Because I have a full time day job as a high school art teacher (although I still manage to paint every day and all weekend long) the summer is the time when I can really bear down and make advances in my work. Along with that I'll usually have a few goals in mind that I'll attempt to accomplish before that school bell rings.
      One of my goals was to move forward into the digital age. The majority of competitions, grants, galleries etc; no longer want to look at slides. They want the work on a cd and usually formatted to a specific pixel size and number of bites. So for about a year I've been gnashing my teeth as deadlines slipped past and I missed opportunities. Finally I went out and purchased Photoshop Elements. Photoshop is not user friendly. It took me two full days to maneuver around and I'm fairly computer savvy. But once I figured things out I was able to take my digital image, match it exactly to the painting, resize it to exact specifications and burn it to a disk. Whew! Hopefully I will remember what I did because I'm sure I will have to do it again soon. It's kind of like playing Dungeons and Dragons where everything is hit or miss and nothing is what it appears to be.
        Another goal for the summer was to take my work in a slightly different direction. A little over a year ago I was advised by one of my instructors that I was painting too thin. He didn't really elaborate on it too much but it seemed to me at the time that he had a point so I started to paint in a much thicker style. I was pleased to a large extent with the way the paintings were coming out but I felt that on the larger paintings ,specifically, something was being lost with what was gained. The baby had been thrown out with the bathwater and I had to retrace my path without going back to my old mistakes. So I did a complete 180 and went back to basics. For me that meant doing a drawing on paper, transferring it to the canvas, covering the canvas with umber, wiping away the lights, windowshading the colors, completely repainting everything with color strings glazed and scumbled. And then finally, in what would be the fourth skin, adding accents, color notes and lights. I feel like I've come out the other end of the tunnel now and I'm really excited about the way the work is going. It has some of the richness of my older work along with some of the bolder color that I picked up in my "Van Gogh" stage.
       Another new element that I mentioned in my last post, is the use of daylight rather than artificial lighting in my still lifes. This is helping me to develop a much lighter touch and greater sensitivity to color changes and something that I think I'll continue to experiment with. The hardest part is guaging the relative warmth or coolness of each color or shadow and the overall tonality since the lights tend to be much further down the scale than with artificial lighting. I've just finished working on a piece that features a bamboo plant and saki cups and it truly doesn't look like anything I've done before(hopefully in a good way).
      I always have more things I want to do in a miniscule two month period than any one person could accomplish in the midst of household chores, friends calling up to fish, family camping trips, parties, anniversaries, christenings etc;. I did manage to take the Jon DeMartin workshop(great), I didn't get to do a life size portrait or figure paintings, I did manage to do a few landscapes and get myself invited to show them in a gallery I've been dying to show at, and I did put together a solo show which didn't go as well as I hoped(when will this recession be over?).
    Next summer I think I will take a once a week portrait or figure painting class which will solve the dilemma of hiring models, and do a lot more landscape paintings which unexpectedly have been doing really well lately. I'd also like to add a skylight to my studio, travel to Maine, Museum copying, linen preparation, cast painting, show at a new gallery, teach a workshop....This is how I get into trouble. Like my parent would always say "my eyes are bigger than my stomach".