by Susan Lobb Porter | Art |
Spring. The time of birth. Rebirth. Renewal.
You know what that means, don’t you? I mean, besides OD-ing on leftover Easter Peeps and getting your hands dirty in the garden. It means…ta-da… it’s time for Bird Being Born!
Alert! Alert! Crappy photo alert!!! Sorry about that, the good photo is on the computer at work. This is a bit blurry but you can get the idea.
‘Bird Being Born’
Helen Powell
©2012 Neighborhood Center of the Arts
Acrylic on canvas $200
This gem was created by Helen Powell, one of the artists from the Neighborhood Center of the Arts. I’ve been teaching there since forever, although I use the term ‘teaching’ loosely. I provide materials, music and help the artists find what it is they do best.
With artists like Helen, who are totally self-directed, we just step out of the way and let their muse guide them. Helen is a true outsider artist. If you’re not familiar with outsider art or art brut you can read about it here.
I love my job.
by Susan Lobb Porter | Art, Life |
This weekend I learned a valuable lesson. I learned to paint like Matthew. He’s one of my students and you can read about him here. Go ahead. Read all about him. You need to do it to understand what I’m going to say. Do it now, I’ll wait.
CAN YOU STAND THAT SMILE??? OMG, I get PAID to hang out with him. Little emoticon hearts here. Lots if I knew how.
And by the way, that wonderful art program is a non-profit agency. Always strapped. Just sayin’…in case that smile made your give o’meter start ticking.
Now back to my weekend. I had the itch. And the only cure was STUDIO TIME. I needed to paint SO MUCH that I willingly braved rain and snow and a wind so fierce trees and birds were falling out of the sky.
I HAD to do it. There was a big canvas calling my name. And when a canvas speaks, it’s best to listen.
This one was 40×40, that’s inches for my Aussie friends. I’d done a number of layers on it a week or so ago. I didn’t have a plan, just knew it was time to add some definition. So I did.
Now, about painting like Matthew…I hooked my laptop to some speakers. Opened up the R&B folder in iTunes. Cranked up the volume ’till the walls shook.
I danced like no one was watching.
I sang like no one was listening.
And I painted like no one was home…
I. Did. NOT. Think.
The bird up above? He just evolved. As did the other shapes.
Evolved into this. Which is still a work in progress. Very much so.
My ego began kicking in around the same time the light got bad. Figured it was time to call it a day. Don’t know if I’ll be able to get back to it until next weekend. The night lighting in Studio Grande sucks. Ahhh, but the soon-to-be-new-Studio-Grande will have lighting conducive to working all through the night…if I’m ever so inclined.
So after a day of music and painting I curled up on the sofa with Mr. Spouse and a couple of dogs. Basketball. March madness. The Final Four playoff. He was very much into the game. And I was very much into the players. Umm…hmm… Sweaty young men…great shoulders…. What’s not to like?
by Susan Lobb Porter | Beloved Beasties, Life
I collect things. Shells. Beach glass. Rocks. I don’t do anything with these collections, just scatter a few here and there throughout the studio and the house. Before I had a laptop my computer desk looked like a cross between a natural history museum and Disney does Burger King. Kid meal monsters shared valuable space with geodes and sand dollars. Feathers stuck out of the pen cup. A realistic toy aligator was glued to the printer.
All my kids had to do was give me a rock, make up a story about it and I’m tellin’ you, that was Christmas for me.
I posted a photo on FaceBook the other day. Turkeys. Wrote a whole post here but FB is where all the comments were. The comments eventually touched on feathers and that got me thinking about this whole collection thing.
Because I collect feathers. I’ve got at least one basket of them in the studio. Mostly white goose feathers I gathered along the lake where we used to live. After we moved to the foothills the feathers changed.
And so did the display. Most of these are from the wild turkeys. Maybe all of them, I dunno. Don’t come with name tags. They’re just there, on the ground.
I took this photo sometime during the winter. It was just….there, in the snow. Sticking up like you see it here. I don’t have a clue what bird this is from or what happened to him. Maybe the tracks leading from the upper left tell the tale. Anybody want to guess?
I collect bird nests too. Ones I find on the ground, usually in the fall after the residents have left and there’s nothing anchoring them down in the wind. At least that’s my theory. They’re abandoned and quite interesting but that’s another post entirely.
Anyone got some collections you want to share?
by Susan Lobb Porter | Art, Process |
See those three guys to the right, the birds? True confession: I go through stages where I use that image a lot. Three fat little birds, always blue, tweeting and twittering throughout my work in a non-social networking sort of way.
That particular painting has been hanging on my studio wall (ok, pinned to the studio wall) for ages. I’ve never been moved to move ’em out.
Earlier this summer I decided to paint them again, this time on plaster. I made a cradled board roughly the same size, coated it with plaster and painted the birds.
The end result was flat as day old beer. Wasn’t worth keeping. Wasn’t even worth photographing.
They had to…go away. But I wasn’t giving up that board without a fight. So I sanded it. Gave it a base coat of dark blue to bring out the cracks. Oh, and by the way, when working on plaster I prefer to use the cheap craft acrylics. Doesn’t have much binder and the plaster soaks it up, giving everything a chalky appearance whereas the good stuff just sits on the surface like plastic. And they’re so cheap you can buy armloads, truckloads, for next to nothing.
This is where I realized I’d scratched boxes around each bird. I could’ve filled them in with more plaster but that would’ve added another day for drying and I didn’t want to wait. And I would lose the cracks.
Warning: The next couple of photographs are out of focus. Squint. You’ll be fine.
I added some color as an undercoat. Don’t ask me how I choose color, I just do. And I guess this would be an over-undercoat since there was already a (mostly) blue base.
Toned it down with more paint to even things out. Sanded just a bit to bring out the under-colors. The texture is coming through and I’m happy with what’s happening.
I scratched some marks and filled them in with contrasting paint. Then I threw in some dots because I like dots. This is what it looked like before wax.
And this is what it looked like after. I incised into the wax, rubbed oil color into the scratches. Rub. Wipe. Rub. Wipe. Working this way is hands on down ‘n dirty.
You can see more of my plaster and wax work here.
