Many thanks to everyone who made it out to the opening reception for my first solo show! It was a great opening!
People started to arrive right on the dot, and before long, friends and art fans were arriving so quickly that I did not get to meet at least a couple of dozen guests (sorry!), nor talk to quite a few of my friends! The good advice I got from another artist was indeed accurate: “Think of it like a wedding, you won’t be able to have a complete conversation with anybody, but they won’t mind.” At least I hope no one minded!
It was so wonderful that so many of my friends, some who I haven’t seen in years, showed up. And I met so many new people, too. I sold three paintings, and got a lot of wonderful compliments on my work.
The Treachery of Others
The reception was scheduled to go from 7:00-10:00pm, but we were all having so much fun that it lasted until well after midnight. The great band, The Treachery of Others, even played an extra set.
We had a wonderful spread of food — from fruit to nuts and everything in between, it seemed, and it was nearly all consumed by the end of the evening. One of the friends of Bay6 smoked a salmon for the opening, which was completely consumed before the night was out. Cantanker Magazine had also hosted a performance in the Big Medium studio three bays down from Bay6. Part of the performance included a butter churner of sorts with a guitar neck that indeed made music. After their performance, they donated cups and cups of whipped cream made from the musical butter-churner.
If you missed the opening, you can still see the exhibit, which continues through November 1st at Bay6 Gallery, open on Saturdays and Sundays from 2:00-5:00pm. (See the calendar to the right for available dates and times).
Photos from the show are online here: The E Word Opening Reception.
Solo show of over 40 of my recent paintings!
I hope to see you at my opening reception tonight – Saturday, October 10th, 7:00 – 10:00pm.
Food and drink will be provided, with music by The Treachery of Others.
Bay6 Gallery is located at:
5305 Bolm Rd., Unit 6
Austin TX
78721
Link
View Map
The show continues on weekends through November 1st.
In eight days, I will be greeting friends and fans at my solo show at Bay6 Gallery in East Austin. I am really looking forward to that moment!
Getting ready for this has been an amazing process. Doing all the necessary organizational stuff besides trying to paint every moment that I can for weeks and weeks and weeks, that is.
I sent out email invitations to most of the people I know; and Bay6 has also invited a large number of folks. We’ve notified people via email, Facebook, Twitter, EventBrite, Eventful and word-of-mouth, and we may be expecting a great turnout! I picked up my beautifully printed postcards today from Tom at ipgprint.com; I will be mailing those tomorrow. Plans are set for music, food and drink, and we will start to hang the show next week. I owe some responses to emails and blog commenters, which I will try to get to as soon as my mental energy rolls in that direction.
I will keep painting right up until the last minute; though I will have to switch from oils to acrylics and/or encaustic tomorrow or Sunday. And I still have to pick up some frames, add wires to the backs of my latest pieces, sign them, print all the bits that need printing, etc.
I just spent about three hours adding a few of my recent pieces to a new gallery page, The E Word. I may still work on some of those paintings, and I’ll have to reshoot the one shown here — the true colors are not really coming through on the screen.
In addition to what you see on the The E Word gallery page, I’ll have work in the show from earlier this year and some from last year. I should actually have many paintings in the show, from very small to pretty large, and quite a few in-between.
I still want to paint about four-five new pieces, and I have two more in progress to complete; and then I’d like to paint another five-six 6″x6″ canvases…in the next two-three days. OK, I doubt I will actually get that much done; perhaps I suffer from an excess of optimism and enthusiasm at this point.
But, it is strangely thrilling to have this looming deadline — it gives me the freedom to say “No” to almost everything else, and it is just the berries to be able to spend so much time (mostly) painting! Speaking of which, back to the easel! Hope to see you at the show!
Hex
Oil on Canvas
16″ x 12″
© 2009 Marilyn Fenn
I recently read an article by a representational painter on another blog, in which the writer said that one should very carefully and thoroughly plan one’s paintings. My first thought was, “No waaaaay!” That would take all the fun out the process of discovery that, for me at least, is a great deal of what painting is about. Feeling a little smug, I thought of the following much-loved quote:
You are lost the instant you know what the result will be. – Juan Gris
Then I started to remember some of the paintings that I got stuck on somewhere in the process — paintings that went awry perhaps because I hadn’t done any planning. I began to reconsider my assessment of the writer’s claims.
In reality, the amount of planning one should do for painting probably lies somewhere between completely planned out and no plan at all, and probably depends primarily on the aims and temperament of the artist.
Marilyn Fenn · Still Life with Teapot and Orange · Oil on Panel · 14"x18" · © 1992
Planning Representational Work
When painting representationally, a pretty clear plan is suggested by the arrangement of the still life objects (or the portrait model or the landscape or interior scene) and one’s spatial relationship to them.
The process of painting becomes a series of decisions: where to crop, what color palette to employ, how to apply and arrange the paint on the canvas, etc. Then you just keep painting until what you’ve created on the canvas looks something like the model from which you worked.
With any luck, the artist has breathed life into what was once a blank surface through such things as their own personal style and vision, their design decisions and their application of paint.
Marilyn Fenn · One Flight Down · Oil on Canvas · 28"x28" · © 2004
Planning Stylized Abstraction
The period of my work a friend named “prismism” — a kind of abstraction where the objects are broken up by lines and planes of color — actually required more planning than painting from life.
I selected my object or objects, reduced the shapes through a series of lines on the canvas, and then chose each color with the utmost of care to relate to all the adjacent colors in a particular way, depending on whether the adjacent areas were part of the object in question or not.
After painting about 10-12 paintings in this style, I couldn’t keep going in the same direction. It started to feel like I was just painting by numbers (but without a chart), and left little room for freewheelingness – something that apparently I need.
Painting is an adventure to an unknown world. New ideas and concepts develop along the way. – Ratindra Das
Planning My Current Abstract or Non-Representational Work
Now I prefer a loose plan, sometimes as little of a plan as deciding that I just want to paint circles or I want to see what I can do with a diagonal composition on a square canvas. At times, I still reference images from life, but they serve at the pleasure of the rest of the painting, so to speak. Often, I have some sort of imagery in mind, though usually not a whole composition. Sometimes, I discover the most delightful things working this way; at other times, I create paintings that just strike me as too goofy or weird. For instance, the painting at the top of this post, now called “Hex,” was once this:
Marilyn Fenn · Hot Links · Oil on Canvas · 16" x 12" · © 2009 · painted over
I think I scared myself a little. Was it a mistake to paint over it? Maybe, but it’s done now. What remains in the piece named “Hex” is the 4th or 5th version of paint on this canvas. The history of the previous renditions still peek through the top layers of paint, adding a kind of interest to this work that wouldn’t have existed if I’d started with a basic plan for “Hex.”
On the other hand, another painting in this series, “Turbulence,” I repainted three times, which resulted in a great improvement. I did not have much of a plan for this painting, either: I just knew I wanted to paint some loops and something diagonal, and I was really grooving on the yellow color used in the background of this series. I got the composition on the first shot, but the application of paint was a little too loose in places, a little too stiff in other places and a little too undefined in the area that now looks like a cloud. The whole painting actually flows much better now due to my continuing to rework it until I was happy.
How Much Planning Do You Do?
I’d love to hear about your process. How do you think the amount of planning you do affects your work? Does it help or hinder the process? Does it help or hinder the outcome — the finished piece?
Here’s one more of my favorite quotes that supports staying loose in the planning stage:
In the brush doing what it’s doing, it will stumble on what one couldn’t do by oneself. Any art is academic by definition if you know what the result is going to be before you start. – Robert Motherwell
State of Mind
Oil on Canvas
16″ x 12″
2009
(work in progress)
Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. - Jonathan Swift
Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. - Josef Albers
I am getting very excited about my upcoming solo show. I’m painting like mad, and I’m beginning to be very happy with some of the results. I think I may just have a future in this wonderful world of painting!
When I made arrangements many months ago to do this show, I had no fear about filling a gallery with my work, as I had just come off of a long period of intense and successful creation, and was (and still am) very happy with the work I had created. And there was plenty of it…more than enough to fill the gallery.
But creatively I was ready to move on to the next thing, though I wasn’t sure what that was.
So I began this year by doing lots of tiny sketches and many small paintings, searching for a satisfying direction. To date, I have completed more than 70 pieces this year — which is a lot for me — though most of the pieces are the sketches and small paintings through which I’ve been exploring a wide variety of ideas.
I must say, this journey from representational to non-representational painting has been a long one and a bit daunting.
You may wonder why I would want to move away from representation. Sometimes, I wonder that, too, as I find it far more challenging to paint abstractly than representationally (what do you paint, and how do you know when you’re done?).
But the thing is, when I go to look at art, it is the abstract and non-representational work that really thrills me. I am interested in the beauty of color relationships, the juiciness and materiality of the paint, and the ability of an abstract painting to take me to places that don’t exist (as far as we know).
I’ve had one foot in the world of abstraction since I started art school, but I kept working on developing my representational “chops” for years. I kept thinking I would paint still lifes and landscapes and the occasional abstraction until my own thing presented itself. I didn’t realize until recently that, at least for me, I was going to have to really work at discovering what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, and that it would take hours and days and weeks and months and years of looking, thinking, drawing, sketching, painting, over and over and over…in fact, it may never end, and I may never feel like I’m finally “there.”
A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on to canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing. - William Dobell
Much representational work, while it may be technically proficient, does not elevate one beyond the ordinary — or does not usually elevate me — YMMV. And even with those representational paintings which are astounding and really well-painted, the representational-ness (not a word, I know, but you get my meaning) can interfere with my enjoyment of the qualities of painting that only a painting can display.
Additionally, if the painting is primarily about something outside the surface of the canvas, I may be further removed from my enjoyment of the painting as painting. There’s nothing wrong with that, and many of you may feel quite differently, but I want my paintings — as with the paintings I love to look at — to be purely and simply primarily about painting. I guess I’m old-fashioned that way.
I don’t want the distraction of some kind of everyday reality. I get too much of that everyday. That’s what cameras are for.
So, basically, I want to paint the kind of paintings that thrill me the most. Will I achieve with my new work the goals I have set for myself? And in time for my solo show? It is probably too soon for me to answer that question, but I do feel that I am on my way. If I don’t break on through in the next two weeks, come to my show anyway, but also check back with me in about a year.
“Wait a minute,” you say? ”Your statement says your work is inspired by life at different scales. Isn’t that something outside the canvas?” Let me add another quote to answer that:
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. - Pablo Picasso
So I start with the things in the world or the universe that I love to look at, that fascinate me in the details of their existence. Essentially, all my work is inspired by nature — some of it by human nature — and I can only hope that through the materials of my work and through the passion of my process, I communicate to the viewer my response to the wonders of this universe. Not a recapitulation of what is, but a creation of what else could be.
