It’s time to look back on my growth as an artist. For a long time I thought this painting was the best one I had ever made. Autumn Clear was a peak point for me, and I made it while I was in high school. Looking back, I can see so many ways that it could have been better, but it still was a well-composed and colorful painting. I loved making it. I was honing my abilities with creating landscapes with acrylic paint and I felt that I had accomplished the most I could with that subject matter. It was time to move on, paint something more challenging.

I started exploring figures and portraiture, lighting and colors beyond daylight. I decided I wanted a challenge, so I chose to paint myself with eight of my friends. It was a true trial. Looking back, it was a disaster. I used a screenshot of a poorly lit photo off of Snapchat, I left out objects that completed the image, and the perspective of the background was warped. That aside, it was the best opportunity to paint different skin tones, different face shapes, and different kinds of hair. My understanding of all of these things was elementary. In terms of skin tones, I felt that I understood there were differences, I was just unable to properly represent them. It was still useful to my growth as an artist. In painting the shapes of the faces, I unintentionally created caricatures of my friends. Part of the issue was that I knew their faces; another part was that I had very little formal training on rendering the figure and the face. The hair was tragic; I knew that it needed darks and highlights, but I had no consideration for the layering required to make it feel real.

Abstract Drawing, Charcoal on Paper, 2016

Looking back, Prom Night was a turning point. It was not my first portrait, nor my last, but I learning to be critical of myself and realize that there is always room to grow. The next major turning point for me came from my first college level drawing class at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. After seeing that I needed significant work with my rendering skills, I decided to focus on sharpening the details. However, exploring the abstract end of drawing broadened my scope much more. We had an exercise in which we toned our paper a medium gray, put on one song, took an eraser and a piece of charcoal in each hand, closed our eyes, and didn’t stop making marks on the page until the song was done. Afterwards, we were to create an image from the marks we made, and this is what came from mine. Unrealistic, but very emotional for whatever reason. I knew art was meant to make us feel things, I just thought it had to look beautiful to achieve that. It was around this time that I was trying to understand why I hated the Abstract Expressionists. It took a long time, but something was finally starting to click.

Several months passed. I finished out my drawing class with some very detailed drawings and sketches, and moved on to a painting class. The professor was an incredible painter herself. She made incredible figurative work with bright and colorful palettes. Her name was Sarah Stolar and I still use the basic palette she gave us for most of my paintings. Near the end of the class, after really playing with and learning how to use oil paints in a much more critical environment than I had ever experienced, we were assigned a portrait project. It was a challenge. We were to paint from a mirror, which was something I had never done, and that made it difficult to compose. There are a lot of good things that came from this piece. For one, painting a white T-shirt gave me access to a much wider range of colors than I expected, and I started examining the underlying colors of things a little closer. For two, I was getting somewhere with the hair, really layering it and trying to get the dimensionality of it, though it still came out a little flat. I also started understanding flesh tones a bit more, but the shape of the face was still rough. I was starting to get somewhere. Clearly I did not think too hard about backgrounds at the time. It’s not a bad background, it’s just rough and meaningless.

After this, things started breaking down a bit. The school I was learning all of these formal techniques from closed down and I had to start looking elsewhere for education. I turned to New Mexico State University and enrolled in a few studio classes, one of which being a sculpture class. I will be exploring more of my growth in next week’s post, so keep a look out for that!