A Veteran’s Life

I’m not sure where this will end up. My initial thoughts were not quite so negative, but I’m not always in control of how things progress. There’s some quote about inspiration having to find you when you’re working, and I think that this painting and many of the paintings I’ve done recently are on the same themes I wrote about in the past. I’m still excited about this one, so I’ll keep at it for as long as I can keep being moved to make changes.

Raid (For Hugh J. Martin)

I’ve been slowly working my way through a lot of the poems that Bruce Weigl sent me. It was really pretty awesome of him to send me copies of his books that I did not already have. Also, he commented that it wasn’t much to send me his books when I sent him a painting, and I get what he meant. But the truth is that if he hadn’t written the poem I based the painting on, then I wouldn’t have had that art to give him. I do think that we all under value our own work, though, and maybe that’s normal, but I want to stop doing that myself, and I want to state here, before I even get a chance to write Bruce back, that it is one of the best gifts I’ve ever received to have the books he sent me.

But this painting that I have done for Hugh J. Martin was inspired by his poem “Raid” from his book The Stick Soldiers. I do think this painting is enhanced by the poem (I can’t say if the poem is made better by the painting), and I hope that as I continue to work on these types of paintings going forward that the art I make that is inspired by art I’ve consumed will create a conversation that is worth listening to and, hopefully, worth engaging in.

Four Waterfalls

I started this painting last winter, and have just now come back to it. I’m just chipping away a little at a time since it’s so large.

Fellowship Submission Complete

After six months of work I was finally able to submit my application to the Anderson Center today.

It’s a good day because I completed a goal that I set for myself, and there have been a lot of goals that I had to give up on or rethink over the past 8 years.

Now I can slow down and focus on new paintings for the next project as well as the illustrations for Dustin Hoffman’s story A Sick Child. I think I’m going to try that as a kickstarter (unless someone knows a publisher who might be interested in a black and white illustrated short story).

This is a great start to the year. I’m excited to get to work on new things and to dust off some old ideas and see what I can do with them.

Hayseason with Girl and Helicopters

I’ve been unable to attend to the website for the past couple months due to illness and then due to the fact that I needed to spend all the available time I had to work so that I could reach my goal of completing the 5 paintings by January 8th, 2024.

I finished the last of my paintings that I had hoped to complete before my birthday today. I’m not sure what I’ll work on over the next week that is not xmas gift related, but I’ll take the rest of the week to see if there is anything else I want to say with this series of work and then get back at it once Christmas is over.

This Painting “Hay Season with Girl and Helicopters” is a 30x40 oil painting on canvas.

Fall Sunset on the Hill

My parents celebrate their 45th anniversary tomorrow. I’m very proud of them for navigating their lives with grace and patience. I did a watercolor of a sunset on the hill where they built their house when my dad retired, and I put a Bronco 2 in the picture to remind them of that vehicle that I drove 20 years ago.

We would drive around on my papa Bob’s farm at dusk to see the deer on the move, and this image hopefully is a reminder of those times. The round bales in the field are there because that’s what happens out there in the fall.

Sergeant Slaughterhouse 5 Update

This was never intended to be a realistic painting, but for some reason the more I worked on the boy’s face the more I pushed it away from the “comic” gestural style that the charcoal drawing had been. I do think something has been lost that I really liked in that original sketch, but I am so far along with this one, that I am just seeing where it takes me as I move ahead.

I stretched his expression quite a bit from where it was at the last stopping point, and I think it makes a lot more sense. He’s a kid and he is imagining his participation in a full-on battle. I added another silhouette of a soldier reeling from an explosion in the imagined war behind the kid, and I think that I’ll do a bit more work for the explosions and smoke behind the kid next. I’m not totally sure if I want anything else in the extreme foreground, but after it dries I may toy around with a hunk of charred debris or something flying forward. I kind of want the imagined stuff to remain behind the boy to make sure it is clear that it is imagined, but if the boy is like “6” then perhaps he’s still capable of imagining himself into unrealistic realities like Calvin and Hobbes. And it could be an opportunity to create an element that helps to grab the viewer and pull them into the painting. I don’t know. Rendering a cracked and charred hunk of concrete might be exactly what this needs to end it, or it might be exactly what I need to do in order to waste a couple hours of time that might be better spent working on the rest of the series.

Progressing Again. Desert Scene: Soldiers in a Hole.

This painting of soldiers in a hole behind a house in Iraq surrounded by dogs began as a black and white drawing that I hadn’t intended to do in oil, but in order to capture the ominous feel of the orange light of a dusky and sandy desert evening, I figured it made sense to use some color.

I am still figuring out how many dogs there will be and how I want the shadows to fall. In order to get this to look right I think I’ll need to push the building farther back a bit and I manned to adjust the size of the hole they’re in.

I think the main goal with the painting right now is to try and get the men and the dogs to feel like two sets of animals with the same emotions about what has happened. The hole is dug, and there is nothing in it. So they’re all disappointed and frustrated at the result of the work. The dogs, of course, did not do the work, but dogs often reap the rewards of work they didn’t do around my house. Not that I am complaining. I’m sure they’d clean up after me if they could.

Fall

Here I am after the second pass with “Fall”. I decided to lose the bombs and the plane because the vapor trails in the sky are more subtle and I think they show the message I really wanted to show. This is not a war zone, and the girl here is not scared for her life, but the weapons of war are always there and that means war could happen at any moment. Which is both good and bad. I don’t want war, but I know we need to be prepared in the event it comes. And I know that anything that can be explained in a line from a Metallica song is probably not the most complicated idea, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth reiterating. After all if we all stop talking about things because we’ve heard them before then we are bound to forget to pass knowledge on that needs to be passed on.

Back at it.

Since this blog is about the process of art making and being a father it makes sense that I write about the hurdles and not pretend this is always smooth sailing. I left instagram recently because I was reaching no one there and I was not seeing any art at all. It seemed mostly like an advertisement for people getting injured. I don’t like laughing at people getting hurt, so I’m happy to move on. If anyone tells you that you need to be on social media, then they are lying. You don’t. If you want to be, then go for it, but it’s not for me.

But I have had sick kids for a while, then I got sick, and the woman who watches my youngest daughter a couple mornings a week got injured, and it has just generally been a rough time going for me regarding space and time to work on anything seriously. I have done some work on some things, but none of it has been moving my submissions for the fellowship application in the right direction. But all of the paintings ought to be dry by now, so I can get back into them. I did get some sketches done and have a good idea for another one of the paintings for the children and war series that I will be able to start this week.

I keep thinking I am better, and then I run or bike and then start coughing like mad when I finish up, so I am just going to hold off on serious exercise for at least one more day, and I will hope that tomorrow I can at least dip my toes back in to my normal schedule.

The paintings need to be done and photographed by January 9th to meet the deadline for the submission, but I am pretty sure I can make that happen. Even if they are not all 100 percent the way I want them to be, and even if some of them end up being done in something other than oil.

Today I was able to get all the girls to school and paint for about 2.5 hours. I had done some sketches of young girls in a ballet class standing near one another and looking at something. I wasn’t sure what it would be until this morning when I sat down to paint.

This is the charcoal sketch I did this a.m. prior to getting to work. I decided on a patriot missile battery firing a missile as the point of their focus. I tried to keep it loose so that I can fool around with gestural, impressionistic lines when it came time to do the painting.

Here is the 16x20 canvas after I did a light wash of burnt sienna (acrylic) over the white canvas. I drew directly on top of this with a charcoal pencil.

And here is where I landed after 2.5 hours. It’s still wet so there is some glare of course, and I’m sure that some of the poses of the girls will change a bit. Skin tones are very gray currently. And I need the background to be much darker than it is so that the highlights in the tutus and the missile fire are super vibrant. I used a cheap payne’s gray and it has terrible coverage. I think it is “master’s touch” paint, and I don’t mean to say that you have to spend maximum money on all your paint, but this I would avoid Payne’s Gray in Master’s Touch. I just need to use mine up or else I’ll feel like a wasteful piece of garbage.

The story here is that I take my daughter to her ballet lessons on saturdays sometimes and when I do I see all the little kids (boys and girls; although here it feels better to have all girls in the painting), staring around at times looking at their instructors. So that was fresh in my head and then I had a conversation this weekend about when I was in Saudi Arabia back in 2003 and I had to fix a patriot missile comm circuit.

The girls in the painting are not intended to be in a combat zone. As with the rest of the paintings I’m doing in this series, these girls are learning and training in ballet while at once there are these terrifying/awesome things that destroy and protect. None of these are anti-war or pro-war. All I am trying to do is capture an honest experience that neither blames nor praises anyone.

The more I work on these, the more I feel like I’m gonna need a palette cleanse when I finish up. I may just do some big landscapes to try and add some beauty around the house. But when I do those I will make sure I don’t waste any time painting with master’s touch payne’s gray.

I made quite a bit more progress on this one. The picture is glossy because the paint is still so wet, but for the most part I am happy with the progress here. Once it dries I’ll make some changes to the patriot missile battery and then take a look at an actual missile to get it looking a bit more like an actual missile. The positions of each of the dancers is closer to what I wanted them to be, but I will take a look at the girl on the far right when it dries so I can see what, if anything, I might be able to do with her gesturally that might add some more energy to the painting overall. Some of the tutus are a bit too high or too low probably, but I will handle that when I come back in with some shadows on the girls’ backs, and then I think the final real step will be highliting the front where the missile is firing out of from the battery.

Study, Study, Study

I’ve been lucky enough to find a bunch of books on artists that I really admire and have started to do some studies of their work when I’m waiting for oil paint to dry and not working on inking and coloring Nana Boo Boo. I’ll hunt down the link for that in case someone wants to find a copy of Other Strangeness, or perhaps if someone wants to subscribe and help keep that publication headed in the right direction.

Anyway. I’m studying some Leyendecker illustrations of kids:

I don’t know if Leyendecker did these in gouache or what (it appears that it may have been in egg tempera paint). I did my studies with pencil and watercolor to make sure I could get them done quickly with as little blending as possible, and it worked fine for my purposes. All I want to do is get some more milage out of the children that I paint in the paintings I’m working on for my Children and War series. And Leyendecker maybe does something a little bit like “over-real” or something with the kids. I’m not sure I can back that statement up with anything, but for me I think I want the kids I paint to be less “plastic” and more sketchy (sort of like what’s here, but with oils).

I also did a study of a Robert McGinnis painting. What I learned recently was that some of these guys were using a Bloptropilocatlifragilictiousdosus (I can’t remember what it was actually called, but it’s a projector) to get their images onto canvas at the right size. Some of them were tracing over photographs. I personally do not care how the art is made. If it’s good, then it’s good. And I think a lot of McGinnis’ work is very good. What it actually did for me was make me feel freer about tracing things (not other people’s work) in order to get some of the heavy lifting done quicker when I have a deadline. It just makes sense when you have a timeline that you meet it. If that means you trace a photo to get the figure right, then so be it. Obviously you can’t invent a traced figure and that is going to have ups and downs; maybe it won’t be as dynamic as one you invent could be, but art is all about choices and no matter what choice you make something is going to suffer as a result or might not be as good as it could’ve been as a result of making another part of the art better. So…I did a study of one of his paintings.

This one I did way too fast. Because I didn’t spend enough time on the drawing the neck is broken and there are other problems. But I definitely got a lot out of the lighting and color, and there is also the fact that I recognized that I broke the neck. Which returns me to my bit about the tracing. I do want to be better at figure drawing (this is a painting, and so it isn’t the same as drawing a model), and in order to do that I believe that I must keep on going to life drawing classes and studying anatomy. One of these days I will bite the bullet and set myself up a schedule for self-study to compliment the painting class and then post that here. So much of this has had to be accomplished without anyone to hold my hand and that is pretty great because of the freedom it provides, but there is also those days where I actually get time to work and then the canvas just calls me names until I go outside and run, or make a coffee, or read a book I’ve already read. No one cares if I paint the things I want to paint, so I have to motivate myself. And that is the real goal anyway. To make the things I want to make, and to improve each time.

Thank You, Bruce Weigl

I got a package from Bruce Weigl in the mail today after sending him an illustration I did of his poem “Him, on the Bicycle” that’s in his book Song of Napalm. I learned about Bruce’s work back when I was doing my PhD. at Western Michigan University, and Song of Napalm was immensely helpful to me as a person and a writer.

I didn’t send him the painting expecting anything, and I think that is what made getting a package seem so incredible. He included with his letter 3 of his books (all signed), and one of them is a book of poems he translated from Vietnamese to English. This is a huge gift because it means I now have something in my house to read that I likely would not have sought on my own.

I do many things not expecting anything in return and believe doing kind things for others without expecting anything in return is a good rule to live by. I also believe that when these kindnesses you do go out into the world they multiply. When a kindness comes back to you, assuming you are so lucky, it’s a good reminder to keep it up.

I’m grateful to Bruce for his response and for the work he’s done as a poet and teacher. The fact that he is also a veteran and he helped cut a path in the world of writing gave me a trail to follow. Although I did not end up teaching, I could’ve done so, (or at least made an honest effort pursuing that aim), and believing such a goal was attainable for a guy like was in no small part the result of Bruce and folks like him who’d done so in the past.

Him, On the Bicycle for Bruce Weigl

You can buy a copy of Song of Napalm by clicking the link.

Sergeant Slaughterhouse Five (For Tom Schaeffer)

This initial image here is the rough sketch I did. I like the energy of the lines here.

This is the charcoal drawing I did on the toned canvas. I lost some of the energy of him body language from the original sketch with this drawing, and I am pretty sure I’ll try and work that back into the painting as I get the rest of it figured out. He’s right up front and I really want him to be moving that tank in a way that shows how much he believes in its invincibility. There was a time as a kid that no one could’ve told me that a person with a bazooka could be bested by someone with anything less. It’s sort of a magical time; the biggest dad can beat up all the other dads, you know? Which is, of course, totally nuts. But a “tank” was more than the machine to me as a kid in the same way that an A-10 was more than just the plane. These were basically on par with greek gods. And I think that at least in this painting I am recalling this and also showing it more than I’ve shown it in any of the other ones so far. But nothing is finalized. So we’ll see how it goes.

So far I haven’t done anything with oil paints for this. The shapes are coming through well enough, and I do think this will be the way the lighting works, but since the background is going to be an “explodey” war zone, I’ll have to change the lighting a bit, maybe. I guess I’ll know it when I see it. But I think on the ground plane in front of him it will be “real” and the lights from the explosions behind him in his imagination can illuminate the back of his helmet and so on.

I’m starting to get a lot more of the shapes the way I wanted them. I have not done anything with oil yet, but I’ll start using oil probably on the next pass.

The more I work on this, the less energy it seems to have. It feels a lot more stiff than it did when it was just charcoal, and one of the problems I often have is that the deeper into a project I go the more I wish it was in a different medium. Any medium presents its own challenges and my ability to draw will limit what I can do no matter what medium I work in. So what I am saying is that I’m going to press on with this once it has dried and just get this finished.

I want to make sure the smoke, fire, and explosions in the background are vibrant and imposing in the comic way that the boy’s features are oversized. At this point I do need to step back and work on some other stuff so that when I return to this I can do it with fresh eyes, and so that I can do studies of a toy tank and the helmet and so on.

After this pass I am starting to miss the comic face from the earlier version, but I’m feeling pretty committed to this now. I’m not totally sure if I’m going to add rank to the helmet back or not. I think it makes sense the kid would imagine himself as an officer, though, so I’ll probably switch to captain’s bars or maybe put a star on there depending on how important I want the kid to believe he is.

I added in some silhouettes in various spots in the background. That space back there is his imagination, so I wanted it to seem like chaos. I redid the size of the helmet to make the kid feel smaller, and I need to hit it with the highlights from the imaginary war behind him when this dries.

I don’t want him to look surprised or scared so I’ll get back into the eyes at some point and make him look like he’s about to drop his tank and unleash hell on the enemy because that is what I intend for the kid to be doing here.

I think it needs more explode-ness. So I guess I’ll try to work that in too.

Combat Take Off Part 3

I made some more progress yesterday. The broke tree is gone, and I redid the girls hands to get them to a more natural size and position. I also changed the sweater to an orange color because I think it will look a lot nicer set agains the cool colors of the jet and the sky bnehind. The roundtable still feels a bit small and I’ll figure out what I want to do with it once the rest of the paint around it dries. I’m using alkyd to speed it up, but I don’t want to blend anything else at this stage. The girls eyes were giving me a lot of trouble yesterday, but I was right up on the painting the whole time and forgot to step back to see it as a whole and that was a big mistake.

Today I think I’ll spend some more time on the Jet, trying to get it positioned farther back in space, and then possibly get some more of the golden hay colors and textures on the field behind the girl.

Art Smart Lessons

My kids’ school has no art teachers. I am guessing this is probably not an uncommon occurrence nationwide, so I am assisting the PTO along with some other parents in trying to get this Art Smart program up and running again.

My plan is to create about 10 or 15 ten minute lessons that briefly talk about an artist’s biography and the style they are known for, and then to post those lessons on youtube so that anyone else who might be in need of some kind of art instruction has access to it. Doing this will help me to get my “Build a Book” series done as well since I’ll be working on that at some point down the line. (More on that when I get the time).

Because I know there are a lot of kids who probably only have access to the most basic supplies I’ll keep this as minimalist as possible. Crayons, colored pencils, and markers on copy paper will be used for the majority of the lessons. These are not my preferred tools, but you really can do a lot of amazing things with the most basic of tools if you understand the concepts and build up the skills necessary, and hopefully explaining that to the kids will help them to see the value in doing the lessons this way if they happen to be bummed about not getting to use the best materials in the world.

The good news is that the techniques and concepts shown with these materials translate easily to any materials the kids have available.

The first lesson I did was a lesson on Monet where I talked a little about warm and cool colors to do a landscape with a haystack, and that can be seen here:

Monet Art Smart Video

I’ll add each new lesson as it’s completed to the youtube channel.

Combat Take Off Part 2

Here I have blocked in a fair amount of stuff. I’m not certain what I want to do with the expression on the girl’s face, but at the moment she’s excited. I’ll figure out the eye placement and so on much later after I get the majority of the other work done. The broken tree in the mid-ground is probably gonna disappear because it seems totally random to me, and I think that it will feel more like a hay field if there are fewer obstructions around. So I’ll get some more hay bales in there and make the hills feel more rolling than they do currently. But I need the girl to be descending a pretty steep one so that the airplane looks like it is in a spot where it can actually exist.

The airplane is not complete, here either. I’ll check a reference and see what I can add to make it more authentic, but I’m not overly concerned with making it 100 percent accurate since that doesn’t really matter in this painting. It isn’t a painting of an A-10 fighter jet.

The little girl’s arms (the right arm specifically) looks a little short to me, so I’ll figure that out as I go as well. Depending on what happens with the composition as I start to move ahead, I’ll make final choices about her sweatshirt color, but the Jeans seem right to me currently. I think I want her to be wearing boots, and I may make them DCU style since I envision these kids as having military parents or having family members in the service.

I like the way it’s progressing so far. And, I know, it does look ugly in spots, but that’s just how it goes with this kind of work for me. I’ll just keep plugging along and get where I need to go eventually.

Combat Take off

I started in on a 30x40 oil painting called Combat Takeoff.

I thought I might work on these things on video, but I truly do not enjoy that at all. I can do it for some stuff, but when I am really trying to work something through it makes me feel like I’m using half my brain for art making and half of it for performing, and as a result both things are half as good as they could be otherwise.

Initial Charcoal sketch for “Combat Takeoff”.

I had planned to hold off a bit on this because I hadn’t done a drawing of an A-10 from beneath, and that meant I wasn’t really ready to get into painting the plane yet. But I want to make some of the choices spontaneously, and I’ll never do that if I spend weeks mapping out every single millimeter of the canvas.

The first days lay-in of clouds and sky.

All I’ve done here is slap some paint down with some galkyd lite to speed up the drying process. I’m still not sure about the broken tree and the hay bale, but I do like the giant cloud in the back left a lot. I don’t know what, if anything I’ll put on the little girl’s sweatshirt when the time comes. I added a heart initially, but it seemed too leading to me. I don’t want these to be the kinds of paintings that make people feel bad for the kids in the pictures. The kids are supposed to be innocent and the weapons of war in the images are supposed to be what they are as well; they are not supposed to just be bad.

I am hopeful that one day soon I’ll be able to get out to the military honor park and do some plain air work on a cannon and a helicopter so that I don’t just do A-10s for every single painting, but I have always admired that plane for it’s aesthetics and for the mission it serves.

New Series of paintings dealing with children and war.

I am starting a new series of paintings about children and war. Currently all that means is that it will have something to do with war (or with weapons of war) and how it impacts children. I’m not sure where this will take me, but the ideas have been in my head for a long time now, and I finally feel ready to start getting the images out and onto canvas.

This is the first image in the series. It’s titled “Fall”, and as soon as I can get some leaves on trees around here to change color, then I’ll be able to get some better references for the horizon line. This is an early draft. The soccer ball is just a sphere with some dots on it, and the A-10 is a bit wonky too. I think I want it pushed back a bit and I’ll figure out the best way to do that later, but this is the overall statement, and I’ll get busy iterating on it soon.

My goal is to do 5 paintings in this series and then exhibit them/enter them into contests sometime early next year. Most of them will likely be this 12x16 size in oil, but as I move along and continue to explore the ideas they may get bigger or evolve into different mediums.

This second image is an early charcoal sketch for the second painting of a child running in a hayfield while an A-10 flies in the background.

I don’t think all of the paintings will have A-10s in them, but I lived on England Air Force Base (it was in Louisiana) when I was in 2nd and 3rd grade and that base was home to the Flying Tigers and that brief period of time seeing those planes has affected my imagination ever since.

Crossing the Creek

This is a 16x20 pastel painting of my daughter and wife crossing a creek in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

Wealtheow

I got Wealtheow inked and I’ll color her digitally for the book. I do think that I’ll finish my favorites of all these illustrations in oils and then put them up for sale on the website when I get the time to do so. Currently the only painting for sale is a watercolor waterfall, but I am not going to be a guy who just paints one thing a million times if I can help it.

Here’s where she’s at right now.