I was recently feeling quite down, not seeing myself as a successful artist.  None of you have ever felt that way, right?  Right.  In my mind I had the cartoon image of an angel on one shoulder and a little devil with a pitchfork on the other, the two of them going at it.  For a while, the little devil was way ahead with arguments like "...after all, you've been at this for 23 years!...you aren't very prolific, are you?...are you just going to teach all your life?  You know what they say: those who can't, teach...so many others are better than you...you could've entered more shows, won more awards...you haven't had any formal training like the better artists...look at your resume, for pete's sake...what do you have to show for all this time and effort?...you're afraid, aren't you?...hey, you've got laundry to do and dinner to prepare."

Sound familiar?

Then the angel on the other shoulder tried encouraging me, but she sounded pretty pathetic in comparison.

Angel:  "Don't listen to him.  You are a good artist and an excellent teacher...It's okay to teach and enjoy painting for yourself.  Remember, you started out just to put art on your bare walls.

Devil:  Yeah, but now you've run out of walls and where are you?

Angel:  But look where you've come from with that tiny start! 

Devil:  But look what you could've done during all this time. 

Angel:  And you were never encouraged to pursue art as a career, either.

Devil:  Yeah, yeah, you're gonna blame someone else now for your failures. aren't you?

Then, as happens from time to time, I was "led" to Kevin McPherson's definition of artistic success in his wonderful book, Landscape Painting Inside & Out (must have been a bigger angel that came along!).  Kevin says "To succeed in art, you must first determine what success and art truly mean to you."  That definitely got my attention.  "If your goal is to reach financial success as an artist or to win awards, what will drive you to continue with art once those goals are reached?"  Yeah, Kevin, you're right on.  That's exactly how I've felt all along!  He goes on to say "If you have an insatiable appetite to create, you will not stop, and the rewards will come."

Thinking further about this, I can say that I've truly never seen myself as having a career as an artist.  I have a degree as an educator.  I enjoy teaching.  I've been and still am successful as a teacher.  I am a communicator.  But I'm also hooked on creativity, creating an image on canvas, paper, or through the lens of a camera.  It does not matter whether it's something I've seen and wish to interpret or a fantasy from my imagination.  When I experience something that takes my breath away or evokes a strong emotion I want to hold on to that experience.  I want to share it with someone else, to communicate.  To me, that is joyous!  I believe that's what souls do on a higher, spiritual level.  I am elevated to a higher place in the process and, hopefully, so is the viewer of my painting.  When I can share this experience even further by teaching a student to communicate his or her own experiences, well, that's just icing on the cake.

So as an artist and teacher of art I can connect on multiple levels and my joy expands.  And that, for me, is success:  to live a joy-filled life doing what I love to do with the ability to share it with others.  Do I want to sell my art?  Of course!  Do I feel "validated" as an artist when someone buys a piece?  Absolutely!  But that, in and of itself, does not make me a successful artist. 

With that thought in mind I flicked the little devilish annoyance from my shoulder and headed to my studio.

Wow, what a great class we had yesterday applying Notan design to an actual painting!  All of the students "got it", including our brand new student who joined the class yesterday.  Using photographs of selected scenes, the students worked up Notan sketches then toned their canvases.  Next compositions were sketched onto the canvases and underpainted using a number 5 gray on the value scale.  Interestingly, we ran into a problem when we realized some students' value scales used black as #1 and some used white as #1 value!  No matter, however, because 5 always fell in the middle.  The confusion began when I asked them to first lay in colors using values 6 and abovewhere they underpainted value 5, and for some that meant light values.  So if you're doing this at home just remember to lay in your DARK value colors FIRST.  Then proceed to the light value colors in the "white", unpainted areas of your canvas.  By the way, this exercise is great for teaching the values of paint hues as well.

Since everyone works in acrylics in this class, we discovered that softening edges using this method became difficult.  This was remedied, however, by leaving soft edges on the dark values and saving some of those mixtures for when we began applying light value colors.  Takes practice but everyone managed to get the idea. 

Everyone was excited to see their paintings develop so quickly, thanks in part to my constant pushing some of the normally slow poke, meticulous painters who all say they want to "loosen up", by the way.  By the end of class everyone went home happy with nearly completed paintings and I went home exhausted...but happy, too.  I love teaching!

I've decided to play around with the font size because I thought the default was way too small.  No, it's not my age.  I've got 20/20 with my glasses on.  The folks at Fine Art Studio Online were extremely helpful in changing the last blog entry and a couple of other sections of my website and told me how to do it myself.  Althought I'm not computer challenged neither am I a techy (is that right?)...Oh well.

This week's art class was a success!  We learned more about using Notan sketches to improve our compositions by evaluating light and dark shapes for better balance.  As usual, the class was buzzing to begin with.  It takes a while for everyone to unpack, visit, grab coffee.  But once we got down to business and everyone watched as I did a demo to illustrate the lesson, the class was anxious to begin their own sketches.  I had previously selected some of my own photographs, which I thought had good separation of values.  The students used these to create Notans using both a vertical and a horizontal format.  The object was to see which presented the most pleasing composition.  A lot of beginning painters just select a photograph and try to paint it exactly as it is, which is usually horizontal, since that's the way most people hold a camera.  It always amazes me that folks don't think about turning the camera vertically to take shots of tall things like trees, buildings, watertowers, and body shots of people.  But that's another lesson.

Too often we are seduced by color.  Beginning students in particular want to jump right in to the mixing of luscious colors and slap paint on the canvas, with little or no forethought, only to be disappointed with outcome.  Then there are students who have carefully made a plan.  They've thought about why they are painting their subjects, they've executed a beautiful preliminary sketch, know where the light is coming from, and selected a palette of colors suitable to the mood and key of the subject.  But the painting winds up being weak or lacking in "something" and the student is disappointed.   That's where good Notan design comes in, a pleasing balance of patterns of light and dark.  If you develop a good Notan plan for your composition initially I guarantee you will experience a better outcome.  Remember:  think SHAPES, VALUE, then COLOR.  Not the other way around.

I was pleased that everyone caught on quickly and some produced some excellent Notan sketches. Sorry I don't have photos for you.  I had my camera with me, intending to snap some shots of my students and their sketches, but in the flurry of teaching I totally forgot to use it!  I promise I'll do better next time.

To learn more about using Notan, see the article by Sharon Himes on the subject. Notan: Design in Light and Dark  You can find more information by entering Notan in the Google image search.

Next week we'll put this information to use by painting from our Notan sketches.  I promise I'll have examples for you to see.