Exhale

I’d forgotten how great it feels to be productive! Exhausting, but fantastic. I’m on fire!

I’m trying out a new painting technique that I’m pretty thrilled about. I love texture (why shouldn’t a painting also be a sort of sculpture?) so I got this heavy-body acrylic gel medium, and I put a coat over the gesso that’s almost like wall plaster. So I’ll get to start the painting with an underlying texture, and then build on top of it! I’m so excited about it that I’ve been putting off everything else to keep prepping my canvases… but I suppose I should stop neglecting printmaking. It’s new and difficult for me, which really means I ought to be putting more effort into it than my other classes, not less. I shall overcome! I have some ideas for my prints, at least, which is better than the sheer terror I was feeling the first week of classes.

On another note:

I see nothing wrong with painting from photographs without abstracting them. A painting is essentially different from a photograph, because it has texture, and brushstrokes, and.. well, it’s not a photograph, it’s a painting. And in my opinion, the paintings are more interesting than the photographs, because you can modify them, and because the duplication of photographic effects in paint is a fascinating and beautiful process.

My painting professor and I disagree on this point. However, this has at least provided me with a solution to the problem I mentioned in my previous post! I have to do two panels of the same subject (loosely defined), and approach them in different ways. How to approach them in different ways? I’ll just do one of the panels the way I want to do it, and one panel the way she wants me to do it! Problem solved. (Although I must admit, I’ve never really done any abstract painting before, much less an abstracted landscape, so I’m more than a bit apprehensive. But how else do you learn?)

Also, Clement Greenberg is a douchebag. He makes some good points, but for the most part, he’s just a douchebag.

Time to go dive headfirst into printmaking and see how I do! Wish me luck, friends.