Studio Exercise

As the summer heat still keeps most of us in doors painting in our studios, back porch, and living rooms I thought it might be a good time to do some speed exercises. Here’s one we all can try. I’d love to see some of you post your results. Let me know if you do this and need help posting, I’ll be glad to help you post it either on the blog or just on the yahoo discussion group. I plan to do this with some tomatoes from my 4 plant garden. After that, I’ll make me a tomato sandwich with Duke’s mayonnaise. I couldn’t use anything but Duke’s mayonnaise because my grandmother would turn over in her grave.

Exercise: Paint with a kitchen timer.

Choose a piece of fruit and set the timer for one hour on a 5x7 canvas. When the timer goes off, put your brush down.

Then set your timer for 30 minutes and do another on a new 5x7 canvas.

Then set your timer for 15 minutes and do another on a new 5x7 canvas.

Then set your timer for 5 minutes and do another on a new 5x7 canvas.

Finally, try a one minute painting.

Doing this exercise will teach you what is essential to get and what can be left out and still have a good painting. It may stop you from focusing on the end product and start seeing the process as everything. It will keep you from noodling, which is my favorite term for working a painting to death. It will also teach you to use economy of strokes and to think before you paint making sure you really need that stroke. It will teach you that if you put a stroke down with the right color and value, you won’t have to keep going back over it. Going back over your strokes time and time again usually doesn’t help the painting. It just shows that you were unclear with the first stroke and made a poor choice. That in itself is not a bad thing, it’s just that by making clearer good choices from the beginning our paintings can be fresher and more alive expressing what we really saw and excited us to begin with.

Today I thought I share a photo of Callaway painter Virginia Bugg in the garden painting.

To view past messages or to make a comment on the public blog, click here.

P.S. I understand that Yahoo is making changes to their data base and many of the email addresses that we have set up in our profiles may or may not work in the future. Last night I posted this same message and my post did not go thru. In trying to see why, I logged on to Yahoo and then signed on with my Yahoo I.D. and took a look at my profile. There in my profile I found that the last five messages sent to my hotmail address, which is my main address I use for all the Yahoo groups I belong to had bounced. When a mail bounces, it goes into cyber land never to be found again. I'm assuming that because my last five messages (to me) bounced my account was suspended! For this reason, the message I left on the blog yesterday did not make it to the Callaway painters Yahoo group to be posted and set out. :( When I found my address was on the bounce list and my email had been suspened, I also noticed that there was a link to have it restored. I clicked that link and made my request to have my email restored and received a confirmation back saying it had been. This morning I am sending out a duplicate of yesterday's post trusting it will reach you. You might want to check your Yahoo account and see if your email ID is on the bounce list. I understand that Yahoo will be doing purges of their data base for weeks to come, so checking your Yahoo account often might be a good thing if you want to continue to send and recieve messages associated with your Yahoo

ID.