Self Portrait

I am now in the process of leaving my longtime art store job. Managing a store is a challenging job. There is much that I have enjoyed, and I have learned a lot. I have ideas about management, but lack the energy to implement them. The past 14 months or so have been pretty much non-stop, keeping the art store running during the illness and eventual passing of the store’s previous owner, while, for me, I worked on my painting and teaching as well. Now I am re-allocating what resources I have to my artwork, and teaching.

And for me, I want to explore. The world is so interesting, I want time to process my understanding and reactions, thoughts and feelings.

Now I am working on what I intend to be a series of large scale paintings in acrylic. Last summer I worked in acrylic to make three paintings for an exhibition at the City of Bloomington Utilities Department. The exhibition is coming to an end, and I am in the process of donating the paintings to the city. I am grateful for the pleasant standard of living I have been able to enjoy here, and hope the paintings will convey that appreciation to others.

Acrylic can be a challenging medium. In a way it is easier than oil, in that the paint dries quickly, so you tend not to have enough time to make as big a mess. But if you are used to the rich, sensuous qualities of oil the watery, insubstantial nature of acrylic can be offputting. Anyway, in order to work large again, in the smallest working space I have had since high school, it seemed sensible to start painting in acrylic again. Having an 8 foot painting covered with wet oil paint a short distance from my bed did not seem like a good idea.

The image above is a detail of the beginning stages of a self portrait I am working on. The painting is 96”x63”. It has guided me back into acrylic. At this stage of the painting I had just started to use regular acrylic paint to make a ground color, after doing a pencil drawing on the white primed canvas. Typically covering the whole ground with a layer of color is more of a classical approach, but I don’t have a regular procedure for making a painting, I just proceed according to feeling. I wanted to start drawing, with a pencil, directly on the commercially primed cotton canvas, so that’s what I did. Then I wanted a warmer ground, so I put one in. 

Now, several weeks later, I am using Golden Open Acrylics. These are slow drying, and give me time to work, but they still dry faster than oils. The layers of paint on the canvas dry faster, but the puddles of paint on the palette are still usable after several days. This tendency may be aided by the generally humid climate here.