Learning to Paint

Yesterday I was invited into a fourth year painting class at OCAD University to critique the students' work.  At the end of the class, one of the students asked (and I paraphrase), "What's the best way to learn to paint?".  I remember so clearly how I felt at school, desperately wanting someone - anyone! - to just tell me how to paint.  There seemed to be so many talented painters, so many with much greater skill than I had, and I wanted that elusive, mythical manual I was sure existed somewhere that would give me the rules, the lessons, the definitive steps to becoming a great painter.  It took me four years of art college to finally realize that no one can teach you how to paint.

Admittedly, there are a few technical matters when it comes to materials, but remarkably few, and really, the only way to learn to paint is to PAINT.  Someone can teach you how THEY paint, but you'll never figure out how YOU paint, unless you, well, paint and paint and paint and paint.  So often a painter's work is interesting simply because of the way they apply the paint -- a unique way, that they figured out themselves.

The most helpful advice I have learned so far can be boiled down to a few points:

1.  Experiment with a full range of different media.  Some media just doesn't suit your hand, your vision, your natural pace.  You need to find a medium and process that suits you, and no one can figure that out for you. (Acrylic paint seemed to be most people's choice at my art school, and I fought with it for years, until I finally tried oil paint one day and became a better painter overnight.)

2.  Experiment with a range of applications.  A great way to start is to try to copy some of your favorites.  I read a great interview with Elizabeth Murray in her MOMA retrospective catalogue in which she describes how trying to copy a de Kooning painting taught her how to paint. 

3.  Take risks.  Push a painting beyond where you think it can go, beyond what feels comfortable to you.  Instead of being scared you'll "ruin it", commit to resolving it at all costs.  The painting will take unexpected turns and leave you with something that you had no intention of creating at the beginning.  Even if it's just one moment of that process that is worth storing in your arsenal at the end (and I can pretty much guarantee that there will be at least one thing that's a keeper), it will have been worthwhile.  And no teacher will have been able to figure out that thing for you.

My final words of encouragement to the student was to not be intimidated or discouraged by the more skillful painters in her class.  There are lots of skilled painters out there who have nothing interesting to say.  If you have something to say, I really believe the skill will come through the sheer desire to say it.


Daily Interest


"I would feel very badly for someone who is so boring that they can't go to a coffee shop once a day and for two minutes say something that is interesting." - Seth Godin

This blog post by Seth Godin has got me inspired to post daily blogs again. And I think his point on having something interesting to say each day applies just as much to visual artists as to writers.  Create a new image a day?

Clarification on Inspiration

"Today, Clyne is most influenced by the fashion industry and the images of perfection and beauty it perpetuates." Lara Cory article, Escape Into Life blog
This was written last week as part of a beautiful review of my work by Lara Cory. But this particular line has been haunting me since I first read it. Although seeing a critique of the fashion industry's obsession with perfection is an entirely fair reading of my work, it is not what influences my work. It is not what inspires me to make the work.

So what does inspire me?

Fundamentally, I am inspired by images and questions of why we want to look at them, of what desires they satisfy, feed, create. I'm inspired by the different ways we experience images -- does the meaning or role of the image change if we see it on the screen of our laptop, or in a glossy magazine? Does it matter if it is experienced as a huge painting amidst the lush display of an old European museum, or as a photograph imprisoned behind glass on the white walls of a gallery? The experience of images is never determined solely by the picture itself. It is an experience of the senses, of memory, of fantasy -- ultimately, of desire. As W.J.T. Mitchell writes in his book What do Pictures Want?: "...the question of desire is inseparable from the problem of the image, as if the two concepts were caught in a mutually generative circuit, desire generating images and images generating desire." (p 58)

So if images and their relationship to desire are my subject matter, then why do I choose to paint portraits? There seems no better object of display to inspire viewers to look than the human face, an object to which we are more highly sensitive to than any other object. My paintings anthropomorphize the image, presenting portraits not of women, but of images. And by using the face, the viewer is confronted with an unsettling and seductive exchange when, as James Elkins writes, "the object stares back". In fact, it is one of the greatest moments in the process of painting for me -- when I step back to look at my painting and the tiny fragments of eyes merge together and my painting looks back at me.

And then there's fashion. Why do I steal from the pages of fashion magazines to make my paintings? At its core, fashion, like images, is about desire and illusion. To put it simply, for me, fashion is the embodiment of image-making.

I hope that clarifies things, although inspiration is of course never finite, and not always easy to articulate. I should have done a better job at clarifying my influences to Lara Cory. What others view as the most interesting aspect of your work is not always the same thing that motivated the work.

It takes me back to the moment I knew I wanted to be an artist. I had quit my job as a lawyer and moved out west, and began taking basic art classes at the local art college. My first class was a course on principles of design and composition. Our final assignment was to create a self-portrait using the principles we had learned. When it came to the day to present the work, our instructor informed us that the person sitting next to us (ie. a random stranger) would present our work. Whatever we had to say about ourselves had to have been said in the work itself. When the student next to me presented my work, she said not only the things that I had hoped the work would convey, but so much more -- and all of her insights were entirely accurate descriptions of me. The work had said more than I had ever intended, had been more revealing than I ever imagined. I was hooked.

Self-Portrait, collage, Amanda Clyne, 2002

Now, as an artist, I struggle to contend with what I hope to express through the work and what others glean from it. Is your work about what you say it is, or is it about what others see in it? I think it is unavoidably and necessarily both.

In Remembrance

"The Sound of His Own Voice Made Him Cry the Most", collage on watercolor paper, Amanda Clyne, 2006


Detail -- sewn fragments of statutes, contracts, faxes and memos from my life as a lawyer.

This is an artwork I made when I was an art student, in remembrance of my experience of 9/11. Here is the artist statement I wrote about the piece:

To many people, the events of September 11 have come to represent the vulnerability of our security, the new threat and fear of terrorism, or the heartstring to pull to justify war. But on that day, I was a New Yorker living in lower Manhattan, working as a corporate lawyer, and for me, the two burning towers have come to represent the moment that became the catalyst for change in my life, for reassessing my priorities, and for searching for the passions and joys that were being sidelined by my ambitious career.

Sewing together fragments of the contracts, statutes, faxes and memos that consumed my daily life as a lawyer, I re-constructed the image of the two towers of the World Trade Center. I wanted the red thread to convey a sense of fragility, memory, and even the suturing of a wound. In contrast, I wanted the fallout of the explosion of the towers to be fragments of my own creation or of personal joys – my niece’s artwork, sheet music for my piano, photos of my best friend’s pregnant belly, generally images of my life outside the office full of art, love, family and beauty. And I wanted to rebuild the city with that joy, as indeed all New Yorkers did after the attacks.

The title of the piece comes from Jonathon Safran Foer’s novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, in which the young protaganist who lost his father in the World Trade Center attacks struggles to answer the question, “Can any good come from this?”. I hope my piece reflects my answer – for me and the city I love.

An Interesting Life

An interesting life makes for an interesting artist. A more in-depth biography of my life so far, recently posted to my website:

"Being an artist was not my first choice. Frankly, I never knew it could be a choice at all. To me, artists were magical beings, fearless and gifted, born with gargantuan imaginations akin to the power of superheroes. Art seemed too important, too precious for me to violate with my amateur ideas and crude skills. Art was for looking, for admiring, for experiencing. For me, that would have to be enough.
So although I knew early on that I was not going to be an artist, I was determined that my life be anything but boring. As the drama and adventures began to unfold, I came to see my life as a series of starring roles in a string of Hollywood films. Here are just a few of my storylines:
    • Young teenage girl sexually assaulted by gang of teenage boys, fights for their conviction. Eventually graduates from university with a degree in Women’s Studies, and goes on to pursue law school.College girl backpacks through Europe for the summer, meets a tall, dark stranger and moves to the south of France for her first great love affair.
    • Young lawyer conquers Manhattan, negotiating billion dollar deals in the boardroom by day, dancing up a storm in the clubs by night. On her precious days off, she secretly trolls art galleries and museums, art books and magazines, wondering what if...
    • Junior associate at New York law firm transferred to Singapore, works in India, travels throughout Asia, begins to see the world anew.
    • Traumatized by 9/11, New Yorker quits her lucrative job and discovers she is an artist. Friends, family and colleagues are inexplicably and freakishly supportive.
I have studied at eight universities, earned three degrees, worked on three continents and lived in six different cities around the world. So far, my life has not been simple or straightforward, but now it is all fodder for my art.
Since graduating from OCAD University in 2009 with the medal in Drawing and Painting, I have been working in Toronto as a full-time artist. And I now know that artists are indeed not magical beings, but hard-working, obsessive, passionate mortals."

Fluid Forms

"The human body is above all a mirror of the soul,
and that is the source of its great beauty."
-- Rodin, 1925

Watercolor is so underrated. I'm returning to some watercolor experiments that I began many months ago, and it never ceases to amaze me how it is one of the most sensual, unpredictable, heavenly media. Too closely associated with flower paintings and seascapes, watercolor seems born for the body. These are some of my favorite watercolor paintings by Auguste Rodin from the turn of the century -- bold, sexy sources of inspiration.