Description:
Thronton.. Silver Wattle and Young Gum Leaves.. Life Portrait Workshop.. A Tribute to Jean Ferguson..
Contents:
Thronton
At last I am back on Blogger and updating my posts.
As artists we all need an injection of inspiration to get us going again. I felt that I had become a bit stale and lost inspiration to begin new work. I was using the excuse that I didn't have the money to restock on painting supplies to justify what was really just lack of motivation.
Michael Goff who many of you know is a good friend and art mentor that I often share critique sessions about my work and art in general. We often discuss teaching too. Anyway he invited me to spend a couple of days with him at Ernie Trembath's amazing studio in Thornton.
A view of the inside of Ernie's studio and one from the upper floor
Ernie's studio situated on the Goulburn River is absolutely amazing. A huge mud brick studio (3200 bricks to be precise) supported by huge recycled power poles. The main gallery is a lofty 30 feet high with mezzanine living bedroom area up stairs.
Day one was arriving and settling in followed by a walk to explore the local area and scout for good subject to paint. If you know Ernie's work you will be familiar of the classic misty morning gums and pastoral scenes. The morning's had been producing good fog so I was keen to get out and give it a go.
After a 5.30 am rise and quick protein shake for breaky I headed of into the brisk morning air to paint the fog rising off the river. It was magic, swirling fog on a mirror stream shrouding the trees that flanked it's banks. Trees loomed from the mist which glowed as the sun attempted to burn it's way through. I managed to capture the Major values and feel in a one hour sketch. Just I was preparing to lay in some detail the fog cleared as though surrendering to the suns might. In a flash it was gone and I was hooked. I came away with a good painterly sketch that I can use to paint a much larger work.
I returned to the studio for a good breakfast and headed straight out to paint the same scene again in morning light. A good painting but lacking the mystery and peacefulness of the earlier one. It was the fog that I was there for. Michael's students had arrived by the time I finished and he was off again showing them the sights and good painting locations.
That night we had a big barby and shared stories around the camp fire till the late hours ticked by. We finished the night with a talk from Ernie in the studio by a large work that he was touching up. I learnt more in that hour than I had learned any where about landscape painting. The following morning I intended to go even further afield and paint the fog.
Setting out at 7.00 I trekked a good kilometre to reach the point I intended to paint. Note to self, I need to devise an easier way to lug all my gear out there. Any way I made it and prepared to paint with the on look of curious cows. They were more interested in the contents of the bucket I use to carry some of my stuff in.
From the beginning of this painting I employed a few of the ideas I got from Ernie's talk. Instead of the usual tonal wash ins I worked thick paint directly to the canvas to map out the major values. This saved me heaps of time and gave me a good surface to build on. Three hours later I was nearly complete before the fog instantly retreated to give way to a morning sun. That's it, time to pack up and head back. This painting I am very pleased with and I shall post the finished sketch soon. It will make a great subject to do on a much larger scale along with the photos I took I have enough inspiration to last me a while.
I am planning to go back there as soon as I am able even if it is just for twenty four hours. Interested in joining me, I will happily plan a work shop so you can get the opportunity to try painting outdoors with tuition.
more on this subject to come and pics of course.
Cheers
Jeff
Silver Wattle and Young Gum Leaves
OK, I know it's been a while, in fact it seems likes ages since my last post.
For the last 6 weeks or so I have been working on a few projects just for myself. These works have zero market appeal (perhaps I'm wrong there) but were merely exercises to keep my eye in and play with a few ideas that I have had.
The work consists of a series of self portraits, again it is just for the exercise and to keep me painting. I am glad I have done them and I am quite pleased with the results although I have had some mixed opinions over them. I promise that I will post them soon, once I have some images of them.
For now though I want to share with you my latest still life study. It is pretty much in the safe and typical vein of what I like to do but I did enjoy it and the result is quite pleasing.
Life Portrait Workshop
Above
60 minute demonstration study of Phoebe
Hi all,
What a lovely week end I have had. Two days in Moorboo North surrounded by forests of towering mountain ash, and a host of wild life including lyre birds. Though I never got to see them their distinctive mimicking calls ring through out the day.
A much needed rest after the two day portrait workshop. Whilst it was a lot of fun it was also a lot of hard work. Those who participated worked tirelessly to complete their work within the two days and the results were great.
The workshop started off with me giving a 60 minute demonstration on the techniques of portrait painting in oil using a classic tonal approach(above picture). It is always a challenge talking and painting at the same time. It seems that the parts of the brain responsible for these functions do not easily operate independently. However in the brief time allocated and with all the talking I managed to present a painterly sketch of our subject , Phoebe.
What I set out to demonstrate to the group was that in order to paint a portrait there are certain 'keys' that need to be identified and recorded early. These are in the abstract shadows and forms that reveal likeness of the subject.
One of the most important things to remember is 'if you paint everything else, then every thing gets painted'. Using the shadows to reveal the nose and the major features and painting the eyes by painting the peripheral areas that make up the eye. These are abstract concepts that students often struggle with so it was important that we spent a good deal of the workshop reiterating these fundamentals.
I look forward to seeing more photos of the end results in my inbox over the next few days but for starters we have an strong and confident work by Wendy Havard below.
A Tribute to Jean Ferguson
It is with a sad heart I write this entry. I want to pay tribute to Jean Ferguson who past away on Saturday the 14 of June from secondary complications of cancer.
I came to know Jean very well through our encounters at the society especially our Saturdays together where I was demonstrating and Jean was the manager on duty for the day. We spent many afternoons together, me painting and Jean joining in for conversation and laughter to while away an other wise quiet day in the gallery.
Jean was always very encouraging and supportive towards me and for that I have great appreciation.
Jean you will be missed and I thank you for the support you gave me and on behalf of the Sherbrooke Art Society for the commitment and contributions you have made.
Wet Paint Up Date
Recently I was at that point that we all experience, painters block. The urge with in me to paint was as strong as ever yet I couldn't figure out what it was I wanted to paint. I was feeling a bit bored with what I had been doing, something had to change, but what!
For the exercise I forced myself into the studio and set about doing some small landscape studies from images on a laptop. I painted a seascape of Portsea which I needed for promotion of my Portsea workshop and a small creek study. Both paintings pleased me and loosened me up a bit for some more considered work.
It came upon me quite by accident when flicking on the lights in the studio. I switched on a light to the storage area, the place I refer to as the gate way to hell, you have to see it to understand what I mean; as I switched on the light and with out a thought turned, it struck me. The gate way to hell presented the most amazing soft lighting effects. I quickly cleared some space on one of the sculpture benches stored in there and tested the light effect on some bits and pieces with in the studio, magic.
This is the sort of lighting I have been trying to figure out how to artificially duplicate and here it was in the least likely place.
The lesson here is to make a start, any start, it matters not. In starting we open ourselves to the possibilities that await us every day.
Although I have been painting for 20 years now I don't consider that I am above practice so I set up a small still life study to explore the effects of this new found lighting. This is virtually a monochrome painted just for fun. I call it The Philosopher
As a result of this exercise I have now more paintings lined up in my head than I have time to paint them. I intend to get back into the studio this weekend and begin a larger still life.
Sunday Demonstration
Last Sunday I was back in the gallery doing a free demonstration for anybody who cared to watch. I find these demonstrations a valuable marketing exercise as well as an opportunity to get some practice in.
The 10 Steps of Mastering Tone
The long awaited seventh step is due to be published in the next couple of days. This chapter focuses on perspective and proportion. I hope that you have been enjoying the ebook and that you have discovered some practical ideas that you can employ in your understanding of painting and in the analysis of the nature of things
I deviate from my current thread of Art or Income to bring highlight to a point I made in recent articles.
Melbourne artist Philip Hunter has just had a sell out exhibition grossing almost $1M dollars.
His contemporary landscapes are highly collected and early bird sales saw much of this recent exhibition sell before opening. Hmmm, interesting isn't it.
Reading editorials about his work one can't help but get the feeling that the narrative is more interesting than the picture and that bourgeois verbage covers up any real merit in the art. So often the case when left field intellectuals of art start frothing at the mouth to justify their collective grip on Australian Art industry. Yet, you've got to give to the man, he remains consistent in his style to an audience that obviously worships him.
Great art? I can't be the judge of that but he certainly dispels the myth of the poor artist.
There is money for artists out there, lots of it. Traditional art may not get the big headlines but if the presentation at the Sherbrooke Art Society on Saturday 17 May for the Streeton Roberts McCubbin awards are any indication then traditional Australian art has deep roots in the Australian psyche and a pioneering spirit that is inspiration to the realist artist and will stand the test of time and fashion.
Keep forging ahead. Of course there's money it!
That's my bleat for the day.
What do you think?
Artist or Income? - Business tools
In my previous posts I have talked about paradigms, the belief system that is keeping you poor. In the last post I promised that I would give you some basic business tools that can help you promote and build your art business.
Online
The Internet is a powerful place but unless promoted it can be of little value to you. Imagine your website is a grain of sand on a very big beach, and you expect people to find it! The World Wide Web is like any other advertising platform, it requires promotion. I recommend tapping into all the free stuff on the web , and there is heaps of it. You can set up your own blog like this one through Blogger, Awebber or one of the many others that offer free blogging. Alternatively you can opt for a free website, these free sites are quite adaptable and flexible to users needs. You will however need to register a domain name. Ireckon is an Australian based company that offers cheap rates for domain names. This will cost you anything from $25 - $50 a year depending on the dot part of the address ( eg .com, .net, .info) You can monetise your site with Google AdSense even insert cool widgets to make your site an e-commerce site, like this one. All this can be done for free.
Once you have a blog or website you will want to let all the major search engines know where to find you. Search engines like Google and Yahoo will eventually crawl your site and add your site pages to their lists but you have just built your flashy new blog and you want people to find it through relevant searches.
If you create an account, again this is free, with Google for example you can register your site for crawling. Google will send it's bots to crawl across your site and list it in the search engines registry. How cools is that, and the best part is a twelve year old could probably do this with out too much fuss.
Once listed with the major search engines you will want to list your new site with every group and network community you can find. Most of it is free. Some good places to start are Blog Explosion, Feed Burner, Bloggers Blog, Blogarama. There are dozens more, take your pick.
Blog and web search engines reward on relevance, the more relevant you make your site by offering information, service, amusement the higher your placement in the search results and the higher your page ranking. Page ranking will ensure that you are on the top of the free listings results of the search page.
The exciting part of all of this is it is all absolutely free. Search engines want your business so badly they give it away for nothing. There's got to be a catch I hear you say. No, there isn't. No catch, no strings attached.
Free Internet - Key words and meta tags.
Whilst writing this I am aware that the world of html is changing and one day this information will be obsolete but for now I will spend a bit of time on key words and meta tags, we can adapt to what's new when we get to it. Key words and meta tags help search engines find relevant sites to the search phrase i.e; income from art. The key words are art and income so search engines will find all sites that feature these key words in their content and meta tags and rank them on the search results according to page rank and relevance. The meta tags are entered at the top of the html so web spiders find them easily. Also web spiders can't read images, so if your key words or phrases are in an image they will not be seen.
Also the articles or content that you include on your site should also include the list of key words and phrases that searches are likely to use. There are some great tools out there that can give you the lists and ranking of relevant key words and phrases that can help you do this. Google offers a very cool service for bloggers that will help you with meta tags and key words.
I have included online tools for this article because it is something that people feel they have been left behind in. We all know that the Internet is somewhere that you can make money but most of us haven't the foggy idea as to how to tap into this amazing resource. I want to tell you two things here. One, the Internet can be accessed and used by anybody, it's not that hard and two, do not expect it to make you wealthy over night.
Webmasters working for large organisations have huge budgets to use when optimising their sites. They use any and every advertising media including pay per click advertising to drive traffic to their sites. I share this information with you not to help make you rich, though quite possibly it can but so you can have an online presence that you can drive your prospects to. Most of these prospects come from offline promotional activities and people that you know.
This blog acts as an online tool that I can send new students or prospective buyers to. Any email I send out I have links to this site, all material I print I also include links to this site. If people like what they see they sometimes subscribe, join my class, buy a book, click on an ad or simply return from time to time when browsing.
The name of the game for driving traffic to your site apart from the fore mentioned is building a data base. Once you have a data base you can begin to market to them. Data bases have a viral quality about them, they can spread, it's called word of mouth, one of the most powerful media resources around.
The next entry I will focus more on building this data base starting locally and building globally.
Artist or Income - The poor artist
I mentioned in my last post the paradigm that exist with in us, the poor artist.
Let me say to you upfront, this is a myth. A belief system that by it's very nature is designed to keep you poor. Before you can begin to earn a brass razoo from your art you have to dispel the power that this myth has over you and rewrite your thinking with a new belief system.
Stand guard to the door way to your mind and keep check of the thoughts that you allow. Positive thoughts generate positive outcomes, negative thoughts generate negative outcomes.
We all want success, more than that we all want recognition for that success. However success is relative. If you are a poor hungry artist right now then you are indeed successful, successfully broke. Your belief systems and actions are working to provide you with exactly what you have been thinking. It suits you perfectly, why else would it be. There is no single external factor that keeps you from having everything you want. The Universe conspires in your favour, think poor artist and poor artist you'll be.
Your thoughts set up a reaction of cause and effect that ripple through every aspect of your life. You will never know of the opportunities that lay strewn along the path way to mediocrity.
Start thinking of what it is you want to achieve and an exact amount of what you believe you are worth as if it has already happened. Research done with athletes has found that visualising their performance before an event actually improved their on feild results. We are by nature what we think about. Next work on some goals that are believable to you but not limited by your current short sightedness. The final step is to put in place an plan of action that will get you there. And take each step one foot in front of the other towards achieving it.
Give your self time. Things won't manifest according to your will they are a result of your actions. Your thoughts dictate even the smallest actions and these actions through the laws of cause and effect manifest as the fruits of our labour.
For an extra income stream with residual ongoing return my wife and I joined a direct sales company to work from home. Before that I confess I had been working with negative belief systems about my self. Although I knew this stuff instinctively I was too arrogant to admit that I was sabotaging my own growth. Direct sales companies advocate on having a strong 'Why' and working on your self is as important as working on your business. I applied these tools to my art business and noticed with in a very shot period of time that my situation was steadily improving.
The most important element to success is having that unshakable belief that it will work for you. Study any successful person and you will find that they all have in common a strong personal belief of their mission in life. Your actions will determine your success and action, like thoughts require constant practice and discipline. It is my observation that most people lack the discipline necessary to achieve what it is they want. Successful people do what the unsuccessful don't do!
Generating cash flow
All businesses need cash flow for them to survive. Whilst you are working full time you can budget some cash and funnel it towards your art business. Use this money for production and promotion, materials, your subscriptions and membership fees. The next thing is generating cash flow from your business. I generate my cash flow from tutoring students in oil painting. When I started out I had no job remember, so I had to apply value to my business with no money to invest. I started by offering my services to the art society that I was affiliated with by doing free demonstration paintings in the main gallery on weekend days. The gallery was glad for the activity going on and I felt that I was doing something. The paintings that I produced from these demonstrations all sold either to people I knew or through the gallery. That's cash flow. Next my presence at the gallery attracted more and more students to my classes. I went from half a dozen students to twenty students in just four months.
Home
|
