Finding Patience: The Trees Through the Forest

Untitled (Red Dresses) 2010 Stephan P. Ferreira

Detail from Untitled (Red Dresses) 2010
Stephan P. Ferreira

When I finish a painting I often have a hard time seeing the whole. I'm stuck on details or the overall language of the painting.

I've labored so much over how I've articulated the imagery that trying to decipher any meaning is the same experience as trying to figure out what a word means after it has been repeated over and over: the word looses it's context, it looks foreign and suddenly you can't even remember if those letters are arranged correctly.

Having been so wrapped up in the painting I can only see the trees in the forest, as it were. It takes stepping away to eventually see the bigger picture. But before then, it's usually these small areas in my paintings that teach me and prompt me to do something else.

A recently completed painting based on a Depression era photograph got me thinking about what changes need to be made in my own process and what the successes in my work tell me about my focus and patience.

Ambiguity as Relationship

I learned how to paint very traditionally. I hesitate using the word classical, since even though I was taught to look at the masters and art history - and had certain ideals hammered into me, like a full 8 semesters of drawing) - my education as an undergraduate painter was more about structure and practice. I began as a student and am now becoming a painter.

So I learned how to make things right. Even though this meant disregarding grandiose art world statements. As an undergrad I even remember a few of us taking a short trip to see RISD's undergrad thesis exhibits. We were intimidated that they might be producing work that was more important than ourselves (and by the way - who was producing important work at that stage?). But when we saw their exhibit, were relieved to find work full of over-reaching themes, grand world statements and conceptual artifice but a lack of any technical skill.

 So we had comforted ourselves: we knew how to paint and draw so we would be better off. I'm not sure if that is true now, but certainly it was true for me. I needed to build structure in my practice before tearing it all apart. I used to envy artists at that age who seemed to have it together. But did they? Were they just endowed with a better creative sense of cool and not cool? Or were they just doing what they did best, and avoiding what they couldn't do: paint?