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As artists we paint what we see.  In the visual arts this, of course, makes sense.  But we see things many different ways and my art comes from the various things and ways I see.  I remember being told the old art adage, ” Paint what you know.”  And this makes powerful sense.  Creation of Art is such an intense thing, pulling something from nothing.  This is not easy, if done well.  If you paint things you don’t know intimately then you run the serious risk of painting only superficial art, postcards from travels to places we don’t understand.  You have to look and look and learn and learn to know something inside and out, to paint it well.  Not to capture the surface detail. Hell, getting a likeness, of a tree or a house or a person, that is basic, easy, Art School stuff.  Surface likeness is shallow, just basic art rendering.  But it is telling something important about the thing that is the challenge.  The challenge that keeps expanding if you let it.

So being told to paint what I know when I was young was terrifying.  I was young. I was dumb. I didn’t know anything so how could I paint?    But then it dawned that it didn’t mean I couldn’t learn more, know more, draw more.

So really painting is not about art but about jumping in and EXPERIENCING.  This is the route to having something to paint, knowing more. Just go and dance.  This is assuming that as an artist you want to paint something powerful, something with vision, something strong.  And a powerful painting can be many things…it can be a huge dramatic painting condemming war, or a small simple glance of sunlight on the edge of a summer bouquet.  It is not what you paint but how well you have seen and how you paint it.

To paint something you need to know it, learn it, study it.  Draw it so many ways that you can move it around in your head to fit any angle, any life you want to give it.  The more you look, the more you see.

Often I pose models but they are posed to fit the vision I already have in my head.  I see the figures inside first, sketch them out and then find models and poses to flesh them out.

Which brings me back to what I first meant.  We paint what we see.  Sometimes that is what is in front of our noses right now.  Sometimes the seeing  is in our heads and the “vision” is made flesh on canvas with our paint.   And often paintings are a mysterious combination of the two…and who knows what else.  Often in my work, things from many years ago, things I saw, people I drew, ideas I had, inform and merge into current paintings to bring a reality to new paintings.  Old joining with new to make a painting.  And as I walk down a street I may see a twirl of hair by someone’s ear that suddenty fits well into my current painting or a thought bubbles up from years ago and seems to fit into now.  My paintings may look like moments but they are more like woven stories from many days.

So paint what you see, paint what you know, but never stop knowing and seeing more.  The more you look, the more you will see.  The more you see, the more you will understand and take into your core.  And then, just maybe, with perserverance, we will paint well.  It only ends when we stop seeing.

[vc_row css_animation=”” row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” angled_section=”no” text_align=”left” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern”][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]My new mural at the Kennebec County Superior Court in Augusta, Maine is now complete.  You can see a portfolio of detail images here: Kennebec Mural.  Just started adding images, many more to come.

Kennebec celebrates the river as road, home and workplace to the generations of ordinary people who traveled, traded and lived on the river. Within the forty foot mural five hundred years and 12 time periods coexist under the same eternal sky. As the river continues constant and unchanging, Christopher Cart paints the human story from Native American canoe to sailing ships to steamships.

The mural depicts ice cutting, logging, sailing ships and ship building, early Popham explorers and Abnakis, leisure days and travel and the hard work of the people who tended the land while raising families. This important shipbuilding river valley launched 4000 ships over the years, so it was a bustling, vital place of importance. The Kennebec river was a major highway to the world and seamen from this region could find fellow Kennebec valley men in any major port of the world.

Months of research were necessary for Cart to accurately portray proper period clothing, tools, ships and details from 500 years of life on the river. Particularly helpful was the vast image reference library at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. After the research, came the drawing of hundreds upon hundreds of “studies” of clothing, figure poses, tools and settings, to refine the details and the overall composition of the piece.

When plans were complete, the blank, primed mural canvas was applied to the wall in the Courthouse using 3 gallons of glue. Next the painting of the actual mural began with a scrubbed in underpainting. Cart’s detailed half size final drawings were then transferred to the canvas in charcoal using a traditional grid method to enlarge them. The mural was painted in archival acrylic paint mostly with one and two inch brushes. It is covered with a clear isolation barrier acrylic and three coats of final varnish.

Over fifty figures populate the mural, from a hardworking pregnant colonial wife to sailors aloft in the rigging. As a point of interest, many people connected with the Courthouse building posed as models for the mural, including several Justices, the building architect, construction foremen and workers.

Kennebec honors the men and women who came before us. They are no more, but their legacy endures.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_column_text]

 

detail: colonial mother and child

 

Kennebec, by Christopher Cart
14 x 39 foot mural, acrylic on primed canvas applied to wall
Kennebec Count Superior Court, 2^nd Floor,1 Court Street, Suite 101, Augusta, ME 04330
Completed February 2015[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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The Kennebec County Courthouse mural is progressing swiftly.  About two and a half weeks of actual work on the wall…following months of research and studies…and the mural is flying along.  12 hour days with brushes will do the trick.

Here my seamen in the rigging are going in well above the doorway.  Couldn’t work on them most of last week as they were moving in office equipment into the adjoining rooms and needed this doorway.  For some reason they didn’t want me hanging around on a ladder right in that doorway.

The middle seaman is looking a bit more piratical than I intended.  He looked good on the sketch pad but up on the wall, larger than life, he is a bit too swarthy.  So I will give him a shave on Monday.

Here are a couple of dock workers just started in one section.  Happy with the light coming in, peeling things out of the shadows. (the grid is from the initial enlargement from the studio rendering.)

and a few more figures on the busy dock…these obviously show early stages but I like the energy at this point.  These early stages of paint have to have the right life, spirit.  If these stages are dead then no amount of polish and detail will hold a chance of resuscitation.

 

Today working on the Kennebec Courthouse mural I did the initial block in of the logger.  I enlarged and transferred the drawing to the wall with the traditional grid method…drawing a grid on the drawing and then drawing a larger grid on the wall and using the grid to reference where the parts of the drawing go.  I have been drawing the larger grid on the wall with light colored pencil and then just drawing the figures in charcoal.  Then I proceed to the block in of the paint.

Also worked on trees, ship rigging, an 18th century musket and some mist today.  A good day of brushes.  I am not the tidiest of painters but I like the feeling of planning very well up front with drawings and studies and then working loose on the final canvas…pulling things from seeming chaos.  Rough scrub-ins give much more energy underlying the final paint.

For my Kennebec County Courthouse mural I have been finding models all over the place.  After lots of research about logging in Maine I had narrowed down the type of pose I wanted.  This taught me the tools and how they were used.  How the men moved and pried logs, and maneuvered logs in various currents.  So I worked up a dynamic posed I liked but then I needed a model.

Then doing a bit of shopping in the grocery store I found him.  A great guy, a great face, and a good model who fell right into the right pose.  This is a man who has done a lot of outdoor work and it makes a difference in the posing.  People who have done physical labor can pose much more naturally than trying to pose someone in a more sedentary job.

Here is an interesting old film about logging I found on youtube.  From stump to ship: A 1930 logging film

Yesterday I spent the day at Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine, doing mural research in the photo library.  It was a fascinating day looking through hundreds of vintage photographs.  This kind of research is enjoyable but is also essential for this type of mural.

I need to make sure that I am getting details historically accurate.  What does a schooner shipyard of the time look like.  What kind of jobs are going on.  All this is very important.  To the right is a nice clear photo of the tugboat the Seguin.  This tug was built in 1884 and towed schooners down the river for many decades.  I needed a clear image of its structure so I can find how to draw it for the mural.  With a clear enough series of photos I can ‘learn’ the ship and then draw it from any angle I need.

There is another aspect that, as a painter, and a story telling painter, that I find very important.

While some photos are of important events in history, a lot of the type of photos I learned from yesterday were the snapshots of the day.  Just someone with a camera.  In these I often look at the main event but I can also find out essential story telling details by looking a tiny corners of the photos.   Someone bending to pick up a tool.  A woman with a basket of bread.  Little things that take time to see and decipher but that will flesh out the daily lives of the people I am trying to portray.

While posed photos of famous people may tell me what that person looked like.  Other photos will tell me how people lived, worked and played.

 

 

 

 

 

An oil for an exhibit about human trafficking.