This one was teetering on the precipice of abandonment for a short while. It began as a simple pencil sketch, followed by watercolor washes -- that refused to do what I wanted them to do.

So I let it teeter there for a while longer,....
 

( title:  Shadows of a Doubt )

A day later, and refusing to admit defeat to a piece of paper, I had at it again.  Again, it refused to do what I wanted.

When I entered the studio yesterday morning, it sat there on my drafting table, silently mocking me.  I picked it up and dangled it in a very threatening manner over the waste basket, when the little light bulb in my head began to shine,...

... if this fledgling work refused to become the painting it was supposed to be, then it was fair game for experimentation. 

I switched from watercolors to acrylics.  Prussian Blue was coaxed into bleeding upwards, while Payne's Grey was allowed to bleed down.  I scrubbed severely thinned Payne's Grey into the previously failed background, then began pulling the subject's highlights forward and pushing his shadows backwards with more opaque pigments, then picked his finer details out with four different tones of color pencil.

I had my doubts, yesterday morning, when I first began reworking the painting -- but now I'm wondering if the painting needed to be something other than what I had in mind.

A few months back I was talking shop with another artist, and we got onto the subject of the qualities and elements that make a body of work distinctively recognizable as the creation of a Particular Artist, so that when you see that new work you know without a doubt who did it.

[below: "In the Blue Room", watercolors/acrylics on paper, 11" x 15"]



He'd used the word signature -- and, dopey me, at the time I'd thought he actually meant the manner of signing one's name to a newly finished work.

Yeah.  I shoulda had the wits to press him for clarification right then, considering he refers to the figures in his own works as 'characters' [a concept I totally dig], but I have this naive tendency to take things at face value.  As a consequence, I completely missed any nuances that might've been in his wording.

Hindsight is said to be 20/20 -- but it takes some things longer to come into focus for me.  Wisdom needs to gestate, like a pearl accumulating its layers of nacre.  That, or I just need to pay closer attention.

So here I am, again pondering this thing he'd called signature.  For my own needs that word doesn't quite work.  I don't want to replace it with the word style -- style can be shallow, a passing fancy tied to an era and its social politics, unforgivably dating it.  But 'technique' doesn't fit, either -- that's the mechanical process of physically creating the art.

Okay, back to the idea of 'characters' instead of 'figures', approaching it all as narratology --

Maybe the word I'm looking for is 'voice' -- like when a writer has a distinctive, recognizable way of stringing words together to get ideas across.  That kind of recognition is akin to being able to pick out a voice you know in a crowded and noisy restaurant -- a personal blend of pitch, timbre, cadence and vocabulary, and sometimes unconscious poetry.

Along with having and developing my 'voice' as a visual artist, I need to ask myself :  What do I want to say?

-- are now on the website:

At long last, I've got a new desktop computer and I'm in the process of making a full migration from PC to Mac.  Gotta find new drivers for my scanner, printer, and interfaces for my digital cameras,...

Also gotta get a new FTP going in the next couple of days, but until then, please note that these one-of-a-kind masks from the "Unique Collection" have just been sold:

"Conciliatrix"
"Merlot"
"Ice Cap"
"Mindsweeper"

TTFN,
Ryl

... and this last one begins with "Dear Sir".  I wonder whether they actually went to either of my websites,...

At any rate, they claim to sell PVC corsets [from a bogus url, yet], and they want me to peddle their stuff for them.  The verbiage of the e-mail's body reads like an attempt at Shakespeare by someone whose first language is not English.

"Dear Sir" -- I get that so often.  Why?

Got a big, new monitor where the squares are squares instead of rectangles, and the circles are circles instead of ovals -- yay! 

But this new monitor also shows just how yucky a lot [!] of my image files are -- bummer. 

So now I need to replace all those yucky .jpg's -- it's going to be a long week.

Yesterday I mothballed both of my Blogspots as it was just two blogs too many -- an account each on Wordpress for my visual art and for my masks, and then repeating the same on Blogger.  [weary sigh]  It all got to be a bit much.

Yeah, yeah, you get more control over the layout and color schemes with Blogger.  But it's just so much easier for me to post on Wordpress.

Several friends and business associates, and now family members, are telling me I just gotta [?!] get on Facebook.  I'll confess to some trepidation over that -- I've been harassed by coattail-riding parasites and stalked by a bewildering variety of whackjobs who've refused to accept the fact that not only am I heterosexual, I'm also married. 

So if I get a Facebook account, what kind of headaches am I be letting myself in for?

Opinions, please,....

Criminy -- !

Don't these Russian spammers know I can't read Cyrillic??!

GAH!

[above: detail of "Nor Hell a Fury"]

[just a nudge, now, because it bears repeating]

For several years now I've kept the current prices of my Open Edition Masks -- but I can no longer maintain those prices, and I refuse to resort to using inferior leathers [ ~ shudder ~ ] as that path yields inferior results.

Below is "Mariushka", an Open Edition Mask:


The current prices will remain in effect until Midnight [Pacific Coast Time] of December 25th to give folks a chance to place their mask orders for Christmas, New Year's, Mardi Gras, Carnevale, and Fasching before the new prices go into effect.

Tah very much,
Ryl

Last week a friend of mine passed away, suddenly and unexpectedly.  Since that time I've been trying very hard to come to grips with the knowledge that she's gone, that I'll never see her again, that I'll never hear her again,...

I feel so badly for her husband, her family, and all her friends, and for all those who depended on her to make their lives and careers run more smoothly.  But that's what mourning is all about, isn't it?  It's for us, it's for the ones who've been left behind -- to go on without those who've slipped through the veil -- so we can say farewell, come to some sort of closure, and eventually approach acceptance.

She was younger than me and with at least as many irons in the fire, probably more.  So many people will now have to do without her -- without her hard work, her wit, her insights, and her love.

I've cried a lot this last week, thinking about her and worrying whether she'd got to do most of the things she'd truly wanted to achieve and accomplish during her time here.  I hope she doesn't feel cheated, by having to leave so soon.

Her abrupt passing has made me look even harder at my own life, my own work, and all my relationships -- I'm going to work harder at them all.

Happy trails, Kate,... we miss you.

Such a stilted phrase, that. I suppose it's a more PC way of saying 'trade secrets' -- same thing, different rhetoric, more syllables.

Earlier this year I attended an artist's reception at the Bella Perla Gallery for Duncan Regehr -- the guy does amazing work, strange little narratives and vignettes that grab my attention and demand that I puzzle out the rather cryptic stories and their symbolism. Sometimes the symbolism is subtle, and sometimes it's "Hit You over the Head" blatant.

And I love the way he achieves those lovely textures and really crunchy colors -- love it so much I brazenly asked him point blank how he did it. After a couple of minutes of listening to him trying to not answer the question while at the same time trying not to offend, I suffered a pang of empathy. I'd realized I'd put him on the spot, and decided to let the poor guy off the hook.

The pang was this: Folks frequently ask me how I make my leather masks. And not just how masks are generally made from leather, but how I get the particular results that I do,...

Candidly, wrangling wet leather isn't nearly as exciting or kinky as some might hope. It's time intensive physical labor, and cuts, calluses and blisters are inevitabilities. And you can forget all about having a decent looking manicure.

But if you're not willing to invest your own blood, sweat and tears into learning how to sculpt and mold the leather, you've got no business picking up a pair of leather shears, much less demanding that 'proprietary information' from any mask artist.

Every year I get a dozens of e-mails from people wanting my 'trade secrets' of making masks from leather. I give some information to spare useless expense and needless suffering, and chitchat back and forth with the occasional kindred spirit. But every now and then I get some yabbo who blows smoke up the skirt and plays at becoming my newest bestest buddy, just to schmooze my "secrets" out of me.

They get coy. They push. They push harder. They nag.

I give what information I can, but these people just don't get it. They don't understand that art is a journey that you have to walk with your own feet. It's like they want to paint a portrait, but they want me to create a paint-by-numbers kit for them so they can pretend at being artists.

[Honey, if it comes in a kit, then it ain't gonna be art. Sad, but true.]

A few claim they understand if I don't want to "share" my "secrets", but they continue to harry me anyway. Again, I give what information I can -- after all, how many pearls of wisdom am I expected to cram into an e-mail? They demand to know how I get those results -- the only answer is "time". I give each mask the time it needs to become what it wants to become. Mojo is involved.

I suppose what bugs me is when the naggers pick my brains [instead of using their own], and that they never says 'thanks'.

Many of those who've asked have been gracious and thanked me for my input and my time, and some of them have later proudly shown me the results of their labors -- and I have been mightily impressed by these first efforts.

It was suddenly remembering many of these moments that made me wince on the inside as Mr. Regehr [so formal!] was verbally shuffling his feet in response to my question of how he creates those delicious textures in his paintings. At that point I grinned in chagrin and asked him another question: "You're not going to tell me, are you?"

He paused and gave me a cautious smile. "It's like a magic trick -- do you really want to know?"

Short answer: Yes, dammit.

Long answer: No -- because I really want to figure it out for myself. That's the only way I'll make it mine.

After scouring the 'net to see what all the other mask makers are up to --and being first appalled by all the copycats, and then being inspired by genuine artists -- I'm compelled now to work on some new approaches of my own.

In my paintings, I've always enjoyed working with mixed media, and now I want to explore that further in the medium of masks.  Stay tuned,....

Ryl,
the Impressionable
[image above: a detail of "Masquerade"]

I've been alerted that many of the links for costuming on my mask site are now dead-ends. So I've begun collecting new links for the benefit of revellers and costumers who are looking for good resources.

If you have a suitable costume-related site and are interested in exchanging links, ping me.

Tah very much,
Ryl

For a long time now, my works -- and the skill sets and viable markets for same -- have been deeply divided.  I begin this journal in the hopes of merging the two pursuits, fine art and mask-making, and making myself a little less harried in the process,....

Life is simply too short to be running down two disparate paths, simultaneously.