I’ll be back when I have more time. Until then, keep smearing colored mud on flat surfaces.

That’s a lot of bad paintings.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been experiencing what I considered to be normal age-related declines in vision (I’m 46). I’ve had more and more trouble reading small text. When reading for too long, my vision locked into that distance and I became unable to focus on greater distances for several minutes. My distance vision became noticeably less acute (road signs were harder to read, for example). I couldn’t see as well in low light. I began making plans to visit an ophthalmologist—something I should have done much earlier.

About a 6 weeks ago, after doing some research, I began taking vitamin D supplements in relatively high doses (6,000 iu per day) in gelcap form (solid pills have not been shown to increase serum blood levels of vitamin D). I did this because I’d read about research on reduction of cancer and diabetes in people taking similar dosages.

Well, I still don’t have cancer or diabetes (as far as I know). Yay for me. The unexpected effect, however, is that my vision has dramatically improved. I can read smaller text without strain. My vision no longer gets blurry when I read for too long. My distance vision is more acute. My night vision has improved. I don’t have the 20/15 vision I had when I was 25, but my eyes certainly work a lot better. It appears that the reduced flexibility of the corneas that happens with age has been to some degree reversed.

I can’t be certain that vitamin D is the cause of the improvement, as I made other dietary improvements at about the same time (cutting out almost all processed foods, refined sugar, and wheat, for example). I’m also unwilling to stop taking vitamin D for a month or so to see if my vision declines. But I think the most likely explanation is the vitamin D. I’m pretty pleased.

I’m not a doctor and you should not take medical advice from me. If you were to do this, the results would probably be different from mine, but I thought I would pass this on.

• I’ve been very busy with work, helping to raise a three year old, and taking an online graduate course.
• I’ve been finishing up the large commission I started over the summer, and I have allowed that to kind of block my ability to do other painting. That’s just about done, however, so it’s time to move on.

I had a whole day off today, so I took the opportunity to start a new painting.

This is “Layover.” It’s 20 × 20”, oil on linen primed with lead white, toned with red earth and raw umber. This is a monochromatic underpainting—a grisaille—which will be glazed over once it’s dry. I used various mixtures of Doak’s flake 1c and Natural Pigments black earth (an iron oxide black).

The key is a little too dark for optimal glazing (since glazes tends to darken what they cover). That means I’ll need to paint into the glaze with white to get the lights up.

I’ll keep you posted on this, and I’ll try not to let such a long time pass before putting up other stuff. Unfortunately, posting will probably be intermittent for the foreseeable future.

My immediate thought was, “Dude, you didn’t find your style. You found his style.” The paintings all had the same sort of pretty caricaturization that is the hallmark of Kobayashi’s style. It’s attractive, but rather cloying.

I’ve had this experience before. I’ll see a few paintings by an “emerging” artist and think, “clone of David Leffel.” Then I’ll look and see that Leffel is cited as a teacher. Or once I was at an open studio event and saw a bunch of expressionist paintings. “Oskar Kokoschka,” I thought. And darned if her bio didn’t state that she had studied with Kokoschka.

I’m not sure how I feel about this phenomenon. Once upon a time, it was pretty normal for a student to develop a style similar to a master’s: c.f. Van Dyck and Rubens, for example. These days, however, it seems a bit of a shame when a painter is presented as some sort of great talent when that talent really amounts to replicating another painter’s signature style.

That doesn’t mean that you should have no influences, but blatant copying of a style seems rather much, I think. Beyond that, I tend to be a bit disappointed when all of the students of a famous teacher such as Leffel seem to turn out paintings just like the teacher’s. It seems as if the job of a painting teacher is to help each student paint their own paintings, not more of the teacher’s work.

Momentum equals power

Momentum produces another critical payoff. As we work day after day with focus and intensity, energy starts to concentrate around us. That energy acts like a powerful electromagnetic field, drawing to us all kinds of providential aid and assistance. Ideas come. Insights accumulate. We even get help from outside sources—friends with money, colleagues with contacts. Serendipitous meetings produce happy outcomes, seemingly random occurrences bring unexpected allies and lucky connections.

When Paul said, “Start the next one tomorrow,” what he meant was, “Don’t mess with your momentum.”

Paul knew that the interval between the completion of Project L and the commencement of Project M is a power moment for Resistance. Resistance loves that moment because it can jump all over us with its arsenal of procrastination, self-doubt, indecisiveness and self-befuddlement. It can paralyze us.

The time to decide on Project M is while we’re in the middle of Project L. We should know what we’re going to do next. Otherwise we’re sitting ducks for Resistance.

This is exactly how it works for me. If I am working on a painting and can do some kind of work on it every day, then the momentum carries me through. If I stop, there’s a lot of effort involved in getting started again.

Go read the whole thing.

Oh, how I hate those parasites.

In case you’re not aware, comment spam is valuable because Google and other search engines rank sites based on how many other sites link to them. Google tends to filter out any site that’s just a bunch of crappy links, so just making sites solely for that purpose is a waste of time. But a link in a comment from a site Google considers legitimate (this site has a Google page rank of 4 out of 10, which is not too bad for a blog with a limited audience) does count. Enough such links, spread out over the internet, gets a site onto the first page of Google search rankings and decreases the cost of purchasing ads.

That’s worth money, so scumbags write programs to scour the internet, finding sites where automated comments can be entered. They are often written to look kind of like a generic nice comment, such as “Excellent points. Keep up the good work!” with hidden links. If you write a real comment that looks generic like that, it’s likely to end up in the spam filter.

Sigh. Sorry for the non-art post, but it’s kind of frustrating.

This is a commissioned piece. The customer wants a painting of this pair of jeans (supplied by him) against a black background. We went back and forth on the composition, eventually settling on making it look as if they were being worn by an invisible person. That entailed hiring a model to wear the jeans as I paint, since I’m pretty bad at working from photos.

As you can see, I’m working my way down. I mixed and tubed a base color and applied that as an initial dead coloring layer. I am working on top of that. Right now, the jeans are hung in midair so that I can paint the inside parts. The customer wanted to capture the iconic nature of Levis 501’s, so the inside tags—especially the one that will have a bright red 501 on it—are important.

I’ll try to post better pictures later on.

I like how it’s coming at the moment. In some ways this is an interesting and exciting project, and in others it will be really good to get this done, as it also represents a block on my other work.

The art world responded by repeating the same joke, with slight variations, over and over, while pretending to take itself seriously in the process. Much money was made by selling random objects to rich suckers. Now the whole joke may finally be starting to fall a bit flat.

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

But that doesn’t mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodigious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with surprising skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jewelry shop window and stop, transfixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped precious stone. Our distant ancestors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it —even before they could put their love into words.

It’s crap. Your heart will never have any idea how to paint.

Of course, there are a few artists out there who could benefit from some loosening up. For every one of them, there are a hundred others who need to learn how to actually paint. This entails the acquisition of difficult skills and the mindset to use those skills to achieve specific goals. Some of those skills are:

• How to draw
• How to draw exactly what you see
• How to draw the figure
• How to draw the portrait
• Proportion
• Perspective
• Foreshortening
• Color theory
• Color mixing
• Composition
• Brush handling
• Rendering
• Art history
• And lots more

That is the case even if you want to paint loosely. Read Richard Schmid’s book on painting (he paints in a loose alla prima style that is wondrous to behold) and you’ll see how hard it is to learn how to paint that way, too.

Heck, it’s a lot of work learning to paint abstractly, if you want to do it well.

Painting from the heart is for lazy people who just want to schmear paint around, feel artistic, and find people to tell them how wonderful it must be to paint.

Instead, learn to paint with your mind and your soul. That’s a lot harder, but will take you much further toward making paintings that belong on a stranger’s wall.