Bethany Pierce

Hotcakes Special

German Chocolate Cake, 9" x 12" 

Update

This is a somewhat overdue post, but I've been having no end of technical frustration with this blog for the last week and a half,so please ignore the sloppy formatting. Daily paintings from last week: Oreos and Milk, 5" x 7" (sold), Kid's Meal, 4" x 6", and America's Favorite, 6" x 8". 

  

Good Catch, Bad Painting

I woke up Monday with a good laundry list of items I was excited to paint, but for whatever reason this wasn't the best week for studio. Today was the first day I actually found myself absorbed in a project and then, four hours in, the canvas tipped from my easel. I caught it, palm flat against the wet paint. Since this was a one a day painting and not a several week project the accident was not as frustrating as it could have been, but still, no images to post today.

I've spent more time at my laptop this week, editing; it's comforting to have sentences to move when paint won't comply.  While going through revisions of a story I've been working on I realized I had every other sentence committed to memory and wondered if perhaps I wasn't "over-rendering" in writing the same way I tend to over-render in paint. If you polish every corner of a canvas the eye has no where to rest.  Novels can be like that. As a writer, you want each sentence well-crafted, but a little filler, a little A to B isn't bad. People can't read purple prose all the time. 

Tomorrow, I paint hot dogs and try, again, to temporarily suspend perfectionism.

Berry Kiss Tea, painting for Thursday

I love Duane Keiser's painting of a cup of tea and decided to try a similar composition for Thursday. 

Painting the red pool of tea was a riot, but I struggled to give definition to the shadows beneath the cup. I finally had to walk away.  Putting the teacup aside, I sketched out the beginnings of the next day’s project, a frozen dinner. Unfortunately starting early worked against me.

When I got back to studio today the previously gelatinous gravy had entirely evaporated leaving the turkey slivers shriveled and misshapen. (Am ashamed to admit I’m a little relieved. I woke up thinking how much I dreaded the painting all those little peas.)

My consolation painting: sketch of Chocolate Chip Cookie, oil on canvas, 4" x 6"

Tiramisu

The painting a day for Friday, August 21st:

Tiramisu, oil on canvas board, 6" x 11" (sold)

 

Into the seventh hour on this painting I was seriously tempted to come back to it later in the week. I felt the unwelcome need to turn this piece into something absolutely photo-real, which is entirely against the whole point of this process, the over developed and meticulously rendered painting being the very crutch I'm trying to avoid leaning on. I'm happy to say, however, that in choosing food as my subject matter I inadvertently did myself a favor. Even if I wanted to come back to this tiramisu later in the week, the tiramisu itself made a return impossible: by the time I'd cleaned my brushes the top layer was all but sliding off the now melted custard. Had I returned to my model later in the week it would have been little more than a blob of chocolate goo.  

Perfectionism thwarted once again!

The real tiramisu, melted beneath lamps,  

notably fatter and squatter than the fresh cake depicted in the painting.

The Bunt and the Cheese (cakes)

I began this painting in June and was working on it fairly steadily until other projects caught my attention. Now the icing on the actual cake has petrified and the paint on the canvas cake has been dry too long. I gave myself a difficult—or maybe I should just say quirky—composition on purpose, but the chocolate icing on the chocolate cake making the image fall a bit flat. The colors lack pizzazz, but so does the paint, and that may be the bigger issue.  

Notably, I started this piece two weeks before I had the one a day inspiration.  It’s done in a style more consistent with the slow, thin build-up of glazes I used for the previous anatomy and horizon paintings. If I can find the patience, this piece could result in something delicious, but I can’t help but wonder if gushy paint just doesn’t work better when icing and chocolate are your subject matter.

For example, here’s a study I did Monday of a piece by Simon Levenson. 

Which would you eat? 

Monday's Painting

 

The Artist's Lunch  5" x 5"

I went to studio with a few odds and ends I'd thrown in a box for a still life, but once I got my brushes set up and my apron on I felt a pull towards something more monochromatic and bland.  I ended up painting the sandwich and coffee I'd brought with me for lunch, which seemed like a really good idea until quarter to noon when I realized I was hungry.

 

A Painting A Day

Some people fall in love with paint. They love the smell of it, the feel of it, the way it smears on the blank and toothed surface of a new canvas.  My relationship to paint is more like that of an arranged marriage: the Professors matched my talent with the medium and the two of us have been working on our problems since. Sure, our marriage looks good to everyone else (it has produced, I will say, some very pretty paintings) but there’s trouble in paradise: I’m bored. I’m so terribly bored.

There are several reasons. For one, I’ve been working the same concept for five years, borrowing images from the sciences (everything from X-rays to mammograms) and using them as inspiration for meditations on the body or, more recently, on the heavenly bodies and antibodies on the macro and micro scale.  When I moved into the McGuffy Art Center, I assumed I would continue this project, certain there are depths to the idea that I haven’t reached technically or conceptually.

The problem is I’ve gotten so fixated on the finished product, I’ve forgotten to relish the process and as a result the painting itself has become about has interesting as studying for the ACT.  Every time I sit down to start a new piece, I become an ADD kid who’s had too many pixie sticks. I go out for drinks of water, I amble to the library for books, I browse the Internet for other paintings. I take these breaks on average every 15 minutes. My studio mate may think I have a bladder problem.

The good news is that googling such inanities of “cake AND painting AND chocolate AND awesome” I’ve come across some brilliant work and more than one idea of how to get myself out of this rut.

First, at the durres of a fellow McGuffy artist who only had to look at my paintings for five minutes to know I was out of my mind with the tedium, I’ve decided to purposefully give myself problems that will force me to think creatively. This means starting a painting without knowing how it will end, much less if it will end at all or will just be one of those failed experiments that gathers dust in the laundry room. I will paint a very large piece, to force myself into solving complicated problems of composition. I’ll ban myself from using a fan brush, or maybe from using any brushes at all, and complete a painting with other materials. I’ll limit my color palette. I’m confident things will get ugly.

While I gather the funds and the resolve to tackle the above projects, I’ve found a fourth more accessible way to challenge myself: for the next month I plan to complete a painting a day every day I’m in studio. 

I got the idea from Duane Keiser, a painter from Richmond, Virginia who decided in December of 2004 that he would paint one painting every day. On his web site he explains: “I made a cigar box easel and carried it with me everywhere I went. When I saw something interesting I would stop to paint it. When the painting was done, I would post to my blog which, at the time, was titled A Painting a Day. My subjects were often everyday scenes which is to say they ranged from the whimsical to the sublime. For me, painting is a meditation on the extraordinary in the ordinary and on the alchemy between paint and subject.” He then goes on to quote Annie Dillard, which makes him possibly one of my new most favorite people in the world.

His two-year experiment sparked a wave of One A Day painters; some sell their work on eBay, some use the model as a challenge for personal artistic development, and some, like Keiser, find the one a day challenge an opportunity for contemplation, for honing in and meditating on the things we take for granted daily. 

Though I’m not opposed to selling these little pieces once they accumulate, at present I’m only interested in brushing up my skill, in getting a little a bit friendlier with the paint. Maybe if I let it have its way, if I stop beating it into submission with fan brushes and actually let it run amok, it might be a more pleasant companion.

 

My first attempts:

 

 

 

Debbie Cakes, 5" x 7"  (This is actually a painting of a one day painting; I needed to remember how a person could paint thick and make it look delicious.)

Birthday Cake, 8" x 12"

Acing Cakes and Devilled Eggs

Since the move, I've gotten back into a routine of divided days: mornings for writing and afternoons for keeping "house" a chore that happily results in plenty of time in the kitchen with my new post-wedding pots and pans. Of great help in this area has been cable television, or, more specifically, the Food Network, a station featuring smiling cheese-balls who for twenty four hours a day offer free advice on how to simmer lamb in olive oil and wine, how to pick a chicken, how to quick-chop parsley into savory, tiny bits.

"Maybe you should do that slowly," Aaron said while watching me attempt the chef quick-chop with our shiny new cutlery.

My affection for Paula Dean aside, my favorite Food Network show thus far is Ace of Cakes.  Chef Duff, owner of the company and artist several times over (aside from creating the world's most incredible confectionery marvels, he is also a sculptor and musician), opened his cake studio by hiring all of his cake making friends. Essentially, Charm City Cakes is a building full of artists who get to wear whatever they want to work, laugh it up, and make dough (money) sculpting marzipan. I first saw this show at my Grandma's house last year while taking a break from painting. It was the only cooking show that made me think about something other than cooking: It made me think about how much I missed being in a studio with other artists who knew how to play as hard as they worked and who sometimes forgot the distinction between the two.

I received my B.F.A. from Miami University of Oxford, a very pretty school but no World News and Report gold medalist for art making.   I was just lucky enough to attend the school at the right time. For two years I shared a studio with a dozen of the most hilarious, eager, and talented fellow painters. Together we enjoyed the undivided attention of hard-working, ambitious professors. The studio we shared was divided into partitioned spaces that allowed each upperclassman a semi-private area to work.  The first year, after each area had been asssigned, a few of us requested shared sovereignty over the one space that remained empty. We wallpapered it in 70's green paper, furnished it with a television, a Play station, and a couch, and quite literally lived in studio for the remainder of the semester. We painted, but I don't remember when or how. In memory it seems the paintings just appeared of their own accord, slapped haphazardly onto canvas rather quickly between trips to Goodwill or late night showings of Spinal Tap. The paintings I did those two years remain my best.

This is nostalgia talking.  I know those painting required work. I just don't remember it. Painting conditions have been less than good since school and I'm inclined to romanticize things in the past, especially when the present disappoints. Watching the artists on Ace of Cakes having too much fun brainstorming together only underscored the banality of my circumstance. Painting in Grandma's suburban basement certainly wasn't what I had in mind for my future as an artist. I listened to bad radio and forced my way through one panel at a time, taking periodic breaks to eat lunch in the picnic room or drag my feet through Elder-Beerman while Grandma dressed me in half price women's wear.  Eventually, the emotional stress of working in her house took its toll: the wood-shop reminded me everywhere of Grandpa, which in turn reminded me of my Grandmother's isolation and never -spoken-of but ever-present grief; despite her cheerfulness, the loneliness of that house was oppressive. I couldn't put a dent in it, no matter how many hours I stayed or how many cups of coffee and pints of ice cream Grandma and I shared. Summer came. I wasn't satisfied with my paintings. Around my grandmother's fervent good spirits I felt guilty for my negativity. The year was starting to look like a bust.

Then, shortly after my wedding and just a week before I planned to move out of Grandpa's wood-shop, Grandma went to the ER with chest pain.  She slipped into confusion then sleep and was gone. I haven't cared about the failure or success of those paintings since; I just thank God every day I had a year with Grandma before she left.

*

Shortly after the funeral, Aaron and I packed our cars and headed south. Aside from a thirty minute wind through the highways of Charleston, the drive to Virginia was all country: country on the radio, country out the window.  We live within sight of Monticello, wedged between moutains and beach, intellectually afloat on the academic life of the University of Virginia.  I've considered applying for a teaching position at UVA, but this town is new territory, geographically and emotionally, and I feel myself retreating from the public performance of teaching, content to sit and my desk and make things, to be an artist and to play house and to not do much else. I might even split infinitives  (for those grammar mongers out there).

Thankfully, Charlottesville has made this sabbatical possible: Thursday I received an acceptance letter from the local artists collaborative. The McGuffy Art Center has two studios waiting, both ready as early as next week.  For at least the next year I'm back in a building of artists, the one place I don't have to try to belong.

I'm doing my best to contain my excitement. The studio is available starting next week. Until then I'll wear the wrinkles out of my apron and channel my creative energy into Paula Dean's deviled eggs.  

Breekbaar verlangen (revisited)

I've spent the majority of the last month attempting to put my life in order by balancing the checkbook, trying to make sense of 1040's, writing thank you notes,and making box blueberry muffins in alternating fits of boredom and domesticity. Sometimes I feel content. More often, I end up crying in the living room over mismatched laundry socks, explaining to the plants how worthless I am as an artist. 

The shipment of books my old publishing house mailed me this week came as a timely affirmation. Several months ago, my editor told me that Feeling for Bones had been chosen for translation into Dutch, but I didn't hear anything more about the project until last week when four complimentary copies appeared on my doorstep:

I've been working my way through Part I (or "Deel I"),  happy to absorb the story in its unrecognizable state; being unable to read my own writing drives home the conviction that a novel can live a life of its own, quite separate from its author.