My 46^th acrylic is a cat. [Like the chihuahua earlier, it was done from a photo in an old calendar.] I don't love this one but I'm done with it — not my best, not my worst. I feel like any further fussing with it will just make it tighter, and I also feel like tighter wouldn't necessarily make this one better. The looseness of suggesting the floral print on the duvet was my fave part to do, as it happens. Onward.

learning something about my self-talk

I had a sudden epiphany today. [This may sound painfully obvious to you, but it's new to me, bear with me, okay?]:

I was looking at one of my paintings, and suddenly asked myself, "What would I say about this painting if a friend made it and showed it to me?" And I realized I would be much more positive and encouraging — and really mean everything I said. So why not say those same things about the same painting when it's made by me?

Why not, indeed?

My latest paintings were both Christmas presents so I had to wait til their recipients got them before making them public, so here we go now:



My eighth gouache is supposedly a chipmunk. I still struggle with getting my paint to a good working consistency — straight from the tube it's too thick to spread easily, but it feels like when I add any water it instantly goes as thin as watercolour. There's a sweet spot in between that I keep missing.



My 43^rd acrylic is my house, as seen from across the street. You can't see much of the actual house frontage and porch from here, so it looks like mostly garage, but there is enough house back there to live in. Any other angle would be mostly tree, so if I wanted to get the whole building in, this was the best I could do.

My 42^nd acrylic painting is a fairly conscious effort to go back to something a bit more accessible than the abstract I did last time. I used some of the same drybrush I did with that chinchilla earlier, and once again I find it a helpful technique for this sort of piece.

My 40^th acrylic painting is a chinchilla (as I hope is apparent). I did it back in August, but it was a birthday gift so I couldn't show it publicly til my friend saw it [so as not to spoil the surprise, eh]. I learned a few things while working on this one:

• my ability to handle acrylic paint technically is a bit more advanced than I consciously realized — I was able to do some things here that I didn't know I could.
• for the first time, I tried using a fair bit of drybrush in acrylic. It's a technique I don't hear discussed very often with acrylics, but I found that it came in handy here.
• so many times I have read that it's not a good idea to fuss with fiddly little things in a painting — but for this painting I felt free to ignore that advice, because I knew what final look I was aiming at.
• I noticed in my reference photo that the chinchilla had both white and black whiskers, so I painted on some white ones and black ones. But then I immediately saw that they jumped out, glaring unnaturally. So I went over them with washes til I ended up with light gray and dark gray whiskers instead, and that looked better. This was a good lesson in paying closer attention to actual colours and values, to see what you see instead of what you think you see.

Art is expression. Of the self, one's thoughts and feelings and beliefs. It's not just painting a tree, it's conveying what the tree means to you. Art evokes, it suggests, it interprets, it expresses. It doesn't simply take dictation. It makes something that didn't exist before, that couldn't exist any other way. The artist who painstakingly reproduces the world in rigorous and accurate detail and no more, simply because they have the skills to do so, is really no different from a camera. The one who cynically cranks out yet another song or story or painting nearly identical to all their others, in their sleep, simply because they know they can sell it and for no other reason, is not creating art.

Art is in the intention of the creator.

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Art is an experience. The painter creates an experience for the eye, the musician for the ear, the writer for the mind, the chef for the tongue. Some will find the experience engaging, or delightful, or moving [good]; others may find it indifferent or unpleasant [bad]. But, good or bad, it's still art regardless. The pop musician may be up on stage playing their hit for the zillionth time on autopilot, bored out of their skull... but people in the audience are ecstatic because that piece connects with them powerfully, here and now. Norman Rockwell cranks out a painting in less than a week because a magazine hired him to make their cover, and some people dismiss him as a hack commercial illustrator... but next week, and for decades afterward, other people are moved to laughter or tears by the story they see evoked in his facial expressions.

Art is in the response of the audience.

I had one of those today.

For the last couple of weeks, I've found myself listening to a lot of rock'n'roll recordings from England in the fifties and early sixties... back when rock was in its infancy, and people were still feeling their way through how to do this thing. And I realize that some of these singers and musicians and songwriters are comparatively crude. But I still enjoy listening to this sutff.

And it occurred to me that, just because there is Better Music® out there that I could be listening to, it doesn't mean I'm wasting my time listening to this instead. There are plenty of reasons to enjoy art besides how accomplished it is. Ultimately those reasons are all subjective, and so what? Heck, have I already forgotten the lessons of seventies punk? That was a deliberate reclamation of the idea that art doesn't need to be The Best® in order to enjoy making it, or to enjoy what someone else has made.

Conversely, something that is demonstrably Well Made® is not necessarily enjoyable, either. Like I said, it's all subjective. It doesn't even really matter if we can identify for ourselves what it is that we like about art, just as long as we like it. People like what they like. And we need to let them like what they like.

Then I got thinking about my own work, and how quick I am to see its shortcomings, and how many better artists and writers there are out there.

And so what? People can still like what I make anyway. Some of them actually do, and I can't say they're wrong to. I could be a crude fifties English rocker for someone out there — not The Best®, but someone still finds something in it to like, for whatever reason.

I keep losing sight of this, and I need to not lose sight of it.

staying on track

In retrospect, I feel like I had a pretty decent day. Ran an unusual number of errands this morning, all successfully, including a physio appt. Navigated the snowy streets without incident. Remembered to change the furnace filter. Stayed on top of the dishes despite being tempted to blow them off. Inked a page of comic strips. And got thru most of the day without needing meds. So yeah, I feel like I stayed on track today a bit better than some days.

Someone posted a piece of AI art somewhere and asked for thoughts and comments. It's the first time I tried to nail down my vague feelings on the subject. Here's what I came up with:

I'm still coming to terms with AI art. On some levels, it's just a new manifestation of something that has long been with us... for example, the human artist who repeatedly paints variations of the same picture and sells prints of them to people who are easily satisfied. It makes visual pleasure affordable and readily accessible. Similar to the way that portrait photographers [as opposed to portrait painters] did. In a way, AI art is a fancier form of clip art, I guess.

This doesn't mean that I wholeheartedly approve of it, just that I recognize that it arises from economic and cultural forces that are not new. It means that original human art will be obliged to become more sincere, less of a commodity and more ars gratia artis. That's bad for artists and their livelihoods, but it's not bad for art per se.