A Year without (Much) Color
It's been an interesting year, art-wise. After finishing the big US Army Corps of Engineers commission last year, we broke down my home studio and moved my supplies out of the bedroom. Currently all my painting supplies are stored at the church where I work as one of its pastors.
It's not an ideal setup. The borrowed easel sits backstage, where there's no natural light and very little help from lamps. I've managed to punch out a handful of paintings this year, but it was not without difficulty. Working from a home studio in your bedroom presents a host of other challenges, so I don't prefer that option. I continue to pray. Who knows if there isn't a studio space somewhere that will appear in the middle of Silverhill, like the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts?
In the meantime, I've been focusing on charcoal, which has been a deep learning experience. So... what have a I learned?
Charcoal is messy. Like, way messier than I'd ever anticipated. I wore through a Magic Eraser after I spilled compressed charcoal powder on the floor of our bathroom. Also, it makes my hands look like I've been pulling a shift at Express Oil Change. Thankfully, it washes off. Mostly.
Charcoal is dramatic. One reason I like nocturne paintings so much is that it gives a high degree of value contrast. The dark makes the light sources pop. I did a simple drawing of the street light outside our house. The soft way the light draws the eye to the reflection on the wet street made me think of our whole generation that were told to come home when the street lights came on. The intense darks and lights communicate a lot of emotion, and I love that about the interplay between dark compressed charcoal and white soft pastel.
Charcoal is forgiving. My process normally starts with throwing willow dust onto the paper, and then I blend it all into abstract shapes with a stump. Next, I make a loose willow sketch and start to erase the highlight areas. Early on, I noticed how easily charcoal, especially willow, comes off the page with a simple kneaded eraser. Somehow, knowing that the medium will forgive you takes away your fear of screwing up; and when that fear is gone, you don't screw up as much. There's a sermon in that.
Charcoal is cheap. My friend Steve, who turned me on to charcoal, is a master of this medium. He makes his own willow charcoal sticks on his grill in a little "oven" made from two tin cans. I'm not there yet, but I love that it costs barely five bucks to get a box of charcoal sticks.
Charcoal helps you to simplify your composition. The more gestural I can be, the better. I am not a surgically precise kind of artist. I don't like tedium. I want to move my hands, my arms. I want to throw stuff around on the surface. I want to work everywhere all at once. Charcoal allows me to work with my hand directly to paper, very quickly, and I can see right away whether the composition is interesting before having to commit. Besides, remember the eraser thing...?
Charcoal offers a lot of expressive freedom. Similar to the previous point, charcoal helps me to make lots of movements and strokes. It helps me not to be enslaved to the reference photo or subject. I don't obsess about how straight my lines are (sighing, looking like the Ben Affleck smoking picture...). Sometimes I do go for a more realistic rendering, but I also just want to be able to scratch up the paper and create a dramatic suggestion of a story. One of my goals as an artist is to be more free to create a work of art, and less conscious of how much it looks like a “picture.” I don't believe we were created for "absolute freedom." That's nonsense. I believe true freedom comes with limits. Limitless freedom is anarchy, which ends up in a form of slavery. But charcoal helps me to be more free from the opinions of others, from the inner critic who doesn't like my work and doesn't think it looks realistic enough.
I truly hope to get back into oil painting in the coming years, but for now, God in his Providence has guided me into a medium that is enabling me to learn some important lessons both about myself and my art.
You can see all these pieces I've been developing over the past year in this medium at an exhibit at the University of South Alabama. The exhibit will run through July and August at the Rodning Gallery in Marx Library.
