What's black and white?

For the past 3 and a half years, I've been looking at the world's shades of grey. Color or no, I've translated what I've seen into various amounts of black and white. First in charcoal and graphite, and then in oil paint.

Why? Because doing so has helped me learn to see how form can be depicted on a flat surface.

Today marks the completion of my black and white studies. While the bulk of my learning so far has simply (! not so simple !) been trying to get the perspective, proportions, and interesting line work to draw what I'm looking at, these paintings helped me translate that learning into mixing dollops of white and black oil paint and swishing brushes around on canvases to get a likeness.

This first attempt at drawing vases made me quickly realize that ellipses are tougher to execute with a fuzzy ended wand (a brush) than a sharply pointed pencil.

An Arrangement of Vases, oil, 7X5

And then, I tried to figure out what brushes could make certain marks like carving sharp edges or layering a color seamlessly over another. Throughout my black and white studies, I experimented with more than 50 different brushes to see what they could do. I came to like how hog bristles swiped in my drawings with ease and how synthetic brushes allowed smooth transitions and crisp layered effects.

But the toughest thing to learn was that my painting was not precious. If I didn't think it looked right, I had to change it. So when I made mistakes--like globbing on paint too thickly or drawing an ellipse off kilter--I had to steel myself before I scraped off my hours of work with a razor blade. Doing this taught me two important lessons: 1) I can critique my own work and 2) If I can draw it once, I can draw it again. I feel surprisingly empowered knowing I have these two skills in my belt now.

This whale vertebra was my defining hurdle for trusting that I could repaint something. When I saw the complexity on the end of that bone, I became overwhelmed. How will I be able to keep focused on all those bumps? What is that weird spiral I see in the chaos? I started in, not knowing how I'd manage it. As I worked, I started to build up layers and layers of thick paint, one for each self-correction to the exact shape and shade of grey I made. By the end, I had succeeded in creating a good attempt that the bone end. But the mounds of paint looked incongruous with the rest of the painting, which I had modeled thinly. Dang it! I promised myself that if I could see something wrong, I "had" to fix it. What option did I have? Only to take my razor blade and scrap off the goopy paint on the end of the vertebra and the shell in front of it. Oh, that was hard!

Yet, when I set up to fix the painting, I had already spent hours looking at the complexity and had an opinion about how the light worked across the forms. Working over the painting a second time turned out to be a lot of fun, relaxing even.

From the Sea, oil, 12X16

My Rock, Paper, Scissors painting culminated my black and white studies so that I can now explore color in Jeff Hein's curriculum. It reminds me of the Escher drawings I used to look round and round when I was a kid. But that game was such a handy problem-solver when I was a kid. It taught me how to move on after a disagreement or impasse with another. There were rules for getting through tough things, forks in the road--rock, paper, scissors. Each choice had a chance to succeed or fail. Which will I choose? Drawing and painting seems like an endless game of rock, paper, scissors with myself. Each choice a new chance to succeed or fail, endlessly treacherous and entertaining.

Rock, Paper, Scissors, oil, 9x12