Doing Great Work

I’m excited to say that my painting in today’s post, Look Both Ways will be included in the 2010 National Watercolor Society Exhibition that opens later this month in San Pedro, California.  It was a breakthrough painting for me, it’s one of my favorites, and I am so thrilled that the jurors liked it too!  

Look Both Ways is part of my current Out and About series. I love painting people engaged in everyday activities in natural environments rather than painting posed models in a studio setting. I discover most of my subjects when I’m traveling. I find that when I travel, my eyes are more open and I tend to view everything I see as potential subject matter. I guess it’s a matter of training - I seem to automatically reach for my camera when I’m in a new place, so I tend to view the world within the four borders of the camera’s viewfinder, which is somewhat similar to composing a world in paint within the four borders of the picture surface.  

Here are some of the formal ideas I’m focusing on in my Out and About series: 

     Blending realism, abstraction, and my imagination

     Putting more emphasis on the design elements than on description

     Creating interesting, non-representational value patterns

     Finding ways to connect everything to everything else in the painting

     Creating rhythm and movement

     An emphasis on gesture and body language rather than on description

     Expressive rather than accurate shapes

     Altered color

     Using black and white as colors

     Having a variety of interesting edges in the painting

     Not stopping until I love it 

In his book Do More Great Work, Michael Stanier writes, “There’s a basic pattern, a rhythm, to the creative process, a backbeat driving the emergence of ideas:

•                          Out. In.
•                          Expand. Contract.
•                          Diverge. Converge.
•                          Create. Select.

You open up, expand possibilities, and have ideas (out, expand, diverge, create). Then you narrow your focus, close down options, and make a choice (in, contract, converge, select).  And repeat.”

Half the battle of improving our work and getting it closer to what we want is knowing what we want. I find it extremely helpful to sit down with my art journal to get my “wants” into specifics. I make lists of ideas and elements I want to add to my work – much like my list of 11 above, and then I make a list of plans for manifesting those ideas and elements. The second list of “plans” is almost more important than the first because our list of “wants” are often outside the area of our current expertise and will require learning something new, trial and error experiments, failing, leaving behind old habits, and starting from square one again.  But, it is the secret to doing more great work, isn’t it! 

Happy Painting!