The Artistic Process

About three months ago I had a freelance job for a lady who lives in New York. She is a costume designer and was working on costumes for Disney Land in Tokyo, Japan. She provided me with very detailed, photoshop generated mock ups of the costumes she designed and I was to paint them on paper. She later explained to me that I was simply filling in a small portion of her artistic process. First she would design the costumes and plan their colors. Then I would use her computer mock ups and swatches to create the colors on paper. It turns out that the costume makers would use my drawings for color matching rather than the computer generated mock ups because the computer screen shines light through the image and it makes it very hard to interpret the colors in the real world. So my work basically made her imagination's ideal easier to interpret for the costume makers. Then the costumes were going to be made using white material. Then adjustments and remakes would be made. And then, finally, the actual materials would be used to make the actual costumes.

Sometimes one of my paintings for her would take about 20 or more hours to finish. It wasn't because I was slow, but because it was painstakingly time consuming to mix the right shades of colors, check with her via text and photos weather or not the colors were correct and often times repainting the same vestige 4 or more times until I would get the color right. She had something like 60 of those kinds of images, if I remember correctly. I did not get to paint all of them, but I painted quite a few, I think about 16 and it was very time consuming. The incredible thing was that I was not even providing her with a finished product of her brain child. I was only one cog in a big wheel of an artistic process that led to the eventual completion of the project. After working for her and getting insight into her very intricate and time consuming process I came to a realization that there really was no cutting corners when you wanted to get a thing done right.

I've always been under the impression that I should learn to make my paintings quicker. I like to have intricate details, but I should somehow accelerate the making of the details by figuring out some way where they're suggested rather than carefully depicted. Now I know that if I like to have intricate details I should come to terms that those details will take some time to create and it's okay that it will take many hours, because that's how long a thing takes to make if I want it done the way I envision it in my brain. I think my latest piece really shows growth in my willingness to do what I endeavor to accomplish. I've certainly done other paintings in my life that took as long and were quite intricate, but I think this has a larger diversity in depth and pattern and I hope that my next pieces continue to improve.

This current work has taken me at least 30 hours to paint if not longer. A very basic run down of my process is that I choose images to reference when I decide to paint something. Then I combine various elements and use those images when necessary to look at. I use many rulers, compasses and right angles. I switch from tiny to larger brushes and back to tiny ones depending on the size of the surface area I am painting. Sometimes I look at a book of my favorite artist to help me with technique or to simply inspire myself when I'm making decisions on what direction to go to accomplish the best result.

From Russia to the USA

I started this piece while I was living with my grandma. She has this photo of herself in her 40s that she really likes and she wanted me to paint her when she was still young and beautiful.

I wanted to paint her in her own apartment, using the things that surround her in her daily life and add elements of the house she spent 20 years building in the country side which she has now sadly sold 10 years ago and never stops regretting it. Originally I planned to use her tablecloth from her apartment and paint cherry blossoms and a yellow wooden house for the backdrop.

The design didn't seem as interesting as the scene that presented itself to me in her very own kitchen so I chose to simply surround her with what she lives with now. That way overtime, when she looks at the painting it won't have to hurt her with painful memories of a regretful decision to sell her house.

Boris Kustodeev is a painter revered in Russia for his depictions of beautiful and flourishing merchant wives. One of the most famous of his works and one of my most favorites as well is titled a Merchant's Wife (very original).

I saw it last year during my trip to St. Petersburg and I've wanted to paint something along its lines for a long time now. My painting from today is my first of its kind and I hope to make many more in the future. I love the abundance of the table setting, the picturesque background and the lavishness of the lady's attire. I especially aspire to the depth of Boris Kustodeev's designs.

Some Art Stuff Between the Cultural and Political Self Evaluation

Truth is this blog was created many years ago for the purpose of sharing my art. I've gone through a phase when I deleted everything on it and completely abandoned the project. I'm working my way back to posting my art faithfully and daily. I'd really like to gain a world audience for my paintings, for what is the purpose of making art if not to share it with others?

While I've been in Russia I started revisiting my old sketches for a story I am particularly fond of by Gogol. The title roughly translates into The Terrible Revenge. When I first read the story I felt a sense of destiny that I should read it, it hit close to my heart and my life experience. It was like a cautionary tale written directly and very specifically to me personally. I was so taken by it that for some reason I sat down and copied the entire thing by hand, and it's a pretty long story! I felt that I really had to make myself memorize it and make sure and remember its significance to me. I also dreamed of illustrating it and have taken some steps to planning the first scene and developing the main villain.

I brought the sketches with me to St. Petersburg simply because they were in my sketchbook. I thought I was going to use my sketchbook to plan my series of matryoshka paintings because that's the what I've been invested in recently in Tucson. But I found it difficult to work on that series in my transient state for it required a lot of precision and calmness of mind, things I don't have right now, as I am away from my husband, reconnecting with my childhood, learning about myself through communication with my grandmother and seeing my country and its culture through new eyes.

I let go of my usual sense of control over my medium and came up with this.

Developments

I have been working on a series of fat matryoshka. This was the first in the series that keeps expanding. My fiancé, Tony Rosano, was the inspiration for this one. One of my friends kept telling me that I should dive into sharing my cultural background with my audience in the work I do, so I tried it and I think he was right. It seems that people really like this new track I have taken. I'll see where it leads me. I'm certainly excited about making these into greeting cards and seeing how well they will do on my Etsy shop when I do finally put them up there.