Joyce Cambron

Green Hill Winter Show

2011-11-14T15:00:00.001-05:00

Last weekend I drove up to NC to deliver two pieces for the Green Hill Center's Winter Show, with the additional pleasure of visits with a couple of old friends. I had planned to take Black Slip (Green Couch) and a newer one:

Furniture Polish (2011), 16'x18", oil on linen

I sent images (rather late, I'm afraid) and received a reply from Edie Carpenter, who is the Director of Curatorial and Artistic Programs, asking if I would hold this painting and substitute another for the Winter Show. She is organizing a show for the fall of 2012, tentatively called “Home-work: views of 21^st century domestic life” and she said, "Your painting of the woman polishing the table, in addition to many of your other works, would be great for this thematic exhibition on home life." She asked for up to six paintings created since 2000. The exhibition will open the second week in September and run through the first week in November. I'm thrilled (of course), and excited, and somehow relieved, because I have another external goal to work towards, with a theme that suits my work perfectly and leaves enough room for me to develop some ideas. The framework is somehow liberating.

M_ Music

2011-11-04T09:01:00.001-04:00

Signed, sealed, delivered. (M_ Music (2011), 16"w x 18"h, oil on linen, commissioned)

Process, the bad and the good

2011-09-06T09:58:00.000-04:00

Every mark I make, each brushstroke, is provisional. I draw with the pencil in one hand and the eraser in the other. As for painting, though when asked I'll state with confidence—bravado even—that "I paint in layers," many of those layers are corrections on top of corrections; my inner mantra has been "I can fix it later." Surprisingly, I think this uncertainty is more due to lack of confidence than skill; it's so hard for me to believe I could make the line/stroke I want to make with the accuracy/weight/hue/value/chroma I intend, that it's only in a spasm of "something must be done, now" that any mark gets put down at all. And then it's an approximation, but seeing the approximation, I can relax (a bit) and discover how to tweak it closer to what's needed. It can be awfully demoralizing, though, and slow.

This seems unpleasantly confessional. I write it as a way of reminding myself that no process, no matter how habitual, is set in stone, and to reassure myself (and anyone else who may notice) that the piece will still get done. The only good I really see right now, in the obnoxious adolescence of the current painting, is that the approximations are getting closer and the process is becoming more streamlined and at least a tiny bit less angst-ridden.

Afternoon Drawing

2011-08-17T14:34:00.006-04:00

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours drawing with my friend Ciana Pullen--she drew me and I drew her:

(Pencil on gray charcoal paper, about 12"x14")

It was wonderful to have enough time with the sitter. Figure drawing has accustomed me to trying to get everything down in 20 or 30 minutes, so I accept all kinds of errors in a mad rush to the feet. In this drawing, though I had time to get proportions and angles right, I still hurried into it and then spent too much time making corrections that a little care in the beginning would have prevented.

Liquin as Varnish

2011-06-10T13:49:00.003-04:00

I've expressed my distaste for Winsor and Newton's Liquin in the past, but on no firmer grounds than that I hated the smell and the color it dried in the bottle. Today I ran across (at the Rational Painting forum) this quote from David Pyle, Director of Communications & Technical Education at Winsor & Newton: Because Liquin is used as a medium by so many artists to speed the drying of the paint layer, it has been an easy conceptual leap for many to presume that a layer of Liquin on top is just as good as Liquin added inside. It's not. Since its introduction in the 1960's, Liquin has been, and always will be, intended only for use as a medium. The problem with Liquin isn't the clarity or the resiliency of the film (it has both of those in abundance); it's that it dries too darn fast and to a solid and highly impermeable film.

If used to seal a still-wet paint layer, Liquin will fully block any further access to the atmosphere and the oxygen that is absolutely essential to the drying of the paint film. Without oxygen, the oil is incapable of forming all those nifty linkages that turn it into a highly durable layer. The paint layer will never fully dry, eventually proving unstable in a number of ways. Moreover, Liquin isn't soluble or removable (at least not in a way that leaves the painting beneath intact), making it virtually impossible for a conservator or restorer to work on the paint film when needed at a later date.

Piccolo Spoleto 27th Annual Juried Art Exhibition, part 2

2011-06-06T13:20:00.002-04:00

The awards reception was last night. Some very strong work, especially the photographs. Yellow Bathrobe took second prize, which makes me happy.

Piccolo Spoleto 27th Annual Juried Art Exhibition

2011-05-31T12:11:00.004-04:00

Coordinated by the Charleston Artist Guild and sponsored by the City of Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs, this exhibition will showcase works of South Carolina artists. This year’s jurors are Alex Powers (painting/ 2D) and Rick Rhodes (photography). Charleston Visitor Center, 375 Meeting St. Admission: free. May 27-June 10; Daily, 8:30am-5pm. Awards reception June 5, 5pm-7pm.

This is the painting I've entered: Yellow Bathrobe (2006-09), 12"x16", oil on linen on panel.

Wish You Were Here

2011-04-28T08:41:00.001-04:00

I won't show my entry as part of the fun is the anonymity. But... here is another from the same series (as so few people see this blog anyway!) Doorway, 4"x6", graphite on paper (which is very hard to photograph).

Re-Nude

2011-04-11T15:01:00.002-04:00

Once again I will have work in this one-night show--two of the French Postcard series (Two Women and Green Hair).

Lots on in Charleston this week. It's the Sesquicentennial of the beginning of the Civil War, which, as I now know, began right here on April 12, 1861 with shots fired from James Island at Fort Sumter. In the morning we'll get up early (way early) for the commemoration.

Another Lost Hour

2011-04-05T10:14:00.006-04:00

Last week I finally finished and delivered a commission, a new and larger version of my painting Lost Hour from 1997. Here I am with a tiny brush adjusting one last edge--or possibly I am completely repainting, yet again, the red shoes.

I don't have a very good image of the original Lost Hour, only a jpeg of a scan of a faded slide. The request for a new version took me aback--how was I to recreate a painting from almost 15 years ago? How faithful a copy was wanted? Although I was able to find a few of the reference photos, they were only snapshots; the negatives and enlargements disappeared years ago. I no longer live in the trailer nor own the furniture, and the model (ahem) has changed a bit, too. And, finally, the biggest stumbling block I faced was emotional--I'm not the person who made that first painting. That painting was a challenge I set myself: To do a figurative painting--a genre painting even--to bring my love of Vermeer's work in some small way into my own life, to show my own life as if it were some 20th-century reflection of 17th-century Delft. Hubris, I know. But Lost Hour set me on the path I still follow (with, of course, some side trips and lots of directionless meanderings in the woods). Would any of that bravery and excitement remain now?

To find a place to start, as a change to my usual working process I first did a complete and to scale graphite drawing. As well as allowing me to work out perspective and composition issues (more or less), the drawing eased me into the mood of the piece. I could "build" true windows and a different bed, feel the light flowing into the room, bring in a chair and some different objects, and consider the psychological moment. It helped me to be there, to rediscover the feelings that prompted me to paint the first one, and to make this one its own painting, its own story and not simply a copy.

Here is the finished painting: Lost Hour 2, 18"H x 22"W, oil on linen. I cannot fully express my gratitude to Becky and Lloyd, for their enthusiasm for the picture, their faith in me, and their apparently limitless patience. I hope not to test it again.

Portrait Drawing with Angela Cunningham

2010-09-03T10:15:00.006-04:00

Last week I took a portrait drawing workshop with Angela Cunningham at the Fine Arts League of the Carolinas in Asheville. It was quite an experience, six hours a day in a darkened studio drawing in a very focused and precise way. In pencil. One drawing only.

The class was a condensed version of drawing practice at the Grand Central Academy in NYC, where Angela is a fourth-year student and instructor. She is a wonderful teacher, patient and approachable, serious about the work yet relaxed. Her lectures and demos are direct, clear and informative--she doesn't get sidetracked, distracted, or ahead of herself or her students--and her critiques are helpful, specific and kind.

Our model, Elisabeth Guibert Thomas, was ideal. Her face is beautiful and interesting, with great structure. (She's also a fun and interesting person.) The other students came from a variety of backgrounds but all are accomplished artists, though not all were familiar with the "classical realist" approach. Angela's blog has photos of the class in progress and of some of our results, mine included:

An Ideal Studio

2010-07-08T12:14:00.002-04:00

Sadie Valeri's Studio.

It's also in San Francisco, sigh. In the Mission. Taquerias, sigh.

See Sadie Valeri's work, which is beautiful and interesting, teaching schedule, and blog here.

Sincerity, Originality

2010-06-20T10:32:00.003-04:00

"Thinking more of sincerity than of originality, conscious that originality that is not the product of sincerity is but peculiarity, and that sincerity alone points the road to the only originality anybody is capable of." -- Harold Speed, Oil Painting Techniques and Materials

Speed's Oil Painting is a classic, written in 1924 (thanks, Barbara, for pointing me back to it). There is much wisdom in it, though his style is sometimes awkward and dated. Sincerity is an old-fashioned idea, but it informs my best work and the work of others that I most admire.

Tiny Touchups

2010-06-17T10:02:00.003-04:00

Kitchen Counter came back from exhibit with just a little edge wear.

Paintings at Carteret Contemporary Art

2010-06-16T13:19:00.005-04:00

We just got back from a North Carolina road trip, visiting family and friends and taking paintings up to Carteret Contemporary Art. A couple are new and there are also a few that haven't been seen in some time. Jack Saylor will be the featured artist.

The one below is called At the Beach House (16" x 18", oil on linen). Another in the pink bathrobe series, it's on a rougher linen than I've been accustomed to using, and maybe that's what got me painting a little more loosely. There's even some knife work.

We visited my friend Marina Bosetti in Raleigh. Her recent work is, if possible, even more terrific. Here is one of her birdhouses (from her blog).

If at first...

2010-05-12T10:00:00.002-04:00

"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." --Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

Singularity, Revelation

2010-04-24T09:25:00.003-04:00

"In a mass society we have the sense of being anonymous: therefore we look for the silent moment in which our singularity breaks through, when emotions change, without warning, and reveal themselves." --V.S. Pritchett, Introduction to The Oxford Book of Short Stories, 1981.

RE/NUDE

2010-04-05T11:40:00.004-04:00

There will be an art show/sale on April 15, 2010 from 6:30pm-10:30pm at 501 King St., to benefit the local Planned Parenthood Health Center. The title of the show is “Re-Nude”, reflecting the theme, an all-nude show, which will be created by local artists. (...) The talented, festive and fun Garage Cuban Band will provide stellar entertainment and beer and wine will be served. Cash charge of $20 at the door/ $15 pre-sale to cover costs of the event.

I have a piece (Column 4) in this show, my first Charleston "exposure." I'm happy to participate, both to have the work seen and to support Planned Parenthood, an organization I've regularly donated to.

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."

2010-03-16T13:04:00.010-04:00

Groucho said that.

When you put your work out there, you never know how far it may travel: O cão que comeu o livro... ("the dog that ate the book"), a Portuguese-language blog, and Klimtbalan, one in Spanish. In the main, I'm very flattered, though Klimtbalan snagged photos that aren't particularly good, and one (reproduced grande!) is of an unfinished piece I'm not happy with. I use this blog to share in an informal way, mostly work in progress with friends who aren't near enough to come by for a glass of wine in the studio. The website I try to keep more formal and more structured, so it's a little troubling to see things piled one on another, out of any context in the case of blog images, and out of the chronological and thematic order of the website. But I guess it's all outside of the dog now.

Website

2010-03-12T15:53:00.002-05:00

I spent the day updating my website, adding many new pieces. I've discovered that it's only a chore if I put it off for, um, a couple of years. Take a look.

Another in the Column Series

2010-02-16T12:13:00.003-05:00

Or maybe the pink bathrobe series. Or the Trailer Series, of which it would be the last. 16"W x 18"H, oil on linen.

Polarizing

2010-02-15T13:56:00.003-05:00

A polarizing filter on the lights as well as the lens (no change to the painting). The face has one more layer of paint on it than the neck area, which is shinier. I think this trick will make a difference in photographing paintings that have opaque color painted into glazes--in photos the opaque paint seems to float above the glaze, whereas in real life there is a more subtle optical mixing going on.

Tabletop Fog

2010-02-15T13:51:00.004-05:00

WIP, oil on linen on panel, 16"W x 20"H. Not the real title (it has none so far), but I like the unfinished hand lost in some otherworldly realm. Still a way to go.

Black vs. White

2010-02-12T09:18:00.002-05:00

Friday evening, between some heavy downpours, we went to the opening reception at Robert Lange Studios for the show Black vs. White. A good though incongruous omen for the show was the brief appearance of a rainbow just as we turned onto Queen St. The theme, or conceit, was to have many of the gallery artists and several invitees create pairs of paintings contrasting black and white. There were some very lovely works--Robert Lange's play on Ceci n'est pas une pipe, Kirsten Moran's tiny Greek goddesses, Megan Aline's Whisper and Hum. (I am, not surprisingly, drawn to small pieces.) There is always good painting to be seen at this gallery and I always enjoy and am energized by a visit there. The featured painters are generally young, the paintings crisp and competent, and there's just enough of a whiff of whimsy for lightness. These artists, and the gallery owners, are having fun while they're working very hard.

(And check out the photos from the opening: who's that famous artist in the first one?)

The Re-Do

2010-02-05T13:55:00.005-05:00

In the last couple of weeks, as I finally get out from under the last of the move, I've pulled out the unfinished or problem pieces and tried to make some decisions about them. A couple were, I decided, unsalvageable--generally something basic was wrong with the concept or the composition--and those I recoated with a gray ground. It can be a grand relief to make a bad painting simply go away.

Then there are the paintings that are not so bad they need to disappear; they're the ones I need to recast in my mind as unfinished or with problems that may have solutions and work a little harder to bring them together.

The painting Column from July of 2008 has continued to bother me. It's been out and come back again. It was a difficult painting from the beginning; the deep chromatic red in the background seemed to overpower everything, the figure was stiff and her head not quite right, Milly got her tough cow-punching feet on it once, and neither I nor Chris could seem to get a good photo of it. The only thing I really liked was the, well, butt crack. But those hips seemed worth the trouble of another attempt at a better piece, and a canvas with paint on it moves along more quickly because I like the surface better.

Here's the re-do:

And the two together:

Breck Girls

2009-10-19T12:01:00.004-04:00

This morning at the easel I was thinking about my grandmother, whose birthday was last week. (She would have been 104.) I have a few tools from her paintbox: a ground-down scalpel that I use constantly--for scraping paint off the canvas, digging out hard paint from a tube, cleaning my nails--a sweet little yellow pocket knife, a couple of magnifying lenses. When I was ten I spent a summer with her in Louisville, a thousand miles from home. One of the things we did together was copy the pictures from the Breck ads in pastel. The exercise probably left me with a peculiar idea of feminine beauty and lasting insecurity about my hair, but I did learn a lot about handling pastel and the proportions of the head, and most important, how to be serious about making a piece of art. Thanks Gram.

(The image is from 1963 and I'm certain it's one we copied. I found it in the Smithsonian archives, here.)

Another Drawing

2009-09-23T15:21:00.003-04:00

Trying to organize and figure out storage for artwork, I came across this one from an unexpectedly productive session three years ago. Although the foreshortening always throws me a curve, it's an angle on a reclining pose that I've chosen over and over again. I think it was about 30 minutes.

"How can you tell she's not dead?"

2009-09-23T11:20:00.002-04:00

Not really the question I wanted to hear about a painting in progress.

I hope I haven't simply put makeup on the corpse.

New Photos of Work in Progress

2009-09-23T09:13:00.007-04:00

Last night Chris set up and photographed everything I've been working on lately. It's amazingly easy to let a pro do it, though we still need to work out some issues of glare and reflections, especially on wet paintings.

This one above (Meeting Street is the working title) has been my problem painting for months and as you can see its troubles are still not solved. It's 16" x 18" on linen.

I posted earlier stages of Martha and Sarah in July, but Sarah's face wasn't right, not a good likeness, not elderly enough, so I worked on it several times without improvement and then on Monday decided her whole head was out of proportion and painted it out. Not dry enough yesterday to work over, so here it is, in progress.

Second version of Nap continues. For me a 24" x 28" painting takes more thought, requires more energy, and, well, uses more paint. I have trouble with that estimate: I put out too much for small pictures and never enough for larger ones. And though I hate to be wasteful (I hear my mother's voice), I really hate not having enough of a mixture. Were I a more rational painter, it would be less of a problem.

I'm still finding things to interest me in this series of images. This one is currently called "Coy Nude with Bedsheets (and Cat)," but only because that's making me laugh this week.

Last pose

2009-07-23T11:21:00.003-04:00

Figure drawing last night was some of the best fun you can have with a pencil--yet very tiring too. (This was the final pose, so difficult, but still the best of my efforts--20 minutes, pencil on Ingres.) Lots of new people, very focused and serious but apparently all enjoying themselves as well. The model was lovely, and though the room was crowded it seemed to work pretty well for everyone. A buncha one-minute poses, some 10-minute, a couple of 20-minute. I'd probably prefer longer poses once I felt I was up to speed, but they're harder on the model and need to be more well-thought--if you've got a bad start, or a bad spot in a crowded room, you can't just hope for better in a few minutes. I look forward to the next session.

Like taking vitamins and exercising, drawing is a habit I should develop. Pencil--line--has become foreign; I kept wishing for a brush. I could barely consider composition, line weight and fluidity in the rush to get the figure down and fairly correct (the far leg above is obviously--now--too long). Practice will help. Being in a group puts me on my toes, but I also become a little conservative, not wanting to fail in public.

Nap II WIP

2009-07-22T10:37:00.003-04:00

This is a second--and larger--version of the earlier Nap, about 24" x 28", oil on linen. Working on chroma, value, texture. I've a long way to go, but I hope that at least the photographs will soon be better. Here's the rough beginning of this this painting, burnt sienna and ultramarine blue.

And this evening will be my first time with a new figure drawing group. I'm eager to meet some new artists and hope to get something useful from the drawing, though after dinner has never been particularly creative--or even active--for me. It should be fun.

Martha and Sarah WIP

2009-07-22T09:24:00.006-04:00

This is from an old photo (I guess that's obvious, eh). In this and the other current WIP (to come) I'm trying to work a controlled low-chroma palette with fairly compressed values. This one started with a burnt umber wipeout, still visible in places, and continued with a monochrome underpainting to establish the drawing and composition. For the underpainting I laid out a string of raw umber and white, values 5 through 8, to keep the painting fairly high-key, though I later added some darker (v. 4) accents. It's 16" x 18" oil on linen.

More on Simplification

2008-12-11T08:42:00.001-05:00

"To simplify something accurately, you've got to understand it deeply." --Thomas Friedman, quoted in The New Yorker (11/10/08)

Blue Ridge Artists' Materials

2008-11-14T15:40:00.004-05:00

This morning I had a treat: a visit to Blue Ridge Artist's Materials, an artist's oil paint manufacturer here in Asheville. I'd always been curious about paint-making, but I'd never gone farther than mixing up some simple pigments with a palette knife for my own use and information. Blue Ridge is a one-man show. Eric Silver, the paintmaker, is a really nice guy, easy and pleasant to talk with, and knowledgeable and conscientious about his work and his business. It was really kind of thrilling to talk to the paintmaker about what I use and why, what I like, what I don't, how different colors work in my palette. I admitted to being a total paint slut, but mostly about earth colors--so it's not as expensive an addiction as it could be. Eric wants to expand his range of natural pigments--the ochres and umbers and siennas that curl my toes--so I hope he'll keep me in mind as a tester or just as a fan with an opinion. I'm looking forward to a productive two-way relationship with him.

Blue Ridge oils are wonderful. I got my first order a couple of weeks ago and used many of the colors to finish up the the first two paintings in the current black slip series. I'm delighted with them. What a lovely consistency, creamy but not weak or loose. Really a joy to paint with. The Flemish white was a bit of a mystery to me--I guess I expected something thicker or heavier, that would require amendments, but it seems like a great mixing white unmediated and that's how I've been using it. Today Eric let me play with additions to the Flemish white. Adding his walnut sun oil really does thicken it right up; it's almost magical. A tiny bit of stearate paste made it creamy; mica powder, as well as thickening it in a dry way, added a nacreous quality.

I generally use a low-chroma palette of mostly earths, and Blue Ridge's natural earths are very good, too. They have that little bit of grittiness that reminds you where they come from and also seems to give them a specially interesting visual quality, especially when amended with just a bit of medium. I'm still figuring out where the hue of the natural burnt umber will fit in with my palette; it's lighter color deserves a spot. The raw sienna is fabulous; it reminds me of Doak's (old) raw sienna and so it's incredibly useful for me. The raw umber is also perfect for me, very cool and gray. The hue of the yellow ochre is lovely, not too orange or brown or acidic.

And then there's the Florentine Lake, what a color. A vibrant almost alizarin, but a bit more violet.

With an order over $100 Eric sends a free tube of Cobalt Violet Deep. CV is such a weak tinting but expensive pigment that you feel you don't get enough bang for your buck... but it is a beautiful color and useful in many ways if you're not stingy about using it. For shadows, to lower the chroma of a yellow, as a spot of violet just for the loveliness of violet.

Green Hill Winter Show

2008-11-14T15:37:00.005-05:00

For the past few days I've been visiting family in Asheville, after delivering paintings last weekend to Greensboro for the Green Hill Winter Show, which opens on December 6. The four on the left are the ones. The little one on the right, along with at least one other small one, will be at Carteret Contemporary for Thanksgiving weekend.

Influence

2008-10-13T12:58:00.004-04:00

Influence is often hard for me to trace down, but then other times it parks itself right in the front of my mind and won't leave room for my own thoughts about the picture at hand or even painting in general. I've recently been sending pictures and links to paintings to a friend who is just starting to look at art (that's what a trip to Paris will do!) and in those conversations I'm rediscovering some of the artists whose work has shaped mine: Vermeer and the Dutch genre painters most obviously, but also Wilhelm Hammershoi, Thomas Dewing, Fairfield Porter. (For me, like all painters, it's an enormous list, but the pictures I immediately thought to send were certainly the ones my own work is most indebted to.)

The Eckersberg below obviously affected the two Columns. For the current series, I finally identified the painting that had been tickling my brain: Lisa Gloria's Self Portrait as Ghost, which I've seen only online. The pose is echoed in Black Slip 4, but (aside from the costume) it's the twinning of intimacy and detachment that drew me to the painting and resonated with my own work. (All of Lisa's work is wonderful, especially The Washer and her drawings and paintings of young girls, her daughters I assume. Her website is www.lisagloria.com and her blog is called painter on painting. She's a thoughtful and interesting writer as well.)

Black slip series WIP

2008-10-12T17:31:00.005-04:00

Black Slip 2, 12"x16"

Black Slip 1, 16"x18"

Black Slip 4, 20"x20"

Photos from last week. Many bad starts lately but I seem to have found a little groove to mine here. Only the top one has any more paint than a simple burnt umber rub-in. I have a long way to go yet.

The happiest addition to my studio recently is a dock for my iPod. WJMC plays all day now, without being so in my head I can't think around it.

Getting ready for the show

2008-07-18T18:07:00.006-04:00

The upcoming show at Carteret Contemporary Art will be four painters rather than five: Martha Bringhurst, David Connell, Anthony Ulinski, and me. I am honored to be in their company. The opening reception is on Saturday, August 2, from 6 to 8 PM.

Today I finished what I think is a very good piece. No title yet, it's 14" x 16", oil on linen. Something is lost in the photo, but I can't seem to photoshop it into any better fidelity.

A good arm

2008-07-14T20:41:00.004-04:00

I was very happy with this arm today. The whole painting is coming along, but once in a while there is some little thing I know I couldn't really improve. The painting is 14" x 16"; this detail is about 4" x 6". It also occurred to me that part of my inspiration for these two "back" paintings was this lovely Eckersberg.

C.W. Eckersberg, Woman Standing in Front of a Mirror (1841)

Vasari

2008-07-07T20:18:00.006-04:00

Today my order from Vasari Paints arrived, in packaging so beautiful I felt like a princess. And all for earths. But earths are what I use. The Capucine Reds, light and deep, are more beautiful-- and promise to be more useful--than I can describe.

Exhibit

2008-07-03T13:09:00.004-04:00

Several of my recent paintings will be included in a group show at Carteret Contemporary Art called "Five Views." It opens on August 2. I'm working hard and waiting anxiously for frames to arrive.

(Edit: I posted at 1 PM and two large boxes appeared on my porch an hour later.)

Column

2008-07-03T13:06:00.003-04:00

10/12 Edit: This is a much better image.

The best image of this painting so far. It's still 16"x18" oil on linen.

Studio Tools

2008-07-01T16:45:00.004-04:00

I looked down this afternoon and noticed that many of my favorite oil painting tools were lined up on the table. The brush just to the right of the tube of Trans Sepia--a Grumbacher Gainsborough #6 bright--has been a workhorse for me since art school, and it's finally showing its age. I'm getting fond of Escoda Tadami synthetic mongoose brushes (the four gray-handled ones). The brights make a remarkable clean edge or thin line, and the filberts allow calligraphic drawing marks with thin paint as well as being all-round useful. The fattish handles are comfortable and have a nice balance. They are holding up very well so far. The Holbein scraper (top center between the Rublev lead white and the big tube of Michael Harding Cremnitz) gets used every day, sometimes even for a purpose other than clearing out a mistake. That's a rolling pin for chapatis on the right for squeezing tubes and threatening intruders. My pica rule (from a past life) is thin and lightweight for straightening an edge, and its various scales can come in handy to simplify mental arithmetic.

Kitchen WIP

2008-06-28T17:02:00.002-04:00

Photo has a lot of glare and in a hurry I did a not-very-good Photoshop fix. Getting beyond its dreadful middle stage. 18x24, I think, oil on linen. I'm so thankful to have the Canada balsam medium again; I can paint without such a struggle.

Canada Balsam Medium Recipe

2008-06-23T19:53:00.005-04:00

My order from Wood Finishing Enterprises arrived today. Although the focus is, obviously, wood finishes (particularly ingredients for musical instrument varnishes, it seems), it's a terrific resource for some expensive and hard-to-find oil painting materials. They carry Canada balsam at a reasonable price, or at least a price that I can almost justify after I figure how much I use to make a medium and then how much of the medium I use in one of my normally not very big paintings: $27 for 4 oz.

Here's the medium recipe: 1 part Canada balsam, 1-4 parts stand oil, 1-4 parts oil of spike. Stir the stand oil into the balsam (warm it gently if necessary) and then add the spike. I normally make up only a couple of ounces at a time in a small jar, and use it sparingly as a couch or added by drops to the paint nuts on the palette. It has a wonderful aroma, though too much spike will give me a monster headache. This is the one to use for subtly fused edges and a bit of the "jewel-like" effect.

The Series

2008-06-23T19:46:00.003-04:00

Part of today's effort. This is very schematic, and I sort of like that. I'm often pleased with the start of a painting, but my level of satisfaction diminishes rapidly as I get into the painting's troubled adolescence. That's why I post rough starts and more-or-less finished pieces, but not too many in-between stages. The middle doesn't seem like a progression so much as a series of mistakes and corrections--not the most efficient of processes, nor something I want to expose to much scrutiny.

I have been pondering "the series." My usual take on a series is a couple of paintings based on photos from the same session, slightly different ways of working out whatever idea I started with, as the two recent "bedroom" pieces. I have made more than one version of a painting (see Boxes I and II on my website) by changing the size and details; and some of my watermedia experiments from the winter used one photo as a jumping-off point. There are a couple of paintings that I had so much enthusiasm for, both image and idea, that I'm thinking of working them up again...because I just don't feel like I'm done with them.

Better photo?

2008-06-21T10:33:00.003-04:00

No doubt my time would be better spent actually painting. The color is more accurate in this one, although the darks and lights are not relating quite the way they do in the real thing. Oh, well, enough.

Another version begun

2008-06-20T17:15:00.002-04:00

Just a sketch, but I like the gesture of the figure a lot. This is 14"x16" on that same coarse linen. I expect I'll develop it further... and probably be sorry.

Woman by the bed, stage 3

2008-06-20T17:11:00.004-04:00

I'm getting close to the finish with this one; the face needs a little work and I have to make a decision about the bedspread. It's yet another with opaque paint worked into a glaze layer, and the photographs look terrible. The darks look too dark, and splotchy. It looks a lot better IRL, trust me--the red is gorgeous. I'll try to get a better photo in daylight tomorrow morning; right now there are thunderstorms threatening.

Woman by the bed, stage 2

2008-06-20T17:06:00.005-04:00

A progress shot of the one in "Rough" below. There was a green/gray stage that I forgot to get a photo of, before the back wall became red. I apologize for the glare.

Artistaday.com

2008-06-20T16:50:00.003-04:00

Geoff Pitchford contacted me yesterday about featuring my work... and so I became today's artist at http://www.artistaday.com/. Here's what the site says: "Artistaday.com’s goal is simple. We feel artists are under-valued, under-exposed, and generally under-appreciated. We want to bring attention to artists that otherwise don’t get the attention they deserve. If we can bring their art to one person that would have otherwise missed the opportunity to see it, we feel like we have made a contribution to the art community." It's a terrific goal and the featured work is generally good and interesting.

My page with, ahem, comments. I'd like to answer them all but I'm afraid I might get irritable--why do so many people see a migraine in this picture? Is it that painful?

Rough

2008-06-13T18:15:00.002-04:00

Taking a photo of a painting in progress can be enlightening. This is a rough start with a lot of glare, but it's apparent in the photo that the bed is only big enough for a child. It wasn't so obvious while I was working on it. (Duh.) So there will be major changes tomorrow when I will also try to get some color on it. This is 15"x17" (which I call "Vermeer size"), stretched linen. The linen is very coarse, and the secondary ground was haphazardly applied (by me), as you can see in the upper right corner where the umber really soaked into the overly absorbent first coat.

Simplicity, Perfection

2008-06-11T12:59:00.004-04:00

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” --Albert Einstein

Gleaned from Mark Bittner's NYTimes cooking blog, but so very applicable to making a good painting. And that from the erstwhile Painter of Stuff. Sometimes the only way to find out what you can and can't take out of a picture is to just go ahead and do it. Once in a while you have to put it back, but so far... not so much.

I'm back in the studio with serious intent but nothing to show yet. Stay tuned.

Surfer WIP

2008-05-05T17:42:00.003-04:00

This is the third (or possibly the fourth) version of this image. (A small study--7"x14"--is available at Carteret Contemporary Art. Matted and framed, it looks very good.) I may decide to crop this a little and to work on it some more, but it came together pretty well today, after sitting in the studio with just the sky wash for a couple of weeks. By now I've drawn this figure so many times, you'd think I'd be getting it right, but he looks heavy to me. Information to take to the next version, or maybe back to the previous one. Watercolor on a whole sheet of Fabriano CP. The photo is a bit dark on the right side; after thunderstorms this morning we had a beautiful day, but it darkened again before I took the picture.

Standing figure, watercolor

2008-04-29T19:04:00.003-04:00

I haven't spent enough time in the studio in the last couple of weeks and it shows. Watercolor, Fabriano rough, half sheet (15"x 23"?).

For Barbara

2008-04-29T18:58:00.003-04:00

A couple of the drawings for Boy on Bed. They're not very good drawings but they worked for reference. (The face and arm/shoulder are hinky. The model was a swimmer so I blame the shoulder on that.) I also did some color sketches in oil but I can't find those.

Still Life

2008-04-13T15:45:00.003-04:00

"It intrigued me to think that sorrow and memory could be contained in matter; that an object could bear the internal life of a person, as if people could not bear to be the keepers of their own souls. I felt a strange pity for the stillness, the steadfastness of objects." --Regina McBride, The Nature of Water and Air

Self-Portrait

2008-04-07T12:33:00.004-04:00

A detail from another recently retrieved image--the rest is very unfinished--from 2004-2005, I think, definitely in the depths of winter (which here is usually unrelieved grayness and gloom). About 14" x 16," from a 20" x 24" canvas. Oil.

Boy on Bed

2008-04-04T10:59:00.007-04:00

This painting is from my residency at Vermont Studio Center in July of 2002, an award from the NC Arts Council. More than five years later, I'm still incorporating insights I gained from visiting artists such as Vincent Desiderio and Frances Barth, and from the other residents, especially my friends Betsy Regan, Steven Barker, and Eleanor Kotlarik Wang.

For a long time I felt this painting was unfinished. Unlike my usual process, I worked from a series of drawings from life rather than photos, and intended to finish on site with the model, but time ran out on me. As I look at it now, however, I like the sketchiness of the paint, the unadorned abstraction of the composition, the bold color, the simple palette. The Nap is in many ways a direct descendent of this painting and shows me a direction to pursue: more beds. :)

Oil on canvas, gritty acrylic gesso ground (wore a good old brush down to nothing), 18" x 30."

Two Women, Part 3

2008-03-24T18:07:00.004-04:00

Acrylic added. Time to start a new one.

Two Women, Part 2

2008-03-24T18:01:00.006-04:00

Watercolor and graphite. Maybe I should have stopped at this point... but I didn't.

Mask

2008-03-20T18:39:00.004-04:00

I found (in a box marked "Pencils," strangely enough) these Derwent Sketching pencils, marked "dark wash" and "med wash," which melt--but not completely--into washes with water. Kind of interesting effect. This is about 6"x 7," on CP paper. The photo charmed me because her mask is crooked and her neck is dirty--I think I caught the mask, anyway.

Two Women WIP

2008-03-20T18:35:00.004-04:00

Graphite, wash, watercolor on 300 lb Fabriano CP. About 20.5" x 28". Lots more to do.

Latest Figure

2008-03-03T18:38:00.003-05:00

Nothing like standing in front of the easel to make you humble again. Wc/acrylic on 300-lb CP paper. The image is about 20"x28"--a full sheet, anyway.

These nudes are based on "French postcards"--erotic photographs from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries. I started with them simply because I love the figure and they were reference to experiment with, but as I study these pictures I become more entranced with the young women they portray. In so many, the poses are "sexy," but the faces are bored or sad, and their hands look work-worn or grubby even though they're ornamented with long nails and jewelry. If I develop this series into more than opportunity to play with new and unfamiliar paint, I will concentrate even more on the faces and hands, trying to find the individuals, the girls locked in these old dirty pictures.

Award

2008-03-03T12:15:00.004-05:00

Nap was selected for the First Prize in Paintings at the NC Artists Exhibition. I'm so proud and pleased I could pop.

Website

2008-02-23T11:23:00.001-05:00

My website is now up: www.joycecambron.com. Whew.

North Carolina Artists Exhibition

2008-02-12T14:35:00.004-05:00

The Nap one (click here to see it) was accepted into the North Carolina Artists Exhibition, sponsored by the Raleigh Fine Arts Society. The juror is Larry Wheeler, director of the NC Museum of Art. One of 60 selections from almost 600 entries. I'm pleased. The show will be up at the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts, in Raleigh, from March 2nd through April 6th.

Figure with Shawl, "stage 2"

2008-02-02T18:11:00.000-05:00

This is more like "stage 1a"--I went in with some acrylic but lost daylight before getting paint everywhere I had planned. A detail, maybe slightly distorted from the angle on the easel.

Figure with Shawl, details of stage 1

2008-02-02T18:09:00.000-05:00

Figure with Shawl

2008-02-02T18:05:00.000-05:00

Or maybe a tattoo. This is the first place I stopped to photograph: watercolor--ultramarine turquoise, quinacridone magenta, and quinacridone burnt orange--and graphite, 22" x 30" on 300 lb. Arches HP. The turquoise and magenta make a lovely subdued blue, not that it's visible anywhere on this painting.

Mexican Plate

2008-01-21T19:13:00.000-05:00

Better image posted below.

Last one, for now

2008-01-21T19:07:00.001-05:00

More watercolor, overworked the hand dreadfully and still never got the drawing right. Tomorrow I start a new image; this girl is starting to sneer at me. I will probably come back to her; the experiments were useful but I didn't quite capture expression/emotion/drawing as I'd like to.

Here she is again, first two days

2008-01-21T18:57:00.000-05:00

For once I took photos in progress--because I keep losing the good in early stages as well as covering the bad. I began with very loose, pale washes to give me an idea where the figure was, then established it with soft pencil and wet those marks to get sort of a shadow wash. The next morning I went in with more color. This sheet of paper was prepared with absorbent ground, which (contradictorily) made it less absorbent, made the color very easy to lift, but really grabbed the graphite. Another lesson.

Detail

2008-01-18T16:05:00.000-05:00

WC/Acrylic on paper, 22" x 30"

2008-01-18T15:51:00.000-05:00

This is the third (current) experiment on paper, the same French lady (probably from a postcard c. 1855). There was a watercolor beginning that got away from me so I covered almost all of it with thin acrylic. I also went in with soft graphite, to add some drawing marks, a technique I'll use earlier in the next one while the paper has some tooth. Whenever I feel too uncomfortable I slide back into familiar ways of painting--at least this time I used bigger brushes. More of Golden's fluid acrylics are on the way--after experimenting a bit with assorted hand-me-down paint, I decided the "fluid"s will work best on paper for me, liquid enough to easily thin to wc consistency with water or airbrush medium, but with enough body to remain opaque without hiding the texture of the paper. Which was 300 lb Fabriano, btw.

There's some glare in the upper left: shiny medium, which I need to avoid or learn to minimize.

Watercolor

2008-01-09T19:00:00.001-05:00

In a continuing quest to improve my skills and make my brain more flexible, I'm trying some water media. Watercolor and acrylic on paper, 22"x 30", more or less.

Finally. Good Photos.

2008-01-09T18:46:00.002-05:00

One might imagine these are the only two paintings I've ever made.

Gray Paint

2007-12-08T13:26:00.001-05:00

The results of a project I've intended to do for a long time: mix and tube eight values of neutral gray, according (to the best of my old eyes, bad light, and less than ideal reference) to the Munsell scale. I have found the best way to neutralize color is with the same value of gray, as complements are hard for me to control and unpredictable. My palette usually contains a string of grays, but each session's string tended to vary by my patience or what I perceived the needs of the painting to be (and my perception often veered toward "less"). Finally I ordered empty tubes (from http://www.naturalpigments.com/, a wonderful resource for painters) and on Thursday started squeezing and mixing. I used several ends of whites, mostly flake with some titanium and zinc, and most of a new tube of Michael Harding Cremnitz white (lovely paint). A mountain of white to amalgamate. Then a much smaller pile of "black"--a mix of ivory, Williamsburg's Black Roman Earth, and some burnt umber to maintain the neutrality (black paint, especially ivory, tends toward blue). The stainless condiment cup in the photo holds about 60ml; the empty tubes were 50ml; so I had at least a general idea of how much to mix for one tube. I started with a small pile of value 5, to see how hard this was going to be and to check the hue of my black, and then used it to tint the lighter values. I worked from light to dark and fortunately had mixed enough (just enough) black and more than enough white. Kind of messy but very satisfying.

There was enough white to mix four values of raw umber as well.

The Nap One redux

2007-12-08T13:18:00.000-05:00

I hope this one is finished; next week it goes to be photographed. The professional photographer will no doubt be able to get an image substantially closer to the real thing--and maybe give me some tips on improving my own photos of work.

The Nap One (WIP)

2007-09-29T15:32:00.000-04:00

Might be finished. No title yet, oil on linen on board, 16" x 20."

Rocks

2007-09-29T15:25:00.001-04:00

Finally got a photo of this one before it goes off to a new temporary home in PA.

Rocks (From Dice's Head), 1997, oil on paper, 23" x 30."

Stretching canvas

2007-09-28T19:32:00.001-04:00

In today's mail (snail) came Just Paint, Golden's newsletter. It featured an article about stretching canvas, from the corners in, with pictures. Here's a link: http://www.goldenpaints.com/justpaint/jp17article1.php
(No pics online?)

Over the years I have become more careful about supports, even though (knock wood) I've yet to have a real failure. One of the things I've managed in the past couple of weeks in spite of this bronchitis that's hanging on is to stretch a few canvases, working in the traditional way from the centers and spinning it, tacking as I go. Then I sized them with rabbitskin glue, and after it dried, as it turned out, almost completely restretched the canvases (it usually turns out that way--I blame it on the humidity). The cheap Polish linen from Jerry's Artarama bagged and sagged unevenly, as though the manufacturing sizing hadn't completely washed out, whereas the Utrecht 66J (my favorite fine portrait linen) sagged quite evenly, needing to be merely tightened (which still involved pulling all the tacks and doing it over). With both linens I was careful to identify the straight grain--thanks to Miss Morrison, who in junior high Home Ec taught me almost everything I needed to know about working with cloth: not just how to run a sewing machine, but how to maintain it; how to alter a pattern to fit; which fabric worked with which styles... The bright yellow "slacks" I constructed for my oatmeal cookie butt were not her choice, but goddamn they fit. Sorry, I digress. My point is that I have always been careful, I'm not stupid about fabric, I use heavy-duty stretchers with quite a proud lip--and still I restretch. My painter friends think I'm some kind of dinosaur because I use tacks rather than a staple gun, but aside from the fact that a tack hammer is easier on my increasingly fragile wrists, it's way simpler to pull tacks when you adjust the canvas.

I've read the Cennini Forum for several years, where I've picked up some very useful information and been exposed to, let's say, some very odd attitudes. Stretching canvas is a subject that comes up often, and the moderator and owner of the forum has been reticent with advice, promising a DVD on the subject soon, with repeated warnings that everything you know is wrong. (Lot of help that is to artists who have to keep working, hoping that what they know is good enough.) I wonder if James Bernstein, in this article, has stepped on Rob Howard's lines. I'm eager to try Bernstein's method.

Mexican Plate

2007-09-28T12:04:00.000-04:00

From earlier this year: Trailer Series: Mexican Plate. Oil on linen, 18" x 24."

Time to get started

2007-09-27T13:30:00.000-04:00

Since I seem to be unable to get a website up, this blog will serve for the moment to show some new and old work.

This is Trailer Series: Bedroom from 2005. Oil on linen on panel, 16" x 18."