Crowded stilllifes
October 23, 2016
underpainting and first forms sketched in acrylic 40 x 50cm
HI folks, this is a continuation of the series I’m working on which seems to be about dancing between realism and abstraction. I needed to keep the freshness of this underpainting and sketch, so I let go of certain givens, like making the yellow ball (which was a pomegranate) bright rose red. When faced with a decision, I chose for ‘feels good’ for the whole painting, rather than ‘right’. Looking at this now, I can also see how landscape is coming in, through the patches of green, like crops seen from the sky. (The red and yellow stripe are the Dutch bulb fields 🙂 ).
Crowded still life 1 acrylic 40 x 50 cm
Above is the ‘finished’ piece. It simply means where I chose to stop working on it. Some things aren’t ‘completed’. But it is the imperfections I love so much in others’ work so I left them in mine.
The next piece was quite different. I wanted to work with more neutral colours. It is painted over a few portrait studies I did, you can see a face peeking out behind the small dropper bottle at the upper right.
Neutral underpainting acrylic 40 x 50cm
Without really thinking about it consciously, I started painting this with glazes rather than solid colour. I think that I was quite intimidated at first by the strong and dominating shadows, and this was a way to approach them cautiously.I really loved the black broken lines of the charcoal sketch, so with dry-brush I imitated them in places.
Crowded still life 2 acrylic 40 x 50cm
For some reason one of my favourite areas in this painting is the little rectangle with the orange and greenish blue plum on the lower right just next to the plate with radishes. I also like the shallots.
It would be tempting to ‘fill in’ everything (see bottle and dropper bottle upper right), but my instinct was to leave it. These paintings are done in a spirit of following where the painting leads. There are lots of open areas, spatially as well as in content. I like the surprises I got while painting it. Things happened which could never be planned. When you’re in that kind of flow, each painting opens out naturally into another one. I don’t have a subject yet, but this exploration will definitely continue.
Next post will be about Matisse. ah lovely.
Painting as poetry rather than science
October 10, 2016
airy still life acrylic 40 x 50cm approx.
One of my present challenges with painting is to distil some basic elements out of a crowded composition.
I don’t like to set up still lifes these days, they strike me as too formal. So when certain aspects of our messy kitchen counter caught my eye, I took a picture and decided to work with it purely as a starting point. This first piece above wasn’t entirely to my satisfaction composition wise, but I liked that I was able to break out of slavishly following the actual photo.
Later, I revisited this set up from another angle. This time I used a specific underpainting which was a previous failed work. Last post I talked about using some of my oil pastel drawings as models to kick start my painting. Take a look at the lower left panel of this piece below.
I decided to enlarge that as a separate painting. It didn’t have enough design elements to hold interest, but it made a great underpainting for the next still life I did.
I let the composition and colours of the underpainting lead my decisions in this still life. Finally, my two ways of working seem to be coming together- the realistic, and the freer, fantasy approach. I need the everyday objects to anchor and engage my attention. But I also need the room to be able to play with colour and light. I also enjoy the freedom of not having to explain everything. Areas are left out of focus and a little mysterious.
That’s why I feel that the approach to painting which speaks most to me is as poetry. Distilling the essence of something without explaining the magic away.
A lot of realistic painting bores me because of the intellectual approach. Just imitating the likeness of something even if technically well done isn’t necessarily art. As either viewer or maker, it doesn’t bring me anywhere new, it doesn’t open any doors in my heart or soul.
Here is a merged photo of the still life over the under painting.
More in this series coming soon.
Back to work
October 1, 2016
It has been a challenging summer dealing with various health issues. But now I have energy again to share some of my life with anyone interested.
Making artwork has never really stopped. Some weeks after the op, I was already painting a copy of a Matisse stillife. Spring inspired me to paint trees, then I got sick in June and things ground to a halt for awhile. Around that time I started sewing a quilt by hand, having bought 2 packs of beautiful Tilda cotton squares on sale. I liked the slow pace and the kind of mindless precise work.
Fall brought new inspiration. My last post had been in June and, with the onion paintings, I had broken through to a new way of working, .
Onions2 acrylic
It was kind of intimidating to try and pick that up again, I’d tried and failed a few times. So I decided to ease into painting again by doing something familiar. I feel most comfortable working in defined areas, like patchwork really. My oil pastel drawings tend to begin as grids, so I chose a few of my favourites and began copying them in acrylics.
It is so true that just working, regardless of being inspired or not, most always opens up the next step.
Even though I stopped again after completing these 2 below, doing them launched me into a new phase in my painting. More about that in the next post. Meanwhile…
When stuck in one medium it is often helpful to go to another. I decided to make collages out of some old oil pastel drawings. I did one a day for a week, here they are:
take care, til next time.
Fresh eyes, marks and meanings
May 4, 2016
It feels like grace when a group of paintings becomes a series. I don’t have to start from scratch with each canvas – the theme is decided, there is fresh inspiration, and one painting leads to the next.
Spirit of Trees is a new series, started last winter during illness, continuing now into spring with new energy and wellness. It has a particular significance to me, giving me a way to express my connection with nature- my feeling of being held/protected by it and at its mercy as well. A healthy kind of humility, I would think.
With the dog, I walk the same paths a lot here locally. Sometimes I get bored with the familiar scenery, but lately I’ve been trying to look at things with fresh eyes. Looking at trees with new affection has increased my awareness of their beautiful forms, alone and in relationship. There was a recent book here (in NL) by a forest ranger who feels keenly the emotions of trees. His lifelong association with trees has convinced him that they do form relationships, communicate with, and protect each other. I also sense different personalities in trees and enjoy communing with them.
The next painting in the series is a small study, completed in one sitting.
new branches
It was done on top of an old painting- once again the background determines the feel of the new image. I’ve left parts of the original painting showing through.
I like this one, but wanted to take the subject further. I had a clear idea that I wanted to do it in the style of David Hockney, feeling the need for sharp colour delineation and a more decorative approach.
Now David Hockney is a whole other topic. I still get blissed out when I remember stumbling by accident into his ‘The Big Picture’ exhibition in Cologne while I was there for another show. I wrote about it here. Excerpt below:
The show was a total immersion experience in the art and life of this artist of stature. I’ve always liked Hockney’s work, but these huge composite canvasses of as many as 18 paintings making up one whole wall of landscape were just awe inspiring. It was a privilege just to see this work… It was all good, all well drawn, all honest, all meaningful, relevant. And yet also decorative, unique and humorous.
I came away from that show wanting to paint in the same spirit as Hockney,( not necessarily with the same technique). At any rate, I’ve noticed that when I get gob-smacked by some inspirational visual art and am longing to have some of the same kind of qualities in my work,it rarely works to try to appropriate part of another artist’s ‘language’. For me that dead-ends after awhile because you are lifting elements out of context, and are missing the whole energy base/story/context which led to them in the first place. They grew out of someone else’s life and a living creative process intimately bound with that person’s story. So copying someone else’s line, gesture, colours-unless they connect with something vital in your own work, will lead only to empty gestures and superficial effects.
I’ve found that if I trust and let go of wanting my work to look a certain way, years later, some influence will emerge naturally in my painting that recalls another artist, but finally has been translated into my own marks and meanings.
tree inspiration
This painting was started very much with Hockney’s series of landscape/ tree paintings in mind, but is not a slavish copy. Temporarily borrowing another artist’s way of seeing or handling subject matter opens new doors of perception for me. There were a series of ahas about how to handle layers of foreground and background, and how to make essentially brown and green trees light up! Google ‘The big picture’ and look at some of the work.
David Hockney, landscape around Yorkshire
What a vitality, and how directly and with what a sure hand they are painted! Can’t wait to get back to work, cheers!
Hometown
May 18, 2013
Walking through familiar neighborhoods, going downtown among the glittering skyscraper canyons, riding the incline to the view of my city- perched like a story on her 3 shining rivers, it is mine- my own place.
Every vista, every stone holds a piece of my history, and memory of loved ones and events. As any expat will know, your adopted town can never be trly yours. Each inch of belonging, every word of a new language, each nuance of a new culture needs to be fought for and claimed.
Whereas, going back to one’s roots without expectations yields all these things as gifts. The landscape speaks a familiar language that resonates deep inside one’s footsteps-steps taken on one’s own home terrain, where one simply is. Not the enemy, not the outsider, but a natural part of it all.
The people actually all speak your mother tongue (praised be!!!), you can respond to a joke or a flirt or a tease in a millisecond, you know the language in all its complex layers and twists.
In Holland I’ve rooted in certain ways, of course– after 30 years there! My garden is an ongoing marriage between my vision and energy and the place where it grows. Several horses that I know well provide me with a connection to the animal population, and the cranes, geese, and other birds sing in a language understood by every heart. My home with my husband provides a haven.
But it isn’t my hometown like Pittsburgh is and always will be.
Interview with Milenko Matanovic Part 2
August 1, 2012
This is the fourth post in the series featuring Milenko Matanovic
Continued from Interview Part 1
SZ And finally, in your talk about art and community building at PopTech, you mentioned a ‘rumble’. It seemed to be in the context of the conference, but I was fascinated by the concept of something passing through one, and suddenly familiar things falling into a new pattern, which in turn changes the significance of those things.
MM When I stepped out of the narrow arts trajectory, there were so many events happening in the world–large social and cultural events like the collapse of communism, the growing awareness of a global society.
In addition, I realized that what we were doing to the natural environment, to our Earth, was effectively a nuclear explosion happening so slowly that we did not even see it – how we nonchalantly take nature as an industrial resources and nothing more.
I tried to understand why we humans are so habitually destructive and how art is implicated in that destruction. I talked with leaders in environmental, artistic, and social issues to try and understand these issues. Together, I call all these ideas the ‘rumble.’ And it was why I felt I could not continue to make art in the isolated context of the traditional art world.
SZ How did you get into this type of work, from which Pomegranate eventually grew?
I came to the USA in the 1970s and I made it a point to meet many interesting leaders and visit cutting-edge organizations dealing with spiritual, environmental, economic, and social issues, and try to learn how they go about their business. I discovered that most organizations which were ideologically based were organized around core belief systems. These they promoted to attract like-minded people. Many eventually turned into psychologically gated communities tolerating some and ignoring others.
Increasingly I started to see this proposition as problem rather than a solution. When starting Pomegranate Center, I wanted instead to explore the idea of community of differences. I wanted to explore if it is possible to create conditions where differences are not perceived as obstacles and irritations, but as assets.
In other words, I wanted to see if it was possible to work together in spite of ideological and cultural differences. Is it possible to create conditions where people are at their best together in spite of seeing their world differently? Is it possible to combine their insights into larger understanding rather than compete for the prevalence of their pre-existing views and beliefs.
In other words, is it possible that we together uncover something larger and more meaningful than we can alone?
When we work on our community-built gathering places, I can’t afford to take sides or have preferences for a certain type of person. We get all kinds of religious and political volunteers, but we simply focus on what needs to be done, ‘Here is a project we can do together, do you want to help?’ We found repeatedly that people are perfectly able to collaborate and create great, meaningful projects together. Like any artistic work, we begin with hearing ideas; we sketch out possible designs; we select the design that is most in tune with the site, local culture and local talents, that is doable on time and budget; we work with many volunteers to build it; and we help them organize programs there and encourage the people to take care of them. I think the power of our projects lies in working with people who are participants in the creation of a large artwork and they see their ideas taking shape quickly. In our times where most people are in jobs where they are in charge of tiny parts of large and complex operations, where their contributions are abstract, our artistic and collaborative projects give participants a sense of real accomplishment, of great satisfaction that results in pride, increased trust, and greater sense of safety. In one neighborhood where we did a project four years ago, crime rate fell by 40% and has stayed there for four years. This is good!
For the article introducing Milenko’s work, please scroll down.
Country Christmas, northern Dutch style
December 28, 2011
Well folk, this is Sarah’s Styling page. 🙂 (Tongue firmly planted in cheek).
These few touches in our house are about as close as I’m going to get to all the Christmas styling going on elsewhere. I am caught between finding a lot of the magazine and TV ideas for a ‘warm, country Christmas’ fussy and kitch, to envy at people’s inventiveness and willingness to spend time sewing Christmas patchwork placemats and such. The irritation comes from being overly influenced, I guess by the northern Dutch aversion to ‘cuteness’, which they call ‘tuttig’.
I did love making the hanging hearts though. They are from dottieangel. My own addition was to scan and print out some great wrapping papers I found. I used those as well as text from old magazines. And for Christmas, used hot pink thread!
The next batch I’m going to make will be from the envelopes that have brought the Christmas cards from friends all over the world. The stamps, handwriting and postmarks will make it special.
Anyway, wishing everyone a late Merry Christmas and a happy, healthy and inspired New Year.
photo by Rende
What you Appreciate Appreciates part 2
July 4, 2011
Feeling lack and tension around money? these thoughts really help.
Continuing on with excerpts from Lynne Twist’s, ‘The Soul of Money’: (once in a while slightly paraphrased)
Our attention enlarges and enriches our experience of whatever is before us. We have the opportunity to direct our attention in the way we relate to money…
When we allow jealousy, envy and resentment to become the focus of our attention we become jealous, envious and resentful people with our money.
When we direct out attention to creativity, courage, and integrity, we become expressions of those qualities in whatever we do in our interactions with money.
When your attention is on what is lacking and scarce- in your life, in your work, in your family, in your town- then that becomes what you’re about.
That’s the song you sing, the vision you generate. You engage in lack and longing and what’s missing, and you call others to that same experience..If your attention is on problems and breakdowns with money…that is where your consciousness resides…. No matter how much money you have, it won’t be enough. No amount of money will buy you genuine peace of mind.
Yikes, I sure have fallen into that trap lately.
If you are interested in how to climb out of this very common and debilitating state of mind, read on in part 3.
Stapelton Kearns-…’marketing in too exalted a position’
March 24, 2011
In one of the recent BrushBuzz newslettters was a wonderful post from Stapelton Kearns about some thoughts on art and money. I’m glad to have some company, someone else in the art field who isn’t blindly following all the latest ‘Sell your art and get rich’ seminars. Check it out. Quote below.
…What I mean to say is that the product has to come before the profit.
I bring this up because I think I am seeing a trend now of putting marketing into too exalted a position. The web crawls with books on how to market your art and advice columns and how-to seminars on marketing your art. And yes, I market my art. I also think you should show and sell your art if you can. But it is really about the art and it’s quality, more than it is about sales!’
2010 in review
January 2, 2011
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
Crunchy numbers
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2010. That’s about 24 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 29 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 203 posts. There were 44 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 18mb. That’s about 4 pictures per month.
The busiest day of the year was February 10th with 167 views. The most popular post that day was About me.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were artwell.nl, artheals.org, phoenix.craigslist.org, facebook.com, and edtajchman.wordpress.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for jeroen krabbe, jeroen krabbe paintings, oil pastels, artist sponsor, and guerilla art.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
About me July 2008
14 comments
Jeroen Krabbé exhibition, Zwolle May 2008
3 comments
Reasons to sponsor artists May 2008
10 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,
Art Calling 