MAFPAR

The other night while I was painting with a palette knife and likening it to icing a cake, I began thinking about ‘painting’ a series of cupcakes using the pallet knife and was chatting to some women at work about the idea.
One of them was out buying cards and found this one which made her think of me. She bought the card for me which was very sweet of her (scuse the pun).

This got me thinking today about my cupcake idea a bit more and about one of the big questions in life, ‘what is art?’
I have felt pressure in the past, to consider art as something that is not necessarily nice to look at, that has to have significant meaning and must evoke an emotional response. i.e., true art is a visual depiction of personal expression.
And a true artist is someone whose primary purpose in life is to produce true art, the need to do so taking priority before people, places, things and even personal needs.
These ideas always conflicted with the idea of art being decorative and my preference for decorative reasons behind any other for owning art.
At home I own many pieces of art, many by people I know. Most of these were done by my Dad. Dad, like me, loves to paint. Most of his pictures have been of scenery from photos of places he has visited. Since retiring, he has been ‘challenged’ to seek other subject matter and techniques but his primary love is scenery.
Knowing the person behind an artwork makes a piece particularly meaningful to me but none of the works on my walls would be there if I didn’t love the aesthetics of them. At some point between those pressure filled days, and now, I have come to believe that the answer to the ‘what is art’ question is, ‘whatever you consider to be art’. And an artist is someone who considers themselves as an artist.
There is no definitive answer and there is no right or wrong opinion. Such is what makes art so arty.
So considering my cupcake idea, I have coined the term ‘Meaningless Art For Purely Aesthetic Reasons’ (MAFPAR). I think that creating a series of meaningless art of cupcakes will be fun and will (hopefully) look wonderful. I can see these palette knife creations in my head - scrumptious I am thinking. Tangible thick smears of deliciously smooth, velvet, hues of paint to represent sweet succulent icing. I can see them on my wall and reproduced for the world at large on sale on my website
But is it art?
Yes, of course it is art.
Because I say it is art, there for it is.

Monotone from a pallet knife

This week it was fruit time and we literally painted over the scraped off vegetable painting last week. I chose red this week as my hue, mixing black and white in first to create a mauve then adding black for the shade or white for the tints. The twist was that once we sketched the image in charcoal we used ONLY the pallet knife to apply the paint. I loved this technique. I might explore it further. It was kind of like icing the canvas instead of painting it. Might have a go at 'pallet knifing' a picture of cakes and cupcakes. Could be fun.

Alla-Prima

We were given one hour to complete a monochrome painting 'alla-prima' (at first). Wet on wet, one session. Apparently Van Gough painted his master pieces Alla-Prima and since there was no layering, his paintings never cracked and still look freshly painted today! This was the first painting I had done since my painting of Seth and I didn't much like the end result. I thought that the background was too dark or maybe the rest of it wasnt dark enough. I had a go at lightening the background (that being easier and quicker than trying to darken up everything else) but wasn't sorry when Mary instructed us to make a print of it onto some newsprint and then scrape off the excess paint with our spatulars, thereby rendering the canvas scraped enough to use again next week when we will be painting a fruit.

Week 1 of 3rd term

I missed the last week of last term but planned to work on my painting and get it finished. Well it turned out I never touched it which worries me - is this going to be another thing I'll get round to some day but never do?
Anyway, I was enjoying not having art class, or should I say, having some nights in when I got a phone call from Archibalds to see if I was coming back and to tell me what to bring and I realised that YES I definately wanted to go back to class.
Yeah, so anyway, off I went tonight and LOVED it. Totally need to sort out some music, put it on and just do art. Once I get set up and started I just love it.
Tonight we had to bring along a small canvas and a vegetable. I bought a capsicum, it being the only thing interesting I had in the cupboard.

Term finished but painting isn't

I missed my last art class for the term in favour of catching up with my brother who was on a flyby visit home from Australia. This means little Seth didn't get finished not that I think I would have finished in one night.
My task now is to get myself sorted to paint outside of art class. I just need to put the beautiful music on, get the paints out and go for it.

The wee fella emerges

Another night of painting and more of Seth emerges. I have applied the paint thin and used too much medium (so Mary tells me) so this is going to be an 'under painting' meaning that once I lose all the orange bits, I start again with the serious and final layer. Still not feeling confident but can see that I just need to keep plugging away at it.
Did I mention that I am rediscovering that wonderful place called the zone - in a room of people creating with music playing and before I know it, an hour has gone by! The other night I had a 'flying' dream (where I can actually fly in the sky - so real and exhilarating). Haven't had them since my happy days at Polytech!

Hail back to 1997

1997 was a very cool year for me. I had left the ugly greasy world of sales behind and went to art school. This was something I wrote about my year at art school:
Art school validated me. I found my people. I was immersed in art, around art and doing art. I was free and life was good. This was the year I had glorious dreams of flying - the most liberating exhilarating feeling in the whole world. I would fly to see my sister in Christchurch. I flew to London. I created an image of my flying in one of my art projects. Such was my bliss that year.
Glittering days, glittering memories. Artist friends and artist teachers. Weird and wonderful and interesting and warm and expressive, intelligent people. And I was one of them.
Cycling along the orchards in glittering sunshine to the workshops where days were spent with music playing, people in their zones, free for all food in the kitchen, craft, colour and design and clever pieces of brilliance were made each day.
Picnic lunches in the sun, admiring friends, passionate people.
Wineries and cafes, lunches and dinners, art galleries, pubs, poets, music and beauty everywhere in sparking, glittering Hawke's Bay.