Hero's Journey

One hundred artists. One DJ. One day only.

"Attention art enthusiasts, supporters, collectors, curators, and creators! Please join the

inaugural 10X10 Art Show on Sunday, July 13th from 1-4 PM at Seaport Studios - a

vibrant community art space located in Richmond and home to Engineered Artworks

and Five Ton Crane. This pop-up art show will feature a finely curated collection of 100

Bay Area artists - each who have contributed unique, small format pieces to this micro

gallery. Join us for a colorful afternoon of art and community, excellent, locally made

wines from Gaduard and Filial and vibey, vinyl tunes by DJ KingQube.

FACEBOOK EVENT: https://www.facebook.com/events/1403567087500001"

The fine folks at Seaport Studios invited me to participate in a one-day-only popup art show. I created a piece specifically for this show and what follows is a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creating it, lightly embellished for dramatic effect, of course.

A rough approximation of the process behind my latest painting, “Narcissus.” It’s not a true story, but it’s a very useful lie. Pull up a teapot, pour yourself an ottoman, and settle in.

It's not that I hate it all. It's that it was all very hard for a very long time.

One of the great privileges of getting older is that everyone’s skills sharpen and diverge. One of the great curses of getting older is that fewer and fewer people understand what you’re doing because they’re off pursuing their own goals and hobbies and have inexplicably neglected all of yours. 

I wrote this piece in an attempt to explain to the world exactly what goes into a work of narrative art specifically, and why it takes as long as it does. 

Day 1

Imagine, then, you’ve just started illustration school. You’ve read all sorts of great stories and made up a few more, and you want nothing more than to paint them. You are convinced they would make great paintings, and you show up to class on day one with your brushes and canvases and paints and you’re ready to go.

The instructor launches into the standard day 1 overview of the rules of the class, and the penalties for not turning in assignments and so on, during which time your eyes keep drifting back to your canvas and your pristine tubes of paint. You’re imagining the tactile delight of opening them and squeezing out the buttery, brightly colored contents (you’ve noticed that all oil painters describe their paint as “buttery”) onto your palette. You look down at your spotless jeans and fantasize about the day when they’ll be covered in splashes of greens and reds and, most importantly, credibility. 

Your eyes drift back to the whiteboard and then snap into focus as you see a series of boxes full of unintelligible lines. The tone from the front of the room is much less bored and much more Northeast Corridor than it was thirty seconds ago. This, you suspect, is probably not related to how many absences you can rack up before your GPA starts feeling it.

“Thumbnails,” The Instructor is saying. “You’re gonna give me three thumbnails for next time, and we’ll crit ‘em. As a group.” It’s like being lectured at by a Manhattan cab driver. You have already grasped that asking what a thumbnail is at this point would be unwise, so you snap a quick photo of the thumbnail slide, gather your stuff (two whole extra bags just for the paint crap) and head out. 

So you go home and do three little scratchy drawings.

Day 2

The next day, you saunter into class, clutching your coffee. The crits start, and one of your classmates is staring at the floor while The Instructor explains that you all should have produced three different thumbnails. “These are all the same drawing. The details don’t matter at this point. You gotta explore the idea from all angles.” The Instructor pauses for a minute, possibly to take a drag on the mental cigarette you’ve convinced yourself he has. “What if we don’t even see Odysseus? What if the Cyclops’ body blocks the entire frame? What if we’re looking down from above?” 

You wince on your classmate’s behalf. The Instructor has just casually mentioned three different compositions, all with different viewpoints and perspective schemes, and he’s acting like it’s no big deal. Judging by the look on your classmate’s face, what is clearly no big deal for The Instructor is going to be a very big deal for his students. 

You look at your three drawings, silently collect your bag, and sneak right back out of class to the local coffee shop.

A number of hours and coffees later, you’ve produced this.

Six thumbnails of robots admiring themselves in various reflective surfaces.

Not just three, but six thumbnails, all pretty much different, all illustrating another of the classics: the myth of Narcissus.

Day 3 

You’re pretty pleased with yourself, going into class with your half dozen thumbnails. And you’ve earned it. The Instructor takes a quick look, glances over at the bag of painting supplies you’re still optimistically lugging around, and points out that there’s only one sketch that will work on the size of the painting panel you bought. “Top drawing on the right. Your panel is too small for anything else. You’ll lose the narrative.” He tells you you’re cleared to go forth and do a final drawing.

Now this is a bit awkward. You’re not really clear on what a final drawing is going to solve, and you secretly hoped that paint would save you from the need to learn to draw. Drawing is hard. 

Luckily for you, The Instructor presents some examples of final drawings, and that’s when you know you’re in trouble. Because drawing, let’s be honest, has never been your strong suit. Drawing is what you’re trying to avoid by painting. The six(!) thumbnails you did already constitute a volume of pencil-on-paper work far exceeding what you consider a normal amount for most paintings (you consider “zero drawing” to be a normal amount). And the drawings shared by The Instructor are works of art in and of themselves. The precision, the confidence in the marks, all of it... why bother to paint it at that point? Just let it go out the door as is. 

And, and, you have to do one of these to be allowed to paint! The ignominy! You have no idea how to draw!! In order to get to the painting bit, the one thing you came here to do, you’re going to have to learn a whole other skill you’ve been avoiding studiously your whole life. But another part of you says, it’s just one thing. Learn one skill, then you can do the painting. One tiny speed bump on the highway to artistic greatness.

So. Ok. Fine. During this whole internal monologue, you’d wandered into an abandoned lot to kick the literal and metaphorical dirt and now, dirt sufficiently kicked, you have resigned yourself to learning a whole new skill. By tomorrow. When the drawing is due. 

Like any sensible person, you call The Friend, the bestie, the one who took this class already, and lay out your situation. “Great!” she says. “I was just going to gather reference. You can come.” You don’t know what reference is, but it sounds like yet another thing standing between you and your paints.

When you meet up later, The Friend looks at your thumbnail and grins. 

“Ok. You’ve got two big problems here. You need a human figure for your robot shape, and then you need a robot design. Did you have one in mind?”

And that’s when you realize what you’ve done to yourself. Because what The Friend has just told you —the harsh truth she has just casually let slip —is that you are going to have to design this robot. There isn’t a standard robot look. Someone is going to have to figure out how the metal plates — you wanted a metal exterior, didn’t you — how the metal plates fit together and where the seams are and how the joints work. So now, it’s not just learning how to draw, is it? It’s learning how to draw and be an industrial designer. By tomorrow.

You keep your chin up. It’s just two things now. Drawing and industrial design. No big deal. Two massive skill sets that people study all on their own, and you’re going to tackle them both in a severely limited time. What could possibly go wrong?

The Friend is unfazed by all of this. “Start with a person and add the robot characteristics later.” 

You consider your sketch and your concept. Vanity. Self absorbtion. Self-obsession to the point of obliviousness. You look back up to The Friend, a woman who knows what she wants out of a mirror and is not afraid to go after it, and wonder how insulted she’d be if you asked her to pose for you. 

“Act self-absorbed? Sure! I’m good at it.” The Friend studies the sketch and activates her phone’s flashlight while you try to unobtrusively pick your jaw up off the floor and pretend like you aren’t completely overawed by this casual display of self-possession. “Your sketch has the robot holding a ring light. I don’t have one on me, but we can fake it with my phone, and that will give you most of the lighting information you need. For the major forms, anyway.” You shoot a bunch of photos from a few angles. You’re starting to see how this all might come together.

This is a real friend and she really did pose and she was amazing about it. Love that lady.

The robot features themselves, though, are a stumper. And in the midst of all this, you have other classes to attend. Today’s is a guest lecture by a working artist who has the job you want. The Guest Artist has billed this as a lecture on taste, and you’re not really sure what that means, but you’re positive she knows a lot of things that you don’t, so you head over to the lecture hall.

Within five minutes, it’s clear that The Guest Artist cares deeply about this subject. If she had a soapbox, she’d be on it. You consider giving her one, as a gift. 

She starts strong, with a two-sentence diatribe on how the West, particularly the U.S., teaches art. “Too much focus on mechanics, not enough on taste.” You look at the pile of anatomy books you’ve just checked out from the library and feel personally attacked. The Guest Artist spends the next 90 minutes delivering what is, quite frankly, a tour de force on the topic of how one’s own aesthetic preferences a) influence the work, and b) must be trained just like any other skill. She goes through well over a hundred slides, and every single one hits you like a punch in the gut. You leave the lecture hall emotionally flattened.

The walk home is a tough one. You’ve got a robot you have to design, and you have no idea where to start, and you’ve got the Guest Artist’s lecture bouncing around in your brain telling you you’ve been approaching it all wrong anyway. 

Your problems started your first semester. You had a slew of classes to make art for and a slew of professors who spent every critique forcing every student to justify every single decision. “Why is that tree there? Why is the sky that color? Why did you choose this scene to paint?” And “because it looks good” was not an acceptable answer. The profs all went out of their way to drive it home. You couldn’t just make something pretty, you had to have a reason. And after five months of being cross-examined over every happy little tree (an orange tree? in snowy mountains? who do you think you are, the Russians? ), you developed a case of the yips you just haven’t been able to shake. You start a painting, get stuck in the middle trying to justify all your choices to yourself, become paralyzed with indecision, and then the painting just...stops. (What this has done to your GPA is unspeakable.)

And it’s not for lack of trying. You heard what the professors were telling you. There had to be reasons for everything, which means research. Somewhere in all the textbooks and the reference is the right answer and all you have to do is find it. Except somehow you never can. You know it’s there, it has to be, because other people manage to get their paintings done. But not you. And now you’re the grand champion of Wikipedia and all you have to show for it are a bunch of half-finished canvases piled up in a little monument to your own guilt. 

And what you’re slowly coming to realize, what the Guest Artist spent a hundred slides drilling into your head, is that you took entirely the wrong lesson from those first semester classes. The Right Answer, the solution to whatever painting problem you’ve got, will never be in any book. You’ll never find it in the library, or in your anatomy diagrams, or in those videos about machine milling and powder coating you’ve got queued up for later. The right answer, the one that’s perfect for your painting, comes from you. From your own sense of taste and aesthetic and preference. Your previous professors were trying to teach you how to give yourself good options to choose from. And somehow you misunderstood the whole thing completely, for most of college, and it’s only now becoming clear just how wrong you’ve gone.

The magnitude of this revelation forces you to sit down on the curb and take a few shaky breaths.

You’ve spent the last... what time is it... two hours?! pretty inwardly focused. But now, having gotten the uninvited epiphany out of the way, you have some extra headspace to deal with the here and now. “Now” is much later than you want it to be, and “here” isn’t looking particularly familiar and will therefore take some work with the maps app on your phone to sort out. But you know where you want to go and you’ve got the tools to get yourself there, and if things really go off the rails you’ll call a cab.

The walk home is brisk, because you have a lot of drawing to do, and tense, because, epiphany or no epiphany, you still have to design a whole robot. But you’re feeling generally good about your prospect. As you’re turning onto your street, internally sloshing around optimistically in a quagmire of indecision, your attention is forcibly yanked back to the present when your neighbor goes by in his loud red sports car. 

Staring at the receding collection of interpenetrating forms and shaped metal, you get the beginning of an idea.

“Likewise for painting an idea. You set the goal, and you begin. The effort of building an image is like that downhill trek. You can bottom-out in the valley, lost in the weeds, but as you continue to climb up things get clearer until you reach the top and head out again. While you are in that valley, you cannot see the goal, but the valley is necessary.” - Greg Manchess, https://www.muddycolors.com/2017/06/10-things-what-you-cannot-know

Day 4

The next day in class, you’re a fidgety mess, awash in the conflicting forces of too little sleep, too much coffee to compensate, and barely contained mania. You spent most of the night researching sports cars. Your workspace, now littered with coffee cups and wallpapered in printouts of old Lamborghinis and Vipers, looks like a standard teenage boy’s bedroom circa 1987 minus the pinup girls. But you’ve done it, you think. You learned the language of car styling, and you adapted some of your favorite visual phrases to apply to a human form, and now you’ve got a drawing.

It's not clean enough to constitute a finished piece, but it will work for what you need it to do.

The Instructor approves. No notes. He tells you to come up with a value scheme and use it to build out some color studies. 

Here, mercifully, you’re on firmer ground. You have a clear idea of how dark you want this all to be, you know what the light source is (and you only have one of them!), and hard questions like color don’t apply. You bang out your value study in a hurry and then apply a few different color schemes to find one you like best.

There was a stage where I considered adding narcissus flowers to really drive the narrative home. I decided against it, but you can see them here, growing out of the robot's neck and stomach.

This earns you a “Very nice” from The Instructor. He asks if you have a favorite and you indicate the image in the lower right. He agrees, and you enthusiastically start pulling things out of your bag of painting materials. Finally! Paint! 

You’ve got your canvas on an easel and your palette and brushes set up when you notice The Instructor watching you with interest. He’s not saying anything, just observing. You sense a trap, which you immediately spring when you go to pick out your paint tubes and realize you don’t know which ones to grab. You look at the color study you did. Greens and purples. You look at all the brightly colored tubes of paint. There are a few greens and purples, as well as plenty of pinks, reds, yellows, and blues from which you could mix more greens and purples. Hand halfway into your paint tube pile, you freeze. It should be so simple. There’s purple on the screen. There’s a tube that says “purple” on it in your paint stash. And yet you know, somehow, that there has to be more to it than that. Going from digital to traditional media feels like jumping out of a plane with a plan to knit a parachute on the way down.

You’re jolted out of your analysis paralysis by an almighty tearing sound. There’s a pile of cardboard boxes in the studio waiting to be recycled, and you look over to see The Instructor ripping one apart at the seams. Other people might find a knife, a scissors, or a box cutter (this is an art studio after all), but The Instructor is having none of it. He’s grabbing boxes with his bare hands and ripping them down the middle, holding up torn bits of cardboard, examining them, and discarding them. Finally, he spies a used pizza box, tears the top off, and hands it to you. “Gesso this, then come find me when it’s dry.” He leaves to talk to another student.

Gesso is the ubiquitous paint primer widely used by artists, and you understand you’ve just been told to prepare this surface for painting. This cardboard. This ripped, ragged-edged, grease-stained cardboard. Well, ok then. Fortunately, gesso goes on easy and dries fast. Half an hour later, The Instructor is at your easel, upon which he has placed the gessoed pizza box. He takes a long, hard look at your color study and a long, hard drag on his imaginary emotional support cigarette. 

“Your light is coming from over here.” He draws a circle and an arrow pointing toward the circle. 

“That means your shadow is here.” A curved line across the sphere and a bunch of scribbles. 

Artist's rendition of a gessoed pizza box with a lighting diagram painted on.

“So most of your color is going to be here. In the transition tones.” He circles the terminator line. 

The terminator line is the line on the form delineating where the lit side of the form ends and the dark side begins.

He grabs a random green, a random purple, a black, and a white, and proceeds to paint the most beautiful sphere you’ve ever seen. It takes him all of three minutes, no time at all, and yet plenty of time for you to descend into a stew of envy the likes of which you previously thought impossible. 

There's a saying in art. "Value does all the work and color gets all the credit." Value is how light and dark something is. Color is how pink, blue, purple, etc. it is.

“...just for fun...” he giggles to himself as rifles through your paints. Out come some yellows, pinks, and blues, which he mixes and starts putting on the sphere with glee. Suddenly it sparkles. It’s beautiful. 

The Instructor can get away with all these extra colors because he matches the value of each mix to what's already there. If you squint, it still reads like a sphere. If you keep squinting, you'll notice that the pale blue in the top right is slightly too light for where it's placed.

“You’re going to do a lot of these. This is how I do my color studies. Just paint spheres until you solve your problem.” He makes it sound so easy. You’re going to need more pizza boxes. 

Day 5

You’re awash in bits of cardboard, all covered with green and purple spheres. You feel like one of those people trying to choose between eight kinds of off-white wall paint in the hardware store. You can’t be bothered to clean your palette, so you’ve taped a sheet of parchment paper around a textbook you hope you don’t have to open for a while, and you’re squeezing your paints onto that. Finally, in desperation, you mix all the paint on your “palette” together into a warm gray, add some dioxazine, the most purple of all purples, and add a green wash to the darks. Suddenly, the mood you’ve been looking for jumps out off the page, and you’ve got a formula.

This is my actual color study for this piece. Torrit gray refers to the gray you get when you mix all your leftover paint together into a singular pile of chromatic mud. It's a trick that is somewhat unique to oil painting since the paint stays wet for so long. The other colors are: dioxazine purple, ultramarine blue, sap green, black, and white.

You look at your canvas again, and now it all seems so obvious. You know exactly how to mix every color and where they’re all supposed to go. The painting, now that you’re finally doing it, is almost too easy. You go from a blank canvas to an astonishingly well-developed underpainting in the span of about two hours. 

The Guest Artist, having professed a desire to learn traditional media, has stopped by to observe. Unaware of your previous history with all things painting, she watches you gin up a form out of nothing in the time it takes to eat dinner and admits to amazement at just how proficient you appear to be. You’re too stunned to respond. Two more days of refining forms, fiddling with details, and leaning hard into your newly discovered sense of taste to add some extra narrative elements and mood, and you’ve got a finished painting. 

At the end of this you are certain of two things. 1. A week ago this would have taken you six months. 2. It wouldn’t have been nearly as good. 

The class critique is the icing on the cake. You end up being dead last and it’s late in the day when you finally display your piece. The Instructor simply looks at it, grins, and dismisses class. You grab your stuff and follow your classmates out the door. Looking back over your shoulder you see him catch your eye, raise a flask in mock salute, and take a swig. 

A work-in-progress shot. Come see the final on Sunday!

This is a lightly fictionalized account of the real process of creating my newest piece: “Narcissus”. It will be on display for the first time on Sunday, July 13 1-4pm at Seaport Studios for their 10x10 show.