Painting

Out with the Old

Suzanne Hollifield-EllerLeave a comment
“Harrison”. Original pastel pencil pet portrait.

When I began this blog, I thought I’d document my journey into art. I’m a late bloomer you see. I took up painting in my sixties, and now, in my seventies, I’m wondering what happened to that creative energy that seemed so passionately powerful just a few years ago when I was reveling in online classes and exploring a variety of mediums with enthusiasm.

Is the pandemic to blame? I know I’m not the only artist who has found the forced isolation of Covid-19 to have been a damper on her creativity. I’ve talked to others who say they, too, have felt uninspired and lacking any enthusiasm for picking up the brush or pencil.

Is it that at the first of the pandemic when our governor had us on lockdown, I went off my SSRI venlafaxine. I did it cold-turkey and suffered definite withdrawal, which, because I had a bladder infection, I first mistook the shaking for a response to infection. Even now, my anxiety level is definitely higher and is difficult to navigate especially in the mornings and is probably a factor in my senior-citizen-onset insomnia. The reason for coming off the SSRI was a diagnosis of fatty liver, and the good news is I’ve lost 75 pounds, which is great for the liver function as well as a couple of other health concerns I have. However, even a higher dose of buproprion (Wellbutrin), has not alleviated the anxiety. Is that a reason I don’t feel like painting?

Is it that I had a very sick dog with congestive heart failure, a collapsed trachea, mammary tumors, and a mouth tumor that made her nose run and caused her to cough even more? I have to be honest and say that often I wanted to work on the sofa so she was beside me instead of working in the art room where she was farther away from me. A dying dog is an unusual excuse for not painting, but I do think it affected my desire to drag out the collage and the acrylics, amped up my anxiety, and kept me glued to the living room more than I normally would have been. She died in August of 2021, and I have felt a lot of grief over losing her. Indeed, I felt sad even before she passed as I watched her struggling to breathe while seemly getting sweeter as she relied on me to help her feel better. She would rally and then have a setback. It was hard.

Is the problem that I joined a local artists group with lifelong professional artists who sell their work and felt pressure to be more original? Until then, I was enjoying just trying to do what I saw the online teachers do, usually in my art journal, maybe on canvas or art paper, but certainly not with an intention of selling anything. The pressure to be more original was a challenge, but it limited my exploration of different media and styles. I found myself trying to be too perfect, and instead of looking forward to time at the art table or easel, I was looking for a book to read or a Netflix show to watch. Instead of adding my own take to a technique and feeling like I was learning, I was painting for an audience instead of myself.

So, have I given up art altogether? No, but the art I have done has been in media that I had no real experience doing before the pandemic. I found Erika Lancaster on YouTube and Patreon and started doing watercolor in 2020. She is a fantastic teacher, and the freedom to just learn without having to produce something original was very enjoyable. In 2021, I did a lot of pastel pencil through the classes of British artist Colin Bradley. I got some of his first classes through ArtBundle4Good, but I eventually bought a lifetime subscription. It is an easy sofa medium, and I really enjoy learning the techniques without having to beat myself up for copying. My original pieces using Colin’s techniques look pretty good, too. I feel like I’ll continue both.

What is in the future for me? I cleaned up the art room. My new dog is comfortable at my feet there. I signed up for a class with Fonda Clark Haight called The Down Deep through Galia Alena’s Art Is Magic site. I have taken it before. It is about using art to explore your subconscious and is more about the inner exploration than the beauty (or potential for sales) of the art while allowing for great originality and freedom of expression. I am hoping it will help me get in touch with the source of my anxiety and maybe help me deal with it better. I don’t want to go back on the SSRI.

I am looking forward to 2022 and a new way of arting. I want to draw and paint for myself again. I have numerous classes I’ve bought and not even opened to explore what new things I can learn about art and about myself. I am going to try to have the goal, not to art every day, but to art for fun. I sincerely believe that once I bring the fun back into my art practice, doing it every day will become a given, and doing something original will be a joy instead of a competition.

Product Review: Prima Complexions Palette and Jane Davenport Pastel Palettes

Suzanne Hollifield-Eller11 Comments

Yesterday I posted photos of two mixed media paintings I did in Andrea Gomoll’s Faceinating Girls Around the World class. It was a great class, and I took it for several reasons.

First, I like Andrea’s style of teaching. She’s perky and explains what and how she is doing what she is doing with detail and enthusiasm. You can tell she loves what she does.

Irish girl watercolor Hollifield
Irish mixed media girl by Suzanne Hollifield created in class Faceinating Girls Around the World

Second, I wanted to practice using watercolor on portraits, and this class focused on skin tones for different races. I’ve done a class like this in acrylic, but watercolor seemed really interesting. Andrea was using Prima Watercolor Confections, of which I have several as well as all of the Jane Davenport watercolors. I printed the pigment sheets for both brands and substituted or mixed for the complexion colors if I needed to. I ended up ordering the Prima Complexions palette as it was easier to have it than to keep mixing.

It turned out that I was really glad I made the purchase. While more experienced watercolorists can create flesh tones by mixing primaries and/or complimentary colors, I enjoyed having the premixed palette. Of course, these watercolors are not Daniel Smith quality. Neither are they Daniel Smith prices. They are around $24 for the palette of twelve half-pans. I thought they were good quality at a reasonable price. They had enough pigment to cover smoothly and were not overly grainy for portraits. They both blended and layered easily.

Third, Andrea is really a mixed media artist. Although watercolor is her primary medium, she uses other media, too. She’s fond of stamping and has her own line of clear stamps that feature her signature cute girls. She uses stencils with both acrylic paint and modeling paste or gesso in her backgrounds. She is fond of bling in the form of glitter and sparkle gel. She always adds pen in the end. In this class, she used Pan Pastels to enhance the complexions of the girls.

Light skinned African American girl by Hollifield
Light-skinned African-American girls by Suzanne Hollifield created for Faceinating Girls Around the World

I didn’t want to shell out the bucks for Pan Pastels. I’ve lusted for them, but I don’t do enough pastel work to justify the expense. Fortunately, Jane Davenport has just introduced a Pastel Palette line, and I was lucky enough to find them on sale at Michaels for 60% off. Needless to say, I bought all four palettes, and since each has eighteen colors, I ended up with fifty-four pans of color.

The JD Pastel Palette worked great. I don’t know how it compares to Pan Pastels, but for my purposes, I was quite pleased. They didn’t seem a creamy as Andrea’s Pan Pastels, but after I got the “new” off the top, they spread well. On the page, they added the color lightly enough that I could layer and not worry about ruining the piece with a streak of color that was too intense. Once I applied fixative, they stayed put.

If you are on a budget like I am, I recommend you check the JD Pastel Palettes out. Michaels has frequent sales on them. You might get a deal like I did. You might want to go the Jane’s website as well. She has some great videos on how to use these and other of her products.

Chinese girl by Hollifield
Chinese girls by Suzanne Hollifield created for Faceinating Girls Around the World

Finally, I took the class because I wanted to work on my own style of faces. Andrea paints girls you recognize when you see them. I could name a hundred other artists whose portraits are immediately identifiable as their work. Some are whimsical; some are realistic; some are illustrative.

I think I’m more illustrative, or at least that’s what I aspire to be. I don’t have the patience for purely realistic works, and I like cute girls. Real people are rarely cute. I love those old forties and fifties posters and ads when artists drew the models and actresses instead of photographing them. I wish I could paint like that. The books I go back to over and over are by Andrew Loomis and Jack Hamm. The hair is wrong, but I love their faces. I have real trouble with wonky-ness though. One side is always a bit off.

Nevertheless, using the Prima Watercolor Confections Complexions palette and the Jane Davenport Pastel Palettes have helped me achieve my goal of creating my own style a little more I think. I recommend both products to you.

Selling Art

Suzanne Hollifield-Eller2 Comments

Girl and hawk original by Suzanne Hollifield
Original oil pastel by Suzanne Hollifield

Last year I was invited to join a local art group named the Uni4Artists (the Unifour is what we locals call four of the adjacent counties that make up our cultural/geographic/economic area). The artists in the group create in a variety of mediums, and I’ve enjoyed our meetings a great deal. I still feel like a newbie, but I am getting more comfortable. The other artists are warmly welcoming, and because we alternate meeting locations between three venues, including a museum, a gallery, and a teaching studio, I’m exposed to a variety of professional and student art.

One thing the group does is participate in at least two shows in which artwork may be sold. I had no idea that galleries were so strict about the criteria for submissions. For example, last year, I didn’t submit anything because all paintings had to be framed, and they had to be wired for hanging, Gator hooks were forbidden. Who knew?

Over the past year, I have bought some frames, and I’m now watching YouTube for instructions on how to make exhibition-ready pieces. Most of my acrylic pieces are not varnished, which I’ll have to do if I decide to submit one of them. The piece I’m using as a logo for this blog is a possibility, but I won’t submit it without doing some more work on her nose and eyes. I can do noses better now, and this one is too wide. The eyes aren’t sparkle-y enough either. They aren’t alive. I’m glad it isn’t varnished yet, but time is wastin’ if I’m going to use this piece.

I have no idea what to charge for a piece, and the price and other information has to be turned in in ten days. I personally think the cost of the painting needs to be at least as much as the frame. Again, I’m back to YouTube and the group. In fact, we were supposed to have a program on framing, pricing, and photographing our art a couple of months ago, but it was canceled because of sleet. I needed that program. I don’t know yet whether the frame is always sold with the painting or not. (Note to ask that!)

On one hand, I’m excited to be putting pieces of my art in a show. Even if it doesn’t sell, it feels like I’m really able to call myself an artist. On the other hand, I’m truly nervous about getting the details right. Of course, it won’t be the end of the world if I don’t. Let’s get this in perspective, Suzanne. The worse that can happen is they won’t hang my pieces. But somehow, knowing how to prepare and price my art seems like the final piece of really calling myself an artist. I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

A Blog a Day

Suzanne Hollifield-Eller3 Comments

I started this blog because of a challenge in 2017 from one of my online art teachers, Effy Wild, who is a master of art journaling. Twice a year, in April and September, she challenges her students to blog along with her every day for a month. It is truly a challenge for me because although I used to write all the time, I am finding that as I grow older, my right brain is becoming more and more dominant, and my left brain doesn’t really want to form logical paragraphs.

I’ve been thinking I should start writing in this blog if for no other reason than my art has improved. I was actually shocked to see how long its been since I’ve written anything- shocked and a little embarrassed. I can do better that this.

Suzanne Hollifield original watercolor for a class taught by Ildiko Karsay called Nature Art, Spring 2019.

Indeed, my art has improved. I’ve become independent, and I’m using more mediums regularly. If I copy now, it is so that I can learn instead of because I can’t produce anything of worth on my own. That’s been both liberating and satisfying. I’m learning to use Photoshop to combine elements of reference photos, and I am using collage in the same way. I’m painting flowers and animals as well as faces. I’m happy.

Sometimes I will hear teachers talk about how art helps with getting the pain out on the paper. This is true. I have certainly worked through depression and anger by arting it out. However, more often painting is pure joy for me. I don’t really care if others like it although I’m happy when they do. It’s just that when I paint an apple and it actually looks like an apple, or I do a pastel owl that is delightfully quirky and fun, I feel joy. I have lots of my paintings in my home. They make me smile. Undneath some of them, especially the art journals, are some writings where I poured out my soul, but always by the time the last of the paint dried, I felt happy.

I encourage you to try to draw even if you think you can’t. Start with stick people or cartoon people. Lots of folk art looks fairly simple in style. It is the joy in the painting that make it worth something. Do it for fun. If you can’t do that, buy a coloring book. Give up that idea that you aren’t artistic. It just isn’t so. You might find joy is as nearby as your pencil.