The main thing that was important to me was the visuals rather than correct perspective, but I like doing both.  I wanted the visual of the perspective being at the angle they are, the sense of possibly being in a dead-end, and possibly not, the size and shape of the windows behind reflecting the sky, and the sense that the mother figure is both possible but somehow detached and larger than life (and slightly scaled up from the figure she is holding).

]]> http://marycoreymarch.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/alley/feed/ 3 Corey pieta 1-12 http://marycoreymarch.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/shirt-and-jeans-pieta-progress/ http://marycoreymarch.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/shirt-and-jeans-pieta-progress/#comments Wed, 11 Jan 2012 04:30:40 +0000 marycoreymarch http://marycoreymarch.wordpress.com/?p=858 ]]> Today I did the shirt and jeans and touched up some of the skin under-painting.  had neglected the toes on the top foot completely, the arm needed thinning (and may need more).  A few other touches here and there. The jeans will get some more work in a drier layer.   I’ve decided that I want to keep the figure in grey/rust/blues (including the blanket, which has all three colors in the photo).

I’m liking the transition from rough to medium to smooth detail I’ve started.  I want things to get more classical and glowy as they approach the mother’s face.  The jeans are a good in-between, the shirt is smooth, but not glowy.  Her shirt and face will have more glow as well as smoothness and realism.  That’s the plan.

…and now to drop into Photoshop to test some different perspective fades…

]]> http://marycoreymarch.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/shirt-and-jeans-pieta-progress/feed/ 0 Corey shirt and jeans http://marycoreymarch.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/roughing-out-the-pieta-continued/ http://marycoreymarch.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/roughing-out-the-pieta-continued/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:45:31 +0000 marycoreymarch http://marycoreymarch.wordpress.com/?p=838 ]]>

I only had a small window today for the studio, but I am quickly learning not to disdain the small windows of time.  Before I had a child I wouldn’t, for example sit down to a sewing project without at least a 2-hour window.  When she was a newborn I learned to grab 2-minute windows to sew a seam or two.

Today I painted windows (and a building wall) in my small time window- half my previous “smallest painting-time” of 3 hours.  It was productive and I like the look of it so far. The whole piece will be many-layered, and the figures are in a complete under-painting still (so for non- painters, no, they will not be blue!  With a day between me and a hectic yesterday, I’m loving the rough strokes showing the under-painting.

It is an old teaching trick to give students a brush that is bigger than they are  comfortable with to get their mark going (a trick I have used on students often).  I use it on myself yesterday, but I took it up another notch after that and loved the result.  Weirdly, I found that the spacing between the windows I sketched out before was the exact width of that brush.  Interesting. I’m really enjoying this painting now.

]]> http://marycoreymarch.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/roughing-out-the-pieta-continued/feed/ 0 Corey studio 1-5-2012 (1) cropped pieta windows http://marycoreymarch.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/painting-challenge/ http://marycoreymarch.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/painting-challenge/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:28:48 +0000 marycoreymarch http://marycoreymarch.wordpress.com/?p=829 ]]> I pushed through a rough spot in the studio yesterday (not least because I forgot my headphones and had to paint through other people’s music and conversations).  I have been struggling with the Pieta painting and how I want to make objects in the alleyway fade in and out of distinction.   I want the figures themselves, especially the Mother figure to be more classical Renaissance in style, eternal-feeling, more real than the surroundings, but the alley/background needs to be less distinct.

It could be blended and fogged, faded, abstract… there are so many ways to go.

Yesterday I had a lot of pent-up, agitated energy.  I almost didn’t paint, but then I felt that it was exactly the energy that should go into the background.  As I started to paint the supporting objects for the figure (a tent-bag, folded blankets, a roll of foam, cardboard sheets) I found myself drawn to a larger brush than usual and went with it.  Bold strokes came out and I found myself loving the space behind them showing the underpainting.

This is hard.

It’s hard to leave those raw marks and not fuss over them.  There is a tendency towards smoothing things out and making them more representational if you know how (something I see when I’m tutoring or teaching a class all the time).    …but when I look at other paintings, those rough ones are the marks I love best.

I think this is my answer.  I’m going to rough it all in in this style, leaving gaps to the under-painting and then pick out tiny portions of objects to add detail to.   I want a little of that dream-feeling that objects only gain detail when you look at them closely and become indistinct otherwise.  I want it to feel in-motion, impermanent, to highlight the rock that is the mother-figure.  I think the “child” figure will have aspects of both.

The whole experience was a uncomfortable and unbalancing, but also refreshing in a way.  It’s a sign of growth- we can’t learn new things when we stay in our comfort zone at all times, and I intend to keep learning.

The painting I find most sublime is when someone can play surprising elements against each other: rough against smooth, figurative against abstract, digital against organic.  It goes with the obsession with liminality and paradox.

I’ve gotten to see my favorite piece grow in recognition and evolve as a piece. Identity Tapestry was honored with an award from Guggenheim curator Nathan Trotman, showed in two new places this year, gained a perfect basket-form, was enthusiastically invited to an upcoming “Kinetic Text” show in LA, and was included in the WCA’s 40th anniversary show catalog  by juror Rita Gonzalez (a contemporary art curator from LACMA).

I got back to painting- both working on new pieces, but also finishing ones languishing from the pre-child days.

I learned a lesson about my process:  While I love challenge, sometimes the best thing for the piece is to use the skills I already have instead of inventing new processes each time I work!  It seems obvious in retrospect but it nearly took a brick to the head.

I learned a new medium- glass casting and cold-working glass.

In addition to paintings I created a new installation piece, a new international collaborative project and a new sculpture.

I got my first grant (out of two I have ever applied for!)

My resume grew by 7 shows, one grant, one award, and one honorable mention from a large international competition- more than I’ve ever done in one year..

I got in many visits to galleries and museums and art fairs in SF, LA and New York.  I read more art history books and books about navigating the art world.

I broke down something that may confuse professionals looking at my art as a whole and am finding ways to frame the diversity in my work to make it clear as a consistent trait rather than random wandering.

I got to work with wonderful people.

I got more organized in terms of my career as a whole.

An old tutoring student visited me and told me what a difference I had made for him and his work.

I feel good about the studio this year. 

In a way things going so well also made me even more impatient for making new work and showing it.  I can’t wait to get to the studio.  I’m excited about the new pieces brewing in my mind, and by the speed I have found in my painting and what I will do with it.  I’m ready to buckle up and step on the gas this year.

One regret- I wish I had completely revamped my website.  I suppose that would be my first studio resolution.

I wish you all a happy new year.  Most especially thank you to all my friends and family who helped in some way to make those good things this year possible!  I was lucky enough to have people to help wind yarn, provide a bed in New York, lug/truck art around, help build panels, watch my daughter, and so much more.  You know who you are.  Thank you.

I had a few faces in mind to reference for the Mother, but I resisted my obvious choice initially to make certain it wasn’t just a default, but  Krystyna turned out to be a perfect choice.

Both of the models I used are mutual friends, and the man (Dan) models professionally. I picked Dan for the great slender definition in his  arms and legs, his curly hair and the fact that he was smaller than Krys (who is tall and big-boned).  It made for a better suggestion of Child in relation to her.  The fact they we were all friends made it easier to get them to pose comfortably for the reference photos I wanted.  I was also fortunate to have another mutual friend who is a photographer (also named Dan).  He was able to bring in all the lighting equipment and get just the lighting conditions I wanted.  I think the best results happen with people I’m really comfortable with, and I was extra fortunate in this case.

Though I always meant to change the woman’s features somewhat to blend between several ethnicities, I wanted to start with a face that had similarities to the Madonnas painted by the Renaissance masters (which Krys had).  I also wanted to find a little bit of a genetic mish-mash to launch from.  Krys’s grandparents are from Uruguay and Poland, with great grandparents from Lebanon, Italy, Catalonia (Spain), Germany and the Ukraine.  Even still I will be darkening her skin (which is extremely pale) and referencing a few other faces as I go from here to get a more universal look.

One thing was very important to me:  I would not have used a woman who was not an actual mother for main reference. I feel that there was something in motherhood that changes your face and range of expressions like nothing else.  I remember being able to recognize a mother-face as a young child, and to distinguish mother-faces from women who worked with children a lot and loved children (which were also notable).   At the same time, I know a nurse who has an infinitely tender and compassionate face (and is also a genetic mish-mash) who I will use as a secondary reference as I continue the painting.

My own mother is a cultural anthropologist (a student of Margaret Mead) who collected images of women and children from all over the world.  I was surrounded by them as a child and they have stayed with me.  While the image is now predominantly associated with Catholicism now, I have always seen it as much more ancient and universal.

It occurred to me as I was painting yesterday that I had actually been there when Krys gave birth to her daughter, the very first birth I’ve seen.   Afterwards (in her exhaustion) she had reminded me of a picture of my own mother taken after my birth.  They had the same color and length of hair and she was holding her baby in the same pose as the picture.  So in a way this model was a more perfect choice than I consciously realized at the time.

*later note*  At the holiday Open Studio, a man walked up to my space in such a way that he saw my source photo of her face before he saw the painting.  His response to the photo was “I love her face!  She’s a mother, isn’t she?” 

Today I had 4 hours in the studio and I completely re-worked the position of the faces and the under-painting for the skin.  I even roughed out some drapery changes.  The halo is a nifty side effect of changing the hair, but will only stay in the faintest suggestion.  The hair itself is minimally blocked out with room to expand.

I think the next thing for this piece is making sure my plan for the space under and to the left of the figures has enough weight to it to balance the right.  More work for Photoshop mock-ups!  So far I’m pretty pleased now that the figures are better placed.

*for more on this painting look under the “Pieta” category”

Last week I had an even shorter block of time in the studio and managed to finish a piece that has been languishing unfinished in my studio for far too long.  It was just time.  I had painted it in my mind ever time I came in, and suddenly I just had to finish it.  It just flowed.  Such a rush to get it out into the world!

There are a number of studies (most famously the basketball one) that show the results of doing a thing after spending a long time thinking through how to do it rather than actually doing it over and over actually gives better results.  I think this is the other half of why my painting is going faster.   I may not have studio time, but I think through all my work a great deal whenever I can, so that when I do get to the studio there is very little searching going on.

The newly finished piece below one shows some of the connection between my fiber pieces, the skin paintings and my sculpted canvases.  To the outside observer without a map, my work may seems less cohesive, but there are very strong lines running through all of it that exist for me.  I think that as I have more time to work the blank spaces connecting all the work in my mind will fill more visibly.  Things that seem unrelated will have more obvious connecting points.

Detail of Pieta in Progress, digital shift in blue

I’ve been using Photoshop as a painting aid for years, and right now I’m finding it even more helpful because I need to make my studio time count.  It enables me to try out various compositional strategies for my current painting at home by overlaying different sketches onto my current photo of the piece.  In this case I decided to use a different photo-source from the same shoot to get a better angle on the head and sketched it in in blue to correct on the canvas.
One side effect to long breaks between working on a painting is that my ideas for the treatment of the painting changes over time… and it gets better.  Were I able to paint every day I would probably do what many painters do, which is to scrape off and repaint ad nauseum.  I’m still doing some of that, but much less this way.  I’m not sure I would have the patience to do three or five separate versions of the same painting as some artists do, especially knowing that the versions I like less would be out there.

What happens with the breaks is that I come back to the painting with different ideas about how to do it, having tried them out in broad strokes on the computer at home.  It means I can rework things, try something, try something else, and immediately get an idea for how it will look without having to repaint.

This compositional shift (above) was an easy thing to do in Photoshop. What isn’t easy to do is a different treatment of the paint, which is what I’ve decided to do.  Originally I was planning to do a fairly traditional late-Renaissance/Baroque style painting in a contemporary setting.  I’ve decided I still want the figures to have that feel, bt that I want more mark and action, even abstraction in the background.  To that end I broke out the charcoal to sketch and inject mark into the under-painting. I want more of a chaotic jumble with suggestions of alleyway items: cardboard boxes, trash bins, shopping carts, crack pipe, sleeping rolls, etc.  At first I wanted those in detail, but I feel like it’s the suggestion that is important, with glimpses of detail- more like a memory or dream.  The figures are more solid because they are outside of time.  They reappear going back thousands of years, they are right now.  Mother and child.  The background changes, that part stays the same.  At first I also wanted to suggest baby as well as adult, but the pose does that.  I may find other ways to hint at it.

Other times I’ve really zoomed in when the piece is in action, overhearing comments and carefully watching statements shift.  This time I paid attention to the general motion of the piece and waited to hear from people directly when they realized I was the artist.  Because the space was more confined I didn’t want to add to the sensation by hovering over people’s shoulders watching them too closely.

The space definitely had an effect.  This was the first time that the first people to read the instructions didn’t immediately grab some yarn and start.  My guess is that the way it was placed in the room made it just a little more intimidating.  It was near the gallery’s desk with the front window to the right, the front desk to the left and people behind you if you faced the piece.  I imagine it gave a blind-alley feeling with people over one’s shoulder.

Still, I saw many of the people who walked away come back when other people started to participate.  At some point at the end of the first hour a critical mass gathered… and then it was mobbed as usual for the rest of the night.  There is anonymity in crowds.  I have started using certain statements to measure how comfortable people are as they do the piece.  I know what percentage of the population those statements are true for on average. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it makes them part of a person’s identity, so they could be skipped even if they apply, but I can still get an idea of whether people are comfortable enough to say the most difficult things… or not.   If I were given more control over the gallery space I would try to make it more comfortable.

Ideally comfortable or not, I was happy to see the way it effected people once again.  I even had a few come and hug me.  One woman in her fifties said that looking at her life, she felt she “had arrived”- a marked contrast to a woman of similar age in Brooklyn who told me she ‘realized that she didn’t really like herself’.  That the piece functions so well as a mirror is wonderful to me.  I did intend that self reflection, but I also intended people to be able to visually see there connections to other people.  I had people come away saying they felt less alone, knowing that other people shared certain things with them.  It is so gratifying to hear that sort of response.

Aside from the effect and interaction, I LOVED the basket.  It completes the cycle.  Cycles of life, death and rebirth are all through my work if you know to look for them.  It was nice to have that more explicit in this piece.  The stones were always memorials, and the tied ends of the threads always roots, but having the nest/womb/egg basket really sealed that.   It was perfect.

…and now when the show is over this piece can actually come off the wall and belong to someone.  It comes off just like a large panel painting.  It’s the first.  My hope for this piece is that each iteration gets preserved in a glass/plexiglass box like a reliquary or natural history museum display.  It is one moment in time, one group of people, one place.  No other will be the same.  Captured in that moment.

“Where is your brand?”

If an artist makes predictably similar work they are much easier to handle.  Do more than two mediums and you are looking for trouble.

I’ve known this for a while, but another aspect of it became clear to me in conversation with one of the gallerists.  He expressed the distress of collectors who collected a famous artist too early when their style had not “settled” yet.   The work was “worthless” because it was perceived as part of a thrashing-around-finding themselves-phase.  In fairness it may well have been done in a period of finding themselves, and if people want the work that is the most “real” from an artist, it makes sense that it be coming from an artist who is ready to be true to who they are.

This presents a problem for me because I do know myself… and I know myself to be a diverse, multifaceted person who will always make diverse, multifaceted work.  If I don’t confront this directly and fully from the start I will either have to pretend to be someone I’m not or leave the floor.  Neither is acceptable to me.

So for the first time in years I’ll be putting up a “bio”  on my webpage to address this directly.  If a bio is supposed to give the reader an idea of the person creating the work and where that work springs from it is as good as any.  It isn’t detailed or long enough to explain half the depth of the few facets I relate (19 years of doing massage- helping people use their hands, stand up straight, live normally, etc. is just one), but I can hope that it gets the point across.

Bio

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I realize that many people never find themselves, and some not until they are in their fifties or later.  Many need a massive transformative experience.  Many wake up late in life and feel they have lived a lie.

I can date my shift to being, knowing, and owning myself to 9th grade.  I have had many experiences that could be life-transforming (studying with a Lakota Medicine Man, traveling the world, living in other countries, attacks, teaching, Burning Man, finding my life partner, having a child…).  All of these added to who I am and informed me and my work, but they didn’t change my underlying sense of who I was.  They deepened and matured me… but I have known myself a long time (understanding that knowing oneself is always a moving target if one keeps growing and learning).  I belong everywhere and nowhere, but I am centered in who I am, and my work has a center too.

My work may appear disjointed to the cursory inspection- many mediums, many styles, many surface lines of thought.  Such an observer might suppose that I will “find myself” at some point and settle into a predictable style.  They would have to wait a long time.  My work reflects my multifaceted nature.  It reflects the breadth and depth of my experience.  It comes from a person who taught preschool, walked tightrope,  worked as a bouncer in a nightclub and rehabilitated the injuries of “hopeless cases” through Shiatsu massage.  I would have to cave in and give up my sense of self to produce easily branded work.

The unity in my work is a deeper current running through everything.  I return to themes again and again in new ways.  Themes such as social and personal perceptions of identity, connections and relationships between people and things, transformative situations, exposed process, reexamining things through multiple views or people’s perspectives, looking at old things in new ways…  all of them relate to liminality in some way.  I will drop certain lines of thought for years and return back to it with new ideas and a different medium, but the subject is the same.

I have no doubt that my work will always have this multifaceted appearance, united by the concepts that I have always wrestled and worked with.   Perhaps as the body of my work grows the connections and themes will become increasingly apparent to the average observer.

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Right now I’m starting to look at galleries.  I found three, maybe four last weekend that I want to keep an eye on out of hundreds.  I’ll keep watching. Somewhere there is a good fit who will be able to embrace the whole and not attempt to box me for sale.