Tree Conversation about to be Launched

 

assorted painted 8 x 6 oval panels from newest series

That I am not a natural at languages clearly stands out with a father who speaks about nine and a little sister who lives and speaks fluently in France. It was truthfully my crayon and paintbrush that helped me communicate and make friends.

 

Trees were my first friends. At age four, I attended an art school located somewhere between an ancient stone temple and the massive aerial roots of a banyan tree in Kuala Lumpur. I have the earliest, distinct, memory of the sound, smells and visual abundance of walking on paths strewn with a variety of shaped leaves.

 

Art School (with my mom) in KL, painting arches and trees

During the lock-down last year, when the calendar cleared and everything went quiet, I undertook a painting project that would pit my skills against a variety of arboreal characters.

 

As an art teacher, I have exhorted my students to identify their inner critic. We all have one or two, (or more). The tenacity of those belittling voices can ruin the fun of any painting session. It is through my teaching that I confronted memories of my own.

 

In second grade, I painted a mural of a holiday pine tree in my Haitian classroom. Proudly standing back to look at the result, I was crushed when my teacher leaned to my ear and whispered, ‘You really can’t paint trees, can you?” Granted, I was trying a new “textural brush work”, but her voice still rings true over 50 years later!

 

As I contrived to once and for all learn how to paint a tree, I studied the limbs, roots, bark, and crowns. Entering into the space of a tree I felt their energy emanating towards me! I can hardly pass one nowadays without saying “hi” or “hello”. Just looking closely at them brings me a sense of understanding, peace, and joy.

 

Be Like a Tree

Each of the Tree Conversation paintings is in acrylic on a hand-cut birch-ply oval panel. Every panel is 8 x 6 x 1/2 inches and drilled with a recess in the back so to hang flush to the wall. In addition, every painting’s backside contains quotes or thoughts taken from a variety of sources and pertaining to a leafy conversation.

 

Starting the first weekend of May, at our open studio on the farm, I will have a couple dozen to share. On May 3^rd I will launch a website sale of my favorites on my store for a limited time only. Please email me with any questions you may have. It is my hope that we all use whatever language comes naturally to us, to converse with nature. I have found it an easy way to get a spiritual measure of oneself.

 

Please subscribe to my blog by email. (top of the right hand column) I post once or twice a month on subjects ranging from what is happening in the studio, to art historical revelations, to seasonal delights of farm living. I’d love to have you in the conversation.

www.tillystudio.com

Rollercoaster love affair

As much as I love trees, (being in them, under them, and surrounded by them), I have found my desire to draw them meets constant resistance.

This started in 2nd grade. I had just finished painting the Christmas tree for the class holiday mural and stepped back to assess it with my beloved teacher. She leaned in and said, "you really don't know how to paint trees, do you?" I had, in my defense, been turning the brush this way and that for texture, but I guess it did not translate.

The shock of that exchange has lived inside me for all these years. When students ask me to demonstrate a tree in paint, I can do it, but often there is an echo inside my head that wonders if they will catch on and see that I "really don't know how to paint trees."

It's hard not to paint or draw trees when you do a landscape, or create a place. Being a fictionalist, my paintings often illustrate a real setting and trees often sneak into the frame. My trees grow out of small gestures, blurred as if my reading glasses had failed me in clarifying the languages of limbs and leaves.

Then in college, my professor declared that I must eliminate green from my palette. Apparently green paintings are unsuccessful and never sell. So my greens come in shades of purple and ochre and pyrollian orange.

So I am starting this project of painting close to 100 small paintings of trees at the ripe age of 59 in order to move through the critics, the ghosts, the self-talk, and the comparisons. I hope to explore different ways to convey the importance of trees and I know it might take close to 100 times get it right.

I hope you can join me when I present my tree stories going forward. Thanks for looking.

Tilly

Materiality in work

Certain things in life make me happy. My jar of brushes would be one of them. Not to get caught up in owning a lot of things, I do admit my joy in collecting brushes, and colors, and tools to make art.

hand-colored lino print

What about you?

Picasso Version H ( I and J) depicts the Danger and Allure of the Women of Algiers

My copy of Picasso's version H

Picasso reportedly told his lover Francoise Gilot that there were two types of women: Goddesses and Doormats. In this painted version H, he goes back to square one, and seems to start over with his attempts to translate Delacroix’ Women of Algiers in Their Apartment.  Concentrating on the two figures in the foreground, Picasso contrasts his approach to them, exhibiting the danger and allure of an Odalisque. To the right, the shifting jumbled mass of the reclining woman is like a hallucination. This cubist affront of the body is how Picasso paints women he is breaking up with. At the time his lover and mother of two of his children, Gilot, was leaving him. The regal hookah smoker to the left who is both poised and paused, was modeled after Picasso’s new lover and future wife, JaquelineRoque.

Lounging, for all we know, in the storage of  Guiseppe Nachmad, a private collector in Switzerland, it was last seen publicly in 2010 at Tate Liverpool in a special exhibition called Picasso: Peace and Freedom. The show was curated by Prof. Lynda Morris, AHRC Research Fellow at Norwich University College of the Arts, and Dr.Christoph Grunenberg, Director, Tate Liverpool. And there exists a small photograph of it hanging above the couch in the Ganz living room. 

Version I was painted January 25^th, 1955, belongs to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasedena, California. 

My sketch of Picasso's version I

Of the 885 works owned by Norton Simon, this work is not on view. Emily A. Beeny, Curator at the Getty, who was associate curator of the Norton Simon Museum, has narrated a good 6-minute video about the Picassocollection and mentions that Picasso said, “Painting is a sum of destructions”. That rings true especially in this work where he has scraped away much of the details. The relaxed brushwork and color is focus here. Picasso limits his palette to the primaries and Black and white. This version is much looser and sketchier than version H. It is as if Picasso used one brush and the leftover paints from painting version H to replicate the scene. 

An artist might do this to enable the essence of the composition to shine through and to explore where the unifying elements lie.  It’s like I tell my students, “squint and just look at the main shapes to see what is working, or not”.

My copy of version J

Version J is like versions H and I, but tighter and more unified. Color is secondary to form and shape. It sold through Sotheby’s in 2006 for $18.6 million and is now in the collection of the shady art collecting Helly Nahmad who resides, (after a brief stint in Otisville correctional facility), in the NY Trump Towers, and Monaco. The painting is reproduced in the 2006 catalogue of Nahmad’s exhibit Picasso: La Californie(London)

Cleve Gray at Hotchkiss

This article of mine appeared in the Compass Art section of the Lakeville Journal on Thursday December 5, 2019

One does not make friends, one recognizes them, so the saying goes, and it seems Joan Baldwin has taken it to heart. She has intelligently curated and installed an exhibition that honors Cleve Gray, the artist scholar, by bringing us into his work and studio through her selections from the Cleve Gray Flat Files. The installation at the Hotchkiss School’sTremain Gallery covers six decades, from his work in high school to the Interplay series created just two years before his death in 2004.

An opportunity to see the contemplative life of Cleve Gray, the show feels half library and half studio. Work is pinned to slanted pedestal shelves. Watercolors, prints and drawings are mounted with bull clips, loose and unframed, so you can practically rub your nose on them. On thick deckle-edged paper, the work feels like a remnant of an event with each gesture of mark-making and color response that, either horizontal or vertical, contains it and converses with the next piece. His ink figures and watercolor landscapes all bear similar signatures with blocked tones, infused color transitions, repeated fractures of light, and screens of geometric patterning created with the long edge of his charcoal sticks.

His brushes are displayed under glass. Scumbled, frayed, split, thickly coated and caked, their disintegrating handles are evidence of Work. Large chunks of pastels, blocks of dried red and orange pigments and wax crayons are presented as relics of a life of physical commitment. A large photograph is displayed of his paint splattered studio sink. His materials look impulsive and untidy. There is a physicality emphasized, with inclusions of worn studio ephemera and text panels describing Gray’s physical breath work that preceded the painted marks. He was a striving, curious, hardworking artist.

The installation is intentionally thematic rather than chronological because of so many returns in his practice to investigations of color, line, pattern, and the open and closed compositions. Included in the show is an early portrait he drew as a teenager at Phillips Academy that heralds his interest in cubism with angular form and emotive use of color. This lens is returned to in his Paris years, his southwestern landscapes of the 50’s and his vertical abstracts of the 60’s.

His college thesis was on Yuan Chinese landscape painting and the theory and process became a lifelong influence. The Yuan Dynasty Chinese painters responded with their spirit to the subject and then relished the marks of the material as spontaneous and transcendent. Gray’s brushwork shows in layers of transparency built up and in the combination of dry and wet marks. In all the work you can see an interest in the calligraphic line and in experimenting with media. A long scroll landscape of the Southwest has multi-vanishing points and details lightened and darkened for emphasis, with field notations woven through out.

After serving in WWII, young and curious, Cleve Gray stayed in Paris making art and joined other artists working in Jacques Villon’s studio. A pastel portrait of Claude McKay, a Harlem renaissance poet who was both a friend and a model at the studio, is an example of this time.

A large wall-sized diagram connects Cleve Gray, “artist, writer, farmer, friend”, to his influences in the educational, literary, musical, and artistic worlds.

There is space for students and visitors to sit and peer through monographs and books on painting, while listening in ear pods to the music of the studio. Music is part of the experiential event and the gallery is filled with the music from Shostakovich to Tchaikovsky that Cleve Gray listened to as he worked.

At the entrance to the show, Joan Baldwin has chosen a quote about the vast array of artistic concerns and the repetitive use of media that keep surfacing in the works over the decades. Cleve Gray was about movement and practice and referred to the pendulum as a way to find his own center, as reflected in Untitled, with it’s two mirroring brushstrokes that are black and white, transparent and opaque.

When swinging on a pendulum between black and white, one always returns to Gray.

Cleve Gray lived in Warren CT. This is his third exhibition at Hotchkiss. He was a parent and grandparent to Hotchkiss students. The Cleve GrayFoundation has been generous in offering us access to this work.

Hunting Game

latest version of work in process

Detail of Peahen

Detail of Peacock

I am full of a flurry of inspiration with a need to capture the daily parade of peacocks that I have lived with for the last 8 years at school. Soon I will be moving away and I want to take a little something of this visual miracle with me. But it is harder to paint a peacock than I thought. Every attempt looks too illustrative and gawdy. This is my 4th revision.

how I start

 In the beginning I throw everything out on the paper...

 Then I go outside and watch them

I feel like a hunter!

Still Time for a Holiday Pet Portrait!

I started 2018,"The year of the Dog", painting peoples pets. It is a lot of fun and I am always game to do more. I am pretty fast and charge about $2 per square inch- working small. Let me know what you want and send me a couple pictures to work from.
Here is one just finished. Between the time the commission was proposed and the time I delivered, the big black cat had passed away and a new kitten had arrived in his place. I thought this caught them both.

see the brush for scale

HFAA kids painting

hands on project!

hard at work, deep in concentration

Natalie's studio space

Ian's outside spray table

a Galaxy by Ian

Continuing in the tradition of the Home Farm Artists Association, my niece and nephew found plenty of time to paint while visiting the farm. When I look back on the time we were all in the barn and recall the humming industry, I am tickled pink. Some might have thought that I was "baby sitting", but actually I was just enjoying their company. I worked on my own paintings in the loft and would catch up with them on breaks. My two rules were to cap the paints tight and rinse the brushes in water. So inspired- we came up with an idea for an exhibition! (more on that later)

Healing Power of Art

It's important for me to share what I can, and use my work to help others make sense of the (mostly) senseless. With this week off from teaching, I am in the studio inviting others to drop by and throw color at the wall. No experience necessary! I even have a collection of symbols that can speak for the voiceless.

Let your inner child out!

ALSO BIG NEWS!!!: I've just been accepted onto the Healing Power of Art online gallery http://www.healing-power-of-art.org/tilly-strauss/ run by Renee Phillips through the Manhattan Arts International. She fuels her website and newsletter by focusing on the positive aspects of creative mark-making and the joy of building communities.

I am thrilled to have my work out in a larger circle, and to gain exposure to other artists working to heal ourselves and this planet.


Please check it out and forward to your friends.
Lots of Love,
Tilly

40 minute Selfie, a Demo for the Drawing Class

serious and blown (up) (away)(bad hair day)

 We are finishing the semester with self portraits on cheap brown paper. I love the addition of drippy black and white paint for the negative space and shirts. The idea came from an art school catalogue.

We proceed with gridded photographs like we did for the staff appreciation drawings. This self portrait took me 20 minutes the first day in just gridding and mapping out the face, and another 20 minutes today adding the dark charcoal, the white chalk highlights and then the quick liquid background!
Thank goodness for my job, it gets me outside of my morose mood since the election.

Bones in ink

After all else is gone, the bones remain. They last.

Relics and reliquary's come from the Latin word "reliquiae" which means "mortal remains". Across the globe almost every religion contains deep traces of a belief in the significance of certain bones. From the caves of our earliest ancestors to the building of cathedrals on bones of martyrs to the emblematic jewelry of the Eurasian gods, bones are seen to hold a mystic power to cure or divine messages from the spiritual realm. And it isn't just religious ritual. In the 19th Century scientists were swept up by Phrenology, an elaborate system of reading the shape and color of skulls to determine the spiritual supremacy of certain types of people.  While they were alive!

I've got a bone to pick

Check out #tillystudio on Instagram to see more of my bone paintings!

Survivor guilt

Almost a thousand lives have been lost in Haiti. God please bless that island sometime soon. Their homes and schools are blown away, bridges toppled, and crops destroyed by a massive barrelling  hurricane and then... a day or two later the same Hurricane, Matthew, skates along the coastline of the USA, where we wait in fear of losing our electricity, running out of water and fighting over fuel, without daring to enter our land space. It just brushed past us. The worst damage was caused by storm surges coinciding with the high tides. How come we are the lucky ones, again?

Our strategies this time were simple: storing water in and keeping it out. Of course I am thankful. But I feel a little survivor guilt too.

History changers in the sketchbook

Poignant brushwork portraits

I just told someone that I didn't paint people- and here I am finishing a series of portraits!

 This group was filled with personalities, all so different. Outside of the advisory they were not the best of friends with each other, but inside the room, they had each other's backs, they respected each other and ... we all learned from each other.

 I am grateful to my job for giving me the opportunity to get to know these kids, and through our Mosaic program we studied, discussed and learned about our ethnicity, our privilege, our inherent biases, our understanding of gender preferences and identification, as well as how to change a tire on a car, cook with an iron, balance a check book and make a monthly budget. We explored the UN's sustainable development goals and found the ones we were passionate about and made a plan, we painted murals, served dinner to the homeless, traveled to Universal studios, and spent a day on South Beach. I saw them elected homecoming king, Mr. Falcon, and into honor societies. We won contests for our decorations, our posters, scavenger hunts and more. I admired their work as editors of the yearbook, as creator of films, as Agents of Change, as soccer stars, as football running-back-record-breakers, as directors and actors, as potters, as poets, as musicians, and as painters.

  I also grieved as they were suspended, disciplined, failed, rejected and heartbroken. I applaud their courage and curiosities. I truly love these guys and will really miss them during fire drills next fall.

 I don't remember many of my own high school teachers. I know I had some good ones, but they've faded, and I never looked back.

These kids ARE my teachers and I must now buck up and look forward.

Tips to document your travels

I love pictures. And by sketching a scene I commit the place and time to memory. My hand helps me see details that I would otherwise, in passing, miss. Five tips: work small, work quickly, combine a couple different media (such as pencil watercolor ink and collage), carry a glue stick to include the detritus you collect along the way, AND keep everything in a backpack or purse so as to grab the impulse/chance when it comes. One more thing: don't expect a masterpiece, just have fun.

 Sneaking a sketch in every chance I can!

I love the water filled brushes

Making gift bags of art materials

Armed with stacks of sketchpads, brushes and color pencils, the students spend the first evening in Haiti compiling zip lock bags full of art supplies as gifts to the school children.

In addition to the assorted art materials, we added a granola bar and a balloon to each bag.

It was a hit! The point of the program is to build relationships and with these tools,(the gift bags and the materials, food,and toys, the children), my students and the students of Lamecette, played together.