"Alien Gate"
Watercolor crayon on paper
9" x 12"
© 2009 Marilyn Fenn

Treasure Chest

Today I'm participating in a collaborative online project with other art bloggers.  We are re-posting one of our favorite posts from our blogs.  I chose to re-post some notes from art school from way back when, because I find these tips personally useful to review every so often, especially this year when I am exploring various other avenues in my creative process.  Perhaps other artists will find some of these tips helpful, too.

I also recommend that you view the post from the organizer of this project, Seth Apter, on his blog The Altered Page.  It's a gorgeous, compelling and inspiring piece.

You can link to all participating artists from the Treasure Chest post on Seth's blog.

Finally, the piece above is a brand new work from my new series, Paintings from the Hot, Hot Summer of 2009.  So here's my Buried Treasure:

Class notes from art camp classes with George Liebert and Dan Gustin, Oxbow, MI, summer 1991.

Make a list of verbs and adjectives about your own work.

When struggling with a work, isolate parts of it and do lots of sketches to come up with a better composition.

What are your personal, specific goals?

Colors: similar vs. somber vs. stronger.

Realism vs. abstraction - both successful, maybe in combination.

Consider excitement of surfaces vs. complex images. Patterns on blanket, individual parts developed, keep to whole color - add pink, red, clear blue, zingier color.

Keep exciting in earlier stages.

Develop through series of big changes to work out issues.

Series of patterns; sincerity, passion.

Beware of making shadows that are a hole to hell (i.e., too dark) - gap in thinking color rather than value.

Take inventory - look at beautiful drawings in museum.

Strange mix of sacred and profane.

Baroque art: look at Poussin, Rubens' sketches, Rembrandt, make drawings about what interests you — movement, etc.

Overlap some things.

Check a variety of approaches; work on sense of design.

Look at Eric Fischl - palette in realistic landscape.

Painting by Susan Rothenberg
"Triphammer Bridge"
1974
Synthetic polymer paint and tempera on canvas
67 1/8" x 9' 7 3/8"

More Notes from Art School, SAIC, 1991

More artists to look at:

• Leon Golub: lots of layers, painting, disrupting it, etc.
• Roche Rabell
• de Kooning
• Rothenburg: investigation of same form; break it down, open it up, more abstracted. Space horse is in; deconstructing, reconstructing. Another layer of movement added by lines.
• Donald Sultan, Clyfford Still - idea of shape.
• Palladino
• *Louisa Chase; Frankenthaler
• *Forest Bess - visionary abstraction.
• Phillip Taffe - simplified landscape.
• Baziotes, Jonathon Lasker - the role of line.
• Louise Bourgeois
• Gary Stephen
• Terry Winters

Figuration and abstraction.
How ideas are developed.
Comes from nature.
Look at source periodically.

Can you not go back and be very particular after moving fast, getting abstract?

Look at:
Diebenkorn (Diebenkorn's missing works) - colors on cigar box top - beautiful: Yellow, lavendar, green, pink, peach, white - very pale with strip of red, brown. Archeological presence of landscape - strata, layers.

Giorgio Morandi - simplicity of shapes. The less there is to look at, the more you look at it (a specific edge). Drawing aspect vs. painting aspect - how to find out from different material.

• Paul Klee - still lifes.
• Gregory Gillespie - very intense - collage (too tight) + wonderfully encrusted walls.
• William Bailey
• Nicholas de Stael
• Pat Stier - 3 still lifes.
• Giacometti - drawing as a presence in the painting.
• Brice Marden - calligraphic, gets looser as time goes by, more figurative. Great interview here.
• Joan Mitchell - more of Joan Mitchell
• Mel Bochner drawings - lines of force.
• Romare Bearden - NOT flat collages.
• *Charles Burchfield
• Kenny Sharf
  
• Malcolm Morley
• Sherrie Levine
• Jan Cherkey (?)
• Melissa Miller
• Roberto Matta, more
  
• Robert Stackhouse, more
• Jake Barlow (Batow?)
• Ross Bleckner

Sketch of anthropomorphized landscape form
pencil
© 1991 Marilyn Fenn

Some random class notes from Advanced Drawing with Barbara Rossi, SAIC, 1991

"The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature—translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive and every work of art should be alive."

- Hans Hoffman

Think about forms of nature that excite you: creatures, clouds, rocks, wood, trees, bones, water, fog.

Make lots of drawings of abstracted form merging with landscape.

Hoffman's "Search for the Real."

The sound of machines; music.

Thorax (horse drowning in a sea of sadness).