In 2015 Chatwin Books published Fabric of the American Dream, a combination monograph (of my Manet covers) and meditation on some of the recurring themes in my work. Chatwin co-founder Annie Brule, who had been a tenant of my ’57 Biscayne studios from its inception, and I had been wanted to collaborate for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect project. Annie is an illustrator, map-maker, and book designer who specializes in art books. She and Arundel Books owner Phil Bevis founded Chatwin a few years ago; Fabric of the American Dream was the first in their artist series.

On Phil’s advice, we produced the book in two editions: a clothbound limited edition, and an unlimited paperback edition. Both versions have identical content inside. I wanted the books to reflect my psychedelic homespun aesthetic in their form as well as their content. When I hear the word “clothbound”,  I’m not picturing some tasteful, plain, dark, smoky, brown number. I’m thinking more along the lines of something I’d use in a painting. The problem with vintage fabric is the difficulty of finding a sufficient supply to do all fifty covers. (Besides, I need it to use in my paintings.) After some searching, I managed to find some brand new fabric that gave off the right mid-century vibe, so I snagged what was left of the bolt.

I consulted with some crotchetty old guys in the midwest who had been binding books for forty years and knew their stuff. They initially tried to scare me away from the idea of using just any old cotton cloth to bind my books, but after I badgered them a bit to tell me what exactly real bookcloth is, they relented and allowed that I could add a stabilizer to the back of the cloth and it would probably work just fine. They were a bit tight-lipped about what that stabilizer would be, so I badgered some crotchetty old ladies here in town who had been in the crafty-fabricky world for just as long, and they, along with some younger artist bookbinders on the internet, recommended an iron-on product called “heat-n-bond”.

Due to some delays and miscommunications at the bindery, we nearly didn’t have any books for our projected opening. The production binder who bound the softcovers and the innards of both editions was unable to add the cloth covers, let alone print titles on them. Some panic ensued, but we found a smaller house to do the binding, and I decided to tackle the titles myself.

I burned a screen in the same typeface that Annie used on the printed softcover. Screen-printing the front cover was easy enough, if a little nerve-wracking. I had exactly 50 of the cloth books to work with; I was committed to having 5o perfect (non inkstained) books when I was done.

To print the title on the spine, I came up with a little contraption on the fly, cutting a book-width slit in a board and adding some book-height legs to it.

Slide the book in, lower the screen, squeegee the ink across it, and presto!

Earlier in the process, when cutting out the bookcloths, I had been very, very careful to use every square inch as economically as possible so I’d have some cloth left over. I spent the day of the book release at home in my sewing room, being just as frugal with the remainder of the cloth, and I managed to squeeze out a dress. Because if it is at all possible to match your publication, why on earth wouldn’t you?

The hardcover edition is entirely sold out, but the delightful Brule-designed softcover is available through my brand-new store page.

This Thursday, several shows I’ve organized for other artists are opening in my building (and environs). Next Saturday, September 9, another artist is presenting my work at her gallery. Let’s hear it for artists helping artists.

Thursday, September 7, from 5-9 PM at 110 Cherry Street, ’57 Biscayne will hold our fourth annual 100 under $100 show, featuring lots of take-home-able work by dozens of artists. Dara Solliday & I curate this event every year, and I do believe that overall quality of the work this year is the best ever. Stuff will be flying off the walls.

As a bonus, we’ll be serenaded by the always-fabulous Victor Janusz on the piano while people snatch up lots of fun and unexpected art.

Elsewhere in the Good Arts Building, the shiny new Cherry Street Coffee House in-house gallery will have its soft debut, with C.Y., a show I’ve curated of abstract works by ’57 Biscayne artists. The gallery will feature bimonthly shows, and I’m lining up some exciting guest curators to partner with me in the venture. NOT your average coffee house art, let’s just say.

Downstairs in the new Arcade, guest artist Fernando Sancho is installing a pop-up show of his photographs, African Dream Academy, while new resident artists Gina Grey and Ieva Ansaberger will be showing paintings, photographs, and mixed media works in their studios–in-progress and in the hallway gallery.

Down the street at Arundel Books, Original Hits by Original Artists, fake album covers by approximately 33-1/3 real artists, is being remounted, will be open for First Thursday, and viewable throughout the month of September.

Saturday in Georgetown, artist Tammy Spears, who has been for several years hosting really cool, once top-secret, art shows in a gallery carved out of her charming Georgetown home, will be featuring my work along with that of Tia Matthies. That is at:

Guest Shed Gallery
739 S. Homer St.
Saturday, September 9, 6-9 PM : Georgetown Art Attack
& Sunday, September 10 1-5 PM

 

Side projects with specific rules and formats are good for shaking up the old brain cells, and reinvigorating the artistic process. I have three pieces going right now that are not typical “Jane Paintings”, and all of them happen to be square. Two of the squares are from a show of my own making, and I’ve roped in a passel of other artists to join me in the madness. (Read about the third square here.)

Music has always been my painting muse, and a source of inspiration and comfort long before I was a painter. I was even a radio DJ when I was a student at the University of Chicago in the 1980’s. We spun records then, and not quaintly or ironically, either. There was a sizeable room at the station stacked floor-to-ceiling with record albums  (I do hope it’s still there) to sift through before your show started. Sometimes I’d pick something out solely because I liked the cover.

The cover! They all had covers! Nice, generous, roomy, 144 square inches of loveliness or weirdness or creepiness or bad art or good art. But they always gave a little hint about what was on the inside. So when the Upstream Music Fest approached the Good Arts Building owners last year about hosting a music venue this May, I knew that I wanted to curate a visual art show inside the venue, and I knew exactly what it would be . . .

ORIGINAL HITS BY ORIGINAL ARTISTS!

I invited a bunch of artists–friends, Biscayne regulars, people whose sensibility seemed to fit the project–to create fake album covers for imaginary bands. And approximately 33-1/3 of them said yes, so now we are going to have a show. It opens Thursday, May 4, at 108 Cherry Street, on the first floor of the Good Arts Building, right next to the entrance to the studios.  During the Upstream Fest, May 11-13, we’ll have free live music on site from 4-8 PM, so one can feast ears and eyes at the same time. The show will also be open May 18, 19, 25, and 26 from 1-6 PM, and by appointment.

My instinct is to keep the album covers, particularly the band names, both my own and others’, under wraps until the opening. But a few images from the process of creating them can keep you guessing.

Bonus fun fact: Album Cover Art by a Famous Artist

Sure, we all know about Andy Warhol’s screenprinted banana, but fewer people are aware of Salvador Dali’s contribution to the genre. I don’t know if he’s responsible for the typeface, too, but it’s rather satisfying.

Sometimes I’m working on a painting, revising and tweaking and changing colors, and it is just not happening. All the draperies, wallpaper, extra characters, or funky appliances in the world won’t make it work. The problem obviously lies much deeper, and the thing is starting to feel destined for the scrap bin. I wrote about flailing in this manner in a previous post, but that time I had waited until after the painting in question had already landed safely and had even found a home.

One of those problem paintings has been hanging around my studio for over a year now, a reject from my Manet covers series which I’ve since finished and shown and published a book about. In that series, I had restaged some of my favorite Manet paintings in mid-century suburban America, using characters I gleaned from various vintage magazines ads.The Waitress, 1879: For my cover of this work, I found the right fifties’ lady holding and contemplating a serving tray, three people turned mostly away from the viewer, a musician, and a sort-of-dancing spunky gal sporting capri pants. I always work out the compositions first as charcoal drawings, then I figure out the shapes of the panels and what fabrics to cover them with.

Sure, the six-figure composition was a little unwieldy and sprawling, but that felt true to the wide-open American suburbia that these people had to inhabit. The housewife serving the beer was in a much larger space than her Parisian counterpart, but her domesticized world was so much smaller in every other way.

The deep expanse of the living room felt kind of claustrophobic with all those people squished in the foreground. Which is what I was going for. So far so good.

I sort of organized the people into “teams” and partially separated them with one of those very mid-century room-divider things.

The yellow squares are paint samples that I’ve made to help me pick colors. But finding colors that would play nice was proving to be a bit of a challenge…

Out with the yellow table! It was pretty and everything, but it had to go. Then the guy’s suit went from blue to green and he acquired a hat. What’s with his friend? I’d chosen her for her weird snail hat, and now I had no idea what to do with her. Unruly, the lot of them. Except maybe the guy at the piano. I kind of had a crush on him, but I couldn’t decide how to decorate his little corner.

The deadline for the show came and went. I had plenty of paintings for it without this one, so it went unfinished into the painting rack, where it sat for about six months. When I finally pulled it back out, one look told me it was never going to work out as I’d planned it. So I unbolted and separated its two halves, and then got ruthless with the white paint. I spared only the areas of fabric that formed figures, and not even all of them made it.

Out went the problem lady and the guy with the hat. Away with that pesky husband sipping his beer at a funny angle. After some hesitation, I let the piano player go, too.

Then I put the two panels away again, hoping I would forget about those awkward, unwieldy characters and their strange preoccupations. Forget about the original Manet, too. These would be just some bits of ephemera I could riff off of when I needed a new bit of something for my brain to chew on.

Brain-chewing day finally arrived last week. I decided that this lady needed a floor to ground her in a world. I’d bought a chalk-line for the specific purpose of making perspective lines, and I was nerdily excited to break it out for the first time. A couple of tacks where the vanishing points go, and chalk away! Fun!

I knew immediately what color her new, clean, streamlined, tiled universe needed to be. Sometimes the technical, repetitive task of filling in dozens of receding squares is soothing and satisfying, clearing my mind and letting me enter the world of the painting.

She’s now been put away for a bit and her orange tiles are drying.

The next day I pulled out her friend and gave her a chalkline grid, too.

I found an interesting receding chevon tile pattern in an advertisement that I’m replicating within the grid. Turquoise is her color. Beyond that, I don’t know where this is going. I’ll figure out their new stories and add the rest of their surroundings as I get to know them. Stay tuned.

 

I have a myriad of strange, unloved paintings shoved into various corners my studio that I’ll never actually exhibit but I can’t bring myself to throw out, either. They are all the paintings I made in front of classes I was teaching, in order to demonstrate a particular technique, to participate in whatever sadistic exercise I’d dreamed up for them to do, or just to pass the time while the students worked things out on their own. One of the many things I love about teaching art is that I get to draw and paint for the sake of modelling a process, with no requirement that the end result qualify as capital-A Art. That is a luxury, maybe even a necessity, for a professional artist with an established body of work and style and market. The pressures to produce more capital-A art can sometimes hinder my experimentation and risk. I get paid to teach, and so if teaching requires me to make quick decisions and wacky compositions, I can harness that relentless work ethic in the service of making pointless, but totally necessary, quick and dirty and weird paintings.

The images above and below are results of an exercise in which I require students to choose two disparate images, then divide their picture plane in half unequally, and compose the two into some kind of coherent whole. The source material for the one above was stolen from art history: Van Gogh’s boots crowding out Vermeer’s Music Lesson as if in a cinematic “wipe.” I found a common formal element in the tile floors and ran with it. Limiting my palette to the same three primaries on both sides helps tie it together as well. It is also acrylic, which I don’t own very much of, and which dries quickly and fosters immediacy.

The second one is a bit odder, possibly because it’s source material is more random. Many years ago I found a set of a couple of hundred photo cards, called the “All Purpose Photo Library,” in a thrift store. The box sat around for a long time and survived several studio moves before I finally found a purpose for it. Its original function appears to have been as some sort of elementary-school learning tool; holding up the pictures would apparently provoke meaningful discussions amongst the youngsters about communities, homes, transportation, professions, musical instruments, extension cords, plastic containers of generic cottage cheese, and the like. The set is divided with little index tabs into categories such as “food,” “inside home,” “outside home,” “land animals,” “insects” –  which pretty much covers the known universe. The photos are seriously low-budget affairs dating from the late 1970’s. It looks as though on certain days a professional seamless backdrop was scored for the shoot; other days they had to make due with posing a lemon on a paper Chinet plate. In other words they are pretty much perfect, just have the students blindly choose two of them and then make a painting out of it. Ego investment, overthinking, preconceived notions about high versus low – poof! GONE!

In a related exercise, I had everyone bring in a bunch of magazines, from which we made collages, which then became the basis for paintings. I’ve since lost the collage for this one, but I appear to have made a handy unisex bathroom sign should the need for one arise.

I also have a fondness for simple still lives, which I would never take the time for in “real life”. But it’s really great to just PAINT sometimes, not worrying about the “Art” part of it; I remember why I do it in the first place. These are from “Color Boot Camp” demonstrations of limited palettes. The first was from a Saturday afternoon quick demo at the Bellevue Art Museum years ago. Space and time were both limited, so I grabbed a bone from my bone collection and four tubes of paint, showed up, and painted it in front of a group of random strangers, making up the blue background on the spot.

Here a lime and a paper bag were the props on hand. (It’s harder than you’d think to match the color of a paper bag.)

My favorite demonstration paintings, however, are the ones that end up reflecting and distilling the true concerns of my real work, anyway. I paint people all the time – slowly and from photographic sources and in great detail, sometimes hiring a model for a missing part of the pose, and working carefully around the edges of the fabrics I paint on – but when I’m teaching a figure painting class I can work loosely and quickly, making fast decisions about color and composition and not worrying about the edges.

I borrowed a gumball machine from one of my studio neighbors, hung up a striped sheet, added some furniture, a mirror,  and a telephone, hired Ruth, and asked my class to make a narrative out of it. Or not.

At Pratt many years ago I taught a class called Pattern, Rhythm, and Pictorial Space. This painting I did of Megan in their sun-filled classroom – a former Wonder Bread factory outlet store – is one I like to pull out and look at for inspiration sometimes.

Most of the fabrics I used in the set-up have since disappeared into paintings.

In the same class, I organized a “still-life potluck”, in which everyone brought patterned objects from home, all of which I arranged into a cacophonous still life. Always thrifty about the materials for these throwaway paintings (which never seem to get thrown away), I painted this on an old piece of mdf that was once part of a floor in a play at ACT Theatre.

I grew up with five older siblings. We had around the house lots of books and toys from eras past, representing the accumulated passing interests of a slew of children. I never knew where most of the stuff came from or to whom it originally belonged. It was just there. Of these random vintage possessions, the most influential on my development were two books by Walter T. Foster (1891-1981), “How to Draw” and “How to Draw Horses”.  My cousin and I spent hours on end with the horse book, first copying the drawings, and then using his method of constructing the animal out of ovals, boxes, and lines (which also happened to be WTF’s method for drawing grapes, humans, landscapes, and most of the visible world).

These kinds of how-to books are a remnant of a time in America when leisure time was newly accessible to a wider demographic (thanks, labor movement) and their proliferation testament to the new consumer hobby market publishers sought to tap. Most of the authors were successful commercial illustrators and admen pitching their foolproof, easy methods to a public with time on their hands and an admirable wish to better themselves, for fun or profit or both. Unlike similar ventures into this market, for instance, paint-by-number, these books actually taught you a skill, and could be a starting point for a budding serious artist who found them lying around the house. They vary widely in their usefulness, production values, and applicability to fine art, but they all share an insistence that ANYONE CAN LEARN TO DRAW!

These are a few from my present-day collection.

Walter T. Foster was possibly the most prolific of the bunch, and he was more geared toward realism than those who were riding the comic book wave of the 1940’s and 50’s. He began his own publishing company, Walter T. Foster Publishing, which produced other artists’ how-to books as well as his own. Possibly one reason he could be so prolific can be found in the off-the-cuff, sketchbook quality of his books. They are full of bits of advice, hand-written in pencil, that usually, but not always, correspond to the illustrations, as if he just remembered something important and had to write it in the interstices of the drawings before it slipped his mind. Sometimes the drawings run right off the page. Possibly they are just his sketchbooks, barely edited and annotated.

He’s full of advice and encouragement. In the example above he is mighty specific about the exact size of drawing board you should use, as well as where you should lean it. Elsewhere, after laying out the 1/3 rule of composition, he exhorts:

Don’t hold to any cut-and-dried rules. Think for yourself and apply what you learn from all sources.

On drawing a vase of flowers:

Fine, go ahead, but if you have trouble just know it isn’t an easy thing to do.

Many of his snippets of wisdom are indeed signed “W.T.F.”

Here’s a helpful, if confusing, hint on the pitfalls in composition, which also looks like a recipe for a successful cubist painting:

The irrepressible Andrew Loomis, author of “Fun With A Pencil”, mixes instructions for drawing cartoon caricatures right in more with realistic figures and perspective theory. His formulas are rather more formulaic, but he also proves a pleasant companion for your drawing journey. “Never mind if they are a little off” is timeless advice for learning any new skill, and people particularly need to hear it when they’re drawing, since the disastrous results of early attempts are always staring you in the face.

This chart of standard facial measurements is from 1939, so we’ll cut him some slack on his ethnocentricity, of which, trust me, this is a more mild example:

The ideal American is not only white, chiseled, and afflicted with lines all over their face, but is also possibly transgender. Note the identical features transposed from Mr. Ideal American to Ms. Ideal American.

Actually, I do hand out a version of that formula to beginning students tackling portraits for the first time. I find it helps them to see what’s in front of them, and usually if not always keeps them from putting the eyes at the very top of the head.  I do add the warning, “actual results may vary,” which one should keep in mind regardless of the subject’s ethnicity.

I’m not entirely sure what this diagram is supposed to represent. It doesn’t even really make sense internally: why is the brow line perpendicular to the ear line? And, besides, one should NEVER use a real knife to draw another human. While we’re at it, let me also state that real children should never be allowed to play unsupervised with perspective.

Next to the Ideal American, the most important formula for the budding commercial illustrator to have in their back pocket was the Pretty Girl, the pleasingness of which, according to Loomis, is “99% in how well you draw it”. Incidentally, this validates Jessica Rabbit’s oft-quoted observation that she wasn’t bad, just drawn that way.

Even into the late 1960’s, it was still important to keep those gender roles straight when learning to draw.

George Carlson, author of “I CAN DRAW!”, from which those were taken, was no Walter T. Foster, but WTF is a valid response to these unhelpful diagrams. This book was aimed at children, but evinces little respect for their ability to distinguish drawing from tracing dotted lines. What is “The head is drawn this way” supposed to mean? Those are two identical pictures, except one is red and one is black with an arrow pointing toward it, but no further instructions.

W.T.F. himself wasn’t immune from the illustrative conventions of his time, either. In his books, men’s hands are to be drawn realistically, while ladies’ hands tend to taper unnaturally.

In my experience, drawing a “leaf shape” first has never, ever been helpful in drawing a hand. It is only helpful in drawing a leaf. You can’t argue with this, though:

Hands are not easy to draw and you should devote much time to them.

Unlike the learn-to-draw-in-five-days-and-get-rich school of art instruction, Foster doesn’t sugarcoat the sheer hours and sweat it takes to learn to draw. You can tell he really loved his vocation and wanted to make it accessible to anyone with the inclination. As a child I had the inclination but I didn’t know any artists (or horses for that matter). Doing the exercises in his books gave my initial inclination some focus and direction. Breaking horses down into their component ovals, however formulaic, demystified drawing for me. I started with his horses and grapes, but I kept on drawing while Foster assured me that, although it was bound to be difficult, I could get it with practice. “Do not let it scare you. Just take your time.”

I will give Mr. Foster the last word:

Draw everything you see, it will come in handy when you start making a living at it. Sure you can. Try.

W.T.F.!

In the movies, painters tend to be seized by bouts of inspiration at unpredictable intervals, upon which seizure they spontaneously and spasmodically squish paint into a masterpiece. Mike Leigh’s recent film Mr. Turner was no exception. The spastic-inspiration trope is the default mode for films about more Jackson-Pollocky types, of course, but Leigh’s William J. W. Turner was seized by this affliction when he gazed at the sea or the English countryside, naturally. In reality, painting and drawing a landscape is rather difficult, and Hollywood cliches like these are misleading about the mechanics and intentionality of composition that are actually required to make a picture of anything, including abstraction.  It’s too easy to assume that good landscapes come about through some kind of direct channelling of the scenery, making it all the more frustrating when beautiful or interesting scene you see in real life does not make a beautiful or interesting painting on your page. Even landscapes have to be composed by the artist. Composition is the mechanics, or machinery, of a picture. It’s how it directs your eye from here to there, lets in linger in some places, and return to the subjects that the artist wanted to you focus on. In the class that I just wrapped up, Making Your Own Work: Subject and Composition, a group of experienced painters exposed the picture-making machinery of the masters, teased out the separate elements of that machinery, and began to employ those strategies to their own ends.

We began the first few classes with gesture-drawing from art history. Recording what you see in the first minute of looking at a painting tells you a lot about where the artist has directed your eye.

Your eye tends to look at the largest form first. In order to better see the hierarchy of forms, we broke them down into two tones, grey and white, simplifying shapes, to get a better idea of the overall order and direction in which one views the painting.

We also made quick five-minute interpretations in black and grey paper cutouts of projected paintings. Here are four different student’s quick collages of Manet’s 1862 Portrait of Jeanne Duval

:

And the original…

Four interpretations of Andrew Wyeth’s Master Bedroom…

And the original . . .

Andrew Wyeth proved to be particularly helpful to study for composition. His subjects were deceptively simple, and he mastered the art of editing and simplifying, while working in the style we erroneously call “realistic”, as if it involved copying from nature. Really, nature is a mess, and you have to tame it. (Just ask Mr. Turner.)

Wyeth’s Brown Swiss, which seems to the untrained eye to be a straightforward rendering of a farm house, is actually a feat of engineering.

A photograph of the same spot reveals that the composition didn’t just present itself. The placement of the house just a wee bit from the left edge makes your eye run over there, too, but then jump down to the reflection before you fall off, then hang a right, sending you back into the painting.. The stream as a big, light, horizontal bar across the lower third was a deliberate choice: water can be dark or light depending on when and where you look at it. The reflection of the house didn’t just happen, either: The artist chose it as an element, its presence and shape dependent on where he stood and the time of day he decided to grab it from. The long shadow on the side of the hill under the house is essential, as is eliminating the sky: the long horizontal shapes are ordered by size, and alternate dark/light. Everything in the picture serves the composition. We can’t say the same for the actual site, which is a lot busier. Granted, the evergreen tree apparently wasn’t big enough to block the house when he painted the picture, but if it did I’m sure he would have found a way to make it work.

Here is a sketch in which he worked out the composition. It’s possible he started with a more literal drawing and just kept blocking out what he didn’t need with ink until the shapes looked right.

We tried to get inside long-dead artists’ heads and learn their tricks by reverse-engineering a composition. This is one student’s analysis, of shape, value, and directional lines, of The Judgment of Paris by Cranach the Elder:

Students took their own subject-matter, in the form of personal or magazine photographs, and inserted them into the structure of the masterwork. Here a Vermeer becomes the armature for a reinterpretation of one student’s old family snapshot.

Treasured snapshots are as difficult to work with as nature. You’re usually too close to the subject matter to know why you like it: Is it the figures, the furniture, the faded colors, or just its emotional associations? It’s nearly impossible to know what is worth keeping and what should be discarded in order to get to an interesting, successful painting. Sometimes the accidental nature of the composition, its very awkwardness, is the best part. This exercise was a way to get a bit of objectivity, and license to move reality around to suit the artist’s purpose.

A continuation of Making Your Own Work: Subject and Composition will begin in late April.