A Bit About the Process

A friend recently suggested that I write about the process that produces a painting. Every artist I've ever known or read about works differently so this will be about my own style. While my operation is simple, there are endless variations. Today I'll describe what I have been doing for the last month or so in my studio.

I have several stacks of semi-resolved collage paintings. These are sorted according to size and each stack has anywhere from twenty to forty layers separated by a sheet of paper, each layer a painting in several pieces almost ready to be adhered to a backing. The painting might look complete and ready but I am not. I look over each layer, adjust the manner in which the pieces are placed in relation to each other, maybe remove a piece, perhaps insert another. Then I put the whole stack aside again. This can go on for years until one day, I decide it's time to finish some. There is no rhyme or reason to this; it just happens. The determination is in place.

So I go over some of these paintings in progress, intent now on making each the best it can be. The final decisions, before mounting a work into its "engraved in stone" ultimate form are about fine tuning the color choices and proportions, but mostly about the coherence, strength and some all-important other quality which I would describe thusly: it fulfills its purpose, it measures up, it's a keeper. So I finish by adhering it to its backing and then take it to another level by adding final touches of pastel or some other medium.

I am baffled when asked about how long it takes me to make a painting because I really don't know.

The image above is Autumn Quintet ©1994, Mixed Media on Etching Paper 20 x 16" each. For information about any of the paintings on this site, please email Joan.

About Art and Technology

I hear some disapproval about the use of technology in art. Rational thinking (my own, of course) postulates that the computer with its software and the printer with its inks are tools as much as anything else we might use. Some of the paints I work with are made of modern synthetic pigments. They are intense, clean, clear colors with unpronounceable names. Mark Rothko bought paint made with non-permanent dyes, guaranteed to fade, from Woolworth’s, to achieve the intensity of color he wanted. The Rothko mural that hung in the library at Yale looked like my bedsheets after some years went by, the original beautiful color gone forever. The archival printing inks we use now will last longer than the paints he used. Longer even than some contemporary paints.

Technology has transformed music, made movie and theater experiences surreal, caused great innovations in architecture and influenced the arts in ways most of us are still amazed by. It can transform the artist into a magician.

I like to paint “pieces”, rectangles and squares and stripes of color using a variety of media. I make these on paper and then assemble them into paintings by adhering the pieces to canvas or board. I scan or photograph some of the painted pieces, manipulate the image on my computer and print these images. This adds to the riches I can choose from as I search for exactly the right piece of color, texture and “feel” to resolve a collage painting. If the tools I use had been available to Rothko, Picasso and Michelangelo, I know they would have used them without apology.


The image above is Antares, acrylic and mixed media collage on archival board, 25 x 25", 2007.  For information about any of the paintings seen on this site please email Joan.

About the Survival of Art and Intellect

I feel sorrow when I read of devastated and looted museums or libraries destroyed by fire or natural disasters. Books and paintings have been burned because they were deemed degenerate. Maybe some weren’t great losses but surely many were. While this is tragic, I believe that people are born every day who can and will produce sculptures, paintings, books, music and all possible art forms every bit as worthy of survival as the revered icons of the past.

The benefit of preserving these works of art lies not in so much in their intrinsic value but in how they connect us to our human history. In high school we learned (or not) about governments rising and falling, battles won or lost, treaties signed, countries partitioned and renamed, and lots and lots of dates to remember. It was a revelation to me when, in my first year in college, we read the ancient Greek plays. There was meaning in these: anger, jealousy, envy, grief, and humor. Way back in ancient times they experienced life as I knew it. Of course battles raged in these stories and governments toppled, but now history was about people.

More than four hundred years B.C. Aristophanes wrote about Lysistrata,  who instigates a peace movement during the time of the Peloponnesian war. Her ploy: “Every wife and mistress is to refuse all sexual favors whatsoever, till the men have come to terms of peace.” The play is still pertinent and funny. The lesson I learned from that play and others of that era was about how little we have changed and about wisdom not being a modern phenomenon. I appreciate that works of art can connect us to ourselves.

The image above is the miniature Agena, acrylic & mixed media collage, 7 x 4", 2005. For information about any of the paintings seen on this site please email Joan.

About Abstraction

There are so many definitions and descriptions of abstract art that I’m going to take the liberty here of defining it according to my own bias. Some of the muddier versions have to do with abstracting from “nature” whatever that is, from the “real” world, (again, whatever that is). There is abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction, color-field, pop art, op art, hard edge painting, and non-representational and non-pictorial painting, and more.

A painting is a mirage. If it looks like a face, don’t be fooled. If it looks like a barn or a mountain stream, it’s not. It’s whatever media the artist used applied to a surface. What looks like a horse in a pasture is an illusion. It’s the artist’s version of what he sees or thinks he sees or invents.

I have no problem with landscape and portraiture and I’m quite partial to still lifes. I do take issue with those who denigrate art that its creator invents without any discernible reference to something outside the painting, (my definition of abstract painting). I am fond of repeating something that Vincent Van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo. He rose one morning wanting to paint a certain combination of yellow and blue. He trudged down a dusty road carting canvas and paints until he found the haystack and sky that suited his vision. The painting was not a landscape. It was the vessel that contained his great love for color in a world he left too soon.

It has been more than a hundred years since abstraction in its various forms appeared in our western culture, though it was part and parcel of many native arts and the arts of older civilizations long before that. It would seem unnecessary to explain or defend it in an age of computer generated art, conceptual art and some of the other contemporary forms of creative expression to be experienced now. Still, I find myself often maybe not so much defending as explaining.

On my last visit to New York I visited the New Museum for the first time. In a center space on the second floor, in the show called “Younger Than Jesus” there was a person napping in a bed. This volunteer was drugged and she slumbered untroubled by the close inspection from museum visitors. Was she real? Definitely. One foot was revealed by the tangled blanket. Looked like she could have used a bath. Was it art? I really didn’t care. It was fun and made the show more interesting.

We who call our work “abstract” or something along that line, are availing ourselves of whatever freedom our individual stock of boldness provides. I still struggle to secure the courage of my convictions. Here’s Georgia O’Keefe: "I have lived on a razor’s edge. So what if you fall off, I'd rather be doing something I really wanted to do. I'd walk it again."

The image above is Mini Triptych Nashira, acrylic & mixed media collage, 4.5 x 3" each, 2005. For information about any of the paintings seen on this site please email Joan.

About Solitude

Painter Mary Cassatt said: "I am independent! I can live alone and I love to work.” While I am sure there are some exceptions, visual artists and writers work best in solitude. I had the glorious experience some years ago of spending a month at Yaddo, the artists’ retreat in upstate New York. The painters and sculptors in the group were given large, well lighted studio spaces and separate lodging. The writers had a bedroom and some kind of office to work in. Our phone calls were filtered, only emergencies allowed through; otherwise messages were relayed when we came to dinner. Lunch was left on the doorstep of our workplaces without so much as a knock on the door. Lively conversation at dinner was the reward after a silent day. Yup, it was glorious.

When I first started painting full time I turned off the phone during the day and made abundantly clear to friends and family that daytime visits were discouraged. I have since learned to keep the phone on and unless the call brings disturbing news, I can slip back to work with ease. I love solitude. And I love silence. I rarely turn on the radio when I am in the studio. I become so submerged in the work that the phone or doorbell will cause an unpleasant jolt. But removing the possibility of that connection to the world changes the solitude to loneliness.

Writer Alan Watts said: “I owe my solitude to other people.” I don’t know if he was talking about being friendless or if it was gratitude to those who did not intrude. Anthony Burgess was clear: "To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world." It takes all kinds.

The image above is a partial view of my worktable as it looks now. I am assembling small collage paintings for the upcoming open studio event in Humboldt County. They are also destined for the new website I plan to have up and running this summer. To be announced.

About the Craft of Art

A dear friend, now departed, with whom I enjoyed thirty years of arguing about art related topics, said that technique could be a trap for the painter. It was long after that conversation that I began to understand what he meant.

There is technique which is about skill in using the materials of choice and then there is vision. What Richard meant was that virtuosity with paint, the ability to make the medium produce the intended effect, on its own could be boring. The skill had to support the vision and be subordinated to it.

Last night I watched the skaters vying for Olympic medals and realized that the same was true there. One of the athletes had something above the great skill he exhibited. I will risk calling it heart. It is what I saw in the show I mentioned last week of art and artifacts of Byzantium at the Metropolitan. There was something more there than the craft; it was alive with the involvement of the persons who created it. I believe that what makes art “art” is that power to connect the viewer with the maker. That connection is the art. Cellist Yo Yo Ma said it was “the inner life of one to that of another”.

I found this at a discussion forum about music:
“I was listening to a singer the other day belt out a song with a terrific technique — great vocal control — and was left impressed and yet bored. Just no magic. Sometimes great ability can even just be irritating. This is often the case with instrumentalists in guitar and banjo too. I am always impressed by great technical skill in a player — how can you not be? However, what really is exciting to me is how a few musicians filter great technique — or maybe even not such great technique — through their personality and produce magic: an exhilaration, a deep sense of satisfaction…”

Of course there is no art without craft, and craft without art is craft, a demonstration of skill.

The image above is Petunia Trio, 2005, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Museum Board, 16.5 x 12 each.

About the Price of Art

Puzzled by the sale of Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man for one hundred and four million dollars, I read all the NYTimes articles I could find. What I can’t get a grip on is what this kind of money has to do with the sculpture. Does the new owner really like it? Is that why he bought it? The previous owner was a bank, which I imagine saw the sculpture as a good investment. Damn right. I know enough about the creative process to be sure that Giacometti wasn’t thinking about the price this work would bring while he was working on it — even though it was a commission for a public venue. I know an honest piece of work when I see it.

This caught my attention: “Money is ready to flow as never before. But the ups and downs of the bidding pattern, not clearly connected with the intrinsic merit of the works being offered, indicate that the market remains haphazard…” Another Times article noted that some of the works that sell for these huge amounts are not the artists’ best work: “A steep £4.4 million was paid for Matisse’s picture of a woman asleep on a couch done around 1917. The rendition of the reclining figure is not immune from clumsiness and the maroon band spreading across most of the wall above the woman is unfortunate. The sketch in Conté crayon of a seated boy by Seurat shot up to £1.94 million despite the confused interpretation of the figure. Oddly, a deeply poetic sketch by the same Seurat, was unsold as the hammer fell at £220,000. One of Max Liebermann’s finer landscapes, painted in 1919, merely matched the low estimate at £241,250.”

In my world artists are advised to set their prices by some combination of the following procedures: knowing their costs and determining an hourly wage, (“This is your retail price. At this price you will have covered production costs plus an hourly wage for yourself. Since most galleries or representatives take a 50 percent commission you will not lose money if you sell through a gallery.”). These typical instructions go on to suggest pricing by the square inch and comparison pricing (“Check out local galleries and note what sells at what price.”). And finally: “Leave emotions out of it.”

There’s marketing art, which is what my artist friends and I do, and then there’s the art market. Not quite the same. It is hard to put it all together into a coherent picture. Some years ago I saw a show of Byzantine art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It was a huge show, took twelve years to orchestrate, and it was amazingly beautiful. There was everything: paintings, mosaics, fabrics, lamps, and artifacts of every description. I spent the better part of three days wandering through and could discern the intent and focus given to each of the items displayed. It all looked like the makers had to have been totally delivered unto constructing the object. They were also, I suspect and hope, making an honest day's wages.

The Times ArtBeat blog about the sale provoked all kinds of responses. Some raged abut the fact that this money was not being spent to help those who live in poverty. Some lamented that it was not a museum purchase. Still others thought the sculpture unworthy at any price.  This was my favorite: “If you gave me $104 Million, I'd stand in your house while you looked at me. I'd come to work daily, and I'd even dust myself off.”


The image above is Spinney, 2009,  50 x 38" Acrylic & Mixed Media Collage on Etching Paper. For information about any of the paintings seen on this site please email Joan.