Painting as Process
I appreciate that if you're reading this, you're not watching the news or otherwise fueling the anxiety that's so pervasive right now. Good for you! I hope this writing helps to remind you of the potential within you to create new realities. Thanks for your attention! Now, please enjoy!
Although I got a late start in my art career, I’ve made up for this by making lots and lots of paintings. First there were lots of still life pieces with subjects I could set up easily. (It helped if they had staying power, like pears that hopefully wouldn’t rot in the time I needed them to model, or, in the case of flowers, would keep their blooms.) Next, I ventured outdoors. Once I got the hang of plein air, I amassed many, many panels covered with my modified limited palette colors depicting popular motifs: palm trees, beaches, bluffs and barns, to name a few. Then, I itched to make larger pieces and occupied my studio in order to do so. Eventually, the paintings grew so large and plentiful I had to find novel ways to display them. The installation BIRDS FLY IN: A Human Refuge has grown out of that impulse.
Over the years, coming up on 18 now, I’ve always been a bit dismayed when out of the blue I would simply lose interest in the kind of painting I had been doing and, seemingly, couldn’t paint that way anymore. What was wrong with me? I wondered. No matter how hard I’d try to want to paint a certain way, if I managed to force myself—often for a commission—it seemed almost impossible to do so. And, it was doubly painful because my fans really wanted me to keep painting what they liked and, even though I’m a people-pleaser by upbringing, eventually, I just couldn’t.
So, what to paint and why? These are questions that—now long past the first blush of making the kind of paintings simply for other people admire—I continue to find intriguing. I read somewhere that Matisse said he painted in order to understand himself. This resonates deeply with me.
Regarding my painting production over the years, I can see my approach has evolved from two radically different processes. In the beginning, my painting process was reactive. I was learning to see and render what is present in the outer world. Representation was extremely important to me; like most novice painters, I wanted my painting to “look like” my subject. (How many would-be artists get stopped because they fail to make what they believe is an accurate copy of reality?) I was fortunate in that I’d been trained, as an ICU nurse, to notice things in the environment and react quickly to them. Before that, I wasn’t particularly adept at looking.
Once I’d scratched that very insistent itch, however, my art-making shifted. Art now seemed to demand that the focus of my own art-making evolve. My references were no longer outside of me in what I could see. The subject of my painting, apparently, was to be me, not anything out there in the world. And what did that entail, I wondered?
I came to understand this as a movement from reaction to creation. These words are spelled with exactly the same letters, but, since they indicate an opposite orientation, their meaning and practice in painting is entirely different. For one thing, the deeply creative impulse arises in the realm of the invisible. The rules for painting what cannot be seen have yet to be written. When I taught representational painting, I could outline a whole set of procedures that, if followed, would lead a student to a decent rendering of a landscape or still life. But when I use my intuitive approach, often the best I can do is put on loud, unstructured music and say, “Have at it!”
This sort of painting bares little if any resemblance to the other kind. The “unseen” tends to express itself abstractly; in my case, it’s quite unruly. It begins—if I allow it—with blind scribble and left-hand scrawl. The kind of wild marks that lead the naïve viewer to remark, “My kid could have done that!” It’s embarrassing, the way the uninhibited art spirit slops on the paint. I want to stop it, make it look better, more respectable!
Yet, the less “I” censors this creative process—the layering of paint, the scraping or scratching of the surface, the combining of colors that no people-pleaser would dream of—the more I recognize that what’s showing up on the canvas. If I stay with it long enough, something sometimes begins to emerge that has something to do with a less-than-conscious aspect of myself, or the Self.
Matisse reportedly said he painted in order to understand himself. This motivation resonates with me as well. When I stay with the process—challenging the editor who believes it knows how make a perfect painting—I can sometimes agree with Walt Whitman, that “I am larger, better than I thought ….” Although, until I’ve seen it through, creation often looks and feels chaotic. I have to learn over and over again how to live with that phase of a painting in which all (me!) looks like a hopeless mess. Unlike a jewel of a plein air painting that I used to whip out in 3 hours, one of these more abstract creations can take months or longer for the inchoate to clarify and resolve into the beauty it wants to become.
I’m not sure if the painting I’ve posted here is complete or not. I’ve already signed it once or twice since I began it last summer; however, it’s insisted on becoming something quite different from either of those 2 earlier versions. It features odd-shaped elements (Ellie-meants?)—on a field of blue. There are hints of birds, lotus, water. Who knows? But I love how what the painting has been is contained within what it is now. It wanted a life of its own—not my will but thine—simplicity rather than complexity. It strikes me in its simple statement of something that can’t be summed up in words but, nevertheless affirms its presence, a Presence, in the world but not of it.
At least that’s how it seems to me, today. What about you?
Wishing you the peace that comes of creating ...
Ellie
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