Stream of consciousness stamping
The battle ground
underneath a thinly veiled sigh
as if nothing could round the edges enough
underneath a thinly veiled sigh
as if nothing could round the edges enough
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Sometimes I think too much or overthink everything. So much so that I become paralyzed and am overwhelmed by all the art work I’ve started. Sometimes it’s just the mess around me and sometimes it’s what’s happening in the world. The best thing I find that I can do is to do something mindless, something where I am more in the moment and I can just follow one line with the next line. It helps to remind me that I don’t always need to be in control and I can let art happen organically. I started this with a 12 square grid and just started making lines and shading in one of the squares, and then just kept going. ~Evelyn  I want to talk about Grey.
We all know grey is great for graying colors for shadow and distance, but what really intrigues me about Grey is its Magical Qualities. For example: place grey next to an intense/saturated color and watch what happens... The intense/saturated color begins to SING. Is this not pure magic? And then for Grey's next magical trick: The SENSE of Unity it brings to the work. And tagging along comes MYSTERY, THE VERY BONES OF THE WORK. Mystery allows something deeper to happen. An emotional connection is made and it leaves us wanting more. A sense that there is more that is unseen keeps us thinking, wondering, and returning to the work again and again. A little uncertainty is an important element in a work of art. Francis Bacon said, "Our job is to deepen the Mystery." Grey/Gray: the magical color....... ~Sefla  ZOOOOM!! 2020 has given the idea of ‘going viral’ a whole new meaning. It feels like we are historically in the beginning of a new epoch, a new distinctive time period. Because we have been ‘given’ this isolating pause, we are just starting to see how different our lives may become. And when we have drastic changes to our lives, our art follows along and reflects those changes. As an artist, I’m used to working alone, it’s how I work best. But in this new age, I am forced to be more social – I ‘Zoom’ several times a week; I FaceTime family and friends way more than I ever did; I share art on FaceBook and Instagram more than ever with more people; and I’m collaborating on line with other artists. With this time there has also been a ‘viral’ spread of ideas and concepts and experimenting that didn’t happen before. I am very excited anticipating the ‘new’ art that will come from this ‘new’ age.  Public opinion wanted!
This sketch is done by Jacqui Low and she would like to know which sketch you like best and why. 
EDGES .....Lost and Found or Soft and Hard I cannot emphasize enough how important the use of lost and found edges are in a painting. Nor only are they are a strong visual factor in a painting, but they direct the focus of your image and make it more interesting and painterly. Losing and finding boundaries or edges help suggest form and bulk – this is a critical step in painting. I first learned to work with lost and found edges when studying watercolor with Master Painter Charles Reid. Watercolor takes advantage of watercolor's inherent wet-in-wet nature. When I switched to acrylics I found it was possible to blur my edges with acrylic also. Soft and hard edges create a resting point for your viewer. They are intriguing to the eye and encourage the viewer to mentally complete the indistinct portions of the painting, thereby creating real involvement with the work. The viewer has now become part of the creative journey, dancing the viewer's eye along the contour of form. ~Sefla  Photo Booth image series on copper with enamel The word ‘series’ really isn’t an art term, it’s borrowed from mathematics and can show how we experience or perceive time as a series of events in sequence. (Think flip-book) Monet is probably one of the masters of this. His ‘Haystacks’ are a series of 25 canvases of haystacks painted from the same location and perspective, but at different times of day and year showing them in different lights, seasons, weather... it even goes a little deeper thinking about how each painting is a moment frozen in ‘time’ and how the series begins to tell a story. Why I like to work in a series: 1- Once I have an idea or theme, then it’s easy to start working on it. For me the hardest part is trying to figure out where to start, what to work on. I’m always hoping that I’ll come up with ‘the one.’ Which would be great, but in the meantime... it seems that I’m more likely to get someplace if I just start working on something, anything. Even if it’s drawing the same exact picture over and over. Even if it doesn’t feel like it, it is taking you somewhere and you may not know where you’ll end up until you get there. 2 - It helps to create a unified body of work, which may not be clear to you until you have 10 or 20 or 100... 3- It gives me the opportunity to experiment... how would this look in green? What if it were longer? What if there were 2 of the same image? The series allows me to try all of the options, not have to just decide on one. 4 - It becomes a narrative and tells a story - for me it is therapy. -Evelyn  Surrendering to a process requires that we take a “Leap of Faith.”
How does it work? Do we just close our eyes Hold our nose and Leap — trusting the unknowable part of ourselves, as we jump into the unknown? I think of it as taking a trip without a map — or a GPS — getting lost and continuing to stay in trust mode while feeling the discomfort of the work not being what I want…yet. So, the big question: Can we be in this place without judging it? Can we gag the critic? Can we forge ahead without knowing where we will land? As we are taken out of our comfort zone, working in a constant state of experimentation and discovery, we must learn to play with paint with a child’s mind: the “I don’t know” mind. What is happening we cannot foresee — it will be a surprise. We are not trying to make a painting, but we just might make a chunk of Life that we could never have even imagined: if you trust the process… -Sefla  Sometimes when I’m thinking about an idea or concept, I like to make a loose grid (this one is 6.5x4”) and then make several drawings in the grid playing around with the idea. It’s small enough that I can do it relatively quickly and move an idea along. I started out with the top row moving left to right, drawing just faces that I normally draw out of my head and then moved into doing contour drawings with the rest. I’ve been thinking about shadows and how it’s hard for me to do a drawing or painting unless I know where the light is, it’s hard for me to abstract it because in my head it looks weird if you don’t have the light in the right place. I sometimes tend to overthink things. I wanted to do this grid and play with the shadows. Of course my original idea changed when I started doing the contour drawings because I started doing contours of the shadows that I was seeing and I didn’t want to do the original thought. You can see how the idea changed when I started doing the contour drawings. That’s ok though because the whole idea of this grid exercise for me is to see where it will take me and it’s ok if it’s not where I planned to go. It becomes a journey, an adventure.
I can’t do a study on an idea without researching it a bit. Technically, a shadow is a dark area where the light from a light source is blocked by an opaque object between you and the light source. The wider the light source gets the more blurred the shadow becomes. What that comes down to is that shadows are about time and space (my favorite things to think about) Seeing a shadow in a painting or drawing might give you information about the time of day or the time of year or the place they are at. Shadows give depth and 3-dimensionality. Without a shadow, your image becomes flat. Not that there is anything wrong with that and not that I haven’t done hundreds of images like that (see some HERE) A lot of traditional Japanese art is also shadowless - here are links to a couple of examples of Kitagawa Utamaro (1792–93) and Tōshūsai Sharaku (1794–1795). The idea is when you are working with ideas in a grid it gives you the opportunity to play around and maybe put the shadows in a place they are not expected and see how it can change your reality. It’s all just an illusion anyway, a play of light. A couple of my favorite shading techniques: • Chiaroscuro which shows an abrupt change from light to shadow when the person or object is in strong light. Rembrandt and Caravaggio are, of course, great old school examples of this. Another good example is Amélie Beaury. • Sfumato is kind of the opposite of Chiarascuro, it’s a softening transition between colors like smoke, a fine shading. Our old school example would of course be Leonardo daVinci and a more modern take would be Gerard Richter - please check out his self-portrait (I love it) and Sophie Pigeron (amazing work) What shading techniques do you use in your art, feel free to post an example in the comments! -Evelyn |
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