Studio Makeover, Day 4

I'm ready to work! If I can't make something inspired in here, then maybe I need to rethink my career choices.

Studio Makeover, Day 3

My stuff arrives...

Studio Makeover, Day 2

Here are the insulation panels going up. They are a very soft material, making them suitable for tacking and stapling different materials to. I used 2.5 inch nails and drove them into the studs (such as they are) when possible.

New Studio Makeover, Day 1

Today I began fixing up my new work space. It's half of an old, red, barn-looking shack in the yard next to our bungalow. I gave the space a good cleaning, even reaching overhead with my broom to sweep at the spiderwebs (sorry spiders!).

One problem I'm going to have to deal with is the textured walls: plaster has been slathered onto the sheetrock as if it were frosting on a cake. While I guess this might look nice in other contexts, I've got to have flat surfaces to draw and paint on. So after cleaning all morning, I set out in search of some homasote.

Homasote is a really great material, nice and light-weight particle-board-like material, soft enough to stick tacks into, and apparently pretty earth-friendly as it's made from recycled paper. I first encountered it in college art classes, where we used it for everything from flattening out printmaking projects to making partition walls for the senior painting studio.

Well, that's not exactly what I came away from Home Depot with; they didn't know what I was talking about, but they pointed me in the direction of some lightweight insulating material made by Weyerhauser that ought to do the same thing. Of course, this was waaay too big to fit into my car, but the friendly and helpful day laborers in the parking lot helped me tie it to the roof. I've fit a surprising amount of crap in my car over the 10 years I've had it, but I think this was its first roof haul. Go Corolla!

Wayne Thiebaud Exhibition Notes

On Saturday I took a field trip down to Laguna Beach to see the Wayne Thiebaud retrospective at the Laguna Art Museum. I’ve not had the opportunity to see much of Thiebaud’s work in person, so I was looking forward to the excursion.

The show included a wide range of work from different periods of the artist’s career, including some early student work, such as still lifes and figure studies, and some recent beach scenes. The latter I did not quite know how to process. They are quite different from the familiar Thiebaud image: instead of carefully detailed, candy colored rows of products, I saw clumps of indistinct, gestural figures getting lost in an active, scumbly background. The landscapes’ odd round bulges and thick glops of paint, as well as the figures’ squiggliness, made me think these pictures had been painted from some long-held, half-remembered memory.

And what of those paintings I was expecting and hoping to see? The pastries and cakes and deli cases and off-kilter cityscapes? Thiebaud’s use of crazy colors in seemingly-inappropriate places was even better in person that I was expecting. Multi-hued outlines around all the forms, shifting from magenta to red-orange to cyan; bright blue-green-violet shadows, so bright they looked straight from the tube. The shadow cast by a casserole dish in a painting of roast chickens from the 1960’s was a vivid cerulean, one of the brightest, purest colors in the whole picture. Such a shadow ought to jump up off the picture plane and wave around like a flag, not lie still and so simply and concretely define the surface the casserole dish is sitting on. Yet it does, somehow….

Another rule-breaking technique I noticed, one that surprised me because it gets lost in reproduction, is the activeness of the paint in Thiebaud’s backgrounds. It swirls around and laps up against the outlines of the “subject” forms of the paintings; I noticed this especially in Food Bowls from 2005 (a grayed-out violet shadow caresses serving spoons) and a small painting of three sunbathers from the 60’s (the white “sand” piles up around the figures in little brush-stroke dunes). These backgrounds look as if they were applied last in the creation of these paintings; their thick paint is sculptural in its application. These thick, active backgrounds ought to overwhelm the paintings’ foregrounds and flatten out the picture plane. Yet, again, somehow they don’t.

(After some careful looking, that activeness in his early pictures ties the newer, from-memory beach scenes into the arch of his life’s work for me.)

These techniques I named—the outlining, the pretty shadows, the sculptural backgrounds—aren’t they all big no-no’s that I learned in Beginning Painting? But screw the rules, Thiebaud makes them work beautifully. Hurrah for exuberant painting.

New starter

With a new year always comes new resolve: to be better, to do more, oftener. So here I am, crawling back to the dusty blog. Since I last posted, I have: been home (back to Little Rock) twice, via the bedraggled and unloved American Airlines system; started working as a glorified docent at an art museum (MOCA, in fact); moved out of my studio; had the starter in my car replaced after nearly getting stuck; and rented a new place to live that includes a beautiful little red barn I will convert to a new work space. I feel that these new developments bode well for 2008.

The new year also brings hoped-for victories and meaningful food. Yesterday was not a good day for the teams I shout at on the television (Arkansas, Illinois, and Hawaii all lost, and looked bad doing so). Even so, I cooked up big pots of black eyed peas and collard greens, well seasoned with salt pork and pepper sauce, complimented by a pan of cornbread. These foods are meant to bring me good luck and good fortune for the rest of the year. Remember that next time, tribes and hogs.