Art

Paul Matthews

Sunlit Wife–Paul MatthewsSo there was an ad for Paul Matthews’ newest show, at Atea Ring Gallery (no website, sorry), in this months Art in America magazine (the May 2007 issue–the front page of the site changes every month). He’s a very fine figurative painter, who does mostly nudes, showing (among other things) pregnant women, child birth, old men’s fantasies, and a general view of modern life. Many of these paintings are on his site–paulmatthews.net (nudity, NSFW)–and there are links to his portraiture, and landscape, galleries, which, unfortunately, are not online yet. His paintings are lush, and well formed, with beautiful colors, and brushwork, some have background landscapes, seen through windows, that rival his figures. Really a must see as far as I’m concerned.

(Image: Sunlit Wife, Oil on Canvas, 10×15 inches, 1992–Paul Matthews)

General

Whoopsie!

Sorry it’s been so long since I updated. Busy you know. Sometimes life happens. I had to fix the brakes on my truck this week (had a hole in a brake line), that was just soooooo much fun. Actually it went quite well, especially after I figured out where the bleeder valve was, so that I could bleed them out, so that they’d actually stop the truck. Of course, it was rusted closed, but some WD40 took care of that. Now I can go places, and stop when I get there.

This post brought to you by the colors red, yellow, and blue.

Art

Art Seen Asheville

is a quirky art program–artist interviews, how-tos, process, studio walks, etc.–on Asheville, N.C.’s URTV public access station. Community TV if you will.
It’s hosted, and produced, by Ursula Gullow, and can be found on Google Video, also.
I particularly liked episode 007, episode 005, and the show on Gabriel Shaffer (an outsider artist).

Art, General

Alfred Stieglitz suggested

Crotch Island, Maine, The Cove–Watercolor
–when John Marin’s father suggested that the younger Marin “do salable etchings in the mornings, and his crazy watercolors in the afternoons”–” that [he] ask his new wife whether a woman could be a prostitute in the morning and a virgin in the afternoon”, which Stieglitz felt was equivalent to what Marin was asking his son to do.
That is from the sidebar of the dead tree version of this article on John Marin.
The sidebar contains a lot of good stuff, and I wish they’d put that up on the site, also.

Art, General

Keep on Trucking

truckin’ Working in the studio this afternoon, (Yeah, I do actually make art.) I had a small epiphany. Something I hadn’t really thought about before this. I was starting a new painting on a canvas panel, doing some preliminary drawing, roughing some stuff out, and when I set it down to do something else, I was reminded of the first painting I tried making, back when I was 15 or 16. The only similarity here being the canvas panels, the subject matter is not similar, and this panel is bigger.

Those aren’t the only differences. I never finished that first one so many years ago, I gave up on it. I put some colors down, and made a science-fictional space scene, but the colors weren’t right, and I didn’t know how to mix color back then, or about underpainting, or anything really, and that was the end of that painting.

Since then, I’ve learned about color theory, underpainting, scumbling, and how to start, and (more important) how to finish a painting/piece of art, and not to give up until it’s done, or until I know it’s unsalvageably bad, at which point, I’ll start over.

I will go on and finish this painting, it may change in many ways before I’m done, but it will be done. Then I’ll go on to the next one, and then the next, and so on. And that is what it is, and what it takes, to be an artist, whether you sell your work or not, is to keep going on to the next one. It’s not about the one you’ve finished, but about the one still inside, the one yet to come.