I think making self portraits is a good practice as an artist. It serves as a benchmark to gauge skill and changing concerns in technique and color. Rembrandt famously made 100 self portraits (that we know of), and it’s interesting to notice the changes in techniques and age in each one.
The last couple days I painted a self portrait, and I think it’s finished. It’s oil on wood and measures 12×12 inches.
In the next few weeks as classes wind down this semester, I’m reintroducing coaching for artists. This will be in a new format, and you’ll be able to easily book coaching calls here. If you know an artist who’s feeling creatively stuck or needs some art-related guidance, can you let them know?
I recently made a series of 6 sculptures using encaustic. Encaustic paint is made by melting wax and damar crystals, and mixing them with pigments for color. Each painted layer then has to be fused to the layers underneath it by liquifying the surface with a propane torch.
The materials I used are: encaustic (wax, pigment, damar resin), cardboard, galvanized steel, and polyvinyl acetate (a fancy way of saying Elmer’s Glue or white glue).
I documented the process from ideation to completion, and you can scroll down to see it from start to finish.
The sculptures are on view and available from the Art Gallery at Congdon Yards in High Point, NC till April 19th.
My sketchbook a couple months ago: the sculpture shape ideas (right) and color combination ideas for sculptures (all over the place). There’s also a drawing for a painting (top left), planning for this exhibit (bottom left), and random ink marks
Drawing a shape on cardboard
Cutting out shapes using an X-acto blade
Cutting and shaping steel wire for the legs and base. The base pieces are also shown
Testing the steel legs and base for balance
Clamping and drying the sculptures. Here the body shape has been attached to steel legs, which has been sandwiched between 2 base plates.
Some of the sculptures after I filled in all the edges with Golden Light Modeling Paste. This way I have a nice smooth, not rough cardboard-y, edge. I sanded and shaped all the edges.
Priming the pieces using R&F Encaustic Gesso for a nice smooth absorbent surface. I sanded the surfaces before and after.
Four of the sculptures primed and ready to go
My encaustic hotplates with melted unmixed colors in the big pots and mixed colors in the lids. The big containers contain clear medium and white.
Six finished encaustic sculptures
In this video you can watch how I fuse the encaustic layer using a propane torch.
Last month I shared with you that I started painting people again. You can see the first four paintings of the series below. I’m now working on the fifth painting of six I planned to make. After I make six, I’ll decide if I’m going to continue making them. At this point, I’m loving the process, I’m learning a lot and I see no reason to stop working figuratively in the near future. It’s interesting to note that I was primarily painting people until a semester into graduate school when I began exploring abstraction. This was back in 2002, and over the years every time I tried making figurative work again, it just didn’t feel right.
This time feels different. The way I’m approaching painting the figures and establishing their relationship to the spaces around them, the way I’m layering the paint and using color feels like things I’ve been thinking of for the last 2 decades are clicking.
I’m interested in what happens when the figures aren’t looking out at us, when they look away or toward someone or something off the edge of the painting. The paintings feel like a moment within time, like something has just happened before we were privy to the moment in the painting and it will continue beyond the painting. The people occupy outside spaces that are ambiguous, sometimes deep and three-dimensional and other time more geometric and on the surface of the painting. I’m playing with colors, noticing which ones create interesting optical effects, particularly on the depth portrayed in the painting. The paintings are mysterious and a little weird and that feels like the right place for me right now.
Four recent paintings on my studio wall
Looking at the image of my studio above and of the painting Pilot Mountain 1 below, you’ll notice similar colors and compositions. Seeing my work from different periods like this together reminds me that I’ve been interested in the same things visually for a long time. I think it’s the subject matter thats most different.
Pilot Mountain 1 is available from my shop. It’s one of the paintings inspired by my favorite place to walk and run, Pilot Mountain.
Pilot Mountain 1, acrylic and oil on panel, 20 x 20 inches, 2018
Two years in the making of a painting collection… What started this body of work was a question I asked on Facebook: What outdoor spaces bring you peace and happiness? Friends sent me photos of their special landscapes, and I used those images as a jumping off point to create these paintings.
In this series of landscapes the feel of wide open spaces meets a soft geometry – a meditative play of shapes and colors.
Explore the paintings in the Searching in the wind collection HERE.
Hi everyone! Join me as I add watercolor to a botanical drawing. Here I’ll show you how to layer transparent watercolor in a loose relaxed way to add color to your drawings. This is the follow up to my Step-by-step botanical drawing video.
Share this freely!
If you are looking to dive deeper into watercolor, check out my new watercolor class HERE. It’s for all levels and features video lessons you can do at your own pace. See you in class!
Why do I make abstract paintings? Well it’s an instinctive thing and it’s what has primarily interested me in my artistic practice over the last two decades. For me, the experience of making a painting successful with nothing but marks and color keeps me interested and engaged. It also allows me to express a lot of the ideas and images I think of in a way that is more sensorial.
I don’t paint so that people can see what it’s like to be outside. I paint so that people can FEEL what it’s like to be outside.
When a painting features a thing or person, we are drawn to those recognizable elements and the possible stories around them. Abstraction is so vital because it captures the things we cannot see. When it’s done well, abstraction pulls at our gut in ways that we may not be able to express with words or photos. It taps a line directly to our emotions. This is why some people cry when they are in the presence of a Rothko painting. I am one of those people. It never fails that if I see a Rothko and I take the time to sit in front of it, I’ll soon be sobbing. (It was embarrassing at first, and then I just gave into it.)
I paint both totally abstract and representational paintings. I consider my more representational work – like my plein air landscapes – an important part of my practice. All of that looking at the world and recording it and making decisions about what to include affects my more abstract work. I think of the small landscapes as finished paintings, but they are also studies for my larger more abstract works. When I paint or draw, and am not simply copying something, I make a series of decisions about how to translate what I see or think of into marks and color. With time, as I keep practicing my craft, my eye and hand become more agile and my decision-making is strengthened. With experience, I’ve become more confident in my decisions while I work. When to make big changes or when to stop are not easy problems to solve, but I trust my process.
Life is a big paradox. I think abstraction often does a more compelling job of expressing this than a photo-representational artwork. I’ve accepted that life is chaos and I’m ok with not having it all figured out. Painting is what helps me explore this and share it with everyone else.
How does abstraction make you feel? Do you have any questions about this you’d like to ask me? Email me and I’ll do my best to answer.
I’ll leave you with this excellent video from PBS’ The Art Assignment. This is “The Case for Abstraction.”
For the paintings in my exhibit at SECCA, “I must love you very much” I did a bit more planning than I normally do. To be honest, I don’t typically plan my paintings, but for these paintings I did have a specific feeling that I wanted. I liked the idea of making a group of paintings big enough to surround viewers such as Monet’s “Water-Lilies.” Some of his water lily paintings were mural sized works that filled specially made rooms at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.
I’ve been obsessed with Pilot Mountain for a couple of years, and have made a lot of paintings inspired by the place, but they were smaller works. For this project, I wanted to make paintings so big that a person looking at them would have the feeling of being transported to Pilot Mountain. While I’m not interested in creating a photo-realistic image of the place, I am interested in evoking the myriad sensations we feel when we are there.
To determine the size of the paintings, I measured the space I had available for my exhibit at the museum. I planned to make the paintings as large as I could make them while still leaving a bit of white space – or breathing room – around each one. I made four paintings, one for each wall.
After determining their size and taking reference photos on some hikes, I made preliminary watercolor drawings to loosely plan out the composition for each of the four paintings. I used a photo as the first point of reference, then reinterpreted the image by looking for the essential shapes that I would use in my paintings. As I worked on the large paintings, I referred to these drawings as a sort of map to give structure to my paintings. These are those drawings:
Want to see how I made these paintings? Check out this time-lapse video I made documenting the process.
I recently finished a group of four paintings for my exhibition at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), and during the time I made the last two of the paintings, I shot a photo every ten seconds to document the process. Below is the time-lapse video of the entire process over the course of six weeks. From start to finish, you’ll see how I put together “Of Stones and Earth and Air” (on the left) and “Unhearable Sounds” (on the right). See these paintings and the others at “I must love you very much,” my solo exhibit at SECCA, in Winston-Salem, NC September 17 – October 13. The opening reception takes place on Thursday September 19, from 6:00-8:00 PM, with an artist talk at 7:00 PM. Artwork is available for purchase. Contact me by phone (336) 283-0185 or email if you’d like to acquire these paintings for your collection.
It’s my pleasure to announce that my first solo museum show opens at SECCA in Winston-Salem next month. Read on for the press release with all the juicy details…
Jessica Singerman, “Unhearable Sounds,” 2019, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches
(August 20, 2019, Winston-Salem, NC) Award-winning painter Jessica Singerman announces her exhibit of paintings entitled I MUST LOVE YOU VERY MUCH, opening at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) on September 17 and continuing through October 13. The opening reception takes place on Thursday September 19, from 6:00-8:00 PM, with an artist talk at 7:00 PM. Artwork will be available for purchase.
In Singerman’s monumental paintings, layered shapes meet muscular paint handling and a bold use of color to evoke a vast landscape and memories of time spent in the outdoors.
Says Singerman of these paintings, “There’s a line from a Mary Oliver poem that goes “If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.” Her writing cuts to the essential about what matters and what I hope to share in my work. It feels especially poignant these days – our world feels crazy and I’m afraid to lose the lands I love so much. One of my favorite such places is Pilot Mountain State Park. It inspires my work with its beauty as it overlooks the landscape surrounding it. This group of paintings came from time I spent hiking there with my family – views from the trail-side and of a pastoral landscape – not wild, but full of a vast energy nonetheless.
Mary Oliver’s writing encapsulates something essential about the human condition and about our experience in nature. If my paintings could speak, I like to think Mary’s poetry is how they would speak. Or rather, I hope that my paintings get close to the kind of transcendence of her poetry. Marks and color that transcend being and take the viewer to another place – a memory perhaps – and spur them to reflect on what it means to be human and on our relationship to nature. In any case, “if you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.”
Arts writer Michael Solender wrote in the Charlotte Observer, “Singerman’s approach to her work and her outlook on life brings a broad perspective as a product of a bicultural upbringing. Her mother is French and her father is American.(…) Her work offers explosions of color, form and light conjuring imagery of motion and depth.”
About the artist: A resident of North Carolina since 1980, Jessica Singerman lived alternatively in France and the United States during her early life. Singerman earned her BA with Highest Honors in 2002 from the College of William & Mary, Virginia, and her Masters of Fine Arts in 2004 from the University of Delaware while on a fellowship. Her watercolors are the subject of a book published in 2017, Little Watercolor Squares, and her award-winning paintings and drawings are exhibited and collected internationally. Singerman lives and works in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. For more information visit www.jessicasingerman.com.
SOUTHEASTERN CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, including I MUST LOVE YOU VERY MUCH, by Jessica Singerman, September 17 – October 13. Opening reception Thursday September 19, 6:00-8:00 PM, and artist talk at 7:00 PM.
750 Marguerite Dr, Winston-Salem, NC 27106, www.secca.org, 336.725.1904
I’m fascinated by the wind. Cultures create all sorts of stories to try and make sense of the wind and how it affects us. My grandparents lived in Caen, France for a while when I was little. It’s a very windy place, and I will always remember how the wind there made me feel. It tossed me around, made me feel little, and made me feel generally uneasy. On the other hand, winds clean the air, carry scents, and even create power with wind turbines.
Music of the Wind 1, oil and acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
I made these paintings as I thought of the wind: how it feels when we’re outside when it’s hot or cold, how it shapes the earth…
Music of the Wind 2, oil and acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
The wind is mysterious. It’s such a powerful force and yet we can’t see it.
In these particular paintings, I’m layering shapes and color evocative of landscapes seen both from ground level and from above (from an airplane for example). I also layer gestural marks and shapes of color to convey the energy of the outdoors.
These paintings are currently available from my web shop until August 27th. Find them HERE.
Music of the Wind 3, oil and acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
There’s a strong wind called Le Mistral in the south of France.
According to popular culture throughout history, this wind has been accused of everything from making people crazy to inciting murder. So in that vein, here’s an interesting tidbit I found this week… Van Gogh, who famously lived in the south of France, maybe didn’t commit suicide. Recent forensic research shows that he may have been instead murdered by a local group of kids who used to bully him… Read more about why this could be true, how the story of his suicide came about, and why a lot of folks are angry about it on the Charmed Studio and on Vanity Fair.
If you found this the least bit interesting, please share it with others. Thanks!
