Card Players

I wanted to do another interior, and a lot of table-related things have been on my mind lately. I've been thinking about still lives, paintings about eating, people seated, and the fact is that tables are a great gathering spot for people. When art becomes part of life, tables are just as relevant as any other item to paint, and including models/figures becomes easier than ever. Just tell them to sit down and do something. I told my little brothers to sit down and do stuff. It began with one of them playing a board game, which made me think of all sorts of board-game related things. Checkerboard patterns, how painting becomes like a board game in terms of moves, etc. So I began to paint and when I looked at it again, the composition reminded me of Cezanne's Card Players. This made me think again of my recent adventure with making playing cards out of woodblock prints, and I wondered whether or not my subconscious was linking things together. Either way I told my brother to sit down and play solitaire while I painted him. Then he got bored so I got him on my laptop and he ended up playing Plants vs. Zombies which for all intents and purposes could count as a modern card game. People play solitaire on the computer all the time! Technicalities aside though, I became very absorbed in the levels of space in the room, the floor, the plane of the table, the window in the back and the world outside. Makes me think of how during a card game everything seems to be in this little world of paper and spades and chance, and outside the window the world still exists. People are absorbed in their own little worlds. Card players, painters, writers, athletes, anyone.

The first take is this:

The little guy to the left at this point was playing a board game which turned into solitaire. The fellow at the end of the table is writing something. I tried a more limited palette to begin with.

Take two eliminated the central figure and related some mugs on the table to a certain dual approach to the painting that I began to see creeping out of the way it was set up. I had my eye on the green square at the top left and was measuring the other colors off that from time to time.

What I decided was the final take had something to say about different color dynamics. I thought the red and the yellow had taken a prominent role in the painting thus far, but I thought it needed some other major players in terms of space, so some cobalt blue took over and made some interesting comments on what had been the green square at the top left but that was eventually considered to be too irrelevant. Clarification was also the name of the game. The figure remains, surrounded by cobalt blue and payne's gray, and the mood of the painting seemed to become a slightly brighter nostalgia. A pair of shoes appeared under the table.

24"x30" Card Players, oil on canvas.

Keeping a Sketchbook is the Key to Everything

After my semester finished at the NYSS, the summer came around very suddenly. Between not working much, and overcoming health issues, I found myself in a completely different state of mind than the jam-packed year. The busy and every-minute-counts mentality of life in NYC was completely washed out by upstate life-no pressing obligations, time to kill, and a lot of empty space. I was sort of taken by surprise. As a result, I was torn between doing absolutely nothing and building a schedule out of thin air.

So I did absolutely nothing for a bit. And then I was struck by how devastating being lethargic can actually be to myself as a human being. It set in slowly. Day after day went by, waking up at noon, then 1pm, then 2pm. Staying up all night and sleeping all day. I got lots of sleep then didn't get any but it didn't matter because my structure-less routine left me. And then I began to feel unhappy and began to panic for myself as an artist-how long could this go on? In the back of my mind I felt I would always be safe, because after all, I'd go back to school at the end of the summer and be on a regular schedule again. But every time this happens, I begin to question my own integrity as a painter, or an artist, and I finally realized that nothing could really fill that need to make, to do things that challenged myself as an artist. I needed to start now. And then it dawned on me that I needed to get my sketchbook going regularly again. 

The sketchbook is the key to making art a part of one's lifestyle. 

I thought about how visual ideas develop. I realized that all great artists kept a sketchbook regularly as part of how they thought. A lot of times I think one can simply look at an artists work and then "get" it, and this is true in a way, but I have come to realize that anything that is made needs the act of making to be understood more fully. 

One of the most influential things in my artistic life has been looking at different sketchbooks that great artists have kept. I have a copy of one of Cezanne's sketchbooks that I look at often, and have looked at lots of other sketchbooks that have been the building blocks, the "behind the scenes footage" of great works. Picasso's Demoiselles has behind it a massive amount of studies for each of the women, connecting back with visual ideas for other paintings, paintings in history he looked at, and so much more than is readily apparent, or could even be grasped by looking at the painting. I recently read a book on Matisse's journeys to Morocco, and the paper trail of sketches, drawings, and studies behind the painting The Moroccans is immense. The same is true for nearly every single work of art that I have looked at. It seems so simple when I think about it, but the fact remains that to develop visual ideas, thinking about them with my brain alone isn't enough. I need to think as often with my hands and eyes. 

So over the past couple weeks I have tried to restart my visual literacy by scheduling in a few hours every single day to work on my sketchbook. I was surprised to find that I picked up a lot of other things in my life that had slacked off, such as learning Italian, going to the gym, and connecting with old friends. Once there is a set reason for doing anything, which for me happens to be making art, the rest of life follows, and life goes on in a way that makes perfect sense. Art becomes life, life becomes art, and the cycle continues. 

Life lessons come from keeping a sketchbook in these temporary summer conditions. 

Here's a couple of my sketches:

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