Ridgetop Vineyard

2/24/2013

Time is flying by – and the Napa Valley Open Studios show at Taste of Yountville is only a few weeks away. I have so much work to finish! I have somewhere between half a dozen and ten pieces in process. To mis-paraphrase Samuel Johnson*, deadlines do concentrate the mind wonderfully....

Ridgetop Vineyard is painted of a view just down the road from my home, where vineyards line either side of the road down to Calistoga.

* As Samuel Johnson actually said, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Preparing for a show is quite a different sort of hanging altogether!

6 Comments

Stephen Sossaman link

9/14/2013 10:35:34 am

Ten pieces in progress at once? Could you tell us the benefit of doing this? I mean, besides the fact that your paintings are wonderful. I assume there is something pleasurable or efficient (i.e. not just letting oil dry between sessions, or meeting deadline pressures!). This interests me because I find great benefit as a writer in working simultaneously on poetry and plays, or one of those and fiction. My guess is that each work uses different brain cells and skills, I like the renewed sense of newness, and I find that problems are often best solved after being away from a work for a while. I wonder if you see each composition or color possibility with fresh eyes after working on other paintings.

Karen Lynn link

9/15/2013 10:38:05 am

Great question! Years ago, I worked quite differently - I focused on each painting exclusively, until it told me it was done.

But in more recent years, I do alternate between them. It's partly a practical matter - I can let one dry as I work on another (though with acrylics the drying time is, fortunately, much shorter than with oils). But what you mention about returning to work with new eyes is exactly the benefit I most appreciate.

In fact, I'm currently going back and forth between a number of paintings, with several of them being older paintings that never quite resolved to their own satisfaction. The longer I paint, the more I learn - so I've pulled them out and am bringing to them skills I may not have had when I first worked on them - as well as new vision.

The process of creativity is seldom a linear one, it seems!

Stephen Sossaman link

9/22/2013 06:31:21 am

I'm glad that you rework paintings when you feel the need to (not that this strategy would work very well with water colors). I have met more than a few poets who would be scandalized, because they see the poem not primarily for itself but primarily as a record of the poet's spontaneous emotion at the time. To me, that is a bit narcissistic, and I think artists should have at least some sense that the work at hand is more important than the maker. I believe that a poem "wants" to have a certain form and style, and lets the poet know by resisting other ways, and that it the poet's job to figure out what the poem want, and then to try to achieve it.

Karen Lynn

9/23/2013 07:48:20 am

My sense about paintings is similar to yours about poems. They most definitely have their own beings. They do want certain things, that often take them in directions very different than I might have originally intended.

I'm both parents and midwife; I raise them through sometimes glorious beginnings and often troubled adolescences; I do a lot of listening to what they need and do my best to bring it about; and then, when they're finally ready, it's my job to stand back and let them live.

(Perhaps this is one reason why I love acrylics so much – they allow for both quick working in the moment, and development over time.)

It's interesting that more than a few poets would be scandalized; perhaps this depends on one's temperament and approach to creating…. I completely agree that the work is more important than I am.

For me, my work is not a cathartic process. Although my colors have expressionist tendencies and I'm inspired by expressionist work, the composition, structure, and design of each piece are central in making it work – so the process is more of a combination of thought, knowledge, intuition, and experience, rather than one of emotion.

It's an interesting consideration, isn't it?

Stephen Sossaman link

9/25/2013 05:55:45 am

Yes, very interesting. One unfair advantage writers have over painters is that they can save early drafts and go back if necessary. Painters can keep digital photographic records, but cannot easily restore early states. Compare to paintings, poetry seems to come with the cultural expectation that a poem is about and must reveal the writer (not my view at all). The wonderful poet Philip Larkin wrote that, in paraphrase, "Novels are about other people, poems are about the poet." To me, paintings and poems and novels are essentially about the subject or theme, and/or about the tools and techniques (color, composition, etc.. I am coming around to the idea that a poem is more about the reader than writer. I do not think that about paintings, since they are usually less directly concerned with human experience and human nature. Plays, I think, must be about the audience. Not sure why.

Karen Lynn

10/1/2013 03:39:37 am

Believe me, there are times when I have wished I could go back to an earlier state of the painting! But, as I tell my students, it's only paint. Unfortunately, it's not possible to keep all the stages – and it's important not to get too "precious" about particular parts of a painting, if they keep the painting from working as a whole. It's good that photography can gives us a record of the stages - just to remember what they were, if for no other reason. One of the blessings of digital photography is that it makes the recordkeeping so much easier!

Interesting to think about the relationship between the work of art and its audience – although I think with painting it's most helpful to focus on the needs of the work itself - unless it's artwork done for commission or commercial purposes, in which case the client-audience becomes critical.

I imagine that for plays to work, they must appeal to an audience. At least poems generally are not commercial! I would hope that thinking of the audience wouldn't get in the way of the creative process of writing the poem... but I do know how other kinds of writing require that you think of the people to whom you are speaking. Different application of the creative process, I guess....

Ridgetop Vineyard

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Karen Lynn Ingalls

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