Avoid Artist Block during the Coronavirus

In this episode Stefan Baumann talks to one of his students about what to do if you can make it into the studio to paint even though you now have the time, you could be suffering of Avoid Artist Block during the Coronavirus.
If you want to get a Free Book on painting please go to www.StefanBaumann.com there you can also get information on Baumann workshops and YouTube videos, if you are interested in coaching please give me a call at 415-606-9074.
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Stefan’s plein air paintings include amazing effects of light, shadow, color and the natural beauty that he sees in American wilderness landscapes, wildlife, and in the architectural styles of older houses and barns.  Through his work, viewers enjoy the opportunity to see spectacular places in America that are too remote and inaccessible for most to visit themselves.  Baumann’s painting style has been classified by art collectors and galleries as “Romantic Realism with Luminism.” Pioneers of this beautiful genre of landscape painting include Frederic Church, Thomas Cole,  and Albert Bierstadt of the Hudson River School.  They were East Coast artists who journeyed to the Western United States to sketch and paint amazing views of the American wilderness, and then they returned to their home studios to paint stunning detailed versions of these vistas on room-sized canvases. Similarily,  Stefan Baumann reveals the true spirit of nature by transporting the viewer to distant lands that have gone unseen and undisturbed on his canvases. Baumann’s passion for painting is fueled by his fascination with and close observation of nature’s sublime beauty and mood.  Baumann’s paintings speak for themselves ~ elegant and mysterious, exciting and bold, every landscape and wildlife painting captures a feeling, a sense of place, and the magic of light.
#artistblock #fineArt 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:04

I'm Stefan Bellman and welcome to another podcast. We live in very trying times right now. Never before in history have we ever experienced an entire world shutting down. It can cause quite a bit of anxiety and fear, and for the artist it may even create a sense of artist block. In this conversation, I discussed with one of my students about how to overcome that. And we focus on love and community. More importantly, to understand the human condition, what makes what's going on right now as an opportunity and not something to be feared. So sit back and relax and enjoy this conversation I have with one of my students about love, beauty, and the human condition. We're doing this not because we're healthy, we're doing this because we care about other people. And so it's done out of love because you and I probably would survive it, but your mother and father won't. And so we do this to protect others, and we do that as solidarity, as a country, as a world, out of love for people who could die from this. So artist block is a real thing. And as a coach, my job is to hold steady you through all crisis. So you will through something like this, with this uh this virus that's that's going on, you're not the only person that's felt paralyzed. And like I said, one of my students earlier, he's had this for a year and a half, and I just hold steady. And he says, you know, man, as long as as long as you're there, yeah, I'll come back. Well, he lost his fiancee, and he lost his job. At first, it was it was he's just really busy. So he was busy with his his life beforehand, then he lost his fiancé, and then he lost his jobs, and then all of a sudden it's like you're stuck at home. And so you sit there for weeks in your pajamas wondering what's going on. You know, where's my life? Everything that you know has been yanked away from you, you know, and you can come back to art if you don't have an agenda. We don't like to do things if we have to do them. That's one of the main issues when I have students and they sign up for coaching. They say, Well, in two years I'm going to retire and I want to make a living as a painting. And yeah, you could produce products, and it doesn't matter if you produce uh beautiful artwork or if you produce, you know, ceramic tiles. You could do that too. If you're looking to offset your income uh with some kind of craft or art, you can make little little pots. Uh, you could get into pottery if you want, you know. So that gives you kind of something busy, and you can make money at it. And you probably can make more money making pots than you can um selling paintings. Um you could even rev up and start a whole company, you know, of new pottery. Uh but as artists we and we love to observe beauty. And it's kind of hard to be aware of that when we are caught up with trauma and with fear and with not secure with what's going on. You know, it's it's frightening for a lot of people. And it's frightening because we're starting to see uh a huge break in who we are as a society. You know, there's there's the shut-ins, and then there are people who refuse to to follow the advice and say we need to go back to getting haircuts and tattoos and you know, whatever the Americans want to want to say. You know, there in Italy, you have had really you're you've been really confronted with this virus head on, and you're you live so socially connected, so close. You had no option except to separate everybody. So that even even if you had to just figure out what was going on. You know, what is this virus? How how catchy is it? Now you're isolated. The thing that you have to do is find beauty within yourself, it's not an external thing. I think art artists that do really great with their art throughout their life, um, come to art as a means of expression, of visually seeing something and the need to share that. I think when you when you come to painting as a as a product, as something I want to sell, that you know, five years I want to be a professional artist, I think that's almost impossible to predict. I think it's very difficult to predict uh what kind of sales you can actually make. And I don't think artists have integrity when they look at at painting as a product. I think that uh you have to have a connection with wanting to express beauty. There are incredible poets that never sell anything. You know, they do it just because the poetry has to be done. There are people that volunteer to act because they love the feeling of acting, but they don't look at it as a source of, oh, I'm going to make money at this. They do that because they love the craft. And I think we kind of have a disconnect because, in a lot of ways, painting, ever since the beginning of time, um paintings that were done uh from commissions for churches, you know, prior to the 1500s, most of our work was commissioned by churches, mainly to illustrate stories in the Bible uh to peasants because they couldn't read. And so they could point to a picture and say, that's what Jesus looks like, this is what it looked like when he took him off the cross, you know, and there's Mary and there's the group and all that. So they were that. And so you know later on you have artists like Michelangelo, who basically loves sculpture, but was forced to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel because that's what you were supposed to do when the church said something. And so, uh, and a lot of the artwork that he produced, he you know, he he died a very wealthy man. He did a lot of artwork, and a lot of the artwork was mass-produced, and it was it was somewhat like Thomas Kincaid, where he'd come up with an idea and he'd give it to people to to finish. You know, so Thomas Kincaid would paint a painting and then they would make copies of it, and then he would give it to a crew of people to touch it up and do whatever with them. Um, that's kind of what Michelangelo did and Raphael did. They did commissions for the Medicis and things, um, and they did really quite well. Um, when you when you look at that art as opposed to Carvaggio or Rembrandt, where they you know Rembrandt needed to make money, but he loved his subject matter, he loved his light. He, you know, he wasn't uh Carvaggio too. He loved the the effect of light more than he liked the commission. When we look at Leonardo um Michelangelo, we don't see the love of light. We don't see um, you know, when we look at the Sistine Chapel, it's it's it's a beautiful illustration. It's almost like a cartoon. You know, it's not it's not like a Caravaggio or a Rembrandt or Vermeer where the light, the moment in time was so expressive. You know, when we look at Vermeer, the interiors of his of his subjects, if you paint out of love, if you paint out of of wanting to express your your observations of beauty, when you listen to poets like Oscar Wilde talk about beauty, um you talk you listen you watch opera, you know, La Boham, all that's about love and beauty, love and beauty. And the human condition, if you focus in from your heart and not on your canvas, if you if you observe and watch life and want to share that with others, you can find inspiration. But when you focus in on product, when you focus in on trying to um mass produce, yeah, a lot of a lot of the artwork that was done during the Renaissance was mass produced. And a lot of that artwork has very little feeling or very little connection, it's just basically decoration. Um Sissine Chapel, as wonderful as it is, is decoration. It's not trying, it's not it by no way does that express beauty and the subtleties of beauty that you'd have even the Mona Lisa. You know, the Mona Lisa isn't an illustration of a person, it's the expression of art as a beautiful device to share with others. Knowledge is gleamed from knowledge prior. And the only thing, the only thing that uh I find artists that are in your position, they'll go, Well, I'll take a break for a year. And then five years later they come back to me and they go, go, I want to take lessons again. So and I go, Well, uh, have you painted since I last saw you five years ago? And they go, I haven't picked up a brush. And see, that's that's the deadly scent right there. Is and then what happens is you become very angry because you have wasted five years. And you and what I hear from them is go, God, if I didn't waste all this time, imagine how I would be now. Um, but you can't live in that in that area. Again, that's kind of that's kind of greed, you know, that that's kind of being really greedy. You you have to come to art because you love art. And if you create art that you love, people will appreciate it and collect it. You have to love the medium, and the reason why uh we build museums for artists is not because you know it's a technical skill that very few people can do, it's about being to express the the human condition. And the the human condition is is is forged out of love. If you look at uh everything you do, like you're trying to to create this this one painting, uh, rather than worrying about it being right or worried about getting it, you know, whatever, if you just paint on it because that's what you do and not worry about the outcome and be curious about how can I paint the the flesh realistically? How can I make her look like she's sleeping? How can I make the the the feeling you know, the the ethereal feeling that that and the love that you have for this person, how can I express that when you do that and not focus on the the the final outcome, you can be with something for hours. And and so what I invite you to do is just be curious, just go, wow, you know, look at how beautiful that face is. How can I work on that? Um, all the technical stuff that I teach you is so that you understand how lights and shadows work. I can't make you an artist, I can just take you there. You have to find something within your soul that keeps you there. I can, you know, and and you become an artist from inside, not from the outside. Nobody can teach you to be an artist. That's an internal north that you have to you have to find yourself. Art is a wonderful thing. And and and any painting that you find that is absolutely beautiful touches you at that way. Anything not isn't that way. It's about connecting with beauty, not about connecting to a product or connecting to a model. It's not being able to draw a model well. Because there's a lot of people who do that. But there's no there's no connection with it. That's why a lot of academic drawings have no value to them. They're just academic. And it's interesting to look at an academic Saison drawing that you know is done in front of a model just for the sake of practice. And it's it's that's different than looking at the soul of an artist. And when you see a soul of an artist, we don't care about the academics. When we look at a self-portrait of Van Gogh, we're not concerned whether or not it's accurate or not. We're more curious about his connection to paint and the connection to beauty and color. When we look at a sunflower of Van Gogh, are we really concerned that it's a sunflower painting? Or are we concerned with how he saw things? What he saw, how he felt about things. It's about showing that. When we watch an actor, it's only real if they become that person they portray. It's not real if they're just going through the motion. When we listen to a piece of poetry, it's gotta connect with our heart, not just words on a page. To be an artist is is the epitome of being a human, to be alive. Without that, there's no humanity, there's no there's no beauty, there's no soul. Otherwise, we're just cogs running through life with no direction. Art gives us inspiration. So But it's wonderful to coach.

unknown 14:00

You're a fantastic coach, so I'm so glad I found you.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

So there you have it. Just because we're experiencing this moment in history that's quite unusual doesn't mean that we have to roll up and disappear. It's a great time to learn a lot about ourselves, about our humanity, and about who we are as artists. If you'd like to get more information about me, about my podcast, about my television shows, about my YouTube videos, you can do so by going to my website at www.stefanbauman.com and there you can register for a free book, Everything I Know About Painting. If you're interested in coaching, you'll find information on my website also. Or you could just give me a call at four one five six zero six nine zero seven four. Till we meet on my next podcast. Just remember, always paint with passion. Have a great day.