I actually have to remind myself sometimes that when I’m painting I’m happiest when I just let loose, let the paint flow and stop thinking. It’s so easy to tighten up and get all caught up in what’s it’s going to be and the details. I’m not sure how to be true to myself every time I sit down to paint, I forget!! Why is that, you’d think it would always just come out of me. But No. Maybe I need a mantra, I let you know soon how it’s going.
Space to Breathe
Yesterday was July 1st and when I woke up I thought about the summer months stretching ahead and how I want them to be big, open and creatively expansive. I haven’t taken significant time off of social media in 10 or 11 years, maybe a week here and there. I decided to just let it go through labor day so I can explore, think and figure out how I want my painting practice to evolve. I love the work I’ve done and I don’t want to give anything up, I’m ready though to spend time exploring process, technique, color, ideas in a deeper way than just a painting a day. So I plan to post some musings and work here, maybe sketches, maybe where I am and what I’m doing, maybe even a sunset or two. It feels like a quiet place for me to be, where I can be a little more real.
In Blog Tags social media, break, painting, creativity
Recaptured Moments
March 17, 2023
I’ve been working on a self initiated project the last few weeks for #womenshistorymonth , painting women from vintage black and white photos. It’s not a new to me project, I’ve been doing them for years but just not for days and weeks in a row. I even have a chapter in my book
I’ve been thinking about why I love doing these. Honoring women who I don’t know but who were special to someone. Maybe they aren’t well known, their impact on the whole world wasn’t newsworthy. They didn’t discover the next new thing or win the Nobel Peace prize. They are like you and me. I am calling them ordinary extraordinary women. I love recapturing these lost quiet moments.
In Blog Tags old photos, augustwren, painting, gouache, vintage photos, women’s history month, women
Painting palette I love but haven’t used much lately
March 2, 2023
When I was starting out in the textile industry a long time ago, I was trained to mix colors exactly. We often used these palettes, (Theres another kind I’ll write about soon) once the color was correct there was enough paint mixed to finish out the painting. Then each color needed to be clean and flat and separate from each other. It’s not how I paint now, the messier the better for me! I love that I can make variations of colors in the separate wells. This is really more appropriate for water based gouache since it can be reconstituted with water when it dries out. I tried yesterday to mix acrylagouche in it. At the end of the day I added a few extra drops of water to keep it wet. It worked pretty well. I was able to make another painting with most of the colors I mixed the day before. There is the problem of extra garbage, these plastic things.. But I actually keep mine forever and reuse them. If its water based gouache I’ll just add fresh paint over the dried stuff and make a new color. It may get a few chunks, or be a touch streaky, but I love that, ready made texture!
I wouldn’t take this out for painting outdoors as it could very messy trying to get home! You can purchase these here.
In Blog Tags painting, palette, art
Art Isn’t About Pretty
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Mary Whyte’s Portrait Art Tells Our Stories, Powerfully
Some artists interpret the nature of beauty quite narrowly. It’s physical and defined in very specific terms. Not for me. Beauty is more complicated, faceted. I’m inspired by stories of real people — their character, personality and unique walks of life. That’s what makes the kind of beauty that lingers in my mind. Mary Whyte and I are on the same page. Her portrait art is beautiful first because she is a master at her craft, but also because her work is suffused with stories of people. She unlocks a person’s whole life experience. That’s success to her, and it’s a truly beautiful thing.
Mary paints so that you want to know their story. Her watercolor paintings and sketches are often portraits of people who make up the backbone of the American South and whose ways of life are declining or going away altogether—a mill worker and farmer, a shoeshine man, shrimper, milliner, and ferryman among others.
Mary also paints her portrait art in such a way that the figures aren’t just shown as their physical selves alone; you see them in their element, amidst the objects and in the environment of their livelihoods. And the paintings are amazingly done. The watercolor portrait painting techniques she uses to render skin tone and texture astound me, plus her color mixing is so vibrant but controlled. But Mary’s works are also thoughtfully composed to have a strong impact. That power comes from having done a lot of painstaking sketches.
Her Painting Process
Mary isn’t the type to wing it. She believes preparation and study are crucial for successful paintings. Starting with small, quick watercolor sketches, just 3 x 4-inch thumbnails, and then she returns to these again and again as source material, enlivening finished paintings with the nuance she captures in these small format studies. She also uses reference photos, mainly to recall specific details about a scene, and more sketches to determine her composition for each piece.
i make pretty things
This post was written and published seven years ago. It was a a different lifetime, really. My marriage had ended the year before – grief and shock were still lodged in my bones. With seven years as a stay at home mother away from my home country on a visa that didn’t allow me to work – my financial future was uncertain, at best.
And so I tried to do the sensible thing. The thing everyone said was the very best possible thing to do. To go back to school. To get a ‘regular’ job. Something solid. Secure. Dependable. To do what I needed to do to care for the wee girlies who were and are my focus.
And yet I struggled and fought and pushed back against this future that felt inevitable – with all my might. In the years since I have gone from supporting myself with my words and my photography, to driving an hour and a half commute and working in a corporate cubical, and back to etching out a living with art once again.
But through it all, one voice has spoken with clarity and force and no small amount of entitlement. She is the artist. She is me. There is no separating the two.
It was the night I wrote of here, stuck in a freezing classroom, attempting to force my brain to understand computer programing – that I found my way to my truth. That truth has never left me, and it never will.
The day after I wrote this post – one of the first ever published here on this blog – I quit school to live my purpose. I didn’t have a plan. it was utterly irresponsible – without a doubt. The years since have been fucking beautiful and fucking hard and fucking everything in between, but not once did I regret listening to this voice- the voice of the artist. Not once did I question her wisdom. Not after this night.
You could say – really – that everything begins here.
The room is too fucking cold. It always is. I forgot to bring my sweater and I’m shivering as the air conditioning blasts away. The instructor is in front of the class, droning on and on in words I don’t understand. I struggle to be attentive but my mind wanders. My fingers are itching to write on the yellow legal pad in front of me, to dive into the words swirling through my brain and make them into something real.
I feel panic bubbling up inside. I can’t breathe. I don’t belong here; don’t want to learn about programming algorithms and logical coding structure. I’m the only female in a room of guys who have been tinkering with computers for years. They are all eager, excited to learn enough to finally unleash their inner Bill Gates on the world. I am terrified, searching everywhere for an escape route and finding none, so ridiculously out of place that I hear a refrain bubbling up from my subconscious, and I stifle a laugh.
“one of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong…”
I’m accustomed to feeling intelligent, but here I feel like everyone is fluent in a language I’ve never before encountered. All the rest seem well versed in the dialect of DOWHILE and ENDIF and PSEUDOCODE. I am missing the part of my brain necessary for making sense of all this. I don’t WANT to make sense of all this. My brain feels like the human equivalent of the blue screen of death that keeps appearing on my failing laptop. I am caught in an infinite loop of confusion and self pity, about to freeze up and shut down.
i just want to make pretty things.
It becomes part mantra, part plea – a desperate cycling through my brain in hopes the universe hears.
Please, not this. I just want to make pretty things.
It took me a long time to call myself an artist. It takes audacity to hold up a word like that and claim it for myself. It is a big, bold, brilliant, terrifying thing. I am an artist. I play with light, bend words to suit, gather inspiration and beauty and scatter it in circles that are ever widening as I learn to step into myself.
I make pretty things. It is what I am here to do. It is what makes me feel alive. It’s not about the medium or the money, it’s about letting the universe flow through me, accepting what I’m given and letting it become what it will. I am so solid and sure of myself, of my path. This is who I am. I create – words or images or communities of people – and it’s as necessary as breathing. I must do this.
This future I’m now staring down – long days in a cubical somewhere, staring at a characters on a computer screen and trying to force them to do my bidding – this feels like a direct betrayal of the work I have been put here to do, a slow death of spirit and purpose. I know what my work is, with a clarity that people yearn for their whole life. I know it, and I cannot embrace it. I turn quickly from desperation into a petulant, foot stomping child.
I don’t wanna do it! I don’t wanna do it! I don’t wanna do it!
So my rebellious teenage self steps in, all cocky attitude and larger than life bravado – chain smoking and punked out – way too cool to be owned by anyone’s expectations.
Fuck it. Don’t get worked up. Just don’t do it. They can’t make you. Go underground. Be an illegal alien. Don’t waste your time with this messed up system. This is stupid. Nana-nanana…They can’t catch you! Just sit there and put your hands over your ears, ignore the bullshit and make your stuff.
But I’m full of self-pity, an egocentric puddle of woe and the worst part is that I did this. Nobody set this in motion but me, and what is there to do but follow it through? The sense of resistance I have is incredible. I’m digging in my heels hard but being dragged along in spite of myself. The logistics of this situation leave me with few options. I am stuck in a trap of my own making. I’m gearing up for ginormous temper tantrum followed by limb flailing meltdown of epic proportions. I’m almost daring the universe to send me to my room for an indefinite time out.
Out of nowhere another voice fills my head, and she’s irritated. She hauls me up off the floor and drops me roughly on my chair for as stern talking to (with a healthy dose of ridicule thrown in for good measure).
So, you’ve got to go to school to learn to do something you don’t want to do? Oh, poor, poor little baby. You know what, lots of people go to work every single day to do jobs they hate and they make the best of it. That’s life. There are bills to pay and kids to feed and this is just reality so SUCK. IT. UP. SISTAH. Oh, for gods sake quit that sniveling – it’s pathetic.
And I know she’s right, damn it, but I don’t want to hear it. I want someone to understand why this feels so fucking terrible. I want someone to hold my hand and stroke my hair and tell me that it will all be okay.
please, just tell me it will all be okay…
I’ve fallen off my imaginary time out chair and I’m curled in a ball on the floor now, an oozing, snotty, crying mess – wondering how to pull it together before people notice.
My gently pragmatic self steps in, sits down next to me on the floor and lifts my chin. She’s all Mary Poppins with her spoon full of sugar and spit-spot snap of her fingers making everything tidy again.
You’ll make the best of it dearie. You’ll do what you have to do and it won’t be forever. You never know, you might even like it. Come on, pick yourself up. You’re a strong one, remember. You can do this. You have to do this, so there is no sense in crying about it. Chin up love, chin up.
And I know all those voices are a part of me, and they all have a point. But the only one who speaks in first person is the artist, the one whose soul burns with the fire of creativity.
The one who makes pretty things.
Class is ending and I’m gathering my things together to walk out. For three hours I’ve sat here so deep in my head that I have no idea what was said. No matter that I’ve turned this around in my head a million times already, I’m still searching for a way out. I get into the car and turn on my iPod, looking for answers the music. I take a deep breath put the car in drive and head home, because sometimes, there’s nothing to do but keep moving forward, taking the next logical step, and having faith that it will all work out in the end.
I am exactly where I need to be. I need to be exactly where I am. I am a blessing manifest.
I’m gonna go home and make some pretty things.
nd it’s true, I believe, that everything that came after hinged here – the way it does sometimes. on these moments that seem perfectly ordinary until lived in retrospect. You could say I owe my creative life to this night. You could stay that it all started right there in that room. And that even now – all of my choices are a way of honoring that.
So here’s to making pretty things. To the insensible and the impractical. To the pull to the center and edges. Here is to vast crucible of art and creation. To the swirl of paint and the spill of words and the melody of song and the glorious mess of it all. May it fill us and break us down and lift us up and make us whole. May it be the very thing that saves us. This is the way of words. This is the way of art. This is the way of life.
Quiet now. Do you hear the the voice of the artist within? She is waiting for you to listen. She is waiting for you to create.>
