Sapphire City Show and Summer Recap and Updates

Hey everyone,

Lots of updates for you today from my various activities this summer:

1. Sapphire City in Retrospect
2. Seattle Museums Series Finished
3. Cherry Blossoms in Pink Major
4. “Impressquarism”

Sapphire City In Retrospect

​Sapphire City is in the books! I took down my paintings on Monday after three weeks on the wall at Makeda & Mingus. All in all, the show went as well as I could have expected and I got out of the experience what I’d sought going into it. I actually went into this expecting to sell zero paintings, and that’s how many sold.

The opening reception was fun, though, and a lot of friends came through to see my art and support me. And guests (mostly my friends) bought a bunch of cards and prints from me that night, so, many thanks to you all! I appreciate it so much.

So why’d I go through the trouble of putting on a solo art show if I expected not to sell any paintings (although certainly I hoped to)?

I actually originally started thinking about putting on a show of my blue paintings even before I ever had the thought that I might go full-time as an independent artist (which I only thought to do literally starting this January). Quite simply, I was proud of my work and just thought it would be fun to be able to exhibit them together as a unified show for others to see. Ultimately, I think shows like this (independently produced shows outside of art venues) are mainly about getting your work out there and building an audience. So on that most important point, success!

I was fortunate that there happened to be an Urban Sketchers drink ‘n’ draw just three blocks away on opening night, so I got a lot of my urban sketcher friends coming through on opening night, who are very much the kind of people who’d appreciate my art. And besides all the kind things they said about my show, the owner of Makeda & Mingus also shared that she got a lot of complimentary words from her customers about my show. Thanks, all!

Along the way, I learned a ton about how these things come together, researching and lining up a space to exhibit your art, how small businesses work with artists to get art in their space, standard practices (such as they are) around payment processing and hanging your art, and how expensive framing a bunch of art is.

But I didn’t expect to sell any pieces for a couple reasons:

1. Original art is expensive for most people relative to how non-essential they view it to be. And then, considering the ecosystem we want to create for working artists, to lower one’s prices to the point that they don’t seem too expensive to most people would worsen the ecosystem for artists in the long term. Namely, we already don’t value art very highly in our society, but our own actions can worsen, sustain, or try to improve the status quo. I want to make sure I’m helping to build a better ecosystem for artists, so I don’t want to undercut good pricing. Furthermore, I’m confident that my pricing was in the right ballpark for a new/emerging artist based on research and the fact that my Leschi Marina painting from this same series priced at the same price went for the “buy it now” price, 1.5x the listed “retail price”, at a benefit auction. This brings me to my next point, below.
2. Showing where your audience will be is important for sales (but not the only consideration for where you might want to show your art). It is really tough to find a good space for exhibiting art as a new independent artist. There aren’t a lot of spaces set up for it or looking to have artists come in, and among those that are, you still need to find a match for vibes and they need to have an opening for you. I’ve found many are booked out months in advance or even years. A lot of the places that will accept new artists are small businesses whose customers aren’t there to look at art, much less to buy art. The casual audience showing up in cafes and breweries, even during art walks, is a different audience than an art buying audience. So going into my show at Makeda, a small, very local cafe (whose owner is a wonderful, generous, and community minded person, and who had a lot of regulars friendly with the owner stopping in), I knew that most if not all the people who would see the show wouldn’t be those comfortable or familiar with art world pricing, even at the new/emerging artist level.

All that said, am I glad I did it? Absolutely! It was a good and satisfying experience pulling it off, and I’m someone who wants my art to be seen and not just to disappear into a drawer after I create it.

(But also, these paintings are available if anyone’s interested, haha.)

Seattle Museums Series Finished

I’ve finished my series of Seattle museum paintings. I feel good about how these came out. With each museum, I tried to capture what I thought to be the most characteristic, enduring look of the building. It’s a really diverse range of architecture, but all very cool buildings.

And like with the Sapphire City series, the paintings of the museums series look great together. It would be fun to do a show of them at some point, but we’ll see. The expense and time required to put on a show is considerable for unlikely payoff, as discussed above.

I will say, though, painting small is in some ways a lot harder than painting bigger. Your hands and fingers and movements need to be steadier to achieve the strokes you want, since every little bit you are off is proportionally much more off than that same little bit off appears in a larger painting. Brushes can come in smaller sizes, but your hands and arms don’t. After doing a bunch of small paintings (these are on 6”x6” paper), I found myself wanting to work bigger so that I could be looser instead of hunching over holding my breath while edging a quivering brush toward a tiny square of paper.

Below are a few of the pieces, and you can see the whole series (I think I’ll name the series and potential show “Museums Exhibit”) here: https://www.waylee.art/galleries/museums-exhibit​

Cherry Blossoms in Pink Major

I’ve also finished my series of cherry blossom color explorations, which evolved into a polyptych. The final framed piece is a pleasure to look at with its bright and creative color schemes. It was fun carrying this project through from initial spark through stages of development and finally coming together into a large finished piece.

I’m interested in the beauty and expressive power of color beyond literal representation. The idea for this polyptych came to me after painting a couple variations of cherry blossoms en plein air during their joyful annual eruption around Seattle.

I wanted to explore a couple things in the color theory realm with this project. I’ve liked others’ artworks I’ve seen using color outside of strict realism, where the values describe the forms but the colors get very creative. I’ve been interested in color schemes beyond simple direct complementary colors, so with these iterations of the cherry blossoms, I played loosely with split complementary and tetrad schemes, as well as what I call “off-complementary” schemes (where two colors are close but not quite complements; I find these to look great and not so clashing the way supposed “complements” are). In addition, I’ve seen a lot of interesting variation in how the light/shadow balance is handled in visual art, where instead of a light-middle-dark division, some will make it so the mid-tones and darks end up close together and it’s those masses against the highlights that describe the form, and others will group the mid-tones close to the lights, or anything in between. So these cherry blossom variations mix and match all of these things.

The title, Cherry Blossoms in Pink Major, riffs on the musical term for harmonious notes played together, namely, “chords”. There’s this naming convention in some classical music where it’s “Something in G Major” or “Other Thing in F Minor”, etc., where the letter is the musical key of the chord. Each of the iterations in my polyptych has a color scheme based loosely around some form of “pink”, even if it’s a very dark version of what we would call pink if it were a brighter version of itself. So then, the harmonious color schemes in these paintings are essentially color “chords” with pink being their “key”. Cherry Blossoms in Pink Major.

I’m going to try to get this into a juried art show. But in the meantime, this polyptych is available!

“Impressquarism”

So with the museums and cherry blossoms done, what’s next?

I’m calling it “impressquarism”. This isn’t a wholly original concept. Other painters have done this sort of square and rectangular paint stroked impressionism, but with opaque paints like oil, acrylic, or gouache. I really like the effect, but haven’t yet come across it in watercolor, so I thought I’d see if I could get it to work with watercolor.

And it totally works!

I find the results captivating, and it’s a lot of fun to do. The transparent layering of watercolor I feel gives the effect more depth than with opaque paints. I’ll keep doing more plein air and on location paintings with this approach to explore it further and refine my technique.

At the same time, I’ll combine it with the creative color exploration that I started doing with the Cherry Blossoms piece. These will be fun! And I hope you’ll agree.

Till next,

William

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