Paintings of France, Italy and Beyond

“How long did it take you to paint that?”

I think any artist who has been painting for a while has to have heard that question a million times. I always find it a little hard to answer, because the question seems to imply a kind of value judgement, such as “paintings that take longer are worth more” (which isn’t always the case.) But if I were to answer the question in regards to the painting below, I’d have to say that it’s taken about 3 months. More aptly put, 1 trimester.

Yes, that’s right…Back in early November we received some surprising and life-changing news. Turns out we’re expecting our first born, due in July of 2010! Having been married for 15 years with no expectations of having children, let’s just say we were happily surprised!

What it has meant for me professionally (at least in the short run) is that my painting came to a screeching halt for the rest of the last quarter and the early part of 2010. Not only did I feel oil painting (with solvents) to be not good for the developing fetus, but frankly I was so constantly nauseated and exhausted that I had no  problem staying out of the studio altogether. Heck, even sitting at the computer for any amount of time gave me some serious vertigo, so I had no choice but to unplug for much of last quarter as well.

What it will mean for me in the future is a little unknown. I’ll still be an artist, but this one’s certainly a game-changer, at least in terms of the way I’ll play it. For sure there will be more periods of absenteeism once the baby makes her big debut. For now, I’m in my 2nd trimester and have both better stamina and the blessing of my obstetrician to get back to work, so I am finally tip-toeing back into the studio to have a  go at painting again. Here’s my first attempt, after a “pregnant pause”; a painting of lovely Lake Como:

“Gilded Afternoon, Lake Como”
Oil on linen, 24″x20″

So…since it took me all these months to finish, do you think I can charge more? Nah….I’ll just price it as per usual. Mama needs a new nursery! Click here for all the details.

Jennifer Young; Vibrant Landscapes
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Still here…though life has taken me on a series of little joy rides lately and sadly required time off from the studio, and out of the field as well. In the meantime, I have at least begun to work on my website again in the wee hours, and I’ve made some changes I’ve long intended to make.

I’ve cleaned up some code and have big plans for my site that are yet to come (as in a complete redesign!) But meanwhile, one of the immediate visible changes I’ve made was to add a plein air paintings section to my website. Here, finally, are the series of plein air paintings I’ve worked on over the last while, now in one place instead of scattered about on my blog and on a select few pages on my main site.

The other thing I’ve worked with over the last couple of weeks is experimenting with different online shopping carts– to the point of tearing out great swaths of hair. In the end, none of the “reasonably priced”, “easy to use” (read: hosted) shopping carts that I tested really worked for me, though there were  a few interesting options that I might have considered if I did not already have such an extensive website. One of the more interesting ones that seems to be used by a number of artists and creatives is Big Cartel.  It is a hosted cart, meaning that purchases would need to be made “off site”, away from the user’s website. If you’re an artist looking for such a solution, it might be worth a peek. From what I saw of it, it is attractive and fairly easy to use. One drawback, however, is that there is a product limit of 100, which is not much considering that if you would like to offer several options for one item (for instance, matted, framed, or unframed) they’d have to be listed as three separate products. Of course, there are many other possible e-commerce solutions as well (for artists and craftspeople, Etsy also comes to mind.) But all of the cheaper solutions tend to require that you upload all of your products to their site. Makes sense, I suppose. But for me it would be too time consuming and frankly pretty redundant, as I already have my paintings uploaded to both my site and blog.

In the end, it seemed just as easy to tear my hair out adding one-option  Paypal Buttons to my exisiting site. It ain’t fancy, but it’s a start. This update is made a little easier using WebAssist’s Paypal Extension for Dreamweaver.  My strategy is to start out by populating my site with shopping cart buttons for my smaller offerings, and then gradually work on adding them to all of my available paintings pages as time permits, with the hopes of making the site more online shopping-friendly. Only time will tell if it is a strategy that is worth the extra effort involved, but hopefully I’ll gather some clues so that I’ll know whether a more robust solution is worthwhile when it comes time to give my site a major overhaul. I’m still in the testing/updating stage for the simple shopping cart that exists now, but so far so good. Oh, and to kick off the cart, I’m offering free one-way shipping in the Continental U.S. for a limited time. :-). 

Jennifer Young; Vibrant Landscapes
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The Paint Annapolis plein air exhibition ended on Sunday, so on Monday I drove up to Annapolis to pick up unsold work from the competition. It would have been nice to do some more painting up there while I was at it, but I had to get back home so it was rather a whirlwind trip. I rather like this little skipjack, patiently waiting for some action as it sits in a drive just behind a veggie garden. It’s probably my favorite piece from the event.

“Summer’s End”
Oil on board, 9×12″

Jennifer Young; Vibrant Landscapes
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When I woke up the other morning it was so stunning outside that I decided to leave the studio for a bit and do some plein air painting in my Bellevue neighborhood. Dave and I passed these gorgeous maples on Newport Drive during our walk in the ‘hood the previous evening and I made a mental note to check them out again in the morning :

“October Maples”
Oil on Linen, 9×12″
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This is not the greatest of photos, so I will try and re-shoot this tomorrow morning when the lighting is better.  There are some areas where I might’ve wanted more refinement, but I am going to sit with this a bit and see how I feel about it when I can look at it with fresh eyes.

One thing I realized from the timed exercise I mentioned in my previous post was just how long my plein air paintings look like absolutely nothing. In fact, a common occurrence with me lately is the feeling of a sinking heart as I look at the confusing mess that is my painting and wonder if I might be better off just scrapping the whole thing. Bleh!

But then I’ll think something like, “Just work on it a little more and then you can quit if you want to.” Only a few strokes later (if they are good strokes) I find myself excited again and some logic begins to emerge.  It’s almost as if something switches in my brain (on or off? I don’t know.)  Maybe I just let go of the outcome and relax enough that somehow I can see the scene before me not as an overload of “things”, but as a rhythmic pattern of lights and darks, colors and shapes.

This is not to say that there aren’t areas for inprovement in this painting. But at least I managed to get the impression of place down, which, based on how the painting progressed in the earlier stage, was quite a surpise to me.  I guess the moral of that story is not to give up too soon. Some paintings are indeed “false starts” and probably just doomed to fail. But then there are those that have potential and a solid start and just require more patience and relaxed focus.  Bargain with yourself to just stick it out a little longer and see what happens. By doing so, you often have little to lose and much to gain.

Jennifer Young; Vibrant Landscapes
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Well, for the most part, my resolve last week to get “back to painting “ crumbled, as I found myself distracted by a number of other issues. I haven’t been in the best command of the schedule I’d set up for myself, setting aside my painting time to do a million different errands and tend to personal issues as well. The tendinitis continues to bother me, too, which isn’t helping my stick-to-itiveness.  In hindsight, in spite of my injuries, I  probably should have made myself stick as much as possible to the same schedule regardless of whether I’m actually “painting”– filling the gaps with new art-related activities (like reading one of my gazillion art books!) In any event, I am starting again–finally– with a color block-in which I’m including below:

Because of the shoulder/arm thing, I’ve had to make a few changes to the way I work so that I’m not in a huge amount of pain by the end of the day.  I’ve lowered my entire painting setup, paint for shorter intervals, and also set a timer when I am painting to go off every 30 minutes. It reminds me to stop and stretch and give my muscles a chance to release the locked position I tend to take when I’m hyper-focusing during painting.

Coincidentally, artist Robert Genn wrote an interesting little article last week in his twice-weekly newsltetter about the timed exercises he uses for  attention and focus, (which naturally caught my attention!)  In the article, Genn suggests that by imposing shorter time limits on a work session (in his example 37 minutes), one is required to come into sharp focus, thereby energizing mind and spirit (and often one’s painting as well.) I don’t think Genn is suggesting that one should always commit only 37 minutes to complete a painting! Rather, these are exercises to ’shake things up’ and breathe new life and energy into old, comfy work habits.

It’s a good idea. And it’s one I’ve implemented myself (though  I used a kitchen timer rather than an elusive 37-minute hourglass.) While Genn required his students to complete small paintings in his timed exercises, I’ve also found that the practice works great for plein air and larger studio paintings when you want to limit how long you spend working on each stage of the process. 

For instance, in plein air painting, where the shifting light already imposes a certain time limitation, the amount of time you spend establishing your composition is important not only to the painting as a whole, but also because it will dictate how much time you have left for the block-in and finishing. So for a smallish painting, I might wish to limit myself to 15-20 minutes to lay in my composition- DING! And 40 minutes for a block-in-DING! That leaves another 30 minutes to (possibly) an hour to make changes, refine shapes and edges and finish before the light changes too drastically (DING! Brushes down.)

You can play around with division of time if you wish, but the result, as Genn suggests, is often that you learn to hone your focus and think better on your feet, without giving yourself the chance to “noodle around” endlessly or jump into detail  too early in the game. It helps in more ways too, than just keeping you on track. For some reason, the timer helps to address all of the canvas during each of the timed stages, thereby avoiding the tendency to  get lost in only working (or overworking) one section of the painting to the sacrifice of the others. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe it’s just that using the timer stage-by-stage causes you to take a more deliberate, conscious approach at each stage, making the approach more methodical by breaking things down into digestible chunks.

While the timed-stages works particularly well for plein air painting (when time is truly of the essence,) I’ve found the same principal can also be worthwhile when applied in the studio, either by similarly timing myself at different stages in larger pieces, or, as Genn suggests, by (attempting to) finish an entire smaller piece in a short interval, as an exercise drill or a warm-up. So I thought I’d try it for the painting above, timing the initial compositional sketch and the color block-in at 15 and 40 minutes, respectively. I don’t intend to finish this piece in just an additional hour. It’s a 24×30″ canvas and I certainly don’t want it to look completely slapdash. On the other hand, I do hope to keep it as fresh as possible to re-energize myself now that I’m getting back to work.

Of course, anything can be annoying if taken to the extreme, but I can see how using the timer periodically can serve a useful purpose. It also provides good insight for me about my process, and just how much time I am spending therein.

Jennifer Young; Vibrant Landscapes
Oil Paintings and Art Prints Online
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