pixels, light and hot wax

I think one of the themes for this year is going to be reconciliation with my body. We don’t have the best relationship right now; it doesn’t like the cheap fuel I substitute for meals at times, and desk job. I don’t like that it has become weak, damaged and soft.

Some of this is fixable — more yoga, more gym, less caffeine.

Some of it I just need to get used to.

The body I had at 30 isn’t coming back, and while I am all about the HAES, it has become clear to me that part of the reason my photography has gone all to hell is that my most convenient subject – me – isn’t something I feel comfortable shooting anymore, not so much for the shooting but the inevitable editing. The Happy Pill Project was a long time ago, now, but when I try to put together figure-based work, that is the era I still source from; and I have lost too much confidence, especially after the failures of my sofobomo project, to try working with someone else.

I am going to try and address some of that by doing a portrait session with a friend who works from the philosophy of “you’re already beautiful, let’s just show it” which I think will be fun, and a lot less …. performative? than Modeling as part of the process of making Art, even though I still want to do that again. And yeah, doing the weightlifting should help, too, because even before it starts to change how your body looks, there is an emboldening experience to committing acts of strength.

My head is clearer, and quieter, which is a goodness.

But my eyes… I realized today that I can now easily see the cataract in the mirror. The idea of putting off surgery until the improved lenses are available, while logically sound, is becoming emotionally less appealing, even though eye surgery still terrifies me.  And since visual creation is what I do for both Work and Fun, it is particularly… fraught. I am trying to open up my ideas about art to things that are less sharp and precise, but there are so many pieces in my head which require precise execution that I still want to make. Imprecise is Not an option professionally, although I do have the Photoshop skills already to compensate for the “dreamy glow” my left eye imposes upon the world.

I am beginning to feel physically old, and I am not ready for that.

New Year’s does not feel like a point of closure to me right now. (Also, Christmas/Yule really did not feel like much of anything.)  Maybe 2012 will feel like a new year when the kids are actually back at school, but I’m guessing not, I suspect my personal rhythms have just fallen far out of sync with the nominal calendar. Maybe year’s turn will come soon, maybe it happened at Samhain when I wasn’t paying enough attention. All I know is this feels like a middle, not a door.

From a strictly counting perspective, there was not a lot of art to recount this year, although the kick start to my mixed-media path that Encausticamp kick started was certainly nice. But really, this was the calendar year in which à la carte albums went from being the mostly larval baby you can just lug around everywhere in a sling to a very demanding infant, and the fact that almost all my energies went into my human children and work baby shouldn’t be surprising.

I made fewer photographs in all of 2011 than I did in the average month of 2003. My self-identification as a Photographer is really starting to waver, which is a bit disconcerting after 20+ years.

But today is not the day to pause and reflect. Today I have an abundance of things to DO.

I have finally come out the other side of my holiday rush at a la carte, and begun to have a few moments to think about my own holidays. (Yule is TOMORROW. How did that happen?)

We did start our Christmas shopping yesterday, acquiring musical instruments for the kiddos. Their Christmas will be epic. We are so not letting Santa take credit for the electric guitar:

though it is totally giving me Stryper flashbacks.

The question of  ”What do I want for Christmas” has not been an easy one this year.  Stuff is easy to acquire, and I am mostly more interested in getting rid of stuff right now. I want time, and space, and tranquility, and perhaps a momentary absence of responsibility for anyone other than myself.

A bit of that is starting to translate into my art-making. More and more, I am working on things that are for no one but me, that don’t fit with anything I have done before. I have no real plans to show them anywhere, maybe not even here; it’s all about the process. It feels very Action Painting, and I certainly never thought I would be making art in way that Clement Greenberg would approve of.

I will need, in the time between now and Norwescon (where I will be talking on several as-yet-undetermined panels (well, Poly Parenting is pretty much a lock), and exhibiting in the Art Show) to make some work that is genre relevant again. The thought of showing all the same work two years in a row really makes me cringe, but I cannot leave it to the last minute, because encaustic takes time to cure and wax is really where I am focused right now.

I do have one early resolution for 2012; it is time to stop denying myself the “good” art supplies and working bigger “until I am ready.” Because when am I actually going to feel ready? Also, painting/drawing small is incredibly hard for me. I need to just accept that and work  where I can be comfortably gestural, and not be so frustrated trying to contain myself to a 6×6 board.

Also, I am writing this post from a coffeehouse while using their wifi; I feel like I have unlocked a new achievement in the “self-employed” game.

In 5-20 minute chunks over the last 4 weeks, I have been working on a series of small encaustic paintings. 2 might be done. A few more are interesting enough to show “in progress” (well, interesting to *me*)

I continue to learn through mistakes in my current “encaustic painting in 15 minutes a day” method of working. Today, I spent most of my energy (in my three 5 minute breaks to paint) on a piece where I am:

1. incising
2. filling the scratches with watercolor or oil paint from the tube
3. scrubbing off the excess
4. layering a coat of clear medium
5. return to step 1

And it has gone from good, to bleah, to ok, to good, and so forth. But this is the interesting part

If I apply the watercolor/oil to the piece when completely cool, it’s easy to just wipe off the part that goes outside the sgraffitto.

If I apply the watercolor/oil to slightly warm wax, the wax surrounding the incised part will hold on to some of the color as a fairly even layer of transparent stain. Which, as a way to continue adding depth to the color, is fantastic.

Also, it’s a fairly easy way to completely mess up your intended color balance if you do this unintentionally. This staining effect can be scraped off, but I think I just spent as much time removing unwanted red from my mostly green-teal painting as I had on the previous 5 layers, and I couldn’t quite get it all off.

But I am hopeful that this is turning into a painting I will actually be happy to show the world, eventually.  Other experiments on the table including more including of pieces molded from impasto wax, and my first forays into encaustic over photographs glued to panel (I fear glue, though less than I fear exacto knives. And I now have official “painting pants” since PVA doesn’t really want to come out of denim.)

If, like me, you didn’t clearly label the “encaustic medium” and “pure beeswax” tins on your palette, head your palette up to not quite 200 degrees; the beeswax will become liquid enough to paint with well before the encaustic medium.

No, I didn’t figure this out on purpose, but it is handy.

Yes, am painting. No, still nothing to show.

I have been very much like a duck these past few months: calm and quiet on the surface, paddling like hell underneath. (Well, maybe not always calm on the surface)

There has not been very much time for art.

There has been a whole lot of work for (and on) my growing business. (I hired someone to help me! For only two hours a week, admittedly, but hey, I’m an employer now!) Which is huge for me, but not anything to blog about.

I am taking a typography class, which is very exciting, but won’t have anything to show for a while. Designing a typeface is REALLY COOL and REALLY REALLY HARD and this may be the thing that forces me to give up and start liking pencils. (Although I am definitely still working, in tiny chunks of time, on Skellington’s fabulous suggestions from the “leveling up in drawing” post)  And I am hopeful this will allow me to expand the range of wedding album appropriate scripty fonts that don’t suck.

But class + business + parenting = no time = lots of small, in process, unfinished art. I am about to have 48 blissful hours of alone time, and should be able to grab at least a couple of hours there to fire up the palette and make the house smell all beeswax-y again. (And ponder whether I can swing a second year at Encausticamp – registration opens in a week or so)

A year or two ago, I began the project of trying to learn how to draw, which was incredibly difficult at the start, went really well for a while, and now has been mostly stalled. Part of the problem in my progress, I think, is that somehow the choice of drawing media became incredibly emotionally charged; subtractive drawing in charcoal spoke to me in the way photography has for decades, and the only other thing that attracted my interest was the splashy lack-of-control that is ink and brush (well, lack of control in my hands, anyway.) These were ways to draw that went with how I see, and with how art making is “supposed” to make me feel, and very very hands-on — in the case of charcoal, usually also nose, chin, arm and other random patches of skin on. The presence of the hand is undeniable, and the process is both tonal and visceral. And we learned to draw what we saw, on really big pieces of paper.

Drawing small is torture. Trying to make line drawings, with precise pen, or worse, pencil is an exercise in frustration that leaves me bitter. (I loathe the feel of pencil on paper. It sets my teeth on edge. I have no idea why.) I know why line is such a struggle — after all these years as a photographer, seeing the world as masses of light and shadow is absolutely intuitive. Drawing from my imagination/memory is just not something I’ve got the skill points to do, at least not any more competently than your average 10 year old.

But if I am ever going to get good enough at drawing to make the pieces in my head, I am going to have to practice drawing a lot more. Every day. And lugging around a pad of 18×24 and my compressed charcoal? Not going to happen. Somehow, I need to find a way to draw that I can stand to practice, that is portable, doesn’t leave me looking like a chimney sweep, and is, if not actually enjoyable in a tactile, at least not actively unpleasant. Tonal would be nice, although I already have started rearranging my budget to acquire the Wacom Inkling, but that’s certainly not going to be an entire answer, especially as part of the point of drawing in the first place was to make art away from the computer.

I did not manage to finish my sofobomo project this year in the allotted 30 days, due to an invasion of life and business … but that doesn’t mean I am not going to finish. I’ve now gotten proofs out to all 12 of the first (and only) shooting day models, and will be making the (35+image) book entirely from images that shoot:

Because cephalapods are cool. And inspiring. And fascinating:

Oh, have some octopus art while we are here, even though I’m sure I’ve posted it before: