Playing with New Materials

 
One of the themes running through this blog is probably going to involve my struggle to breach the wall that sometimes rises up around artists with intensive or exclusive training in academic realism.  To survive three or four years of full time atelier study means, at best, feeling like you're in drawing and painting boot camp or, at worst, like you're being indoctrinated into a cult. When you leave that bubble (and thanks to social media, you can unfortunately cocoon yourself in it for a very long time), you realize that many people may see your beautifully executed work as quite boring. (Trust me, "this looks just like a photograph" is a compliment that rarely leads to sales unless you unintentionally painted someone else's favorite toy or food.) In other words, you're on the way to mastering a craft, but you've mislaid your creative soul along the way.

I've recently been trying to find my way back to creativity and self-expression by playing around with cold wax medium.  My goal is to set aside a few hours each week and experiment with small, abstract studies on Arches oil paper using few colors, no brushes, some weird scraping and rolling tools and a short amount of time to complete. In spite of quite a few easily tossed, obvious fails, I've been amazed at how emotionally engaging the process can be.  Sometimes I've produced something that captures how I feel before I am aware I am feeling it.  The piece above, "Black Rain," seems to be exactly how I was feeling about the pandemic; watching helplessly as a firestorm seems to rage out of control.  That certainly wasn't consciously in my mind as I was playing with my wax and paint, but I realized it as soon as the first stroke of "rain" appeared. Even when one of these is a fail and I don't wind up with any emotional connection to it beyond disgust, it acts like an attitude cleanser that gets me back to my regular work. I wind up glad I can draw realistically because I clearly don't have a career in abstraction!

There are realist artists who have incorporated cold wax into their work and perhaps I will do that someday.  In the meantime, I am hoping that I am at least taking the first steps on a journey to find my own artistic voice.

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