Goals

I think my draw­ing and paint­ing skills have improved markedly over the last two years. I’ve worked steadily and pro­duced some good pieces (and some real dogs, but I’ve learned from those as well). Study­ing with Den­nis Cheaney has been very useful.

I still have a long way to go. Here are some things that I want to work on:

Pic­to­r­ial com­po­si­tion. I don’t feel like I have a real han­dle on how to plan an exe­cute a pic­ture so that I start with a plan and end up achiev­ing the effect I was look­ing for. While I can usu­ally iden­tify what went wrong, that doesn’t always trans­late into not mak­ing the same set of mis­takes again. I feel like I have a few basic com­po­si­tions that work OK, but I don’t have a breadth of com­pe­tence in this area. I want to become com­fort­able with com­plex com­po­si­tions involv­ing mul­ti­ple fig­ures and a hier­ar­chy of focal points.

Color. I still strug­gle with how to use color. Some­times I default to dull color mix­tures because they are easy to use, not because they are the best solu­tion for the color prob­lem I am work­ing on. I want to become more com­fort­able with color com­po­si­tion, includ­ing var­i­ous sorts of anal­o­gous and com­ple­men­tary color schemes.

Draw­ing. While I can draw, I often move too quickly and later real­ize I’ve made some seri­ous error in place­ment or pro­por­tion. That is par­tic­u­larly prob­lem­atic when I am in the ini­tial draw­ing stage of a painting.

Light. I want to become more com­pe­tent at paint­ing a vari­ety of light effects.

Land­scape. The land­scapes I’ve attempted in the last year have mostly not been suc­cess­ful. I want to get bet­ter at plan­ning land­scape com­po­si­tions and mak­ing them work.

The fig­ure. I want to find a way to start work­ing from the model again. While I am some­times able to attend fig­ure draw­ing ses­sions with the Worces­ter Draw­ing Group, the poses are too short to really go into the sort of depth that I am look­ing for. As our fam­ily finances recover from Brendan’s birth, I want to hire a model for long poses. And, if pos­si­ble, get back to Den­nis Cheaney’s classes in fig­ure draw­ing and painting.

Body of work. I am try­ing to develop a sig­nif­i­cant and coher­ent port­fo­lio of paint­ings that I can present to a gallery for pro­fes­sional sale.

That’s what I can think of right now. There are obvi­ously lots of other short­com­ings to work on, but those are the areas that I feel need the most work at this time.

Leave a com­ment. It would be great to see your goals for your next steps as an artist.