Recently I took an abstract realism workshop with a master painter. I had never done abstraction and but wanted to incorporate another style into my own paintings. For the first time in my long schooling career, which spans decades, I found that I was not doing the exact homework assignments. It felt somewhat naughty, I guess a throwback to childhood.
So much of what he was teaching reawakened in me the knowledge and experience I’d learned over 40 years ago in art school. It reminded me of the many lessons in color, value and saturation. Lessons in composition and layout. All the many lessons in technique. Conversations I’d had with myself but hadn’t heard out loud in too many decades.
When the workshop began, I’d been in the middle of an oil painting in my studio. Instead of doing the homework assignments, I began, at first unknowingly, to apply them to the painting already on my easel. I changed the composition of the piece. I altered my color selections to focus on the clarity of modern colors. I added attention to value plus the placement of cool pigments and warm pigments.
My painting began to take different turns, it zigged and zagged as new ideas and focus resurfaced in my brain. These switches in reference really stretched out the time it took to complete the painting. I began to think of Picasso’s transitional piece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and how it took him forever to complete it and how clearly you can see the major transitions he made. My painting wasn’t even close to his level of redirection, but for me personally, it was as dramatic.
Usually, there is so much to learn and to relearn that it can’t be absorbed in the 8-week duration of these workshops. But this online program is available for access, practice and review for a year. It will take longer than that to truly grasp the many nuances of his teaching. Daily studio time will ultimately allow the lessons to flow in and around me until I am so accustomed to the process that I can roam freely and more widely on my own as I’ve done for years but now with a twist.
Many weeks into the painting I knew something was off about the work. I looked at it every day. Multiple times. I popped into the studio to catch it by surprise. I photographed it & played with it in Photoshop to try to figure out the problem, turning it upside down and backwards. Trying different filters to see if color was the problem.
Through the twisting paths and obstacles in life, the two constants for me have been my Art and my Garden. These are my anchors. They keep me balanced, complete, secure. The arrival of spring flings me from my studio where I’ve been creating my Art all winter, into the emerging garden surrounding my studio. The colors shout optimism to me. The joyous season has begun again. This is where I grow my subjects and gather the imagery for my work.
I love studying Art History. I’ve been doing it steadily now for decades. My personal library still contains the first book in which I saw the work of Georgia O’Keeffe in the 1970s. I wept each time I opened it. I had to limit myself to 10 pages a day since I was exhausted from looking, from feeling, from studying. I remember stroking the large pages hoping to absorb something, something unknowable to me at the time. Her work somehow spoke to my soul. 
Once I recognized that I was an artist, I’ve always maintained a working studio even when at times circumstances prevented great productivity. Then I would sit in there and study my books of the masters, absorbing not only their techniques but also an understanding of the enormous obstacles most of them had to traverse in order to continue forward with their work. They kept me going.
Exactly 20 years after I graduated with my Fine Arts degree I graduated with a degree in Ornamental Horticulture with a focus on Landscape Design. I am combining my art and my love for gardening that was instilled in me as a child by my favorite Uncle Teddy. I am absolutely driven by these two passions. In fact, in 2000 I rebuilt my home and added two studios overlooking the gardens I’ve designed over the decades. These gardens that surround me in the quaint town of Northport on Long Island and beyond are the main inspiration for my Art.
I leaned forward against the railing of my deck, my mind emptied of rational thought. No plan of action arrived. My logical brain inactive, devoid of anything other than the pain. It gripped me. Wrapped me wholly. I was enveloped with pain. Just the thumping, throbbing, pounding of pain.
