Barbara J Carter

A few years ago I painted a series of 5×5-inch mini-paintings. They were much smaller than my canvas paintings, but otherwise they were much like my usual work. There were about a dozen paintings in that series. They were a fun project for me, and proved quite popular with my collectors.

Well, I’m doing it again. I need to have lots of paintings on hand for all of my upcoming shows, and these little guys seem just the thing. They’re pretty quick to paint and the smaller size is more affordable for collectors, not to mention easier to find space for hanging.

Here’s a group shot of the first few mini paintings in the new series, in varying stages of completion. I mat each one with a thick mat that I float above the surface of the painting for a peek-a-boo window effect. The mat hides the edges of the painting. How far does the painting go under the mat? That’s the mystery, and I’m not telling!

Each mat’s outside dimensions are 11×14 inches, a standard frame size. Unlike my paintings on canvas, these mini paintings do require framing, so I make that easier by using a standard size. At my shows I’ll also offer frames to go with these.

Check back for updates as I finish painting and assembling these mini paintings. I’m having a lot of fun with them. The only question: how many will I be able to finish in time for my next show? Stay tuned!

Sneak peek of painting in progress:

This is just a small part of the no-longer blank canvas shown in my last post.

That’s all you get to see for now!

The painting still has a long way to go, but rest assured: you’ll see it here when it’s done.

The phrase “blank canvas” gets used a lot in everyday speech. It evokes an image of a blank white surface, waiting for the first mark, the first touch of paint.

It’s pristine, unblemished, expectant. It’s intimidating. It calls to mind Gene Fowler’s description of writing: “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.“

Ouch!

But in fact this isn’t how you go about creating at all. No one in their right mind starts with an utterly blank canvas or blank sheet of paper. They’d just end up staring at it helplessly. Creativity doesn’t work like that.

No, first you go off by yourself, nowhere near a canvas. You think, you muse, you ponder.

You look around, go for a hike, take in a movie, riffle through your sketchbook, look at art books, magazines, photos. Ideas bubble to the surface, inspired by what you’re looking at, or maybe jarred loose by thinking about something utterly unrelated.

You scribble, sketch, jot down notes, make an outline. You play with colors, messing with paints or pastels or crayons or colored pencil. There’s no pressure at this stage. No finished product is expected. You might use scratch paper, or a scruffy sketchbook, or a private journal. There’s freedom to erase, redo, scratch out, throw away.

At some point, after all this messing about, you’ve got an idea cooking. That’s when you pull out the paper or canvas.

You start writing down the names of your novel’s main characters. You outline the main plot points. You rough in the main masses of your painting, lights and darks, basic shapes. You make sure that it looks like it’s going to work, then you proceed to refine, adding color, texture, details.

Before you know it, you’re painting or writing and that blank canvas wasn’t a hurdle at all. Quite the opposite: it was a natural part of the creative process.

Anyway, for me a blank canvas isn’t white. It’s red.

I don’t paint a canvas red until I know exactly what I’m going to do with it. Bigger ones like this one (which I just finished painting red) take longer to prepare. This delays the gratification of jumping into the actual painting process, but I think the delay is good for me. The anticipation builds my enthusiasm for the task ahead.

This story is from Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

To me, the thought of making a “perfect” work of art is awful. What can you do after creating perfection? There’s nothing left to do!

No, it’s much better to just create, and see what happens. I have no illusions that I’m creating perfection. I don’t desire perfection, I just want to make some art.

Everyone knows what goes into creating a painting, right? Canvas, some paint, brushes, a palette, an easel… Whoa, hold your horses! A LOT has to happen before stepping up to the easel!

Here’s what I do to prep for painting.

Since my painting focuses on the landscape, my first step is taking photos… LOTS of photos!

Taking my own reference photos is important to me. It means that the entire creative process, from beginning to end, is entirely mine. And it means that I’m not using someone else’s copyrighted image (which is illegal as well as unethical). If you’re just painting for yourself, it’s fine to use a picture from a magazine or the web. But as soon as you start selling your work, it becomes illegal to use someone else’s photography as the basis for your art (unless you get permission). So, I take all my own reference photos.

That means going where the scenery is photo-worthy. Although I have used photos taken while walking my dog around my neighborhood, usually the best photos come from further afield. I’ve had several opportunities to drive all around California this past year. I diligently took lots of photos everywhere I went. The best light is when the sun is low in the sky, casting wonderful shadows across the hills.

If you ever see a car pulled over on the side of a highway and a woman holding a digital camera over her head, it’s not a crazy person, it’s just me taking reference photos! (I like to hold the camera high to focus on the hills and avoid foreground clutter like fences and cars.)

Next comes the digital processing. This includes storing the photos so I can find them again, and sorting through them to find the ones that look promising. Each photo requires a lot of editing. Photoshop is the big-name photo editing program, but I use Paint Shop Pro, which does pretty well for me. I edit out annoying or unimportant stuff (like telephone wires, fences, signs, and in one case a hillside full of windmills!). I crop the image to create an interesting composition. I tweak the colors and the contrast to bring out the details I want to emphasize. And then I print it out. One raw photo can yield up to 10 different reference images (different crops and different sizes for different canvas sizes). Each is the correct proportions for a particular size of canvas that I use. I call these printouts “thumbnails”.

Many photos never see the light of day, while others can yield multiple usable thumbnails. Out of thousands of raw photos, maybe about 30% generate thumbnails. And then, of all those thumbnails, I end up painting only a tiny fraction. It’s a very rigorous process, and one I’m constantly refining. For example, I’m now keeping much better track of where each photo was taken, so I can use the location in the paintings’ titles.

When I want to begin a new painting, I pull out my files of thumbnails and riffle through them. I’ll pull a handful that strike me as interesting, and eventually select the one I want to paint. I leave the other finalists on the top of the stack so next time I’ll see them first.

(Actually, I usually select 2 to 4 thumbnails to paint from. I like to work on several paintings at the same time. But for the sake of the story we’ll focus on just one.)

Now, at last, I can start prepping the canvas. Finally we’re actually painting!

The whole canvas is first toned with my background color, red. For my California landscape paintings, I usually use cadmium red. This toning process takes several days because I paint not just the front surface but all 4 sides as well. It usually takes more than one layer to get the color really solid. Since the canvas has to rest on one of the edges, I can only paint a couple of sides at a time before I have to set it aside to dry. It’s best to let it dry overnight, so the process takes a few days. The result is a nice solid-red canvas, on the front and the sides.

Now, thumbnail in hand, I can begin actually painting the image. That’s the topic of my previous post.

That’s a lot of prep work for one painting, isn’t it? Hey, no one said this was easy!

Here’s an example of how a painting comes together.

I’m skipping a lot of preparatory steps… I’ll blog about them next time!

I work on my paintings in stages, letting each layer dry before applying the next. Here’s the first layer:

I usually start by blocking in the darkest areas of the painting, just to give me some structure to follow. Notice that even from the very beginning I use my characteristic pointillist style dots.

My table, to the right of the easel, holds my palette (it’s the big white sheet of freezer paper taped onto the table). The photo I’m working from is also lying on the table. You can also see other photos taped up on the wall behind the easel. Those are for other paintings.

Now I’m ready to start adding other colors:

I’ve put in some of the lightest parts of this painting. Again, this helps me keep track of what goes where. The midtone areas get filled in next:

This stage takes a while. I’ll work on the painting for a while, then set it aside. I’ll come back to it in a few hours or the next day when it’s good and dry, and I can look at it with fresh eyes. I’ll add to it a little each day. This goes on for several days. If I get really stuck, I might even set it aside for several days or even weeks just to let my subconscious mind work on it.

When the painting is almost finished, I’ll often leave it alone for several days, propped up somewhere in my studio so that I can see it while doing other things. Progress can slow down a lot in the final stages as I mull over what the painting “needs” in order to pull it together.

Here’s the end result (picture taken in better light):

“Hills and Shadows”, 2007, 40×30″