Art direction?

Floral Emotion

Original Oil Painting  12x30" gallery wrap canvas

by Susan Roux

Where is your art going this year? Will it be taking a different direction? Will you try new techniques or work on perfecting your current ones?

With all the talk of New Year's resolutions and dreams for the year, I have trouble not focusing on my art when answering. January of last year marked the birth of my girls at the beach with simplified backgrounds. It seems as though I've been working on them much longer. When I began, I wanted to play with pale shadows that still read like shadow. I've tried to hold that as part of my focus, but also delving into developing fundamentals.

I'm certain you recall me using words like painstakingly. Trying to improve our painting habits is never an easy plight. We become comfortable doing certain things and it's easy to continue to repeat them. Forcing your brain to think differently, apply the paint differently and try to have a result that doesn't look like you spent too much time "thinking" in the first place can be a very painstaking act. I speak to you from experience. 

Personally I'm drawn to great paintings that offer a balance of creativity, meaning that pure emotional spontaneity, with perfectly executed fundamentals. When these two dance on canvas poetically it's difficult to look away. I'm drawn to surprises. That creative use of color, unexpected in its location, yet working beautifully to unify the composition. A harmony that leaves something to the imagination and elevates the viewer to drift and dream. 

As you can see I set my goals high and I still have a long way to go to achieve them.

Working on fundamentals engages the brain. Spontaneity and gut reactions go out the door. Focusing for a full year on these has helped me develop, but a fear of being unable to shut my brain down grew. What if I can't access that creative side again? What if I want to analyze every stroke all the time? I'm striving for a balance of the two. How will this be possible?

The holidays presented me with very little time to paint. I'm certain you can relate to that or at lease to the growing desire to just pick up a brush when time doesn't allow it. The feeling became so great that one day I just exploded on canvas! I didn't want to think. I didn't want to follow any rules. I just wanted to paint!

And so I did. 

The painting posted is pure emotion pouring on canvas. Oh how it felt good! I look at it now and want to return to it to define some element more. Pick a cluster of flowers, maybe just one flower, and give it a bit more attention. I know it doesn't resemble my other work. That's ok. I could go back and define it, but I want to keep it as is. It'll be good to hang in the studio as a reminder that my creative side is not dead and can still be accessed. Now I can relax and continue in my development of fundamentals. 

Something inside still drives me. My work feels cut out for the new year. My direction is clear. Develop the fundamentals further and begin to allow the creative side to dance with it. Somewhere between my girls at the beach and this emotional outburst lies the place I'm headed. 

So I ask again. Where are you headed with regards to your art this year?

Nicolaides words

Fetch

Original oil painting 18x24"

by Susan Roux

After dozens of suggestions from Don to buy Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw, I finally own a copy. I haven't posted for awhile because I've been toiling over this painting. Do you ever do that? Toil? I have grunts and groans, huffs and puffs of exasperation that pour uncontrollably from my body. I throw my brush down, take a few steps, turn to look at my work through a mirror, exhale deeply with thrust and return to do another stroke. The level of concentration is so great that each stroke seems a massive effort. In the beginning of Nicolaides book, I read a new word to describe this. Painstakingly.

It describes my efforts to a T. It's miles away from having "fun" on canvas. It's deep and concentrated and a place I don't always get to while painting. It renders with precision and every now and then, I find it necessary for what I'm trying to achieve. In this particular case his sweatshirt became the challenge. I wanted it to read oversized. My fear was making him just look fat.

The secret was in the folds. Nail the folds and it will look correct. So I spent hours and hours and days and days on those folds. Long days.

I was pretty content with the results. I know these images are inferior as usual and some of the values and transitions are incorrect. But still, I feel I captured so much extra space in his sweatshirt that you could almost crawl right into it with him. Painstakingly. Yeah, good word.

Nicolaides had another word to describe a painting method. Ferociously.

Now doesn't that conjure up a great image for you? He ferociously put paint to canvas. The release expressed in that sentence is massive. It reminds me of my initial block in. Some parts go on slower, but I definitely have moments of ferocious strokes. Spontaneity and determined force are things I associate with that. I often call it scribbling with paint. My backgrounds certainly fall into that category. This is where I'm in fear of having too much fun on canvas. Sometimes it's tempting to call a painting finished after ferociously blocking it in. It's full of freshness and personal emotion. It's easy to feel connected to it, but rarely my best work.

The biggest challenge I had with this painting was trying to keep enough spontaneous looking strokes to achieve movement. The tightness of the folds made this difficult. I found myself softening them a bit in the end. I felt I had to overcompensate by making my loose strokes extra loose, otherwise it all looked too stiff.

There lies a balance in there somewhere. I know I have a lot to learn before perfecting it. Maybe it never gets perfected. A juggling of the right amount of painstakingly and ferociously applied strokes. The yin and yang of art. Balance. Rhythm. A poetry of color...

The journey continues.

Heart vs Fundamentals

Lupines at Dusk

Original oil painting 10x20"

by Susan Roux

Creating art can be a nagging series of conflicts. There exists a fine line between painting from the heart and adhering to the fundamentals. How much of one is too much? Painting from the heart is freeing and spontaneous. Letting go. The brush dips in color and impulse and the canvas dictate what color is next. You feel your creativity bubbling out of you and great joy is experienced in the process. If that's all you do, where do you end up?

Is there such a thing as having too much fun painting?

The fundamentals, those pesky rules, pull it all together. The values define shapes. Design and composition lead the eye. Sun and shadow patterns contribute to the illusion of reality. A wise man told me an artist is allowed only a small portion of fun to be visible per painting. Oh shucks, really?

Here is me painting from the heart. I was captivated by the lupines on Monhegan. I loved the way they danced in the sky. I photographed a lot of them, but the feeling of observing them could not be replicated in an image. I wanted to portray them at dusk. Those wonderful lupine shades were transformed during golden hour. How rich and warm the cool blue's, pink's and purple's became. I concentrated on capturing that. My photo references were poor suggestions, so imagination took over.

Once I finally captured the light I was after, I felt the painting was complete. Funny how if you toss in one crazy element you're unstable with, everything you're grounded on slips from memory. A well advised critique put it all back into perspective for me. Too much heart and not enough fundamentals. Form became sacrificed au lieu de couleur.

I returned to the painting, freed from focusing only on color and began to establish form. Somewhere between heart and fundamentals one can strike a balance that satisfies. Satisfies the viewer, satisfies the artist. After all, if the passage is not defined well enough, the viewer misses the message...