On the Motivation and Joys of Painting with Friends

In my Studio, October 28, 2014

My husband, Arny, got a new iPhone 6+ and to see how good its camera was,  he came down and took a shot of me in my studio painting.

    I'm working on a small oil that I'll talk about later.  It's one of three small works I'm wanting to have in good shape before tomorrow -- when I'm having a painting date with a friend.  My friend is Deb Watson,  a wonderful artist and teacher. Check out her webpage to see her work, and get great watercolor painting tips, and lessons.  

     We have known each other for years, but we hadn't talked in a while.  She is a real go-getter, and her career reflects that.  I reconnected with her a couple of weeks ago, after my opening because I wanted to she how she was doing and get inspired by her energy and enthusiasm.  As usual, talking painting with her was a blast, and reenergized me.  She too seemed to have a good time.

    While she does oils, she's primarily a master watercolorist -- my original love in painting. She has done some work in oils, but not as much as I, so we'd thought it would be fun to set up a regular painting time where we could do our own work, and benefit from the enthusiasm and skills of the other.

     Last week was our first meeting.  We met in her studio, and talked a lot about stuff she is thinking about, then I sat down and did some sketches for a couple of little paintings.  Although I didn't get any farther that day, it inspired me to work on stuff this week, and I've almost completed the two works I started, and today began a third one.  Although I'd been painting abstracts recently, Deb's work has inspired me to return to my original love, realism, this week.   I think we're going to play with oils, but maybe she'll need to work on her watercolor stuff.  Either way, I am really looking forward to painting with another artist, I always find it increases my motivation and creativity.

    The picture you can see me working on is a little oil of a wonderful farmhouse B&B we stayed in with my sister and brother in law (Elaine and Larry) in August.  It's called the Arvgarden B&B in Wellsboro, PA.  We loved it, and loved using it as our base of operations so we could explore Pennsylvania's version of the Grand Canyon.  I'll put it up later today and make it available on my Paintworks website for auction and sale -- and later in the week I'll do the same with the two other small works I've been working on.  Look for them.

     I

Dipping Into and Out of Abstraction -- part 1

Ever since I started painting, I have thought of myself as being a realistic/representational painter. Like so many self-taught painters, initially my painting style was very tight.  At the time I was painting almost exclusively in watercolor, which is a medium much more dominated by realism and that often values precision. But, even so, I realized that the most compelling pieces often had looser/more abstract parts within them. Thus, while didn't feel much pressure to experiment with abstraction in general,  I came to understand that if I let myself get looser, less literal (at least in parts) my paintings could be more interesting.

Teacup Pineapple, watercolor on
paper by Tracy Feldman 8 x 8", 2004

The little watercolor to the left is currently available on auction in my Daily Paintworks Gallery. It is an example of my  loosening up within a very realistic piece.  I reached past the literal by messing around with placement and how I named the piece.  So, I did a very realistic painting of a mini pineapple and a teacup for which it was named. I also placed the items on a tablecloth decorated with pineapples.  For me, it was an amusing piece of "reality with a twist". But as the years went on, I had a growing feeling that in order to keep growing as a painter, I needed to challenge myself even more by allowing myself to let go of my realism touchstone.

Reef,  by Tracy Feldman,
Acrylic on Canvas, 24 x 36" , 2010/11

Something that helped me loosen up was expanding my painting milieu to include oils and acrylics.  Being easily able to paint over sections of paintings to change the composition and coloration helped me feel safer using a looser painting style.

By 2010, I was willing to take a foray into abstraction.  I took an abstract painting class at the PA College of Art and Design.  During that class, I found that a brother-in-law of mine was ill.  I worried about him, and knew there was nothing direct I could do to help since they lived in another state.  So, I decided to use a number of his underwater photos as the inspiration for  an abstract work and send him good energy while I painted. That one piece grew into a series of figurative abstracts -- which means in my case that while my painting had identifiable "real world" shapes, the objects in the pieces were so simplified, and the color scheme modified in such non-naturalistic ways, that the final pieces became abstracts.  

But, these abstract works clearly didn't signify that I was moving from realism to abstraction.  At the same time, for example, I also was painting a number of very realistic pieces.  Furthermore, the next year, while my husband and I once again went to Galway, Ireland for his sabbatical, I went back to realism. More on this topic in tomorrow's post.