Taking the fun out of it...

On the Metro, Acrylic on Canvas Sheet, 18"x 24"

Art at the Mill is described as, "one of the premier art shows in the mid-Atlantic region, attracting artists and buyers from over a dozen states."  The show does offer a huge number of works from 300 amateur to professional artists.  Eleven years ago the pig painting I entered seemed the most likely to sell because of the predominance of pastoral landscapes, animal portraits and other bucolic works that dominate the show.  Instead my view of St. Peter's cupola with a male figure from behind in a winter coat was the one to sell. This year will be my second attempt to exhibit.  Of the five pieces submitted one was accepted.  A pensive portrait of a little girl wise beyond her years, it seemed the most likely to be noticed.  Although it is well painted, it was not remarked upon by many in my small circle of artists.  Remember we paint for ourselves, not for anyone else, right?  But what about selling art-- is it to please the artist or the buyer?

Bastava Baciarmi, Acrylic on Canvas Sheet, 18"x 24"

This figure study has received the most attention from my circle of artists in recently posted works. Perhaps it is the daring nature of a nude that makes others stop to stare.  Objectively the painting is brighter, more boldly painted, and not overworked into awkwardness. I felt more free as I was painting this than I did with On the Metro.  This work was also submitted for Art at the Mill.  It isn't too surprising that it was not accepted.  I do live in Virginia, and I can't remember the last time there was a nude hanging at the Mill.  Or it could be that the cropped composition and surreal background just did not suit their look this year. Offering such a work for consideration makes me that much more vulnerable.  Something I painted to make myself happy does not necessarily garner the approval of others. I'll be curious to see what else hangs this Spring. 

Putana della Miseria, Pencil on Paper (my most viewed on flickr
for no apparent reason other than someone looking for a tattoo
design with hearts and flames)

The process of offering work for consideration, even if it's just to ask a loved one, "What do you think?" is risky.  What lives in our minds and hearts is not normally on display.  As an artist the exposure to the opinion of others can be detrimental to our creativity if not processed with a grain of salt.  We have never lived in an age where images are so readily available as they are now.  The act of someone choosing to look at your painting, much less go through the effort of framing and installing it into their life, can be a huge commitment.  If I were to live on painting, there would be that much more risk involved.  Perhaps that is what it takes to be truly daring and liberated as an artist.  After all, buyers are paying for a unique piece of the artist that only they have procured.  With so many Artistes in the world, however, the cachet of ownership has become diluted.  In a relationship with privileged patrons the onus is on the artist to really stand out.  

Embrace, Acrylic on Canvas Sheet, 16"x20"

One way to be noticed is to widen my circle of potential patrons.  This month I posted work for sale on Etsy.  Although the pedigree of this electronic venue may not compare with that of Art at the Mill, I should be more likely to find patrons by casting my nets across the globe.  If nothing else, the twenty cents it costs to post a work on Etsy is a lot cheaper than the $40 application fee to even be considered for display at a local show.  How's it going so far?  Well, the game of getting noticed via social media is a lot more work than I realized.  Even on Etsy, it's about who you know and who knows you.  Eager to set up my community, I immediately searched for artists I admired.  There are no shortages of brilliant artists out there.  There is even a handy group called Finding Fine Art which aims, "to provide a unique shopping experience for fine art collectors seeking original art on Etsy."  Sounds so easy in some ways.  I have posted seventeen items for sale, all created in a six month creative growth spurt.  No purchases so far, but I have been told by my friends to be patient.  So I will.  Regardless of selling or not, I paint.

Figuring Next Out

Davanti le Porte, 16'x20', Acrylic on Canvas, 2011

All of December has gone.  The holidays and cold kept me from the studio, but I have set up shop in my kitchen again.  My course-work with Mary Ann Wakely is almost done.  Painting with her has opened up so many doors that it is hard to choose the next step.  It will involve the body and portraiture-- I'm just not sure how.  After playing with paint under tutelage, a thrilling return to images and ideas long stock-piled has become possible.  Slave to the photograph in the past, I am now eager to paint past the pre-conceived and captured image.  Portraits and figures have always taunted me with their illusive nature.  In turn my work on the canvas is usually labored and frustrated.  With new found freedom in paint, I hope that the forced quality of past projects will fade.

Orage, 16'x20', Acrylic on Canvas, 2010

Before considering the challenges to overcome, why not celebrate what I have gained in the last 2 months?  Comparing the first painting of the class with this most recent work offers an excellent window into the changes not only in my work, but in myself.  The very first painting is difficult to look at without seeing the possibilities of hind sight.  I had an experience in my head that I wanted to capture.  There in lies the problem: capturing implies some kind of control, possession and/or seizure.  It offered the comfort of structure initially, but as I worked I found myself painted into corners without satisfying solutions.  As an initial effort it showed promise of how I might not create corners in future paintings.  And so I sent it off in the mail to Mary Ann to help me move on to the next painting.  It was liberating to let go of something that seemed so precious.  I was free for the next step.  Davanti le Porte is not corner-free, however, my eye and mind move more freely through the composition and color.  It plays with my imagination in a way that Orage cannot.

Inside Saturn, 18'x24'?, Acrylic on Canvas, 2010

The most surprising painting of the class is Inside Saturn.  Its process was a painful, ugly with a middle phase that looked like an aquarium on a mottled, multi-colored mess with sienna, green, orange and blue in all the wrong places.  The goal was to allow myself to make an ugly painting.  I hated it so much I didn't even photograph it in that awkward middle stage.  Here is the under-painting, I think. Something called Palette Fingers I.  Painted at the end of the day to rid

Palette Fingers I, 2010

my palette of paint in preparation for the next day-- it seemed a hopeful final gesture as the sun set in the studio.  Looking at them side by side they have a similar abandon to an intuitive release with only the color and brush as structure.  I would be able to look at these for years before I tired of the meandering energy and possibilities in the forms.  It was that middle step where I forced myself to make an ugly painting where the corners built themselves around my head.  Mary Ann and I were having one of our sessions over google video when Inside Saturn came to life.  I credit the ability to make a silk purse from a sow's ear to a synergy in working side by side with another artist who so easily abandons herself to that intuitive play with whatever is in her hand.   

Al Ronego, A Casa, 24'x24', Acrylic on Birch Plywood

And then the holidays came with the demands of family and a need to gift something home-made from the heart.  People love having an artist in the family to paint their myths.  Recovering and fallen Catholics still love pulling one out just in time for Christmas Eve.  It almost makes up for never going to church.  I wanted to please my mother without taming my new found freedom.  So I painted her child-hood home with reckless grass, dirt and trees in greens and masses of brown, blue and purple that I simultaneously tangled and combed until satisfied.  The composition is dead-simple and the patron almost impossible to disappoint-- a loose enough structure to try on my new independence from corners.  She was happy and I was happy.  What next?

Davanti le Porte, (progress)

I came across some night-time photos of Italy taken with an unsteady hand and an improper setting on the digital camera.  The energy of the bouncing light and unclear buildings seemed a likely subject to explore with free-flowing intuition at the helm.  I set to work capturing an accident-- how foolish!  It almost worked until the cookie cutter planter painted itself in the middle ground, and the realization that the awning was never going to behave.  That was it.  I had to destroy some of these corners.  I flung light gold paint and lazer lines of light until it hummed with the unclarity of bad photography and happy accident.  Suddenly the interiors were alive.  The title made complete sense.  In front of the doors, but also inside from where energy was leaking out into the alley.  A cathedral of unstructured abandon emerged.  I came across a much more masterful painting like this by Vittoria Ramondelli called Cardini in my travels to Rome in June.  It haunted me immediately and echoes had emerged on my canvas 7 months later.  This is why I signed up for the class with Mary Ann.  Not to copy Vittoria's work, but to force myself to abandon my self so I might tap the same well.

On a high from escaping the corners, I met with Mary Ann via google video this week.  Like the dying Fawkes in Harry Potter, we both weren't sure of what was next.  Buoyed by the inspiration of works like these and my own recent applauded attempt at an abstract nude, I felt less like Fawkes.

In the Afternoon by Peter G Hall

Nude by Kamyanov Igor V

nu allongé by Olivier Rouault

Figure Study, 8'x10', Acrylic on Canvas, 2010

The optimism was short lived as I tackled my next canvas.  Mary Ann asked me what I wanted to do-- play with the paint until the figure emerged.   The result was not the intuitive accident I was looking for.  An unhappy Mayan War Goddess appeared with disproportioned limbs, chest and head.  Where was my graceful nude floating in an ethereal bath of light and shapes?  The energy was the same stubborn energy of capture from the beginning of my class with Mary Ann.  With any luck I can put hard earned awareness to use and paint with greater satisfaction next week.  As for Art with Mary Ann II, I am not sure what the curriculum could be.  I do know that looking at this strange portrait there isn't a lot of worry. The key is to abandon the new corner I have painted myself into.  What next?  Learn to draw the figure without control, possession and/or seizure.  Simple drawings, watercolor, something to carry me through harsh January and February.  My last session is next week.  Perhaps I'll just wait and see what happens. 

I just don't Know

I had artist envy at a very early age.  My first-grade art teacher loved the work of a Korean girl in our class.  She didn't speak much (if any) English.  I remember her water colors.  He would have to take them away from her before she rubbed a hole in it from all her work.  She would get very upset with him when he told her they were done.  I remember her struggling to keep the piece of paper on her desk.  They were beautiful.  The memory of the push and pull between artist and teacher tugs at me when I stand in front of the canvas still.  I need that first grade teacher to take away the paints and put me in front of a new blank mind this week.

Here is Thing 2 in Progress:

 The chiaroscuro underpainting

 The initial explosion of color.   I shudder when I see sienna anywhere near green... and still it happens.

 I love the upper left hand corner, but that egg shaped horizon would not shake loose.  It was on purpose to prevent any frenzied flipping.  Must control something.

 The break in the horizon helped, but the right hand tree had disappeared in a parallel river path to the ochre distance.

 Bring the pink into the foreground and break up the right with black. 
Over thinking things? Yes.  But can't I fall in love with the neurosis of it all?  Some people stab away at a canvas for years.
It could be the cold that has crept into the Eastern Mid-Atlantic and the half naked trees in post peak splendor.  Either way, today was rough going.  Not wanting to waste the rest of the paint and the lovely birch board I had primed, out came this before leaving:

 Which way is up? I just don't know.

Which Way is Up?

Clumpy paints from years ago.  Bumpy canvas.  Stray brush hairs.  A paying job demands attention.  Immediate creative vertigo.  Swimming in cold weather, ill prepared with an expectation of warmth outside the door, I made it to the studio with a lavender hat, a pink scarf and my thermos.  Thanks to passive solar radiation it was warm.  In spite of well laid under-paintings, today seemed like a waste of last week's enthusiastic preparation for a new fluency in my painting.  It wasn't.  Read on and you'll see.

Last Friday I wanted to paint large.  The tubes of liquitex felt skimpy.  Why not use the paints purchased for summer camp 6 or more years ago? First there was some black.  Shiny thick with a hint of blue, it made a great first mark on the birch plywood.  It felt somber, so out came the white. The brush marks of the hardware store 2 inch brush were sponged away here and there.  Cheap paint disintegrates into its component colors really well with water washes. The hint of payne's grey and purple were not intentional.  The other thing about these particular paints is that they don't dry right away.

 While waiting, I pulled out 2 hand stretched canvases primed with gesso that had frozen and thawed at least 4 times.  It felt like a layer of sand under white paint.  I hoped the color would help.  Grey alone was too superficial.  Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Raw Sienna?  How about red, yellow and a dash of blue?  With a little black it became umber and on its own it came close to sienna.  As drier flecks of paint rose to the surface, they were slid off the canvas with a brush and washed away in the bucket of water.  This was slower and less magical than expected, but it was a road map for something waiting in my mind.  An abstract chiaroscuro with major components of the composition appeared like an out of focus sepia print. It would be perfect when I came back to the studio on Monday... right?

Inspired by some of the pictures snapped on my phone, I was working toward the strong contrast of October light on the trees and grass.  If I start with an idea of a tree, it usually turns out to be anything but.  It felt childish.  Separate parts of a scene would pop into my head--yellow leaves, horizon, sky, trunk.  With the brush I wandered from icon to icon.  The idea was to get the color out in a new way.  Unfortunately the distraction of sand and loose hairs from the brush made me want to leave.  In a moment of intense disappointment, I flung the canvas across the room.  It was also time to do some paper-work and have a "Farm Meeting".  Checking out physically and mentally was the best way to put a day and a half of  seemingly wasted work into perspective.  My call with Mary Ann would surely give me some guidance.

She did give me a lot of ideas, but they fell on somewhat cynical ears today.  At 3pm I came back with these synthesized pearls.  Some days conditions are crap.  Just get to work.  And so I did.  I abandoned good brush technique that would just be a waste on uncooperative ground.  My  hardware store brush worked just fine, but I was caught in the icons swimming in my head.  I just kept working really fast and flipping the canvas every time I felt like flinging it across the studio.  Tom Waits was on.  If he can make music out of junkyards, I could make something out of this mess. The staid landscape icons faded. As I continued to flip the canvas some interesting things were almost born: a raven, a woman's face, a female torso, huge owl eyes.  Tempting as they were, I kept painting them away.  My technique: make smaller studies in a round robin of frenzied activity only on the parts that itched each time I flipped the canvas.  Was I playing with the paints?  Yes.  And it was as decadently satisfying as alternating spoons of peanut butter with bites of chocolate.

At some point, glutton's remorse set in.  Just what the heck was I doing?  Although there were some excellent pieces of paint, which way was up?  The horizontal sky on top of a quilt of color was not completely disorienting; however, it was not what I wanted.  It felt lazy and formulaic.  So I took it out in the sunshine for a photo.  It's strange how the camera can act as a fresh pair of eyes.  I saw the beauty, but I wanted vertical instead of horizontal.  Solution: flip it again, consolidate some warm colors in the center with ochres, and let the orchid invade the column of green on the right.  To my surprise, the canvas started to behave.  With fingers and brush I had tamed it.

The crazy thing is, as I type this way too late on a school night,  I wonder-- Did I go one step too far?  Who cares?  No, really.  It doesn't matter.  No matter the intention, after an honest process something living was born.  It changes each time I look at it.  Even with the moments of intense doubt I come back to it.  The beauty of photography is the ability to preserve as you go.  I can have step four and five if I want, and step five is growing on me.  At the end of the day Thing 1 was put aside, and my new favorite ritual was repeated: clean the palette.  It's as meditative as washing the dishes after a huge, delicious meal.  This time there is a little more structure to the process.  It hit me as I was leaving the Food Lion last Thursday.  Here is what it looks like in the first few stages.  Working with a photo in my head and off to the side of the canvas, avoids a lot of the pressure to make something just as it is.  I'll let you know how it turns out.

Week One: Getting There Part 2

Thursday is busy at Smith Meadows Kitchen and has been since the business began in 2003 when I was making all the pasta, ravioli and sauces for weekend markets.  Yikes! It's hard to believe that 7 years later I can spend a Thursday morning in the studio.  The feel of failure from the night before had faded.  Forrest and the farm apprentices were moving the cattle, the air was crisp, my staff of two was in the kitchen making ravioli, and I was free to get into the studio.  On the way I showed our farm hand, Robert Albright, my current work in progress.  "What ya got there? Purple, green, blue and some white. That's real nice. You want some gum?" His smile and the stick of gum was just right, in spite of his skeptical glance at my canvas.  I might not need my tea today.  With the clarity that morning can bring, the white smear that spelled failure last night became the ocean I had once tried to paint in this piece early in 2010. Or was it clouds?

The emptied palette needed to be scraped clean with fresh paints added.  My old glass palette was irreplaceable for how easily it shed dried chunks.  Nonetheless, I couldn't keep wasting so much paint, so the deviled egg holder with lid has taken its place.  I can't resist a complete rainbow when getting started.  The sickly sea green from Florida dominated the right corner of the canvas, but with some orchid, naples yellow and parchment Girogione's sky might appear.  There was sea spray in the white.  There would be sand (somewhere) and the irrepressible horizon would emerge.  It was all unavoidable.  What to do about the accidental blunder of sienna and hunter green that met too early?  Greys are the most fascinating part of mixing color.  I flirt on the edge of mud with many combinations of opposing hues.  Shades of green and red have always been my least favorite (an aversion to Christmas?). Payne's grey and phthalo blue (green shade) to the rescue with some gloss varnish medium.  No more mud where the ocean appeared, but what about the upper left?  The same tension from Orage had presented itself in the new canvas.  To the left was more sienna/hunter mud, and to the right were some distinct masses of sand fading into a payne's grey horizon line.

It was resolved with a similar solution as in Orage.  A slow drying gel mixed with some iridescent medium into sienna and more orchid as it touched the sky.  Then a touch of lemon yellow on parchment, on raw sienna in the very top left to give a reason for the misty haze that creeped toward the sunny sand.
How did I end up with the exact same tension in the second canvas? Was it resolved any better in this piece?  Beyond the Sea may not be fully realized.  The right still struggles for some kind of comprehension, but the ambiguous quality draws my eye from one side to the other.  I do miss the first intensity of the white splash of finger paint from the under painting now that it has been toned down with warmer whites.

Two landscapes have surprised me this week.  My rambles in color remain closer to full expression rather than the short hand that abstraction should be.  After emptying my palette on Wednesday I came home to the books just arrived from amazon.  Two completely new artists for me: Joan Mitchell and Howard Hodgkin.  For a girl who loves Vermeer, it's close to impossible to sit down with abstract expressionism without some unease.  Tempting to dismiss Mitchell as a Pollock pop-version of Monet, and align Hodgkin with complete incomprehension.  But if I hadn't looked at them, I would never have found the sea spray in my mud.

What next? Do I continue with landscape? Intentionally?  Do I put some rectangles down instead of my spiraling rainbows of paisley underpaintings? How about limiting my color choice? I have a zillion photos begging to be translated onto canvas in some short hand.  There's that series of children's portraits I am hoping to enter in Art at the Mill in the Spring.  And what about Etsy?  I have no clue, except I am going to the studio tomorrow with some tea in a thermos and my son.

Week One: Getting There Part 1

Last week walking into the studio was my greatest accomplishment.  This week I exploded into my paints and canvas.  After a conversation with Mary Ann Wakeley on Monday, I set up my tasks for the week:

• Set Up Studio so I Don't Have to Clean Up
• Get Music 
• Start Introducing Myself with Business Cards "Nancy Polo, Artist"
• Play with color on whatever I get my hands on
• Etsy?

Tuesday brought my first opportunity to march right in and get to work after a brief clean and set up on Monday night.  My trouble is filtering out a stream of impulses and ideas that rarely make it to the page, but I set to work with no real plan.  The first effort was rough.  Chalk Pastel on paper.  Much as I'd like to believe that dust and mess don't bother me, they just plain do.  I grabbed a set of pastels I had purchased long ago to do a portrait of my nephew and a piece of raw sienna paper from a painting class in 1998.  "Just put the color down." So I did, and this is what I got after playing with it for about 30 minutes.  I used my fingers, my fingers in gardening gloves, a brush with some acrylic paint (when I could not get the depth I wanted), and a rubber tipped shaper.  Having not received the books on my class reading list yet, I was itching to figure out where I stood with what I had just made.  The title: Acqua, Piume e Finestra (Water, Feathers and Window).  Vaguely reminiscent of my obsession with Venice and Carnival.  The result was well received on flickr by contacts who don't normally comment, which should lead to me believe it is successful.  I have my doubts.

Next I grabbed my palette with left-over paint from my last project Still not Emma Grace. I duct taped a piece of canvas sheet onto a board.  With a vague idea of driving through the apple orchard on a sunny day, and a memory of a photograph borrowed from my friend Patrice on facebook, I laid down the colors: sienna, white, cerulean blue, portrait pink, light orchid, dioxin purple, sea green, umber, ochre and some payne's gray (perhaps some parchment and naples yellow).  Happily my memory did not cloud the process too much.  While listening to Pandora station based on Bobby Darin, I danced across the canvas sheet.  I was overwhelmed to see what appeared.  Driving during the Spring and early Fall can be dangerous for me.  The light plays with everything and I see the most gorgeous landscapes, but I can't stop along the highway to capture it all.  It never seems to be as good when I stop.  The motion of driving and ever shifting horizons is what I am after.  Trying to get it has almost gotten me into several car accidents.  Listening to music while hopped up on my thermos of green tea chai (another necessity in the studio), I could almost enact the feeling of driving through the landscape in an explosion of color.  With my trusty phone camera I captured my work and set about transforming it almost immediately.  I was avoiding attachment. I had not gone far enough into the process to merit calling it DONE. Really?

Next came the search to really recreate in paint a specific day in the orchard.  As a crutch (on the right side of the canvas) I used the idea of an old sycamore discovered on a walk with David and his kids.  He showed me how it was hollow.  Squirrels live inside these hollow trees, coming in and out of small holes in a rodent shutes and ladders.  In my mythology of iconic landscape components, these dinosaur sycamores play over and over again.  It served as an excellent support to the mental process conjuring itself in my head and on the canvas.  What I was really after was still so illusive and somewhere on the left side of the canvas.  Imagine two old apple trees in a staggered arch above your car as you are driving on a dirt road through an autumn morning.  The trees were hugging me in my vehicle with the sun.  Yes, somehow I want and need to paint something so impossible.  At the end of an hour or two of work this materialized.  Linus was on his way home and I had to meet him at the B&B where he gets dropped off.  Take a break and let it dry some.

Wednesday afternoon in the the studio brought more progress, but I was less absorbed by my memories.  The canvas had taken hold of me and it was no longer a conversation with my memory.  It was now a push and pull of left and right.  The left side harbored some strange middle creature of hunter green and tree.  The right side was a pronounced real tree with roots growing across the horizon.  Playing with some smaller brushes I began breaking up the plain into successively smaller, receding plains.  The orchid was vying for space with the fake sea green that belonged somewhere in a painting of palm trees in Florida.  Yellow ochre and sienna (raw and burnt) happily toned down the competing colors.  I continued to play and listen to Rat Pack music.  It was heaven.  Every now and then I felt Bob Ross creeping into the process and he was quickly shut out by adding more of this or that in a very messy way.  How deliciously unlike me.  The only unresolved part was hunter green asking for shape with some electric yellow green and dioxin purple.  What was happening on the left side?  Was it a cloud, a storm or some leaves thousands of feet away moving in?  I solved the problem with purple haze and iridescent gel contrasted with clouds in the middle of the sky for balance in the composition.

The afternoon was broken up again by Linus coming home.  Somehow he knew that Mamma wanted to be in the studio, so he stayed with me after Auntie Bet dropped him off.  We played, we listened to music (some India Arie playlist mixed in with indulgent 80's dance tunes).  He loved it.  He even painted a bit by himself.  I was happy to see my critter working with paint as I abandoned myself to the canvas.  When he was done, he wandered into the sandbox in front of the studio.  I should have worried about his ruined khaki's, but I painted instead.  After Orage was done, I ripped off the duct tape and grabbed another piece of canvas sheet that was re-taped to the board with the same tape. 

What now?  No idea. With no memories or visions to guide me, I emptied the contents of my palette onto the canvas.  Here's what happened.  It was originally a vertical piece with some unfortunate combination of browns and hunter green toward the bottom.  In an attempt to fix the mud, blue was added on top and in the middle.  I had no idea what would become of the sea green and mustard ochre that invaded the upper right.  The palette was almost completely clean.  Only some white and parchment lingered.  What do I do?  I smeared it on in the center with my fingers.  Complete failure.  Unresolved and looking like nothing.  I decided to go home with my critter and eat dinner.

As I type this out on a busy Friday, I am 10 minutes late getting to the commercial kitchen to make Mrs. Ratszenberger's Short Rib soup: a trial run for Smith Meadows Cooking Classes and some for the farmers market.  More on painting to come later...

What's Next at La Capretta

My Girls Lynsi and Kate

This week I said good bye to my apprentices Lynsi Pasutti and Kate Westlund.  I had no idea how much of a doorway it would be.  I've been in many airport terminals, have walked out of many houses, and have felt the physical and emotional tug that comes from crossing into another dimension.  Each time I need decompression to properly assimilate into my new landscape.  The girls have left me, but I feel as though I am the one beginning a trip.  There's no destination, but I am on a precipice surrounded by everything I have worked over twelve years to put into place on this farm.  With Lynsi and Kate's help it was possible to uncover the dust on many wonderful parts of my life at Smithfield.  I have my son Linus, a modest business large enough to support me and Linus while I pursue my art, a staff that allows me to spend time in the studio, a gallery, and a comfortable home that I share with my fractured family.  In all ways I am poised to take a leap into an amazing life.  I have never been so terrified.

Erysichthon in Dixie, by Clyde Broadway

Yesterday I went to Border's in search of books for a correspondence course I just started with an artist, Mary Ann Wakeley.  I ordered most of what I wanted on Amazon, but I couldn't wait til Super Saver Shipping would have them at my door on November 1st.  In the paltry aisle of art books with only the most predictable on the shelf, a stranger said hello.  We exchanged names and a handshake.  He commiserated on the lack of anything interesting and mused over the former erotica section.  Since I can be shy, "Exit Stage Left" immediately came to mind, but I listened for a few more minutes.  Clyde told me his agent was pushing his new work down in Atlanta where he had entered some work recently for the Elizabeth and Mallory Factor Prize for Southern Art.  Overwhelmed by so many details shared in the span of a few minutes, my need to go look for my son in the children's section afforded me an opportunity to walk away.  Clyde found me later and recommended the magazine section which was more au courant.  He was right, however, nothing offered seemed appropriate.  With no Wassily Kandinsky: Concerning the Spiritual in Art or anything else on my list to be found, I settled for a book called New Acrylics Essential Sourcebook.

Summer Reruns, by Clyde Broadway

Today on facebook was a message from Clyde.  He encouraged me to keep painting and sent some links to his work.  Ain't the internet great? I only remember saying my first name and that I painted.  Curious to know about Clyde's work, of course I took a peak.  It is very reminiscent of Henri Rousseau with a modern Southern Gothic twist.  I particularly liked the work Summer Reruns. The Factor Prize site has an interesting array of artists, including its 2010 recipient Radcliffe Bailey. 

Returnal, by Radcliffe Bailey

His work on the African American Diaspora certainly merits accolades and contributes to a new understanding of the South.  His use of "culturally charged" objects and photographs creates harmony in an array of masterful sculptures, paintings, installations, works-on-paper, glass works and modified found objects.  His installation piece Returnal struck the strongest chord.  As always, prize winning work with cultural heft leaves me feeling small in the world of art.  More importantly, however, stumbling onto Bailey's work made me wonder how I could orchestrate harmony in my own body of work.

Untitled, Chalk Pastel on Paper, Nancy Polo

2009 was a productive year of painting, photo montage, poetry, one clay work and lots of sketching.  2010 has been somewhat less productive, but that will change with coursework in Mary Ann's class and a renewed appreciation for my place on the farm.  This most recent work was done with stolen time after a bunch of Autumn mornings that begged to be painted.  Pastels are not my medium of choice, but they help me spit things out when under duress.  The sky has set the scene for many of my photographic works in the last two years.  Most often it has been the vehicle for muting drawings too raw to share.  In Autumn the earth meets the sky in spectacular light and color sending me into fits for not training as a plein air painter.  Abstraction has never worked for me, or at least no one close to me has ever said, "Wow! I love it when you do this."  Nonetheless, I am training with an abstract artist to see if I might achieve a harmony unattainable so far in my checkered career.  Many questions nag at me in spite of my joy over this new plan.  What about my bunnies?  Who's going to want my work?  What if I hit another wall?  Do I deserve to sit around and make art on a busy farm?  Shouldn't I be making more money with noodles instead of pastiche?  I could go on.  I'd rather get started and see where it takes me.

Court Jester?, Pen and Ink on Paper, Nancy Polo

So I proffer this blog as the first entry in my Artist Journal to be kept on a journey put off for far too long.  In homage to the Bunny who started my string of solid work in 2009, here is an early bunny piece made sometime between 2000 and 2005 (I think).  I rarely felt my work was worth signing or documenting before 2009.  The queen is holding court with a jester (perhaps) presenting his case?  It was a flash of something forgotten that made this one bubble to the surface.  I should thank that stranger Clyde for saying, "Keep on Painting." It still amazes me how easy it is to find a person on line with very little information.