steve cleff
NYC
I have a few goals for 2011, sell a t-shirt, do a shoot with my favorite model, make a book of all of last year’s paintings, some projects code-named “colorforms,” “bubbles,” and “the big myth,” paint and donate two celebrity paintings for charity, have a show in New York, and dig deeper, be bolder, and have more fun than last year.
Well, this Thursday 1/13 I’ve got that show in New York. It’s at Niagra Bar 112 Avenue A, at 7th St, in the East Village, right on Tompkins Square park, courtesy of the Antagonist Movement. Read about them, they’re doing good things.
Loyal readers (Trish, Mario, Susan, and Gary) will recall that I planned to take it easy this year. I’m trying. Really.
That’s what I’ve done so far this year. I like painting. I can’t really stop.
Here are the paintings in the show:
It’s easier to paint than write these posts, so I’ll guess at your questions and makes some notes for myself about the show:
- It’s a group show. No idea if there’s a theme.
- I’m showing three pieces, one existing (the tall one), two new (the ovals)
- I chose to make images that pick up where I left off from my April ’10 show
- I wanted to reconnect with my mission: For the women who view my paintings to recognize their own inner beauty
- Picking colors: I pick songs first and they tell me what colors to paint (i have synesthesia)
- I planned to do two paintings. One with colors I’m comfortable with and another with colors I haven’t used before. For the colors I haven’t used before, I chose orange and purple, thinking of the Invisibles). When I was done though, it didn’t seem “Cleff” enough for my debut (first? last? who knows?) show in NYC, so I decided to do a red and purple one. I also realized I wanted to make all three work as a set, so I made the image face to the right to compliment the left-facing blue one. I’ll put them on either side of the large painting
- They’re on canvas. I buy the canvases pre-stretched
- They’re done with watercolor. I have magic primer that lets me paint watercolor on anything
- I don’t remember exactly how large they are, they’re around 12″ x 16″. The large one is 2 feet by 4 feet
- First I drew the under-pictures on standard rectangular canvases then realized I wanted to use the oval canvases because it creates more powerful images
- I’ll probably go and paint the same images on those rectangular canvases too because I love these images and I want to try some looser painting
- While the images are based on pictures of models I worked with, these images aren’t meant to be portraits of specific people, they’re meant to represent aspects of feminine confidence
- I met the models through a site for models and photographers to network. For both models I spent about a year working to fit into their schedules
- The show is only up for one night
- I got the show through networking, responding to requests to show (submitting to one show and attending led to networking which led to submitting for another show. Thanks, Stacy Lynn!)
Feel free to ask me more questions, I usually only get them at shows, not online, but I’m happy to answer them.
Here’s a bonus, a closeup of the image I decided not to use for the show.
Dreams, Death, and Near-death
Thank you for a very good year.
I realized a lot of dreams. I did everything this year I could dream up. This list below is to help future versions of me to remember what happened this year, and see what’s possible.
Dreams
Most importanty, I helped my wife raise our now 14 month-old.
I also landed a job I’d been chasing for two years.
Now for the art stuff.
I had a goal this year to be in a gallery show. This actually came up last year as I was getting prepared to be a dad. I imagined my future son finding a closet full of my paintings, asking me if I had ever done anything with my skills. In an effort to show him by example he could do anything he wants, I decided to get a show.
I wound up in six shows (two solo, four group), and invited to be in four others.
Also to set a good example for my boy, I decided I wanted to start regularly donating portraits of celebrities to charities. To start it off, I was able to donate a painting of a portrait of Amanda Palmer to raise $950 for RAINN.
I also donated another painting to Pinups for Pitbulls and a painted umbrella to raise money for the Philly Mural Arts program.
Because I suspect that my audience has the same budget as me, I wanted to make my art affordable. I got lucky and found a class on photographing artwork and with my friend, photographer Jeff Smith, I was able to make some affordable options for people to get copies of the paintings. These include prints from my paintings, a book of my work, and at the end of the year, I got my work on a t-shirt. Soon you’ll be able to get those if you’re interested. Here’s some of the prints available:
I wound up in a couple of articles this year, one for the City Paper blog, one for City’s Best, and I’ll be in one next year in HAHAMag. I should note that Amber of Amberella gallery got great press for the shows in Livingproof Mag, 5150, and Out of Print mag.
To finish things up, I got hired to storyboard a feature film and illustrate a comicbook for the movie, Sufferance, from Eventide Productions. I’ve wanted to do both of these things for years.
Death
At the beginning of the year, my wife and I took over Dr. Sketchy’s Philly and hosted seven sessions. Including one at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and another with the legendary Stoya as Neil Gaiman‘s Death.
Near-death
I also had viral meningitis and was in September I was in the hospital for three days and in bed for about two weeks. I’m fully recovered, and was able to get in another couple of Dr. Sketchy’s and a show afterwards. Shortly after I got out of the hospital I tried a new style of painting I had thought of, specifically because I knew this new style would test out my brain and I was very pleased with how it turned out. What you see are seven round canvases of various sizes all hung together to make one image. One reason I like it is because it involves the viewer, as your mind has to fill in the blanks. I’ve got about 20 variations of this I want to do next year.
The painting served another purpose too – it was this year’s Halloween painting. You can see the Halloween paintings at MakeitBleed.com. I do the paintings every year for our annual Halloween party. This year’s party evidence:
Finally, I worked on daily sketches again this year. I started in 2006. I drew daily for most of the year, with breaks when I was painting daily and when I was sick. Highlights from the daily sketches:
Thank You
Special thanks to my wife Tricia for making every day a dream come true, to my son Patrick for being the inspiration that got me to do all this stuff this year, to Stoya for being a great friend and muse, to Amber Lynn for letting me have my first solo show, to JL Schnabel and Tanya Dakin for advice. Thanks to Candy Mayhem for helping to run Dr. Sketchy’s Philly and to Miss D’Arcy D’Lux and Little Darling for all of their help with Dr. Sketchy’s Philly. If I got nothing else out of the experience, I got the benefit of meeting you all!
Thanks to everyone who came to my shows and thank you very much to the people who purchased paintings and prints, it means a lot.
Thanks to Gary Irwin for shooting and editing this amazing video:
Thanks to Eventide Productions for hiring me to storyboard and illustrate.
Thanks to Susan and Tom at Comcast for hiring me and to everyone at CIM for dealing with my time out with meningitis.
Thanks also to everyone on Twitter who supported me throughout the year, especially Jamie Berry, Kat Ostrow, Jerry Shawback, Ken Powers, Spyros Heniadis, Warren, and @BlueGumboArt.
Thanks to LisaLou McKnuckles, Michelle Hengeveld, and Sean Saunders for their support. Thanks to the Fall Studios and Tina and Linda at Topstitch for letting me show.
Thanks to Amanda Palmer and her management team, to Chelsea at RAINN, to Neil Gaiman, and to Stoya for helping me to give back. Together we helped 180 people get crisis counseling.
Thanks to Ginger, Leigh, and Lilly at HAHAMag, and to the folks at Paradigm Gallery for helping me raise money for the Mural Arts Program. Thanks to Little Darling for helping me raise awareness for Pitbulls for Pinups.
I love all you guys and you keep me going.
Next year? I have to chill a little. I have some big paintings ideas, we’ll see how many I can get to. Please keep checking.
Here’s the paintings I was able to do this year. Enjoy.
Oh yeah, I tried out using social media to support my paintings. I did sell a painting through twitter and met a lot of cool people. This next picture is my highlight though. I don’t know who these other three people are, but I’ll take being compared to Maynard.
Happy New Year!
Last show of the year. New style
You can still see my new work at the Amberella gallery.
From the opening:
I love the bubbles. It’s a new style I’m going to explore next year.
I’ve got loads of ideas to try.
Because it’s impossible to write a proper post these days with everything going on, here’s a bunch of pictures of the sketches, primer work, and under-paintings for the show paintings.
Topstitch Show
The exhibition at Topstitch was a lot of fun and well attended.
It opened on First Friday in Philly and was mentioned in an article about the night in the City Paper. I’m very proud of the show. I took a few risks: painting in a new style, trying to portray an abstract idea with realistic figures, and getting it all done in three months with everything else I had going on. I currently don’t have any future shows scheduled so if you want to see my work in person, stop by the Topstitch Boutique 54 N. 3rd St Philadelphia PA 19106.
In addition to the paintings, prints of all the works are available for $20 each. You can buy them at Topstitch or contact me here.
First some pictures from the night before of the paintings on the wall.
Photos from opening night. Great crowd. Try and guess which one’s my dad.
Don’t ask me who’s the guy in the last picture. Well, you can ask me, but I don’t know.
If you haven’t seen them before, here’s the paintings from the show.
What I did on my Summer Vacation
Sometimes success comes down to a last-minute decision. In late June, with the deadline for the show approaching, my wife and 8-month-old son and I went down to the Outer Banks to spend a week with some friends. Just before we hit the road for a seven-hour drive, I grabbed six of the smaller canvases for the show, and stuffed my watercolors and brushes in an Art Bin and threw it all in the back of the car.
A quick note about the show:
My next solo exhibition will be at the Topstitch Boutique, 54 N 3rd St (near Market) Philadelphia PA, 19106.
Opening reception on 8/6. Show will be up all through August and all through September. Stop by Tues – Sat: 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM; Sun: 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Back to the story.
We got to the rental house on a Saturday. Sunday night I decided that yes, I would definitely paint on vacation. My son gets up at 7 and then takes a nap from 8 – 9/10. As part of vacation, I took care of him in the morning so Trish could sleep late. After he went down at 8 I went out to paint.
I set up a card table on a balcony, filled an empty plastic container with water, played some Paul Van Dyk on my iPhone, put on some sun tan lotion and started painting. It was about 100 degrees out and I had to keep sweat from dripping onto the paintings, but it was a real pleasure painting outside.
I was very tentative not being in my studio with my typical set-up. I also wasn’t exactly sure how I wanted to paint these paintings. Because of the set up, I wasn’t able to paint in the order of techniques that I wanted, with the splatters first, the fabric second, etc.
This actually had an effect on the finished pieces. Since the concept was so abstract, there were aspects of the paintings I had to figure out while I painted instead of before I painted. Because of this I didn’t know how they’d turn out till I was done them all.
So each piece built off the previous piece and since I painted them all simultaneously, and none from start to finish, portions of each affected they way each other came out. The whole process was evolutionary.
Anyway, so it was scary doing the first one because I couldn’t really afford to spend the time to redo it. I worked on painting the skin and hair added some small splatters, thinking I could add more robust splatters when I got back home.
I got through it and I really liked how it turned out. Of course now I’ve painted more pieces, I see that those later works are more finished, more smooth, but I like the first one because of what was happening while I was painting it, the spontaneity and energy that is evident from my tentativeness and perseverance.
I had finished what I wanted for the day. But now that the canvas had gone from blank to halfway finished image, I really wanted to complete the piece. When they’re in a half-finished stage they kind of call to me until they’re done. But I had to move on and paint the same portion of the other paintings in order to get them all done in time. And it was time for my son to wake up and he and my wife and friends and I had some beach to go to see.
The next day, buoyed by having been disciplined to have painted the first one, I painted the next.
The second painting was with a model I was working with for the first time and it was here that I realized the challenge of a new model. Or, I should say the advantages of working with models repeatedly. I wasn’t consciously aware that it made it easier to paint the images. I painted the second one and I used some familiar techniques on the hair to help balance it out and keep me moving. Note: the picture below was taking a couple of weeks later after I had added the fabric.
Wednesday I realized that if I painted two that day and two the next, then I’d have Friday to go back and work on the finishing touches on that called to me. Theoretically I could have all six of the small pieces completed. On vacation.
On Wednesday I painted the blue and orange paintings, one with a model I’d painted a few times and another new model. I was really comfortable by this point and liking the way the paintings were turning out. Also getting a little more bold with my splatters.
Looking at four paintings in-progress was powerful and really gave me confidence I could get the whole show done by the end of June.
Thursday, it was tough working on the last two because I was getting more complex with the skin, working in many colors (as opposed to the first four which were variation on one color, or at least using very similar colors). You can see the yellow painting uses combinations of many colors, in ways I’ve never done before.
On the last painting, the turquoise one, I really hit a groove and if I had time I would have done them all over using the technique I used on the last one. I wet the entire shadow, distributed the turquoise, then dropped in some yellow and orange for the warm areas I wanted to project towards the viewer. (Cool colors like blue, purple, green recede while warm colors like red, orange, and yellow project (or look closer to the viewer. Use warm colors on the cheeks and tips of noses and shoulders that should look like they’re closer)). Since it was all wet, it blended well and dried really organically. I made a note to keep this in mind when I painted the skin on the large pieces. In retrospect, I didn’t do that as much as I wanted, but those paintings kind of dictated how they wanted to turn out. (I used to be annoyed when I’d hear other artists talk about their work dictating how it would turn out, but now I see what they meant and there’s really no other way to explain it). I’m definitely going to try and use that technique again, it actually solves a problem I long struggled with: when the model in my reference is more in shadow than I want and I want to show subtleties in the mid-tones and shadows to communicate the form and the expression the body language conveys I can use this technique.
So Thursday was a long morning. Remember, it was about 100 degrees out and mentally, working with all those colors in a loose but controlled way was taxing. I got it all done before my boy woke up from his second nap. I was pretty proud. I treated myself to a long swim in the pool and then took the boy out there for some swimming.
I didn’t get back to painting on Friday, but I had accomplished a lot more than I had expected to on a week of vacation and was feeling confident about the show. Very grateful that I decided to bring the canvases and paints.
Between the painting and spending all that time with the wife taking out boy to the beach and to the pool for his first time, it may have been my best vacation ever.
Next post. I’ll show you how I got started on the large pieces, and spent a week in a world of abstract splatters. It was a lot of fun.
The show is August 6th to September 30th at Topstitch Boutique. 54 N 3rd St, Philadelphia PA
Fluid Beauty: Streams of Consciousness a solo exhibition 8/6 – 9/30 by Steve Cleff at Topstitch Boutique
My next solo exhibition will be at the Topstitch Boutique, 54 N 3rd St (near Market) Philadelphia PA, 19106.
Opening reception on 8/6. Show will be up all through August and all through September. Stop by Tues – Sat: 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM; Sun: 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM
About Fluid Beauty: Streams of Consciousness
There’s a freedom that comes with being underwater
that is unlike anything else we experience.
Being unburdened from the limitations of our typical physical
experience allows thought to become action.
It allows our bodies to mimic our minds when we’re alone in our
heads, where our thoughts can go in any direction,
where one moment naturally flows into the next until
we find ourselves
somewhere we didn’t plan to be.
A stream of consciousness.
it’s these times when we are connected
to a reality that is limited only by
our imagination.
I thought it would be interesting to try to
capture these types of thoughts in images.
The poses and colors and jewelry* have specific meaning and inspiration,
but these images aren’t meant to be representations of those ideas.
This series of paintings is highly dependent on your interpretation.
I hope the longer you look at these images the more you learn about your thoughts
and stream of consciousness and connect to your own limitless imagination.
Or, at the very least, you find them pleasing to look at.
*The jewelry in the images comes from the artists who contribute to the Topstitch Boutique, a special place in Philly PA that’s very feminine and exists only because of the imagination of its owners and the other artists who contribute their skill and vision.
Video from the Gallery Show
My friend, filmmaker Gary Irwin (of GI Creative) shot and cut this short video of my painting process. Working with Gary a few years ago helped me realize a dream of getting into the IMDB.
I am completely floored by Gary’s talent and so grateful to have this video that captures this awesome time in my life.
Some of the paintings that were shown in-progress in the video:
