4/20/07 Day 1
Today I decided to make art and write about it every day for a year. I recently started drawing again, so that will allow me to make art no matter where I am. I won't need my painting studio. All I am required to do is to make one drawing a day. If I paint as well, great, but it is not required in this agreement.
I also decided I want this year to be honest. That is, I want to paint and draw for myself, and I want to write the truth. Neither of these is easy for me when I am trying to make a living selling my art.
What do galleries want? I am having two shows this June and need to paint for them. But I am paralyzed. My art doesn't come out of some "end game" where the result is known before hand. It has to come out of sincere exploration, not an attempt to paint what someone will want to buy.
I am also tremendously influenced by current sales. When I go for a week without hearing from anyone who is interested in my art, I get depressed. When I have a good week, I get exuberant and eager to paint.
I also have continual doubts, mixed with moments of exhilaration at my great talent. Today I hate half the paintings in my studio. I want to clear them out.
No one seems to want to buy the paintings I love best. Rarely. But then, I have different reasons for preferring one painting over another. I know what a canvas cost me. And I know when it led me to a new place.
I have many doubts, but I'm not supposed to write about them because that might turn collectors away.
I'm bipolar, so I am going to be up and down.
Kurt Vonnegut died recently, and maybe now is the time to live up to the statement in one of his books, which goes something like this: "You are who you pretend to be, so be careful who you choose to pretend to be."
I'm sixty-five years old, so maybe now is the time to stop pretending.
I get lots of compliments about my "honesty" on my website and in my blogs, because I write about my messy past and being bipolar. But what do I leave out?
Sometimes I'm not honest because I want people to like me. I don't want to say anything they will disapprove of. Rather, I want to fulfill their expectations. At a certain point, I may not even know what I believe because I have brainwashed myself to fit into someone else's worldview.
Given all these caveats, I plan to be as honest as I can here. I wil start with what I've been working on this week: self-portraits.
I hadn't painted a portrait of any kind since my early twenties, and now I decided to try self-portraits again. What a scary undertaking! I haven't painted from life since . . . I can't remember when. It's much harder than it looks and it takes practice to get good at it. If you don't use it, you lose it.
Here are three of the self-portraits I did early in my life. I even painted one with my mouth open screaming on my first husband's motorcycle helmet, before he was my husband. "Mouth open screaming" was how I often felt about life then.
Lynne Screaming painted at age 17
Lynne at USC Tempera on Poster Board, 1961
Self Portrait in Watercolor 1960s
Looking in a mirror now, which is what I have to do in order to make a self-portrait, is a very different experience from what it was at eighteen. First, I can't see the details clearly because I have cataracts. That's another thing I shouldn't talk about, the cataracts. Who wants to buy a painting from an artist with cataracts?
I don't think the cataracts affect my abstract painting and drawing, but when you are working from life, you need to see it in order to paint it. Then there's the problem of my eye-glasses. I never have my photo taken with them on, and I don't want to put them in my portraits. So I have to guess some of that section around the eyes where the glasses interfere.
My attempts at realism fail, as you can see in these examples. So I move into abstraction. Not much better. And I haven't gotten up the nerve yet to put in the wriinkles and jowls.
First attempt, pen on paper
Second attempt, pen on paper
Third attempt, acrylic on canvas
Fourth attempt, pen on paper
(Note: There is a gap between the dates I'm writing and posting because I had to give myself time to get ahead in case we travel and I'm not able to post.)
