meg scheminske

Project for the weekend: twenty-five little paintings inspired by lichens! 

Last night I tried again with the Chinese inks, watercolors, and some newly-purchased gouache on real watercolor paper (as opposed to the drawing paper I'd been using).  I actually did not like the watercolor paper at first -- it soaked everything up (as, I suppose, it's meant to) and didn't produce the exquisite details of the ink splotches I got with the other paper.

I quickly decided that I need to make a lot of little water paintings (that's what I'll call them) to learn about the new medium and figure out how to do what I want to do with them.  So I will make fifty.  And I will only take seriously painting number 51.  Once I made that decision, I relaxed so much and started to have fun.

This is a picture of the simplest little guy I made last night, and my favorite:

It is very Agnes Martin-esque (a good thing, in my book).  I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to apply the tiny strips of tape, wash over them with watery-ink, wait five seconds, and then peel off the tape!  Voila!  Done!  I am used to this process taking days for each and every section of a painting, because I always used oils in the past.  Take Josh's painting, for example:

Every "pixelated" part took four sessions, with two days in between each session to allow the paint to dry!  Yes, I am enjoying these new paints.

P.S.  Columbia Art Supply on Burnside sells a big set of gouaches for $10.00!  Good deal!

I experimented with Chinese water colors today.  The past year has been one big experimentation in the studio, really, and I keep waiting to settle in.  Little bits of this and that feel right, but in the end the acrylic feels too plastic (as a friend so aptly put it yesterday), oils feel too slow and trudgy and toxic, plaster is too fragile, silicone-as-relief is still promising (but not really do-able without a scale to measure the parts), clay is too dusty and hard to finish/fire.  All of them have their exciting points, and I haven't given up on a single one, but none of them felt quite so right as these watercolors did today.  I can be messy and drippy and painstakingly intricate with them.  They are water-based (woohoo!) for easy easy cleanup and no fumes!  Who knows how I'll feel tomorrow, but today they seem like a perfect fit.

 I forgot to bring my camera to the studio to snap some photos.  Maybe tomorrow.
 

 





Please Control Your Blobs.

 Adding color slllllowly.  Ugh.  Trying to (re?)teach myself to paint "real" things, just to see if I can. 

I'm very excited about these plops I've been making out of plaster!

 
I am taking a drawing class at The Drawing Studio with Phil Sylvester.  Last night, we were tasked with making self-portraits of a sort. For this exercise, we had to fold the paper up in four sections and work on each one without looking at the others. We also had to intentionally put the eyes and mouth on opposite diagonals, and make the nose super huge.

I am in the process of painting a skateboard to benefit COMPLETE Skate, a non-profit here in town which "builds youth resiliency through skateboarding."  Here it is in second-layer stage:

Other artists painting skateboards:

1.                  Brad Adkins
2.                  Anneli Anderson
3.                  Jill Bliss,
4.                  Vanessa Calvert
5.                  Calvin Ross Carl
6.                  Bruce Conkle
7.                  David Corbett
8.                  Bradly Delay
9.                  Diana Fayt  (SanFran)
10.                  Felicity Fentonv
11.                  Stephan Maze Georges  (NYC)
12.                  Sean  Healy
13.                  Harvest Henderson,
14.                  Scott Wayne Indiana
15.                  Mark Warren Jacques
16.                  Emily Katz
17.                  Tim Karpinski
18.                  Bishop Lennon
19.                  Rebec Loring
20.                  Marne Lucas
21.                  Seth Neefus
22.                  TJ Norris
23.                  Nicky Kriara Peterson
24.                  Joe Roberts
25.                  Amy Ruppel
26.                  Paul Schiek
27.                  Phil Stern  (Albany, CA)
28.                  Sunshine
    
29.                  Annette Thurston
30.                 Christine Wong  (NYC)