Painting in Oil For anyone who's wondering what I have been doing with my time -- since I don't have a job, or a kid, or even a pet, here are some samples of one of my activities in the past few month: oil paintings.
I have always liked art. Even as a little child I liked doodling on paper, producing pages and pages of drawings. In a family of scientists and engineers, this activity was viewed as somewhat of a novelty, a childish fancy to marvel and poke fun at good naturedly, but never encouraged. My drawings of what I would call human figures were jokingly called "ghost" pictures. Admittedly, I was the only person in the family who had shown any interest in drawing. But so what? An artist, I was told, requires immense and obvious talent. That I apparently do not have. So why bother? Though I was also apparently not a genius in Math or science, had shown no interest in those subjects whosoever, these are fields where talents and/or interest are less important. So I never took art seriously, never took any art classes besides the mandatary ones in elementary school, and in time stopped doodling on paper altogether...
Wait! I am getting carried away here and starting to turn this simple report of my oil painting class into a history of my art development. Let me get back to my original intent and leave the other story for some other time.
Before this year, I had only painted in watercolor and tried my hands briefly at Chinese brush painting, which is a little like watercolor in a way. I like watercolor, but I have always been curious about painting in oil, the media of all the great masters. Once I enrolled in a community center oil painting class. But the teacher was an 86-year-old lady who had passed her teaching prime. She spent most of the time selling us paint, then ordering us to add up the amount of money we owe her, and rechecking our math. She was astonished to find that I could add acurately, but taught me next to nothing about oil painting and I left the class without finishing a single painting.
This year I actually learned something about painting in oil, from a wonderful teacher named Rebecca Alex. We started painting basic forms in black and white, then progressed to painting in the Grisaille method, glaziing colors over a monochramtic underpainting. This is the method practiced and perfected by old masters since the 17th century. A bit tedious, but it produces a luminous effect, which unfortunately was not captured well in this photograph.
Next we practice painting a series of still life. This I found challenging -- now that we are applying colors directly, the painting tends to lose it's value contrast. I also found it difficult to paint fast. Amazingly, time went by rapidly when painting, and I did not really finish any of the still lives. I was not particularly interested in still life painting to begin with, but seeing the works of some of my fellow students (who were not beginners), I am inspired to learn and practice more in the future.
At the end of the semester, we were ready to copy a master painting, then create our own in the same style. I chose "Oriental Poppies" by Georgia O'Keefe, one of my favorite painters. Several years ago at an exibition, "The Poetry of Things", I became completely mesmerized by her images of larger-than-life flowers and haunting Southwest landscapes. Her paintings are both abstract and figurative, with an expressiveness and evocative beauty that I admire. Her goal, "to fill space in a beautiful way", is exactly the way I want my art to be.
To create my own painting with her style was more difficult than I had expected. Rebecca wanted me to choose a subject matter that is not a flower, so that I would not be merely copying through the subject but understand the essence of her style. As a lover of water, I chose a picture of tropical waves as my inspiration. I found my painting process went through the following stages: first, excitement at this project, of painting something I love in a style I love; then came apprehension: could I really do this? I felt I knew so little! Then as the painting slowly took shape, I became alternately excited and depressed -- depending on the progress or the mess I made. I had fun playing with the waves, then had a lot of trouble defining the clouds -- they just never seem to look like what I imagined. Again, I am learning to have patience. The painting is still not completely finished (the clouds are still somewhat more like Van Gogh than Georgia O'Keefe), but I learned a lot from it. Even though it is not perfect, I still think I want to paint.
What next? I already mentioned that I was impressed and inspired by some of my fellow students' paintings of still life and portraits (unfortunately I do not have photographs of their works). I want to paint in a more painterly style, also to explore non-representational art. I am especially interested in learning to paint portraits, to return to my childhood theme, and finally producing something distinctly recognizable as human -- live ones, not ghosts.
(If you are wondering why I've been going on and on, it is because my classes are over and I finally have time to write long articles such as this for the blog... hope I am not scaring my readers! :) I must also say that it is so much easier to write in English!)
