"Paintings With Personality"

Here is one of my spackle knife paintings. The explanation is in this post.

            I have always preferred painting people and even in my current work (city scenes in acrylic on canvas) I am unable to omit the people. To paint in acrylic is a new step for me after years of painting people in watercolor. The size of the canvas alone is a giant step.

A few years ago I took a workshop from Skip Lawrence. He challenged each of us in the class to choose a ‘simple’ un-inspiring subject and paint it 20 times. It wasn’t to be a beautiful object; Skip wanted us to be more creative and not be tempted to make a perfect representation. Each painting had to be different from the others. They could be changed in any way we wanted, size, color, value, shape, anything.

            I didn’t do the exercise until I got home from the workshop.  I took the lid off my dried up watercolor paints and picked up a bristle brush. I decided to go ahead and use the hard as a rock and sometimes flaking paints on the exercise Skip introduced. Why not, at least I wouldn’t be wasting any ‘good’ paint while fooling with the same subject over and over again. My object of choice was a 3” yellow plastic spackle knife. Not once did I paint it in yellow. I explored that yellow spackle knife forward, backward and inside out before I got finished. I thought I never wanted to see another spackle knife in my life!

As a beginning artist I was only interested in painting what I saw. My goal was to learn how to paint. My work was detached and lacked feeling. I had long since gotten past that stage when I met Skip. His exercise caused me to stretch my imagination and go beyond all rules. By the time I got to 10 paintings of that detested ‘spackle knife’ I was becoming very creative. I wasn’t thinking about making a reproduction of the knife, all I thought about was design. I was thinking ‘what if I do this or that’ rather than this is the way it is done. In doing the experiment and going past the rules I learned my art could become exciting and fun. I no longer had to paint the way I had been taught, I went past what I had been taught and found my own approach. By the time I had finished the twenty I had a personal direction. I knew what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.

How about it, are you ready to learn to express your feelings in your art? Here is the challenge…

Pick a simple subject that you are familiar with, choose something you can trace right on your work surface so you won’t have to worry about drawing. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or inspiring, in fact, you’ll be more likely to stay away from a description of the subject if it is a bit boring. That will make you more creative. Here are few ideas (scissors, water bottle, spritzer, electrical plug) or look around the kitchen; you’ll find all kinds of things.

      Divide your paper into pieces; use the back of a ruined painting or something like that. The painting doesn’t have to be large, certainly no bigger than 8 X 10. Paint your object 20 times and never paint it the same way twice. Send me a few of your results; I really want to see them. I’ll post them here on another blog.

After much thought, another spackle knife.