Freshman Graham Class

Freshman and Sophomores have their dance block in the morning, so I showed up at LaGuardia at 8am to paint Tadej's Freshman Graham class.

Mr Munroe was the musician which is always amazing because he sings.

Look up Andy Munroe on Spotify.

It's a magical atmosphere, perfect for paint!

My friend's daughter is a Freshman so I got to see her dance.

Ms Debbie from Manhattan Youth Ballet- Deborah Wingert- was also there to observe..

It was the right morning to be at LaGuardia!

Today I experimented with full gouache- no pastel today.

And Inktense pencil for small details, it's a real time saver.

Except that.... I'm getting faster.  I'm not trying to, it just happened.

I finished in the same time as yesterday- 10 minutes to spare, that's a long time!

(Yes I look at the time on my phone throughout, I need to know my halfway point.)

The difference MIGHT be that I snapped a quick photo pf the pose, so I didn't have to do live figure sketching. And at this point I know the rooms really well.  Because of that I focused on overlapping figures.  Arranging the figures takes some thinking. I could have added kids standing around in the back but... no time for that.

5x7 gouache

Tadej was wearing a shirt that says SHIFT.

He used it in his class as an answer to a question.

(Ms Foote talked about marshmallow floors yesterday.)

There are roses in front of the school.

I'm going to miss LaGuardia SO MUCH!!

Daya going there for high school has truly been one of the biggest blessings of my (our?) life.

Her teachers- particularly dance- are the most amazing people.  Like you don't even know that type of amazing until you encounter it.

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Mr Steffa (I misspelled his name in the text) teaches gym and is a dean of... idk, something.

He also oversees kids entering the building sometimes, I see him at the entrance a lot.

He and Daya are good pals.

She started bugging him before she even got accepted into the school.

Mr Steffa ALWAYS wears shorts.

It can be -3 outside and he'll be wearing shorts and a LaGuardia hoodie.

When we went for the initial open house, before auditions happened, he was outside managing the very, VERY long line. He asked if anyone had any questions.  Daya yelled out "DO YOU ALWAYS WEAR SHORTS?"

Answer: Yes.

Then Daya got in the school and they have been pals ever since.

I saw Mr Steffa when I volunteered for audition callbacks, and we had a good chat.

Today I also saw him and he gave me a hug and congrats on Juilliard.

He said he had been looking for me all week!

I asked did Daya tell you or avoid you?

He said she avoided him but he staked her out and made her announce aloud in the lobby that she got into JUILLIARD.

I sent Daya a text about Ms Debbie, because she was still at home, probably making breakfast.

Daya did come by to say hello when the class ended.

She said--- you woke up very early just to come to school for Freshman observation and now you are just going home?

I said yes I wanted to paint.

Daya's not one to talk though, she's crashing the Junior Graham class on Thursdays while the rest of her group who isn't in rehearsal does..... she doesn't know, something not dance... but she wants to dance so she goes to class with the Juniors.

Unfortunately I did not get to show Mr Steppa Daya's text because when I left he was teaching.

Next time I see him I'm gonna dig up this picture and show him and we'll have a good laugh.

Crashing Class to Paint

The journey to LaGuardia High School takes 35-40 minutes.

I gave it an hour to account for any train weirdness.

4 stops later, when I was switching to the E/F, everything was at a standstill.

Not good.

Unauthorized person on the tracks.

That takes a while.

Like a LONG while.

So I switched over to the 7, and that had signal problems.

I was SO UPSET, I did NOT want to miss parent observation!!

I was late but did see most of the Horton class.

But I couldn’t paint, there was no time. Even losing 15 minutes is too much.

So I enjoyed watching Daya’s Horton class, and then she had rehearsal.

Some of the other kids went to ms Foote’s class, so I decided to go there, too, and paint.

I love Ms Foote.

She didn’t mind at all that I went in to paint, and she also thinks I should come back after Daya is gone to paint.

Here is the painting, 5x7 mostly gouache with some pastel…

I was thinking about the size of the figures on the page, it’s zoomed out a little too… but the main thing I did differently was snap a picture of the pose I wanted..

I think I’ll do this from now on when I am allowed to take photos; sometimes I’m not allowed.

This panel was gray-toned but no clear gesso, and i can’t decide if I prefer a smoother surface or not

But it worked out really well and is a good strategy, as much as I don’t like using any kind of photo reference for these things.

Here are some pics of Daya.

Painting Problems

It's parent observation week for the LaGuardia Dance department! 

The LAST ONE for me, I'm so sad!

Although......... maybe they will let me come to paint???

They totally would if I asked, they are very friendly to it.

I like painting dance classes for many reasons-but it sure is a lot of problems to solve.

It's exactly like expenses: one goes away and three more appear.

It's such a difficult environment because of the time and also there is no composition. In that way it is more difficult than plein air.

So today I got to watch one class, so I had an hour and half.

I know how to budget the time now.

The first half of the class is barre.  That's the time I have to paint the room.

Then the barres go away and it's time for floorwork.

That's when I have to get a pose in my sketchbook while the dancers are doing combinations and decide on the figure arrangement.

I am at a point where I need to learn the ballet positions. It would make this part of the process about 70% easier. So that's my next step, and I hope I get to do this again...... I hope this isn't my last week of dance class painting....

5x7 gouache and pastel

I gray-toned an illustration board and gave it a coat of clear gesso, for the pastel.

Once I started laying in the pastel, I switched back to gouache., mostly.  The painting is about 80% gouache.

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I have a kind-of onging problem, difficulty if you will, and today I realized it has to do with scale.

In all my dance class paintings, the room itself is about the same size. I pick a section that I think has good floor-to-wall proportion. It also greatly depends on where I am sitting.

But the size of the figures relative to the room- from my vantage point are quite large.  This is a difficulty when placing several figures in nice size to the page together. In the picture above, look at how large Daya is compared to the room, because she is close. At viewpoint size in my painting, her feet would be near the bottom of the page and her head almost to the top.

Today I shrunk them a little.

I think it kind of works because it pretends I am sitting farther back than I actually am.

But I have to guess the height of the dancers relative to the room.

This is something I need to play around with and is a point of deviation from reality.

I think as long as I am conscious of the eye-level perspective I can work it out, at least in a good-enough way.

Tomorrow and Thursday I am going back and I'll try something slightly more zoomed out AND even smaller figures as if I was farther back.  It's a real composition challenge that has been bothering me for a while now.

Parent Observation Paintings, Again

Tonight I painted during the partnering class then the pointe class at Manhattan Youth Ballet.

I decided to go simple, beause I had absolutely no time.  Each class is only 1 hour and I had to switch studios.

Because of that I decided to try a different approach... I'm not sure if it worked or not but it was interesting.

Instead of gouache I used my small set (small meaning 24) of inktense blocks... you can use them kind of like watercolor pans.... combined with inktense pencils and white gouache. The reason I did this was so I didn't have to set anything up. There is just no time.

My biggest problem was time. And at the end I was really struggling with wet paint.

I might touch these paintings up if I decide to post them on social media, but I want to document the work on-location after 1 hour.

Mr George's partnering class, 5x7

The pointe class was even less than an hour, and with the studio switch I decided to drop color all together and use pencils plus one of my Derwent paint pan sets... this one. And then I added the blue because it needed it.

I wanted to zoom out a bit more and put more figures in.  I had to choose a warm-up pose early on because of time....

This isn't the greatest painting but who cares, it isn't always about the end result.

And I know how difficult this is to do, so with that considered it's pretty successful for what it is.

It does need studio touch-up for social media posting though.... if I choose to do it.

MYB Observation Week

 It is Parent Observation Week at Manhattan Youth Ballet and that means..... painting live dance classes!

I am SO BUMMED this will be over.... I wish I could do this much more.
Maybe LaGuardia will let me after Daya graduates......

Anyhow, Daya had ballet with Ashley Bouder, then modern with a sub.

Both paintings were 1 hour painting time and are in gouache.
The ballet class is more than an hour and I had a HUGE advantage tonight that both classes were in the same studio... so I could just stay set up. It's a massive time-saver.... and this kind of on-location painting is extremely difficult to do. Doing it in an hour is batshit crazy to be honest. It's stressful.

I have been unhappy in past attempts at the figures, so this time I brought my sketchbook and sketched moving figures, chose a pose, then referred back to my "notes" to place the figures in the room.  

This approach worked really well but I still need to refine the process.

I need more practice.

5x7 gouache

Ashley Bouder (!!!) reposted me on instagram!

Dance Shows and Paint- Fri and Sat

In the last dance parent association meeting, I was invited to paint at the senior dance concert.

I have been stressing about it, figuring out how to do it.
I have no idea how to approach this.
While I wanted to work in pastels, I thought gouache would be better.

Also, Daya had performances at Manhattan Youth Ballet from Thursday thru Sunday.

Friday Evening I went to the Senior Dance concert.
Originally they had chairs for me at the front, but I have a light on my box o I had to move to the very back, which was absolutely MUCH better.

I used gouache and did some backgrounds and everything looked really stupid.
It was a gear and space experiment, and also while I have painted at live music performances before (they stay till) and also I have painted moving dancers before, I have never painted a dance performance and it's basically impossible.

I think I looked really stupid in public but it's one of those things that I can't care what people think.

Basically I tried to do/plan one painting for each dance, 7 in all.
At the end of the show I had a bunch of looked-like-nothing-but failures-5x7 boards with some colors on them.

I *really* wanted to figure out how to make this successful and not a face-plonk embarrassment.
And Friday night I really felt stressed and also like artistic crap.
Because I had no idea how to handle this situation but I wanted to, very much.
And also I still had thoughts of pastels and pan pastels in my head.

I did not sleep well. Like at all.

The show was livestreamed Friday night And I kept it on my ipad to use as a bit of reference from the backgrounds I chose and started with at the live show.

On Saturday morning I organized all the panels and did a little touch-up with panpastels over the gouache on a few of them. I also reconfigured my gear and packed panpastels instead of gouache.
And i packed a little sketchbook to do some figure drawing to get a feel of the live dancers to try and get some of that movement into the studio paintings.  And also because I didn't know what else to do.

I did have the luxury of the livestream to make decisions on the figure compositions.  It absolutely had to be a hybrid approach. I could not do the figures live. I still had no idea how to handle this dumb stupid artistic hole I got myself into.

I should have taken pictures of all the crappy backgrounds but I did not.

Then Saturday afternoon I went to Manhattan Youth Ballet for Daya's performance, which was fantastic.  Here she is! She would not let me take any more pics than these.

I was so tired and stressed and spacey after the show.  I treated myself to sushi and walked through Central Park, which was lovely.

Ok, Saturday night, time to go back to LaGuardia for the Saturday night show.

The setup was much easier the second night because I knew what to expect.

During the second show, in the places I had pre-planned already with the backgrounds, I painted colors from life (very quickly) using panpastels. So most of the backgrounds for the paintings were painted on-location from life, and then I did some few-second moving figure gesture drawings.

At the end of the show I had 7 little panels with pretty colors, each matched to a specific part in each of the dances.  Again, I didn't take pictures of them but I should have.

Panpastel over gouache is actually a very nice combination. The panpastel goes over gouache very, very nicely.  I had no idea.