If Henri Rousseau persevered - we all can!

It was going so well up until judgment day. There were experiments and free play. There was a sense of joy in discovery, a feeling a pioneer or a scientist might have mixing unconventional techniques and ideas. And after a number of compliments I decided I'll put this piece into a juried museum call. In order to do that, I needed to finish it that day and all of a sudden I froze.

All these preemptive feelings of shame of rejection, the nervous anxiety of anticipation overtook my creative flow. I couldn't put down a single stroke without worrying that it'll ruin the piece.

How is it that some people are such natural salesmen? How is it that their stomachs don't churn at the thought of criticism and disapproval? Why does the life of an artist have to be so full of punishments?

Yes, I can tell myself time and again that this isn't about someone's appreciation of my work. But that's a lie. I want to be seen, I want the attention these pieces deserve. I want them bought, auctioned off, hanging in museums. I want to be earning money as an artist. Why even after so many years in the industry do I not get the formula? Is my art too shallow, too impersonal? Do people need to bleed from the inside in order for me to succeed? You take what's most precious to you, turn yourself inside out and only then do you get noticed? Or does it have to be completely void of any personal touch and be an abstract blob?

I'm just thrilled I had read a children's book to my students recently on the life of Henri Rousseau, on his yearly rejections and his ability to persevere. If only I could have the same strength and not take this whole process so close to heart...

Embrace all your different realities!

You start painting an object and move it into an abstract composition of shapes. It seems to lack depth so you add light and shade, you construct believable grooves and folds. Then this something starts to look like another recognizable subject. You run with it and add more elements that will turn it into a fish, or a person, or a hilltop. Once you're past this layer, all you see is that central shape of a physical being and it annoys you tremendously that this is no longer just an abstract painting that is free to be anything. Does our eye always seek something recognizable to hold onto? Do I as a painter and in my real life need to steady myself with reality?

You turn the piece upside down and tell yourself that you'll start from scratch. You can simply see lines and shapes and colors, without needing to go anywhere else. Yet, within ten seconds your eye begins to search out recognizable imagery - formal elements of a painting aren't enough for it to chew on.

Perhaps it's the nature of shapes and lines to be suggestive. With one stroke Japanese calligraphers evoke a mountain top because they know our eyes will complete the scene on their own. So why should I try to run away from suggestive imagery? Why not embrace as many realities as come to mind? When the landscape is full of incomplete spaces, our eyes are able to take it in and add to it in just the same way they see things in an abstract shape. It's about doing more with less. Wouldn't that be a nice life motto?

Let your inner child play as long as she wants

Reflecting on a memory of a real landscape brings so many questions. Even after I figured out the mood for the painting, and limited my palette accordingly, I was still struggling with just how precise this depiction needs to be. As much as I wanted to leave the reality of the scene, things like perspective, shapes and textures of specific subjects were forcing me to stop and reconsider my every move.

When does this adherence to reality take a break, and lets the imagination take over? How can I open a door to creativity if a constant logical critic sits on my shoulder and demands accuracy and academic realism? How did Kandinsky accomplish this feat? To have a landscape and to not have it at the same time? To let shapes, colors and lines take over the composition? To have a real scene turn mythical, become a dreamscape?

I guess a lot of it is a dance of inner voices, but in a dance there's always a leading partner. How can the lead shift to a more abstract thinking section of the brain? Perhaps these voices relinquish control and don't take turns? When there's a real marriage of color and line - the trick is to not turn on the switch back to observation, and to just let yourself sink into the simple pleasures of mixing colors, the way a little child would, for hours.Yes, that is it. Just like I force myself (not always successfully) to not interfere and let my children play their game of choice for as long as they need, I need to not rush my inner child, and let her play as long as she wants. Then just stop before judgment kicks back in.

Then the goal is to repeat this for every painting session...and for every child's invented game.

How important are your acquaintenance relationships?

As I embarked on the color theory journey along with my students, I feel that I'm getting lessons in subtlety. When you limit yourself to the very basic means, you only then start seeing nuances in relationships, in shades - those fifty shades of any color, in vibrancy, in temperature, and in transparency.

Everything doesn't need to be harsh, full of contrast, jarring in order to make an impact. Most of the time, the beauty lies in the subtle mixes of colors, and even more so in their transparent layers. An opaque layer covers all your tracks, all your moods of yesterday. While semi-opaque or translucent layers are able to neutralize if too much has been said, or add a little accent of focus.

All my life I've been searching for only the deepest relationships. It's all or nothing. You're not making it onto my friend list if we can't have the most intimate conversations. Mere acquaintances would stay by the wayside, as that's just what they were. I dismissed so many wonderful people because of this all or nothing approach. In reality, however, one can gain so much from even the smallest encounter with a stranger, or a mentor/student relationship, developing both ways. So much can be learnt from an inconsequential family visit, or a cocktail party conversation. Everything happens for a reason, and if you're only after the most idealistic statements, you miss the nuances, the everyday messages of life. I love this new bare essentials approach.

Stop projecting yourself onto others!

Last semester has been quite difficult. I kept seeing lack of progress in my students, instead noticing their repetitive mistakes. It seemed to me that some get stuck in certain areas at the expense of the whole painting. Others use way too many colors. Yet another bunch never has enough time, and most don't trust in their creativity and inner voice. These problems kept me up at night and made me rethink time and again why I'm bothering to teach at all if I see no progress in my pupils.

It's when I started this painting, which differs greatly from my typical way of thinking, when all these issues hit me all at once like a ton of bricks. As I typically paint from life, and with this endeavor I was attempting to unblock my dream painting practice, I was facing a myriad of problems all at once. How do I bring out images from within, somehow convincingly connect them, and trust myself while doing it? I had to choose colors randomly, knowing they will have a different feel when placed next to other colors. I had to properly employ perspective, and hold a palette knife just so to achieve lines of desired thickness. I had to fight with contrasts, toning and vibrancy of almost every stroke. Throughout this turmoil, my own words of encouragement kept coming back to me.

I then suddenly realized that every single problem with which I struggled was an exact flaw that I saw in others' works. Essentially, I was projecting my own fears and insecurities onto my students.

Hearing this teaching voice with its practical suggestions made it come back full circle. What I need is to experience all these problems in order to be able to teach them. I need to learn to trust my inner voice as I'm teaching. Finally, I need to go through the quest of teaching to guide my own road to painting.

This semester started on this high note! :)

Everything needs its individual attention

The question of giving every student different treatment and a varied set of tasks based on his/her personality has been haunting me for a while. Time and time again I see that inevitably one or two students in each class need a lot more time on each project than others. I feel awful hurrying them along, as typically these are the students who truly pay attention to details, are quite the perfectionists and want every one of their pieces to truly become a work of art. But then what do I do with the rest of the group? I can't constantly split up, on occasion into three separate corners - where each student is doing something different based on his/her skill set and interests. It makes me crazy, I'm feeling like my head is about to explode in all these different directions.

This painting has been attempting to give me answers to that question. I went into it with my typical expressive approach, covering the canvas at once with slashes of my favorite palette knife. It all somewhat worked, but all the elements seemed to lack their own personality. And it occurred to me that I can't treat the surface of the water in a completely identical way in which I'm handling the tree growth, or the clouds floating along. They each move in their separate way: trees reaching up, clouds circling along, water drifting in horizontal lines. I need to copy their movement with my lines, being mindful of each and every personality, so that it could be a valid form in the composition, so that all these actors can have a dialogue with each other.

And yet, these are all parts of one whole painting, and all these personalities have to coexist in it. Trees and sky reflect in the water, merging and balancing out colors, shapes and lines of the final piece. It's just like all people ultimately coexist in one society, somehow learning along the way their ways to cope with that society's demands. So then even though a conversation with each student can be slightly different - should my final goal be to teach them integration into their group? That would ultimately give them an important life lesson, correct?

How do you set your priorities?

This painting has been haunting me in its purpose because it's a sudden internal shift from trees and all their symbolism to a cityscape. Did I need to do that for more people to understand me, or was it something inside of me that wanted a new or rather re-visited challenge? The answer to this question I don't know even now after the painting is finished.

What I do know is that it was a true lesson in setting priorities. What is more important to me - the infinite sky, the haunting water, or this magical town highlighted by rays of sunshine? It was a constant adjustment of what hides and what comes out. Especially fascinating was how the darkening of one element brought out another. 

One day my friend and teacher, Andrey Tamarchenko, came to visit, and said that textures can be varied throughout - treatment of water and sky should be softer than the rough outlines of a city with its decaying walls. I ended up making the sky and water more pale, and suddenly the city became clearer, as if coming out of a mist. But it bothered me because the city wasn't my focal point. It was actually the opposite - what I loved was the cityscape's complete integration into the landscape, how it effortlessly coexisted with the cloudy sky and the murky water. I changed it yet again to level out the planes, and that made me happy. So is the lesson to take away from this process the opposite of what I'd initially thought, and in fact you can really have it all? Or that perhaps you always need to make a list of priorities?