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Diary of A Working Artist 

February 2004

Tuesday Feb 3rd

Attended a reception at a local Mill Valley (CA) cooperative art gallery, where a friend of mine (originally a student in one of my classes) was the featured artist. The show was called 'Contemporary Abstraction' so I felt guilty that I hadn't found the time to enter a piece of art myself. After all, I am primarily an abstract painter. I've recently moved across the Bay to Vallejo, 40 miles away, and though the drive is less than an hour, it still seemed a long way to go to deliver a painting which may or may not be chosen for the show. If it was turned down I'd have to collect it the next day, which would mean another 80-mile round trip.

Now, let's be honest, this was not the only reason I didn't enter. Firstly, I knew one of the jurors - in fact, she's been taking abstract painting classes from me for a couple of years. I have no idea whether she likes my work, but I didn't want to put her in the potentially embarrassing position of having to turn it down. No, no, let's be really honest: I knew that a number of my students were entering and I was afraid that, if I didn't get in, I'd lose my credibility. How stupid is that? What I really should have done, if I'd been rejected, was show them just how well I tolerate rejection. And I do - really.

Anyway, the reception was a good networking experience, as it was very well attended. Cathy's new body of work looked splendid. As it turned out, about 10 former students of mine had their work on display and I felt great pride in their achievements. One or two had never been in a show before and were thrilled beyond measure. It reminded me not to allow myself to become cynical. In any profession things tend to repeat themselves so that one's attitude becomes blasé: I still remember very clearly that first time I was accepted into a juried show put on by my local art organization. I took the little green postcard out of the mailbox, turned it over, and began punching the air and doing a wild Irish jig around the house, screaming "Yes! Yes! YES!" I had achieved my, then, ultimate goal. It didn't take me long to move the goalposts, to change my goal to being offered a solo show. When I achieved that, I moved the goalposts even further…and so on. Watching the excited faces and hearing remarks like "I can't believe I'm in this show. I didn't even know I was a good painter." reminded me of the joy I once felt when I was at the beginning of my art career.

Friday Feb 6th

Working hard in my bright new studio on several large paintings simultaneously. What luxury! In my old studio, which was actually my garage, I could really only concentrate on one large painting at a time, while the others in the series remained stacked in a corner. I find it helps my continuity to be able to see several pieces at once. Often I'll put the background texture (modeling paste, heavy gel, pumice, tissue paper) onto the canvas first, then leave it several hours to dry, while I work on applying the first layer of paint to another, already textured, canvas. Right now I'm obsessed with texture. I buy modeling paste in huge jars and slather it on with a wallpaper scraper, smoothing it out with a squeegee, then imprinting it with plastic grids, stencils, corks, and the cardboard circles from parcel tape. I have no notion when I start a piece how it will end up. Except that I usually have a clear idea of my palette. I seem to be rather stuck on reds, yellows, and oranges these days. I tried for a while to move away from strongly saturated hues and onto more neutrals. Every now and then I'll paint something as near black and white as I can make it, but it's so hard to keep my hands of the jars of yellow oxide! In my attempt to use a different palette, I'll occasionally look through the ads in glossy magazines and select one of their color schemes. One thing I have learned is that I own way too many different color paints. I could easily manage with just two reds - Pyrrole Red Light and Quinacridone Crimson, two yellow - Hansa Yellow medium and Yellow Oxide, two blues - Payne's Gray and Ultramarine, plus Titan Buff (which I buy by the gallon) and White. But then I do love the transparents - Quinacridone Gold, Transparent Red Oxide, Quinacridone Burnt Orange, and Transparent Yellow Oxide.

There's another reason I'm painting mainly in warm colors these days. They sell. Two of my galleries have told me in the past year that they can't sell blue paintings. Of course, you're thinking, any really sincere artist would only select a palette according to his or her own preferences, not those of the dealers. All very well to say, but sales put bread on the table and keep me in art supplies. What causes certain colors to be acceptable to clients more than others? The fashion industry! By which I mean interior design as well as clothes. On an old music stand in my studio I have a card with about 25 color chips. Above them is the title: Forecast for 2005-2006. I got it from my fine art publishing company, which has 4 posters of some of my abstracts in production due for release in June of this year. Until the subject came up during a meeting with the director, I had no idea that such a forecast existed. Being a true, sincere, expressive artist, I could not have conceived of the idea of anyone making art according to an industry-driven palette. Yet I know very well that many of my own clients buy art to go over the sofa and that frequently my paintings are selected by an interior designer for one of their customers. When I think about it, I haven't succeeded in selling any large blue paintings in the last year. They're languishing against the walls of my studio. So what's an artist to do? Take the moral high road and watch her income dwindle, or join the commercial rat-race? Somewhere in the middle is where I see myself. If a blue painting is desperate to come out, I'll let it. And if I just happen to prefer warm colors, well it's not that I'm painting to please others, is it? I'm just doing what I do best!

Monday Feb 8th

Went to see the Diane Arbus photography exhibit at SFMOMA with a good friend who is currently turning her attentions from printmaking to digital photography. This was my second visit to the show and, boy, was I glad I went. The first time I only had half an hour to spare and, as I'm a slow looker, I barely grazed the surface. This was a huge exhibit with many of her most famous candid shots of New York people, mostly ordinary folk but some downright freaks. I was deeply moved and more than a little uncomfortable looking into their often difficult and unhappy existences. A young couple out for a Sunday stroll in Central Park with their two children held a between-the-lines narrative of their daily struggle. The little boy's grinning mouth revealed too many teeth and his slightly crossed eyes suggested a developmental disorder. Certainly Arbus paid attention to the deadbeats as well as the rich. In one photograph an elderly wealthy widow, dressed to the nines in a brocade sheath and jewels, hair extravagantly coiffed, sits rigidly in a small room crammed with mementoes of foreign travel. Her determination to keep up appearances is painful to behold. Many of Arbus's photographs were shot in the grounds of a mental institution and show groups of childlike adults engaged in various forms of 'fun'. Their institutional clothes and strange gestures give them away. One room contained Arbus's notebooks - closely handwritten accounts of her intentions and experiences. Photographing people necessitates getting them to sign a release. It is sometimes surprising that her subjects agreed to be photographed in the situations in which she found them. Arbus had an unfailing instinct for seeing the weird in the mundane and the mundane in the weird.

When I mentioned to another painter that I had been to see the show, she expressed some surprise, since I'm not a photographer myself. Surely it is important to experience as many different forms of art as possible to keep the mind open to new possibilities. What I took from Diane Arbus was her feistiness, her intense curiosity in the human condition, and her determination to pursue her art under difficult conditions.

Wednesday Feb 18th

Got an e-mail from my gallery in North Hollywood, which rents out art to TV and movie companies. They needed at least four more small square paintings pronto. There's a big run on multiples that can be hung in rows vertically or horizontally or four-square. Did I have any in my inventory? No problem, I assured them. I'll mail some off at the beginning of next week. Please note that I did not say that I had any such thing in my inventory, I merely stated that it was no problem. On putting the phone down, I dashed up the stairs to my studio and began rummaging amongst my boxes of small blank canvases, eventually coming up with five 12"x 12". I laid them out in a long row on my counter top and started work on all five at once. For some reason I already had a clear idea of what they were going to look like. I began by writing symbols used in ancient counting systems with a Sharpie, then I adhered wrinkled tissue paper for texture, then the thicker mediums for imprinting, then several thin transparent layers of paint. I moved back and forth from one to the other, keeping my approach as fresh and spontaneous as possible. One got finished long before the others, but four were completed after 4 hours. The fifth looked to be a total failure, but I came up with a solution later in the day. In the end, I decided to ship all five. When I received an e-mail upon their arrival, thanking me profusely for the 'lovely work', I found my protestant work ethic nagging away at the back of my mind: How could they be lovely when I'd spent so little time on them?

I have one of my other artist friends to thank for introducing me to this particular gallery last Fall. Artists are generally very willing to share information, I find. After having her own application accepted, she was told that they were looking for more abstract art. I was planning to drive down to Pasadena to teach a workshop anyway, so when the owner responded favorably to my portfolio submission, I offered to take a few pieces to show her in person. She selected some quite small ones from my website, but I decided to load several large canvases into the van as well. As it turned out, she accepted everything I showed her. Since then they've been rented out on a fairly regular basis to such shows as "It's All Relative", "Rock Me, Baby" (What IS that?) and "General Hospital" and a couple have even been sold to people on the sets. At first I would try to watch the shows in the hope of spotting my art in the background, but so far no luck. Of course, background is background and not designed to be distracting, just to add authenticity to the scene. I've been amazed at how much original art is used to dress the sets. I'd always assumed they used posters or prints, but nowadays, with the advent of high-definition TV, attention to detail is far more important. What used to appear as a blurred rectangle on the wall on a 19" screen can now been seen quite clearly on a 42" plasma set.

Thursday Feb 19

Today we finally got our old house on the market after many months of remodeling and repairs. It looks so splendid that I can't think why we didn't do it earlier. Anyway, the sooner it is sold, the more quickly we can get our lives back to normal. The process of moving has severely interfered with the process of creating art. When we first moved into our new home at the end of December, I was totally intimidated by the large room over the garage designated as my studio space. Despite the large number of unopened moving boxes, it looked alarmingly neat and sterile. My husband had installed a huge new countertop and I now have room to step back 20 ft to judge my paintings. Only trouble was that all I had on my easel was a blank canvas which remained untouched for almost a month. By the middle of January I had all my paints sorted into carts with wire drawers which can easily be pushed around the room, all my canvases stacked according to size, my flat files reorganized, my collage papers all catalogued in translucent plastic boxes, my brushes reconditioned, my pencils sharpened, my jars of medium newly Vaselined, and my numerous art books shelved. My studio was the neatest neat it had ever been! All it lacked was art. Finally one day I plucked up the courage to open a jar of paint, dip in my brush, and deposit a stroke on the canvas. That's all it took. Since then I haven't been able to stop painting. Perhaps a break every now and then is a good thing.

Thursday Feb 26

A letter in the mail informs me that my limited edition giclée prints are being dropped by the publisher which produced them about 5 years ago. No more will be printed, the digital files will be deleted and I will receive 5% of all remaining prints. This amounts to only1 or 2 prints of each image to distribute as I wish. I will be paid in installments over several months for past sales of prints. The small San Francisco-based company was bought out by another, much larger company last year. My work is not a good fit with the more traditional style they favor. Ah, well. You win some, you lose some. For a while I was receiving regular monthly checks for between $50 and $700, my 25% share of the sales online and through the catalog. Since all the costs of printing were borne by the publisher and I gained excellent exposure through their website and catalog, not to mention several thousands of dollars over the years, I have nothing to complain about.

Friday Feb 27

Earlier this month a dealer in a large gallery in Palm Desert responded positively to my portfolio submission and has invited me to take a few large pieces to show him when I'm in the area in early March. Attempting to select 3 or 4 good pieces out of my current inventory has been hard. As a result I keep painting new work in the hope that it will be better than the rest. This in itself is a good thing, as it hones my critical skills and encourages me to move forwards, to try harder. Complacency is a dangerous state. I reached a point a couple of years ago when I had been painting using much the same techniques for several years and I felt very comfortable with what I was doing. Gone was the angst and self-doubt and in its place grew contentment. Then I realized I was getting bored with my own work. It all began to look the same. Friends would visit my studio and say: "Haven't I seen that one before?" while standing in front of my very latest piece. I had trouble identifying my work by the titles in my inventory list. Then I decided to try something new - encaustic or painting with hot wax. What a challenge! I never knew how anything would turn out; the wax seemed to lead its own life. I wanted to master it but I couldn't. It didn't stop me enjoying myself, though. It was like when I first learned to ski. I'd return time and time again determined to get it right. After 18 months of encaustic painting I was able to return to acrylics with renewed enthusiasm.

This month I've produced 14 new large paintings so far. Of course, my new garden is a vast patch of weeds and the dust bunnies are scurrying through the rooms of my new house. Hey, but we artists must always get our priorities right. Right?

Oh yes, we got a buyer for the house 3 days after we put it on the market.

Review of February:

I haven't been in any shows. 
I haven't entered any shows.
I haven't submitted my portfolio anywhere. 
I haven't made slides of any of my new work.
I haven't labeled any slides waiting to be identified. 
I haven't sent out any postcards.
I haven't updated my newsletter.
I haven't updated my mailing list.

I have prepared lots of new teaching materials for this year's new workshops.
I have at last updated this website.
I HAVE PAINTED!

All in all, a good month.

©Ann Baldwin 2004

 Check out these entries in the archives:  

June 2003 Three months without painting
July 2002 (The Ups & Downs of an Artist's Life)
November 2001  (Art - Who Needs It?)
June, 2001  (On quitting my day job)
February 2001  (A typical winter week - so much to do, so little time)
December 2000    (Look Back at the Year 2000)
July 2000 entry    (Looking at Art in Europe)
April 2000 entry    (Attending Bay Area art openings)
February 2000 entry (Painting in the Mexican Jungle)
January 2000 entry (New Year's Resolutions)

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