Typically, the summer can be a very wierd time for me. A lot of my friends and relatives like to rib me a little about having the summer "off" (they are so jealous!), but I think if they knew what I actually spend my summer days doing they might think otherwise. I wake up at 5a.m., have breakfast and read for about twenty minutes, exercise, shower, walk the dog etc;, in the studio ready to paint by 7a.m.. This year I had air conditioning and heat installed in my converted garage studio, so I'll work through the day until about 5:30 or 6 p.m.. I'll keep going like this seven days a week until something comes up to break my schedule. It's not that I'm overly obsessive (maybe just a little), but this is the only time of year when I can push myself hard enough to make something significant happen. Not necessarily a major breakthrough but a leg up, so to speak, on my work, that can only be achieved through consistent, sustained effort. It took me a while to get the idea that the artists whose work I admire aren't just super talented but are driven. The old cliche; 90% sweat, 10 % inspiration, theres a lot of truth to that.
             Most of my work is still life painting, so that's what I'm focusing on. In summers past I would be engaged in a potpourri of artmaking; landscape painting, portraits, workshops etc;. This year I decided to really stay concentrated on one thing. I've slowed down my process considerably. I used to work directly on the canvas. A quick charcoal drawing, ebauche, and jump right in. Now I make a detailed pencil drawing, transfer it, do a wipe out, and while that's setting up I make a poster study. Is this making a difference? I think so. And I feel like I could slow things down even more. Make more thumbnail sketches when arranging a composition. Do a modeled, fully refined pencil study. At heart, I'm a figure painter, making compositions involving numerous subjects, in emulation of my hero, Rubens. But I realize that practical matters being what they are, job, space, funds etc; that that kind of painting is, at least for now, out of my reach. So I plan to treat my still life paintings as if they are figure compositions on the grand scale. I don't mean grand in the physical sense, I just mean that I want to put into them the kind of planning, and energy, that an old master, such as Rubens would put into his paintings. The summer is really the only time when I can give these grandiose ambitions a dress rehearsal. See what I'm made of. It's easy enough to talk about how great it would be to be a full time artist, but when you're actually there in the studio, it's not all wine and roses.
             For one thing, you have just way too much time to think. You talk out loud quite a bit. Make silly noises. It can get a little tedious and a little lonely. You really have to discipline yourself. Keep  your eyes on the prize. It's no wonder that Michelangelo wrote all that crazy poetry while he was working on the Sistine chapel. I wish I could turn off my brain and just work. Eventually I do settle in and I'm "on the form", in meditative concentration. That's when I'm going to do my best work. It's hard to get there when I'm in the throes of my regular life; Teacher, husband, father etc:, but not impossible. These long summer days spent finding out who I am, if it's a productive summer, will carry me through the rest of the year. I realize that it's not most peoples idea of a vacation but it's a refreshing break from my usual routine, which is to get a couple of hard won, frantic hours, in the studio each day after work, and the full days (when I'm free) on the weekends. It's not all work and no play. I'm looking forward to a week long camping trip, with my grown children and their significant others, and some friends, that should be a blast. As much hiking, kayaking, fishing, staring at campfires as can be crammed into six days. And no art. I probably won't even bring a sketch pad.
             I've been spending quite a few days this summer thinking about form. (is there a cure for this?). Theres a scene in "The Matrix", the first one (the only good one), towards the end of the movie, where Neo is fighting the bad guys, and eventually he starts to see things as they really are. He sees their bodies made up of waves of energy and this allows him to calmly "kick butt". It's a good analogy for perceiving pure form. It's one of the hardest concepts to get your mind around when you're studying cast drawing and cast painting. The instructors are constantly advising you to stay on the form. To think about where that specific section of form is in relation to the light and at what angle it tilts up towards the light and how much light it really has as opposed to how much it appears to have. Heavy stuff. I couldn't get my mind around it. The instructor would say to me " make your sculpture (your drawing) look like that sculpture (the cast). "Say what?" Eventually what worked for me was a kind of disassociation. I would look at my drawing without thinking about what it was representing. I would then ask myself, what do the visual cues that I've rendered look like. What are the forms in my drawing actually doing? If they weren't doing what they were supposed to do than I knew I needed to make changes. That's when your pencil can feel like a sculptor's tool as you reach into the space of the drawing and carve away or add form. Even though I didn't fully grasp the whole "where is the form on the light sphere thing?" this was enough to allow me to begin to see pure form. And as I'm painting I'm constantly trying to see if I can disassociate myself from what I'm doing, and have that "Matrix" moment. As Picasso once said, you can put the eyes and nose wherever you want and people will still see a face. For a classical painter that's not good enough. You want to get beyond symbolic mark making and search for a purer truth. Well I do, anyway, I can't really speak for all Classical painters. It seems to me that this is what Chardin was after. His paintings don't have quite the bourgoise aspect to them that can be found in the works of the Dutch masters and some of his contemporaries. At his purest and simplest his paintings become objects captured in a world of light, with no need to be anything other than what they are. And that's enough.