✨ Introduction
Painting is a constant evolution fueled by determination, failure, creative energy, and the promise of joy.
I began my art career five years ago at The Arts Students League of Manhattan’s studio space. There, I painted a hodgepodge of New York characters; some of my favorites include the disheveled old naked woman with the knottiest hair I have ever seen, the jazz musician with a beautiful straw hat and flute, or the naked man covered in tattoos with gauges in his ears.
Immersing myself in the New York art community with artists fifty years my senior, even for a couple weeks a summer, became such a sacred space of growth in my adolescence. Art has never been a full time gig; however, this past December break, I averaged between four to fourteen hours of painting per day that spilled into the late hours of the night. The time flew by, and it was in these meditative moments, I was able to take some of the most important artistic risks of my career.
Whether or not you consider yourself to be a painter, these lessons below can translate into many creative mediums. Delve into the past five years with me, as I trace some of my most memorable creative lessons in painting.
🖌️ 🌎 Paint the World as You See It
The artist must transform the mundane into a revelation of beauty.
Often, that involves serious observation, and exaggeration of different characteristics of the subject. Don’t be afraid to go against what you believe to be visually true; the most interesting painting is when the artist is able to surprise the viewer with the unexpected. You can still make an area of your painting “read” as the subject without copying it completely because, after all, that would be photography!
I will draw on an example from my first large scale painting I did in 2016. Exaggerating the pinks and blues in the model’s skin tone while still allowing the skin to still read as brown was a big learning moment for me at the time. The choice to take from and go beyond the visual environment is a mindset shift we can all make as visual artists.
I am not trying to recreate the very details of a person, but rather, I am trying to emulate the essence of life in the painting.
🏃 Stay Moving, Physically and Mentally
They say “courage is fear walking”, but I’d also like to say that painting is too.
In the act of painting, I never sit, and I am constantly moving back and forth from the canvas. It must look as if I am making jabs at the canvas like a fencer, but instead of a saber, I have a paint brush.
Movement also rids the body of tension, allowing the artist to have the perspective to take risks. It is extremely important to stay standing at all times when you paint, so that you can move around the built environment and see the painting from different angles as it is evolving before you. If there is stillness in the painting process, your art will lose dimension.
Physical mobility is also related to your mental state, which brings me to two important factors: as you paint, remain fluid and forgiving.
In terms of the former, recognize that you cannot control when your best painting happens. Sometimes I will paint for ten hours for fifteen minutes of clarity or be “on” immediately. Often, the best course of action is to set the painting aside for months, so that you can look at it with fresh eyes.
It’s also important not to paint on a time crunch, which often just ends up stunting creativity. I unfortunately learned this break, as I tried to paint my parents' faces in a week before coming back to Cornell for the spring semester and failed miserably. I have since set the painting aside and will begin to work on it again in May.
The forgiving aspect involves being okay with taking risks; the moment that I become afraid of “ruining” an area in a painting or attempting a difficult stretch in the process, I put down the paint brush.
With fluidity, there is vulnerability, and the artist must allow themself to lose some of their best work to gain back greatness in the end product.
💫Let The Painting Tell Its Story: Delving Into Abstraction
This break I wanted to make the jump from portraiture to abstraction. I find abstraction to be far more difficult because there is no direct subject in the visual environment for observation.
Instead, I relied heavily on early hip hop, rap music, jazz as well as southern rock for inspiration. I tried to let my stream of consciousness reveal the painting to me.
In the final hour of painting, my sister watched as I jumped around my attic, blasting R.E.M’s Murmur as I tried to make compositional choices that reduced the clutter in the painting.
In these critical moments of painting, I let the painting speak to me, rather than my own goals for the painting interfere and further clutter the essence of the work. I ended up painting the sides of the abstract over with green and white to unify the painting. I realized that saying too much is detrimental to the work as a whole.
The most difficult aspect of abstract painting is saying just enough to invoke an emotional response in the viewer, and this involves sensitizing yourself to the painting's weaknesses.
I hope you learned a couple of tips that will help you develop your unique creative process and philosophy, no matter what medium you specialize in! Painting has helped me see the world as a beautiful, transforming, and dynamic place, and I hope it does the same for you.
Natalie Breitkopf
Natalie is a Junior American studies major with a passion for storytelling through fine arts and documentary film. Her work forms a collection of portraits, abstract pieces, and landscapes in a variety of mixed media.
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