Waking up to Paint with Kelli Folsom: October 2015

I thought I would share an experience I had in my last year at art school, 2011. We had to submit artwork for our big senior exhibition. This was sort of seen as the culmination of all you learned....or didn't learn of the previous 4 years. So yeah, there was some pressure. Beyond the fact that I knew none of the instructors were going to like my work regardless, I wanted to do my best. I also knew that this meant that time was running out and I would have to find a way to pay my bills after graduation. I hoped this would be by painting. So the pressure was really turned up. Although I had worked very hard for 3 years, I started to get frustrated by the time that I was putting into 1 painting with failed results.

One day I was contemplating a solution to this problem. I asked myself, "How can I go through all the steps that go into finishing a painting faster?". The answer at the time was by cutting the canvas size I could cut the painting time. So I grabbed a 20x24" panel and roughly gridded out several small rectangles.

At the time, I really thought my compositions were the major weakness so that was my focus. Setting a timer of 2 hours- I would set up a still life, paint it and go to the next. I didn't analyze each painting after they were completed. I just went to the next one. After a couple of days of doing this, I had this whole panel of little still lifes. I was really excited because I could see that after the repetition I was changing things up, getting more free, more creative, thinking more in visual terms.

There were 2 paintings in particular that I felt really had something. So those 2 I decided to try on a larger panel. I found that the paintings were far easier for me to complete after having done the study. And when I added up the time I would have given to all the more blah compositions, I saved a good 80 hours!

These two paintings turned out really well for my technical capabilities at the time and they both went on to be in shows and both won awards and sold. So the 12 hours I invested in the studies saved me 80 hours of frustrating and painful painting and led to profitable pieces. Now the rest of the mini studies had a charm all on there own and I wound up cutting them out of the panel and selling most of them....and some of course were Christmas gifts for friends and family. I learned other things from this approach I took, but I will share that at another time.

I hope that you will listen to that voice inside of you that says, there's got to be a better way and I hope it is as successful for you. (Or you can take this idea!) Good Luck.

Panel with some of the paintings midway through, in 2011 (looks like there were 16 in all):