hooray! you get to paint today!

this is a painting i've been wanting to do for awhile. on the plane ride home for winter break i spent a lot of time in transit focusing on the colors around me, seeing how well i could remember them for a possible painting. i grabbed a canvas the first weekend i was back. but this was also back when acrylics (argh!) was the only option. so the canvas just sat there the whole break. i stuck some letters on it before i left. and put it in my purse to take on the flight back to baltimore.

enter: oils. yes, they're toxic. and yes, i'm pretty sure i'm already addicted to their smell. one of our projects for painting is to keep a swatchbook (aka: a chance for some scrapbook action.) we have to collect "50 color studies from life and memory," making "a mental note about the specific colors/values that are evident in a small slice of life." a very cool project. and actually what i was trying to get at with my plane observations. so a month later it finally makes sense to go for it and just swipe some paint down on that blank canvas. i started my first color observations with the green leather seats on the collegetown shuttle and the creamy cool interior of that plane.


painting has been such a pleasant suprise so far. i am so lucky to have just the right teacher. she seems like she will demand a lot, but take you through each part of the process step by step.

last week she made a presentation about her own artist influence (something that each person in the class will be doing throughout the semester.) she shared with us squeak carnwath. squeak is someone who's artwork shows a vested interest in what it means to be alive. and as if that isn't enough to hold my attention, her paintings include handmade grids and handwritten lists of text that seems to rise and disappear just like thoughts. anyone with an shared obsession with square grids and lists (although she appears to be a little less ocd with it...) is kin in my book. she also created "a simple list" for painting. and simple is good.

a simple list:

1. it's simple really, to paint is to trust. to believe in our instincts; to become.
2. painting is an investigation of being.
3. it is not the job or art to mirror, images reflected in the mirror appear to us in reverse. an artist's responsibility is to reveal consciousness; to produce a human document.
4. painting is an act of devotion. a practiced witnessing of the human spirit.
5. painting are about: paint, observation, & thought.
6. art is not about facts but about what is; the am-ness of things.
7. all paintings share a connection with all other paintings.
8. art is evidence. evidence of breathing in and breathing out; proof of human majesty.
9. painting places us. painting puts us in real time. the time in which we inhabit our bodies.
10. light is the true home of painting.
11. the visible is how we orient us. it remains our principal source of inspiration about the world. painting reminds us of what is absent. what we don't see anymore.
12. painting is not only a mnemonic device employed to remember events in our lifetime. paintings address a greater memory. a memory less topical, one less provincial than the geography of our current occupied body. painting reminds us of what we don't know but what we recognize as familiar.
13. painting, like water, takes any form. painting is a film of pigment of a plane. it is not real in the way that gravity-bound sculpture is real. it is however, real. painting comes to reality through illusion. an illusion that allows us to make a leap of faith; to believe. to believe in a blue that can be the wing of a bug or a thought. it makes our invisible visible.

-squeak carnwath, from "lists, observations, and counting"