The Unfinished Self

I am often asked to provide a photo of me. A head shot like the one you can see of me at the New Blood Art website. Ideally I would have one of me in the studio, brush in hand, canvas at the ready, the flair of creative genius zinging wildly in my unkempt hair.

But the reality is that my studio is less than the cover of Dwell magazine and more like the aftermath of an armed robbery. Also, I have no self portrait paintings. I did a few years back but they have all since been whisked away by my mother for ‘safe keeping’.

Also, I want my self portrait to be done while I am pregnant. My current body shape may be a transitory state; I look like I swallowed a watermelon; but it is a fitting one for this project. Like the artist in the studio is somehow holding within them the works of art; pregnant with possibilities.


When I started painting portraits I don’t want to paint big pink heads; I looked for what I loved about other people’s portraits.

Clair Alexander is a London based portrait painter who I really love,
She uses blues and purples, colors that infuse the vitality and life into the sitter.

Amy Shuckbrugh is a painter friend of mine also in London. She is eloquent and delicate. I wish I could be half as ladylike as her. The funny thing is in one of my self portrait attempts (The Muse), I painted her. Each time looking into my own round and pink face and scribbling away her willowy eyes and petite nose.


Anna Judd is a painter I met while shooting a reality show about artists.
It wasn’t this one
She seemed uncertain when I met her; like she was a little scared of the world. Her paintings have stayed with me, wriggling into my thoughts. Her tender tragedy and plastic handling make me want to wipe away the tears.

For a while I was painting a lot of portraits. It is good bread and butter work and I enjoy capturing other people. The light around them, their confidence or lethargy, that moment in their character that invites you in through their eyes.

But when it comes to painting me, I can’t help but paint a piggy squiggle. I assure you that I do not have quite such a wide porcine snout, my complexion is not so ruddy and I don’t always look dumbfounded.

I am working with another handicap; I am using acrylic not oil. I love the vibrant colors and lackadaisical dry time of oil, the way it slips gently onto the canvas. It dries clear and the colors are true. Acrylic is chalky, clumsy, fast and uneven to dry. It is like making love with oven mitts on. But it is not toxic.


I started of with a large mirror propped up in the studio on a spare easel. Charcoal and pencil are great materials for initial sketches. It is plastic, moveable, and accurate. It is easy to mark down the specifics of shapes, light plateaus, and reflecting shadows.

But like saying a word over and over again until the sounds no longer have any meaning; looking at myself in the mirror led me to paint first who I wanted to be, and then who I saw myself as; but never just what I look like.

I love the art of the psyche. I encourage my own ramblings and scribbles when the night is too long and sleep lifts the curtain. I love walking into a kind of waking dream and painting or writing what I can see there. Reality is there for all to see, but imaginative interpretation is something that only a mind can create.

But for this project, I wanted to show people what I really look like. My second attempt I used photographs; a way to remove my mind from the process and concentrate on the logistics of the shapes in my face.

This time I was left with paintings that looked like me, but lacked ‘come hither’ eyes or slightly knowing lips. The project was supposed to take just a few days, but has began to bleed into subsequent days. And even as I write this and put this project to bed, I am still not convinced with the outcome.

Perhaps that is okay. After all, as people, we are never finished. Even when we are dead, there were things that we planned to do and never got round to it, places we meant to visit, things that we meant to say. Perhaps we can never truly represent ourselves in the same way that we can never see the back of our head or get our own first impression. Perhaps portraits should never be finished.



Other commissioned portraits
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A Colorful Heap on the Floor

Life keeps getting in the way of my studio work. I have been horribly busy moving artwork from one show to the next and arranging contracts for sales. I finally get in the other day. It was late, I was a little flustered when I arrived.

I had a great plan for working in blue on a canvas I had prepared, practicing for the blue of the Triumphant Shoppers trousers. And there are the rare occasions when I do what I plan, but most of the time life gets in the way.

Well, I did not have the required discipline; I had promised myself that I would remain on a diet of only blue. But things started off on the wrong foot when my under painting got too involved, too warm in color, and then I could not hold myself back from greens and yellows. I ended up a colorful heap on the floor.

I chucked it out. Deep breath, and went to white. I redrew my triumphant shopper. I painted her from behind. I whited her world, took her off the raw canvas and sterilized her. And then I left her be.






Amy at Bernays .net
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Canvas

The canvas that I am currently working on is much toothier than I am used to. The texture of the surface is coarse; it is like painting on sandpaper. Which I like. Which I wanted.

The paintings are of the shoppers in big superstores like Wal-Mart and Target. I want there to be an earthy texture to the painting. Like a canvas bag from a health food store or a burlap sac.

I like it aesthetically, the texture, the color and the weight of the cloth when I stretch it. But also I want to emphasize the fact that I am making paintings; real canvas with bumps and texture and a presents.

I have this great place that does my giclee prints. The prints are so realistic and smooth surfaced. I envy them. Like a serf in the Middle Ages I marvel at a photograph, I find there is a magic that a print on canvas plays on me. I yearn for my paintings to achieve the same smooth, faultless surface.

But I am not a machine. And that is a good thing. The Rothko that I saw at the MOCA exhibit breathed in the room and the De Feo had dirty edges and frayed lines, imperfections that makes the thing original, proves it to be handmade.

Anyway, I want all this texture on my canvas but I have to learn how to paint on it. It is greedy. It takes all the paint off my brush before I can spread it to the rest of the hungry canvas. It has made the current image lean, anorexic, anemic for color.

If I could use oils I would be fine, oils are slick, abundant and generous to the canvas. You can share out oil paint like biblical fishes. It slithers on a canvas like a whore on silk.

The smell of the turpentine and even odorless mineral spirit (a misnomer) sends my pregnant body retching. So I am just going to have to re-teach myself the joys of acrylics.

So as not to bugger up what I have done, I am going today to work on a simple landscape. Same MO. A light sketch beneath, and then work the blues of the sky and ocean. I have a few smaller prepared canvases for this very purpose.

Anyway, better get going,

Bravo’s New Reality Show About Artists

Bravo TV has a new reality TV show Works Of Art; it is like Top Chef for artists. It airs in the US tonight. A few months ago, I did a pilot for a show like it…


“Wait, so let me get this straight, you were born in a tree house, in Hawaii, during a hurricane?”

The big, blue, stuck-on eyelashes fluttered at me,

“Do you think that was the best place for a woman in labor to be?” I asked.

“Well, they were on drugs” she blinked back with a perfectly reasonable explanation. Mimi had just finished telling us all about her self-portraits.

“Well, let’s move on to our next challenge.” The Host burst into the contestants, a bunch of surprisingly attractive artists standing awkwardly in a semi-circle. The six easels and the camera crew were stacked in front of us; holding aloft the selection of Mimi’s painting for this Show-and-Tell segment.

The camera darted to cover the host, followed by the sound man on a leash attached to his head phones. It hovered on the host’s face like a bee to a burger on a hot day.

“Thank you, Mimi, for showing us your next work” the gruff Bulldog of a presenter nailed out to the leering camera, “Next up we have Amy Bernays,” he gestured to his right with the grace of a buffalo.

Mimi tottered around in her high heels collecting perched canvases and setting them in a neat little row in the corner of the room. She bent to stroke her miniature Hairless Crested Chinese excuse for a dog who was loitering at the back of the studio like a teenager’s pompom dangling on the end of a pencil.

Mimi was wearing what my sister calls ‘knock me over and f**k me’ high heels. The bubblegum pink mini dress that she was wearing was exactly the same size and shape as the five other dresses that she wore each time she emerged from the make-up room. It was a feat of textile engineering and some bending of the laws of physics that she didn’t flash her G-string each time she moved.

The PAs removed the five extra easels that I didn’t need for my presentation and I positioned my lone painting of a tree.

“And what do we have here?” the Buffalo asked with his back to me, looking down the barrel of the wafting camera lens.

“That’s a question to you, Amy” the Director piped in,



“Um, It’s a painting of a tree.” (I thought that this was fairly obvious.)

Silence.

Expectant looks from the director, his hands held together in pained prayer, his eyebrows up in his hairline

“It is not pretending to be anything other than a painting of a tree” I continued.

“I used to do more literal, more rigidly representational work like Mimi’s lovely paintings of herself, but that is not what I want out of painting. We have cameras or magazines for that and I don’t see that as the aim of painting.

“I found what I admired in other people’s paintings was mood, color, atmosphere, texture. I like it when painting reminds us of a thing or moment when we were happy. When I closed my eyes and followed my heart I was lead in this direction. It is about light and paint and atmosphere, an ideal, freedom. And I love this tree, I love its thick buttery paint, it makes me want to lick the paint right off the canvas.”

“Right. Yeah. Amy, next time, short, snappy sentences. This is TV. OK”


Later that day, in a new dress, Mimi places a beautifully manicured hand on my arm. “You know that I’m not really like this” she said earnestly, “this is TV and I want this show to be picked up so I can be famous … you know, they want us to create drama.”

She teetered over to her easel and perched her barely covered butt cheek on the stool. She kept talking to me as she continued to paint her Marilyn Monroe portrait with the letters HOLLYWOOD printed over the top. “Anything that I said in the personal interview about your art is not meant personally, I love your painting in real life.”

What had she said about my painting?

At that moment the Line Producer called me into the living room. “So this is going to be a gossip scene with your ‘best bud’ Janna.” Janna was sitting on a sofa looking terrified. She had confided in me earlier that day that she too almost didn’t turn up for day two of the taping. We had wanted it to be an inspiring experience; ‘Lets-get-the-world-painting’ kind of show that would creatively engage a nation. Scripted gossiping scenes were not what either of us had signed up for.

“So, if you could say something like, “I hate Mimi, her work is crap,” and then you, Janna, say ‘Isn’t she a stripper!’ that would be great.” He smiled at us for a split second and then, with a look of concern at the shine the lights were leaving on my nose, he yelled, “Can we get make-up in here?”
---





Amy at Bernays.net
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A Brief History of Me

So I went to the studio and made a start.

I am not satisfied just yet, but it is a good start. I find half the work of painting is done in my head; thinking about color combination's, gesture, and the back fat to bottom ratio. All of which I was working on today during a slightly dull meeting. I am not sure yet what to do next with this painting, so I thought best to do nothing for fear of buggering it up, was nothing. so I did other things today, non art related things. None of which will entertain you in the slightest.

One thing I did do today was write back to an old boyfriend who has recently returned from living abroad. I knew him while I was in school in Cambridge and he was studding medicine at the university there. He knows nothing of what I have been up to in the last 10 years so I did a brief history of me, which I thought you might be interest in:

After Central St Martin’s I ran away to sunny California. I ended up running a dude ranch just under the “D” in Hollywood. Sunset Ranch


I lived in a little house on the ranch in the park, surrounded by horses, chickens, peacocks and coyotes that kept jumping on my roof at night and keeping me up.

This is a bit of a tangent but there was this one time, my mum was staying with me on the ranch. She is horribly allergic to horses, so spent the whole time high on Sudafed. Anyway, she comes knocking on my door in the middle of the night

“Amy” she whispered in her long mumsy nightgown that only the over 50s and those in period dramas can wear, “there’s a Police man at the door”

“No there’s not mum, go back to bed” so she tiptoed back to her room.

Then a very official Bang Bang Bang at the door, I leaped up, pulled on pants and answered the little wooden door.

“ma’am, your horses have escaped and they are running down Hollywood Boulevard.”

“Bollocks they are!”

The Americans don’t count bollocks as a swear word so I try and use it as often as possible when talking with officials. Plus, if the horses had escaped, they would go up the hill to the wild brush and lush grasses and not to the bright lights and short skirts of downtown.

I was explaining this to the officer when a helicopter rose up from the canyon, its search light scanning the ranches sleeping chickens.

“Well can you count them and see if you are missing any?”

“there are 80 of them in that corral and it is dark and they are all moving around. And there’s another thirty in stalls up the hill.” I waited for him to say I didn’t have to do it.

“It’ll take a while and I probably won’t get an accurate count.” I said over my shoulder as a tromped up the cold hill.

I guess it was a slow crime night in Hollywood as the helicopter spent the night hovering about, shining its giant search light behind the bushes and trees of the stars houses for hiding horses.

Needless to say, as dawn broke 8 of the very adventurous horses came back down off the hill just in time for breakfast. They smelled like wild sage and were practically giggling.

Turns out some punks had broken in, opened the pens and shooed the horses out. They then called the cops and said they were galloping down Sunset Boulevard as a prank.

Running the ranch was a lot of fun, lots of great stories, but eventually; after about 4 years; I needed to move on.

I went back to London and decided not to do an MA in painting; I got a studio in a dodgy little part of east London and painted until I ran out of money.

Then I remembered that the UK was cold and wet and full of people who had frowns and said ‘no’ a lot. So I hopped on a plane and came back to Hollywood. I got a job working for a grumpy old man training animals for TV and Film.

Really, I trained a lot of pigs. They grow very quickly and production always wants a cute little one with a little pink piggy nose (they also have very sharp teeth).

I worked on quality features like “you don’t mess with the Zohan” and “Tropic Thunder”. Fart jokes and camels go hand in hand apparently. Although I did get a chance to work on Avatar, which everyone is always very impressed with.

I kept up with my painting all this time and I have a few galleries that show me.

Partly because art was going fairly well, although I would always like to sell more, and partly because I am pregnant (goodness gracious me, turns out I am terribly bad at contraception) and catching buffaloes and riding camels is not really appropriate behavior for a woman in my condition. I recently gave up the animal thing and went full time to painting. (I also do graphic designy things but that is far less interesting)

My husband is a film maker and we live just north of downtown with three chickens who lay eggs, two puppies who eat clothes, and a pot bellied pig called Nora who loves cake almost as much as I do.

This is an art film I made with my good friend and artist Ann Hadlock



amy at bernays.net
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Painting the Fatties

There is nothing like the knowledge that there are other people looking into the whiteness of your computer screen, ready to read the burblings about to be sprouted, to really dry up the creative juices. I have to pull up my proverbial socks and smooth down my trembling tootsies. I will pretend that I am writing a letter to my sister. Trying to explain to her what I am doing with my life and why I haven’t gotten a proper job yet.

In truth, I am yearning to get into my brand new studio. Yesterday, under the flickering light (due to be fixed this morning) I prepared my canvas. I am working on a large painting of a sketch I did about a year ago

http://newbloodart.com/artwork.php?ArtworkID=5655

It did it for an art competition based on Icons. All the other applicants, without exception, did fabulous paintings of Bob Marley and Che Guevara. I did a play on the Byzantine icons of Russia.

Needless to say I did not win.

The organizers of the competition were a little confused and then politely nodded and said what an interesting interpretation of the theme.

But the sketches that I did of the shoppers in a target store have stayed with me.

As an aside, I did get some very strange looks as I skulked about the store with my sketchbook, hiding under low cost t-shirts and plastic shoes. I resorted in the end to taking pictures with my little point and shoot camera, hiding it in the flap of my handbag so as not to scare away the fatties. One mother with her 7 year old girl saw what I was doing and told the store manager and I was asked to leave.

But the image that I loved the most was the one of a fat and triumphant woman with her bags of newly purchased things. She was holding aloft her keys to open her SUV.

She reminded me of images of a runner crossing the finish line after a hard won race.

I want this painting to be monumental scale, 3foot by 4 foot. I am using a thick, course canvas, I want to have texture, like the hemp bags that you can buy in the health food stores.

Ideally, I would leave the canvas raw but oil paint will rot canvas over time if it is not primed. One can use a clear primer like rabbit skin glue, but it stinks not surprisingly of dead rabbits. I am pregnant and the smell makes me want to chunder.

So I am painting the canvas (did that yesterday), and then using a very thin wash to sink into the texture of the canvas and emphasize its texture (doing that today).

I will take pictures and show you tomorrow.

Day of Firsts

Joy of joys, today is a day of firsts.

It is my fist day in my new studio and my fist day writing this blog.

My studio is large and spacious; much like this page. My little portion of the studio it is at the back and slightly less large and spacious, but it is mine, and it is beautiful.

Since leaving St Martin’s, I have been meandering around my practice, languishing in the buttery landscapes and playfully rowing in boats and making sandcastles. My colleges and the galleries that represent me keep telling me to focus. To do one recognizable type of art…. It is good advice. I have nodded politely and continued to ignore them, zigzagging my way about my style. Doing what I liked, and learning what kind of artist I wanted to be.

But a funny thing has been happening recently. I have found myself staring into my pallet, like looking at a shimmering object at the bottom of the lake, unclear in the ripples. The point of my paintbrush has been rising up to pierce the surface.
I have connected the dots of my college theses, the work I make that I like the most, and the thing that keeps driving me to make art.

Although I do not know exactly where this is going, I know it is going to be a fun ride.


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