New Mural, Figure drawing, Food Bank Auction, and Fancypants!
This month get ready to see my latest mural, come draw with me at Sketchboard Co, bid on art to benefit SF-Marin Food Bank, and join me at the next Fancypants!
Happy February everyone!
This month I’m going to share with you my latest mural, officially announce my new role with Sketchboard Co, give you a peek at what’s going up next at Studio Gallery, and invite you to the next Fancypants! Stick around until the end to see the latest from my cat, Ruby, as well.
First thing first, however— don’t forget to sign up for my next class at Arch Art Supplies! We have very few tickets remaining, so get them while you can. If you took the class last time and are thinking about coming back, we will be providing a different limited pallet, so you’ll get all new colors.
Cityscapes in Gouache will dive into the potential of gouache as a versatile plein air medium. Nathaniel will guide you through his approach to gouache painting on panel, from subject choice, composition, and thumbnailing, to value, atmospheric perspective, and color mixing. This intermediate class will focus on simplifying your subject matter and learning to work with gouache, whether you are coming from watercolor or oil.
This month I want to share something more from the class. I worked hard on the curriculum and packet, squeezing my entire painting process into a five hour intensive.
Most of the packet deals in more concrete skills and techniques, but I also wrote an introduction about my personal philosophy of making art. That introduction has three topics: Quantity Equals Quality, Painting from Life, and Keeping Your Priorities in Order. Today I’ll share the first with you:
Quantity Equals Quality: Work Small and Many
This concept is the foundation of my artistic practice. Create a lot of paintings. Try everything. Work fast. You can learn as much from a small painting that took you less than an hour as you do from a large piece that you invested weeks in. For each painting you must grapple with composition, value, color, etc. Every iteration gives you a chance to solve those problems anew, and the more times you do it the better you will get.
The Daily Painting movement is based on this idea of doing many small paintings, often. I recommend Carol Marine’s book Daily Painting as inspiration for this as well as a great guide for all the foundational painting concepts.
One of my favorite anecdotes about this idea is from the book Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland. They share a story about a ceramics class, in which half of the class was to be graded by the quality of one single piece, and the other half was to be graded based purely on the quantity of pieces made. So, the first half spent long hours on complicated and difficult pieces, while the second half worked as quickly as they could. In the end, those that made the most pieces also made the best individual works.
Quality and quantity are not opposites, they are directly tied to each other. The more you make, the better your results.
If you’d like to hear the rest of the philosophy section, sign up for the class or let me know and I will include it in future newsletters!
Next up, I want to share my latest mural. I was asked by the clients to bring together their favorite San Francisco icons for their new baby’s nursery. I stretched my illustration muscles and brought them this design:
The design accounts for the use of the space, including the fact that the crib will cover a large part of the bottom right area. However, I want the mural to be able to grow with the child and stand up to future room arrangements. The clients also specifically requested strong, clearly identifiable colors. Though I’m generally a more literal person, I was able to bend my geography of the city and place some peaked-roof style homes next to Lombard Street to get a sense of the painted ladies. One of these was later changed to represent a specific family member’s home. And of course I was delighted to paint Sutro Tower, as always.
The small size of the room meant that I couldn’t use a projector, so I free-handed the design sketch onto the wall using a grid of thirds to assist.
I am delighted by the finished piece, and I think it’s so exciting that a person is going to grow up with my artwork as their first impression of San Francisco, and indeed of painting and art!
If you have been following along on Instagram, you may have noticed an increase in figure drawings in my feed. That’s because this year I have stepped up as a facilitator with Sketchboard Co, a fantastic local figure drawing group that I have been attending for over a year. I am proud to be stepping up in this amazing community.
(Model Nat Demar)
As I have grown my plein air painting practice into a career that is paying my bills, figure drawing has become my sacred art activity that is more about process and community than product. Of course, I certainly wouldn’t object if someone wants to buy any of my drawings, after all they are just going to sit in a drawer otherwise. Because the real person I am drawing right in front of me is only going to hold their pose for as little as 2 minutes, it’s an intensely in the moment experience.
(Model Allan)
I find the experience even more potent because of the group of people who are all drawing the same pose at the same time, each creating something that could only be done right there and then, by us.
Even if you’ve never done it before, I strongly encourage you to join us! We have events Mondays through Wednesdays in San Francisco, and Thursdays in Oakland. Each day and venue has a special feeling, so try each one out to find your favorites. All events are ticketed except for Tuesdays, and you can find all the details and get tickets on the Sketchboard website. You’ll see me at many of the events helping to run things and drawing!
The next exhibition you can find my work at will be Studio Gallery’s San Francisco-Marin Food Bank Auction. It’s going to be an online silent auction, but the paintings will be available for viewing in the gallery February 22-25, with a closing reception on Sunday, February 25 from 2-5 to see the final bids come in. In addition to several of my usual small sized paintings, I have offered up two larger, more experimental paintings to the cause. The first is Architectural Abstraction: Green, my first exploration of this idea of abstracting San Francisco Victorian houses through perspective:
The second is an oil painting based on the view through the airplane window near Eugene, Oregon. It’s also somewhat abstracted, and it is better to see in person because a large part of what I’m playing with in both of these paintings is thick paint and texture.
The auction is a great opportunity to find fantastic pieces by local artists, possibly at a much lower than usual price, while supporting the food bank’s mission of ending hunger in these two counties.
Even sooner than the auction is the next Fancypants!
Fancypants is a Trans-Temporal Evening for the Gender Playful, sliding fluidly through genres and artistic forms to bring you a night of cabaret, drag, burlesque, poetry and performance art that’s like nothing else seen in San Francisco! A feast for all the senses, Fancypants uniquely incorporates craft, literature, and even taste offerings to bring out the Bohemian spirit of every guest. A stellar cast of trans, enby and genderqueer artists work with a new theme each quarter to make Fancypants genuinely one of a kind.
In just a few days on Sunday February 18th at Oasis, we are bringing you V is for Valentine!
(Poster by Reese Bice)
Join Fancypants as we dissect the fantasies and fallacies of this cardio-centric holiday! Let's reeducate ourselves as we explore the Mythology of Romance, explode the Chemistry of Attraction, and recalculate the Geometry of the Love Triangle. Each performance is a master class in Advanced Anatomy! Get your exercise by falling in and out of love with Fancypants, over and over!
It may not be immediately clear what this show has to do with me and my art, but I have to credit Fancypants for making San Francisco my home. Before I was a full time artist, I was working in theater, and I came to the city as a fellow at American Conservatory Theater, with plans to return to Seattle when my fellowship was over. Near the end of my time here, however, I attended my first Fancypants and that set me down the path to finding my community here and deciding to stay. Now that my art practice is built so thoroughly around this place, it’s difficult to imagine, but without this show none of it would have happened.
(The Fancypants performers at the end of V is for Voracious. )
Just like my work brings you the beauty of the outdoors of the Bay Area, Fancypants brings you the beauty of its people. So grab your tickets and I’ll see you there!
Thank you for joining me for another month! While you await the next newsletter, you can check out my website to s((ee my portfolio of plein air paintings, still lifes, block prints, tiny scale model houses, murals, and you can also find information on commissions! Please feel welcome to email me and ask about any ideas you have that aren’t covered on my commission page, I’m always willing to discuss!
Stay tuned for next month, and let me know if there’s something you’d like to hear about in the newsletter in the future.
Lastly, as always, here's Ruby!
Thank you!
-Nathaniel J. Bice
he/him