Friday, March 25, 2011

Monday, March 21, 2011

blah blah blah blog

I am very tired and may have to elaborate on this later, but I am sort of wary of a any art or discussion of art that makes my brain go "blah blah blah ginger."

I mean I know sometimes I go off on overly art speak tangents, but I think mostly when I do I am explaining a technique or tool or if discussing critique I am keeping it simple and communicative.

I am referring here to overly involved "I paid for these words with my tuition check and better use them"  discussions. Regurgitated coursework. That sort of thing.

When I worked as an operator for the phone company, we'd get a lot of Spanish speakers, and since when I was a drama filled teen (we all were, don't judge, you were too) my PLAN FOR LIFE was to be in Paris wandering around painting I took French all thru jr high, high school, and college. My Spanish is not functional. I cannot speak it at all. and I should have taken some Spanish at least a semester or two. But since I live where I do, I understand pretty much anything said to me in Spanish, I just don't command a vocabulary capable of responding with any accuracy.

When spanish speaking people would call in, I found that as long as I paid attention to what I was saying, visualized the point I was trying to get across, and meant what I said and said what I meant in English, then the Spanish speaker and I could understand each other with very little problem. Of course these were simple phone interactions having to do mostly with the operation of the phone itself.

But I found that the meaning what you say and visualizing to get your point across also works when explaining things to students and people who don't know what you are discussing as well. For instance if I were explaining how to prepare a canvas, I had better luck teaching it when I visualized it while I was speaking.

If you are talking about things and don't understand them yourself it makes it very hard for people to follow what you are saying, so if you are just spewing words you think will impress people, everyone can tell and it shuts their brains off, and you get a lot of "blah blah blah ginger" going on.

That's why I normally think it's a waste of time to "explain" art. Yes, it is a form of communication, BUT it should be self explanatory and the meaning changes for each viewer.YOUR explanation is not MY explanation, and that's fine, that's how it should be.

 People who NEED to explain it verbally to other people are imposing their view OR don't really want to admit they didn't actually look at it and let themselves be affected by it, so they are restating something someone else said about it without the power of understanding to fuel their words.

schools, influences, labels... they are all, at their base, meaningless. The real thing to understand is your internal thoughts about it. Art is simple, art is pure communication, visual depiction, music, dance they have no language barrier, all beings can be influenced by them see/hear/feel/do them.

It's the universal language, as simple as a smile and as complex as the history of the world.

Anything else is teaching a pig to whistle.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Well that tears it...

This morning in a fit of frustration I moved all my originals from Etsy to ArtFire.

So the only thing left on etsy is commissions for oil or acrylic portraits. I may move those at a later date.

From now on if you would like to purchase an Original Painting please Visit  my ArtFire studio.

The new interface combined with the old problems... just proved too much for me, the tools etsy offered weren't doing anything useful for me, and it's just time to throw my energy at the ArtFire shop, and see if I get better results.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Mask II

Daily Painting - ACEO - Mask II
©2011 Amy-Elyse Neer
Daily Painting for 3-10-2011
Watercolor on Hot Press 140lb watercolor ACEO 2.5" x 3.5"

Monday, March 7, 2011

St. Patrick's Day Green Challenge

Green Glass And Silver Buttons


Read the right side bar on the blog if you've never voted before.

My Old Lamp, And a story of frustration...

First off

Daily Painting - My Old Lamp -
©2011 Amy-Elyse Neer
8" x 10" 2h Faber Castel,HB derwent sketch, Dark Derwent Charcoal On Charcoal Paper
Daily Painting for 3-7-2011



There's a sketching challenge on redbubble this is for, in a certain group, unfortunately, the group is restricted to a max of 20 works. So I went through my stuff (this was one of the first groups I joined there) and found all my works in the group and removed all the ones I felt it was time to take out of the group. BUT that still ( I think I removed about 10 or 12 works) did not make it so I could put this IN the group.

There's no way on there to sort things by group, like tell it to bring up all your works in x group, so I had to go through each listing by hand and take stuff out. Now the cool thing is they are using one of my sketches for the cover image for the challenge, so that's very awesome. Now if I could only figure out what I am doing wrong and get this into the group so I can put it in the challenge.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Mask I

Daily Painting - ACEO - Mask I
©2011 Amy-Elyse Neer
Daily Painting for 3-6-2011
Watercolor on Hot Press 140lb watercolor ACEO2.5" x 3.5"

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

The Triptych Finished. False Spring


Three 4"x4" Oil on Studio Wrapped Canvases meant to hang in a diagonal arrangement

A print of the whole thing will be available after they are dry enough to scan, Individual prints are available now, But I reccomend waiting till the final scans are up.

False Spring Panel 3

4"x4" Oil on Studio Wrapped Canvas