Studio Research: Analyzing Creative Choices (part 1)

Hey Stranger!

I hope your weekend is lovely, I am super achey from a week of angle grinding and sanding. We powered through multiple pieces this week at my work and they’re coming along great. I work in sculpture full time, which is interesting as a painter. I enjoy it! I am getting soooo much training in different materials and tools that are out of my typical realm. Me and my coworkers keep joking about how buff we’ll be at the end of the summer with all the heavy work we do.

What’s sitting in my mind today is visual perception and creative choices in past pieces. I love taking in-progress pictures, even when something is in a very obvious “ugly” stage. I think I’m curious about what helps me get out of that stage and is there a way I can push through faster and make my process more efficient?

“Ugly” stages in pieces are typically the point where people stop making art because they hate what they see because it got muddy and they don’t know what to do to get out of the phase. I think one of the main things as an artist that has helped me with that phase is knowing that it’s completely normal in every single piece. You absolutely can stop at that point and move onto something else, but then you don't push yourself and explore new techniques, or try. Where’s the reward in that? The ugly stage is where the magic happens! It usually means you’re on the precipice of something amazing if you pay attention. So I want to run through some pieces and try to verbalize what choices I see in past pieces that pushed me out of that stage and is there a specific habit I do that helps me get out of that?

Below are some old in progress photos of pieces from the last couple of years

Starting with a self portrait I did from a mirror in my little apartment in 2022 in the summer around now actually, June.

This one you can see had SUCH a rough start. I have a bad habit of adding random colors in the first layers and confuse myself about my choices in the early stages very often but it was much worse back then than now. Also painting from a source that you move in and don’t stay completely still is difficult.

Then there was a moment where I *realized* that I was making random unintentional choices and causing my own frustrations so I slowed way down, took notes. This piece was pretty much next to my bed and it was the first thing I would see in the morning and before I slept, so I thought about it ALOT. I re oriented my space and found a better set up to stay still for the mirror, then decided to soften all the hard edges. Then I added white and tried to “backtrack” on some of those random placements just a little bit so it would be easier to correct my mistakes. I added more neutrals. The soft grey, purple, and red around the eye socket.

good habit number 1: tuning in to frustration and slowing down on decisions to create distance from it.

bad habit in the piece: not being intentional about the space of my painting set up, feeling unsure what colors to use in the beginning layers for the drawing and then trying to identify specific parts of the drawing through random colors.

Next up we have another self portrait (great way to learn how to do portraits!) This one was from spring of 2023. The above piece is on a circular canvas, I had enjoyed it. So this one I decided to try an oval shaped canvas. Reader, it was SO hard compositionally, I wanted to begin slowly adding more things to an image, so this one, I wanted to add a hand and a candle, with very dramatic contrasts.

Something I have learned over the years is that most issues in painting come from the beginning. Drawing mistakes, set-up mistakes, things that can go unnoticed until it becomes a bigger problem later. This drawing isn’t too bad, except the hand. I compressed the hand into a small rectangle with massive fingers and the shoulders are too small proportionally, and the eyes are a little off too.

The grisalle layer fully establishes my drawing and then I began the color layers. I don’t have many progress photos of it anymore because despite its progress, it got a rough critique because of how bad the hand looked at the spot it was in. I had a bad reference photo, but I also had a stress induced spinal fracture in my tailbone at the time. I left the crit, feeling so crestfallen that I covered up the painting and put something else on it. I didn't abandon this idea though. I just realized that the choice of composition with the shape of the canvas and the bad reference photo meant it was time to start it over completely and rectify those choices. The colors in the face however, came out so beautiful, so now I know what kind of colors I want to use.

Good habit 2: experimentation of method, surface, and technique. Listening to my body (with pain and with my choices), knowing when to start it over.

Bad habit: allowing a tough crit to get to me. I can’t criticize more because genuinely the physical pain I was experiencing constantly was intense, it is impressive to me that I was even painting. You know how much it sucks to get injured right before your last semester of your senior year of undergrad? I was feeling so much pressure at this point in time.

Next up we have another piece from last spring (2023). This one came after the above piece, and despite my horrible tailbone pain, I pushed through all the stages with this one and stuck it out. I, at the time, had been focusing on painting using the grisalle method. The method is where you tone and underpaint in raw umber (or other neutrals) and then fully paint your picture in “black and white” using raw umber and white (optionally add black). Once it dries, then you do color on top so you have less problem solving because your drawing is finished already. It turns out, the method is not my thing. This method is best for glazing thin layers of color. I have yet to enjoy glazing. It’s so time consuming as someone who tends to want to jump right to color and experiment with thickness and opacity.

So this one I ditched grisalle, and just did a general map out drawing using raw umber, I also used a projector. I wanted to focus on color and not on drawing. Despite what many nonartists believe, projectors are a very useful and legitimate tool for learning how to paint, because, oftentimes if a drawing is incorrect, we spend so much time correcting a drawing using color, causing a painting to become muddy. A projector to do a basic line map-out is good if you want to focus on learning how to lay color. I knew I could draw this myself but, with my pain at the time as well, it was best not to. Then my first color layer was for the background to “set the stage” for the rest of the painting. The first colors were a mid tone, then one dark, then one light color so I could begin matching up my values to my reference. I began filling shapes. I wanted to explore exaggerated colors. I chose green and yellow to be the focus. Below photo is a mid layer photo, I had placed all my general colors and shapes and was in the process of softening all the edges. But I still felt dissatisfied with the yellows. I wanted them to be warmer, so I began laying glazes of Indian yellow in between my thick layers.

Good habit three: not forcing myself to use a method in my studio I don't like (but I wanted to learn it anyway), “setting the stage”, the 3 main base colors, intentionally choosing colors, alternating methods each layer. Figuring out a way to use a method I don’t prioritize in a way that is useful to me (glazing between thick layers).

This was the beginning of refining the way I work, which I have continued to do.

I can’t run through ALL my works in once post but this will kind of be a mini series in split parts. The first three, dating from 2022-2023. I had so many breakthroughs in small habits in the studio. 2024 I have been more rigorously focusing on the ways I make my creative decisions. I think over time it has evolved from Problem Solving Everything At Once By Causing More Problems (random impulsive decisions—>regret) to Use What I Know To Take On Each Problem As They Come (staying present—>clear intention). And ultimately, writing notes about the piece and taking space away from works can do me wonders.

Anyways, it’s almost midnight here, so I’m out.

Til next time Stranger!