Washington D.C. Cherry Blossom Festival 2018

It was a picture perfect day on March 31, 2018 in Washington D.C., perfect to grab some photos of the blossoming cherry trees! 

After seeing these beautiful trees, the story of George Washington chopping down a cherry tree becomes even more poignant. 

The Cherry Blossom Festival also includes an amazing kite festival, where kites of all kinds are flown along the National Mall. You can bring a kite or buy one on-site! It looked really fun.

There were several blooming trees to be seen near the White House: 

Like any good festival, there were also many occasion-specific souvenirs available, featuring cherry blossoms on almost any kind of product you could imagine!  I'm not always a sucker for souvenirs, but I was so in love with the cherry blossoms that I felt drawn in by these little items.

The National Mall itself looked stunning in the rare clear blue skies and the bright sun. 

Four Key Takeaways from The Keys by DJ Khaled (For artists!)

Here are my Four The Key takeaways from The Keys: 

1. 🔑 Major Key: Stay Fresh.

"If you want to be treated like a boss, you've got to look the part." 

DJ Khaled even says it's good to get a haircut twice a week. The logic here is, you never know when you will get a chance to prove yourself. You might meet Jay-Z tomorrow and you should have great hair at all times just in case. Although Khaled does recognize that not all of us can afford twice-a-week haircuts (until we've made it, that is), he is a huge ally for self care and respecting yourself through dress.

This does make sense for your everyday visual artist - while I prefer to have paint-splattered clothes in the studio, it is nice to add a good piece here or there for wearing to shows and museums. 8) 

2. 🔑 Major Key: Pick up the Phone.

Khaled tells us: "If you have a situation, you pick up the phone. You set up a meeting and you talk among grown men and grown women." 

It's easy to resonate with this major key because... sometimes you can't solve everything through email, Twitter, or chat. It's much better to pick up the phone, take time, listen, and solve problems as grown men and grown women.

While Khaled loves Snapchat, he isn't the biggest fan of social media or the culture of online witchhunts. "I can't imagine a bigger waste of time. Who has all this energy to stir things up? People who aren't successful and people who aren't working hard, that's who."

I loved this piece of advice from DJ Khaled because, as artists, we need to work on our work - stirring up trouble online is a short term game to win attention. Good work and solid art are the keys to longterm success. 

The book THEY don't want you to read

3. 🔑 Major Key: Real Talk, Don't Jetski at night.

Just search Youtube for DJ Khaled Jetski Night. You'll see why this is a Major Key. 

The incident of the jetski at nighttime also made DJ Khaled more famous. When Khaled got lost on the water and started up his SnapChat app to document the experience, it showed that he cared about his fans and that his fans cared about him. When he was in trouble, he couldn't call the police, he couldn't exactly call home... but he could call his fans in the time where he needed them most. Like the poet Saul Williams once said, Vulnerability is Power.

Yet... be careful about Jetskiing at night.

Art I made in 2015 of DJ Khaled Jetskiing at night

As far as how to not jetski at night as an artist ... I suppose it is a matter of having fun and taking risks, but not taking too many risks. 

4. 🔑 Major Key: Keep Two Rooms Cooking at the Same Time.

In this chapter, DJ Khaled reveals that as a producer, artist, and CEO, he knows how to do every job, even the smallest, most menial jobs in his organization. He stays humble. Knowing all the parts of the machine and working on at least two projects at once keeps up the momentum in his production studio. 

In our world where focusing is as prized as gold, and where industries push their best and brightest into hyper-specializations, it is nice to know that at the end of the day, it's not only okay to be a renaissance man, or a jack-of-all trades ... but... it's cool. It's a good thing to have experience in every dimension of your business. It's okay to take on more than one project at once. In fact, crossovers of knowledge and overlaps in projects can fuse together and make the most rare and valuable beat of them all: something new.

The practice of keeping two rooms cooking at the same time works for visual art as well. When the paint is drying, it's good to start another painting or pick up a new drawing. With the technology and resources that are available today, artists are able to be so multidisciplined. #D animators can be poets, collage artists are businessowners, and sculptors are painters. Never limit yourself. Or, as Khaled would say "Don't play yourself."

David Hockney at the Metropolitan Museum

Despite the fact that this show will close in about seven days, The David Hockney retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum was packed to the gills.

Usually, the best time to see an art show is long after opening night, where you can stand in a gallery and look at a painting for several seconds without interruption or without being aware of people. It's nice to get lost in art.

Very few things are more annoying than someone walking in front of you while viewing a painting, and rest assured - I annoyed as many people as annoyed me at this David Hockney show. I was only able to get the photos for this article because I am fairly tall and I can hold my iPhone high above everyone else. 

Solitude is just not going to happen at a David Hockney show. He's too wildly famous. He's too good. And more, he has something for everyone. 

Hashtag Showerthoughts... 

Hockney's earliest paintings shown in the show aren't even depicted here - the first gallery after entering the exhibit happened to collect the worst Hockneys I have ever seen, pieces that the artist had done as a young art student that were quite bad.

I wish I had taken a couple photos of the 'Bad Hockneys' to prove that there is Life after Art School, but, everyone already knows that, I hope. If anything, the muddy gray Bad Hockneys existed solely to help attendees appreciate the later Hockney even more.

Hockney made a couple of these shower paintings, a resplendently gay take on bather motifs from Degas. 

With Hockney it's easy to forget he is using acrylic paint, and as he was painting the above Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy in the early 70s, he would have been one of the earliest painters working successfully with the medium.

Though just as bright and as pigmented as oil, fast-drying acrylic doesn't blend or save itself for later. Acrylic favors fast thinkers, fast action, and commitment. If you make a mistake in acrylic, you have to paint over the mistake with no blendability into the bottom failed layer -  and mistakes can stack up quickly.

In these realistic paintings, Hockney is a master of drybrushing and scumbling acrylic in order to create atmospheric light. The wall behind Mr. Clark isn't a plain brown, but a sienna with slate blue and green brushed over in smoky clusters. 

As you get closer to these large paintings, the imperfections show up a bit more - the checkered backing of the chair isn't made up of perfect Lichtensteinian dots. The base of the lamp above is a bit wonky, but the phone is entirely convincing. This is Hockney's magic - not everything is perfect, but we know enough, and we are impressed enough by the color,  to let it slide. 

This Hockney Pool painting, or as I refer to it in my mind: "The most SoCal Thing That Has Ever Existed" allows similar up-close imperfections to emerge. I always thought of the painting as a realistic piece, but for some reason, in person, it is more like looking at a painting of a unicorn.

The unicorn feeling is less present in the pool painting below, given the absence of any fancy people.

The show also collected some of Hockney's drawings. Hockney is great at capturing faces, hands, feelings, and fashion. In the three drawings below, each sitter has incredibly expressive hands.

In the book "That's Thee Way I See It" Hockney discusses a series of painted portraits he made of his friends, eventually revealing that none of his friends really liked the paintings he had made of them. These drawings I feel must be different than the paintings, I feel that these subjects must have really liked the drawings. Either that, or they must have been difficult to impress!

The show included a couple of Hockney's paintings of the Grand Canyon - both perfect in the way that the canyon takes up the entire canvas, and the sky is just a small stripe of blue, if anything. I had to love Hockney's use of pale purple and blue on the red canyon walls. 

In Hockney's more abstract landscapes, it's hard to know exactly what is going on. The primary and high-key colors attack the eyes.

Abstractions considered, we all know that Hockney can reel it in with landscape paintings like the one above. Overall that is what I like most about Hockney's work - it's studied, it knows where it is going, yet it is also so free.

Magasin Sennelier

Undoubtedly, Paris figures as an amazing city to see artwork and learn about art history - but what about experiencing modern Paris as an artist? What does Paris have to offer its citizens and tourists as far as art materials? 

Magasin Sennelier at 3 Quai Voltaire is the place to go for art supplies and for learning about what materials are available and loved by artists in Paris. 

The store had a great selection of drawings tools, including pastels, chalks, and other mediums. 

The paper curation was to die for. I've never seen a more diverse or unique collection of artist papers from all across the globe. Chinese papers, paper from Nepal, and handmade paper from France itself adorn the shelves of the second floor. The availability of oversized handmade paper added another point of uniqueness into the store - usually it is easy to find handmade paper in small sizes, but the glamorously large sheets of handmade paper had me swooning. 

Even the testing grounds for pens and markers seemed more interesting in Paris, where a seriously good artist scribbled out a few studied faces. Usually in the States all that these say are "Kylie loves Jace" and so forth. 

The easel section surprised me with a showcase of the very same easel model that I have back home in the States - it was wild to see a new and unpainted version of the easel I have trusted for more than ten years. Julian easels have my recommendation as I have had no problems with mine so far. As a revolving door of computers, sketchpads, and canvasses turn through my life, I can always count on my trusty easel. 

Knowing how difficult it might be to fly back home with paints or chemicals, I ended up purchasing watercolor pencils and a few books of paper. 

I ended up using the paper above to make this fish: 

I am not sure what I will make on the rest of the paper! It has the quality of being "Too good to use" but I am sure I'll come up with something good. 

Visit Magasin Sennelier's website here!

Other Paris art adventure writings and photos: 

The Egypt Wing of The Louvre

The Sainte Chapelle Royal Chapel

Closeups at the Orangerie

And the watercolors I've been up to

December 2017 Studio Update

Before moving to Maryland I made a couple final paintings in Houston, including this piece of a Fairy Slipper Orchid: 

I will miss painting in Houston and I will miss the weird ideas that swooped down upon me while stuck in traffic. 

These pieces will be available at http://www.harper-rose.com/ in Leadville, Colorado. 

Right before moving I had the chance to visit Paris, France, and see some of the greatest paintings of art history. I was interested to capture the self-portraits of painters and paintings of painters.

"What do you mean, the painting has to be done by tomorrow?"

There were moments in the Louvre that surprised me, such as my own awe at sculpture. 

After the Louvre I tried a quick drawing of the sculpture with the photo as reference. The statue had too many admirers in the museum itself - I would have never been able to get close enough and have enough time to make a drawing there! 

While in Paris I was also able to pick up some water color pencils (more on those soon!) and very special paper.

This paper turned out to be so special that when I searched for it online, the website seemed to be defunct. 

The art store in Paris that I visited was this one: http://www.magasinsennelier.net/ I was amazed by their selection of handmade papers, along with many other fine art materials such as pigment, pastel crayons, and easels.  

That is December on the studio side! Catch you guys soon.