Charming children

Celine before the dance
36" x 24"
acrylic on canvas
sold

This painting of Céline is another example of a
painting that whipped along. At 12 Céline was an
accomplished artist herself. She was a sweet,
utterly confident little girl, and knew that we
were rushing to deadline. It had taken me
three months to paint her brother, and we
had at the most one month to finish her portrait
-- which meant with her busy schedule, after
school classes, her own drawing and painting,
homework, and family obligations -- I'd be lucky to
see her for six sessions, when I normally
need between 10 and 12, two hour sessions.

Her mother and Céline chose the dress
before we started, her brother's finished
portrait established the background, so we began.
On our second session she brought a
thick sketchbook of drawings she was
going to hand in for art. She was
so talented I was afraid she'd be
hard to please.

As it turned out she loved the painting.
We were working to the deadline of a show
opening. The idea was to surprise her father
on his birthday with these two portraits.
The paintings were his birthday gift
from his wife. I didn't meet the Dad
until the opening, although his
children had been coming to see me
all winter. All through the process --
which was arduous, his mother kept the secret
of this gift.

Rémi before the dance
36" x 24"
acrylic on canvas
sold

Rémi broke his leg in the
middle of our time together, but gamely
put the broken leg over the chair arm as
we had posed him that way originally.

When the Dad walked up the stairs into
the gallery and saw his children's
portraits on the wall he was clearly
overwhelmed. His wife beamed at him,
and it was one of the happiest moments in
my career. As their grandparents looked on
the children and their parents hugged laughing.

Have a making-people-happy day.

Inspiring children

Sean
36" x 24"
acrylic on canvas
sold

Sometimes when I'm working on a portrait it
comes together so quickly that I amaze
myself. I've tried analyzing why this happens
and can't give you any concrete answers.
It's not simply about connection, because
some of the portraits that have taken the
longest time to do were of people I loved.

This portrait of Sean was a complete surprise,
because it developed with such ease.
Sean is a fantastic human -- when I painted him
he was verging on 15. He was polite, incredibly
funny, loved his family, was devoted to board
sports, and liked school. We seemed to click
instantly, and every portrait session was a
pleasure. He liked eating cookies and talking
in the breaks; he enjoyed the cats, and
happily wore my son's white shirt for every
session.

His was the third in a series of three images
that would hang together on a wall at his
parents' place. The paintings had to work
individually, and when hung together had
to appear to be one big work. I
completed the series last summer, and
it is definitely one of the best things I've done.

Group Portrait
Sean, Madeline and Elizabeth
36" x 6'
acrylic on canvas
sold

Despite all our training, practice, knowledge,
and understanding painting is a chemical
or alchemical process. Sometimes it is
so easy we feel with every brush stroke that
we were born to paint, sometimes every
decision is painfully deliberate -- and the
results can be exactly the same, giving
off the same feeling of delighted ease,
whether we had a great, or difficult time
producing the image.

Here's to a day of effortless creativity.

Late summer thoughts

One of Steven's shots of
St. Clair Avenue
A major Toronto street during
the blackout of August 14, 2003

Five years ago, on August 14, Toronto experienced a
lengthy blackout. I was at my friend Jennifer's place,
and we were drinking a cup of tea, when her husband
Michael told us the power was out in the area.

Thinking nothing of it, I got in my car to go home
and walk the dog, and that's when I found out this
was much bigger than a little foul up in Rosedale.
In fact it was a massive power failure that darkened
Ontario and much of the United States northeast that day.

When I got to Yonge street near Merton, taking my
usual deke route home, trying to avoid the St. Clair
rush hour the problem became real. Thousands of
stranded subway riders were walking home in all
directions. People always say Torontonians are cold,
but I didn't see that. All of the motorists were offering
people rides. Of course traffic was moving at a snail's pace,
but I drove some people home that day.

Pretty Flash in Cedarvale Park
August 14, 2003

In the park we listened to the rumours running
rampant among dog walkers trying to figure out
what caused the blackout. We had a laugh with
Astrid, who was walking her lovely new Border
Collie, Flash. Then we wandered down to Amato's
on St. Clair, a pizza place that was running its
gas ovens without the electric fans required
by law, and doing a booming business.

The now defunct Amato's pizza took a
safety risk to feed the neighbourhood.

We ran into the whole neighbourhood there,
but especially Joan and Richard, and the four
of us decided to carry our pizza picnic to a nearby
little park and eat under the stars.

Me (left) with Joan and Richard
Everybody's happy.

That was the real miracle, a dark sky studded
with thousands of stars, because there were
no lights, except the candles people lit
cautiously in their houses and on their
porches.

Car lights on darkened St. Clair
August 14, 2003.

We visited with friends nearby, and then
walked home to sit on our garden bench
and enjoy the marvel of the night.

More car lights on dark St. Clair
August 14, 2003
by Steven van Schaik

In the morning our friends Cathy and Chris
invited us for breakfast. They were using
their barbecue and had coffee!!! By lunch time
the whole thing was over, but it remains in
our memory as a wonderful time.

That doesn't mean we want it to happen
again. We were lucky that our fridge
full of groceries stayed cool. But it
was a lot of fun at the time.

Great artists abound like peaches in August

Starting Out
A 12" x 12" gessoed canvas is painted
in a combination of acrylic colours to produce "peach"

One bad thing about the Internet in my life is that
I'm already easily distracted, and the visual stimulation
available on the fantastic art blogs I'm discovering
can keep that going full time.

I loosely draw the image in cadmium red.

I read on someone's blog lately that there were
no good art blogs, and I wondered if that
artist had his head in a paper bag. Maybe the
blogger was wearing a sleep mask that day, because I
find the complete opposite to be true. And that's
serious.

I fill in a turquoise background with a large
brush to get some depth.

There are so many astoundingly creative, masterful
artists to discover that I could spend my whole
day reading about them, analyzing their work --
learning. But at some point I have to pull myself
back from the readily available, technologically
induced attention disorder and sit down to paint.

I start working on the details, peaches
background, shadows and highlights on the glass
and add a peach. I'm not happy with
the balance, so that's tomorrow's problem.

Two things got me working on the little painting
I'm giving you the step by step on today.
1. was a video on painting a peach by Hall Groat
II, www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5 - lfm X9zQA
the second was the amazing peaches we've
been eating this week.

In fact those peaches are so good that I had to
move as fast as possible with the painting, because
my family wants to eat the peaches that are in
my antique glass bowl.

I decide to darken the table, and work on
the shape of the bowl.

The astounding thing about this painting's progress
is that it happened in the middle of a housing
disaster, and I stayed focused on the one task
I could accomplish despite the very bad news
in our house.

I work on refining the bowl, peaches,
shadows and glass and then
the demands of the house took
over. I'll finish it up tomorrow.

In the 300th rain storm of the last
three months, our basement flooded, and now
my husband is trying to clean up with my
son's help, while I make the calls to drain
companies, insurance and the clean up crew.
I have a cast that can't get wet and I'm on
crutches. When in doubt paint.

Have a productive and dry day.

The Big Guy

Me and the Crow
Black and white photograph
8" x 10"
by William Wallace Muir

In every child's life fathers and mothers loom large --
a fact you forget sometimes when you're a parent
yourself. Doing your own work, remembering to
buy the right groceries, thinking of something to make for
dinner, solving small day-to-day problems and doling
out as much love as you can each day tends to make
parenting feel only as important as breathing.

But looking back on the huge impact your own
parents had on you shifts your perspective. My
Dad was among other things, an artist. I didn't
appreciate his paintings when I was a kid
entering art school, although I do now.
He started painting seriously about the time
that I did, but for different reasons.
I'd painted all my life. He was inspired by
a little book about painting by Winston Churchill,
his all-time hero.

After supper jokes
Black and white photgraph
8" x 10"
William Wallace Muir

My dad ended up developing a passion for painting that
stuck with him until he died. But before he was a
painter, he was an excellent photographer. I talk about his
work a lot, so today I'll show you a few of the
images I grabbed from the stacks at my
mother's place -- they're of my brother Andrew
and me as children. The spots and imperfections
have happened through damage to the pieces.
Perhaps they weren't meant to be kept. He
matted most of his favorite shots.

Playing Doctor
Black and White photograph
8" x 10"
William Wallace Muir

Have a kids-loving-parents day.

Working from photos

A lot of artists whose work I love paint from photos.
This means that they can hold all the density of
the image in their minds while they are painting,
adding to the details in the photo, and using it
more like an actor learning lines uses a prompter,
than a source to copy detail for detail.

I've used photos myself, and always hope that
something alive and original combines in the
unspoken contract between me and the photo.
We're working together, but the photo is
helping me, I'm not recreating what it says.

The Blue Sweater
acrylic on canvas
24" x 36"

Tonight I'm including a painting I did of
my sister, from a photo that my father
took when she was a teenager. I know I've
used this painting on the blog before, but I
didn't talk about it then, so forgive me.

I find it almost impossible to create a portrait from
photos alone, although I've done it when there was
no other option.

The painting differed greatly in every
way except for the pose and the expression
on my sister's face. She was not sitting on
a yellow chair, there was no table, or
cup and saucer, and the painting in the
background gives the nod to Skip
Lawrence whose work I greatly admire.

But my father's photos were amazing
works of art in and of themselves. They
were beautifully lit, composed, worked
on, both before and after be took the
actual shot. His 8 x 10 black and white
prints piled by the 100s in my mother's
house, are rich in detail, mood, nuance.

My memory of my sister at this age is
strong, but without my father's original
black and white work I couldn't have
done this painting.

So I would say I have much better luck
painting from photos when the
original image is still vivid in my brain,
and when I love the person, landscape,
or still life.

Have a catching it on your camera day.

Dancing on one leg

You get, as it happens, better and better at being a person
on crutches. After the initial couple of weeks of fear
and loathing, comes a time of just bloody well carrying
on, and after that -- the realization that all is not lost,
you can still be you.

Today I was listening to the tunes on my computer, and
dancing with one knee (the knee of the cast leg)
supported on a chair, and then the bed. I saw myself
wildly waving my arms in the mirror, and thought two
things: 1. I am happy. and 2. I am dancing! Dancing!!!

Detail
Shorelines Spring Break the Beaches

How exciting.

Right away the metaphor of dancing on one leg,
as a true representation of any kind of art
project hit me. We are all -- pros, amateurs,
everyone who attempts to create a visual
image -- dancing on one leg. Why? Because
the joy of creation, is hampered by whatever
part of it we can't do yet, but we still
go for it -- eyes wide open, arms beating time
to the music, filled with inexplicable happiness.

Keep on dancing.

Have an indestructibly creative day