Starting an Art Center

By the end of March , I am going to submit a proposal to lease this building as an art center  And I would like your input!  You can join this discussion on this blog or at my Facebook Page.

Here is some background and some of my ideas so far:

The building is located in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood in Saint Paul (my neighborhood).  It is a WPA building, built in 1938 and designed by Clarence "Cap" Wigington.  Wigington was the nation's first black municipal architect, serving as senior designer for the City of Saint Paul, Minnesota's architectural office for 34 years when the city had an ambitious building program. It is big enough to have two full size classrooms and one room for a gallery/event space.  It also has a small office space, 2 bathrooms and limited storage (and a flagpole on top).

Here are some of the questions I would like to address through the activities of this art center:
- What media can be taught best in this small site with limited storage?
- How and what can this center give to the artists who live in this immediate neighborhood?
- How and what can this center give to the neighborhood around it?
- What can the community give through this art center?
- How can individuals be taught to create beautiful artwork they care about?

If I acquire the building, it will be too late in the spring to create a full slate of classes for the summer.  So, this summer will be about trying different types of programs, getting feedback from the community and developing the fall schedule.  At this point, I am not too concerned with financials.  That will come later. 

I think that is where I will stop with the questions and thoughts, but you could add comments about any aspect of starting a new art center.

Who am I to start an art center?   In 1994, I started the education department at the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory and coordinated a fine art and botanical art program there for nine years.  The arts programming was very successful.  Since then, I have helped to create a city-wide beautification program called Blooming Saint Paul.  I have taught undergraduate art classes at Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY and at Bethel College, Saint Paul, MN.  I have taught community education art classes and workshops for the last 18 years.  To learn more and see my work, please check my website: www.markgranlund.com.

Thank you for posting your comments and thoughts here or at my Facebook Page. 

When I Am Not Painting I'm Being Grandiose

I have not felt as if I have been doing much artwork lately, although that is not true.  I have been doing much computer work finishing up the layout on several Book of Bartholomew stories.  I have also been working slowly on the city council scene for one of the stories.  Below you can see the inked version.  I am currently painting the image with watercolors.

One thing that has been preoccupying me is that soon I will pursue a building to begin a small art center in my neighborhood.  I have been talking with many people about this endeavor and trying to develop a mission for the center and configure what programming would take place.  I have decided I want more people's input, so that will be my next post. Stay tuned.

Sometimes I loose sight of what is important.  The training I received in school, and the general paradigm of the era I grew up in, was that artists cranked out work to be sold in galleries.  If you weren't producing paintings you weren't an artist - you were a hobbiest.  It is hard to shed that old paradigm which is no longer true.  Technology and the general understanding that being a creative artist simply means creating something and putting it out there for anyone to see.  I hope this change has come about because artists have figured that out that there are far more artists than the gallery world can provide for.  It is not up to the gallery owners and collectors to decide who is and who is not an artist.  It is no longer a matter of sitting in your studio producing as much as you can and, if it doesn't work, then getting a real job.

The other paradigm for artists back then was to become an art professor at a college and then have summers, weekends and a little help from students to get your work done.  Today, with the technology we have, the paradigms has shifted.  There are more avenues for expression and more venues for exposure.  So what am I doing when I am not making a painting to be sold at a gallery? I'm busy making the world I want to live in.  A creative world where people are helped with their life decisions. A world where artists collaborate with each other because of the energy and potential for satisfying work.  A life where the walls between disciplines are breaking down. A life where the walls between people are crumbling.  Yes, it sounds grandiose, and it is - but it's not.  It is simply making a decision every day to do something creative and to reach out while doing it.  This is against the grain and counter to society and most peoples lives.  That is the only reason it seems grandiose, because you can't be grandiose unless you are contrary to the norm.  Anything contrary to the norm will seem grandiose - or grotesque. I guess I am choosing not to seem grotesque.

So what am I doing when I am not painting?  I am still here making, working and being my grandiose self.

Sketchbooks and Journals

I am not a big journal person.  The collection on the table above is probably half of the journals I have kept over the last twenty five years.  Some are half empty. The one in the middle is the oldest and is from college.  The binding is coming apart and the drawings in it are smudged.  The newest one is the smallest journal just above my one from college.  Now, as I mentioned, I am not a person who is constantly putting my thoughts and feelings about art, life and what I ate this morning into a document that will live beyond me into immortality (or shame).  I am also not a sketcher, an artist who works out everything in miniature before approaching a canvas or piece of watercolor paper. I find nothing wrong with that process, I just am not that patient.  I want to make things as few times as possible before being done.

This is what I mostly do in my journals and even my sketch books: I think through structure.  The image above is for a story I have started about the beginnings of cities and culture.  For stories, I do not write down ideas and then figure out an order for those ideas.  I start with an idea and build the structure of the story, going from one thought to the next.  It is an intuitive line of thought and feeling I follow.  Structure comes from my feelings of boredom.   If I am getting bored with an idea, or part of the story, my mind drifts to something more interesting.  I will then pick up that thread and follow it to the next.  In my journal I jot down a beginning and where I want to be at the end of my story.  I will also write down thoughts of what might happen in the middle, but I usually end up somewhere else.  I spend as little time as possible in my journals, preferring to spend it writing or painting or drawing the real piece.

Here is a sketch and the completed ink drawing for a Bartholomew story.  The sketch is maybe 6" x 8".  The final drawing is 10" x 20".  In the sketch I was trying to determine the larger forms in the piece and composition.  By the time I completed the ink drawing, some things had changed from the sketch.  The audience on the sides of the composition are not in arching rows and the council are sitting at a square table area.  Individual faces, bodies and expressions are determined in the moment of drawing.  I like most of my work to be done on the final piece, not on the preliminaries.

Personal journaling is something I no longer do.  As I have looked back over the years at my journals, I find the same drivel repeated every few years.  Obviously, I was not getting anywhere with it.  Like my art, I prefer to spend my time in the final experience of living, not in the sketching out of what I might think about my experience.  I find responding to what is around me far more interesting. But that's me.

Retouching Paintings

Part of renovating my studio has been going through old paintings and deciding what to keep and what to paint over.  It is interesting going back to old paintings after not seeing them for awhile.  Some, obviously should be painted over.  Others, because of my overly critical eye when I paint, look better than I remember them.  There was a series of small canvases I created last year where I timed myself.  When I reached my time limit I stopped, no matter what.  Some of these small paintings ended up looking great.  Others needed a little more time to look better.  Here are two examples.



The first version of this cyclamen painting was a bit flat in the flowers and, although not as obvious here, was a bit more orangey than fuscia pink.  I painted over the flowers in the first version of the painting with a bright pink glaze.  In the shadowy dark areas I mixed in a little permanent blue to the bright pink glaze.  By glazing, I didn't have to re-draw any lines or shapes.  I simply changed the color.  I was happy with the leaves and left those alone.

In this landscape of two islands up north, well, the first version is so bad I even misnamed it. I called it Hawk Island, when in fact it is Crow Island.  The painting felt clunky and needed just a little more time to refine, especially the water.  So, I went over the entire painting with glazes and some thicker paint here or there.  The two biggest changes were to create more contrast in the trees and less contrast in the water. I repainted almost all of the trees and the hillside behind with lighter and darker tones than were there.  I also punched up the highlights on the rocks.  The end result being that you now see through the tree trunks on the closest island to the furthest island.  I also made the leaves on the closer trees more autumnal in order to create even more contrast between them and the island behind.

Then I attacked the water with a scumble of very light blue-grey over the existing wave patterns.  This creates more of a surface on the water instead of a pattern.  This also creates more distance - as it makes the surface of the water lay down and feel more horizontal.

I never used to go back into paintings once they are completed.  But I find it fun when I know that just a few more minutes of tweaking will make a great improvement.

Oil Painting: Stir Fry Painting

Stir Fry

Media: Oil Paint on Canvas

Size: 18" x 24" x 1.5"

This is the completed oil painting from two posts ago.  Amy Sippl cooked the meal and I made a painting of it as an illustration for The Book of Bartholomew.  To see an early stage of this painting check out my previous post here on The Artist's Brain blog. This was a fun painting to create - a lot of small detail which was challenging, yet at the same time, it didn't take long to paint any one thing.  I think the hardest part were the handles, they project out from the wok on metal rods at odd angles.  At first the handles looked curved and striped instead of like smooth wood.

Painting Finishes - Cold Wax

I have been busy lately renovating my studio and touching up old oil paintings. I have been putting final finishes on some of them. In the past, I have tried different kinds of varnishes but have never been happy with the final surface of my canvases. I paint with layers, allowing the colors underneath to show through here and there on the final layer of paint. In places where I use more oil, in order to thin the paint to glaze over another color, the surface ends up being more shiny than the surface around it. Other times I like to create a dry scumble of a lighter color over a darker color. Sometimes this ends up being a very flat or dry looking surface.

Creating a final surface with brush-on varnish would sometimes take a VERY long time to dry and would be too glossy. Spray varnishes, now maybe this is just me, but they make the surface look mechanical - too consistent - non-human. Varnish, in general seems to sit on the canvas, not act as part of the surface.

Non-human? Oh, he's off his rocker.

I recently have come across, thanks to recommendations from the staff at Wet Paint, cold wax medium.

This is a medium you rub onto the finished painting with a lint-free cloth. It doesn't need to be a tie-dye t-shirt like I am using here, but t-shirts work well for this.

You can see on this next painting the wax that I have  rubbed on.  It is a bit thick here.  It should be rubbed on thin without any ridges showing.  Rubbing in circles works best.  Let it sit for one day.  The next day, rub it again with a lint-free clothe to buff the wax.  It is just like waxing your car.  When you are buffing the wax, the microscopic platelets of wax are being flattened to overlap each other forming a protective skin.  If you don't buff, the painting still has some protection, but not as good as when the overlapping platelets form a skin. 

Overall, the wax creates a consistent satin surface to the painting that "feels" more a part of the painting than a varnish.  It smooths out inconsistencies in the shininess of the painting surface.  In this picture, on the left hand side of the image, you can see the shininess of a spray-on varnish.  On the far right of the painting, I have rubbed on some cold wax medium.  You can see the difference in shininess.

Also, wax can be applied to the surface of an oil painting as soon as the paint has dried to the touch.  Varnish should not be added to an oil painting until the paint has completely cured months later.  Wax still breathes and allows the paint to cure.  I am very happy with the wax and will continue to use it.

Oil Painting: Stir Fry Painting - Part 1

Stir fry painting?  Oh jeez, what is he painting now?  

This is the first stage of a painting of stir fried vegetables in a wok.  It is a painting/illustration for the story Harvest Dinner from The Book of Bartholomew.  The story publishes in eight days, so I am working feverishly to get this painting done, along with a couple other drawings of food.

Why is he always painting food?

Harvest Dinner is a story of harvesting some food from a garden and making a dinner.  There is a menu for the meal and it is this that I am illustrating. I got together with Amy Sippl and her husband Greg to have dinner.  Amy cooked the menu from the story and then I took pictures and we ate.  I did bring some garlic and onion fried yams.  It is always pleasant getting together with them.  If you want to read some of Amy's writing about food, go to her own blog: mnlocavore.com.

I will show additional stages of the painting and share how I am making it as it develops.
Be well and eat good food,