Tabula rasa: a new pose and a new sketchbook

I performed my Sunday routine: all my pencils have been sharpened and ready for another week of drawing. Tomorrow in Michael Grimaldi’s class, I start a new pose, pose number 11, and a new adventure. Tomorrow I also start a new sketchbook. I already miss the familiar tattered sketchbook and I am getting a little nervous about being without my notes from end of July to end of Oct. I am, however, ready meet another set of sketches, demo notes, quotes, and thoughts… a chronicle of my artistic development and obsessive fretting.

At the end of my outgoing sketchbook, I am a different student artist than I was at the beginning. There’s the fact that I was introduced to so many new and exciting ideas such as constructing the ribcage and the pelvis, and modelling. But more importantly, somewhere between the pages, I have decided to take my studies more seriously and become an artist. Who will I be at the end of the new sketchbook? I don’t think I can trump all the exciting firsts that happened during the reign of the outgoing sketchbook… and yet, somehow, based on my experience with drawing & painting so far, I know that more wonderful than imaginable things will happen between the pages of my new sketchbook too. And for that, I am thrilled and terrified.

Tabula rasa: daily painting woes

Since I last wrote in this blog, I started painting in oil. I paint almost everyday now… although that doesn’t mean I get to paint hours and hours each day mainly because painting is hard, makes me hungry, and gives me a gigantic headache. So there are days when it comes down to a 30 minute session, most of which is spent playing with my palette and admiring the new funky sheen used wooden palettes acquire.

Drawing is painful but painting is a whole new torture. There, of course, is the issue of seeing color but there is also the material… all those pigments, solvents, brushes, and surfaces. It is incredibly hard to stare at the subject, take five minutes to make a color that isn’t even close, try the color anyway to find that it actually looks different on the panel, and start all over again. I feel stagnant: like some Greek myth character, I may have been condemned to try all combinations and permutations of value, hue, and chroma until I die.

I paint daily and daily I want to quit. Yet the next day, I would be going about my day and then get this feeling that I want to paint everything. In the midst of that euphoric excitement, the finished painting is palpable… then when I actually sit down to do my color studies, the overwhelming frustration returns. But it is ultimately that feeling, the desire to paint everything, that causes me to try again.

This is a feeling I do not understand. And it does bother me that I do not quite know why I want to paint. A short, lovely, and profound book I read this week, Hawthorne on Painting, started giving me some clues. He never answers my question directly, but he does show me the enthusiasm of a painter as someone who is forever a student who searches for beauty and aims to represent it with utmost integrity. And maybe I want to paint because I want to be a painter.