How To Find Your Artistic Voice

I have just spent a vast amount of time looking up painters that I like. My goal - i.e. assignment - was to just find everything I like and get as many images of the paintings by these artists as I can. Then from these images, choose paintings with elements I would like to use in my own work (such as a lot of detail or not much detail at all.)

This is so much harder than it sounds because when I finished choosing all that I like I had well over a thousand images!

One of my all time favorite artists is Edgar Degas and I had nearly the thousand of his paintings alone! I am supposed to cull it down to around ten. HA! So far, I have it down to around a hundred paintings, and I really don’t think I can get it any further! Soooooo I have decided to just find the ones that contain the most of what I want to do in my own paintings and use those for the assignment, and make a folder to keep of all of what I have gathered as my absolute favorites.

It surprised me how well this assignment worked, because I really thought I had wildly diverse range of what I liked, and while I do like a lot of differently styled paintings, there are some common elements that run through the batch! Evidently I’m a fan of vividly colored portraits with less than clear detail! I already knew this but I didn’t realize that I so gravitated as strongly toward this subject! Almost every painting I choose was a single figure with some intensely colored area in the painting.

Some of the artists I chose as my absolute favorites are, (in no particular order)…

Peter Paul Rubens	Greg Calibey
Malcolm Liepke	Vincent van Gogh
Milt Kobayashi	Richard Piloco
Alice Neel	Jenny Saville
Alex Kanevsky	Emily Wood (UALR graduate!)
Sophie Jodoin	Edgar Degas
Larry Rivers (I used this painting as the muse for the painting of my grandmother)

I really recommend this exercise if you are trying to determine your current expressive interests. It takes quite some time, but I can imagine it could be very beneficial if you did it every couple of years! That’s my plan anyway! :)

A Recent Painting

In honor of starting my last semester of college, I am posting one of my recent paintings! 

I would love anyone's opinion of it! 

A Florescent Football?

I am not a football fan. It’s not the game that I don’t like; the little I understand is pretty exciting. Even though I’m not a big enthusiast of the violence, it’s hard not to get excited over a hard fought for touchdown! And I guess I have a few default favorites because of my hubby… that would make my college team the Arkansas Razorbacks, and NFL team the Dallas Cowboys, but as far as players and who is best, I don’t have a clue. I don’t know the difference between a quarterback and a cornerback, nor do I know what either of them does. Nevertheless, I have some ideas that would improve the televised game watching experience.

Now don’t worry, I’m not changing rules, just making a couple of minor adjustments…

Firstly, I would put a cap on the noise level for a broadcasted game. I come away from a televised game with a headache because of the boisterous crowd. You can’t understand anything they are yelling anyway, so it’s not like they are yelling to the players that someone from the opposing team is about to knock them down, like they might in baseball (which I love to watch, by the way, and I also feel these adjustments could probably apply to just as well.) I just know this could be done; they superimpose the marks for where a down is and they draw the little arrows showing where players are running, so surely it shouldn’t be too difficult. Of course most people like to simulate as closely as possible the real experience, but this is a game in my world!

Secondly, I would consider screening the announcers a little better. Some of them are real know-it-alls. I do know that some diehard fans agree with me on this one, but they disagree with each other on which announcer is being particularly annoying. Well, here’s the way we could screen them – no more than I know about the game, if I can tell they are being a know-it-all they must go, plain and simple.

Thirdly, and obviously, the most important issue is that the football should be florescent orange and this color should never be allowed for uniforms or field décor (sorry AT&T, you gotta go…) I mean, you have 10 or 15 guys all trying to pile up on a ball that’s hardly bigger than their forearm! How do you keep up with the thing? I can’t imagine how the players ever know where the little earth colored projectile is! BUT if it were bright orange it would stand out at least enough that I could spot it on the TV screen.

No trouble finding this football!

These handy little modifications could make the football watching experience a much more enjoyable one for the gridiron challenged, such as myself! At the very least, the lowered volume of the crowd and fewer annoying announcers would make it easier to ignore the as the rest of the pig skinned crazy family members rally for the third game of the day!

Let's have some fun!

So, I hope everyone had a safe and fun New Years Eve and Day!

I had such a great time in Fayetteville over the holiday visiting with my kids, one of my nephews, and his family! The only drawback was that my husband did not get to go, and every time I talked to him, the poor guy sounded like he was bored to tears.
We had a bottle (ok, a gallon jug) of "Santini's Homemade Muscadine Wine" and and several flavors of Post (my favorite local brand) and we played Apples to Apples to bring in 2012! Well actually, they guys had several kids of beer - chocolate, coffee, orange. 

My nephew’s wife (who is a kitchen maven) made candied orange peels, a delicacy I had not ever heard of. It takes me forever to eat any citrus fruit because I peel every last bit of the pith away before I eat it, so I was not sure what to expect. However, once the peels had boiled down we removed all that and cooked them once again, and once they were finished they were delicious! I still can’t get over it…clever girl!

 We went to Dickson StreetBookstore with basically no time limit, which was awesome! There is nothing better than getting to browse around in all the books and not have to choose quickly. I got a great book about Vincent van Gogh, some pocket books about Cézanne and Degas and one about Chinese art.

Another book had such a multitude of photos by old masters that I bought it even though it is in French, and considering I speak no French, it will truly be a picture book for me! (I still don’t think I could take the book apart to frame any of the plates.) 

And probably the highlight of the trip for me was Crystal Bridges Museum! I had not even thought of going, and once it was suggested I could only hope! The place is awesome! I have tried to decide what my favorite piece is a dozen times, and change my mind each time! At this moment it is an Andrew Wyeth painting in the Wonder World Gallery. Or maybe the Alexander Calder mobile, it’s amazing as well! I will post about it once I make up my mind!

Yield, a 47-foot sculpture by Roxy Paine, stands near the main entrance of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Update 1-7-12: I think Yield by Roxy Paine has to be my favorite piece at Crystal Bridges. It has stayed with me this week following our trip. I just love the free feeling that the waving branches on the tree give me every time I remember it!