"Under the Skylight", Oil, 12" x 12"

When I asked for and received a critique of my work last fall from a well-known artist, the process involved evaluating the work on my website and deleting all the bad paintings, with the idea that the bad paintings degrade the good paintings.  This process of elimination is necessary and good—one that I do all the time—but the idea of always thinking about my paintings in terms of "bad" and "good" is paralyzing and the proverbial killjoy of motivation.

On the other hand, posting daily paintings, however imperfect, in their own venue, can be highly motivating and an adventure in learning.  So is it better to take the risk of displaying a not-so-perfect painting and be highly motivated to wake up the next morning and try again, or to ruthlessly “burn” all the paintings that according to the painting gods should never see the light of day?  Well, it was a risk to ask for the critique in the first place, and having done that, I’ve decided that there’s no point in worrying about “what is on my gravestone,” as the other artist advised me to do.

So metaphorically, I’ve gone on the open road, a road many other artists have taken.  The concept of posting daily paintings is like a road trip with no advance reservations.  There is joy on the open road because it is about exploration, not having to get to the perfect painting.  I have some idea of where I’m starting, but no strict idea where I’ll end up or exactly what I’ll be doing along the way.  This is oddly motivating—makes me more serious about what I am doing, less fearful about results.

Gretchen Rubin, initiator of the Happiness Project, says “the things you do every day take on a certain beauty, and provide a kind of invisible architecture to daily life.”  And so far, I’ve found this to be true. So I'm taking the leap: my daily painting blog, with all its ups and downs, is the open road to a learning adventure.

http://www.kathryntownsend.blogspot.com

"Zangle Cove, Winter", Oil, 9 x 9
 
Since I started this blog I have often wondered what is there, really, to say.  The older I get, the more I seem to live in a kind of dream time where nothing is certain and no idea can say any more than what has risen to the surface of the current moment.  The exhortations about the 10 things I must do to sell my art work still seem unutterably alien to me, but I can’t say that this feeling won’t change tomorrow. 

As the days are darker and the nights longer there is some tension building that can’t just be attributed to the ridiculousness of politics and television commercials, or the fact that the Christmas lights are still to be put up and the tree is still splendidly alive at Hunter Farms, or that having the family all together next week will bring its own terrifying confusion. No, it has something to do with the earth and it reminds me of the Gabriel Faure Requiem that I first sang when I was fifteen. I didn't know what the Latin words meant, but I knew the Agnus Dei, after all the other voices and building of the musical story, was the moment that brought release, grace and forgiveness.  

So now I sit here, with “A Cezanne Sketchbook: Figure, Portraits, Landscapes and Sill Lifes” by Paul Cezanne, as my companion, listening to old tracks of Joan Baez, knowing that at least for this moment, the past, present and future are all bundled into one and nothing else matters to my cat but that he be fed.

Grace be with you this holiday season.
Kathryn
P.S.  I'm actually surrounded by no less than six books on Cezanne, and if you are looking for a gift for the artist in your life or yourself, here they are:
"Cezanne: Landscape into Art" by Pavel Machotka.  I bought this book at Cezanne's house/museum in Aix. Incredible explanations of how Cezanne constructed his landscape paintings with photos of the original sites.
"Cezanne's Composition" by Erle Loran.  Another incredibly insightful book, mainly about how Cezanne constructed space, complete with diagrams.  If you want to study composition, buy these two books.
"Cezanne the Self-Portraits" by Steven Platzman.  Beautiful color reproductions of the self-portraits and other paintings.
"Cezanne" by Cahin, Cahn, Feichenfeldt, Loyrette and Rischel.  From the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Filled with paintings, drawings, watercolors--many works that you don't ordinarily see.  A huge cataloge.
"Paul Cezanne" by Philippe Cros.  A beautiful retrospective that I've looked at, but haven't read yet. 
"A Cezanne Sketchbook: Figures, Portraits, Landscapes and Still Lifes" by Paul Cezanne.  A reproduction of one of several of Cezanne's sketchbooks. A joy to look at and glimpse of the every day obsession to study and record the world around him. "His incisive studies are the backbone of all of his paintings." -- Carl Schniewind.

"Storm Hell's Backbone", Oil, 9" x 9"

When I was living in Boston I went to Filenes and bought a winter coat.  I loved the coat—it was long and sleek, gray wool with two rows of buttons down the front—and it was warm.  When I got home, I modeled it for one of my housemates, who said it looked like a 1940’s army coat.  Then I hated the coat because that wasn’t the image I had of myself. This is called “reframing,” a psychological term used by the guys who developed neuro-linguistic programming.  But their objective is therapeutic—to turn bad experiences into good ones by creating a new context in which to view an experience.  Politicians use reframing for negative purposes—to turn good qualities of their opponents into loathsome ones.

The same thing happened when I took a group of paintings to be critiqued by an older experienced painter.  He dismissed some of the paintings I loved with contempt.  He loved some of the paintings I hated.  But the reframe only worked in turning good experiences into bad, not the other way around.  I can’t bring to life the paintings that he loved but that I hate—they will always seem dead to me, the past, not the future.  But some of the ones that I love, the ones that represent the future that I am still reasoning with, are more fragile, and it was pretty easy to end up feeling ashamed for my lack of skills and lapses in decision making.  The fact that they represented joyful steps in my progress didn’t enter into it—they were now dogs to be burned.

There is always a risk in asking for a critique.  There is the part that wants to know the honest truth--what the expert thinks--the part that knows a reality check is in order.  But the expert says, "do not, under any circumstances, paint for the market," so then I have to be careful not to take the expert's judgments as the word of god and fall into the very trap that he advises against.

The problem with outdoor painting, I write to him, is that there is a natural "high" from the experience and that feeling is transferred into the painting, whether or not the painting is any good on its own.  Painting outside has proven to me that at least a big measure of the joy and inspiration of painting comes because of the open air and the beauty of natural light.  So the big issue, the one I am always pondering, is how to protect the positive feelings that are the basis of motivation from the cold hard assessment of the end product.  

It is almost winter.  It rains a lot here.  I decide to clean my studio and confront my piles of never-to-be-framed paintings.  I get a newsletter from Rebecca Ross of the Composed Domain.  She says “clearing creates a resonance which allows disturbed energy to return to a state of balance.”  I remember the paintings that I had a friend take to the dump that ended up on his wall. I take the utility knife out of the drawer.

I learned about Oblique Strategies from Robert Genn's Painters Keys Blog.  These little dilemmas are a creative way of getting out of thinking ruts.  On Friday, I turned over the next card in the deck and read, "Do nothing for as long as possible."  This is an existential question and I could write a million blogs on it.  But that would be incredibly boring.  What its really about, I decided, is making use of guilt. 

Sometimes I do nothing for a couple of days just to build up enough guilt to get going again.  The block study above is my 44th and I did it on Thursday after a couple of non-painting guilt days.  The 45th study on Friday wasn't going well and I needed to fix it.  When I went outside I forgot the little step down to my patio and I fell down, my left foot twisting in the little sandals I was wearing.  Half the skin on my right palm was scraped off and I knew there was something seriously wrong with my foot.  Jones fracture they said at the emergency room. Update: the orthopedist says I have an avulsion fracture which is a lot better than a Jones facture, which often doesn't heal.  So my outdoor paintings days are not numbered.

Now it would be quaint, even if true, to say that the universe was trying to teach me a lesson about doing nothing for as long as possible, because I have been forced since Friday to lie down with my foot elevated and iced.  And to wear a therapeutic boot and use crutches making the simplest of tasks tediously time-consuming.  But the real moral of this story is that if you are painting outdoors and you have your head in the clouds, don't wear silly little sandals that can screw up your balance. Wear your hiking boots! I know if I'd been wearing my Renegade GTX Lowa Hiking Boots, the ones I wore every day painting in China and hiking this summer on Mt. Rainier, (or even my Crocs for that matter), that the 5th metatarsal in my foot would still be intact.

My friend Barry Raybould, one of the two guys I went with to Yunnan Province, China, last March, (the other friend is Timothy Tien) has been talking about block studies ever since I met him.   This was my summer project--block study/still lifes in outdoor natural light.  I painted this one about a third of the way through my goal of 50 studies.  When I got halfway through, I forgot why I was doing it, which forced me to do things I'd never done, like go read the Henry Henshe facebook page to try to understand what the purpose of painting colored blocks in natural light was all about in the first place.  I realized I didn't know the first thing about what the block studies were for and so then it got interesting again.

Meanwhile, I entered a couple of plein air competitions in the Northwest and won awards in each one.  This painting won an award from juror Xiaogang Zhu at the Whidbey Island US Plein Air Open September 12, 2009.  Maybe the block studies are paying off.  I am beginning to see everything as a big block study.

Driving in fog in the area of Coupeville on Whidbey Island, we came across Ebey Road Farm with a red barn and Holstein cows, the only bit of contrast and color we could find.  Parking by the "no trespassing" sign, we walked up the road past the house and said to the guy in the truck, "please sir, could we paint your cows?"  He laughed at us, of course. "The cows won't stay still!" he said. 

Yet we drove around to the other side of the barn and set up our easels in front of a small group of most curious cows, vying for position on the other side of the fence.  The two guys fixing the roof on the big barn were singing, the sun eventually came out and the rather busy cows (busy trying to figure out what we were up to) followed the alpha gal from one end of the fence to the other, took a lunch break on the other side of the barn, and finally came back and settled for a rest facing west, with their backsides in our direction. A little sweet talk with some grass brought them around and I was rewarded with a kiss on my hand from the long pink tongue of the most forward and courageous cow.  A little quick sketching between laughing heartily at the antics of these amazing animals made for the best morning of the week.  I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

 
"Rapids at Salmon La Sac", 8 x 10", Oil, 2009
High Country Artists Plein Air Competition, August 2009, Ambiance of Kittitas County Award (Best of Show).

I love it when the painting paints itself and wins an award.  I think for half an hour that I can die happy.  Then I become anxious--because past performance may not be indicative of future results.  I don’t want to have to live up to that painting.  I’d rather have the good painting just around the next bend.  So then I have to reorient myself to my work ethic.  Go back and start practicing scales again.  Think about what I need to learn-- remember what Rilke said:  “If the Angel deigns to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner.”

"Mahjong Player", Oil, 14" x 11", 2009.
This fellow took time out from the mahjong game in the courtyard of the guest house in Yu Lu Village, Yunnan Province, China.

In March of 2009 I traveled to some of the ethnic minority regions of Yunnan Province in western China with two painter friends.  I've compiled some photos of part of the trip, particularly of the remote Tibetan area near Deqin in the Three Parallel Rivers area of China.

"Xizhou Market Street", Oil, 9" x 9", 2009
Painted in Xizhou, Yunnan Province, China

I like to talk about my process.  I think a lot of women do.  Its often how we get to understanding.  Men are different.  When they talk, it’s often to express the certainty of a solution--not the baffling uncertainties of the process.  It’s frequently the end of the conversion not the beginning and therefore a boring conversation strategy.  Some of my guy artist friends assume when I talk about my process that: 1) I am asking for advice or worse, asking for permission; or 2) I am really a troubled person.    When a guy artist friend told me recently that he hoped I found what I was looking for soon, I decided I was making him seriously uncomfortable and had better shut up—at least about the process stuff.

A lot of people appear to be phobic about uncertainty or at least phobic about expressing it and there’s a good reason—most people feel validated when they are given the opportunity to give advice and expressing uncertainty is a really big green light.  So if you express uncertainty, you are asking for it.  But I find expressing certainty inevitably leads to its opposite as soon as I express it—so I have to be careful.

It says in the Bible to not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing.  Its supposed to be about alms and hypocrisy.  But I think it’s also a psychological truth about certainty and uncertainty: if you try to express convictions in words, you will inevitably be a hypocrit.  So its better to express it in deeds and not tell anybody what you are doing.   And more important, don’t tell yourself what you are doing – just ride on that certainty that the inner voice is, after all, the ticket holder.

"The Green Door", Oil, 10" x 8", 2007
Painted in Venice

A couple of years ago I lost my voice--I got a condition called spasmodic dysphonia.  Doctors say this is an incurable neurological problem and they give botox injections into the vocal cords.  You can listen to Robert Kennedy Jr. on his radio show if you want to know what it sounds like.  I didn't want botox shots in my vocal cords so I went to a cranky, 80 year old voice therapist in LA--Dr. Cooper.  He had a lot of stories about the medical community and notebooks filled with scathing letters to the spasmodic dysphonia associations and doctors and reporters--because in his book spasmodic dysphonia is a functional problem, not a brain disease--its a misuse of the voice.  He sat me in front of a musical biofeedback machine and made me say "um hm" a million times at a certain pitch.  I nearly passed out the first day from hyperventillating.

My voice is better now.  But it can sound pretty bad when I get nervous.  Sometimes the least uptick in my emotions and my voice crackles and breaks and people think I am about to cry.  It makes them nervous.  You never think about your voice until it doesn't work.  You don't realize how many mechanisms have to be in sync to speak.  I hold my breath when I get excited.  That's part of the problem.  I talk to myself all the time in my head, and it sounds perfectly normal.

Painting doesn't require speech--I can go for days without speaking much to anyone except my husband and my cat. When I talk to Muffin, I don't have any problems, because I instinctively pitch my voice higher.  Dr. Cooper calls this "pet talk" and he says it proves that spasmodic dysphonia isn't an incurable brain problem.

I bought a CD from a guy named Roger Love on using the voice--Roger works with Hollywood stars and famous singers.  He teaches specific exercises.  Two years ago I couldn't sing at all.  Now I can sing again, thanks to Dr. Cooper and Roger Love.  But now I get daily email newsletter solicitations from the outfit I bought the CD from, exhorting me to buy other programs--ex-CIA operatives expert in body language, brain aerobics for the elderly, secrets of obscure farmers now worth millions.  I keep unsubscribing but it doesn't stick.  Its hard not to associate all the cheerleading art marketing experts with all this stuff--they all sound pretty much the same. Just one more person telling you what to do. Maybe they never had teenagers. I remember when my daughter told me to stop telling her to practice--because it made it harder, not easier.

Losing my voice was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It gave me an excuse to chain saw a lot of stuff that I didn't want to be doing--to start to figure out what is really important.  I was freaked out and I wanted to fix it.  But it made me realize that there is wisdom within--wisdom that expresses itself in the most unexpected of ways.