Child's Play

I'm not sure I understand what is meant by the process of making art as being playful and coming from the inner child.  I've never really thought that either of those things are true in my process of making art.  Sometimes it comes easily and I feel a certain satisfaction and delight when it does, but most times a piece of artwork is hard fought and stressful in its production.  The making of art is hard work.

On the backside of the actual painting process, there's the prep work.  I make my own supports.  I like to paint on birch plywood panels and the prep for these is very labor intensive.  The only outside service I use is the cutting service offered by the store where I buy the 4' by 8' sheets of plywood.  With the cradling and 3 step priming process I use, I have invested many labor hours in the prep work.  I usually prepare several panels at once.

Many artists argue that making your own supports is a waste of time that could be better spent painting.  Fact is - I very much enjoy this part of the process.  I look at it this way - if an artist spends all of their time painting, they're possibly not spending enough time thinking about painting.  The menial preparation work gives me the contemplative time I need to prepare myself for the creative process.  I also find a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that I crafted the piece of art from beginning to end.

I wonder too if there may be some connection between the quality of the finished piece and the sweat put into the prep work.  That is - does the painting craft live up to the effort put into the woodcraft?  I find myself weighing this question in the end and based on the answer, I may decide to trash a painting and begin again on the same panel.

This and other considerations were born of simple economics.  I began making my own supports because I could make them at a fraction of the cost of buying them ready-made.  My style of painting may also be influenced by the cost of paint and other materials.  I buy student grade paints and professional grade when they're on sale.  I also use latex house paint - mostly for under-painting.  I use my paints very frugally - saving every scrap of leftover paint in glass jars to be used again.  I also use a simple "primary" color palette consisting of cobalt blue, cad red, and cad yellow along with titanium white and some form of black.  I keep a small tube of burnt umber handy for mixing buff white hue and for use as a stain for natural wood frames.  Most of the latex house paint comes from the returned paint shelf at retail outlets.  If they have an interesting color on the shelf I can usually pick it up for 2 or 3 dollars.

I once saw a Youtube video of an artist readying herself to paint.  She pulled several big gallery wrapped canvases from a box that had obviously been shipped from an online art supplier.  She laid them on the floor and went from panel to panel squeezing out copious amounts of the most expensive professional quality paints.  She playfully troweled the paint over the surfaces and completed 3 or 4 paintings in about 10 minutes (not including edits).  I watched this and wondered, "Wow, wouldn't that be fun?".  She used more paint in that short bit of time than I probably use in a year.

No matter...  Artists are a diverse bunch in the way they think about and approach art.  Whether it be finding satisfaction in an arduous process or being impatient to unload their creativity and arrive at a finished product post-haste, ultimately it is most important to produce art.

In my case I believe the preparatory path I take gives me a certain freedom to be spontaneous in the creative process.  However, often times spontaneity breeds dissatisfaction - with no recourse but to willfully overcome it.  It's often hard fought and stressful - things intolerable to children.  It's hard work kids!