable and incongruent to shake things up within the whole

2) I need to give myself something brand new to deal with, because of course adding a thing like that immediately effects everything else, and it keeps me from getting bored by offering me a self-imposed problem to work through

3) a bold change would contribute greater sophistication, an element of surprise, eccentricity and complexity if it is used effectively

4) ultimately the goal would be to take the composition from mediocrity and predictability toward  excellence and individuality

He totally agreed. He said it was time. I suggested a large area of flat, unapologetic strong color. Orange in fact, because there is already a bit of orange splashed around the composition. He liked that choice. I also said I wanted the area of orange to be placed in the lower right quadrant of the composition – he agreed. He and I talked….he threw out some additional ideas and I did too. He and I discussed the challenge of the 365 days  ahead of me – and the probability that nearing year’s end the paint will have gotten so thick that it inhibits the artist’s options. For instance perhaps you want to make a line, for direction and emphasis, which I actually love to do, and yet you cannot do that because the surface has gotten too bumpy with paint buildup that you cannot create a convincing straight line. So you have to adjust to that, as well as a lot of other things. I am only into month 2 as of this writing. Can I do this? Do I really WANT to do this? What is it going to get me, in the  long run? I have had so damn many “character building” experiences in my life – do I need this too? I hope it doesn’t sour me on painting as it builds up my character. I don’t want the art to become a chore.

You see the “before” and the  “after” – remember it is just a start of orange.

I really like it, but it is not a big enough change for my taste, so I may decide to enlarge the orange a bit more or honor and enhance a second area with it’s presence.

 

The Year Long Canvas Project #6 – Going Postal

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

photo414

Year Long Canvas installment #6, copyright 2014,  Jo Ann Brown-Scott

When a painter is working he is aware of the means which are available to him – these include his materials, the style he inherits, the conventions he must obey, his prescribed or freely chosen subject matter – as constituting both an opportunity and a restraint. (John Berger)

Well today is Monday, class day. As you can plainly see for yourself, something snapped today. I broke out, flipped out, escaped the status quo, threw caution to the wind and decided I would add color with wild abandon. Whether you like it or not, you can be sure it is a temporary transitional composition, and it will not survive a year. Undoubtedly it will lead to something else. But it has successfully  taken things in a more chaotic, but controlled progression, more free-spirited and bold, so perhaps the lesson this week is that I have set a tone and decided I will not allow this image to be boring. I will not allow old age to rob its energy….even after a long long year.

In case you had not noticed, I worked on the painting in the upside down orientation from before – I just turned is on its head and solved the problem of the vast void at the top of the canvas that I mentioned in the last #5 post. So that issue has been solved. It still has its rhythm, but lots more color. Splatters and lines are a favorite of  mine and those have multiplied to help fill the void. I didn’t want to lose the giant swoop, the swish, the motion of the composition – and it is still there in spite of the fact that we flipped it – the swoosh  may be sacrificed and disappear at some point for the betterment of the whole thing but for now it remains.

That’s about it for this week – I have finished 2 other canvases this week  that were way more fun to work on than this one. And as a bonus, my esteemed instructor, Homare Ikeda, likes them. Sorry to say that one of the side effects of this year long project is that it is too academic for me, too restrained. I like my freedom!

I am a bird in a gilded cage, and actually I have no complaints. I feel fortunate to be there and I am singing.

 

 

Art at the Speed of Life

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

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Mixed Media Collage titled Life Weavings by Jo Ann Brown-Scott copyright 2014

It occurs to me that the Year Long Canvas of which I have been writing in my recent posts is humming along at the speed of life – one day at a time – with some days more attentively dedicated to it than others. What else can a painting ask for? I mean really, I have worked on many canvases for months, on and off, off and on, and at the end the best I can do is to call it DONE, with many unrealized possibilities for its final form still floating around in my brain. In my sleep. In my waking hours too. But I had reached my limit of endurance for working on it and so it stays where it is for all eternity…I have a long way to go before I make that decision on the Year Long Canvas.

All you can do in life is to take each day, doing the best you can, 24/7, under the circumstances of the situation you have to work with. That is the best scenario you can hope for with any of your endeavors. You cannot be expected to perform based on information you do not yet have….you have only the NOW’s worth of information to go on.

It you look back at any kind of big thing or event or occasion or circumstance in your entire life, (and this usually happens when you can’t sleep at about 3 am) and you begin to second-guess the way you handled it, questioning the decisions you made at the time, and believing that you might have done better in hindsight, try to remember all the extra-curricular stuff that was going on in your life at the time. Chances are you had a lot going on – a lot to deal with – many shades of gray to be considered. All of that factored in to the way you handled things at the time. There was more going on than just the activity in the center ring at your circus of life. You were juggling and trying to keep a lot of balls in the air.

So go easy on yourself. I am certainly trying to do that myself. Seems to me that our lives are all like paintings, and we have a lifetime to paint them with endless possibilities for the composition. We make choices based upon what we know at any given time.Then we make more alterations, more changes, more adjustments and we paint some more, eliminating the negativity and giving prominence to the positive. We brighten the color, then we tone it back down. We try new things or we revert to an old idea and make it new again. This is art at the speed of life and life at the speed of art. I think it’s all the same thing.

The Year Long Canvas Project #5 – Taking Off

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

year5

Canvas in progress, not yet titled, copyright 2014, Jo Ann Brown-Scott

Things are finally beginning to take shape – the composition has gained complexity, additional depth, and more color without losing its rhythm and movement. It is still recognizable from last week, but at some point it will give up its former identity and be in the witness protection program….my way of saying that it will have a whole different look, probably. That is very likely to happen with a year to go.

I am pleased with the progress this week, but already wondering about how I will add another warm color to all these cools….what intensity, what shades, what COLOR? I really don’t want the Naples yellow to be the only sunny color. Although it could. But the artist says she wants more color.

Last week the painting that resulted AFTER I stopped working on this year long canvas was pretty cool – it can be seen in the #4 post – and the same is true this week. I am working on another 24×30 canvas at the same time I work on this one and it is going to be a fine painting, I think. I am not quite ready to go public with it, and this post is supposed to give center stage to the year long canvas, so….we shall see.

Abstract art is supposed to work from any orientation – whether  you turn it upside down or rotate it sideways. As you can see, there is very little happening in the upper portion of this canvas, and that issue must be addressed soon. It’s never a good idea to get too far along and still have such a void in one large area – it makes you desperate to fill it up at some point, and then whatever you do to it looks like an afterthought rather than an integral part of the composition. Right now it is screaming for my attention…and I am not answering yet, living on the edge of a decision about what to do to it.

This entire canvas screams at me sometimes. I hear it calling for attention and yet I can’t run ahead too fast. A year is a VERY long time. You would think that the larger the canvas the easier the challenge, since you would have such a vast area in which to screw up and figure out how to fix it, time and time again as the months go by. But if you remember, my instructor told me not to add the challenge of SIZE to an already difficult assignment. So here we are at 24×30 and every single minute stroke shows up. You cannot sneak anything in there without it being noticeable. Idiotic moves will show….and the idiot has to correct them. I realize that there is no failure with this project, only learning experiences, but even so there will be days when I am not at all happy with what has happened to the canvas by my hand, on my watch.

I am going on a walk now and I am going to see if I can find the art Buddha to come along, because this abstract world is enough for now.

Year Long Canvas Project #4

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

newclass 004

Year Long Canvas in progress  – un-named, copyright 2014 Jo Ann Brown-Scott

Ok well class on Monday was daunting – the wind was blowing hard and many students had mishaps just getting up to and through the Denver Art Students League doors, which are preceded by many steep steps. There were actually 2 people who fell and needed first aid for minor, but bleeding, cuts and bruises. The never ending parade of canvases in and out of the double doors at the top of the concrete stairs, like a fluid gallery show with legs, is entertaining on a nice day but accompanied by wind or even rain, sleet, snow or hail it becomes difficult to watch. Not only canvases but people with various movable carts full of art supplies, carrying everything they and their imaginations require for the afternoon. That’s just the logistics of it – no way to get around it. Then you settle into the room and set up your art camp.

My year long canvas and I, plus one other canvas in progress and one that is finished but needed its final critique, made it in just fine, but across the room was a woman who was one of the casualties. Blood happening, particularly on the face of anyone, is not a fun thing to see. She had hit the pavement face first. She was basically fine, needing no stitches, but cut inside both lips, a small gash on the bridge of her nose, badly bruised already plus quite shaken and needing first aid so we all made sure she got the care she needed. It took us all awhile to calm down.

My YLC (year long canvas) had just 2 colors, Paynes gray and then Naples yellow, overlapped in a diagonal swoop, as you remember from the previous blog post last week on this subject. My esteemed instructor, Homare Ikeda, took a long glance at it as I set up camp and pronounced that is was a great start, with a large smile on his face. Wow – what had seemed underwhelming to me and so effortless and simple got the thumbs up. I was encouraged. I decided to proceed with work on it while I was fresh. I added a couple areas of white. Then I worked in some larger areas of Warm gray – I call it “dove gray” – because it is neutral and also because it has faint undertones of lavender. Maybe that is an indication of things to come, maybe not.

I am attempting to remain neutral for as long as I can because the addition of COLOR! brings such emotional reaction. We are all sucked in with the sensuality and the strength of color. Once you allow it entry, it can take over at the expense of all else and you might get so caught up in its spell that composition takes a back seat and the painting is out of your control. I see that happen to me and many other painters. You have to control that lovely monster.

Even with the little bit of work I have done so far, as I work am asking and checking myself, always walking the multiple lines of – Is the composition  merely ok? –  is it boring and basic and just barely enough to work, lacking potential for greatness, and not impressive enough yet to be better than average? Then adding more work and asking  – are the new additions an enhancement or not? Is there any one area that is really awful, or perhaps even really excellent, but must still be sacrificed (covered up) for the sake of the democracy of the entire dynamic?  Every stroke has to play well with all the others. As I paint along, I constantly ask myself what more can be done, knowing I can’t do much more today. I have to pace myself..

Several people walk up to it and say they like it just the way it is! Already!

Since I am assigned this year long project, I need to keep working, well past the times when I want so badly to stop because it works, it is exciting, it is strong. After some thought, I walk away from it. All done for today.

I love color, pattern and texture, but this project is all about restraint. I was feeling so restrained that I was comatose. The fast and furious painting that came after my short amount of time spent working on the YLC was a reaction  –  a quick and distinctive answer to that restraint. I let loose – see photo below. It is a small canvas (12×24) so it was completed in the rest of the afternoon and left me feeling happy. I think I detect a smile on the face of the art Buddha.

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Acrylic painting by Jo Ann Brown-Scott, copyright 2014 not yet titled

 

The Creative Epiphany – The Year-Long Canvas Post #3….being underwhelmed

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

gesture1   gesture2

Gesture #1 and #2 on the Year-Long Canvas – Big F****** Deal, right?

I must say that this Year-Long Canvas Project (see my archives for more explanation) is starting off as a non-event. Knowing how far I have to go on it and anticipating all the many layers of paint ahead of me, it seems irrelevant what my first gestures on the canvas are. I am ALREADY  yawning with it, eager to pick up speed. We all knew that would happen, but so soon?

My first brushstroke was not done with a brush – one of my favorite ways to begin a painting  is with a random swipe of my squeegee over liquid paint. I chose Paynes Gray. Why not a lighter color? Because I felt like being dramatic and I love the possibilities of Paynes Gray; it has more character than jet black. I chose to swipe it in the sort of diagonal direction so that I could  take advantage of the purposeful texture already there from my background color’s application.  Then a second color, Naples Yellow, using a palette knife and spontaneously adding a fling of splatter with it which will undoubtedly not matter one dot by the end of the painting but it got a few of my wiggles out and made me feel good. Not yet a third color. And no blending just yet.

Wow that was fun….sort of. Am I going slow enough? Such a pathetically small offering to the art Buddha.

I have other irons in the fire of course – several other canvases demanding my attention – so the lazy year long canvas ( I am sure it hates that nickname) is just standing over there in the corner now. It is very difficult for it to be a non-participant in the daily hum of things. I would not want it to be a sad painting, so I consciously decide to be joyful when I work on it the next time.

I guess I am predictably engaged in this process. So easy to know me and how I will handle it. So boring in my reaction. SOOO already feeling frustration. I am sure that my instructor knew full well what he was doing in offering this challenge to me. Painting like this is like biting your tongue until it bleeds with things you want to say. It is like knowing you will have a scrumptious dinner but not until next year.

I am silently screaming…..but I was told to make just a few gestures at each meeting of the canvas and me, allowing time between sessions to ponder and think and even meditate, I assume. How long between meetings? I don’t know. Restraint is the key word. It could vary immensely from month to month. It occurs to me that I am too old for a time factor like this. I try to make the most of every single day….because at a certain age you just never know. So I have trained myself to live in the NOW, savoring the moments. And I guess that is actually the point in a project of such long duration. But still, next year seems very far off.

But I can do it. I can restrain myself. Hey – you bet I can.

Here I go, doing nothing on it for awhile.