Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Some Serious Blockage/New Mentor

I've been working hard to pull together all my thoughts from this last residency for the last few weeks, all in hope of arriving at some point of departure for the next semester. I left Boston with many good ideas, but have yet to decide a course of action. It's been very frustrating to feel that I need to be moving ahead with something now and I don't know what that is. To stay creative I've been filling up a sketchbook with little watercolor/ink drawings, studies for bigger paintings. I feel light years away from where I should be and that's pretty scary. I can't remember feeling so blocked before... 

On the positive side, I have decided on a mentor and things should work out great. Patricia Canney is a Twin Cities oil painter whose work I've seen around town at galleries and the Minneapolis Art-A-Whirl. In her recent work, she has concentrated a lot on groupings of objects with interesting shape and light. She also manages to harness a feel of past time, which of course is something I'm more than a little interested in. I'm questioning my route as a figure painter and I think working with her will be very beneficial. We'll hopefully have our first meeting soon. Here's a few of her images: 

     
                                          

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

BOSTON residency 2


Residency 2 is in the books and it was a great time. As expected, It was 10 days of art overload filled with critiques and conversations. I now have at least 12 possible artistic directions, so my main task in the next few weeks is to collect and sort through all of those ideas and choose a course of action. My first paper of the next semester is a semester summary due in a few weeks, so I'll wait till then to post those ideas. I can say with confidence now that I will still be working in the same vein, but I'll be pushing the idea and the stylization quite a bit further to make it more unique to Nate Stromberg style, whatever that may turn out to be... thats a little scary to think about now. In only 6 months I'll be back in Boston again with a whole new set of work. I've still got a long way to go. I didn't have a lot of time to enjoy Boston, but I did get a morning to walk the city. It's a great place and this time it did feel like returning home a little bit. AIB is right by Fenway Park, so I got to experience the crazy Red Sox fans. One of these times I'd like to go to a game... I also missed the Celtics victory parade by a day, oh well.  It's good to be home and I have lots to do.... As usual I'll post my thoughts and pictures of my work here.