Small Scale Canvas

and a minimal palette

Yeah, I’ve been painting great big fat paintings for almost 60 years. From my years of working in Fuller Potter’s studio, absorbing every bit of abstract expressionism I could, I sort of lost my open style. I’d been painting on silk, making batik, spontaneous design that would become cloth for dress designers, and for me too. ;) I used a minimal palette of dyes that I could turn into thousands of shades. The years of making marks with Fuller on his canvases on our canvases and on my canvases had created a limitation I wasn’t expecting.

Here’s a Fuller/Ellen painting on unstretched canvas:

I took classes with John Udvardy, and Duff Schweningen to shake up my entire world. Sculpting? Yeah. No. But John liked my great big nudes. At least.

Duff did stuff with I-beams. Here’s an example of the stuff John was doing:

I tore into some paintings I call healing paintings after university. They were big and drippy and not bold, they were ephemeral and captured a nano of a nanosecond in a particular time. I started playing the piano while I painted. I loosened up. But kept falling back to painting with tubes and fingers.

Here’s a healing painting a made before leaving New England:

I took a train cross country and ended up in a new place. Miraculously, I found art supplies and painted what would be my first solid pieces. Think Diebenkorn. I don’t have those paintings any longer. They went with my divorce. So, I found a therapist who became my art mommy or daddy and he gave me permission to just do something every day. Something. Draw my toe. My eye bags. All those years of abstract expressionism and Fuller’s disdain for things like drawing, had me. I took 4 years of drawing at University. 3 of painting. I could never get into a printmaking class and I’m none the worse for it. So, Fuller or not, I learned how to draw and how to paint and 89 different perspectives and that, believe it or not, freed me to paint chunky abstracts that moved with grace.

Here’s one after 400 years of therapy (Vagina Dentata)

I love painting great big paintings.

Around the first of the year, I received a commission to paint Indian Rocks Beach, where my brother grew up, and my family lived until my mother’s divorce. I don’t live near Indian Rocks Beach, but I had canoed down a trail that came out on the West Coast and it was flat and greeny. Not unlike IRB, St Pete Beach, etc. I set out to paint a 24 x 36 land and seascape. A path. Sea grapes. Shells.

I got distracted when our truck had to go into the shop for 2 weeks. I was constantly borrowing a truck and finally renting a car, which is not all that helpful around a farm. “How much hay is left?” “Well, we could fit 50 pounds of oats in the trunk…” Then I became ill with a damn cold that left me with a toothache and an earache. I felt like the self-portrait of Van Gogh with his bandaged ear.

I was decompensating. This repair sounded expensive. Then the original garage said they couldn’t do it. So the mechanic got it running and we took it to a further away mechanic who could do it. He did it. And then, I started the painting.

My husband made a stretcher and I unrolled a lot of canvas. I prepped it with rabbit skin glue and oil painting ground. I painted an underpainting the color of sand. I painted the sky. It’s beautiful. I love it. But the Gulf. My reference photos are all of a big flat green gulf. How frigging boring can you get? Then work on details! Ok. Details. So how do YOU paint sand?

Free expression includes “the way I see” and I have awful eyes with artifacts and odd dots and squiggles. They are in the painting. Not distractingly, but the way I see.

I threw up my brushes and said that I needed to start again if I wanted to paint this painting impressionistically.

So I changed my medium and painted in watercolor. HA. That should knock some crust off. Yeah. But it isn’t oil.

So, I took small canvases and painted grayscale versions of fruit. Then the fruit. Then I painted the actual gray scale and the actual scale of the fruit. It helped a lot. But I became addicted. I started painting apples and pears. I have added onions because they remind me of painting waxed paper. I have red pears and lemons and limes and mangoes and bananas. And fruit flies. And they cheer me because I know I’m making progress in seeing light. Seeing not light. Shadow. Subtle remains of light. Subtle remains of shadow. I am hearing old tunes that I wrote a million years ago. The fruit flies lay down a fine ostinato. And I photograph and paint the still life setups. I feel that if I had a room I could work in, instead of a kitchen table with is more often than not in use, I could be doing something great. So I just keep smiling at myself making lightboxes out of cardboard and setting up drapes and still lifes.

I still do my line and circle meditation every day…we all have some way to warm up, don’t we? And start. I finished this onion today. I like it. It makes me happy. Soon, I’ll be able to paint sand and breathe life into a flat green gulf. I’m confident.