trying out my new specialty pencil sharpener [designed for carbon and charcoal pencils] and finding out it works exactly as hoped

My 56^th acrylic is, once again, a visual that mysteriously popped into my head and stayed there. (As usually happens with any abstract that I feel moved to pursue to completion.) There's something about this colour palette that seems to connect with me, seeing as I used this same one last year. I can see me using these colours to sub for the white/gray/black palette I'm accustomed to working with in my cartooning, and doing value studies that way. (I even have a vague idea for the next one...)

My 52^nd and 53^rd acrylics are, as you can see, both pups. One is a gift, one is for putting up at the cafe and [hopefully] selling. I've already realized that my animal paintings are the closest I get to “crowd-pleasers”. So, when it comes time to make a gift, that's what I fall back on. But I've also already begun to wonder how much these paintings actually qualify as fine art. Like, do they say anything? Do they express anything about me? Maybe they're just an expression of “my love of animals”, and maybe that's enough, I dunno....

On the other hand, I can think of an artist I see on Instagram who only ever paints horses, and she quite cheerfully admits that's all she ever has any intention of painting, because that's what she loves most. And I've never questioned her legitimacy as An Artist®, so why do I need to question my own?

On the third hand, lately I've gotten more of an urge to spend at least some of my easel time working on less accessible pieces — I can feel things in me wanting to get out. I've already resigned myself to those new pieces not being understood or enjoyed, but I still feel like they'll be worth trying anyway.

My 51^st acrylic is a nocturne of the Christmas fair at Hebden Bridge, which we visited in 2018. I got into how the night suggests rather than displays things, and really got into the depths of the lights on the tree. There's no razzle dazzle in this work, but I feel like maybe there's some honesty about a night I remember fondly.



My tenth gouache is a horned owl in the snow. This was my first time using an angle brush — I only recently picked up a few of those, in both bristle and soft synthetic — and I really enjoyed how it handled. I can see myself using them a lot in future. And, once again, the limited palette I have felt my way into for animal paintings came in handy here.

My ninth gouache is a chipmunk, done on watercolour paper 8 x 10. Once again, the painting was a gift for a friend [who loves chipmunks] so I had to wait til they received it before sharing it here.

I wanted the foliage to be cool as a contrast to the warmth of the chipmunk's coat, but I'm not sure I pulled that off all that well. Keep trying.

Over the past five years, I have read a lot of books, articles, posts, etc. about "how to paint". Most of them offer advice along the lines of things you should or shouldn't do. Rules, or at least rules of thumb.

In that same period, I have seen each one of those rules broken [successfully] by at least one artist producing a good piece in their own lawless fashion. Sometimes that artist has even been me!

For a few years now, I've been saying that [the recently late] Alice Munro is my favourite writer. Now, news is coming out that calls her personal character into question. [It also suggests that efforts were made to suppress this news while she was alive?] This brings us once again to the issue of, "What do we do when good art, art that we love, has been made by a person who is not good, who we find it hard to love?"

There are various levels of separating the art from the artist (or not), and we all vary in how much we are able or willing to do this. Ultimately, it's a subjective and personal decision. I've come to realize that, for me, it's better and more accurate for me to say that I am a fan of a creator's work rather than a fan of a creator. I'm now trying harder to express myself in that way.

And now I'm seeing people going back to Munro's work, re-reading it in a new light, and wondering if they were inadvertently approving of messages counter to their own values. In this case, I don't have so much of an issue, I guess. For me, it isn't so much what she wrote about, or what her message was, as how she wrote it. Her writing has an elegant and insightful economy to it: she never sounds like she's straining to sound Writery®. That's what I like about her sutff. Those times when she wrote about dubious people doing dubious things, I never took it as approval of those things — more an awareness that there are people like that out there.

And now it turns out that she was one of them, so maybe we shouldn't be so surprised.


P.S.: I can understand boycotting an artist when we learn things like this about them, not wanting to contribute to them financially, etc. But, once they're gone, that whole aspect sorta becomes moot, I think?

Long ago I read that the only truly American artforms are jazz, comic books, and rock-and-roll. [The accuracy of all of those claims is easily disputed, but let's leave that aside for the time being so I can make my wanky statement about them]:

I got thinking about this and realized that all these artforms share a common element. Even if we break down jazz into its three major waves [Dixieland, swing, and bebop], the same process always took place.

When these artforms first emerged, all of them were originally dismissed as garbage for kids, the poor, and the ignorant. It took years for each of them to achieve some measure of artistic credibility, i.e., acceptance by well-to-do whites. I just find the consistency of this sort of reaction to creativity to be kinda intriguing.

My 45^th acrylic is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. [I'm showing it after #46 cuz this one was a gift and I waited til it was received before making it public.] I find myself wondering if I should've made the green background lighter so that the dog's head would stand out more distinctly. But I also realize that I like how the dog's brown and the background green are similar in value, to create fewer, larger and simpler shapes of light and dark values, to make a stronger composition. I am unusually aware this time of the distinction between how the work functions as composition vs. as depiction.

[It also made me realize how often I make decisions like this in cartooning, composition vs. depiction, and I realize that, in that medium, clarity of depiction is always most important. Sometimes we downplay conventional rules of composition to make the image communicate with more clarity and immediacy.]