Blog / 2024 / My Artistic Nemesis

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

I don’t paint a lot of buildings—I mean, there was this brief moment about ten years ago where I did do a few home portraits. But, generally speaking, this is unusual.

It’s not that I don’t like to paint buildings; it’s more that I feel like there are lots of other artists who are doing that and so they have that covered. Sort of like how lots of people have wearing blue denim covered, so I feel like it’s my job to dye jeans before I wear them, or else it would be too much blue—too many paintings of buildings.

Though I don’t think I’ll ever find it necessary to wear blue denim, sometimes painting a building makes sense.

It’s a practice of getting outside of my usual practice, because it means sitting down with my nemesis. Every artist has one: a subject or technique that they just can’t get the hang of. And, for me, it’s straight lines.

Growing up, I remember asking my mom to draw lines for me and I remember her encouraging me to figure out how to do it myself. But the truth is that I am not now—nor have I ever been—someone with a hand that’s steady in that way. In fact, maybe that’s a better description of my nemesis: the steadiness of a sign painter’s hand. I mean, I do okay. I paint and draw with confident marks. But smooth lines—whether they’re straight or curved—remain difficult for me.

Which is why architecture isn’t something I paint too much. Well, that, and the thing where other artists have it covered. Except, of course, they also don’t. In the sense that no one else will ever paint a building like I can, because no one else is me and no one has precisely the same weirdly antagonistic relationship with smooth long lines.

In the case of this painting, I decided to remove distractions in order to more fully face off with my nemesis. I limited my palette to titanium white, burnt umber, primary cyan, permanent violet, cadmium orange, quinacridone gold, nickel azo yellow, and maybe some hansa yellow medium. That may seem like a lot of pigments, but forgoing a darker blue* and any green or purely red pigments is different from my usual practice.

This method of limiting my palette was something I used to do a lot of when I was first starting out as an artist. At that point, it was a way of getting to know the pigments and how they interacted with each other. But for this painting, I wanted to concentrate on the way the lines in the piece intersect. Keeping the palette more focused seemed like a good way to do that.

I’m happy with how this painting came out. I don’t feel like buildings are going to become my thing now, but this has inspired me to challenge myself to paint at least one building a year. It’s a slow-burn befriending of my nemesis and it leaves me wondering: what is your artistic nemesis? How have you made friends with it?