The Experimenting (Older) Artist

Artist Jaguar continues experimenting with water-miscible oils, and finding them fascinating because they are Not Like Gouache. I have a long, long list of things I need to experiment with in order to feel like I understand these new/old tools, because When Last We Left Our Young Artist Painting With Oils, she was all of twelve, and her brief experiments in college lasted only one semester and that doesn’t feel to me like enough time to master anything… particularly when the teachers in question weren’t interested in teaching you technique. (They didn’t teach me technique, at all. It was a miserable experience, but that is a different subject.)

Going at this as a settled artist is a very different experience, because the tension between Dreams and Reality is so much stronger now. Tween Jaguar, and College Jaguar, had a tenuous grip on reality. Verrrry tenuous. Their overwhelming desire was to paint AMAZING THINGS like the book covers of their favorite Big Fat Fantasy novels. They wanted to paint ginormous canvases filled with amazing details. They wanted these things with great passion, and it’s not like their wants have vanished as I’ve gotten older. I still want to do amazing/crazy things that result in giant pieces of art that blow people away.

What’s changed is that there’s a new filter between me and my kneejerk decision to go Buy All The Herculean Canvases and start filling them, and that filter is not artistic. It’s not solely practical, either. It's a voice that says: “What kind of artist do you want to be?” And it leads to these kinds of observations:

• Enormous canvases are great. Where would I put them? I already have my college paintings in the attic because I have no other place to store them. I continue to fill paper sketchbooks, and they require space. Space is no longer easy to find. So what would I do with all those canvases? Since my usual answer (these days anyway), is ‘sell them to people to get them out of your hands’, that leads to the next question:
• Who’s going to buy enormous oil paintings? My prices are fair, by my standards, but they’re also predicated on my work being small in size and modest in material cost. One little squirt of gouache lasts so long I can go years before I replenish it. One squirt of oil paint won’t cover a square inch of canvas. Scaling my prices up from my usual small paintings would result in price tags of over $10,000, which would contract my collector pool considerably. And even when I do sell one, I have to ask…
• How am I going to get my pieces to buyers? Right now, my average shipping cost for an 11x14 original is somewhere around $150 within the US, because I pack those suckers like the priceless treasures they are (and because insurers respond to claims by looking at how much work you put into shipping; they’re not going to pay you $2000 if you tossed the thing in a padded envelope and said ‘good enough’). So either I’d have to sell to in-person buyers, or I’d have to crate the things. Which is another huge leap up from my current prices, and an entirely new addition to my current workflow.
• Also, who's going to archive these things? Because they can't be scanned. A scanner shines a light at them, which reflects off the paint and the textures and creates... well. A mess. Every painting I do will have to be photographed by a professional with a real lighting rig, which is another expense.

All of this comes into ‘who am I as a painter’ because my established workflow reflects my lifestyle. I’m not solely a painter; I’m a hybrid artist who works in other media, and that means I don’t spend all my time working on art; this limits how many pieces I can reasonably accomplish, and their size. I have space for storage, but after working seriously as an artist for decades, I already have a large body of physical work, and any new work is going to have to fit around it. Too, I already have a clientele, and they’re not gallery-shoppers, so my process is designed around my ability to get my pieces to collectors, and to sell them in the sweet spot budget range for us both (between $500 and $5000).  (Yes, these are my prices, and yes, I do layaway.)

To use gamer lingo, I’m specced into a particular talent tree because it fits my life, my artistic needs (book covers and developmental art for stories), and my patrons.

This is not to say that I think trying something totally different is bad. I actually think it’s necessary because while my process works for my life right now, there's no reason I can't make changes! And there are existential issues that switching gears might help substantially with, like the fact that my eyes are no longer as good as they used to be: painting larger, or more expressionistically, might help mitigate the difficulties I’m having with tiny details on tiny paintings. There’s also the important fact that if you don’t learn new things, you get scaled over and rusted, and I need some shaking up. Besides, deciding that my original desires aren't practical doesn't mean I can't ever take on a project on some 5-foot-by-4-foot panel... just because I don’t make big, impractical projects part of my day-to-day workflow doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do one, once in a while. The attic can hold a couple more ginormous things, after all.

For now, my focus is learning my tool, something I can do best by completing a lot of very small projects. But it’s interesting to me that I now ask myself questions about whether the impulses that got me into oil painting might not be just as well served if I deflect them into slightly different avenues. One of the best parts of working in physical media for me is that it has a physical reality--and it's that reality that makes questions like this necessary and precious, to me particularly as someone with that tenuous grip on reality, because it requires me to interface with the prime material plane. It connects me to Real, Tangible Objects, and that's a lot of the joy of the process to me. And it's wholly new to me to think of the challenges of dealing with physical media as part of defining my artistic needs. I do what I do because of the interaction between my tools and my heart, and that makes the limitations of the tools a part of the work.

Anyway. Long and maundering digression into the philosophy of process! But I accompany it with one of my experiments there, a tiny sketch of Vasiht'h and the Queen Ransomed from the final book of Princes' Game, From Ruins.