Vacation painting

The beautiful thing about having my main show up (and please go see it at Eclectic Eye until January 2nd if you’re in Memphis!) is that I’m now free to experiment a bit and see what new things I can try since the pressure of producing exhibitionable art on a deadline is past. Which is not to say I don’t love painting with a purpose and creating a body of work for a show. But I love do also love the freedom of vacation painting.

I’m back in Washington, as you may be able to tell from the scenery. It’s been a quiet start to vacation as I continue to soldier through a cold, but I’ve gotten to sit under a blanket and read a lot. I’m in the middle of a book on Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz, and it’s made me go look up her early watercolor work from the teens, which is stunning. I also looked a bit at John Marin’s watercolors. Both are free and impressionistic and do not involve the use of line. I have a couple of friends who have recently been painting first in watercolor and adding lines only later, if at all. I’ve never painted this way with watercolors, and even in my oils, I lay out the basic composition in chalk before diving in.

I've been trying to relax in my life lately and be a little bit less of a workaholic. I also think it's good for me to go through periods where I work quickly and loosely. Printmaking is so exacting that I can carry that tightnessback into my painting as well. I find that there’s a sweet spot at the center of the spectrum between too tight and being too sloppy, and what I tend to do is swing back and forth across that line, over correcting one way or the other in almost every piece. It’s the classic Goldilocks search for “just right.”

When I started watercolors, I was afraid of doing “little old lady” watercolors, and I felt that the presence of a strong line made them more sketchy and vibrant and energetic, as well as giving them a different feel from the old fashioned, very precise watercolors. I have mostly stayed with that style, though my lines have often gone from black pen to lighter inks to pencil. But O’Keefe’s simple and vibrant watercolors use no lines at all and simply sing. So after looking up that work of hers, I decided to try a few of my own. I can’t ever get as ascetic and spare and reduced as her gorgeous work. I’m simply too much of a detail painter. But it’s been freeing to use to lines and all and just play with paint. Here are the first four. It’s raining today, as it has been for most of my visit, this being Washington in the late fall. So I’m working from some photos I took on the one beautiful day I got to go out and take a gentle walk (while still fighting a cold). Perhaps if the weather breaks again and I feel better, I can do some on site painting as well.