My Creativity's dun gone. i wanna paint , but Im stalled

And I as well, farmer (being prissy with usage here)

Use to write, read, do oils, now I'm just sittin' here looking at a work in progress.

oy. ve both need some counseling.

Iwsnt that annoying/ I just took my art supplies on an 800 mile drive.

farmerman, why not paint one of your cows?

Cows, att least our few, are a real pain in the ass to try to draw. They keep wanting to be near whatever else is going on in the pasture. So, if I would come in their field, they would gang up and hover around , sharing the experience., like Calee fornyans. One of the dexters likes to lick my drawing board. Nothin is grosser than cow spit, and if you yell at em, they get all hurt.

Besides, we arent home. All we have here are 2 cats.

I guess I can't help you then.

But damn it.... I tried.

How about doing photography for a while? Change your artistic medium....?

The trick is to get started. Set up your easel, your work surface and media. Put a mark on the work surface, almost anywhere will do. A dot, a dab, or better yet a line. Thick or thin, straight of curved. This requires no thought, or flash of inspiration. Now, put a second mark down. You have the beginnings of a composition. Correct it to bring the skeleton closer to your vision.

Do values early on. Where are the darks and the lights? Mass them up, and begin gradation between the extremes. No blacks, no whites. Continue until the surface is covered. You will probably have made many corrections and changed directions often. So what? You're working. This won't give you skill, if you have none. It can not be better than your grasp of technique and the general rules of handling composition, color and texture. Those things you need to have before sitting down to paint a "masterpiece".

If painters only painted when inspired, or had a clear idea of what they want to accomplish, the world might be served by a single large museum. The art isn't in the vision, but in the doing. Talk less, paint more.

BTW, painting isn't drawing, though draftsmanship is certainly a useful skill to have. Painting is about composition, color and value, in short it is about how light defines shape. The painter manipulates pigment and composition to capture the attention of viewers. Most folks look at a painting for less than a second. You need to catch them, captivate them for just a bit longer. The painter, using sophisticated techniques, takes control of the viewer's eye and leads it from one place to another. "Move there, Linger here". The eye is made to dance rhythmically across the surface in a visual ballet. Anyone can paint a Master Piece once, perhaps even twice, by accident and inspiration. Real painters work for long hours day after day. Each painting is a learning experience, and a period that exists almost outside of perceptual time. When one is working, focused on the work, time just slips away. While working, thinking is pretty much set aside; the painter, pigment and surface interact and in the end there is .... surprise. For a few days the new child is golden, and then we begin to pick apart the faults and in a month the painting might just as well be trash. Work is the thing, the process is the beginning, the doing and the end.

Man your palettes, Get ready; on your mark ... PAINT. I want to see what you come up with.

Asherman, that was a very good response.

I might go so far as to say your feedback was more valuable than my "paint your cow" suggestion.

Asherman, youre correct, Im a total bust up here. My medium is watercolor and sometimes tempera. My pencil is a part of my way of painting. Ive used everything from watercolor pencils to whiteout shades.

At home, Im cranking stuff out quite regularly. Up here, Im seeing everything as trite sea coast subjects like in an Emille Gruppe work.

However, Ill get some discipline and keep pushing . My three pears defined in negative space is pretty good , but , its not me. Its like another trip into my mental catalog. Im sure I saw this scene somewhere and I just cranked it out , except backwards.

Gusw, no advice goes un appreciated. "paint your cow" is concise and precise. Dont beat yourself up.
Dont get all likkered up , youre still on a "time served" stipulation .

Hehehehe...!

Wait, it's not nice to laugh at your despair.

But, I mean, "retarded clam"!

Anyway.

Looks like Asherman had some good advice, good luck.

I'd go to a museum or a gallery show, look at an art book or an industry mag, something creative and visual for a jumpstart.

Farmerman - If the shoreline and such looks trite to you, why not go somewhere else? Into the woods?

theyve got mosquitoes as big as cargo planes up here. however there is a small graveyard that Ive been told has some very old stones. Ill just put on a base coat of my DEET and lavendar.

good thinking!

Ahhhh, strikes me as a good time to let yourself go.

I have seen one hell of a lot of mediocre plein air and I refuse to bow to it just because one drove to the spot and withstood flies.

Not to challenge it, I appreciate great plein air as well as the next. But it isn't mandatory to paint land.

A painter who came in to our gallery about a year ago visited again Saturday, when he was taking his wife to the chiropractor from a town about an hour south. Somehow he remembered all about me and my damn eyes, and I remembered him since I looked him up on google and he is quite the successful fellow - and he had, by circumstances, only taken photos of our harbor in a few weather/light conditions, because that is all the time he had, on the chiropracter visits, and then done what I would estimate as twenty paintings. I really liked most of them, all from photos.

Sometimes desire is equal to mosquitoes in place.

Ok, enough of my pov on photos.

You may want to break, farmer, from your usual way, or may want to play more. You are recalibrating. It is all probably good.

photos or plein air isnt my big problem.Lately Im just not driven to paint.
I guess I need to create some deadlines to get me suitably motivated.Today were going to rent some sea kayaks and paddle out to East Quoddy Head

Going to a location with another painter can
be very motivating for both parties...perhaps there's an element of accountability and competition!

I am painting in my garden....intermittently, a
large (for me) 36 x48" painting....but I find
lots of distractions in our all too brief summer!

I thought gus had a good idea about painting one of your cows, but I thought he meant on unprocessed leather, not canvas.

When I get writer's block, I write about having writer's block as this new one illustrates (I haven't been terribly inspired lately):

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=30363&highlight=

I wonder what a painting on those thoughts might look like?

I once did a collage of a series of long slabs of paper that were cantilevered off the main sheet. i wanted to express an approaching deadline .
Painting about "not painting" hmmmm, gotta think about that .
gotta go get wet now, fogs lifting