Teaching Art Again

It's been a while since my last post and all the blog building websites say I'm a bad girl for leaving it so long! :(

Let me fix that quickly. :D

First, here's my latest painting since this is supposed to be an art blog:

The Way I Danced for You - Acrylic on board (53cm x 84cm)

Now for the News:

I'm teaching art again!! :D

I've been teaching a rather odd variety of subjects since I was 18. First I taught as a junior lecturer at an emergency medical training academy owned and run by a dodgy uncle of mine. That lasted about two years and ended quite abruptly because he was, well, dodgy. Then I taught English as a foreign language to all sorts of international tourists in Cape Town. There are a lot of language schools floating about and it was a fabulous but utterly exhausting experience.

In between all this I taught art. Sometimes for profit, sometimes for fun but it was always there, like hayfever, just waiting for a chance to surface and make a mess.

Now that I'm all professional about my art and stuff I've found myself giving portrait and figure painting lessons and thoroughly enjoying the process of helping my students to look at things in a whole new way.

I've been fortunate enough to find some wonderful venues around Knysna but I have yet to find a permanent home for a proper teaching studio. One possible location would be the light-filled balcony above Weylands in the Sawtooth Building on Thesen's Island while another proposed venue is the gorgeous and central loft area above the Coffee Connection on Knysna's main road. I had also contemplated teaching from my studio here in Brenton since it's already set up and well equipped, but it's a bit far for most people to travel.

Time will tell what works and how.

In the mean-time I have several wonderful students who are very passionate about their art and who have been amazingly supportive through all the relocations. I'm also happy to say that, despite their protestations to the contrary, I have yet to meet anyone who has "no artistic talent". Most of the time it's just a matter of their inherent style not matching their favourite artists' styles.

It seems strange but often I find myself teaching people to love their own natural style because they happen to prefer a different one than what they've already got! I guess it's a lot like me and my natural jazz voice, even though I'm not really a jazz fanatic - once I learnt to just let go and enjoy it I started to seriously rock the Nine Simone! ;-)

In related news, I'm also slowly caving in to pressure (from friends who have spawned) to start teaching kids. Not little kids though, more like teens and tweens. The kind of kids who can hold a brush and look at Kandinsky seriously.

That would be fun. :-D

For now I'm running classes wherever I can and painting about 4 hours a day at home. Life is good. It's chaotic and brain-frying but I cannot imagine giving this up for anything or anyone. ;)

Who was She before She was Me?

I started this painting such a long time ago, or so it seems. About a week ago I finally I felt like my skill and brain were ready to tackle the last details required to finish it so I sat down to paint. 

Of course I ended up repainting just about every part of it. I do think it's better now though - and that it's as "done" as it should be.

Who was She before She was Me? - Acrylic on linen (42cm x 60cm)

This is a self portrait taken from one of the many photos my mom took of me when I was little. Unlike with many of my pieces I always knew what I'd call this one. The title was self-evident from the moment I started on the face.

I have some vague memories of my life and thoughts when I was this small and I remember how I felt at various moments; but I am not now who I was then.

It feels a little like what I imagine a psychic (like River Tam from Whedon's Firefly series) might see when they look into someone else's mind. I was another person then, and her ambitions and interests were so very different from my own now, but there are so many similarities.

I have to wonder if she would like me. I wonder how she would see my life and how I would explain my journey and choices to her.

Would she have wanted to turn into me?

An Unexpected Self Portrait

I finally got sick of my own procrastination yesterday and decided to move a bunch of my works in progress into my lounge where I can't avoid them any more. After all, the main reason I didn't want my studio in my house was the fumes from the solvents I was using with oil paints. That's no longer a problem with acrylic! :D

The move back home was pure frackkin genius, I tell you!

I hung the blankest of my canvases on the work-area I've set up behind my garden door without actually intending to paint anything (what with admin and dishes to do), but an hour later I had a viable underpainting for a new piece. This is how it looks now, after about 5 hours of actual work (not including tea-breaks, sleep and watching Firefly reruns on my PC).

Still a work in progress but I'm fairly impressed with myself! (acrylic on canvas, 76cm x 62cm)

 I'm posting a few of the shots I took between stages of painting. I used my pallet knife pretty-much over the whole thing and it's just been so much fun to work with. Of course I used a lot of brushwork too but I'm really getting into this whole texture-paste thing!

10 minutes -ish. Pretty-much just the palette knife

About half an hour; starting to use the brush a bit.

About an hour or so.

I'd kinda lost track of time by this stage but it was about 10pm.

How it looked this morning as the sun came up. Yeah, having my studio at home in winter is frikkin AWESOME!

Painting in Marble

I started using something new recently and I thought I'd share the very early stages of this next painting with you as an example of the incredibly versatile medium: marble dust.

Yes, you can get it from most art supply shops.

The Grace of Gravity -  Work in progress, acrylic on gessoed* board. (53cm x 84cm)

I've always painted in relatively thin layers and it does look pretty fabulous with oils but now that I'm working  in acrylic the paint gets thinner, not thicker as it dries. (Here's a useful article on why oil paints get thicker as they "dry".)

The end result has been that my paintings show too much canvas texture and there's a definite "unfinished" feel to the glazes in some areas. Until now! 

[Queue evil laughter.]

I thought about buying some acrylic texture paste but then I went and looked up the ingredients. Turns out it's just chalk, clay or some other stable powder mixed into glue; pretty much the same thing as traditional gesso, really. 

Then I priced the ingredients and did a happy dance!

Instructions for making the paste are below.*

The background for this painting was just too much fun. First I primed with regular, el cheapo student acrylic, then I applied a layer of my beautiful new, home-made gesso-type-stuff over the whole surface with a pallet knife. After that I took all the little containers of leftover paint that I tend to hoard in tupperware (more on that later), and I toned the whole surface with random colours. Somehow they blended beautifully!

Then came the fun bit: I took more of my texture paste and scraped it kinda randomly over any areas that felt right. I don't usually paint intuitively so this was kinda like preschool. :D That gave me some super smooth and highly absorbent patches as well as some richly textured areas.

With that dry I started this underpainting. I really have only put down the very basic outline but I already adore the piece and I may end up adding very little to it.

-----*-----

* To make the paste/gesso** I mixed acrylic gloss medium with marble dust on a glass pallet using a pallet knife. You can use all sorts of powders to make this as long as they are inert mineral powders (not flour or other organic powders though, that would be bad). Just be generous with the glue, mix it thoroughly and don't put it on too thickly because it will crack. I like to make it a bit stiffer than my paint so that it goes on like plaster, this does make it very absorbent though so I'd advise sealing it with acrylic medium before you paint over it if the absorbency bugs you.


**For the pedants reading this, yes, I know that strictly speaking, gesso is supposed to be made from rabbit-skin glue but I have vegan friends and besides, acrylic polymers have been very well tested over the last 6 decades. Here's a link for making traditional gesso. Happy now?

The Waiting Girl - Watching a Work-in-Progress

Yep, I still kinda have flu so I'm not in much of a writing frame of mind - or a getting-out-of-bed frame of mind for that matter. None the less I have painted and I have hereby blogged about it.

Aren't I a good girl?

Work in progress - Waiting, acrylic on canvas (91cm x 76cm)

This painting started out as a late-night sketch (below) and went through so many different iterations once I'd put it on canvas that I seriously just wanted to paint right over it at one stage. Fortunately now all I really want to do is touch up the hair and sort out the detailing on the eyes, dress, hands, floor... ...um... .

Shush. :-P

Please excuse the poor lighting, my BugBerry is misbehaving and I can't  get a better one right now

I've included the various iterations and other sketches below to so you can kinda see where I originally thought I was going with this painting and where she eventually decided she wanted to go.

That's all I have so far. I'll take a really pretty photo and post it as soon as she's all done. I will hopefully feel well enough to write something about why I needed to paint a sad girl who's sole purpose in this world is to wait, and wait, and wait.