PEOPLE OF NEW YORK SLIDE SHOW & MAY PAINTING CHALLENGE

Usually, photos are only interesting to the people who took them, especially vacation photos. I usually leave the "tourist" type photos to my husband and I spend my time searching out potential material for paintings. Since I am mostly interested in faces and figures, the majority of my photos reflect my interest. Digital cameras are so amazing and they allow you to take tons of photos and edit later. I often focus in on small details that can be inserted in other images. Shoes, hands, etc. A good zoom lens keeps me anonymous. The slide show will give you an idea of the kind of people who catch my eye. My friends have me all figured out and are good spotters for me when we are out together. The Museum of Modern Art was a wonderful place to take interesting photos. Most of the museum had no restrictions on taking pictures and they allowed you to get quite close to the art work. For those of us who want to see every brush stroke, it was a welcome bonus.

Today is the first of the month, so I have a challenge for myself and any of you who want to join in. Let's start with the title and see what image pops into our heads! With this in mind, I have an exciting web site for you. It is designed for writers to give them ideas but it works beautifully for artists as well. I will give you three titles to pick from. If you don't like any of them, you can go to "http://writingfix.com" and play around until you find a sentence or phrase that inspires you to paint. Many of them lent themselves to images other than people. Because of my desire to do a figurative painting, these are the three that set my imagination off on a journey:

1. "Her Friendship is like a birdcage"
2. "Finding my Marbles"
3. "The Picture in the Catalog had lied"

If you come up with some other wonderful titles, be sure and share. It will be fun to see multiple interpretations of the same title.

DISCOVERIES ON THE WEB plus PLANE ART RETURN TRIP

Something was not working well with the Slide.com web site. My slide show was not loading properly. After 5 tries, I decided to forget it for tonight and try again tomorrow. I am posting the little color sketch I did on the return flight from New York. I found a black and white photograph in the newspaper to work with. I usually travel with some of my photos to work with. I didn't think to do that this trip.

I wanted to share some discoveries I made on the web recently. First is a website of a wire sculpture artist who does very original work, many of the pieces look like drawings. This kind of work requires seeing the image in simplified terms....what to leave out?...what to leave in? It's a great way to think about capturing the essence of your subject. Here is the web site for Spencer Little:
http://www.dirtyclean.net/ SPENCER LITTLE WIRE SCULPTURE

Google has a free service called Google Alerts. Whenever my name or web site appears on the Internet, I receive an e-mail from Google with the website. I received one of these alerts the other day and found myself on a website that had quite a few of my images from my web page. It was in a foreign language that looked somewhat like Spanish but turned out to be Portuguese. I was more than curious to discover why my work was there. A friend who had lived in Spain for a few years told me there were web sites that can translate other websites. Who knew! I Googled "Translate Website" and sure enough the first entry did the trick. It turns out that all the text was poetry by different people. You just put in the website url and then choose the language you want translated into English. The website with all my work on it appeared on my screen in English. WOW! This is an amazing service. I thought this was so special, I have added this service to my blog. The company is called Babble Fish.

Tomorrow is a new month, so look for a May Painting Challenge. It will involve another very special web site which I will reveal on my next post.

INSPIRED!

They are painting the outside of our house today and the paint smell was giving me a headache, so I stayed away for much of the day. I was anxious to start painting after being inspired by all that great art in New York, so I came back in the afternoon and started work on this little abstract. I have posted the original photo I shot from the window of the Museum of Modern Art. They were doing some reconstruction on a building across the street and I thought it might make an interesting abstract painting. When you are in the MoMA everything starts looking like a potential abstract painting! I normally do not attempt this type of painting as I never know when I am finished. I plan to add some lines to this and maybe lift out some additional light shapes. I might collage some small pieces into it. Sometimes you have to let an image marinate for awhile and then go back and work on it. So far I like what is happening.

Tonight I went with a friend who was speaking to a college class studying interior design about her business of Art Representation. She works with local designers in placing art work in client's homes and businesses. I talked a little about the latest innovations in watercolor and how it can be put on canvas without glass. It made for a long day, so I didn't get my slide show of interesting people of New York made. Hopefully, I will get it done tomorrow.

PLANE ART GOING TO NEW YORK

It was a long flight, so I entertained myself by painting in my sketch book. I took a small 6 x 9 Aquabee Super Deluxe sketch book with me on this trip. I love this paper for doing detailed graphite renderings and it works well with the Elegant Writer Pen but I wanted to see how it accepted watercolor. I'm still working with the same image. I saw a beautiful woven sculpture before I left that had heads divided down the middle with different color schemes. It was very interesting so I thought I would try it. Warm on one side, cool on the other. Awhile back, there was a terrific suggestion in Watercolor Magic magazine to make a small watercolor travel set by taking 6 plastic bottle caps from bottled water and glue them into an empty Altoid Mint tin. Load the caps with a warm and cool of red, yellow and blue. I used Cad Red Light and Alizarin Crimson, Quin Gold and Cad Yellow Light (wish I had used a less opaque yellow) and Thalo and Cobalt blue. The lid made a nice little mixing space. I like this set so much I want to load a second tin with some other colors. The paper takes the watercolor very nicely. I did some glazing and it held up. This is the same set I used to do the Central Park sketch.

I am still editing my photos from the trip but I posted a small slide show of a few pictures from the top of the Empire State Building (87th floor). We arrived at dusk and saw the sun setting over Manhattan....a beautiful site that is impossible to photograph perfectly...and we stayed until the lights of the city came on. It was the perfect way to start our stay in New York. Our hotel was a short walk away. I couldn't resist taking these photos though I usually leave the traditional photos to my husband while I am busy taking pictures of subjects for future paintings (translation: on the prowl for faces and figures). Tomorrow I will make a slide show of some of the interesting people of New York.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, IT'S A WONDERFUL TOWN!

I'm back! We only had 3 days and 4 nights in New York but they were jammed with exciting activities. The weather was spectacular in the high 70's and all the flowering trees were in bloom. I spent a few minutes in Central Park while waiting for a gallery to open, so I did a small plein aire painting which I have posted. Everywhere people were enjoying being outside. We lived in New York our first year of marriage and I hated every minute of it. It was a rude, mean, dirty unfriendly place. What a difference 45 years make! There was no graffiti, the subway was relatively clean, people were pleasant and helpful. You still see people talking to themselves but now they are on cell phones.

The Salmagundi Club is housed in an old historic home. It has been an art club for many years. One of the photos is the outside of the building where the AWS banner and a poster advertising the exhibit were on display. We met up with some other exhibitors on Thursday afternoon to view the show as it is too crowded during the dinner to really study the paintings. The show is on two levels and all the work was truly remarkable. So many styles and techniques. We were anxious to see the Gold Medal Winning painting in person as it looks so much like a photograph in the catalogue. Honestly, we peered and peered closely at it and it still looked like a photograph!! Amazing! I have no idea how she was able to paint like that. The Silver Medal painting was the polar opposite in feeling....very playful and inventive in every way. It was fun meeting the artist, Mark Mehaffey. His personality matched his painting. I also had the pleasure of spending some time with Donna Zagotta, who is not only an outstanding painter but one of the very best workshop instructors around. I am looking forward to taking her workshop in September.

Friday evening was the long anticipated event, the Awards Dinner. I met and enjoyed talking to many more of the artists in attendance, including Jean Pederson who was so complimentary and wanted to get together and paint sometime. She promised to show me how to get that great background texture explained in her book. I made such a mess of it on my first try.

There were cocktails in the downstairs gallery and everyone had a chance to mill about. I met one gentleman, Anthony Ventura, who is 81 years old and was receiving his signature membership this year. He has been trying for 25 years and was so excited and justifiably proud.

They set up tables in the upstairs gallery for the sitdown dinner. Frank Webb was the master of ceremonies and he told lots of jokes, some of which were funny. The president, Janet Walsh, handed out the awards and everyone had their photo taken. I received the CFS Medal which is very beautiful and quite heavy. It would make a nice paper weight for the desk but I think I will display it on a shelf.

Like everything, one waits and anticipates and then it is over in a flash. But, it was a beautiful moment in time.

My good friend, Mike Bailey, also was an exhibitor for the first time this year with AWS. We spent lots of our time in New York with him and his adorable wife, Diana. That made the trip that much more fun and enjoyable. I will post more of the highlights of the trip tomorrow along with a slide show.

AFTER THE WORKSHOP

Today was filled with last minute preparations before we leave early tomorrow morning, so there was no time to paint or draw but I did receive a wonderful e-mail from Kate Cissell who attended the Littleton, CO. workshop. Here's what she wrote:

"Myrna, Hurrah! I finally finished my painting of Bill a couple weeks ago. Here're shots of it at the end of the June workshop in Littleton and the finished version. I love how it turned out. You got me to step out of my comfort zone with great results. Thank you!"

Great Job, Kate!

This is the last post until next Sunday. Here are the final words of wisdom from Bruce Mau to inspire you through the week. You will notice breaks in the sequencing of numbers. That's because I have edited the material to be relevant to us.


11. Harvest ideas. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life.
12. Keep moving. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.


17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.


20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.


21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.


22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."


28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.


29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

LATEST DRAWING MARATHON RESULTS

Today was another drawing marathon. I had to miss the morning session but made it to the afternoon one. Too bad! The models for the morning were two of my favorites. In all the years I have done life drawing, I don't think I fully appreciated a good model until this afternoon. It's too bad it takes a negative experience to contrast with a good or great one to wake me up to the extraordinary talent it takes to be a good model. I didn't realize what creativity it takes to invent lots of interesting and varied poses not to mention strength and focus. None of that was in evidence this afternoon. The model yawned through the entire afternoon and her lack of energy infected the room. The gentleman was much more accomplished but tended to just do variations on the same pose. Anyway, it was good to be drawing from life. It's a very different experience than working from photo references and I might try going to the Tuesday night weekly session more often.

I kept switching materials for drawing today, trying to get excited about what I was doing. I tried a new combination on Tyvek which I think has some possibilities. I worked some nupastels into the wet wash and they worked very well. Above are the best of today's session.

MORE WISDOM:

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.



8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.



9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.