What Does My Solo Show Mean? Consciously Counting the Beats to My Next Cymbal Clang

If you've followed my posts, you've read about my path, development and process of becoming an artist. I refer to myself as that now, though it still feels a bit clumsy or maybe pretentious as it rolls out, but it's incorporated into my life in so many ways. It's how I spend my time, my vacations, my money; it's in my clothes, those with and without paint. It shows in the special but ugly light fixtures in my "studio"  and, the renovations that created better storage for equipment, supplies and paintings that haven't found a home. I bristle at the word "hobby", yet the IRS has a definition I can't deny, but I'm still an artist, even if leaning toward starving in the metaphoric sense.

Up until now, I've referred to myself as a beginner painter. I've been aware that I've moved through phases used in the training industry. I showed unconscious incompetence, when I asked an early teacher, "why?" when he told me I needed to learn to draw. I approached conscious incompetence as I struggled with making landscapes recede or shadows lengthen correctly,  to conscious competence where I seem to reside most now as I struggle with consistency in my painting processes and intentionality with each brushstroke, it's like the percussionist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra who moves his lips and counts the beats preparing for the next cymbal clang or drum bang.  And, sometimes, there are inklings of the next and last phase, unconscious competence, when I put down a stroke and it's right and I know it, and I leave it.

This show marks the end of the beginning. No doubt, I will continue to move through consciousness and competence as I continue to paint and improve my painting. This end allows me to forge a new path and direction, not letting go of what brought me here, but building on it.

Invitation to The Buzz – Bees and Beekeepers An Exhibit of Paintings by Mary Longe

Invitation to The Buzz – Bees and Beekeepers 

An Exhibit of Paintings by Mary Longe

Artist Reception Saturday June 29, 5:30 p.m. – 8 p.m.

Evanston, IL: The public is cordially invited to an exhibit of paintings in honor of bees and the people who tend them. Meet Deerfield, IL artist Mary Longe and see her art, Saturday June 29, 5:30 p.m. – 8 p.m. Chimera Loft, 2948 Central Street, Evanston, IL In keeping with the theme, Wild Blossom Meadery and Winery will provide tastings of mead, an alcoholic beverage created by fermenting honey with water, sometimes with various fruits, spices, grains, or hops. 

More than forty paintings are on display showing urban and rural settings with portraits of beekeepers actively tending hives, equipment, and bees. The paintings are done primarily en plein air (on site) with some painted from a photo source. Longe uses oils or watercolors.

The Buzz – Bees and Beekeepers Paintings by Mary Longe was conceived in counterpoint to the reports of the decline of bee populations and intensifying world hunger. “I like to eat, and I like to paint,” Longe Says. “Bringing awareness to the joy found in bees, what they provide, and the people who tend them is one way I use my art to inspire others to care too. I often paint outside. “En plein air” it’s called, like the French impressionists. Focusing on scenes of nature for hours helps me better understand and be grateful for gardens, flowers, trees and the energy in that moment. I realize that what looks green at a glance is so much more… like people, like life, like bees. Painting is creating a new perspective, conveying an atmosphere, telling a story and inviting the viewer to become its main character. I hope through The Buzz, viewers will find themselves appreciating the bees and their care takers and becoming part of the picture.“

Mary Longe is a visual artist working in oil and watercolor paints. Her works have been exhibited at the Palette and Chisel, Academy of Fine Arts, Chicago, as well as programs in Wilmette and Skokie, IL. For, 2018, two of Longe’s paintings hung as part of the Public Works of Art program in Deerfield, IL. Mary Longe manages the Plein Air Painters Chicago, and, produces a YouTube Chanel, My Art Dish, video chats with artists. 

Chimera Loft, LLCin Evanston, offers a performance space, art gallery, art exhibits, music and arts, spoken word, craft shows, and event space. Upcoming events can be found at their website. http://www.2948central.com

For more than two decades, Wild Blossom Meadery & Wineryhas been a fixture in Chicago, creating wine and mead using locally produced ingredients.  The meads produced at Wild Blossom Meadery & Winery are among the most sustainably produced beverages in the world. With more than 30 years of winemaking experience, Wild Blossom Meadery & Winery is the first winery in Chicago and the only producer of mead on the Northern Illinois Wine Trail. Being a mead producer, at Wild Blossom Meadery & Winery raises its own bees and collect its own honey. Wild Blossom Meadery/ Bev Art is also a source of education about wine and beer making. More information can be found on their website, http://www.wildblossommeadery.com

CONTACT: 

Mary Longe

Deerfield, IL

Mary.longe@gmail.com

http://marylonge.com

847.727.9279

Wild Blossom Meadery, Winery and Brewery 

9030 S Hermitage Ave, Chicago, IL 60620

Greg Fischer

greg@bev-art.com

(773) 840-4642

http://www.wildblossommeadery.com

Chimera Loft

Mel Winer

hwg2948@comcast.net 

http://www.2948central.com

Paintings and Synchronicity

Who loves synchronicity? Me too. 

So, there I was at the Chicago Flower and Garden Show looking for something to paint. Nothing spoke to me, till I found a large display that included farm implements, a bee keeping suit, bee hives and a farm stand with honey. Turns out the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences sponsored the booth. I painted the faux farmer’s market scene and bought honey at their trailer where they sold that and other products they produced. I was inspired after talking to the kids and teachers and learning about the cool programs they had, and wanted to connect again. Unfortunately, I didn’t get names. Ha… until synchronicity stepped in. Guess who the lead beekeeper/teacher is at the school? Greg Fischer, the beekeeper and owner of Wild Blossom Meadery and Winery, who will be offering mead tastings at the Buzz – Bees and Beekeepers, paintings by Mary Longe at Chimera Loft, 6/29 5:30-8.  

Oh, and who doesn’t love a good pun?  The Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences is outstanding in it’s field. 

The other odd thing that happened at the Garden show while I was painting  that picture… I had tucked myself in a corner so I’d be out of the way. Nearly done, I heard, Mary Longe? It was the daughter of dear friends who live in Asheville who’d moved from the south a couple weeks prior. I had a painting I’d done of her playhouse in TN a couple months before that, to give her as a house warming. Honestly, I don’t love the painting of the faux farmers market, but I love all the connections that day.

How to Edit a Landscape with Help from Twyla Tharp

How do you decide what elements to include in a landscape? I am regularly challenged by this. I typically want to paint it all... every damn leaf.  I watch other plein air painters include three people, not twenty, move a tree, change a tree shape, omit a building, or add clouds to a clear sky, without a hesitation. Exclusion for me is an inaccuracy, maybe a lie. I think plein air paintings are creating a moment of history. Cave walls tell us about the animals present, and sometimes the dress of the day… Not that I expect my paintings to last millennia.  Yet, I do see merit in editing for the composition especially.

Over the last couple weeks I began savoring a Christmas gift, reading, not too fast, Twyla Tharp’s 2003, The Creative Habit. Her stories of musicians, writers, and artists of all kinds are entertaining in themselves, but the exercises she suggests have inspired me. They are different from many other creativity books I've read. The one I want to wax on about, is led into with a story about Neil Simon, which you'll have to read for yourself.

Back to the challenge of editing a painting. Twyla talks about the power of seeing, you know, like Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot by watching.” She recommends watching a couple and making a list of their actions and gestures until you have twenty. He puts his arm around her, she picks a piece of lint from his coat, she crosses her legs, he man splays, she pulls a Kleenex from her pocket, she blows her nose. It’s not hard, to list twenty items in a brief time, Twyla
comments. The second phase of the exercise is to watch another couple and list the actions that please you aesthetically or emotionally. A sign of tenderness in a touch on the arm, the slide of sunglasses onto the head, to see something more clearly, an elbow jab with a laugh, a slight step back at some news. Now judgement is added to powers of observation, and being selective becomes essential. 

Twyla’s point is that what catches your fancy is not as important as the difference between the two lists. What one includes or edits speaks to how you see the world. My thought is that what catches my fancy in a scene are the items I’m going to paint with more intention, might even be my focal point. And, if not my focal point, I will create a relationship to it… place it where it best tells the story I am painting. 

Once again, Twyla danced me into a new way of thinking.

As I wrap up this post, it reminds me of another one, I wrote a while back on making word lists to create a more accurate and interesting piece of writing. That process, coupled with asking yourself, what pleases you emotionally or aesthetically, offers another way to consider what to edit. This link will get you to it Lexicons and Writing. And, "That reminds me of..." is as always another powerful creativity prompt.

Photo: From Twyla Tharp Pinterest Page
Painting: Waiting for the Magic, Mary Longe, 2019, 16x20" Oil on Canvas

Fundamentals of Drawing and Painting: A Course in Courage to Become an Artist

I’m struggling with a painting of a beekeeper in a field calming bees by smoking a hive. An 18”x24” panel sits on a wood easel I bought last year to bring my painting practice inside. Until then, I’d painted only outside, en plein air, except for classes, since 2014. This morning, I sit on the futon in the room I call, with a bit of self-suspicion, “my studio”, and look hard at it.

Twice I’ve scraped it and started over. I may do so again. Two days ago, I stood in the Milwaukee Art Museum looking at Winslow Homer’s paintings in awe of the people he painted in the English fishing village of Cullercoats. Setting aside my surprise that Homer is actually American, and that I wonder if he picked that particular village because of its perfect-for-an-artist name, today, I wonder if my beekeeper isn’t the same story as the woman standing on rocks, above a tumultuous sea, a sail in the background, knitting. We viewers look up at her. She stands in the very middle of the picture… a frequently mentioned no no done well. Horizontally, she takes up the painting, her arm outstretched pulling on yarn from a skein in her apron. The painting foreground is no larger than the bottom of her shoe to her calf; the space from the top of her head into the sky, is that length plus up to her knee.

I know now, that’s “the story.” It’s the placement, the emphasis Homer gave her in space. The fishermen on the boat are not the story, her knitting is what she does while they are away. Her skirt billows like the boat’s sail. She’s as much a cog in the fishing village life as they are.  Like Ginger Rogers dancing all the same steps backwards without Fred Astair’s acclaim from the masses, she knits standing. My beekeeper needs a story. How do I know that? How do I do that?

I confess, I probably wouldn’t have known that was the issue with my painting, nor would have looked at Homer’s as critically, till discussions recently in the Palette and Chisel’s Fundamentals in Drawing andPainting class. Unfortunately for me, yesterday was the last day of that class. It’s a series, like college classes where you take 101 and learn basics about shapes, color, drawing, and 102 and 103 where they build on those knowledge and skills, and offer an understanding of what it really takes to create a successful piece of art. Yesterday was graduation.

I’m certainly not saying that now that I have completed the class I know exactly how to create the story. At best, I know I need to tell one. I am also saying that the difference from when I began 101 in March of last year through completing 102 and 103 is as if Fred had found Ginger a year before suffering from vertigo and never having danced. 

Until last March, I’d been struggling to move from hobbist to artist. Bob Krajecki and Dale Popovich the instructors who’ve taught this class together for years, gave me steps, not the choreography. I’d taken many classes and workshops, had dozens of critiques, but still couldn’t create a painting that I could envision as successfully completed. Fundamentals gave me language about art and about my art. It’s given me check lists, both in notes and in my head of how to start a piece, how to develop it, what to look for to complete it, and how to self critique it.

This post is as much a thank you to Dale and Bob. Though I’ve learned tons from previous instructors, it wasn’t until I had this core structure, did the previous teachings make sense.

I am grateful I came to the class with experience in painting, critiques and hours outside painting landscapes and cityscapes in wind, sun, rain, snow and fog. Those experiences teed up many aha! moments in class.  I’d heartily recommend this program at the Palette and Chisel for anyone who comes to painting, without formal training, no matter if they prefer, oils, watercolors or pastels. I don’t recommend it for those who aren’t willing to do the exercises or have a tendency to defend their finished pieces, it’s a place to learn from every nuance, not turn out masterpieces.

I received an email on Saturday, that a painting of mine sold from a plein air competition in Northbrook, IL. Currently, I have two paintings hanging for a year as “public works of art” in my home village of Deerfield, IL. These are signs of acknowledgement of my development as an artist since I began the class. My palette knife is ready to begin the third scrape, and I with the help of Krajecki, Popovich and Homer, the beekeeper’s story is about to be retold.

+++  

The following posts are in chronological order from most recent to the beginning of my journey since 2014 when I began to view myself as artist. 

• How to Pack for Plein Air Painting
• 2017 - Progress on Becoming an Artist
• The Trail to the Cedarburg Plein Air Event
• Your Creativity - Early or Late in Life? Quick or Never Done? Malcolm Gladwell makes sense of it
• Unpacking The Evolution of Learning and Mastery of the Creative Acts
• Self Confidence and the Up Hill Climb of Learning a New Craft
• Dabbling Is My Creative Process 2015
• You Calling My Art a Hobby? 2014

The Trail to the Cedarburg Plein Air Event

Full Circle. In 2014 my friend Nancy and I left the Interurban Bike Trail to find facilities and coffee and rode into Cedarburg, WI. There were people at easels everywhere, painting the town, so to speak. I remember being fascinated by a guy painting a Vienna Beef umbrella, someone else doing a door of an iconic mill, and people along the river. I turned to Nancy and said, “I want to do that.”  Reading a banner over the main street, it was the first time, I learned the words, plein air, as in Plein Air Festival.

Retirement looming and the hours it brings, might have been the biggest catalyst, but I think the brightest sparks offered the opportunity to be outside, as long as I wanted,  doing something creative, alone with people.  I knew nothing about paints, painting or perspectivehat, but that didn’t deter me. I’d watched my friend Lynn go from knowing her sign to digging in and not only learning astrology, but becoming the Astrologer to Oprah’s astrologer.  My friend Veronica took a pastel class and within a couple years exhibited work. I knew I needed to buy a lot of paper, a few good brushes, some paint, and get humble. The learning curve would be steep.

Within a week or two, I found a one day class at Lill Street Art Center in Chicago, registered for a week-long class with watercolorist Tom Schaller at Madeline Island School of Art in the Apostle Islands. That's where I met Steve Puttich and learned that there was a group called the Plein Air Painters of Chicago. The first Saturday I could, I went to one of their paint outs to see the equipment used. It just happened to be at Montrose Harbor and Carl Judson, The Guerilla Painter was visiting with his truck of wares. Stephanie Wiedner introduced herself and encouraged me to meet people. I did and I was hooked.

Since then I’ve taken loads of other workshops at the Palette and Chisel and elsewhere. I've learned from Errol Jacobson and Stuart Fullerton. I've painted and painted and painted. I have more than 30 paintings and sketches of one single scene, in every season, at Fort Sheridan… none are good.  After a couple years of interminable humbleness and frustration with watercolors, a well respected artist, Tim Clark told me I needed basics. I didn't understand exactly what he meant, but I started back at the beginning.  Figure drawing to understand what I’m seeing, fundamentals to understand pigments and washes and lines. I switched to oils and a 7-week perspective class. Who knew there were algorithms to shadows? It's all helped.

I registered for the plein air event in Cedarburg as soon as the 2017 event was open. Two months prior, I called the event-runner to understand the consequences of quitting. At that time, I could’ve gotten my $60 entry fee back. I didn’t quit then. Twice, in the last month, in spite of losing my fee,  I made plans to do something instead of going to Cedarburg, but I rescheduled. A week or two back, I put in a sizable order for paint supplies but left the box unopened in the kitchen. Yesterday, I unwrapped them and added them to my working kit.

My car is packed to leave for Cedarburg Plein Air Event and I will leave in a little while. I wanted to take a couple minutes to reflect on getting to this point. I’m doing a lot of self talk and internal wheelin and dealin… you don’t have to submit anything, go have fun, no one has a masterpiece every time, meet people, there will be artists of all skill levels, the weather is going to be beautiful. Mostly, I’m eager to be there. I know someone will walk by me and say, “I wish I could do that” and I will assure them they can.