I was just introduced to fellow DPG Jeff Mahorney's art blogs via Facebook yesterday - love his work! In one of his posts he talked about doing some digital color matching using Photoshop. ("Digital Starts") Its an exercise in seeing when you can't actually get out the paints and work from life. I was reminded of another blog I found quite awhile ago and have since lost track of... but it was a small group of digital artists who used a tablet to create digital paintings. I loved the images and was fascinated by the art and the process. I even looked into buying a tablet and using it to sketch! As an example for now, I found a similar artist who looks like he has since moved on from his "Thousand Sketches" - Walter Logeman - but he has some interesting cafe scene sketches. Its no secret I work from photos regularly and sometimes I use Photoshop to adjust lighting and color, to crop and edit and to add and rearrange, but I haven't used it to paint.So today, while I sat in the infusion clinic with my husband, I played with painting digitally. I used a museum photo and reduced it to a line drawing of sorts using Photoshop's photocopy filter and then I set to work, matching the colors I saw in the original photo and also just being loose and massing things. It was a lot of fun. I used the regular paintbrush but should have looked into using a different style that maybe wouldn't have had such hard edges. Its a great exercise for seeing color. I find that the more I look at photos on the computer, the more color I see. A printed photo can generally lose a lot of subtleties, as it averages the lights and darks, but I find that on my monitor, perhaps because it is bright and illuminating, I see a very wide variety of color. I don't paint in probably near as much as I see... perhaps I need to start! At the end of this exercise I began to pop in some of those colors, but I also wanted them to be small and not disrupt the color harmonies I had working in the overall painting.
On Friday, when I cleaned up my brushes and stood back from my easel, I like what I painted, but I had this sensation that it was just "fluff."It was a museum scene and I like it, and its well painted, but I began to have doubts that it was "art." Doubts perhaps that I am not "pushing" myself.Those doubts rather increased through the afternoon and I think some of that had to do with the fact that I spent a couple of hours with my husband at the neurologist again. His troubles seem to be increasing and there are doubts now about the toxin diagnosis. Things certainly get put into perspective fast when your loved ones are ill or unhappy. He is in for more tests early next week.So I think I began to feel like my painting was a nice outlet, and healthy for my mental state, but is it all so important? NOW... before I start sounding like I'm having a big pity party let me go on to say that I've been reading this nice little book simply called The Impressionists (Art in Detail, by Diana Newall) and I began to reflect on the work the impressionists did. Most notably they documented scenes of ordinary life and people. They were perhaps groundbreaking at the time, but they were not trying to set the world on fire. They simply wanted to paint what they knew, what they experienced and understood first-hand.And that made me feel so much better. I, too, like to paint what is familiar to me. And the reasons are that it is comforting. I paint the places I like to be, the things I like to experience and share. So in times of worry and doubt, I love nothing more than to sit in a quiet corner of a coffee shop, or browse for a good book, or to get together with friends for a nice dinner - to be part of the world, to be "out there." But then to work at home alone in my studio and recreate those moments of relaxation and togetherness is a gift. And its that which makes me want to paint these common scenes, and that which I hope carries forward to those who buy my work and want to look at it everyday in their homes. There is comfort in the familiar.
