Painting – Page 9 – Deidre Adams

339. Resonance

339. Resonance, 30 x 40 inches, acrylic & mixed media on panel-mounted canvas, ©2010 Deidre Adams

This is a new painting I finished last week. I’m quite happy with it. One question I’m asked frequently is how do I know when it’s done? I’ll admit that I struggle with that. The best answer I have is that it’s finished when it no longer nags at me. Each painting is done in stages. I work on it for awhile, then I set it aside. I keep several paintings, in various stages of completion, standing up where I can see them all around the studio, which spills over into my bedroom and even the bathroom. Sometimes I don’t come back to them for quite awhile, but they stay there in front of me where I see them every time I walk by. They are almost part of the landscape, but somewhere in my subconscious mind I’m thinking about each one, and when inspiration hits for a particular one, it gets another working turn. I can’t take it out of the lineup until I have declared it officially done.

At one point in the process for this particular painting, I thought it might be finished when it looked like this:

339. Resonance in progress

But I just wasn’t sure. It seemed OK, probably, but was it really? Somehow it seemed it wasn’t quite rich enough to me at this stage. This is when it’s the scariest for me. What if I do more to something that’s really pretty OK, and I ruin it? Actually, I’ve done that many times now, and so I’ve figured out that if that happens, I just keep going and eventually I can resolve it. Each of my finished paintings has had several different identities throughout its life. I could have called it done at any point, but I would not have been completely satisfied.

Here’s an even earlier stage of this painting:

339. Resonance in progress, early stages

The title comes from the 1939 edition of Physics by Erich Hausmann and Edgar P. Slack, a couple of pages of which are collaged into this painting.

339. Resonance, detail

This painting started out on stretched canvas. Normally, I like to work on panels because I build up textures by putting many layers of paint and medium on the surface. I don’t have any concerns about structural integrity when it’s on a hard surface. But when I started this painting, I didn’t have any panels handy, and I did have some canvases in storage (more about that here). I didn’t think I’d be making any great masterpieces; I had just come off a longish dry spell and all I cared about was getting back into the studio to paint!

When I got into the process of this painting, however, I became very committed to it and I put a lot of time and energy into it. And I do really love it. However, the weight of all the layered paint on the canvas was too much for the support, and it was obvious that it wouldn’t stand up to being moved around a lot. But I came up with a great solution. I have since bought some very nice panels, and for this painting, it was an easy matter of mounting it onto a panel with Golden gel medium.

I first thought I might need to use some kind of glue, but in researching it (don’t you LOVE the Google!), I found blog posts by people who had used soft gel medium to mount canvas to panel prior to painting. But there was nothing about using it for a finished painting, and I wasn’t sure the medium would be strong enough. So I called Golden tech support. I spoke to a very knowledgeable individual and explained the problem. He said that the Golden medium is preferable to glue because it is more stable chemically and not prone to breaking down over time like glue. He said that I should use the regular weight gel instead of soft gel, though, because it would better support the heavier weight. This was welcome news to me, since I already had a gallon tub of it sitting on my work table.

So all I had to do was pry out the staples holding the canvas on the stretchers and trim off the sides (but leaving about a half-inch safety border). I laid it down on top of the panel and got it positioned the way I wanted it, and then weighted it in the center with heavy books so it wouldn’t move. Then, starting at one end, I lifted up that side of the canvas, and with a wide putty knife, I spread on a layer of gel about a third of the length of the panel. I rolled the canvas back down from the middle, smoothing and applying pressure by hand as I went. I used a rolling pin over a towel like a large brayer to press it into place. Then I repeated the procedure from the other side in two stages: center, then the final end. I gave extra attention to the edges to make sure they were securely pressed down.

The gel is tacky enough that I could keep working on it without disturbing the positioning, so I decided that it would be best to get the edges trimmed before the gel dried and became difficult to remove. A lot of it splooges out the sides. So at that point, I turned the whole thing over and cleaned up as much of the excess gel as possible, then I used an X-acto knife to trim the canvas flush to the edge of the panel. After it dried, I sanded and painted the edges of the canvas to match top layer of the panel. Voilà!

October 18th, 2010|Painting|4 Comments

Ups and downs

Mining Chaos, 36 x 36 inches, acrylic on panel, ©2010 Deidre Adams

The past week has been a crazy emotional roller coaster, with extreme highs and lows. Briefly, one high was that I received notice that my textile piece Façade VII has been accepted into Quilt National 2011. This is just about the most prestigious juried show there is for art quilters, and it’s a great honor and achievement to be accepted. Readers who’ve been with me for a while will recall that I complained bitterly about being rejected from QN’09.

(Update 10/6/10: Note that the image above isn’t my QN piece. They have a rule that accepted works cannot have been published or shown on a web site other than the artist’s prior to May 2011. So even though this is my web site, I’m not taking any chances of being disqualified. The image shown here is a painting that will be part of the “Urban Beauty” show, details below.)

One very low was learning over the weekend that one of my favorite professors at Metro had passed away most unexpectedly. Eldon (“E.C.”) Cunningham was Professor and Printmaking Coordinator at Metro for many years; he was mostly responsible for building the shop and the department into a respected force in the printmaking world. He ruled the shop with a velvet-gloved iron fist, and while I can still hear him admonishing all of us to do our “shop jobs,” I also learned a great deal from him about being an artist, about developing intent and a strong work ethic. He didn’t suffer fools lightly, but he could find the good in all of his students and their work. He was incredibly generous with his time and knowledge, and he never hesitated to offer individual assistance. Critiques with him were an educational experience in which I learned some things not only about how to talk about art, but also how to deal with egos both overblown and fragile. Dear E.C., you will be missed!

Finally, I have good news about an exhibition. I will be participating in a group show called Urban Beauty at the CWCC Art Gallery. Details:

Oct. 20, 2010 – Jan. 5, 2011

Fall Art Show: Urban Beauty
Colorado Women’s Chamber of Commerce Art Gallery
1624 Market Street, Denver
Mon-Fri, 8-5

October 5th, 2010|Exhibitions, Painting|3 Comments

New work in progress

Well, I don’t know exactly what happened, but after a summer spent mostly unfocused and adrift, I have returned to painting with a vengeance. Maybe it was the change of the seasons, maybe it was getting some lingering projects finished, maybe it was limiting my Facebook and web-surfing time. Or maybe it was going to Ohio — so much yummy urban enchantment & so many fantastic surfaces — plus a change of scenery always does me a world of good. Whatever it was, I now have no fewer than 15 paintings and 4 textile works in progress.

A large part of my creative funk probably had to do with finishing school. As much as I complained and whined about the forced manner of the assignments, of having to do things I didn’t really feel fit with my vision, the truth is that I loved having a place to go and a community to be a part of. Being completely on my own is a two-edged sword: I am for the most part an introvert and find it hard to work with lots of noise going on around me, but on the other hand, the company can get kind of boring when it’s just me.

And my other problem stemmed from the normal letdown after a show is over and all the work comes back and is sitting there in the living room waiting to be stored. The sustained push to create all the work for my thesis gave me an energy that’s hard to maintain when there isn’t the goal of a show looming. It was easy to make excuses — I can’t make panels by myself, I can’t be creative when xyz is going on, etc.

But a little over a week ago, I was rummaging around in my basement for something, and I came across some canvases I had purchased a while back to use in class assignments. Over the last couple of years, I had bought quite a few of these when I found sales. Then we learned how to make our own canvases and panels. By about the 3rd semester of painting class, you are shamed into forgoing the purchased canvases in favor of either making your own (a pain if you’re just not into the whole scary electric saw thing) or buying them custom-made (expensive, and difficult to find someone who can make them to your standards at a price you can afford to pay). In any case, I had a large assortment of purchased canvases on hand, and I thought, why not just get a couple out and throw some paint on them, can’t hurt, right? I had to trick myself into getting back to work. “Self,” I said, “Now, you’re not really doing ‘serious’ work here, you’re just playing around, and if you make something really crappy, no one need ever know. So it’s OK. Go ahead.”

And that was all there was to it. I’ve been completely in the groove, just painting away the hours, totally absorbed. It’s that best possible art-making state, when the works just flows; it’s like a meditation, relaxed and most pleasant, and the realization that it’s time to stop and eat or do something else or go to bed or whatever is just plain annoying. This is how it should be.

September 20th, 2010|Painting, Work in progress|9 Comments