Every other week Jane and I have an art date and at least for the summer I’m trying to think of it as an art adventure. This week we headed to a local spot, Salem Willows for some walking and painting. The Willows is a place past its prime, like so many places in the North Shore of Massachusetts, the Willows had several prime times in its existence, the first around the turn of the century and again around the 50’s and 60’s when it was a destination with loads of restaurants and games for kids. Now it’s the kind of place you go to chill, unwind and hope you don’t see a dirty old man with a hooker hidden in the far reaches of the parking lot. (You also don’t leave anything of value in your car.)

All that being said the Willows is worth the trip if only for the views alone. The park juts out in to the bay affording a grand view of Beverly, the Beverly-Salem Bridge, the waterfront, Boats, and beaches. The rocky outcroppings are just dramatic enough to offer some scenery for paintings but not so dramatic that you can’t scale them in sneakers.

We headed to Dead Horse Beach. It’s a mystery how it got its name, a Google search brought me back nothing except the quip, “A dead horse washed ashore there.” Which was something I had assumed anyway, but I was hoping to find some sort of tall tale about settlers and 1649 and witch trials.

We wandered the beach, avoiding a large group of children who were in some sort of science class and set up a base of operations. I decided to afford myself a little more time in my image this time than I had originally planned, I still worked quickly but I wanted to get some layers going in the image. I started working with one of those cheap bristle brushes applying color in large swaths. Though it was a dull day we’d get these moments of bright sun, I wanted to capture that fleeting moment, so I used bright colors and toned them down later.

The sky in my first painting was successful I’m not sure about the rest.

The second image I made I decided to focus on a grouping of rocks, 3 of them at the water’s edge, with me looking sort of down on them. In the image are the 3 rocks water and a small bit of ground.

As I waited for bits and pieces of my images to dry I wandered about and snapped some pictures of things, like the remnants of various playground things and rusty bits of metal and tiny little crabs. All in all it was a great art adventure.

I’ve been thinking of the concept of adventure or a life filled with curiosity and exploration. Perhaps the recent death of my Great Grandmother brings this concept home for me. I think of the way I’d like to live my life and how I conduct myself.

Fpr some reason the word adventure comes to mind. I think because it embodies a never ending curiosity with life and the things around me.

Adventure is wrapped around art and art wrapped around adventure.

Sometimes I try and make a trip to Starbucks and adventure by walking the long way and snapping pictures, or I’ll get my coffee and sit outside and sketch. Of course it helps that it sits on waterfront and there is a nice view of boats and pretty trees.

This weekend I’m headed to a tougher place than my usual haunts for a little en plein air painting and possibly photography. I’m looking at it as an adventure in a pretty but run down place. Jane and I will be slinging paint from 10 to 2.

I have more to write on this subject but the words are failing me.

I took a class a few years back at a really well known art college in the area, the sort filled with faculty who were showing in Boston and New York and Paris and all over the world.

I just wanted to take a moderately priced Continuing Education class in Figure Drawing.

I didn’t care about the professor credentials, hell, I didn’t even look them up.

Apparently he was something of a BIG DEAL.

I just wanted to draw naked people on all kinds of different kinds of paper and different sizes.

He was kind of stiff, really serious and totally had bromance for Jim Dine, which I totally get. He also did the en plein air classes in Paris for the school. 2 weeks in paris with this guy? NO THANKS.

However he let me look through his sketchbook and told me about his process. Which was totally fascinating. He worked in these small watercolor sketchbooks he picked up somewhere fascinating and his palette was a 2 part fly fishing fly box with all the foam ripped out, one side held his tubes of gouache and the other held the paint. He squeezed colors out into great gobs in the palette. Mixed in corners were various shades of greens, reds, blues and shades of white. In his sketchbook were lovely colored sketches of Paris in winter, spring and summer. There were quick studies of Boston at all times of the year. The paper was cockled and warped but this fastidious stiff old dude didn’t care.

It was all about the art.

When I took his class I was just starting out with bookbinding and I’d take a week’s worth of drawings stack them, pierce holes through them and then use a rivet to hold them all together. He was fascinated by this and how much easier it was to carry a stack of my loose drawings rolled up when secured in such a manner. He asked me a ton of questions about where I’d learned it and he seemed surprised when I said I’d just done it. We talked for a brief moment about my college sculpture professor who was into bookbinding and how I felt rivets were faster plus, I didn’t have any cord to bind the sheets.

Necessity.Mother.Invention

All that stuff.

This guy who thought nothing of buying $30 tubes of gouache painted with something I thought was a riot, those 50 to 99 cent Loew-Cornell brushes you used to be able to buy singly and now come in blister packs and multi packs for $10, you still get 15 to 20 of them but you can’t do what this guy used to do and buy 20 of the same size at a time.

I watched that professor paint the model once. He attacked the page- scrubbed the paint onto the pages of his small sketchbook, aggressively mixing colors, squinting his eyes at the model, capturing darks in deep purple tones and lights in swaths of golden yellow.

He did with that cheap brush everything I’d been taught NOT to do with a brush since kindergarten. He hardly ever rinsed colors from it; he simply dipped the dirty brush into whatever the next color he was interested in using. Then he applied it.

Watching him paint was mesmerizing and a study in focus and attention. What got me most was he was using those ultra cheap Chinese bristle brushes that no one would have dared to bring into one of my college painting classes. This guy created great stuff with them, all painted with 2 sizes; a #2 round and a #3 flat.

It was the second time I’d met a working artist that used what I’d been taught was a garbage tool, and used it well.

Hmm. Has to make you wonder if the pricey expensive tools are quite as wonderful as the companies making them would have you believe.

I've been debating taking the ads off my blog for awhile now, but I'm going to give them one more week. When there are no ads it simply looks horrible. Feel free to head over to Project Wonderful and search for Comfortable Shoes and bid on an ad. I moderate them so only ads go up from artfire/etsy sellers and bloggers.

One of the things that really gets me going in the online art world is the concept of the online art instructor saying things such as, “You’re an artist because I say so, “and the “I give you permission to create.” It’s patronizing, condescending, arrogant and downright self-absorbed.

I am an artist because I believe I am; I create because I must, not because someone on the internet says so or gives me permission to do so. I’ve voiced this opinion before and the major argument was that these statements are put out there to give others self confidence. I submit that the reason you are here (reading my blog or at aj ning) is at least partially because you have an interest in art, maybe you don’t call yourself an artist, and that’s fine. Maybe you are looking for inspiration, and that’s fine too. If you are looking for permission  you are looking in the wrong place.

I can’t give you permission to create or to call yourself an artist.
I can’t do that because the permission comes from within.
You have to give yourself the permission to create.

You have to make a conscious decision to call yourself an artist. Maybe you never will. Maybe your kids think you are. You could be like my Mom and call yourself a really good craftsperson.

Maybe if you are looking for me to call you an artist (or some other online art instructor) then maybe you aren’t ready to call yourself an artist? Maybe you don’t want to say it. Maybe you don’t want to be labeled. You could need more time. It’s not up to me or anyone else to slap a label or pigeonhole you into something you may not want.

You need to make that choice.

You need to grab permission and take it for yourself. If I give you permission to create you’ll always be looking for my approval. I don’t want that. I want you to create art because it is inherently wonderful for you. I want you to create because you love it, it relaxes you after a hard day and because you learn that you cannot live without creating.

You need to make your own permission.