I have a notebook that I’m filling up with pen drawings.  Usually I crop drawings to eliminate the extraneous edges, but when you’re dealing with a notebook, to crop the picture is to ignore the notebook itself, and that I think eliminates a significant part of the charm.  An artist’s drawing notebook, like other books, participates in a mystique of opening and closing.  You enter another world, as it may be, in opening a book.  Closing it, you leave.  A book is rather like a door that way.

I like the area of space in the unused page, the way that previous drawings bleed through and appear like ghosts.  They blur the edges of separation between the pictorial things and remind the observer that everything exhibited is ultimately just lines of ink on a sheet of paper.

I have several vases in the notebook now.   Each drawing is a little world.  And the notebook, therefore, is what?  Door to a miniature alternate flower universe.

I have been stuck in a rut lately, wondering what to do.  And just when I needed some help, wouldn’t you know it comes from a fellow blogger.  Poet Gabrielle Bryden has asked for citrus fruits and so I’m going to draw (mostly) lemons.  And this will involve some “live blogging” because I’m just now starting.  The lemons came out of the refrigerator a little while ago.  They’re sitting on a plate.  I’m getting the crayons out now.

UPDATE:  The first citrus drawing made using watercolor pencils.  I am searching for the edges of things.  Trying to find the character of these patient fruit that sit here “looking” at me.  They’re all so dignified.  Wish I could get to the essence of their gravitas.  The shadows are deepening.  Not a quality to be well captured by watercolor pencils.

With the second drawing, I’m already encountering some problems.  I have the wrong crayon box with me.  Keep forgetting that this box has run out of certain colors.  It’s “limited palette” time.  And the yellow has already smeared into the blue outline I used.  I’m never getting rid of that smear.  A small matter, this smear, but defining.  Some artists would go to great lengths to avoid a smear from the very outset while I always figure that mistakes are inevitable.  Must work it into the plan somehow.

More stuff in the picture.  But do the citruses enjoy the status that one wants.  Is this an arrangement of shapes and colors or really a citrus picture?  Not enough citrus presence…

When I’m at a loss for something to do, or distracted from the work at hand, or sometimes when I’m on the phone, I draw little dipsy doodle drawings of whatever happens to be within my line of sight.  Is interesting how much freedom is there to be had when you just breathe in the local air.  Though it is wonderful to travel, yet there are also adventures to enjoy at home.  And sometimes I look around and find that even certain regions of my studio contain picturesque material, airy linear heights and craggy inky depths to plumb.

Some of the doodle drawings relate to “serious” works.  I might have a still life going and take my drawing from this standing source.  But the differences between the fast pen drawing and a “serious” painting are like the difference between business travel and a vacation.

One might wonder why an artist needs a vacation from painting!  Well, let’s face it.  Everyone needs a vacation from everything sometimes.  And little doodles take you to another mental place.

But the really nice thing about little dipsy doodle drawings is that they take you — briefly — to another mental sphere, bright and light and spare, and the expense costs no more than a sunbeam …

One is forever learning to think quickly for no matter how many times one may have acted spontaneously in the past, each new spontaneous action is singular.  Always some brake that must be met.  Always some objection to get around.  The barriers are spontaneous, too, and only agile quick-witted thinking out-smarts that part of the brain that waits for you with the utmost caution.

The koi are quick witted, too.  Quick and sleek swimmers are they, as agile as desire unstopped by will.  Their direction is all their seeking.  Of one seamless swift intention they move.

If the crayon can be made to move with fish-like certainty, that would be a koi drawing indeed.

Have to make the small drawings sometimes.  Gotta to have some little fish to stock the pond.  This one above is a page from a large notebook, and the drawing is made using water color pencils.  And the colorful frame comes from the bedspread.

Nothing quite so relaxing as drawing the little fish who grow up to be the big fish.

I was at the koi pond this week, visiting fishes that I have sorely neglected.  What have I been doing lately anyway?  Feels like a whirlwind.  Well, the end of one year moving into the beginning of a new one can feel that way.  I know I was drawing still life and doodling some landscape ideas and this week I returned finally to my fishes (who pretended not to recognize me).  Is rather like juggling roses and shrubs and koi.  Quite a circus act, that would be.

Well, after a suitable interval of distain the fishes stopped being coy.  Then it was just koi I juggled.  And they tumble into a bunch in the detail above, bustling and crowding one another.

I have a bunch of ideas for new ponds.  One pretends that art works will follow each other in some kind of logical sequence.  But it never quite works that way.  The impulse to do this or that happens higgledy-piggledy.  The real work of picture making is a melange.  It just is.

The koi need to understand.  But they did persuade me to come back soon.

I had gone to the National Gallery of Art and made a quick drawing with oil pastel in front of Cezanne’s “Peppermint Bottle” and had drawn a detail of two of its apples.  And reencountering Cezanne with crayons in my hand led me to make a vigorous drawing of my own household apples.  Remembering that event (one great virtue of keeping a journal or a blog lies in its power to bring the past back before your eyes), I feel once again that keen desire to make a bold study of some ordinary thing.

Draw apples, or anything ordinary.  Draw your shoes.  Lay some clothes on the bed and make a study of them.  Open the cabinets and draw your china.  It doesn’t matter what it is.  Simply study the visible world.

Glancing back over 2011 and asking myself what were its best gains for me in terms of my art, I think it came toward the year’s end when I decided that I would do pochades.  For many years I set my sights on big things, partly because I wanted to find out if I could do them.  That journey led into some wonderful places that I plan to continue visiting, as for instance the koi ponds.  But when I turned my attention to making pochades, it was with a realization that I had perhaps forgotten how to make small paintings.  And I needed to come back to this once familiar ground and relearn its lessons.

And that’s the lesson I’m eager to carry forward into 2012, this year full of wonderfully round numbers!  Indeed, I want to combine the old habit of visiting the koi pond of thought to see what new ideas it brings and to do its opposite also in the making of small quick pictures.  I want big expansive pools of big healthy frisky koi.  And I want little sketches of colored land and sky small enough to hold in your hand, something that I can do in a couple brief sittings.

I love the beginning of the year because it provides a natural moment for reviewing the past and for making new plans.  And I love to plan!  I love the empty page full of possibility and light!

May the blank pages of possibility on your 2012 calendar fill with good things and happy spirit’s adventure!

The problem in art, after you solve all the other problems, is what to do.  The old saw about “being dressed up with nowhere to go” is true, and it’s the bane of art.  People talk about the technical things, but thank your lucky stars for all the technical stuff — for when the technical stuff is all used up then you have to decide quite simply “what to do.”  At that moment, perhaps it’s a good time to turn to the drawing challenges that people have graciously suggested.

I add one of my own:  draw your hair.  It’s a good “tempus fugit” subject.  Said differently, draw your hair while you still can — while you still have hair, while you can still hold a mirror, while you still have a sense of humor ….

And if I’m too late with my advice, and you don’t have any hair, get a doll with big hair …

One wonder of drawing in notebooks is the experience you get opening the notebook after a chunk of time has passed and having a day of your past life come rushing back into being.  If there were one reason that stands above all others why artists should indulge the practice of drawing in notebooks, I’d say it was this.  Indeed, the notebook is like a diary except that rather than relying on words it deals in images.

Both diary and drawing have their unique capacity for distilling time.  I don’t praise one above the other.  All I do is exhort people to keep them, one or the other, a record of words or pictures — at least for a season.

It’s like canning peaches.  This is my canning:  only I canned a whole pond and included some ducks too.