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IrisGrundler β My Backyard II
Published: 2006-01-20 14:41:40 +0000 UTC; Views: 958; Favourites: 17; Downloads: 62
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Description
The original is 22x30 watercolor paper (Carson cool press). This was painted from a picture this past fall. The Maple tree and wild dogwoods are the best trees to paint. But I am not sure if the dogwood looks like a dogwood, I think it looks more like a Cherry tree? Oh well.Related content
Comments: 48
Thank you so much, is Spring in my backyard, i love spring time.
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Beautiful, you have a lovely backyard especially in autumn.
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I like this painting very much...in particular the colours 
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Thank you. Fall is my favorite time of the year. I am lucky that in Maryland each season has its own color.
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In the "Fall" take lunch into the woods or a joint? and listen to the trees. Just be there and you will "understand". If you want to make a Fir tree be something like a Maple, then It's OK! But you have to know what a Fir and A Maple live on!
"Peace"
Earle
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You and my husband woul get along very well. You are living the life he once dream of but I was selfish.
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You are never selfish with love involved dear! All is worked out with sharing each other!
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You are right. I think if I did not mention no one would notice it. Thanks for the comment.
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Yes, I totally agree! This is a wonderful creation! I would love to give you a kick in the ass for being so "unsure" of your work (yourself). I am just checking out other of your stuff now, but "This work" I would love to see as a wall Mural!- I love it!
Best,
Earle
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Thank you (not for the lick, but for the confidence on me). I had been using the computers for so long that any of my hand skill put in doubt.
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This is so bright and glorious! I love it! So beautiful. Your colors are so strong and clean and natural.
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Thank you.
Finally I got around painting some flower, please check out my Day lily, and let me know what you think.
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I think the :favorite: says it all, though I did give you a few paragraphs of watercolor trivia that might be amusing -- or just repeat stuff you already know. lol
I love your watercolors. They rock. The day lily had so much detail and precision that I was awed. I don't think I've ever done a watercolor floral that rich in depth and detail and I know I'd like to sometime.
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It is not that I do not want to respond it is some time what clever thing to say. I have to learn so much from these different mediums.
I do not know if I mention to you but my background is in Architecture; a few years ago I resented the fact the field is so technical, required so much accuracy, and on top of that building codes that the artistic part is neglected. I feel like I sold myself to the business so I can make a living. This is the main reason that I choose watercolor, since I have to be loose in every sense. I painted so little in college and now I am attacking with hunger.
P.S. I am not looking for sympathy. I a little disappointed how thing are going in that part of my life. I know one day I will see a light at the end of the tunnel⦠when I get over this feelings.
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Oh, I can understand! I got very burned out on art at the point that my health forced me to quit doing street art. I'd done so well on it for so long and really loved it at first. I was thrilled about what felt like easy money for something I enjoyed doing, but when I could not produce enough to live on and didn't have enough energy left to have a life, I started resenting it.
That's an old feeling based on misinformation. I didn't understand how severely I was disabled or how unreasonable the physical things I had to do in order to market it were in relation to my real abilities. They weren't that extreme in relation to what other people can do. There were times I wished I had a golf cart to drive my art out to my spot in the French Quarter -- but at the same time it was also physically difficult to hang it and take it down when it rained every day at 2pm and hang it again till sunset.
I felt bitter about the fact that I couldn't afford to keep my own art, had no time for Prismacolor art or any other slow mediums I did for love of it, most of all had no time for writing. I look back on the point I was burned out and it was strange because I had serious gaps in information because I was in denial about being disabled. I knew my back was bad and that was about it. The quality of my drawings suffered and I had fewer sales because I'd be sick when I was out there. I forced myself to go out on days I wasn't up to it, but didn't earn much on those days because tourists don't get attracted to someone who seems tired, frustrated and sick. They're interested in someone who's enjoying being an artist and having a good time, sharing the party.
All this has to go into Street Sketching. But I remember what the burnout felt like and how things I used to enjoy became miserable.
I also do remember how architectural art worked, had a roommate who was into it as a hobby and didn't want to go professional because of those same strict requirements. It's so mechanical, accuracy is so important and often accuracy can ruin its artistic qualities. If you do a watercolor of a farmhouse with some trees around it and the proportions of the house are off by half a room and the painting looks better, well and good. You can make up the farmhouse just as easily as you can make up a tree to balance the composition and in a landscape painting no one's going to say "that tree is too close to the building for code."
I had that feeling I was selling out when I was a typesetter because I didn't have enough strength and time left to also have a life. It ate too big a proportion of my life and while it earned good money I didn't have anything left and wound up hip-deep in bills.
If you're still doing architectural renderings at work, I can understand not enjoying your job and being ready to move on. Sometimes it's hard to move on, sometimes it takes a massive logistic effort to do so without ruining your credit and your peace of mind. If you've already left it behind, yay good and congratulations. But what I see now is that all the energy of your frustration with the limits of architectural rendering is exploding into glorious watercolors that have so much energy and beauty to them that there's completion. Everything you couldn't do in architecture, whether you still do it just for the money on weekdays or not, livens up your watercolors and gives them an exuberant joy.
I've procrastinated on the portraits I need to do for Street Sketching. I still have some waiting before I can get my power chair and get out and start selling my books, I have another nonfiction memoir that's ready to submit anyway, and some of it may be rumination. I was so bitter about art in general after that life-defeat that I just didn't do any art at all. I left my materials behind and gave most of them away, only kept the Prismacolors that were my noncommercial medium. I kept them on the off chance I wanted to get some coloring books and do those for relaxation. It took years for me to be able to enjoy art again.
And now I've got a different perspective on it. Now I know that it would have been very possible to have a successful enough art career to have plenty of time to build my writing career without getting bogged down in more commitments than I could handle, provided I'd had enough mobility aid and physical assistance to make it in life in general. I needed to know that what stopped me was something real that wasn't my being lazy. I had so much shame about all the days and weeks and months that I laid around the house doing nothing at all because I was too sick to do anything.
I felt like a sellout and a fool because I had time to write-- I seemed to have time to write, but didn't actually have it to write because I need to have a reasonable amount of physical energy just to sit up, type and not be distracted by exhaustion. My having time without distractions is not the same thing as time to write, because if I have days without responsibilities but don't have the energy to fix my dinner or get my desk clean I'm not going to be up to writing. It makes sense now. It didn't when I believed it was all in my head because every doctor I'd seen thought it was all in my head.
It sounds as if architectural rendering bore the same relation to art that my typesetting did to writing. I can't say it doesn't help me as a writer to type this fast and accurately. The typing practice and editing practice did teach me skills I use today when I write. But it was a supreme frustration not to be writing during those years and they felt like a waste. They wouldn't have been if I'd made other decisions in my time off work.
I'm feeling more thoughtful than sympathetic, I care and I'm empathetic and have had similar experiences but I'm curious about it too. That's so interesting. I honestly think that frustration itself may have given you some intensity in painting that's coming out wonderful now, just like the years I was typesetting or street drawing and too sick to write during my time off gave me a tremendous hunger to write and may have affected my writing style. I know that when writing every single thing I've ever done or learned in my life flows into it seamlessly.
Painting well is a matter of perception.
I can remember exactly the point when I began to see the proportions of the human face accurately. When I looked at noses as they are instead of having a nonartist, nonrealist's idea of a nose or an eye or a mouth that leads to certain natural beginners' mistakes like putting a hard outline all the way around a nose and thus resulting in a weird potato-nose that's ugly in the drawing no matter how accurate the shape because there are no hard darks on that part of the face but the nostrils. I looked at people differently.
I think that when you got frustrated with the architectural drawings where mechanical accuracy contradicted artistic quality, you learned to see those artistic qualities. Something clicked in your mind and eyes that makes you leap with joy at the freedom of watercoloring a flower, whether it's from life or you make it up in your head, and you pay attention to it with the delight of being able to put those artistic qualities first.
Learning experiences are interesting in themselves. Typesetting made me a fast accurate typist and so the stories I make up flow out of my hands at 100 words a minute thanks to the Dvorak keyboard. I was typing 80 words a minute anyway. One result is that rough drafting a novel on an idea when the fresh impulse to do that novel comes up is easy and practical as starting a Prismacolor drawing. This would not be the case if I had to write it out longhand and then edit it without Cut, Copy and Paste.
You reached a point of conflict with architectural rendering but came away with a perception of composition and artistic qualities that now makes your watercolors incredible. If you don't have to do architectural rendering any more for a living, congratulations. If you still do in order to earn enough to be comfortable, at least you've got a skilled decent-paying day job that gives you time to paint and resources to get good watercolors and paper and brushes. I've known people who love architectural rendering but it takes a particular personality and you're getting skilled enough that your own art is taking that unique Iris Grundler direction, you're doing the paintings no one else on the planet could even conceive.
So I respect and admire you and think it's neat. I can understand the sheer pleasure of busting out of a restriction like that.
I'm getting over the feeling of shame and defeat about quitting street art and winding up homeless in New York. If I had not gone to New York, I might have wound up homeless in a city that didn't even have homeless shelters and got swept into jail for vagrancy or gotten sick and died or something, I took the course in life that I did. I actually needed Social Security. Facing that fact is something I tried many times during those years but I kept getting turned down and they kept saying it wasn't so, and that's a very different conflict than "burned out on selling street art."
It takes a lot of the sting of defeat out of it for me to realize that if I wasn't disabled at all, by now I'd have gotten a Jackson Square "A" license and become one of the seasonal Jackson Square artists, saving up a few months of basics while flush so that I'd paint all winter and write novels every summer. A good rhythm of life. Something I'd advise to an abled person with my abilities but not my disabilities. I wound up failing to survive on street art alone for the same reason I couldn't do it at tarot reading or jewelry selling or anything else, did not have the physical ability to sustain it at the point it became successful enough to demand more activity than I can do.
I think there's a big light at the end of the tunnel for you, and that some of it is probably perceptual and some may be life decisions like whether to continue a job you're beginning to hate and what alternatives would be both practical and soul-satisfying. You've got prints up, you've got the start of a fine-art career, you could get slides made and start entering watercolor competitions and general art competitions, you are at the start of something very beautiful, as great as my writing career is for me.
It takes capital to get going on self employment, both in money and time. For an art career it takes relatively little money other than to live on till you earn enough to live on, why the "starving artist" archetype is usually a happy rags-to-riches story because anyone who goes out and does what I did in New Orleans can go from "loads of free time and personal freedom and doing something you love but eating macaroni and cheese and putting up with roommates" through this growth that's a bit different from the business world track. It's not like the way I lived on typesetting.
I can remember the way literally every week or month while I lived close enough to my spot that it didn't wreck my back and had the strength to do it, my life got physically and financially more comfortable. I was doing without all sorts of appliances and conveniences that middle class people get used to, being oh so proud of that artistic poverty and life-simplicity and then as soon as it got hot and I had a good day after the rent, getting fed up and buying a small air conditioner. So many things like that were things I enjoyed thoroughly instead of taking for granted.
I'm recapitulating it now as I make up for years of doing without good art supplies and other tangible things, every month I've got something beyond what I need just for subsistence. So every month I do something real and new that makes my life better. It's been art supplies for a long time because I really missed being able to try new mediums, replace supplies I used up, have the freedom to relax and use the good paper or my favorite Prismacolor colors knowing that I can actually get more when it's gone.
I'm getting used to doing okay in life and it's sinking in that it's been over a year since I had any real financial crisis. That even the few troubles I had where I needed something for my computer and I was tight, big deal, I was able to just deal with it and at worst have to wait a few weeks to do it. This is off on a tangent.
It's not clear if you're still doing architectural rendering now and getting paid a lot to distort your artistic perception, or if you quit doing that and are now just joyously painting and not doing anything else with art. But in your last sentence it sounds as if you're approaching some shift in conscious perception as profound as my realizing "hey, I'm physically disabled for real, that means that I haven't been making lazy haphazard efforts at life and failing through lack of caring, I've been accomplishing extraordinary things, climbing mountains that look like and are molehills to the undisabled."
Information changed my feelings.
I got so used to thinking of myself as "burned out on art" that I didn't know how to react to art coming back into my life other than to draw a hard line between my professional career as a writer and my hobby as an artist. I'm not that bad at art. I could go professional at it. I've brought it into my writing career in a new and unexpected way by recognizing I love teaching and that writing How-To is fun. This does mean that in some, not all of my reviews and things, people are going to say "Writer and artist Robert A. Sloan" or "Artist and writer Robert A. Sloan" or "Multitalented creative bloke who does many different arts" and not always say "Robert Sloan the science fiction writer." And that for an art teacher it's important to accept that people will respect me as an artist and call me an artist.
It sounds as if you're wrestling with some redefinition on that order and probably are getting close to seeing the resolution, some way of looking at everything you're doing that makes it all make sense. I can see that getting frustrated at following the rules and priorities of architectural rendering may have taught you a lot of artistic perception of exactly those qualities you're bringing into your watercolors. What was forbidden became visible instead of mysterious and unknown.
So that may be a way to look at it. Let me know if any of that made sense or not. I'm chewing on some similar ideas myself with getting used to "I'm disabled and actually incapable of doing normal things" and "but I needed to survive and I'm still breathing so doing all those stupid short-term choices did make sense at the time, so did selling out when it was that or die for lack of housing." In Chicago where I worked as a typesetter, every year a few elderly and disabled people died, literally died of their utilities being cut off in the winter. Sometimes died of hypothermia when they turned down the thermostat to keep the bills within their fixed income. So when I say that was life and death in some of those situations, it's on that level -- it's that I knew what the consequences would be if I didn't overdo it and do things that caused physical long-term damage. Most of those disasters and risks were very slow ones that crept closer and closer, barely avoidable and anything I did in an emergency had its own cumulative loss of health. I don't mean life and death like combat. I mean facing ugly situations where I had to make the lesser of two bad choices to get through the day, the week, the year and still have the resources to move on when I had to move on.
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You are a true survivor. I think that is the reason why I open up to you. You are so easy to listen (or read). I like the way you see life βI'd advise to an abled person with my abilities but not my disabilities.β A lot of people would give up in NY but going to Chicago β¦ Hmm.
I think one of the qualities that one learns from surviving is to like yourself and being able to live with yourself. Otherwise no one would make it. You have so much to teach to others, I think that You have an obligation to write your life experiences so people like me that are in transition so we can get it clear in their heads. This is so much better than therapyβ¦
I still do architectureβ¦
Architecture is a different type of art. It sound glamorous but is not. One has to be able to design something from nothing, then put the idea into construction drawings and/or but it is the big oneβ¦ It is the ability to do what the client needs (not the builder) and fit their life style for the money they have and the majority does not see that for beautiful thing it will cost them a lot, and then, the builders do not want to give up their 30-40 % of the a lot, and little guys like me get all the blame since we drew it. It is so awful position since I feel manipulated. If I had to start all over again, I donβt know what I should had done differentlyβ¦.
Donβt get me wrong. I fight these people, but I get tireβ¦
Well, I got it out of my chest. I hope I did not bore you.
Tomorrow night my husband and I are going to an art show. It is call βNew Englandβ and the artists are Walter Bartman, Michael Graves (not the Architect), Michael Moss, and Joan Grisworld. I am looking forward. I think if you google you will find them.
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Funny you should mention that.
I wrote some of my life experiences in The Shelter Stories, 100,000 words on the three and a half years I spent in a Westchester County homeless shelter. I need to edit a few chapters, it's still in the polishing stages. Once I have my power chair and get settled in Kansas, I'll be sending that out for publication. I've got Street Sketching in progress but I do other types of writing too.
The main thing is that the first book that sells needs to be reasonably high-paying nonfiction so that when I leave Social Security behind, I don't try to say, make $3,000 last an entire year to live on it. Some types of book don't pay as well as others, but nonfiction tends to pay quite a lot more. Once I have one of those sold, all my novels start going out too.
Oh wow. So you're not just drafting and rendering, you're designing homes. That rocks. Yeah, I would expect people might often wind up having to cut corners financially and thus wind up with something that's not anywhere near as esthetic. I didn't really think of it as glamorous. It's respectable, but then, I'm a novelist and that's glamorous too and "glamorous" is one of those things that apply when you're looking at something from backstage or onstage with it. More like architecture's challenging, difficult and often frustrating when dealing with people who don't understand the logistics.
Vent all you like! And enjoy the art show, sounds like fun!
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Hmm. " Shelter stories" It sound likes a movie I saw once with Marilyn Street. I will look for it when you publish it. Put me down for one.
I was disappointed with the art show .It was in a hole in a wall, poor lighting and the art pieces were not well display. It makes so, so much difference when one has wall space and good lighting. I am sure they a worth what they asked for, but I only saw a hand full that I would be tented to buy (not that I have the money or the space...)
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Yeah, the display area has a lot to do with it. But also the tastes of whoever put together the show. I've seen some that left me drooling and walking away with a burning need to sell enough novels to spare an advance to sink just into cool artworks. Others that left me wondering if I ever did become that rich why I'd ever buy art from a gallery instead of my friends. (Which is still valid considering that some of my friends are great professional artists and even the same ones in or out of a gallery, I'd be paying twice as much to support the gallery if I didn't know them.)
New Orleans had enough galleries that some of them only carried the work of one prominent artist. There was a tiny one with a very narrow facade that featured a sculptor whose name I don't remember, but he worked in metal and then painted it with enamel so realistically you'd swear you bought a live rare orchid or some other strange flower from him, insects and all. I loved that guy's sculptures, because I'm really into realism -- but I couldn't afford one to six thousand dollars a piece and knew I wouldn't till I could also afford the house to put it in and some kind of appropriate display area with good lighting.
Art is so personal. Subject, color harmony, theme, mood, cultural factors, a thousand things besides technical skill influence what makes a piece something you need or something you'd rather someone else needed. My grandfather honestly said "I don't know much about art but I know what I like."
The more that I know about art, the truer I find that. Even though there are quite a few important technical things I've learned, it ultimately becomes very personal. In some styles it's not even possible to measure its technical merits when artists deliberately blow off one craft element about it in order to get a different effect, then it takes studying that style a bit to understand why you could do a stunning still life in a kitchen that was perfect American Primitivism and bursting with sunlight and warmth, something that evoked everything great about the South and made me want to eat grits and take my hat off to ladies and just grin and sit on the porch gaining weight and gaining peace in my soul... and another one that has the same type of flattened perspective combined with soft shading and pretty colors looks as if it could give the viewer diabetes in a glance and would be vaguely annoying even in a pretty Southern kitchen. There's a lot of feeling. There's a lot of personality, more than anything else.
I know that the techniques are so fascinating though. I think almost all artists do have that fascination with the process itself, with color and technique and materials and the tangible process of making a dream become something real. There is something wonderful in that.
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We had a good time anyways. My husband is like your grandfather. He has good instinct for art, but he cannot draw if his life depends on it. I do agree with you, we learn something from everybody, to bad we only alive a short period of time in earth. There is so much to see and appreciate.
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No kidding. I don't like to look at it that way though. In a weird way I just sort of live and expect to live a really long time and dangit if I got killed, that'd be the end of it. I'd die young whenever it happened.
My grandfather actually was very good at sculpture, he did great welding sculptures but didn't understand why they were because he had no formal knowledge. He knew what he liked. He thought they were silly, but maybe they had grace because he was a good enough welder to construct them in ways they wouldn't fall down either. He could draw reasonably well, he did some good line art and decorative art. That was his style. He did a tree mural with little oval pointy leaves in the hallway of their house after they got a house, very careful, beautifully balanced, two shades of green and coppery metallic leaves. He painted swans on toys. He could do stuff like that and thought of it about like sawing wood or varnishing or something, but didn't think he was that good at it. I remember and I can see he had none of the terms and about half the techniques for what he considered great art.
Sometimes it's a mental block. Other times it's more that a person's not involved with the art world enough to care about fashion and get into styles that take a depth knowledge to appreciate. It's odd for me because I'm starting to write about art. Some part of me will always prefer the easy simple visceral art like your irises or Houly's birds of prey that don't take an art degree to understand, just catch your breath and love it for what it is.
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I know what you mean, Your grandfather, I think had the ability to observed nature and understand the scientific part of it and he was able to balance it as a result it is pleasant for look at. Sometimes to much education doe not help arts. I see some may pieces that you know that person had some technical drawing background since it look so perfect, cold and calculated. Sometimes, when I get and idea, I stored it back in my mind and work on it in my head and when I am ready, I get to it and finish it. I try not to over study it, so in that way it becomes more spontaneous. Some of my friends ask me how I process an idea and I say it is like planning for dinner you know what you want and when the time comes you just fix it. At least it works for me.
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I've seen that too, pieces that have a lot of precision and lack something. Usually when I have seen something like that, it has a lot of precision in one way and it's missed the point in another. It'll have some glaring technical error too, like maybe the artist has gotten every proportion on a building mechanically straight and hasn't shadowed it and has straightened out every irregular line with a ruler. The type of "cold" piece you're talking about has often got serious mistakes that someone looking more at what he's drawing would've done just by following what was there.
My grandfather did have a good eye and strong intuition too. He just didn't realize it and had a belief he couldn't draw well.
Oh yeah sometimes it takes a long time between getting the idea and doing the piece. I think that's just part of the process, and it usually comes out well if I do it that way.
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Thank you. You are kind.
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mm I like the workshope and the detail engagement - it really looks like a painting of fun and inside need.I really adore the warmth flowing out of it.
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You can tell that I like the subject, can you?
It takes me a while to pick them and to paint them. Thank you for you omment.
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Thank you. You are so kind.
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Wow that's beautiful. It has a very nice warm autumns day look to it.
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The color look so nice when is a sunny day, doesn't it?
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Thank you, I like your signature ( I agree with it)
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thanks, i agree with your signature too!
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this is great! makes me wish it was autumn again
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I love the color too. Thank you!
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Thank you so much.
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