What To Expect?

by Cooper on 8/23/2010 6:05:17 PMComment on this

Greetings,

Welcome to the Cooper studio, Jefferson, Iowa, on a wonderfully hot, sunny, August Monday! I said August---surely hot and sunny is what we expect, right?

Which of course, brings to mind that saying: "Expect the unexpected". Moronic, when you look at in in type. After all, how can you possibly call it unexpected if, in actuality, you are expecting it? The guy that made that phrase famous was obviously crazy.

For example, let me share a bit of my day. The studio got the first of it's replacement windows installed today. Yay! They look WONDERFUL and the trim isn't even on yet. We have been planning this for a while, so we expected the day would finally arrive and it would really happen. Now, how on earth was I supposed to expect the unexpected with that? A 55 x 92" gaping hole in the side of the studio, rain every other day for the last two months, what would you expect? Well, what we got was mosquitos. Make that MOSQUITOS. But trust me, you don't plan in advance for mosquitos in your studio. At least, I didn't. But they came anyway. And now their little carcasses are laying all over the floor :) (Ha, I dealt with the unexpected, and feel successful about it.)

Of course you all know I'm going to turn that into a paint-related moral-of-the-story somehow. And here's how it goes: we are taught to plan for a painting; thumbnail sketches or compositional sketches, whatever. Some artists like to draw the idea on the canvas in detail with charcoal, some like to take a paint brush full of really runny paint and make vague lines, (my personal favorite) and some folks just start blocking in with no guides at all. But even for the latter group, they have the idea, the expected, in their heads.

And THEN we hear that we need to remain flexable! "Look for what's happening on the canvas", they say. "Look for interesting things that the paint is doing, and go with it." Wait! Isn't that like "expecting the unexpected"---assuming the paint is going to do something we hadn't planned and then waiting/watching for it to do so? And didn't we already say that guy was crazy?? Maybe not so, because when you think about it, if we follow the plan, that thumbnail sketch or compositional study exactly, isn't that just one step removed from paint by number? And if we really are painting our reactions to the subject in front of us, shouldn't those reactions fluctuate as we work? Or would it be better to be a little artist-robot and do exactly what is expected? I don't think we're in this game to be robots. Wow. That sounds a little bit like another famous phrase "thinking outside the box". But we're going to save that one for another day. Thanks for stopping by.

Later, Cooper