My Rock – My Mom
Sarah Drawing a Picture, ink on paper by Emmy Ezzell, circa 1984. Click here to see more drawings from this session.
My Mom was the first person who knew I was an artist, and who never ever told me I couldn’t be one.
There are thousands of things she has done along the way to make sure I followed my dreams – too many to list here. The most important thing she does, by far, is love me.
Thank you, Mom. You make it possible.
5 Reasons to Love James Jean Online
Waiting. Acrylic and Pastel on Cradled Wood Panels, 34 x 34″, 2010 by James Jean. Click image to view source.
You’ve probably seen James Jean’s work around the Internets. Maybe you love it like I do. He seems to draw and paint the other people breathe. It’s delicious, mysterious, pleasing and disturbing at once.
I’ve never seen Jean’s work in person. It occurred to me to ask myself why, other than the quality of the work itself, do I enjoy looking at it online?
Because James Jean has an excellent website.
Coco Chanel famously said that when a woman dresses shabbily, people notice her dress, but when she dresses well, people notice the woman. I looked at Jean’s drawings and paintings for several years before I noticed how well he presents it online. Here are some reasons why:
Less is more.
It’s a cliche that independent artists often combat, but Jean lets his work speak for itself. His site design is absolutely spotless. No explanations, no exclamations. Just the art, loud and clear.
Big, beautiful photos
He doesn’t make us squint to see the work. The photos aren’t fuzzy, washed-out, or imbalanced. The Reclamare scarf is a good example.
Up close and personal
If we can’t see the work in person, we can at least pretend. I wish more artists offered close-up details of their work like this.
Figure studies
Because artists never stop learning or practicing, especially when it comes to the figure.
Sketchbooks
Two of my favorites: Ottoman, Mole D-2
I’d like to thank the artist for putting all this work where we can see it. Keep it up.
Flat Stanley, Cheap Markers
Clement Gets Abstract, ink on paper, 2008 by Sarah Atlee. Some rights reserved.
In which I discover that cheap markers are just as useful as the expensive ones.
A poor carpenter blames his tools, right? I often draw with Prismacolor markers, known for their vast chromatic range and luscious blendability. And I’ve been known to paint with a W&N Series 7. But I also love tools and supplies I find for cheap or free. It’s all in how you use them.
In 2008, on a whim, I picked up a 36-pack of thin markers from the kids’ aisle at Hobby Lobby. They turned out to be some of the best pens I’ve ever used. These off-brand beauties had soft tips, a variety of colors (that tended toward the magenta end of the spectrum), and showed surprising versatility. Not long after I began using them, they dried out and began acting more like colored pencils. Suddenly I could layer, layer, layer. Just like using washes of acrylic paint.
Alas, Hobby Lobby changed their off-brand-brand of cheap markers (the newer ones have chiseled tips that don’t play well) and I haven’t found another set of these since then.
Clement Gets Abstract was created in July 2008 as part of a community journal project about Flat Stanley.
Wrangling Those Blog Post Ideas
I Miss Oklahoma, ink on paper, 2009 by Sarah Atlee. Some rights reserved.
I’m learning in the Blog Triage course that ideas beget other ideas. How to keep track of them all?
Following is a cross-section of my own blog-writing process.
Ideas are slippery. Capture them.
If I get an idea for a post and I’m not at the computer, I write it down in in my Hiptser PDA. Then I say to myself, “Captured – huzzah!”
Since my Hipster is a series of to-do lists, incomplete tasks stay on top until done. Post ideas stay on top until I store them in the Blog directory on my flash drive, which I carry everywhere.
Ideas want to wander. Park them.
At the computer, I open a new file in a plain-text editor (NoteTab or TextWrangler) and type in one or two sentences describing the idea. Example: “Flat Stanley, cheap markers.”
I save the file with the date in ISO 8601 format. Example: “20120501 flat stanley cheap markers.txt”
Because computer operating systems like to sort files alphabetically by default, this date format automatically keeps files in chronological order. Handy.
In a web browser window, I open all the web pages that relate to my post in separate tabs. Oh, how I love tabbed browsing! Each url gets copied and pasted at the bottom of my plain text document. This is just to park them until I turn them into links.
Maybe this won’t turn into a post today. I move the plain text document into a subfolder on my flash drive called “unpublished.” It’s a great place to go back and browse when I’m looking for new content for my blog.
Now, to the WordPress dashboard. I create a new post, put ONLY the title in, and save it as a draft. It is very important that I do not fiddle around with any of the shiny WordPress buttons at this time.
Ideas want to be polished.
Back in NoteTab, I finish composing my post.
Using the bits of html code that I know, I put all the link URLs into place.
I run through my preflight checklist, checking all links, spelling and grammar, and taste-testing for maximum zestiness.
I copy and paste the whole text into WordPress. I save the draft again (!) and preview it to check my links again (!).
Then, and only then, do I click “Publish.”
Last step: eat some chocolate and go to bed.
Are you having trouble deciding what to write, or how to write it?
Keep your eyes peeled for Alyson Stanfield’s next Blog Triage workshop.
Conspicuously Absent – Composing a Still Life
Landlocked: Still Life with Sushi, acrylic on canvas, 8 x 8 inches, 2011 by Sarah Atlee. Some rights reserved.
Composition is about choices
When composing an image, the artists chooses where each element is placed in order to produce certain effects. The desired effect could be motion, tension, calm, strength, quiet, noise, and so on.
Lately I’m revisiting Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings and studying his compositions. I’m wild about the way he pushes those divisions of space almost to the edges of the canvas in a conscious step away from the traditional Western pyramid. As my former painting teacher Martin Facey (himself a student of Diebenkorn’s) would say, the middle of this painting is full of “nothing,” as in no thing.
Painting no thing
In exploring still life painting, I find that composition is queen. A solid composition is complemented, not overshadowed, by color and paint handling. I enjoy playing on the notion that the most important business of a painting happens in the middle.
For Landlocked, above, I wanted to try pushing all the action to the first half of the hour, so to speak. I frequently employ the circle-within-a-square layout, and I like how the oddish placement of the sushi plays against the static underpinnings of the image.
My original photos of these leftovers included a teacup with soy sauce in it, a very dark element dominating the upper left quadrant of the composition. I decided against including it in the painting, choosing instead to fill that half of the plate with no thing. I also changed the color of the plate from green to a more neutral grey to turn its personality down a few notches, letting the sushi pop (better than putting it in the frying pan, no?).
Landlocked was created for the annual Small Works exhibit at JRB Art Gallery at the Elms. See more of my still life paintings in the Images section of the site.
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