“The soul of autumn is introspection, maturity, and transformation. This is the time of the year when we find ourselves examining the past, discovering our unfolding maturity and realizing that change is the champion of freedom.” John Ashbrook
Happy Thanksgiving!
I am grateful and thankful to have so many wonderful things in my life that bring me joy; family, friends, home, studio, and my love of art and everything art has to offer. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that after so many years I’m still a curious and enthusiastic artist who loves to learn and experiment with new ways to express myself in my paintings.
I’m also grateful to my students – you inspire me to be a better teacher! And a heartfelt thanks goes out to you, my loyal and encouraging readers who have supported my blogging efforts for the past ten years!
Again – Happy Thanksgiving from my studio to yours! I hope that you’re surrounded by love and joy on this special day.
“The more abstract the painting, the more the painting becomes about the artist who painted it rather than the subject that inspired it.”
In my current figure work I’ve been experimenting with new ideas for adding more abstraction and personal voice to my paintings. My intention is not to accurately render the figure, but to use it as a jumping off place for expressing my inner responses – both emotional and intellectual – and for experimenting with arbitrary environments that emphasize flat shapes and patterns, color and value relationships, personal mark making, random lines and textures, and expressive brushwork.
Each new painting is a new journey of self-discovery and a search for new and creative ways to use the formal elements of design. My approach is a combination of intellect, curiosity, and improvisation. Currently I’m working from photo references taken in modeling sessions with my granddaughter, Amelia. I usually begin by brainstorming for ideas in Photoshop, which immediately helps me see the photo in terms of patterns, values, shapes and other creative possibilities. In the past I’ve had a hard time getting beyond the “realness” of my subject matter and being able see my subject abstractly at the very beginning of my painting process has proven to be a real benefit.
Donna Zagotta, Picasso Summer, drawing of the pattern of lights and darks
My next step is to do a simplified drawing that focuses on compositional issues such as figure placement and value relationships. If I feel that I need more information about the figure’s gesture and body language or to see the shapes of the features and/or how they are placed, I’ll do additional drawings to gather that information. In order to feel free to stylize, abstract, and experiment in my painting, I need to be thoroughly familiar with the figure before I begin painting. I learned that lesson the hard way! The times when I was in a hurry and skipped the intellectual, information gathering part usually resulted in a tight and realistic painting rather than the creative and expressive one I had in mind.
Next, I do a small (8×8) color study to work out the painting’s colors, intensity range, and value key. This is the place where I feel I can totally let loose and improvise and experiment. I freely, spontaneously, and fearlessly apply colors, marks, lines, and brushstrokes and respond. If I like what I see it stays, if I don’t, I keep adjusting everything until I’m excited with what I’m seeing. I’m searching for a creative and poetic expression, a personal connection to the figure’s body language, and a painting that comes alive with mood and feeling.
Donna Zagotta, Picasso Summer, underpainting in transparent watercolor
I begin the final painting with a transparent watercolor underpainting of arbitrary full intensity colors mixed from three or four transparent staining primaries. I started this practice in order to approach my paintings looser and more abstractly. It’s really hard to create a traditional realistic figure painting over those wild and bright colors! The underpainting also reinforces my abstract and expressive intentions for my painting. Once the underpainting is dry, I use my small study to guide me in placing and painting the big relationships of color and value. I paint layer after layer of thin and/or thick “catawampus” brushstrokes of opaque paint mixtures of watercolor and gouache with the goal of further emphasizing the poetry, personal connection and mood I responded to in my color study.
How do I know my painting is done? When I love it!
I’m excited to announce that registration is now open for the two workshops I will be teaching in 2019! Both workshops are titled “Adding the You Factor to Paintings 2.”
If you want to increase your confidence in expressing your personal voice in your paintings, this workshop is for you. Each day we will look at concepts, tools, and techniques that will encourage students to create and rely on a personal rather than rule-based approach to composition, color, and the formal elements. Our workshop goal is to use subject matter as a jumping off place to create imaginative and personally expressive paintings.
Here is the registration information:
March 27-29, 2019 Adding the You Factor to Paintings 2
Ann Arbor, Michigan http://artensity.org/donnazagotta
Contact: Debra Zamperla
You’re always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence that I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe. Robert Frost
Donna Zagotta, Avery Tracy
I’m really interested in how our unconscious beliefs, assumptions, and what we tell ourselves impacts our creativity. For years I told myself that I was not creative. And of course, I proved myself right. However, at one point, I decided to find out if my assumption was indeed true, so I did some research on creativity and what it means to be creative.
What I discovered changed my thinking, my attitude, and my self-image. It turns out that we are all innately creative and that we all have more creativity within us than we can ever use in a lifetime.
Over and over again, I read that the major obstacle to feeling and being creative is our belief that we are not creative. And the best way to feel and to be more creative is to simply tell yourself that you are creative; to exchange the negative words, I’m not creative for the more powerful and positive words, I am creative. One researcher suggested that a good place to start is to look into the mirror each morning and tell yourself, I am creative. I was pretty skeptical that a lifetime of beliefs and assumptions concerning my creativity could be changed that easily, but I tried it anyway (and that was over 10 years ago). I am happy to report that it absolutely works! I began by telling myself that I am creative, which gradually led to my believing that I was creative (I was also bolstered by the research stating that most of us, because we believe that we aren’t creative, never get in touch with our creativity at all). Pretty soon I found myself acting “as if” I was creative, and eventually I saw myself feeling more and more creative. These days, I’m totally comfortable with the idea that I’m a pretty creative gal!
Challenging my automatic beliefs and assumptions about myself and my creativity totally changed my life and my relationship to my painting. Often, at the start of a new painting, I’ll ask myself, “How creative can I make this?”
“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?” William Butler Yeats
Claude Monet, Water Lilies
Over lunch recently, a dear friend and art buddy and I reminisced about some of our early workshop experiences. We chuckled as we remembered one of the very first workshops we attended taught by a watercolor instructor who was V E R Y popular. In preparation for the workshop, I worked and worked for weeks to understand and learn as many of the artist’s ideas and techniques as I could, reading everything I could find documented about the artist in books and magazines. During the workshop I took pages and pages of notes and I took step-by-step photos of every one of her demonstrations. This fabulous artist had figured out a fabulous way to paint her fabulous subject matter and that was exactly what I/we all wanted. I was so enamored by this artist’s techniques that I remember saying to myself, “If I could learn how to paint like her, I would feel like I had died and gone to heaven.” I was sure that if I could master her ideas and techniques I would become the artist I so passionately wanted to become. I came home from the workshop and worked for months on mastering her fabulous subject matter and her fabulous techniques for painting them. And, finally I achieved my goal! I had painted a fabulous painting that looked exactly like hers. In fact, it so closely resembled hers that I remember thinking that if I put her name on the painting everyone in the world would totally believe she had painted it. And that’s when it began to dawn on me that while I had achieved my goal of painting exactly like my favorite artist, I hadn’t really achieved anything that had anything to do with the artist inside of me.
I had reached the destination I set out for, but I was on the wrong path! And, I had to travel down a few more wrong paths over the years until I finally got it. And when I did, I realized that I had to begin a new journey, and I had to begin this new journey at the beginning – at the place of my not knowing. Beginning at the beginning, I set out on path to discover my own fabulous subject matter, my own fabulous ideas, thoughts and opinions about art, and and my own fabulous techniques for painting them.
My conversation with my friend began with my questioning how and why we teachers teach art. As a workshop instructor, I have a dilemma. I have formed my own ideas, thoughts, and opinions about art, and I have developed some techniques for painting the subjects I love to paint. Many students in my workshops are there to learn about those ideas, thoughts, opinions, and techniques. That is what I have to share – my own journey as an artist. But how do I TEACH that the creative journey begins not with secondhand ideas, thoughts, opinions, and techniques, but with honest feelings and authentic responses?
In his book, No More Secondhand Art, Peter London addresses this idea and my conundrum very effectively: “Of course technique is important; so are principles of design. But you already know this. You also know what it takes to acquire these traits; long, hard work. Do you want to draw like Rembrandt or Degas? Simple! Just draw ten hours a day, six days a week for forty years. That’s how they did it. Ready for that? How did Monet paint those densely woven symphonies of strokes of light, weaving that luminescent Japanese bridge over the swarming lily pond? First he excavated a huge hole, then diverted a river to fill the hole, planted it with lily pads, then built a Japanese bridge over the whole thing, all at vast expense. Then he bought a boat, made a floating studio out of it and for twelve hours a day, for over twenty years, he paddled around that pond, and painted and painted until his eyes glazed over. If you want to make stuff that has Monet’s charm….have Monet’s passion, devotion, largess, sacrifice.
The techniques of Monet or Degas can be copied; their principles of design are not obscure, they can be learned. If you want them for yourself, you can have them – for a price. And the price is dearer than you may think. Not only will you have to put in at least as much time as they did in developing these same skills, all your living days, but the real price you will have paid is that you will have succeeded in becoming them, and will have missed becoming you.
Monet’s technique and principles of design are Monet. They were created by him so that he could portray what he alone was seeing and thinking and feeling. These are not simply techniques or principles of design. They are conceptions of the world. Monet had to create his own repertoire of techniques and principles of design because he could not portray through the prevailing means what he alone was seeing and feeling. You can’t have his technique or apply his principles of design without becoming him. Better to raise the questions Monet did than to mimic his responses. What are his questions, the task he set himself? They are remarkably similar to the questions any artist, any creative person, any awake person asks. “What is that damn thing out there? What does an idea look like? How can I give form to a feeling? How does this whole mess fit together? How can I speak about the thing no longer there? The thing not here yet? Why am I moved like this by mere daylight, by nightfall? Is there a truth here, or merely beauty? Does this line have integrity, or is it guile? What have I made up, what have I observed? Of all the things I can do, what shall I do, what should I do? Will I ever get it right?”
Your particular techniques and your principles of design will be derived from your struggle with these questions. Monet did it. Rembrandt did it. So did Bellini, Breughel, Bosch, Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Byron, Bartok, Berlioz, Bernstein, Brubeck, Basie, Balanchine, Beckett, Bergman, Beckmann, Berryman, Borges, Bellows, Baldwin. You get the picture.
All creative journeys begin with a challenge to introspection, to fathom not only “what’s out there”, but “what’s in here.” They are invitations to original response.”
They are also invitations to dance your own dance, sing your own songs, write your own stories, and paint your own paintings. And through them the world will know who you are.
