Tropical Heart

Tropical Heart watercolor 30x22" by Meera Rao 

This is a full sheet painting I completed some time ago but forgot to post  :) It was in the Peninsula Watercolor society show 2014  and is now at the end of six month hanging at the Hampton Convention center.  This painting was a challenge I took on - to paint full sheet after only sketching in 5x7 sketch books for four months in India! Painting those shadow backgrounds and layering paint on the banana heart was fun. I also learned how much easier the process is if I have all my values figured out ahead -since mostly I paint first and figure out a plan as paint ! I really loved the process and all I can say is that sketching everyday definitely improved my drawing skills!!

"A slow sunny day" watercolor 2.5x6.5" by Meera Rao 

On another note, my painting "The slow sunny day" won 'the award of excellence' at the TAA miniature show -- really surprised and pleased as it is also one of favorite paintings.  I am grateful for the judge for boosting my confidence :) No matter how many times I tell myself  'just paint' there is something to be said about being noticed! 

Just recently I read "The Art Mistakes: Unexpected Painting techniques & the Practice of Creative Thinking"  by Melanie Rothschild.  The book is about losing the fear of mistakes and to have confidence in one's own abilities. I liked what she had to say about creativity  : "Of all places, art is a spot where mistakes should be considered honored guests." I am grateful that a copy of this book was gifted to the Poquoson Public Library  by the Friends of PPL in memory of my mother who was indeed a very creative person. 

Sin or Crime?

Garland weaver in Reverie mixed media by Meera Rao 

The fear of messing up so often means I think a painting is complete before it really is!  Couple of months ago I was surveying my paintings to pick one to submit to the local art league members open show.  One of the paintings  that I had thought was finished, signed, framed and blogged  about suddenly felt incomplete.  I pulled it out of the frame, and added some darks here and there. Satisfied, happily I put it back in the frame and took it to the show.  And here it is on my blog once again. 

Since then I have been mulling  over  how to know when a painting is finished?  Is it "A painting is always finished before the artist thinks it is" (Harley Brown) ? Or is Eugene Delacroix right  when he whispers in my ears :" One always has to spoil a picture a little bit in order to finish it."  Alas there is much truth in what D.H . Harding had to say : " The important thing is not what the author, or any artist, had in mind to begin with but at what point he decided to stop."  Then there is Claude Monet who proclaimed : "I say that whoever claims to have finished a canvas is terribly arrogant."  What did Picasso have to say about all this? : "Woe to you the day it is said that you are finished! To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul – to give it its final blow; the most unfortunate one for the painter as well as for the picture." 

May be it is as Ted Goodwin says: "A painting is finished when to have done less would be considered a sin and more a crime!  "  The trouble is I am not a good judge when it comes to sin or crime ;)

The Power of Choice

Garuda Puppet  watermedia  22x30

So how long does it take me to complete a painting? - I started Garuda fifteen some years ago at the very first workshop I had signed up for.  We went to an antique shop and I sketched an Indonesian puppet in pen on a full sheet of Arches watercolor paper! Each participant then picked three colors from a basket to use as underpainting.  I ended up with Opera, Phthalo(more like acid)green and Aureolin yellow :)  Too meek to protest or cheat with tamer colors, I tried to do my best by really diluting the paints but still ended up with a very garish start. I remember very well trying to save the whites around the face of the puppet! But I never even attempted to complete the piece. Over the years, I could not discard it --the paper was too expensive, and I did not want to admit defeat! 

Yesterday I pulled out the piece. All my reference photos were lost somewhere in my studio. I decided to plunge by boldly covering the space and underpainting behind the puppet with opaque blue gouache. Things already looked better! Except for the face, the arm, and the hands, I glazed the background designs with a thin wash of ultramarine blue --that subdued the colors and pushed it back. I then defined some of the shapes with indigo violet, some with yellow ochre, remembering the  batik textile designs from the Indonesian island of Bali. Feeling a bit adventurous, I defined the eyebrow and the beak with a mix of opera and phthalo green. I finished by glazing the arm with yellow ochre and one last thin glaze of ultramarine blue on everything but the face and arms. I am pretty pleased with the rescue - mainly because I learnt so much in the process! Funny thing is that, all this took about 4 hours! And I really wish I had a 'before' photograph.

This painting session was the exact boost I needed desperately yesterday.  During the past month I had received one too many rejection notices for shows and someone from the artworld even questioned my commitment as an artist. As I thought through my experiences, I suddenly realized how far I had come in the fifteen years and how much I enjoy what I do. And talk about serendipity, I came across the wise words about 'social validation and false merit metric of prestige' at Brainpickings :What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.[…]Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like. - (Paul Graham on How to do what You Love). Tucked in the same site, TED talk by Alain de Botton about 'ideological fallacies of success.' was also just what I needed :)

So, I would like to really thank all of you who visit my blog and validate what I do here! I also  especially want to thank Aparna from Warli Soul for the 'Liebester Award' she gave me. Liebster is German for dearest, beloved or favorite. This award is bestowed on blogs with less than 200 followers but deserve more attention (-Serendipity again!) In my next post, I shall pass this along :) Meanwhile, do check out her beautiful 'Warli' art. 

Cheers to Potential and Possibilities!

Hofbrauhaus at Dusk  watermedia 12x9"

Sixty posts, twenty plus paintings, thirty some pages of color pencil 'sketches' and narrative to go with  them  for my sketchbook-fiction project  "A Day In The Life -In Blue Jeans with Gold Embroidery" and more on-the-go pencil sketches than any previous years makes me content with 2011 art-wise :)  This surely has been a year of experimenting for me with finishing an illustrated sketch/fiction book, yupo, deliberate washes and paint mixing, water brushes, field kits and working on patience! 

I am pleased to post this painting - done mostly with watercolors except the sky part where I used acrylics mixed with watercolor. The watercolor paper  was a 'test-paper' for colors by a young friend of mine who wanted to paint with me sometime ago. I pulled this paper out waiting for washes to dry on couple of Yupo paintings I was working on. I needed to keep my hands busy and away from the wet yupo. Using Masquepen Supernib I sketched free hand and then proceeded to play mostly with transparent watercolors in between the washes on Yupo. The reference was a photograph I took in Munich years ago.  The underpainting worked quite well, and I felt little stress since I was really  only 'playing' around. I am totally ignoring any problem areas in the painting and enjoying the smug feeling of rescuing a good paper :) 

 before

So, here is to a brand New Year full of potential and possibilities ! 

Inadvertently Omitted...

A Day in the Life..... page 22 Sketchbook Project color pencils 

'not intentional, not on purpose, not conscious'  -- it is the definition 'not conscious' that stings! And it is not the first time this has happened - and not just in art either. I felt so very disheartened.  It truly represented a 'Day in The Life'.  I decided to  force  myself to consider this as a set up for a new twist in my Sketchbook Project ! This time my 'inadvertent omission' had created three empty pages right in the middle of a book with a planned narrative and a challenge for me to somehow resolve it and to incorporate  new ideas into the story line.  I did not want to just tear the pages - a self imposed constraint to be a bit creative to compensate for my slip; to be grateful that it is a small mistake in the scheme of things,  a way to assuage my guilt for not being mindful....

What do you do when mistakes 'happen' in your work? Do you despair and scrap the whole project? Do you change it? Do you cover it up? Do you start over? Do you call it divine intervention and move on?  

Second Chance

The past few days have been devoted to matting and framing some of my recent paintings.  In between cutting mats, rather than start new paintings I have been going through my discarded and abandoned ones and playing with them to see if I can experiment and revive any of them.  'Yellow Roses'  had a part of the painting chopped off and its leaves and background washed off carefully and reworked in entirely different colors and style.  I didn't touch the roses this time around, just worked on the rest of the painting.  Working on old 'failed' paintings like this  gives me a chance to learn from my mistakes and try out new  or different techniques. As I was wondering if only there was a something that will let me know just before I make mistake, I stumbled on this article in latest issue of 'Discover' about 'Brain Scans that Can Predict When You are going to Screw Up.' According to a study, just before the subjects committed an error, brain waves in two regions spiked: alpha wave in the occipital region and mu wave in cortex region.  These results have excited scientists in a lot of different areas of interest from Air traffic controllers to possible improvements in treatments for ADHD. I am torn now since a part of me also feels, in art, quite often mistakes lead to new discoveries.

Yellow Roses watercolor 17x15" 

Mindfulness and Compassion

I need to incorporate more of both mindfulness and compassion into my life.  I spent the day writing a verse from Rig Veda in calligraphy and then illustrating it.  When the project was almost finished I see a glaring mistake-  after all the planning, measuring, copying and recopying, checking and rechecking I had managed to completely omit a word in the very first line. The whole thing had to be trashed --no way to salvage any of it!  So, now I am trying to convince myself that it was a good practice session and  I can move on to painting the real thing.  

I get to dip into my collection  and post a painting I did a year ago - Coconuts in watercolor; 7 1/2 x9 1/2"