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Some Paintings Tips that Have Helped Me a Lot!

Paintings in Waiting

A couple months ago, I found these great tips on making paintings which have helped me tremendously. I have found these to be immensely helpful in getting the critic off my shoulder while I try to create: a problem that’s been dogging me for years! Now I have a couple dozen new paintings that I will start sharing with you soon–warts and all–and more in the making.  Yay! 

Here’s the condensed version for the studio wall:

1. Quality through quantity.
2. Do NOT mix generating and editing.
3. When to judge: After you’ve completed a piece, look at it and decide what direction you want to go in next.
4. Don’t be afraid to re-use elements.
5. How to have “lots of ideas”: permute.
6. “Get through your first 50 failures as fast as you can.”
7. Don’t even bother “fixing” pieces.
8. Work fast. Creativity is exciting.
9. Let your level show.
10. Don’t hide your failures.

And here’s the link to the full version, from the Scarlet Letters blog: Notes on Making Art.

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Falling and Recovery

Color Mini 2014-016
Oil on canvas
4″ x 4″
© 2014 Marilyn Fenn

I was never satisfied with the initial version of this painting, so I worked on it a bit last night.  I decided I very much liked the sense of stacked and possibly falling boxes on the right hand side of the painting (now turned 90° counterclockwise), so I worked to carry that theme throughout.  I’m pretty happy with it now.  It reminds me of the idea of pushing oneself off-balance, and then having to catch oneself—a falling and recovery, ala Merce Cunningham.

Here was the original version, which just didn’t quite make it:

Color Mini 2014-016
Oil on canvas
4″ x 4″
© 2014 Marilyn Fenn
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It Feels Great to Be Back in The Studio Again

Color Mini 2014-025 Oil on canvas 6″ x 6″ © 2014 Marilyn Fenn

It is taking me a while to get back in the groove, though. Worked on 3 paintings Monday night, with no resolution on any of them. Did this one last night, though I am considering some color changes here and there. Temporarily then, here it is.

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Susannah Coffey at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects


Susanna Coffey – Elemental

Oh, how I wish I could see this show! Susannah Coffey was a professor at my alma mater, and I came this close > || to taking a class with her. It was Figure in the Landscape at Oxbow summer art camp, and she was to co-teach it with Dan Gustin, another great professor, but he showed, and she didn’t.

I did attend at least one self-portrait show of hers during my years in Chicago, and it was amazing. You can see her self-portraits here: http://www.susannacoffey.com/?cat=3

“Steve Locke wrote (from the show’s page below) that, “Coffey is painting a new kind of space… She is painting the interference, the attitudes, the obfuscations between the understanding of the self.“”

If you’re in NY, I hope you get to see the show. If you’re not, some night, indulge in a little sumpin’ and stare at her paintings online. 

http://www.shfap.com/

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Last Night’s Mini-Painting; Thick Paint with Palette Knife

Color Mini 2014-022
Oil on canvas
4″ x 4″
© 2014 Marilyn Fenn

Last night’s mini-painting. I’ve started most of the rest of these mini-paintings with a small composition sketch (which invariably is only a starting place and gets changed along the way), but I wiped out the sketch for this one, and just felt my way into each block of color. I reworked the initial version of this painting in thicker paint applied with a palette knife, and I like it better still.

Gotta try stuff, and I like what happened here. These tiny paintings are such a great little way to work out my ideas! I’m really looking forward to whatever will happen later when I resume working bigger again.