Life Goeth Byeth

Here I am, 7 or so months pregnant with my second child.  And trying to pack things together, as well as picture what my life will be for the next two years.  My passion in life is art.  Art.  Painting, drawing, expressing... what.  Well, it's all dry right now.  It's all in my gigantic stomach, in this baby, in watching my 2 year old daughter run around and giggle.  Yet, I feel an emptiness when I don't draw.  When instead I read P.G. Wodehouse or listen to Agatha Christie on the B.B.C.

Who is this blog for.  It is principally for my self.  To give my self an outlet, and a place to show off the small things that I manage to do right now.  Maybe a few other people will find it interesting, that would be nice.  I envy those geniuses who can somehow envelop the world into their consciousnesses and spit out a clever interpretation.  Everything for me is very detail-oriented and piecemeal.

Here is what I am thinking of, in terms of art right now.  I fell in love with art in high school.  I really had no previous education in art, besides a few visits to museums.  But in high school I started to paint on my own, in acrylics, learning the human face in a very primitive way.  This freedom is what I loved.  The unexpected result.  Then I decided I needed structure, to learn technique.  And I studied for a long time, got beaten down by the instructors, did lots of oil paintings (they forbid acrylics), none of which I enjoyed.  My school dislikes anything beyond 1850.  I dislike most of what they love: Rubens is tedious, Rembrandt boring, Michelangelo predictable.  Not that I don't respect their technique, which is unattainable to me and the rest of the living universe.  But, it is so predictable.  All of Ruben's ladies have the same face and they are fat.  Rembrandt's backgrounds are dark.  Michelangelo's figures look like men on steroids doing yoga.  I tried really hard to like them.  But I always felt more comfortable with Gustav Klimpt, Vincent Van Gogh, even David Hockney.  Some of Manet's boating paintings are fabulous, and Sargent is divine. 

So, my school really taught me a lot, and I respect them a lot, but at this point, we are parting.  I fell for Edouard Veullard and his pocadots.  Yes, pocadots.  My really favorite art, an odd taste, similar to the taste for wheat germ that I have right now, is for the 12th century religious painters such as Giotto.  I want to combine Giotto's sensibility with Veullard's pocadots.  How is that possible.  I'm not sure.  I bought some acrylic paints.  A huge act of rebellion.  My school would have a heart attack.  But, I don't like oils, never have.  They are messy, smelly, toxic and expensive.  And besides that, my school taught me to hand-grind them with a cooked oil containing lead, which accelerates the drying time, and they taught me to add some Maroger Medium to them, which is persnickety, and extremely gooey, and I get it everywhere.  I find that using cheap tube paints makes me very uncomfortable, kind of like using garlic powder in stead of fresh chopped garlic.  And how can I paint without the precious Maroger?  Which people all over the world covet.  Yet, making the stuff is really a pain in the neck.  So, acrylics.  Where my heart is anyway.  They dry fast, are plastic, and I only need white, black, red, yellow, and blue. 

This is my first painting with acrylics.  The drawing is... wellllll, it's better than what my 2 year old can do right now.  I must say, I had a great time painting it!  

Then, to compare, this is one of my older paintings, sold immediately off the easel.  It took two weeks of intense concentration, and and all my skill, and was not fun to paint.