Blog

This is a portrait depicting our niece Elizabeth on the day she accepted a proposal of marriage from now husband Chris. I painted it as a wedding present. There they are in harsh midday sun at the Griffith Park Observatory in L.A. Not the best lighting for either a photograph or a painting, but there you go. Their eye sockets appear as dark featureless blobs, but I can state for the record that the real people depicted herein have in actuality quite pretty eyes with fully functioning pupils and irises. I choose this image for a portrait because of the sheer joy in both their faces, lack of eyeballs notwithstanding.

Like all of us, I've attended my fair share of weddings. In some cases, it is natural to keep ones fingers crossed hoping that the marriage will last until the couple arrives at the reception. Not this one. This was such a joy filled celebration headlined by two souls so obviously perfect for each other that even a stranger walking in to ask directions to Sea World would have been enfolded in the sublimeness of it all. 

Elizabeth has had the foresight to jettison the last name Creech to protect potential offspring from the inevitable schoolyard nicknames I know from personal experience (Screech, Creature, etc., they write themselves). She is now a Kramer. Thanks to Seinfeld, we'll have to let time determine whether this will be an improvement, nickname-wise. 

Congratulations, Liz and Chris.

One of the joys of living in Richmond, Virginia, is the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. Sure, people in New York have the Metropolitan and the DC crowd has the Corcoran, Chicago has AIC, and blah blah blah everywhere you go. I'd put the VMFA up against any of them. But if you are like me, and painting is your guilty pleasure akin to playing golf or tennis or whatever, it can suck having access to such a great museum. Here's why:

We went to the VMFA's Whistler to Cassatt - American Painters in France exhibit a couple of nights ago and I took away two things from it. One, it was one of the best art exhibits I have ever enjoyed. Two, I will NEVER be able to paint even 1/100th as well as some of these artists. For a while this really took the wind out of my sails.

The painting attached to this blog is Madame Errazuriz by John Singer Sargent. The first thing you should know is that seeing a reproduction is nothing like seeing the actual painting.  Nothing! Not even close.  This painting is absolutely amazing. The cautious detail in the face and skin tones.  The broad energetic big bold brush strokes of her hair. The tiniest dot of paint representing her earring which looks like an actual diamond incorporated into the work. It is stunning in both its simplicity and its technical mastery. There are at least 100 other paintings and drawings, and it almost becomes so overwhelming that you cannot take it all in at once (true of all great art). The exhibition only remains until the end of July, so it you are anywhere remotely near Richmond over the next couple of weeks, get your ass over there. You're welcome.

But yeah, I will never be anywhere close to these painters, which made me sad temporarily.  But not permanently. Not everybody can be Michael Jordan but that shouldn't stop anybody from enjoying a good game of HORSE in the driveway. You're no Meryl Streep? Don't let that stop you from auditioning with your local theatre group. I will never be Rembrandt, but I don't really care and neither should you. I will try to learn from the masters in this exhibition, and from all paintings and painters I admire whether the work is from 1893 or 2022. 

Finally, I think that if I try hard enough I just might be able to paint 1/100th as well as John Singer Sargent, or Vincent Van Gogh, or Vermeer or whoever rings my bell at any given moment.  Frankly, 1/100th would be pretty damn good so it is a very worthy goal.

This is a work in progress. The tentative title is Grapevines and Lavender. It depicts a real place: Ankida Ridge Vineyards in Amherst County, Virginia. You'll have to take my word for it. It's quite possible that even the owners of the place wouldn't recognize it from this attempt.

I'm at a stopping point because until some paint dries doing anything else to this bad boy will only result in mud. Mud is a term we amateur artists use as shorthand for "STOP Dummy! Put that damn brush away before you ruin it entirely."

Inventory:

Rule One of composition is don't divide your painting in half. Did I do that with  top of the nearest treeline? Or is my original plan of the far end of the vineyard serving as a divide between the foreground and background still a happening thing?

There's another Rule One.  Have a focal point. Maybe the lone tree? I'll have to sit and cogitate on that. 

Rule Forty Seven of composition is that background is BACKGROUND. Fade away, use even paler colors than what's really there. Except that when I originally did so the mountains in the far distance looked absolutely nothing like mountains in the far distance. I boldened them up and now they look like rows of blue hobbit houses. Or blubber. Or maybe not? I've got to let it sit so I can ignore it for a while and I'll have a better feel for that one. 

I also think leaving such  a thin line of space at the top for the sky (as yet void of paint) may have been a boo boo. Nothing to do about that now. 

On the Other Hand:

Every painting, every one of mine, anyway, at some point reaches this stage of STOP! RECONSIDER! It is a natural part of the process. Sometimes I let things dry, then spend no more than three minutes farting around with things only I can see. In other cases, I realize that I am only halfway there, or going down a very wrong path, and the future effort may take longer than what it took to get this far. Something between 10 and 20% of everything I start ends up in the whoopsie pile, never to be seen by anybody else. The remainder ultimately achieve some level of acceptance from me as being worth public sharing. 

Stated another way, I have my own near-sighted crap-o-meter I use to judge the worthiness of everything I paint. On the plus side, only 20% is of such inherent awfulness as to be abandoned. The other 80% ranges between C- and A+, and I have learned the hard way that what I think of as C- can be somebody else's A+. And, sadly, vice-versa. I share this painting with you because it - at this stage - might become a complete reject or something that others can decide is average or better.  I'll let you know. Right now I've got to go clean some paint brushes.