"Paintings With Personality"

It's A Blue Hat Day. I often use the white of the paper to lead my viewers eye to my focal point when I paint portraits in watercolor.

            I have read several articles about how beneficial painting in a series is to an artist. One piece went so far as to say the way to tell professional artists from art hobbyists was their willingness to work in a series. I’m not sure about that but it is food for thought. I have created enough figurative paintings in watercolor for them to be considered a series. But I hadn’t set out to do a series of paintings until last fall when I decided to actually begin a series of paintings of NYC in acrylic on canvas. So far I have finished five large canvases. One of them is at the Salmagundi Club in NYC right now. The work is turning out to be a lot of fun and I look forward to creating ten to twenty more. The next paintings will be a little smaller because there are too few places where I can exhibit large work.

            If I get tired of painting NYC, I’ll take a little break, pick up my watercolors and do something different for a while. A friend told me about Golden Absorbent Ground which goes on canvas and allows the artist to paint watercolors on canvas and that sounds like something interesting to try. The main thing is to make sure I keep my momentum and go back to my series after a day or two.

            Developing a series of paintings takes a lot of thought. If you’re interested in creating a body of work by painting a series here are a few suggestions that might help:

1. Decide on a topic and medium. In making the decision make sure you are inspired and have personal feelings about the subject. In that way your art will be more appealing and will help keep your interest for 15-20 paintings. Learn everything you can about your subject and then learn some more. The more you know the more comfortable you will be when you begin working and you will be able to apply different emotions to the art work.
2. Have plenty of resource material, a lot more than you think you will need. You’ll need to think about design and composition for 15–20 paintings so the more material the better. If you use photos make sure you use your own. It’s pretty hard to have personal feelings about someone else’s experiences and photographs. Inspiration is essential to being able to see and paint the subject in new and different ways from what other painters have done.
3. Now that you have your reference material, go through it and narrow it down to 30 or 40 items. You will have those to choose from when you paint. Pay particular attention to the design elements and be aware of what you want to convey as you choose what to use and what to reject.
4. Set up a weekly schedule think about all the things you do each day, job, house, children, and etc. Decide how much time you can devote to the series each day. If you can’t paint every day set up a calendar of which days you can create and stick to it.
5. The fifth suggestion might be the most important and that is commitment. Get all the supplies you will need for the entire series, get so much you will have to complete the series just to use up your materials. Work on two paintings at a time if you have the space. If you take a break and paint something else, make it a short break and then get back to your series. Do whatever you can to keep yourself motivated.

There are several benefits involved in working on a series. It makes us focus on our subject and that improves our art. It also helps us get in touch with our creative imagination and forces us to work out design problems. We are compelled to reach inside ourselves to find out who we are, why we paint and where we’re going next. The deep ‘focus’ will help us become more confident and skilled artists.

I’ve been working for several months on the same NYC series and haven’t gotten bored yet. I look forward to each new painting. I only wish I had the room to paint two at a time. How about you, are you ready to work hard and become the painter you were meant to be? Let me know in the comment section below.