Painting and Finishing, Painting and Finishing

Blackburnian, Canada and Black-throated GreenWarblers. 9x12 inch  acrylic painting. Copyright 2020 by Ken Januski.

Savannah Sparrow at Dixon Meadow  Preserve. 9x12 inch acrylic painting. Copyright 2020  by Ken Januski.

 

Though I had thought I might  have returned to printmaking by now I obviously have not. I think I know why. September  and October so far  have both been very active with migrating birds. I see them,  am stimulated to  portray them  and/or  the experience of  seeing them  and  I have to choose a medium. Which medium seems to offer the most flexibility? Not printmaking, not watercolor, at least for  me, but acrylic.

Most of my artistic background  is in painting, either acrylic  or oil, where I  can make a major change in a nanosecond. It turns out that this is  the way I feel like working right  now. I want a  direct way to make some sort of portrayal of  what I've seen.

But  I almost never want a portrait. I realized after almost my first or second bird painting that I didn't  like the idea of  bird portraits. Yes, there are many  handsome, beautiful birds, including all of the ones above. But to  portray them to me seems wrong. Too often it makes them seem cute. Nicely posed, painted in understated colors, etc., etc. I occasionally do something like this in a watercolor study, though I wouldn't argue that I do so with any great skill. But they are just  studies. They aren't finished  paintings and for me aren't even studies for  finished  paintings. Why? Because they would just look like portraits, like photos from  the 19th century of  your distant ancestors in photographic studios. Very stiff and unnatural!

I've never know how to portray them in a way that looks more natural, though this is a lack of both imagination  and skill with particular media, e.g. oil, watercolor, printmaking, et al. Acrylic painting allows my imagination to run free. I can keep experimenting and changing until the composition seems right. It's a very direct way to work.

So that is more  or less what the "painting" refers to in the title. I just keep painting trying to find the right way to  make a picture of something,  in this case birds that I've recently seen.

There's also the question of "finishing." I've always, and I do  think always is correct, disliked paintings with high finish, particularly paintings  where you  can't  even see any  brushstrokes. This  has been an ideal for  some painters for many centuries.  And I'm sure I can find some painters, Raphael perhaps, where the high finish doesn't bother me. But often it  just is very irritating. Ingres is somewhere in between. I have to  admire his work but  it does leave me pretty cold. Unfortunately in wildlife art it has been de rigeur for 100s years or more as far as I can tell. And it is wildlife  art that it seems most misplaced. For still life, nature morte,  it might make more sense. Most of  the subjects are no longer alive. Even the fruit has  been plucked. But wildlife IS alive. Why paint wildlife that looks like a still life? As I've written about this  many times  before I won't go  on. I'll just say that it is not a type of  "finish" I want in my  paintings.

My idea of  "finish," is much closer to Matisse's, at least the Matisse who wrote early in his career that in his paintings he wanted everything in its place, where there was nothing extra and everything worked  together. I think that idea has probably been prominent in my work for 40-50 years. I wouldn't argue that  it's the only way to make art. And  I'm sure that for  some viewers it can be just as offputting as the high finish of  more photographically-minded painters is  to  me.

So the other thing I like  about painting is  that also allows me to get to the type of  formal finish much more quickly than any other medium. Both printmaking  and watercolor generally require some planning and exclude much change and modification. It's  just the  nature of those  media. If you have a good  idea what you want to start with then they can be ideal media. And I do  love to the work of  others in  them. I even like some of my own.

But right now I'm more interested in both formal finish, ala Matisse, and wildlife art that seems alive and not a portrait, sometimes a stultified portrait. So  I continue to work in acrylic, painting and finishing.

I'm sure there will come a time when I want to translate some of  that into prints.

I had hoped to write more  about the upcoming Society of Wildlife Artist's 'The Natural  Eye ' show  in London. But I think that should  be another post. For now you can see, and  buy, much  of the work at The Natural Eye 2020.

(I'm starting to hate the new Blogger. My html may indeed be invalid as Blogger tells me but I didn't  create  it, Blogger did. I'm sure that this is of no interest to readers to I'm just going to ignore it. I don't have time to babysit Blogger.)

First Brood Parasites of 2015 (Please Note the Date)

Drake Canvasback and Hooded Merganser. Woodcut by Ken Januski.

Blame it on something I read about April Fools Day. I wouldn't normally use such a jokey title as I have today. But it is appropriate. We saw our first Brown-headed Cowbirds today, shortly after the first Eastern Phoebes have arrived, and you can bet that some poor phoebes will soon be raising cowbirds, even if the young cowbirds are twice their size.

Below are some recent field sketches: I've already mentioned the female American Kestrel feeding on an American Robin at Morris Arboretum. On the opposite page are some of the first Eastern Phoebes and Hermit Thrushes that we've seen this year. At bottom right another thrush, the American Robin, that posed just long enough outside my studio window to sketch in everything but his head. When I looked up to do that he was gone.

One of the things I always notice about Hermit Thrushes is that they are pot-bellied. Because of this I sometimes think that all my Hermit Thrush look the same, almost always starting with the pot belly. Still it is accurate. That's just the way they are. They're also a bit smaller than American Robins and 2 out of the 3 times we've seen them together over the last week the Robin chased the Hermit Thrush out of his feeding area. Given his size I guess the Hermit Thrush wasn't going to argue.

American Kestrel with Prey, Eastern Phoebe, Hermit Thrush, American Robin. Field Sketches by Ken Januski.

Yesterday I experienced something new: printing two editions of the same print in the same day. This wasn't planned. It's just that the first edition of the Canvasback and Hooded Merganser at top was much too dark, with many of the finer lines covered/blurred by ink and/or the type of paper I used. I also switched from a soft to hard brayer part way through the edition with little improvement. After all the work that goes into a print it's very unsatisfying to have the end result be something other than what you anticipated.

So after some errands I returned home and printed a somewhat smaller edition. This time I used the smooth side of some Shin Torinoko paper as well as a hard brayer. That seemed to keep the ink just about perfect on the surface of the print. That is what I'm showing at top. This edition is for sale on Etsy. I may eventually put some of the rougher first edition up for sale at at a lower price. It looks alright but it just isn't what I planned on.

I've read recently something I read every year or two in a different source. Audiences, to a large extent, like their art to be interactive. By this I don't mean the silly online interactive quality that many struggling businesses use to try to save their businesses. What I, and the people I'm reading, mean is that the artwork is not so perfect, so closed off that the viewer or reader is left cold, as though he's an observer rather than a participant. In other words he is able to use his imagination and experience to finish the work. The most obvious case for this is novels. They are not visual, nor aural. And yet most readers react badly when they see the characters they're familiar with from novels portrayed in film or on television. We often react badly because we've developed through our imagination a far different view of the character.

In visual art I think that this is why I shy, to put it mildly, away from high finish in my work. High finish may impress those who assume it must take work to get such a finish, but for an audience that looks for something more I think they often react badly because the art work is closed to them. Their imagination cannot enter into a dialog with the work and complete it as they see fit because there is no room. The artwork is a closed door. Stand back and admire my skill, or else.

This is a lengthy argument and something I won't purse at length. But it is not something new, not some fad forced on art by modernism. If you think so then take a look at Rembrandt. Up close so many of his works just show brushstrokes. But from a distance the viewer uses his imagination to complete the work, and history shows that they are far more esteemed than contemporary work of a high finish.

Why do I bring all of this up now? It's something I think about in regard to the woodcut. Woodcuts, just like linocuts, can be exceedingly linear and graphic. It would have been possible to outline every branch and twig in the print. I could have made neater more regular lines for the water. Relief printing lends itself I think to linearity. But even though we undoubtedly see line in the world it's not all we see. And if everything is line it undoubtedly can have a strong graphic, two-dimensional effect but it eliminates the possibility of three dimensions, the world in which we actually live.

All of which goes to say that I try to avoid too much regularity in my prints. I could easily add them and get a snappier two-dimensional, flat result. But that's not what I want. I think that the more irregular method used above and in many of my prints gives the viewer a little more room to enter the picture and enjoy it. Sorry for this lengthy digression but I often write about my dislike for too much finish in art, especially wildlife art, and I just realized another reason why: it closes off the viewer from the experience.