What People Want To Know About Your Art

When I first started to paint it was just for me-my own indulgence.   Maybe it really still is, but it’s also the way I stay connected with the world.  It makes me observe and engage and be responsive to how people react to my work.  I’ve become increasingly aware of how other people view my art.  I think more beforehand of what I want to communicate and of what story I want to tell.

They say “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Maybe so, but I find people still want to talk about what they see. They want to swap stories. They want to probe and compare.  I’ve had many viewers directly say, "Tell me the story of this painting". I think they are asking me the following:

• Details of time and place of the subject
• What inspired me or why I chose the subject
• What personal connection I have to the subject/place
• Do we share something in common

Sometimes I’m evasive about exact details, as I want the viewer to have their own story, not just mine.  I like my paintings to have a universal story.  I enjoy sharing why I chose a subject and about personal connections.  I especially like learning from them the story they see.

Many paintings I’ve done have been based on interior home scenes, family travels and family heirlooms.  The back stories to these paintings are varied and personal. Constructing short essays about the paintings has helped me see themes in my work. I'm now collecting and organizing these essays into a book for a 2016 publication in conjunction with the opening of my studio in Wilmington, NC, tentatively titled “Painted Stories”.  Here’s one:

Platter Pleasing oil 16 x 16 Available here

Memories of Vintage Aluminum

Some of my favorite childhood memories were made at my grandparent’s house. I would bicycle through Detroit neighborhood streets to their Tudor style home in nearby Rosedale Park.  It was a grand home my architect grandfather, Charles Babcock McGrew, designed and built in the 1920’s.  The furnishings in the house hold a spot in my memory. My grandparents had antiques, two sets of silverware, lovely colored glass displayed in the dining room window, and beautiful paintings on the walls, some painted by Grandfather McGrew, a fine watercolorist.  My grandmother Hazel was an excellent cook, and she had special dishes for special foods, too. They served us banana splits in special banana split glasses, and made chocolate sundaes in special sundae glasses! They had decorative aluminum trays with fancy designs etched on them--chrysanthemums, tulips, dogwoods, pinecones, and bamboo stalks.  Even scenes of far off Europe, where they had traveled.  Each tray was unique.

My grandfather, adorned in his Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, liked to grill outdoors and these trays were especially useful to carry the hamburgers from the grill to the tables.  Bright and colorful anodized aluminum drink tumblers and pitchers complemented these trays, even though they made my teeth ache from the cold. I didn’t care so much for the tumblers, with their propensity for sweating and giving chill to the lips. But I enjoyed running my hand over the designs on the trays.  I was always fascinated by the hammer marks and scenes.  You could run your finger over the designs like reading braille.

I came to learn later that some of the better trays were hand hammered and pieces of fine craftsmanship signed with maker’s marks.  Later pieces were machine hammered.  The trays could be polished almost up to a silver sheen, and just as easily washed with a sponge. But they weren’t silver, and thus these pretty trays were even used to serve the cats!

These trays made me feel safe.  I might break my grandparent’s other fine dishes.  I was sometimes scolded for spilling my treats on their furnishings.  But these embellished trays-- no, I could appreciate and admire and never harm in any way! For me they represent a time when an ordinary item was made to be both pleasing and enduring.

A portion of my sales go to support bee/pollinator conservation.  Why?  Because I add beeswax to my oil paints, paint and consume the beautiful flowers, fruits and vegetables those bees and other pollinators provide.

If you want to be the first to know about exhibits and discounts, join my NEWSLETTER updates email list on bottom of my home page here..

Thank you for reading. If you enjoy my essays, please share with your family and friends.  I’d like to hear from YOU!  Please leave comments and questions. 

My paintings are available at my studio in Cary, NC, online at Sheffield Art Studio

Please LIKE me at my FACEBOOK Fan Page

Follow me on Instagram  

Fine Art America FAA 

The Two Most Important Things an Artist Needs

Southern Comfort 10 x 8 oil Available here

This week Heather Horton @Heather_Horton shared on twitter that the two most important things an artist needs are peace and time. Ahh  . . . quietness, stillness, serenity and the time to breathe it in.  But life doesn’t always serve up that kind of day or year.

This year has been a year for commotion.  Watching the decline of elderly parents puts aside peace. Participating in decisions for their care--time evaporates. Fortunately, the joy and excitement of a grandchild brings renewal and a sense of forward motion.  But even without turbulent life changes, an artist has many distractions to deal with.  I long to sit on a porch like the one pictured above and take time to reflect (more information here). Each day brings an assault of phone solicitations, advertisements, and tragic world news. I suppose it has always been the same down through the ages for artists.

I realized this past week during a short illness that I had let distractions destroy my peace and squander my time. I wasn’t painting, the very activity that keeps me truly emotionally, (and, I think, physically) healthy and connected to the world. I had gotten myself into a vicious cycle of not feeling peaceful because I wasn’t being creative, and not painting because I wasn’t peaceful!  After painting two paintings in a day at a plein air event in Wilmington this past weekend, I felt rejuvenated.

How are artists to have the peace and time to create?

In my April blog “4 Ways to Restart Your Engine” I listed some suggestions for getting over a “block” (see, I told you this has been a problem this year), but to that list I can now add:

• SCHEDULE or PAY for an event or class.  If you’re as cheap as I am, you won’t skip it.  You’ll have committed yourself to the TIME. I am thankful I sign-up for the plein air event.  What I dreaded because of low energy, lifted me up.
• Change your creative place. Set up where you work in a new location, even if it’s just in a different place in the house or yard.  It seems like a fresh start.
• Prepare your creative materials the day ahead, so all the analytical part is over.  For painters, that may mean do your sketches or thumbnails and materials setup the night before. Start the creative day fresh with no barriers.  Start with excitement!
• Absolutely shut off the phone, commuter and television for the entire day-don’t even think about those for the tiniest little bit! 

 

Sea Lion Lounge 16 x 20 oil Available here

I’ll leave you with a peaceful painting of sea lions lounging on a rock overlooking an ocean view (more information here). Lounge and breathe!

May you have a peaceful day!

A portion of my sales go to support bee/pollinator conservation.  Why?  Because I add beeswax to my oil paints, paint and consume the beautiful flowers, fruits and vegetables those bees and other pollinators provide.

If you want to be the first to know about exhibits and discounts, join my NEWSLETTER updates email list on my home page here.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoy my essays, please share with your family and friends.  I’d like to hear from YOU!  Please leave comments and questions. 

My paintings are available at my studio in Cary, NC, online at Sheffield Art Studio

Please LIKE me at my FACEBOOK FanPage

Follow me on Instagram   

Fine Art America FAA

How I Discovered Buried Treasure

 When I was young I endured many ear infections and respiratory ailments. While I was in bed under layers of vapor rub with the humidifier running on high, I read Robert Louis Stevenson books. There was The Child’s Garden of Verses, Kidnapped, and, of course, Treasure Island. Maybe he planted the wanderlust and my life-long desire to find buried treasure.  I went on to study archaeology and anthropology which is a sort of treasure hunt about us and our history.

Sometimes treasure hunts and treasure “findings” are as close as a closet. The painting Between Dances, painted many, many years ago, illustrates such a case.

Between Dances. Acrylic 12 x 16 NFS

Between Dances

In her last years my mother wore only Birkenstock and Dr. Scholl’s sandals daily. Sturdy, comfortable, practical. About as close to barefoot as a person could get. My foot is almost an identical replicate of hers, so I inherited her closet of footwear. When it came time to clean out her closet, a treasure trove of memories fell out of the shoe boxes. In the back of the closet buried under old blankets there were sexy, hip, glittery shoes of bygone days, shoes made for cocktail parties and dancing.

There they were−see-through high heel shoes, glittery shoes, black strapless heels. The shoes transported me back to dress-up days in Michigan when I would raid my mother’s closet for shoes, dressing gowns, hats, and gloves. I would proudly parade up and down the street in my finery. It wasn’t just my mother’s closet I’d invade. It was a favorite pastime to scour my grandmother’s fabulous walk-in closet. There stored was my very favorite pair of chic, open-toed silver high heels that I always wore when I visited her home.

So here I was ransacking my mother’s closet once again. My mother hadn’t relinquished these shoes because they told her story. Between high heels and Birkenstock there were dances and babies and three daughters to teach about dress-up, garter belts, stockings, heels and boys. I’m a grandmother now who wears tennis shoes and Birkenstocks. This time my closet raiding that began with grief and dreading yielded not just remnants of clothing, but happy memories, recalled love and complete delight. 

I look forward to the days when my own granddaughter will loot my closet—and discover still there in the back of the closet the shoes and stories of both me and my mother.

Hats Off 12 x 12 Oil Available here.

Hats Off  (more information here) is a recent painting from my own closet--dear memories from college, Easter and beach outings. 

Discover treasure in your closet!

  

A portion of my sales go to support bee/pollinator conservation.  Why?  Because I add beeswax to my oil paints, paint and consume the beautiful flowers, fruits and vegetables those bees and other pollinators provide.

If you want to be the first to know about exhibits and discounts, join my NEWSLETTER updates email list on my home page here.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoy my essays, please share with your family and friends.  I’d like to hear from YOU!  Please leave comments and questions. 

My paintings are available at my studio in Cary, NC, online at Sheffield Art Studio and at my Daily PaintworksGallery (see also clickable link above right) 

 Please LIKE me at my FACEBOOK FanPage

Follow me on Instagram 

Fine Art America FAA