Not Getting Past The Ugly Phase

this is about paintings not faces dw.

I am finally back from Bombay to freezing cold New York. I spent most of January and the end of December in some sort of intense slump. (yes, I do plan to continue to be obtuse about burnout in this newsletter.) It’s not that I wasn’t making anything, I still had art I owed various art directors and editors, it’s that everything I made was feeling like a struggle. An oft-repeated maxim among my friends (as in, I repeat it often to them) is that I think one is only as good as one’s worst effort. At first glance, this might sound a little harsh, but I actually think it comes from a place of compassion. I can’t and don’t expect myself to sit down and deliver my best work every single time I sit down. Daily I’m probably closer to 60 or 70%, lower on bad days. don’t think I come across as particularly put together in this newsletter but I realized I haven’t shown you what it looks like when I’m operating at far-from-my-best. Sometimes the final products turn out well. In these cases, I always have a sense of what went wrong at the beginning and I appreciate that I allowed myself to deviate from my process to noodle around and figure things out. Sometimes the final products turn out awful. Those examples will not be in this newsletter.

I want to note quickly that a lot of “not going as planned” has to do specifically with paint. Sometimes I sit down to paint a piece for work and all my intuition and practice with the medium seems to have drained away. Every painting has an ugly phase where nothing has really come together yet. I think sometimes, especially when a time constraint is involved, I just can’t get past the ugly phase. In these instances, I scan and bring the painting into procreate. Then, I let myself noodle around with it (without any real direction or planning) until some part of it comes together enough for me to have something to sink my teeth into. This is not true for everyone but for me, producing something that’s mostly digital always feels a little stiffer and lacking in something than my gouache work. A lot of this is taste (Although this John Hendrix instagram post might suggest otherwise) but maintain that I can’t quite make the best of digital tools the way many of my peers can.

Most recently, I did this piece for AARP:

Ultimately I was pleased with how the final turned out, but the way this piece started out was messy and full of silly mistakes and shortcuts (forgive the wonky photo)

I’d done a value study for everything outside the mirror shape so I was pretty confident that eventually I could sort out the limited colour palette + lighting and just generally get everything to a consistent place. The issue was that I had not figured out how exactly the scene in the mirror would appear. The drawing I’d done on my ipad was not translating well in this painting for some reason. I had only 1 day to paint this so at about 1 pm I decided to admit defeat and throw the image into procreate. I could then take advantage of the forgiving quality of digital work and tinker around with the piece until I arrived at something I liked. As you can see, the flowers changed, I decided on a Georgia O’Keefe painting for the frame, and the angle of the scene in the bed shifted. I could also play around with the colours until I achieved this kind of soft, pinkish light that I wasn’t really able to visualize while painting in gouache.

Example 2 is from a while ago:

It’s causing me great pain to show you these.

This was from a series I did for what eventually became this piece on The Trace. Obviously, the image above is the “before” photo of this glow-up story. I’d just about laid down all the shapes and my next step would have been to choose an area of particular visual interest to me and start layering on details/more colours. Unfortunately, this was one of four pieces I was juggling for this project. I blocked in all four and found myself frustratedly fighting the gouache. It was taking longer for me to figure out what colours to put down and how to achieve the lighting I wanted. I gave up quickly, threw it into Procreate, and came up with this:

It was so much easier to alter color and lighting digitally, although I know that sticking with the painting and achieving something a little more organic (but less effective?) would have made me happier!

I think traditional media in general has a degree of unpredictability that one has to work with rather than try and work against. And I still feel so green when I paint, especially when I am operating below my best. I’d love to show you the once-in-a-blue-moon jobs where I sit down and knock the whole painting out in one sitting but my failures are far better documented.

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PS: Found a folder full of paintings stuck in their Ugly Phase so this is a series now I guess?