Category: art as life

From #1 to #56 in One Year

What’s Left of Fall ©2011 Dora Sislian Themelis
7×10 Watercolor on Arches

Last year I posted this watercolor still life of rocks, a favorite shell and leaves I kept in my copy of the Artist’s Way as one of the tasks of abundance. They served me very well at the time. I was already painting twenty minute works. When I decided to join in the 100 Paintings Challenge this was #1.

Four Shells with Rock ©2012 Dora Sislian Themelis
7×10 Watercolor on Arches

This watercolor painting with more of my favorite broken shells and rocks is #56 in the challenge. It will seem as if these items were the only subjects I painted, but that would be the wrong assumption.

Plenty of challenges were met in between these two paintings.

This weekend I also had time to go through all 56 paintings I did this year. Some works were twenty minute pieces. Others took a couple of days to complete. How I used the medium seems to me to be tighter on this last work than the first. My handling of watercolor evolved to where I’m more at ease with it. I learned a lot and still have far to go.
The 56 works evolved into different series of pieces, mostly still life work in watercolor. When I looked at each painting I could relive the past year. I can remember my days with every work, how I felt, what I was thinking, where I was and how I got myself to paint. It was a moment in time. A lesson of life.
Feel free to drop in some comments. 

Art is About Life

I came across something online yesterday that caught my attention. It was an essay about blogging and the idea behind why people blog, what to blog about, and the blog’s main idea or focus. What story are we trying to tell with a blog? Are our ideas all over the place, or is the blog about one topic and only that topic?

Some blogs seem like an open page of a person’s diary. Other blogs are like another person’s photograph album. One blogger likes to ramble about not much of anything in particular while another writes very technical information with tedious accuracy.

This article stated that an art blog should be about art. If that’s the case then what about the life of the art and artist?

While I was pondering this essay in my Morning Pages I found myself writing that there really is no art without life. If that is true, then there is no life without art. The beauty of art and art making is synonymous with life and all it’s beauty. The two are totally entwined.

When I started writing this blog I knew there was no way I could only discuss my art journey or the process. Life would sprout up between the posts of painting and not painting. Nor did I want my whole life to be an open book to put up to scrutiny. A little life story here, a rant about my latest painting there, and there you have it.

I was watching a television show where celebrities were making art for charity in one episode. None of the stars were artistically talented. Creative, yes, but not in the painterly sense. They arranged their work in a gallery for the public to purchase and donate money.

What struck me was a patron made their decision to purchase one work only after hearing what the celebrity artist had to say about his feelings while painting it. The painting itself was really not great, but the thoughts of the artist were intriguing enough to make the decision to buy. How interesting is that?

The daydreams and ramblings of the artist are the things that make life interesting. And life is more interesting because the artist has a different view of it. Does a painting posted each day make the art blog a good one to follow? Maybe not, because art isn’t all about art.