Done

I feel this one is done... I had a different intention when I visulized what I wanted to do originally, and I swear I have no idea how it developed itself into a sort of traditional portrait, but what's most important, at least to me with this particular painting, was achieved.  He had this look, this really specific look that I wanted to hint at (again, originally), because I didn't want to describe it. So god knows why I ended up describing the features, but I feel it was in an effort to go towards whatever I was hoping to communicate... (talk about being vague...) Aaaaanyways, it's done. Hope you guys like it.

WIP 2

 Ok... sooooo... I would've wanted this to show that I had the balls to take more risks.... but... I don't know... there was something not working out. Seemed like I HAD to try and get that really specific look or the portrait just wasn't going to work...

I know I said I really liked this painting's start... It was one of those things, kind of like the drawing I posted before, that I think is cryptically personal. I guess I was the one who saw some sort of potential in those initial gestures, even though a lot had to be redrawn. But the energy was there... that was the important part. The intention of the painting was clear, and sometimes, many times actually, that intention doesn't appear after weeks or months of work. Many times it doesn't even appear at all...

I'll keep at it until I feel it's done. I should've done a more detailed WIP, but I was struggling a bit too much, searching a bit too much to be concerned with taking photos. Sometimes a painting just solves itself through decisions that denounce the struggle that was involved. 

Start

I like this start... which is annoying because once you like something you're not inclined to risk ruining it. And if there's something  I've found out about myself is that I have to feel like I'm right at the edge of messing everything up to really enjoy the act of painting. That's when my panic mode kicks in and when I truly feel like I'm doing something with paint.

Taking risks that ultimately pay off doesn't happen all the time obviously... more often than not, more often than I would like for it to happen, I take a safe way out of a problem. It's a shame...

BUT, I promise I'll take this small painting to see what I can do with it. I love this guy's expression, he's a student of mine... he's got an incredibly intense look... he looks like he could be a genius or a kid whose about to overdose... love it. I have to try and see if I can get that feel, not with small detail, but with shapes of paint. We'll see how it goes.

At least one...

When I'm done with a drawing session, I always feel that it was worth it if I find that one of the many drawings I did, was able to communicate what I was observing. Many times it doesn't even have to be one whole drawing, but a moment in a drawing. If I'm able to see that little bit of a drawing, and understand why it worked, I'm content with that whole session. And sometimes, it's not even a drawing session, but a whole sketchbook that produces that one little drawing. Now, other people may look at the sketchbook and feel that all the pages are consistent (I wish!), but I find that there's almost always one specific drawing that catched my attention and makes me feel that all those other drawings aided me in making that particular one.

So I drew this the other day, and I guess, for me, this is that little drawing... may be nothing specialto you folks, but to me it reminds me that when you're drawing and things come out well, it just feels like everything just falls into place. A line becomes a little puzzle piece that helps you do another line, and another and another, and when you're done, it was almost effortless. I wish this would happen ALL the time, but the truth is for every good drawing there are tens of bad ones.

I've always felt that while great artists are considered great because they're consistent, sometimes I wonder how many crappy drawings and paintings they did that are hidden from the publications and museums. Because, lets face it, we don't want to see a bad portrait when we open a Sargent book, and god bless him he's Sargent but he did plenty of, granted lets not say bad (that's blasphemy), not so good portraits. They were all human, some of us are more human than they were, but they had good days and bad. The important thing to remember is that the bad days always turn into something good in the future... may not be the next day, but if you feed enough of those crappy ass days  into your system, something good comes out of them.

Btw, here's a painting I showed a WIP pic, but never showed the finished version...

 

Sin Pan y sin Trabajo

I went to Argentina for vacation... Buenos Aires, Ushuaia, Calafate and Bariloche. Simply amazing. Even though I am horrible at painting lansdcapes, I had a huge urge to just sit there and try and interpret through paint what I was looking at... When you think about it, it's almost a curse... being a painter that is, not vacationing. Everything we look at, we paint; at least in our heads we do. I sometimes find myself trying to let go of being a painter just so I can take in what is there in front of me. The truth is it's impossible, painter and person are the same person, and we have to accept that. I decided to take photos... a REAL painter would've painted, but I opted for my camera... and I have to say I love taking photographs. When done regularly, the process of composing starts to come from your gutt, and in my experience gutt is good.

I was also in Buenos Aires, and had to go to the musuem of Fine Arts (MNBA). I knew they had a really nice Bouguereau (The First Mourning) and an emblematic image in Argentinian figurative painting, Ernesto de la Cárcova's  Sin Pan y sin Trabajo, which always reminded me of Bramley's Hopeless Dawn. Now both Boug's and de la Cárcova's work are absolutely wonderful. Boug's is much more subtle than the reproductions I´ve seen, and surprisingly de la Cárcova's painting is somewhat impressionistic. There are blues and purples in the hands... bits of broken color that are intelligently placed. All this would've been fantastic, if the museum would let people take photographs. But nooooo, only the most important museums in the world let people take photos, but here in LatinAmerica we don't trust ourselves yet. The reason they gave me is that the museum owns the rights of the works that are displayed so if I wanted something I had to go to the store. So I went to the store, and they obviously had nothing of de la Cárcova's work, no reproductions of the painting, no postcards, nothing. Their argument made complete sense.

So I realized that we hold on to whatever we can remember. Granted I could've taken notes on the painting, and sketched for a while... but I decided to look. And I stared at it for a looong time, and I tried to take everything in. I asked myself, not how he painted it (although that's an inevitable thought), but why it made me feel so connected to it... how and where is it that human emotion is so purely represented, that 100 years later,  when the world is completely different than the one they depicted, I'm still connected to their image. And so I looked... and I guess looking is almost rhetorical... I didn't come up with any answers, it seems a bit intangible. I realize people may dismiss these sort of works as overly daramtic, almost kitschy, but I'm drawn to them. That's all I know, all I care about.

Gypsy Cab

I finally can post this painting. It was challenging in a lot of aspects... For me it was one of those images that tests my will to leave things as they are. It is soooo hard for me to not overwork something... I guess the urge to "finish" areas or arrive at detail has to do with the way I was taught, or even more so, it's the weight of traditional figurative painting. But I've come to understand, (in my particular process, I wouldn't want to generalize) that I absolutely love when things just work as they are. And I guess I use that word, "work", because I truly believe that every single element in a painting has a purpose. Every single inch of that image has to work in tandem to help communicate something more emphatically. The famous Duran quote always struck me as one of those things that is at the core of image-making - "En art tout ce qui n'est pas indispensable est nuisible" (In art, all that is not indispensable is unnecessary).

  

I truly feel that this painting is helping me get on the "right" track... at least MY right track. I've always loved the idea that bigger paintings should look like blown up sketches, and even though my work looks nothing like what I envision (that is our curse after all), that's the path I want to follow. I think that this painting in particular is full of little moments that are just what the painting itself needed. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to sound presumptuous... I'm not sure if it's my best painting (who the hell am i to say what, if any, is my best effort), and I'm clearly not stating that it's a flawless image... I'm just saying that it's one of those images that I'm grateful for because I needed it. I just had to paint it and solve it in this particular manner because it meant that I was making a conscious decision to follow something. That "something" is probably different for everyone but in my case, it meant not touching things that I loved, even though every ounce in my body begged me to keep painting on top.

I've also been working on a bunch of portraits, together with some other bigger paintings. Here´s a pic of a painting that is currently more resolved but I have this older shot at the moment.  I had done a previous Tim Burton one, and this one is Tim Burton revisited. Stripes = Tim Burton... that's how advanced my brain is... I started painting this after I bought (always buy, don't download or copy artist videos) the Michael Klein video. I wanted to see how much I could work in the same manner, without sacrificing my ways, and I think he paints beautifully, and I'm very glad he does because I can't for the life of me paint that way. Wonderful video, get it. I'm always eager to see how other people approach painting, but it clearle wasn't for me...

So after a while I said fuck it, and I couldn't stick to the drawing and I just had to move paint around and mess everything up.

Anyways, here's  part of the painting, bad shot, but it gives you guys an idea...

That's it for now... later!




 

Why?

That seems to be the one question we figurative painters get asked a lot... why do we paint in this manner? Why? It almost seems that the works we create can't be experienced if this question is not answered beforehand. As if the act of painting can't justify itself solely with the finished painting. I wonder if the opposite could be true - if you looked at a painting and absolutely loved it and later, after learning the reasoning behind it, you absolutely hated it. I can't believe this scenario is possible, and I also can't understand the first one where an instruction booklet is indispensable in order to enjoy a painting. It is in fact a moot point because the image has already been painted. I can imagine a conversation... well it never really feels like a conversation, it feels more like an interrogation. So, I can imagine the interrogation ending abruptly:

"Why did you chose to solve that problem through painting and not some other language?"

"Well... the paintings are done and are hanging in front of us at the moment, so lets not dwell upon it and lets judge the work accepting that the problem was attempted to be solved through painting."

Even if we don't want to accept it, we just try to find gentler ways if answering "because I want to." But the truth is that Art Schools and galleries and critics around the world will not accept such a simple answer. There has to be some sort of enchanting but intelligent reasoning behind such a daft act. Because we all know painting is something apparently ANYONE can do... it's so easy to comprehend, so quickly can one find its limitations, so rapidly can one bore one's self with painting, that it can never be a goal. Maybe a capricious whim, but never an objective in life.

"Oh, how cute, he made a painting."

"Don't worry honey, he'll grow out of it."

And I mention the word intelligent before, because it seems that as soon as a figure enters the realm of painting, it dumbs it down. Bouguereau's women might as well be blondes. I wonder if people have a checklist to establish how intelligent we are:

"Semblance of good drawing..."
"Check."
"Atmosphere..."
"Check."
"Thorough understanding of paint manipulation..."
"Check."
"Harmonious sense of composition..."
"Check."

"I'm sorry sir, 4 out of 4. You are legitimately stupid."

Truth is, we can't do much about it. I think it's ridiculous to try and convince someone that I am intelligent, or educated, nor am I willing to accept that my paintings should be judged on how much theory I can cram behind them. As long as there's people out there that will not give themselves a chance to experience a work of art in the way it was meant to be experienced (lets not forget, painting is a visual medium), we will be faced more and more with these sort of questions. What I have resorted to is blabbering the sort of answer the person wants to hear when they ask a stupid quetion. But in the end, just let them keep believing that dumb people are capable of making great paintings.