Ben Pines' Art & Travel Blog

This is a sketch from William Brymner’s painting Girl with a Dog, Lower Saint Lawrence, from 1905, and a reproduction of the painting.  The piece caught my attention during a visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2017. The subject matter was unusual. A girl sits on the sand, or dirt, wearing what I guess was everyday dress in 1905, and holds a stick in front of her dog. Is she restraining the dog from greeting the viewer? Or is she protecting the dog from us? In the painting she has an expression I would describe as angry or frustrated. I find that my sketch adds more sadness. In the original work she faces the viewer more directly. In the painting she is connected to the land by similarity in value and color, and is held down by a horizontal land form in the middle ground. In my sketch I lightened the light on her hat, separating it from its surrounding values and perhaps connecting it more closely to the sky. I like the comma in the title, separating the pro...

This is a detail of a painting I am working on. That rectangular shape is the start of a birthay cake. My mother made a cake for me when I was three or four, at the end of the 1960's, or five months into the 1970's. There is a photo of me sitting at the table in the apartment my parents were renting on Montgomery Ave. in Ardmore, with my mother standing nearby and another young person, who I cannot now identify, looking off to the left. The photo is square, the original Instagram, but black and white, not murky 70's color.   In this painting I started painting the cake and the white table cloth in green because I felt like it. I wanted to have my feeling supersede any intrinsic requirements the subject may have presented, for the sake of my ongoing connection to my work. Sometimes when this allowance is made surprising connections are made, or depths are revealed that feel true to the subject. And sometimes the self-satisfying decision can just express my feeling, whic...

Here is an detail of the painting I have been working on for the past several months. The title is Living Statue: The Eight Foot Professor, the medium acrylic on unstretched canvas, size 96”x63”. The canvas is tacked to the wall of my studio, which is covered with a plastic sheet to protect it from the paint. A full image of the painting is below. I started this painting last summer when I was busy working at Pygmalion’s, the local art store in Bloomington. Store operations and the everyday lives of those involved had been disrupted by the illness and recent passing of John Wilson, the artist who owned the store. As busy as I was, marshalling my energy and focus to help manage the store I felt the need to have a large painting to work on. Perhaps working large would externalize and help me manage feeling overwhelmed. In a more symbolic vein I also wanted to affirm the importance of art making to my life by making a large painting. Bringing this to a state that I wante...

Winter Hill Self Portrait, Stories from the Past I am currently working on two large scale paintings, one a self-portrait in a landscape setting, and the other a landscape. I am also in the process of wrapping up the fall semester, and preparing for my two classes in the spring. It has been a month since I left my job at Pygmalion’s Art Supplies. I am beginning to re-imagine myself as an artist and teacher as I work. The painting above is Winter Hill Self Portrait, 20”x20”, oil on canvas. I made it in 2005, three years after receiving my Certificate in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The painting looks back to my life in 1987 living in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts. In 2005 I was living alone in the house I had inherited since the passing of my parents. It was the house that my sister and I had grown up in, a five bedroom, three story twin built in 1900, in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. I was painting...

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 gratef...

I took a few months off from writing in this blog. Several things have happened since the last time I wrote, this past January. I have been working at Pygmalion’s Art Supplies in Bloomington, Indiana. My co-workers and I have been keeping the store going, as the previous owner’s health declined, and he was in and out of the hospital. He passed away in June. John Wilson was an artist, who worked primarily in the traditional print media of woodcut and intaglio. His prints crackled with life and humor. Fluent drawing and design skill bring his work to life. There will be a show of his work, here in downtown Bloomington, next month at the Waldron Center. The opening will be Friday, September 6, from 5 - 8 p.m. Later this month at the Waldron Center I will start teaching my fall semester Color/Design class for Ivy Tech. For the past few weeks I have been refining the curriculum.   I have added insights gained from the spring semester’s class, and from my ongoing investigation in...

Blog entry 1 19 19 It has been awhile since I shared anything on social media. My attention for the past couple of months has gone to my Color/Design class, and non-art working. I have been enjoying long walks around Bloomington. Taking in the subtle colors of winter that I enjoy, and acclimating to cold weather. Without leaves on the trees the vistas open up. I’m glad for the hilly terrain around here. Here is a little sketch from Jan Van Eyck, the Dresden Triptych. This is my rendition of the central figure. It is an amazing piece, overloaded with finely drawn detail, but also wonderfully composed in a large way. St. Catherine, on the right panel, is in much stronger light than anything on either of the other two panels, which I love. I can see everything else in the other two panels acting as a foil for the figure way off to one side, which I find wonderfully eccentric and energizing. There is also something of a sense going through the three panels of a movement from ...

I started looking through the photos that I took on my trip to Ireland in January of 2017. Exploring memories from that trip seems like a nice way to think about my life. What I have enjoyed and why, and what I tend to do when I have traveled. This could give me some clues about what I should do next. The first two photos were taken from the airplane, probably flying from Indianapolis to Chicago. Then I find myself in Dublin. It was a gray, cloudy day, and I was standing on the North Wall Quay by the River Liffey, that runs through the city. I had just taken the bus from Swords, a suburb of Dublin near the airport, where I was staying, and was headed to the National Gallery of Ireland. That is what I like to do when I travel: explore a city, on the way to and from the art museum. I like to spend a lot of time in the museum. I find a painting or sculpture that interests me, and draw from it, sitting or standing there for hours. In a new place, sketching from great, original ...

Yesterday we installed this painting at the Utilities Department building in Bloomington. It is part of an exhibition of five 'water-themed' paintings that I will have on view there through next August. If you are in Bloomington and have the chance, please stop by and see them! Aqueduct Painting is 54"x64", oil on canvas. I finished it this past Saturday, adjusting the female figure's right hand, and turning a fan on it so it would be at least somewhat dry. Most of the painting was made with palette knives and somewhat thick paint. I found it enjoyable and exciting to work this way, especially in the area of the water. For me, the paint surface has a richness and power that I like very much. The image was built up over the course of about 7 months. I spent a lot of time looking at the painting, to decide what to do next. The figures and the aqueduct were there from the beginning, but I developed the landscape elements later on. At first the figures had no r...

This is a self portrait that I drew about a week ago. It was the first one I had done in almost two years. The drawing is in pen, in my 8 1/2"x 11" sketchbook. I wanted to think about where I am now, and to engage and energize that thought process through making a drawing. Now I am painting in a small studio space. Thinking about what I might do next, as I work on a large painting that is due in two weeks. The drawing reminds me of a self portrait that I drew years ago, in my freshman year of college, thirty four years ago. Both images have a dark background, with a close-up view of the head. A few angular, impatient marks that are trying to find the shape of my glasses, on the right side of the drawing, remind me of marks I made in that past drawing, trying to draw the similarly shaped but larger wire framed glasses that I wore then. That drawing I made in college was in pencil, in my 18"x 24" sketch pad. At 18 years old I was full of thoughts, feeling...

When I heard about the opportunity to show water-themed artwork for the city, there wasn’t too much time before the submission deadline to prepare. I would need to speed up my process to do this project. I had been painting mostly medium size portraits, and working on them on and off over the course of years. For this show three 40” square paintings, with relatively complicated subject matter, would need to go from start to finish in about two months. My first concern was that the studio in which I was working at the time was especially humid, even for Bloomington, and it was taking a long time for my oil paintings to dry. Right before I started on this series I had been working on a painting that, two weeks after my last application of paint, was still completely wet to the touch and hazardous to move. Turning a fan on it full time eventually helped, but that kind of time frame wasn’t going to work for these paintings, so I decided to paint them in acrylic. I bought th...

These are the three paintings I made this past summer for a special show opportunity here in Bloomington. Artists were invited to submit proposals to show water-themed artwork at the Utilities building on Miller Drive, to celebrate Bloomington’s bicentennial. My paintings emphasize the human element in Bloomington’s water supply and maintenance system. Employees at a water treatment facility in town are portrayed, in a monumental, classical format, engaged in everyday workplace tasks. In each painting it appears as if the figure is standing in an interior space with a large window. The insides of the water processing facilities that I toured do not actually look like this. Walls, structures, and details of the interior spaces are replaced by landscape views set against a large, open sky. In the first painting, an employee is examining a water sample delivered to the facility by a resident, along with paperwork identifying the sample. Bloomington residents can have thei...

Here are two sketchbook drawings from earlier today. One is a life study from a figure drawing session, and the other is from a reproduction of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. This was the first life drawing session I have attended in several months. It was good to work from the model again. The reproduction of the Vermeer painting was in the copy of David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge that I have borrowed from the public library. Secret Knowledge is Hockney’s historical investigation of the use of lenses in making paintings. He convincingly demonstrates that as early as 1430 artists such as Jan Van Eyck were using the advanced optics of their time to transfer a real image to their painting surface. Along with the large art book, Hockney produced a two part video series on the topic. Like the book, I find the videos enjoyable and convincing.   The idea that lenses were used in making some great paintings does not make me think drawing is not worthwhile. Drawing...

Vlogs were new and unfamiliar to me when I first started following one, a little over two years ago. I came across Eight Miles From Home, an almost-daily video diary made by a young English expat couple living in Portugal. My youtube viewing experience up to that point had consisted primarily of travel videos. Some were slickly produced, like those made by Expedia, or Rick Steves, and some were less so. I was a fan of Kees Colijn’s videos in which he simply turns on a camera and walks, or bikes, around a city for an hour or so. He has made videos in many places, but it was his native Netherlands, particularly Amsterdam, that I was interested in seeing. In true Amsterdam fashion, he shows no fear of getting hit, or running into, cars or bikes. In the months leading up my trip to Europe in 2016 I watched his videos frequently, whetting my appetite for my travel to come. After my trip, watching one of his walks in Amsterdam, I realized that he was walking through the neighb...

The other night I had a dream that was set in Philadelphia, or in some dream-altered Philadelphia-like place. Part of it was set on Cricket Ave. in Ardmore, where my parents, sister and I lived for a few years in the early 1970’s. It was kind of like Cricket Ave., except, oddly, the sidewalk had a curb that was about two feet high, stepping down to another sidewalk, that had an 8” curb to the street. Who knows why one imagines or remembers such things. I had been watching John Thornton’s videos on Philadelphia artists, and thinking about my time there, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and afterward. The image above is a two page spread from one of my sketchbooks from PaFA, with preparatory studies for my painting Portrait in a State Park. I was rehearsing the pose, and thinking about the setting for the painting. My fellow student at PaFA Christina Kelly was kind enough to pose for me. I wanted to make a life size portrait that would fit on a 68”x48” canvas, whic...

I worked today, on Labor Day, painting on a relatively large piece with two figures. It was almost all done with palette knives, spreading oil paint on thickly. I will share an image of it soon. While working I listened first to Beach Boys songs, then to an excellent documentary on the band from 1999, then to interviews with the members of the band. Their story is fascinating in a number of ways. If you want to delve into an interesting American story, the Beach Boys’ story is one for sure. Mike Love, the lead singer, spoke about his father’s work in the family sheet metal business. That likely would have been Love’s source of income if the band didn’t work out. Love spoke of his emulating his father’s hard work of providing for his family. I was thinking of my father’s work, providing for his family, with gratitude. The image above is a detail of one of the paintings I did a few years ago, from old family photographs, of my father and his sister as children.

It has been sunny and humid here in Bloomington. Yesterday afternoon I spent some time indoors, with the a/c on intermittently, getting more settled in to my living space. Several boxes were unpacked, the contents sorted through and placed in what seem like sensible places. I tacked large canvas pieces to two of the walls, so I have spaces to work on larger paintings leaned up against the wall without damaging the apartment. Before I moved in I had put a canvas tarp on the floor, stapling it to the baseboards of the walls so it stays in place. There are several boxes of paintings to take to my storage space, then two more boxes with assorted apartment stuff to go through. In the morning the town seems to wake up slowly. It is quiet here at 8:30. Based on my memories of living in the suburbs of Philadelphia, it is much more relaxed here. People are out walking their dogs now. Through my north-facing window, the east light of the morning sun, on this partly sunny morni...

My fall semester started this week, here in Bloomington, with the first meeting of my Color Design class at Ivy Tech. Afterward I had a private painting lesson with one of my students. I had been somewhat anxious about both meetings. It was my first time teaching a class since May, and I had been scrambling to update the course material in time for the first day of class, after moving, and finishing the paintings I was working on all summer.   For the private lesson, it was my first one at the new studio/apartment, and I haven’t really finished unpacking. But I think the space was adequate. As my student was arriving, I got a call from an unfamiliar number. The caller turned out to be a soft-spoken woman with an accent, who was calling on behalf of the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts. I had trouble hearing her. She was looking for people to renew their membership with the museum. When I visited Montr é al in May of last year, for two weeks, I signed up for a full...

I am getting settled in my new apartment, and studio. My window faces out on a well-lit street, which is a change from my previous place. There I had windows on three sides, but the apartment was at the back of a house, so the views mostly looked verdantly suburban, almost rural. Here in my new place orange light from the street lights, slightly augmented by lights on the building across the street, and reflection from the paved parking lot and wide street, shines in when I turn out the light at night. Street lights, and the closed blinds, project a dull orange, geometrically bounded striped pattern on the floor. It feels more city-like here than it did at my last place. I was expecting this, and hoping it would inspire me in a way similar to my brief stays in city apartments in my travels. One thing that I liked about several of the apartments I have stayed in, during visits to Europe and Canada, is how quiet the living space could be, even close to a center of activity. Wit...

I moved to my new studio and living space last Tuesday. The unpacking isn’t done yet. Back at the previous apartment not much got weeded out, it just got put in boxes. So here it all is, questionably interesting or valuable, offering one opportunity after another to make a decision. Keep, recycle, landfill. If I keep it, where does it go? Back to working on paintings. I repainted the part of the sleeve that I mentioned in my previous blog post. But when I was working on it the other day, here at the new place, the work did not have that heightened-awareness 'key to the painting' feeling. At the time of my previous blog post I was imagining a work session in which, if I got the color shape for the area on the sleeve very well designed, it would spark the painting to life, and I'd be done, or close to it. Since painting is not a time-based art form, it isn't clear which part of a painting was painted last when you first look at it. Seeing it come together woul...