cmsa; HOW TRAGICALLY IRONIC that in solidarity with france we have been whipped up into a patriotic frenzy of hatred...producing exactly the same mentality that creates terrorists in the first place...
November 16th, 2015
CMSA i am currently fascinated with form that has a neon edge at their parameters like those mountains and the cloud bank!!!!!!!!!thanks Sheri Howe!
November 12th, 2015
CMSA; notes to a good painter on a bad day;
I often feel like an "outsider" too... like there's a great party going on i didn't get an invitation to! ...i've felt that way often over the years...it sucks, maybe it's part of what makes me internalize the worst criticisms i've heard and accept them as the ugly truth, and made me NOT hear all the lovely things people do say...maybe it does that to you too? Ultimately we're painters first, no matter what...to paint is to have a world in our own control while we live in a world in which we can often feel powerless....so let's get painting!
November 10th, 2015
CMSA; Yay! good news week for me; Southwest Art Magazine will do a feature about my work in their january issue and sometime in 2016 my work will also be featured as part of the spotlight series in The Artists Magazine. This is especially great news because things haven't been going fast enough for me lately; ; I've been back in los angeles a year now (after a 25 year hiatus)..and,as i've mentioned before, the local gallery scene has not gotten near as excited about my work as I have myself. It's hard to get my foot in the door because before I open my mouth or show my work, I'm overwhelmed by the negativity generated as soon as the gallerist identifies me as the dreaded ;" ARTIST THEY'VE NEVER HEARD OF"!!!!!!!!!.. with any luck these articles may help remedy that...
November 9th, 2015
CMSA; A little further along in the great spray paint experiment WIP Cynda Valle
November 2nd, 2015
CMSA: NOTES FROM LOS ANGELES: SHAME ON YOU LOS ANGELES GALLERIES! You hire bitchy young ladies to man(make that wo-man) the desk and the phone; it seems to be their avowed intent to keep you ( the artist whom they have never heard of) from conveying a message or inquiry to the director/manager/owner...sigh...HAVE A LITTLE RESPECT; THE ARTIST IS NOT THE ENEMY...thank you...that is all
November 1st, 2015
CMSA; this is what i've been working on this month; a portrait commission as a surprise bday gift (so can't show the face yet) but the cool thing is they let me do whatever i wanted in the background; in the midst of drought i love thinking and painting places that are wet and green naturally; LET IT RAIN, CYNDA VALLE OIL ON LINEN 50X24 INCHES
October 25th,2015
CMSA; NOTES FROM LOST ANGELES; I'm working on a very unusual portrait commission...i was commissioned to paint my patrons' wife (whom i have never met, from photos he took), in ANY WAY I WANT!!!the commissioner said" i like your work, i'll like whatever you do, so do whatever you want" that was an amazing approach, usually the people that commission me have very rigid parameters that are more about their aesthetic than mine....I hope my patron will be honored by his own presence in the painting as the "Diamond Crested Scott-bird"....look i even put teensy little glasses on him....if you recognize him, don't tell, it's a surprise! i think i was inspired by the old religious paintings that included the patron off to the side, and smaller
October 23rd, 2015
CMSA; I HAVE TAKEN FIRE LATELY REGARDING MY SUPER SATURATED PALETTE ( ; The traditional painting artworld does sometimes find fault with it and associate it with a particularly female, over the top type childlike color aesthetic; something derived more from popular culture than "high" fine art...It is ironic that in a culture where anything can become art (think Damien Hirst), people will persist in judging....american culture of the last 40 years has shaped the way i look at myself and the world around me. By noting wwhat is emphasized (like the bright palette) and what is left out (like her legs!) in my work , one can draw interesting conclusions (both negative and positive)about what was important to the culture that produced me...I think this idea first cropped up, art historically speaking, in the work of andy warhol..
October 22nd, 2015
CMSA NOTES FROM LOS ANGELES; when i was a small girl i became fascinated with pictures of ordinary things...i thought it was so cool that , in a painting, you could make a well lit pile of poo poo as beautiful as a beautiful woman ...here's a beautiful painting of an ordinary thing by Chuck Connelly.
October 20th,2015
CMSA. NOTES FROM LOS ANGELES;From my fb friend Sue Ellen Parkinson, I ABSOLUTLELY LOVE WHAT SHE SEES IN MY WORK...THANK YOU SUE ELLEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"What I get from your paintings is that there is this profound radiance that exists in everything...refrigerators! kitchens! all the ordinary everyday stuff and circumstances. That amazing underpinning of Life is so everyday that we often don't even notice it---until an artist shows it to us. You bring that awareness to the foreground."
October 13th, 2015
CMSA: NOTES FROM LEFT FIELD ;my facebook artist friend Lori A. Escalera is presenting a paper at TRAC and asked me some questions regading pictoral space, myself, and the work of F. F Scott Hess...thanks Lori, you really got me thinking; a great topic for today's blog! see painting of mine from early 80's;( on the left) when i was gettting a bfa at tyler painting was "dead" and i was taught that the "honest " approach to traditional painting was to keep the image flat acknowleding that canvas was a flat graphic 2 dimensional plane...you can see from above i tried to paint flat and surfacy as i was taught, but still paint the illusion of depth that i have always loved...after i got out of school, like so many of my classmates, i slowly started to reject what i learned and listen to my heart; for me the most wonderous paintings are all about the magic of the illusion that a more dimentsional pictorial space produces (no wonder i love scott's paitnings!) ...over the years i became very interested in the wide angle distortions my little point and shoot was producing in my reference photos; the end result being a prctoral space that appears tipped up; almost like the parallel perspective of classical japanese images....a deep space, yes, but ii usually put a bit of visual interest at the bottom foreground of the painting as if things could indeed" fall out" (like the baby in the painting "all that glitters" has to hold onto the edge of the paintng so she doessnt'" fall out" ...i have noticed the same effect in scotts recent work messing around with the panorama function on his phone..those images are .like a party so fulll and rowdy it spills out into the hall...images and compositions that tip the contents right into the viewers lap....makes me think of some of the things scott worte about in "figural movement".
October 10th, 2015
CMSA my wish; if the art fairy could grant me one wish. it would be that i could magically teleport all my mendo county painting friends and students here to the brewery in los angeles. this is heaven for a painter; i feel like i'm getting a second young adulthood...i want the same for my old willits buddies. i think many artists find they have more in common with other artists than they do with their blood relatives...wherever artists live and work i feel the most at home, and the most accepted...warts and all.. thank you art god
October 9th, 2015
CMSA; next on the easel; a portrait commission; block in first of a jungly lookin landscape (pictured here), next i'll put the head of the subject ( in safari hat) kind of transparent in places so you can see through her..than a foreground of woody orchids and tropical birds...grateful to this client whose giving me free rein; a rare and wonderful thing in a commission! ps. using fastmatte white oil and neomeglip in my block-in mean it dries enough for a new layer every 8 hours...amazing how fast even the thicker more opaque colors dry!!! WIP C VALLE
oct 8
tim barr, featured artist on the feed today; here's the link to a recent article about his work; http://somervillemanning.com/timothy-barr-american-art-collector-magazine/, ...strange we were both painters born...but during those years we didn't paint at all and i don't even remember talking about painting with him..why was tyler like that for us Tim Barr??seems like we missed something important ? anyway here's another nice thing tim said about painting and his recent cover story; " i'm going for hard edge without that awful stilted feeling. I always remember someone saying that paintings are a game of some kind that is won at the edges. " yeah, i know what you mean tim! ...know what you mean tim! i
oct 8
next on the easel; a portrait commission; block in first of a jungly lookin landscape (pictured here), next i'll put the head of the subject ( in safari hat) kind of transparent in places so you can see through her..than a foreground of woody orchids and tropical birds...grateful to this client whose giving me free rein; a rare and wonderful thing in a commission! ps. using fastmatte white oil and neomeglip in my block-in mean it dries enough for a new layer every 8 hours...amazing how fast even the thicker more opaque colors dry!!! WIP C VALLE
oct 7
here we go again!!!!, experimenting with spray paint for the underpainting WIP. c valle
oct 7
"Venus of Mayberry" cynda valle, oil on linen 2015; Experimenting with doing the early glazes with neon spray paint...so far i'm happy with how it's handling ... The painting was inspired by Manets painting" Bar at the Folies Begeres ". and also inspired by scholarship surrounding the Venus of Willendorf; specifically the hypothesis that by what is exaggerated in the sculpture (like the breasts and belly), we see what was important to the culture that produced her, and by what is NOT there (her legs) we learn just as much about what is not desirable (in our culture's venus she doesn't have legs either in an effort to keep her in the kitchen!
oct 6
NOTES ON THE BREWERY ARTWALK; wow....LA never ceases to amaze; i met literally 1,000's of beautiful, interesting, multi ethnic, friendly people; LA is truely the melting pot of the world...i have never had such a huge number of potential models!!!!!Have to say the downside was 99.9 % of them would not part with more than the price of a greeting card...or they took pics and spent nothing at all....BBBBBOOOOOOOO VIEWING PUBLIC; PLEASE BUY FROM YOUR LOCAL ARTISTS.....WE CANNOT SURVIVE INDEFINITELY ON CANVAS AND OIL PAINT!!!!!!!!
oct 5
NOTES ON THE ARTWALK; FEELING PROUD HERE; AND EMBRACING THE "MORE IS MORE" AESTHETIC THAT THEY NEVER COULD BEAT OUT OF ME IN ART SCHOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!