The Real Me

I was going through a closet at my parents’ house, in the back room that was mostly my dad’s domain.  I was very curious what he had squirreled away over the years, and I found plenty of junkque to be sure, but I was very surprised to find hidden away at the bottom of the closet a bunch of drawings I made my first year in college (that would be during the Jurassic period for any geologists reading this).  Thank you, Dad.

Woaw.  It’s like going back in time and meeting yourself.  I found stuff I didn’t remember ever making, as for instance this collage above.  And the collages (there were three of them) were especially intriguing because I thought that my interest in making pictures by cutting up and gluing bits of paper was of fairly recent vintage, but I see that I was doing the Matisse thing for about as long as I’ve been an artist and long before my love affair with Henri.

Life in Bits and Pieces

The beauty of materials is a good starting point in art.  It parallels the beauty of materials in life.  Look at the textures of life’s things, seen at any focal length, they are amazing.  You see the fish.  Closer in, one sees the scales.  Deeper into that, the cells.  The atoms.  The quarks … the whatnot of smallness in whatever scientific discipline has spied structure by means of an intense myopia.

Get in close to art, and you find the beauty of the drawing’s mark or the stroke of a brush.  The chalky texture of oil paint.  The luminosity of watercolor.  The spare bracing Attic logic of a pen’s pure line.

Marks are like thoughts, they pile on one upon another, coming from the unseen textures of mind. “Who has seen the wind/neither you nor I/but when the trees bow down their heads/the wind is passing by” was a nursery poem my mother read to me, but who sees thoughts except as we say them or craft them into this and that, and where do they come from?  If you want to get close to a mystery in nature, you need do no more than try following the thread of a dream back to its source.

The details of my pictures are like snap shots of the whole.  The pieces seem like echos.  I was thinking the same things, whether big or small.

The early stages of a drawing have a certain charm, too.  It’s narcissistic to gaze in this mirror, I’ll admit.  But when you go to the trouble of trying to make something, you might as well get to know the maker.  Yet I have so little clue what I’m doing as I draw, and this mystery fascinates me.  I think the artist preserves something of a child-like spirit.  They way that a small child can content herself with watching someone tie a shoelace.  (Well, it really is pretty amazing when you think about it — and children unlike us — well, they think about it.)

When you look into nature, even human nature, sometimes it looks back at you.  Kind of spooky, that!

A pond’s surface has no up or down

I dug some large drawings out of storage to have a new look at them.  Old koi more scribbly than their more recent cousins.  These were made one fish removed from the real, abstractions formed of abstractions.  What can I say?  I like to scribble.  In these exercises in thought fish, it’s hard to identify the top of the picture, so it doesn’t strictly speaking have an “up.”  I made these somewhat like my old Aussie pal, the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, my teacher I never met — anyway, I sat on the floor and drew with the fishes spreading out horizontally (as fishes should).

And so I compared the scribbly with their firmer finned friends — all this taking place, of course, at my secret studio in the capital of the USA.

Climate Change

Though the weather hasn’t really been all that bad (today’s high was 57 degrees) in my notebook I have been wandering around in warmer climes.  Was taking a hike down memory lane, as well, revisiting motifs that I have drawn before in other media.  You see, I found a trusty old pen that I used to draw with, so I whipped out my 30 year old super-sized bottle of India ink (still works) and decided to give the old pen a new go.  Been kicking the can down the road in other ways besides these.   Been looking for subjects, motifs, something a little bit different yet also pleasantly familiar.

Been trying out drawing with and without my precious crayons.  (It’s hard to leave go my beloved crayons.)

So, I have crepe myrtles with and without colors!

Something about things that swim

Perhaps it’s hereditary.  My kid is drawing things that swim, too.  Hers are mammals, but I call this close enough for jazz.

I’m not sure if she wants to own a dolphin or be a dolphin.  Maybe both.

Before and After

Sorting through the photo records of my pictures, I found these before and after details of one of the big koi drawings.  It’s nice to gaze backwards sometimes.  I feel like I did something.

A nice kind of rut to be in

I pulled a big old canvas out of the closet and set it on top of the bookshelves with the koi, putting it on my “to do” list to finish.  And standing back, it begins to look a lot like the koi theme in a different form.  I started the painting of the winter mountain before I began painting koi.  It’s based on a rather famous photograph (don’t tell anyone), and I have worried about the question of copy-right.  I’d love to compare it now with its original, but as so often happens, I don’t know where the source photo vanished to. 

How odd, though, to be indebted to an anonymous photographer for an image that so neatly anticipates my koi obsession.  But it doesn’t end there.

It imitates the forms of another picture, too — one “unrelated” to the koi.  In the collage of the child asleep in dreams, a stream defies gravity by rising up like a mountain — and of course, the mountain rises up like a mountain too.  These different forms sprawl in much the same ways.

Looking into one’s mind reveals weird metaphors.  Even in stealing, I only take my own obsessions back from the hands of others.  And somehow in my occasional housekeeping, I manage to unearth these things at apt moments when the mixed metaphors can meet each other in daylight.

I have a well etched fissure in my brain somewhere, drawn by neurons firing.  I’m guessing that under closer inspection, it probably looks a bit like one of these pictures!

My office is the floor

On her blog poet Gabrielle Bryden posted some photos of her office which has inspired me to post one of mine.  While it’s true that my “office” is really a studio with all the cumbersome stuff that artists need, I still enjoy fantasizing about being able to work from a very simple space.  I figure that if I were whittled down to the barest essentials, I could still manage fairly well if I simply had a floor.  Being a kid at heart, such an arrangement does not seem a sacrifice — more of an ambition as yet unreached.

A cup of coffee, a few pencils, a notebook, a floor, a planet with gravity and light — occasionally a chocolate yogurt — and I’m set!

Alas, all I really lack is a window view of kangaroos!

However, at my DC studio I do have some very nice clouds.

Idling

My days have been so hectic of late, but today was a welcome contrast.  What  a lovely, quiet day of hours spent idling and lolling about.  The autumn air was unseasonably warm.   Had coffee in the kitchen beside the golden light of our little lamp.  Lazy tropical thoughts in my head.  After a bit, I took my coffee to the big window.  Had my notebook in my lap.  View of the trees beside me, leaves of changing colors, kind breezes coming through the open window, comforting humidity.  I had a long talk on the phone with my mom, and while we talked I sketched some flowers in the notebook. 

I love my notebook!  Spent long, lazy minutes doodling with it in my lap, talking with my mom, traveling back through time. 

Getting ready for making a shift to still life.  Still life.  It’s been my all-purpose aspiration these days!  Stillness, sweetness, not having to rush about so much!  One of those things that art does (it serves many aims, comes in many guises) is render things still.  Someone has said that the defect of painting is that it’s flat and it doesn’t move.   And for me that’s all the charm!  Let motion pictures charm the hectic world.  I crave stillness!  I get all the dizzy motion I want looking at inanimate objects.  “Does an apple move?” Cezanne asked.  Well, it did for him as his nervous, searching lines attest.    The contours around flowers can be very hard to pin down.  One would think the bouquets are dancing a ballet.

I like to draw things over and over.  If I paint these flowers, I’ll have drawn them a dozen times in advance.  These are artificial flowers, of course.  But there’s ways of playing around with drawing  when working from life too –  and lots of artifice involved in making things that are “real.”  My fake flowers make such demands on me that I’m scared of real ones.  And if you’ve ever seen one of those time-lapsed pictures of flowers, you discover that flowers are actually very weird and scary — one is wise to think twice about being alone in a room with a vase of tulips!

The last have-at-it today needed crayons (of course).  Rather unapologetically I did not “finish” my sketch!  And there’s a whole bunch more unfinished drawings coming right behind these!

Lastly, I must include a detail of my unfinished drawing.  On a lazy day, one simply cannot neglect enjoying the laissez-faire of scribbled lines.  All my leisure lies suspended in these lines:  heedless, lazy, indulgent, contented, grateful! — on a quiet Sunday.

Life in the Fast Lane

Spent some time around the koi pond meditating on the agile delights of quickness.  Sometimes you’re just of a mind to play.  Today I drew fast swimmers.  The fast study is very different from other kinds of drawing.  Nicolaides called it gesture drawing when you seek out the essence of the thing from the inside out.  I’m not embarrassed to call it scribbling, though it’s scribbling of a high order.

Made a couple of these today, as well as rediscovered a couple that I’d made in notebooks as exploration for previous paintings.

The gesture of the lines can take on a life of their own.  It’s like listening to the syllables in a word.  The beauty of the activity is something that the artist should continually seek.  We are not just drawing things, we are drawing our thoughts, and discovering the forms and gestures of which thoughts are composed .  Along the way one discovers a world of inner hieroglyphs.

My work began today with this drawing above — a study for the “Big Guy” of the koi pond featured in my previous post. 

Agenor surfaced, too, while I was turning the pages of the notebook.  He’s the star of my first big koi pond.

Here’s the view of the koi studio today with a few of the fish that jumped out of the pond.