Waiting

Waiting
Oil on Panel
30 x 15"

I have a new muse, and an extra layer of visual storytelling has become possible. My new model is an actress, and came with a bumper box of costumes and ideas - I'm so lucky! I actually borrowed this wig a little while back from an artist friend, Ali Warren, and had been turning over ideas about how to use it ever since. It's so incredibly tall I had to really think about the best way to compose a painting around it. This was a good exercise in edges too, as I haven't really painted tight curls before. It's still hair, so can't be too hard-edged, but is also a very structured (man-made) thing, so can't be too soft and fuzzy either.

I met with fellow creatives Phyllis Shafer, Suzanne Roberts and Kim Wyatt last week for our first critique group (Tahoe Artists Network), and took this piece along with me. It was an incredibly valuable idea exchange, and I came away full of inspiration and drive to create more of these paintings.

Life Drawings (Autumn/Winter 2009)

Annie
Charcoal on Paper
30 x 20"

For sale - contact me for a price.
shelley.zentner@gmail.com

Life Drawings (Autumn/Winter 2009)

Seated Nude
Charcoal on Paper
30 x 20"

For sale - contact me for a price.
shelley.zentner@gmail.com

Cassy

Cassy
Oil on Panel
12 x 12"

I'm pleased with the energy in this oil sketch. The light was shifting due to a rare occurrence of clouds in our otherwise flawless Tahoe sky. It made me work faster, in a more intuitive way - whilst still bearing in mind all the valuable lessons I'm learning about edges and colour right now. I used a much more restricted palette than I have been using of late, and it really forced me to consider the relative temperature and value of each patch of colour. The big omission from my palette (which was a challenge) was black. This forced me to create dark values from other colours, which makes the temperature more 'adjustable'.

Learning to love green

Untitled Study in Green
Oil on Panel
15 x 30"

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"Green how I want you green. Green wind. Green branches."

Federico García Lorca
Spanish Poet and Playwright, 1898-1936
"Romance Sonámbulo"

"Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises."

Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Spanish Poet and Playwright, 1600-1681

"He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sig of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals."

Oscar Wilde
Irish Playwright, Novelist, Poet, Short Story Writer and Freemason, 1854-1900
"Pen, Pencil and Poison," Fortnightly Review (London, January 1889)

"Absolute green is the most restful color, lacking any undertone of joy, grief, or passion. On exhausted men this restfulness has a beneficial effect, but after a time it becomes tedious."

Wassily Kandinsky
Russian-born French Expressionist Painter, 1866-1944

"Green represents the dead image of life."

Rudolf Steiner
Austrian Philosopher, Literary Scholar, Architect, Playwright, Educator, Social Thinker and Esotericist, 1861-1925

This was a study I did in Phyllis Shafer's figure painting class, and was an exercise in colour. We were looking at Secondary Colours, that is two primary colours mixed together - green, violet and orange. Now, I would never usually use such a revolting combination to paint a human being, or anything else for that matter - which just goes to show how much I understood the properties of colour. I had visions of lurid fauves - type imagery, which is fine if that's what you want to create, but I don't, so I was slightly appalled at the task in hand.

Then Phyllis demonstrated the colours when mixed and desaturated (mixed with white, black or grey) - and my horror subsided into curiosity and wonder. A new visual world was opening up to me, which I had resisted partly due to my arrogance (I know what I like, and I don't like that!) and partly because I had no idea about how to use these colours in a naturalistic way.

"There are no "beautiful" or "ugly" colours. Those words describe our feelings about colours, not their intrinsic properties. "Wrong" or "muddy" colours are simply mixtures that are the inappropriate relative temperature for the area in which they are placed."

Richard Schmid, Everything I Know About Painting.

The model was posed on emerald green velvet, and despite my initial, "oh god, I actually have to use that Viridian with the cobwebs on it", I really enjoyed painting this. I took my time, used every ounce of observation skill at my disposal, and pieced together this study from all the tiny shifts in colour I now saw in the models' flesh tones - as reflected by the green velvet and the light I now understand a little better.

So now I understand a little more about the properties of green, and how it affects the colours around it, I'm learning to love it.

The Earring

The Earring
Oil on Canvas
50 x 40"

So this is the painting I posted as an underpainting a while back. I tried really hard not to lose that energy in the markmaking that I loved so much. It was hard because I've been working on wood for so long, and then painting on canvas again is completely different. I primed it 6 times, but it was still more absorbent than I wanted it to be. I'm torn now, because I like the texture of canvas, but I like my paint to slide around on the surface more than my canvas will allow. Perhaps I just need a finer weave? If anybody has any suggestions, please let me know.

Sujet

Sujet
Oil on Panel
49 x 24"

Fabula and Sujet (also sjuzhet, syuzhet, sjužet, or suzet (сюжет) ) are terms originating in Russian Formalism and employed in narratology that describe narrative construction. Sujet is an employment of narrative and fabula is the order of retelling events. They were first used in this sense by Vladimir Propp and Shklovsky.^[1]

^{This painting has been sitting in my studio waiting patiently to be finished for a few months now. I really dislike leaving pieces half completed, but moving house just meant that certain things couldn't get done normally.}

^{My ideas about the body telling a story really came through with this painting, I think. I'm becoming more and more interested in the emotional value of 'unfinished' brushstrokes, when juxtaposed with more 'refined' areas of interest in a painting. I think it adds a raw quality to the piece, an energy which I've been looking for to balance the new things I'm learning about the more technical aspects of painting.}

^{I've got a lot more work to post, and it's interesting for me to compare this piece - which was really at the beginning of the change I'm seeing in my work - with the paintings I've done over the past few days. I'm still working my way through Richard Schmid's 'Alla Prima', and right now I'm very preoccupied with edges. And colour.}

^{Sometimes I feel like my head will explode with all this new awareness of the visual world; other times, a lesson I learnt just appears in my mind at the right time, and I get to try it out for myself. It's very satisfying but I'm very much out of my comfort zone right now, and it reminds me of learning to drive.}