blah blah blah technique. blah blah blah practice.

the more i work with gouache, the more i love it. absolutely love it! in that dire, swirling, crazy-pants kind of way. and i suppose it's fitting. my practice is a practice of opposites. or an examination of opposites. not quite contradiction, rather a fuzziness of identity- black and white. faceless portraits. and now... water and oil.

the other day i met a friend of a friend and was introduced as "an artist" (always sort of a weird moment. ha!) and the other person asked what i work in, what i do, what my subject is. most artists will tell you that this is an odd moment. there's so much to say in response to these seemingly direct and simple questions... so the trick becomes scaling back, not scaring the person away with art historical references and philosophic meandering and all the stuff that goes in to The Artist Statement. they don't care and that's NOT what they're asking. they want the basics... or, usually, they're just being polite.

i've got my token answer all worked out at this point. usually something along the lines of "oh, i'm pretty much all over the place. a bit of this, a bit of that. mostly painting though. mostly portraits." i learned pretty quick NOT to say "i make headless portraits" because most people start envisioning rather gruesome images which is not at all what my work is. and so i started in with my token response and this time it didn't feel quite right when she asked what my primary medium is and i said oil. at least half the paintings i do at this point are in gouache. and i see no reason not to proceed painting in both mediums alternately, as often as i can or want to or need to; whatever fits the subject and day and mood the best, giving primacy to neither.

and gouache is just so much faster and i've been jump-started again, in love with so many ideas, so many ways to work with a single image, that gouache allows me to proceed with my investigation in a much more rapid way than oil.

i love oil tremendously. everything about it. the look, the smell, the process, everything. but it lends itself better to certain images more than others. the maid portraits for sure. and believe it or not, i've got a ton of paintings crammed in my little cottage right this second that are being given the time to dry so that i can proceed with at least some type of gusto. in order to do that with oil, since my process relies so heavily on glazing and dry-brush techniques, i have to have a multitude of canvasses going at once in order to keep working while i wait for one or another to dry. there's a lot of down time in my oil painting practice. and this is exactly why it's so lovely to be working in an "opposite" medium. water-based paints dry almost instantly by comparison and i can actually get a painting finished in a single day! that's awesome!

yesterday, i spent about 5 hours working on a gouache painting- hair. yep. strand by strand pretty much. thin layers that absorb in to the paper so quickly than i can just keep pushing along with the image unrestricted by waiting-time. it'll be done soon. maybe today. but i'm running out of gouache and payday is still a few days away. another practice in patience, i suppose. ha! the major ingredient in every part of my practice since moving to realism. would you have guessed i started as an abstractionist?