Painting #1: Snowy Twilight Forest

This is my first painting of the new art odyssey.  Just looking at it makes me shiver, even though I painted it outside on a warm and sunny day.  Now you can see how my art takes me to other places.


Here's the photo I took of my grandmother's forest in upstate New York last winter: 

The "blue twilight" effect is a cool trick I discovered by altering the white balance on my camera. We had more snow in December 2012/January 2013 than I have seen in many years. And it was very cold, below zero.  It was also windy as the snow came down, so it frosted on to one side of all the trees.  Walking through this forest, everything was peaceful and totally like a scene out of a fairytale. I got the snow dusting on the tree trunks with a dry fan-tipped brush and very small dabs of white paint.


...And this is the dark corner of my parents' basement that I sometimes work in. For no other reason than lack of studio space.  I do what I have to do.

Sketch #1

Daily drawing. From a closeup I took at Longwood Gardens in 2012. This took me about an hour and a half this morning with colored pencil.

Time to do something with art again.

I have a confession to make.  I have committed a sin when it comes to art.


I have gotten lazy.

Even though I am a passionate, dedicated hard worker at every job I do, I am still extremely lazy when I'm not at work.  I mean lazy about art.  I just don't enjoy it like I used to.  When I set my mind to it I can do awesome things, but lately I'm feeling blah.  And I don't want to accept that this is simply because I have a regular job now. 

Work takes a lot out of anyone.  It drains the life out of anyone.  When I come home, it makes me want to sit around in a catatonic state, and do nothing and think about nothing until I can fall asleep. 

That's bad. In fact it's terrible.  There's so much I could be doing in my spare time.  It's a well-known, often overlooked and unpleasant fact that if we spent just 30 minutes to an hour doing something we enjoy every single day, we could master it in a year.  But most of us don't have the motivation to start anything new.

It's time to do something.  I had an idea today.



 I have taken thousands of digital pictures. Like over 100 gigabytes' worth of photos. Every significant moment in my life for the last 6 or 7 years.  A visual universe of memories, most of which I shared with no one but myself.  And right now, these images are all locked inside my computer, taking up space on my hard drive. The free space is getting ever smaller.  I've been taking much less pictures lately, because this occurred to me.  My Macbook is almost 8 years old, I bought it for christmas in 2006.  And just about every internal component of it has been upgraded or replaced, some more than once.  The cooling fans, DVD drive, battery, hard disk and memory have all been replaced.  But I know eventually, it will die.  And eventually, my backup disk will die too.  And years from now, the recordable DVDs I store my life on will deteriorate.  And all this stuff will be lost.  Why? Because it isn't tangible.


I think it's time to start drawing and painting my photographs.  100 years from now, a painting will be worth more than a photo, right?  The world has been photographed a million times over, but art exists only in the head and hands and what they create.  There's billions of photographers out there, and they all take the same images.  But no one will ever see them the way an artist does.

I need to create stuff again.  I need to stop my laziness.

So...why not draw or paint my photos?

I should pick a photo I really like, sit down and turn it into a work of art.  And then make another, and another.  I'll start small, of course.  Small stuff takes up less space.  But it's time to start making a body of physical, tangible work that I can show people.  And the process will make my art skills better, too. 

I have a lot of sunsets, and landscapes. Seasonal pictures. Natural stuff. Some things which are gone and can never be seen the same way again.   There is already so many colorful and pleasing subjects to choose from.  It's my own stuff, so why not?  No need to ask permission to use my own images. No need to give credit, or pay royalties.

It's sort of dumb to just let this stuff die without using it.

The Grand Teton mountain range, 2011

I can start small.  Like index card size, maybe.  Small enough that I don't get frustrated and abandon it.  Small enough that I don't get bogged down in details, with my obsession over realism. Maybe spend like an hour or two on them.

Then as I get better, I can go bigger.  I could go from small watercolors or colored pencil drawings to
bigger paintings.  I could fill a sketchbook, or use up some art supplies I have laying around.

I should try new things.  Like rendering a familiar picture in dots, or lines, or squiggles, or smudges. 

I need to use unexpected colors, or patterns. 

My realism limits me too much.  I gotta loosen up and be free.

Smear the colors around, make a little mess and enjoy the work, not obsess over unimportant details and perfection.  I need to stop caring so much about the end result, or this won't be possible.  In the beginning, the focus should be on quantity, not quality.  Then as I make more stuff and grow more confident, I should really make it shine. 

With all the images I already got to work with, I could spend the rest of my life drawing and painting.

Just an hour a day.  That would be all it would take to transform my art, if I can just get started.

I gotta make a pledge to myself.  I must do this. There is no excuse not to.  No one else will ever see the world the way I see it. Unless I show them.

This is my journey of a thousand miles, and this is my single step.