Tag: Fred Lipp

I ran into a guy who was in my painting class for many years. He asked if I was still painting. I said I am drawing. He said I haven’t done anything in two years. That would be just about the time our teacher died. Fred Lipp affected many people that way. He was a way of going forward. Criticism, correction, repeat and then on to the next piece.

I too took a long break but I never stopped thinking about his advice. I live with his words in my head and the absolute last thing he would want would be for someone to stop when he left. I was going to move on from this whole crime face stuff but I’m not finished with it yet. I never will be but it sort of encompasses everything so why bother. And I have an opportunity to show a lot it in October so I’m carrying on.

My father called this morning to tell me I should buy Jeff Spevak a few beers. He spotted the piece Jeff wrote in Sunday’s paper about the band and my art show at the Little. Nobody reads the paper anymore so I posted it below. I say nobody but I still do. I’m not sure Jeff does because he refers to the “Crimestopper” page as a “feature once run by the Democrat & Chronicle.” I’m working on fifteen now that were in the “A” section a few weeks back.

I snapped the photo above to remember what parts of my painting Fred Lipp covered. His grey paper is his primary teaching tool. and you can see it in action here. I was struggling with this one. It got away from me and too many parts were out of whack. He told me he liked how I carved with white in what is shown and this let me see what works. The parts under the paper were smoothed out or blended. The dreaded “blended.” He can sometimes cover three fourths of your painting and then tell you, “There’s your painting.

Paintings by Paul Dodd, Fast Forward Film Fest and G. Love
“The narcotic groove of Rochester’s avant-garde jazz combo Margaret Explosion has returned to its free, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday residency at The Little Café, 240 East Ave. So that’s happening all through May. As a bonus this month, the walls of the venue are filled with the odd, haunting portraits by the band’s drummer, Paul Dodd. The pencil sketches are taken from photos from “Crimestoppers,” head shots of people wanted by the Rochester Police Department, a feature once run by the Democrat & Chronicle (Don’t you ever accuse this newspaper of not supporting the arts).

Six oil portraits on the wall behind where the bands play are particularly intriguing. It’s the 1957 Mynderse Academy basketball team from Seneca Falls, Seneca County, taken from the school’s yearbook. The whole team, it had only six players. In his artist’s statement, Dodd says he picked the team because the players looked “especially hapless.” Indeed, as the headline accompanying the yearbook photo notes, “Team Faced Tough Competition.” Virtually all of the portraits, basketball players and second-degree assault suspects alike, are reduced to heads floating on a white background.” – Jeff Spevak D&C

My father worked from his sketches of the Charlotte lighthouse to create this watercolor in class last week. Amazing to watch him work so quickly in an additive medium that is so unforgiving of missteps. There are, certainly, missteps whenever you stretch or do something new. He is not beyond putting the whole sheet in the bathtub and washing it out. And he has a short, stubby brush that he uses to scrub out small sections. I watched him the other night as he took some figures and a sign right out of an Adirondack scene. The color came up and ran all over the piece as he soaked it up with a sponge. It is nearly impossible to reclaim a white. Opaque white is a sickly looking substance. You protect whites and they are often the strongest element in the end. It is a dangerous but seductive process.

One week later this lighthouse painting is in a show in the gallery at the Creative Workshop and I was taking this photo of it, trying to dodge the reflections from the glass, when someone behind me exclaimed, “I love that painting.” I proudly said, “My dad did it,” and he said, “I teach the watercolor class.” All very cool but you have to wonder why most classes are segregated by medium. Fred Lipp’s “Advanced Painting” class is the exception. I recently switched from charcoal to watercolor and then oil and needed to be be reminded that the intent is exactly the same. A change in form can be described by change in color just as a change in form is described by a change in line.

Fred Lipp, an artist and teacher at the Creative Workshop is giving a talk on Sunday at the MAG. I’ve talked about what Fred has tried to teach me many times. I am a slow learner. The talk is entitled “Comparisons of Visual Spatial Effects Utilized in Modern Painting.” That’s a mouthful but the talk is guaranteed to to be an eyeful and a headful as well. Peggi and I were lucky enough to have a brief preview and feel this will be a most rewarding experience.

This could also be a last opportunity to see the fabulous Matisse show there.
2pm Sunday June 1, Memorial Art Gallery
Free with gallery admission.

Some days I get so bogged down making the rounds of friends’ blogs, news sites and links from my Tumblr page that there is no time left for a post here. That is as it should be. Yesterday was one of those. Who knew that Millie of “My Boy Lollipop” did such a beautiful version of “Since I Met You Baby” and that Jacke Edwards, the male voice on her early records wrote this song. I had always thought it belonged to the Tex Mex border artists like Doug Sahm and Freddy Fender. Kevin is on a roll over at So Many Records.

Louise Wareham Leonard called my attention to a Louise Gluck passage on how writing never gets any easier. I find this fascinating because I recently had a conversation with Bill Keyser, a sculptor, painter and fellow art student at the Creative Workshop. He was telling me how he worries he is getting dependent on our teacher, Fred Lipp, and he wrestles with whether he should skip class for a while. He is torn because Fred has this amazing ability to always be there at exactly the right juncture to call your attention to the next concern. Only when you are ready to see it and be in a position to do something about it. Just when you think I’ve got it, this painting is done, Fred will turn your your head around.

I found this conversation so interesting, of course, because I have been there, still am. If you’ve read Louise’s piece you might want to take a look at this post I wrote a few years ago on the Midas Touch. Like Louise Gluck says “the fantasy exists.”

I apologize for the quality of my photo of Bill Keyser’s painting, “White Intrusion,” currently on view at the Lucy Burne Gallery in the Creative Workshop of the Memorial Art Gallery. The painting deserves better.

Masterfully simple, it could be described as one color on a white ground, a positive and negative space play, but the title tells you the white is a positive and both colors could be positives. In fact there are three forms involved in this intrusion. The two colors are completely flat but the three forms are multi-dimensional. Bill Keyser is a woodworker/sculptor/painter and a fellow student in Fred Lipp’s painting class. I find this painting very exciting.

Zanne Brunner is a former art teacher. She runs the I-Square Gallery and she has asked me and the five other artists in the current “Sight & Sounds 2” show to do an artist’s talk tonight. Art educators like that sort of thing and often the back story is more interesting than the work. I couldn’t decide whether to just wing it or prepare for it. Winging it would be easier but I would surely say something stupid so I’ve decided to collect a few notes.

Why? I’ve been painting and drawing these characters for a long time and I’ve noticed most people look at my work and quickly avert their eyes. The faces could be a lot more compelling for one thing but for most it is simply not a pleasant experience. Others, like Pete Monacelli, spend a lot of time trying to figure out why I paint these guys and I would guess he has spent more time thinking about this than I have.

I started this project by trying to capture the expression in the mugshots (reference for the human condition) from the local paper, a lifelong academic exercise, but lately I start with the source material and then leave it behind as I try to mold the figure with a more dynamic presence. I could point to a few examples in the show. Better to have a dialog with them. Where is this all leading? Here is a music analogy since we are all musicians. I have listened to Peggi Fournier create beautiful melodies on the spot for a long time. Pure creation!

I continue to take a Wednesday night painting class with Fred Lipp and he has helped me immeasurably.

How many times over the last few years have I heard Fred Lipp say those words? “Let your eye be your guide.” In other words, “Don’t think.”

I still go around in circles as I look for a solution to compositional problems but I am increasing finding the answers not in the source or in logic but in my eye. I am thrilled to report that I’m learning to trust my eye because I’m finding it works. When I see it I know that this is my solution. But I have to let my eye see it before I think about it.

I’ve been drawing from the same sources for the last few years, a bunch of mugshots from a Chicago paper. I’d rather use the local Crimestopper models but they’ve reduced the size of their photos both in the newspaper and on their website so I found twenty Chicago mugshots online. I’ve drawn each of them four or five times but increasingly I find myself working away without the source and when I go through the stack to refer back to the one I used I can’t find one that looks like drawing. I find this very exiting.

Almost November and we’re still harvesting tomatoes, red peppers, jalapeños, eggplant and spinach. We came back from the garden with two bags full this morning. That “cooler by the lake” thing that we have going in the Summer works in reverse during the Fall so we’ve managed to miss the hard frosts. I’m looking for an eggplant recipe in a separate window and will report back.

I love the idea of an “art bank” or I should say my idea of what an art bank could be since I have no idea what this place is all about. We had dinner at El Rincón in Sodus and spotted this sign on the main drag. I looked it up online and found remnants of a collective that fell apart years ago and has since let their domain name expire.

I’m thinking of a place where art truths and treasures are stored and protected. Last night in painting class Fred Lipp told Peggi “You can take that to the bank.” He was on a familiar roll, the one where he convinces you to trust your eye and not your mind (or the plan you started with). You trust your eye when things are right on. You just know before thinking about it, and when there is something wrong, as in “I’m not sure about this passage… is there something wrong with it?” For that there is this truth: “If the question comes up, the answer is yes.” Every town should have an establishment that protects these foundations.

Fred Lipp brought three framed copies of Matisse drawings in to our art class this week and set them on my work table. He called them really fine examples of minimal maximal drawings. Matisse is indeed the master. With deceptively simple line drawings he creates an immense amount of volume along with expression.

These three self portraits demonstrate Matisse’s understanding of Cezanne’s use of space and all carry on from “The Watchmaker“. His understanding of these principles allows him to knock you out with amazing composition. The forms not only occupy the space they animate the space and the environment animates the form. They are close to sculptural. You can almost encircle the figure with your gaze.