I’ve always learned by watching people do things. This is a new age where perhaps we show too damn much…our breakfast….the new shoes we bought….every little thing we find amusing or ego boosting….. BUT
I still want to see people doing the things they value the most, the playful expressions of their creativity, and the countless ways they bring joy and meaning to their lives.
Over the last number of years I’ve documented quite a few paintings such as the one in the video. It’s a bit of a chore because you have to set things up, and key up in a slightly different way for the act of painting. But I found the process of documenting useful.
We are always a bit hidden from ourselves, and the video camera shows much about our own habits. Show 10 minutes of what you’re doing, and it’s like showing 10 years. What you do in the short term, will have a predictive power over what you do in the long term. If you paint or do anything involving, I recommend taking some video of yourself in action…..you’ll enjoy seeing it, and you’ll learn little secret things about your own habits and inclinations.
So much of painting is in the hand and the mark….I love how marks are made. For this reason I always show video at real life speed. I often like how decisions seem to come out of the blue. Are they decided, or do they just arrive? Things definitely are decided at some point. Things in a picture are kept, and things are discarded. But sometimes you can’t really see how things get going, and that’s often the fun of it.
No good painter knows what they are going to get in the end….it’s all a bit of a mystery.
Find artists at work that you find fascinating, for whatever reason. You’ll learn without knowing it. And you won’t know exactly what you’ve learned. But that’s the way it works.
Here’s one!
I’m working on encaustic paintings at my outdoor setup by the pond quite often during the summer, so I expect I’ll do a mailing about that process at some point before the weather turns in late fall. Probably that will be the subject of my next mailing.
As always, find my work at these 2 places:
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