Moving Time!

I'm sure it must look like I've given up blogging, but I have just been busily building a new website.  I am now all packed up and moving my blog over there.  It has a fresher, cleaner look, and I'm very happy with the ease of it all.  I'll be blogging regularly over there, so I hope you'll join me! 

https://robinolsenart.com/

Finding the Joy

The mental shift that occurs throughout the course has to be the main benefit from doing Nicholas Wilton's CVP program.  I feel more deeply connected to my work and more committed to doing it.  I feel an eagerness to get to the studio, and much of the fear and resistance has been removed.  I still have sticky points when I'm afraid I'll mess up a painting that's going in a direction I like, or when everything is in that yucky area of no direction at all, but I have more confidence now that I can get through those periods by just showing up, finding something I love, and doing more of it.

Nick teaches to find the joy in painting instead of allowing yourself to get sucked into self-doubt and wallowing in a dead end.  If you like that little area of polka dots, do more of them.  Put polka dots all over your entire painting!  They might not remain in the end, but they allow a shift to occur where you are painting from a place of spark and joy, and that moves you forward.

Painting on multiple panels at the same time is essential for this process.  If you find you don't know what to do or are getting negative about your painting, it's time to move on to the next.  One painting will inform the next.  This little patch of turquoise against olive looks gorgeous here, so let me try that combo in this painting that isn't working so well.  They lift each other up.

This painting is on my easel right now.  A work in progress.

It's at a stage where I'm happy with the energy in it, but need to do more and clean it up some.  I need to be open to the fact that I might kill what I love in the process and end up having to take the painting in an entirely new diretion.  It's hard not to tighten up at this point and hang on to what's working there, but I'm learning to accept what arises to eventually get a better painting.  Who knows when that might occur, but I have more faith now that it will.

Getting my Bearings

The problem with stepping out of blogging for a while is it feels impossible to catch up.   I've been on a whirlwind of travel and art classes and my thoughts are swirling.  In brief, I took a beautiful cruise in the Mediterranean with my mom, came home and took a quick trip to California for my niece's graduation, and now I hope not to leave home until next fall!  

One of my big objectives for summer is to try to absorb what I've been learning in Nicholas Wilton's CVP program.  I wasn't able to finish the last three weeks because of travel, but we have access to the material for a whole year, so after I finish the remaining lessons, I think I'll go back slowly and revisit exercises and lectures.  There is such rich material in the course, and so much of it, that I still have quite a few hours of video to finish and a bonus 10 hour documentary of Nick painting one of his large paintings from start to finish.  What a heavenly treat for summer afternoons!

The course was so profound to me, and I want to talk about it, but I still need to do a little digesting.  Nick is so generous with his knowledge, you really do feel like he holds nothing back.  Usually I'm hesitant to share what I've learned in classes, thinking that belongs to the teacher.  At the end of the CVP course Nick said, if this was valuable to you, share what you learned with others!  Who does that???  I've never had a teacher say, "go out and share this information that I make a living on" before.  So as I start to settle back into painting and have time to reflect, I will be talking about the course more.

Right now I want to step back into painting and need to loosen up.  Working in class and trying to balance all the principles Nick was covering, left me painting very self-consciously.  I'm hoping the material will be absorbed soon, and I'll not be thinking so much as I paint.  I decided to return to black and white, as that always feels like a relief from too many color decisions, and paint as freely as possible.  Now I can go into analytic mind and come in and make some corrections, but try not to lose that spontaneity.

Another nice outcome from CVP is I felt encouraged to show some of my work.  I am thrilled that I applied to two juried gallery shows and had work accepted in both.

These two pieces are currently on show at Gallery 114 in the Pearl Dist. in Portland, OR, and up through the end of the month.  1100 NW Glisan St, right across from Dick Blick.  They made a video of the show, you can see here.  

The theme is "Everything is Music".  Music often plays a big role in my painting and can determine the energy of a piece.  These are inspired by songs that make you want to dance.  This first one is called "Every Little Thing's Gonna Be Alright."

 And this one is "Blame It On the Bossa Nova."

This next piece will be in Verum Ultimum's "Living Mark" exhibition.  The show opens June 30 with a reception from 6-8, and runs through August 11th.  I'm planning on being at the reception, so hope you can stop by. 3014 NE Ainsworth, Portland, OR 97211.

 "End of the Day" was inspired by a winter's walk at sunset.  Everything was drab black and gray, then the vibrant colors of the sun poked through.

Texture

It was texture week at CVP.  Since we are working on wood panels, there are lots of opportunities for scratching, sanding, gouging and scraping.  I don't know that I'll be doing any of those regularly, but I did fall in love with using a trowel to put on thick, smooth layers of paint.

And I do love the depth you can get with some texturing techniques.  This first piece had sanding and glazing and scratching.  Those opaque white areas were put on with the trowel.

I probably went a little trowel crazy on this one, but I adore those smooth, creamy surfaces, and they are perfect for drawing back into and for revealing bits of color underneath.

I'll be away traveling for a while and won't be posting until the end of the month.  I'm sad I have to miss the last two weeks of CVP, but we have all year to revisit it.  I'll be catching up then and reflecting on what I have learned from the whole thing.

Rest Week

We were given a week off from CVP to rest, catch up, explore, whatever we wanted without any new lessons.  It was a much-needed break from having something new come at you almost every day, as much as I love that abundance.  It was a good week for me to sit and absorb some of the lessons we had been covering, revisit a few things, and mainly think about my direction.

I played with more layers on my larger panels, without giving much thought yet to the principles I need to incorporate.

I continued working on the smaller ones.

Mainly I took some time to think about my own voice and what is important to me.  As much as we are encouraged to work in our own style, it's a little hard to know how to do that from Nick's demos.  His work is so shape heavy, and that forms the basis of his lessons.  It's easier to see his principles at work when you are working with clear shapes, so I've tried to do that in my panels, even though they often don't feel like me.

This week I went through all my Pinterest boards, and my old work, and made notes about those things that resonate most strongly with me.

I do like a fair amount of structure in my work, and it's easier to see the principles of differences and value shifts at work in a more structured piece.

My big challenge now is how to keep that raw energy I love while also working with some underlying structure.  I love the random marks and brushstrokes, but it's easy to muddle up the piece with them.  I think this next piece starts to incorporate both randomness and structure.

So many things to ponder along the way!  And today we add the whole new element of texture to the mix.  I imagine many of my earlier pieces will be due for a total makeover.

Good Days and Bad

One of my favorite parts about Nick Wilton's Creative Visioning Program is we spend lots of time talking about the process and how to create a sustainable art practice.  We have some fantastic coaches who delve into the psychology of art making and address all the ups and downs, the fears and the enthusiasm, the progress and the set-backs.  We are encouraged to journal about what works for us, what we love, what we resist.  And over and over we talk about the good days and the bad ones.  For me, the bad ones occur about every other day, and I'm starting to find ways of accepting that and moving through it.

Nick's whole approach is you bring to the canvas whatever you are dealing with that day, so if you are bored, your paintings are boring.  If you are excited, your paintings are exciting.  The trick is to move on if you are not loving what you are doing.  By having lots of pieces going, there should always be some pieces you are not too attached to, low stakes pieces, that make it easy to go in and make big changes.  The deeper into this program I get, the more I am loving that approach.  It makes it so much easier to get to the studio when I know there will be something there that I enjoy doing.

Right now, I have these low stake pieces on my easel and started making big changes to them.

I have 3 bigger panels with 3 layers of paint troweled on, a very soothing process when nothing else is working.

I have a few pieces I just covered in gloss medium and am debating if I want to call them done or add some glazing to soften them.

And I am trying to rescue a favorite brush I forgot to wash.  Damn!  Again!

Taking It All In

I have turned myself over to the twelve weeks of my Nicholas Wilton Creative Visioning Project class, and now that we are in week 7, I'm wondering how much more I can hold.  My sketchbook is full of notes, ideas, inspirations, practical advice.  I watch the videos of everything from cleaning a paintbrush (who knew you should always dip it in water before you begin painting?) to showing up fully and revealing yourself in your paintings.  I'm obsessed and even lose sleep over it.  Thankfully we get a week long break after next week.

Right now we are in a deep experimental mode.  Here are the boards I posted last week:

And those same boards this week.  Better?  No.  I probably don't even like them as well as last weeks, but we are experimenting, trying to find differences and building up layers for future work.  

 While I've been working on the lessons, I've also been painting in my usual style and seeing how much I've absorbed without giving it a lot of thought.  The lessons we get over and over are about creating high value contrasts, moving the eye, and creating lots of differences.

It's challenging to move back and forth between keeping fresh and spontaneous and being analytical.  There are so many things to keep in balance that I never seem to be fully satisfied.  There's always a bit more tweaking to do.  I'm excited that we move on to glazes and creating depth this week.  O1ne more challenge to add to the equation!

Series in Process

I have a feeling I'm not going to have any finished pieces to show for quite a while.  Part of the process in Nicholas Wilton's Creative Visioning Project is to work on a series of panels for weeks, letting them build up as we learn new material.  I've gotten used to working in series, but Nick has a little different slant on it that I am really enjoying.  He had us start with 3-6 panels.  Being an underachiever, I started 3, but I'm already regretting not having more going and will be starting 3 more.  

When I've done series before, I might start 6 at a time, work on all 6 to get them going, then settle into finishing off one or two at a time.  Nick's approach is to bring up all 6 of them at the same time.  You work on each panel for 10-20 minutes.  As soon as you start feeling stuck or bored, you move on.  He believes you should always be working from a place of joy and enthusiasm.  How wonderful is that?  He says to go in and work on your least favorite board first, since you have nothing to lose on it.  By bringing that up to a higher level, you raise the bar for the other panels and then bring them up too.  I really love his approach of focusing on what you love, what delights you and moving from there.  It makes it so much easier to get to the studio when you know it's focused on fun and staying engaged.

Here is my first pile of starts.

Then another round of layering on top.

We are instructed to keep being aware of those areas that we love, even though there is a good chance that we will be covering them.  We keep letting those things sink in as they determine our interests and our personal style.  Right now I love the mark on the white area in this one.  I'm sure I'll lost it, but can always do it again elsewhere.

We'll start shaping these up with more focus on value and design soon, but always coming back to having a very playful spirit to our approach and a willingness to let go.  In case it isn't obvious, I am loving this program!

Balancing It All

My online class with Nicholas Wilton is so intense that I am actually dreaming about painting revisions in my sleep!  Nick provides many hours of image adjustment videos each week, in which he, or the other coaches, take student paintings and revise them in Photoshop to show how they could work better by applying the principles he's teaching.  Yesterday alone, we covered 150 paintings in a session.  The guy has endless enthusiasm and energy for the course!  It's really a fantastic way to learn since people paint in so many styles from realistic to abstract, and it's fascinating to see how the principles apply to diverse paintings and a great way to drive those principles home.

I find, though, that I don't always agree with changes he makes.  He tends to like things a lot busier than I do, so I'm trying to find a balance of taking those elements he teaches that are very powerful and applying them to my own work.  Right now I feel like I'm plodding along and analyzing every brushstroke.  I know that's necessary to absorb the info. and I'm hoping that eventually it will feel like second nature.

One principle Nick emphasizes is getting the eye to move all through the piece by having lots of high contrast elements in every part of it.  This is a painting I did before thinking about that principle.  It would never pass his test because the lower right corner has very little contrast to draw the eye down there.  But I like it this way.  I'm a big fan of breathing space in painting.

This one, done for class, shows the principles at work more with the eye pulled to every quadrant and side.  I like this approach too, but don't think it's a requirement for all paintings.

Funny he is having us use the Zorn palette (black, white, cadmium red dark, and yellow ochre) for our limited palette.  I never even heard of it before a couple months ago, and here it shows up in two classes.  I do love the range of colors from it!

Painterly Cross Training

Maybe one of the best things about taking 3 painting classes at the same time is you quickly learn how different teachers have their own way of doing things, and how many things are just preference, not rules.  Joan Fullerton paints with liquid acrylics and lots of water, often using water color techniques, while Nicholas Wilton wants thick opaque color, more like oil painting.  And Nancy Hillis leans towards transparent paints and glazes, but also uses some opaque.

The other good thing about taking 3 at once is the essential lessons cross over, so value, for instance, is important everywhere.  One class reinforces the next in that way and sometimes adds a different twist to it.  Now I'll be absorbing bits and pieces from each class and trying to incorporate them into how I work.


In Joan Fullerton's 4 day workshop last week, I enjoyed working with lots of transparent washes and collage.  I was happy with this one painting I finished and have several more underway.

In Nick Wilton's online program, we are focused on value and design right now.  We're working in black and white and thinking about loud and quiet conversations, eye movement, and differences.  It's a lot to balance at one time and trickier than I expected.

And in Nancy Hillis' class, we're also focusing on value, and I've been working on using warm and cool whites for light values.  Not sure how well they show up in this picture.

Lots of new ideas to take in, and I'm loving being challenged in so many new ways.  It feels like a total work-out.

Painting Immersion

The best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in the culture and practice 24 hours a day.  I'm wondering if that is the best way to learn painting.  It seems to be what I have signed on for lately.  I'm continuing with Nancy Hillis's Studio Journeys.  This month we are looking at value.  That's something I tend to think about quite a bit already, so I think the exercises will just be incorporated into what I already do.  There are some new areas I would like to play with this month in value shifts and dominance. 

Next week I head up to Whidbey Island for a 4 day painting workshop with Joan Fullerton.  I'm looking forward to a new approach and to be surrounded by lots of water.

And I'm continuing my very deep dive into painting with Nicholas Wilton.  The first two weeks of the program have not involved painting at all.  Instead we've been exploring our inspirations, our desires, and our personal art history.  All of this is foundational to what the heart of the program is about--painting with your own authentic voice.  I am so curious where this journey is going to take me.  I have seen people's work change dramatically from the program, but I can't envision where mine will go.  And I find that strangely thrilling.

Here are a couple paintings from this week, working on light and fresh.

I'll be up in WA next week, so won't be posting on my blog.  I hope to still get some pieces up on Instagram though.

Shifting

This year has been a strange one for me.  I seem to start down one path and end on another.  But that's OK.  I'm just letting things unfold as they will.

I started Feb. by signing up for Leslie Saeta's 30-in-30 challenge to paint 30 paintings in 30 days.  That didn't work.  I found out pretty early on that that is not the format for me.  I need to let things develop slowly and take as long as they need.  I then tried to challenge myself to paint every day for 30 days.  I didn't keep good track and know I missed a few, but I'm very happy that at the end of the month, I ended up with 15 finished paintings.  They're small, 12" squares, but 15 finished is definitely a record for me.  I tried to explore something new in each of them.  Here're a few of the latest ones when I was exploring minimal color with black and white.

And then trying to reduce the color even more in the next one.

Along the way I signed up for Nicholas Wilton's Creative Visioning Project, a 3 month long, online painting class.  That was a really big step.  I had looked at it last year, but it required so much dedication, not to mention money, that I passed.  It has been haunting me all year, so after hearing a number of alumnis say it was the best thing they ever did, I took the plunge this year.

We are only a week into it, but so far I am very impressed and excited.  It's a huge, juicy program full of information, inspiration and support.  We have something scheduled every day of the week, except for Sundays.  Always a new video, online coaching, newsletter, something coming our way.  And a huge file of resources to go through.

For the first two weeks, we don't paint in the class.  We establish our vision and goals.  The first project was to make a large inspiration board, using pictures of things that light you up.  These are going to be put near where we paint because, as Nicholas says, you need to be working from that point of enthusiasm and inspiration, that place that provides your unique spark, to create authentic paintings.  The class is very much focused on working from deep within to create your own work, no collection of techniques to make your work look like the teachers.

My board ended up dividing between things that I find calm and peaceful and things that are high energy.  I'm very curious to see where this will take me. 

Listening

A little bit more stitching this week.  Staying with Xs and Os for now and neutral colors, but I can't help thinking about how they will join and what I might do with the background white, but that will come later.

Mainly I've been absorbed in painting all week.  I'm continuing to explore the idea of color contrasts from Studio Journeys this month.  I've been thinking about all the ways of getting variety in two complementary colors, so here violet and yellow.  I've been playing with different hues of paint, different values, intensities, temperatures, and transparencies.

And in this one, exploring blue and orange.

I decided to do another blue and orange to try leaning a little more towards the warmer blues.  I also wanted to play with a central composition that does not extend to the edge of the paper.

I've made a strange discovery lately.  I always liked to paint either in silence or with some wild dance music in the early stages to get everything flowing.  While I'm stitching I enjoy listening to podcasts, lots of them artist interviews.  I especially love The Savvy Painter and The Jealous Curator.  In the interviews, many painters talked about liking to listen to podcasts or books on tape while they paint, but many said they found music distracting.  That seemed so alien to me.  I thought I'd be distracted by the spoken word.

I was way behind on listening to podcasts, so I thought I'd try some while painting.  I couldn't believe how much I enjoyed that!  They actually seemed to help me focus on painting and were still easy to follow.  I was listening to an interview with Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroscientist who had a stroke and observed what was happening in her brain.  She described the left hemisphere shutting down and being unable to process language and reason, but the right hemisphere being free to see the bigger picture and have stronger intuition.  It made me wonder if that's what spoken word does while painting.  It keeps that language side of the brain busy enough that it quiets it down, and you are left working more intuitively.  That's how it seems to work for me anyway.  I felt like I was more absorbed in the painting process and that critic in my brain wasn't allowed to talk.

 I also discovered a new-to-me highly addictive podcast out of the BBC called Desert Island Disks.  Celebrities from all fields are interviewed and asked what 8 songs, 1 book, besides The Bible and Complete Works of Shakespeare which they are automatically given, and 1 luxury item they would take if stranded on a desert island.  It's really fascinating to hear the stories that go along with the music they choose.  Bill Gates interview was especially fun.

Simplify

My word for the year is "Simplify."  That mainly means a lot of long overdue decluttering and cleaning up, but it's also about mental focus.  Trying to narrow down the things I do to those that are really important to me.

Last year I was catching up with posting my 2016 stitch components, along with showing how they were joining together, and also showing my 2017 daily stitch project.  I needed stitching to have a separate post each week, but this year I'm going to mix my stitching in with painting in one weekly post.  The stitching is coming along slowly.  When I do it, I enjoy it, but I am not feeling compelled to stitch everyday, so I'm letting this project evolve as it will.  Here's one I did over the course of a week.  I am already thinking that I might like to join them together and do more in the white background area.

I seem to be more absorbed with painting than stitching this year. I thought I was going to do the 30-in-30 painting project this month, a painting a day for 30 days.  That didn't last long before I simplified it to 30 paintings in a month, since I often work for days without finishing one, then might finish 3 on the same day.  And then I decided to simplify that even more to just painting for 30 days straight.  That now fits me.  I am a slow painter and often have to work on a piece for at least 5 days before it's done.  Even when it looks loose and random, it takes days for me to get it that way.

I seem to always be reacting to what I just did.  I was painting dark, heavier paintings for quite a few days, then wanted to switch over to much lighter ones.

The thing I come back to over and over is my love of mark making.  That's definitely my favorite part of stitching or painting.

Lots of Painting

I'm feeling deeply immersed in painting these days, and that's just the way I like it.  I'm continuing with Nancy Hillis's online Studio Journey class, which gives some structure to the month.  For Feb. we will be focusing on color contrast.

I also decided to participate for the first time in Leslie Saeta's Thirty Paintings in Thirty Days challenge.  I thought it would be good for me to try to finish a small painting a day since I usually am slow and ponderous with them. But I quickly realized that that's not how I work.  I need to have a bunch going at one time, then finish them as it happens, which doesn't really lend itself to a painting a day.  I decided to skip posting on Leslie's site and aim at completing 30 paintings in 30 days, rather than getting caught up in one a day.  The main objective is to try to keep moving and get things done.
My constraints for the project will be 12" square pieces, and I want to try to experiment with something a little new to me in each one.


I started working with a different palette for me.  I was taking a walk at sunset on a crisp winter's night, and was attracted to all the pastel colors in the sky.  I think I've spent my life avoiding pastels, so thought they would be fun to play with.

The first one a little heavier on marks.

Then the second one simplified a bit.

 I'll be posting more of my paintings on Instagram and am planning to do a weekly summary of how it's going here.

Improvisational Art

Happy New Year to me!  My health is settled, my family is settled, at least for now, so I'm ready to start my delayed new year and seem to have that fresh-start boost of enthusiasm.   I've started working on my word of the year "Simplify" by doing some much needed studio clean out.  Now to begin my new projects.

One thing that has become increasingly clear to me over the years is that I'm not too interested in doing anything but intuitive art.  I remember taking early quilting classes and being very excited to see the first 8 or so blocks join together and discovering the secondary patterns that formed.  Then once I had a good idea what the final quilt would look like, it became mechanical and boring.

Same with realistic painting classes.  I liked the challenge of learning the techniques to make something look realistic, but as soon as it did, and I knew what the finished painting would look like, I lost interest.

I really like doing improvisational work where all decisions are formed in the moment, when one stroke informs the next, when one shape determines what needs to go next to it, and without any idea what the finished product will look like.  It feels a little dangerous since you never know where you are going, and there are many things that don't work out along the way, but it keeps me feeling alive, and that's the whole point of doing art for me.

This approach works well with painting because I can easily cover something up or move it, but the approach is much harder to apply to stitching.  I really don't want to rip out a week's worth of handstitching to move a piece over 1/2" when it's throwing off a composition.  Still, I've decided my stitch project for this year is going to focus entirely on intuitive stitching and responding to what is already there.

I'm starting with 7" neutral background blocks and am stitching on the same one everyday for a week without any, or at least much, of a preconceived idea what they will look like.  I'm sure this will produce plenty of horrendous looking, ill-composed blocks, but maybe they'll highlight the good blocks when they are all joined together?  Or maybe they will end up in the trash.  I'm starting with a fairly neutral palette, but will take it where ever it wants to go.  Just to give myself a little grounding point, I'm going to start with my favorite shapes of X's and O's in mind.

That's the plan for my 2018 stitching project, but in a true improvisational nature, I'm allowing for the possibility that I'll abandon it all together after a pile of ugly blocks.  We'll see how it goes.

First week started with a scrappy X:

Second one with a blobby circle:

Painting Large

In Studio Journeys, our art bundle, or monthly lesson plan, for Jan. has been scale.  Those who tend to paint small are encouraged to paint large, and those who already paint large are encouraged to try very small paintings.  My challenge has been to go bigger.  I've gotten pretty comfortable with the 12" square or the 16x20".  This painting is not huge, but it is a step up at 24x30".  I'd like to try some really big paintings like 5 ft. x 6 ft, but that seems impossible until weather warms up and I can use the garage.  There is quite a challenge to keep the same loose energy going as you go bigger, a whole new set of tools required, but it is exciting and I'm eager to experiment a lot more.

For this painting I used the Zorn Palette which I've fallen in love with--cadmium red medium, yellow ochre, black and white.

Need a Do-Over!

I've decided I'm starting the new year all over in Feb.  Things are not getting off to a good start.

I lost my 13 year old bulldog, and trusty studio companion, Jack.  He was constantly by my side, and his favorite place was my studio.  I always felt like he probably picked up happy vibes from me when we were working in there.  He often got there first and barked to let me know it was time to join him.  The studio is very empty without him, and I'll be grieving that loss for quite a while.

My energy level is very low as I struggle with a cold.  I'll be heading to CA to help my mom recover from foot surgery for a few weeks, so everything will be on hold for a while.  But February!  Time for a fresh start!

I have only begun a few stitches toward my new daily stitch project.  Maybe I'll get it off to a serious start in Feb.  I know the direction I want to go now--lots of spontaneous stitching.  Here are some of the inspirations behind it.

The stunningly gorgeous stitching of Lisa Smirnova.  Her version of Frida takes my breath away.  I love the rawness of her stitching combined with her delicate touch.  Wow!

The playful heavy stitching and recurring motifs of Junko Oki.

 These wonderful chunky stitched pieces from The Nui Project, a stitching program for developmentally disabled adults in Japan.

And the very spontaneous stitching of Rieko Koga.

I so love all of this work, and hope that I can somehow capture that free, spontaneous feeling in my new project.  My posting will be sporadic until I get settled back in in Feb, but maybe by then I'll have lots of wild stitching to show.