Where have you been? All over.
To South Dakota and Back Again
It’s been a while, so welcome back! The past couple months for me have been a bit unusual, packed with a lot of traveling over the holidays, bouts of sickness, confusion with my part-time job, and issues in our apartment complex. So I apologize for my tardiness in this supposedly-monthly newsletter, I promise to be better in the future!
In January and February, I’ve been working on a few different projects. Continuing my oil painting depicting a hillside setting in Austria, I’ve spent a lot of time doing some research on how to resolve the painting. When chatting with a cousin of mine at one of my husbands school events, he asked me, “if you had to choose a style of art that you would say your art falls into, what would it be?” and that stumped me for a second. In this day and age, we don’t have a particular style that can be nailed down to the 2020s, like the way that the Expressionists, Realists, Surrealists, Dada, or Cubist artists did. Right now we fall into the Contemporary Art Period. What does that even mean? That doesn’t feel like my art style at all, but I don’t think there is a particular movement that my style would fall into. The best way I could think to answer his question was to say, “I don’t know if there is a style, but when I’m stumped on what I’m working on, I typically find myself looking back at the Impressionists.”
I have a pretty vast library of books on art; built from Christmas presents, professors giving books away, Half Price Books, and garage sales. When I don’t know where to go in my piece, I go to the bookshelf for inspiration. In my college painting class, this is what we were instructed to do by our professor (my personal nemesis as well as mentor, taught me a lot and I kicked and screamed the whole way) and I found that this method worked wonders for me. It’s not about copying, it’s about seeing how other artists resolved similar works. For my hillside painting, I’ve looked back on the impressionists: Monet, Renior, Degas, and Cassatt.
Looking Forward
What am I looking to do? Well first of all I’d like to finish a piece so that I can say I’ve accomplished something! That’s goal #1. Looking further than that- I know that March is going to be a lot of traveling. I’m going to visit my alma mater in Nebraska as well as a gallery that currently has two of my artworks in Kansas City, and then later in the month I’m traveling down to Florida with some family. My goal for these trips is to build up my ‘En Plein Air’ skills so that over the summer I can enter festivals that celebrate that art style.
‘En Plein Air’ simply transaltes to ‘outdoors’. So Isabella, you just want to learn to paint outside? Yes. I do. Nature has always been a big part of my life, but I haven’t taken advantage of that in the past. Painting what’s directly in front of you while being surrounded by the natural world is very different than painting in a studio from a photograph. Just trust me on this.
Even More Forward
Looking even farther than that, the summer is looking to be very unpredictable. We’ll most likely be moving out of our apartment and take up couch hopping for a couple of months, which will mean figuring out a traveling studio- yikes! However I hope to be able to set up some booths at farmers markets and craft fairs. I’m determined to figure out the business side of this whole ‘independent artist’ thing, just you wait and see.
What’s next?
If all goes to plan, you should be seeing me again sooner than next month. I’m in the final stages of two different pieces and you’ll be the first to see them! Thank you for being engaged with me, talk to you soon!
