Your own personal Rorschach test

If you want to know the inner contents of your mind, rather than looking at somebody else’s butterfly ink-stain pictures, make some of your own — then look into the in-between details.  There in the indefinable whatever of your heedless marks — those that you made while your mind was all fixed upon some idea — those that look so crisp and abstract when removed from their context — that’s where you look.

And if you want to peer even deeper, stack a bunch of those randomized details one on top of the other, as I’m doing here.  You can find the inner corridors of your brain and you can take a little walk around in there.

Wow, it’s dark in here.  Anybody got a flashlight?

What you’re supposed to do with this deep psychological information is anybody’s guess.  But I know where you can look to find it.  It’s there in the hidden whatcha-ma-call-it moments of the picture.  Your own Rorschach upon which you can endlessly Dr Freud-analyze yourself!

And it’s so deep.  

Disabstraction

Notwithstanding innumerable art appreciation classes offered round the world, people still don’t understand abstraction in art.  The public doesn’t understand because they were never supposed to understand. And certain artists don’t understand because they first encounter the word through the mediation of the schoolhouse.

The idea of the abstract was from its outset an obfuscation. Every artist who ever tried to draw something either faces or struggles against the ways that the materials possess their own qualities.  So while abstraction as an idea might seem confusing, its reality is quite commonplace.  The marks you draw are at first just marks.  You begin with a blank canvas, and every line, color or tone that you place on the canvas that does not instantly present the motif in a mimetic way is “abstract.”  The most descriptive marks are also abstract too, but we’re less apt to notice.  The fact is that we see nature entire and each effort (of whatever sort) to separate out qualities is de facto an abstraction.  

But abstraction as a deliberate confusion of seeing came into vogue and persists as things do — just because.  Sometimes it can be marvelously used but it has become a convention now.  Its root taps deep down into Nature, but fads do not trend the way a thing winds into the mind’s labyrinth as a touchstone of perception and dreams.  No, the fad becomes a path disappearing into thickets.

The interior of thought

You can break down the process of drawing something into components for the purpose of learning.  Many of these elements of drawing are well known even to non-artists: composition, light and shade, proportion, perspective, free-hand drawing.  Of this latter, I have long wondered in a wry way what its opposite might be, though I must acknowledge it’s a wonderfully expressive term:  free-hand, as though to marvel at the degree of control and daring that one sometimes finds in drawing. 

The well known terms can be broken further down into even more expressive nuances.  For artists, one might list things like contour drawing, cross-contours, blind contour, gesture drawing, drawings that can be corrected through erasure (pencil, chalk, etc.) and drawings that cannot be corrected (pen).  For tonality, one notes that there are many ways to create the appearance of light and dark:  hatching, cross-hatching, stippling, continuous tone, curved hatching, smudging. 

For proportion, one studies accurate, “realistic” proportion in various ways, sometimes by the use of devices such as a perspective frame, or by measuring with the hand or another kind of sighting tool or by training one’s own internalized sense of measure (again another variation on that marvelous free-hand approach — a kind of “point and shoot”).  Of course, along with proportion are various discoveries of and uses for distortion.  Moreover one uses the angle of vision to enhance the quality of dimension in objects whose forms are more easily recognized by one facade rather than another.

And so on.

However, there are entirely different ways of breaking down the process of drawing.  You can break it down in time — drawings made quickly, drawings drawn out very slowly, drawings made incrementally over days or weeks.  Drawings that are timed. 

Drawings made to understand the nature of binocular vision, or that study the texture of something attempting to evoke the sense of touch, drawings made from memory, drawings whose sole purpose is to understand one aspect of something such as a study that answers a question that maybe only the artist herself is asking.

Habitual Delight

In between times, it’s good to have something that regularly provides delight, and for me it’s the koi.  I have to take breaks from them sometimes and draw other things, but then they are so delightful to revisit, and I strike out in search of some new thought to find in the old pond.  It’s part of the rhythm of work, like waking from sleep, like pauses during the day, like holidays in the calendar year.  Things that predictably recur and new things that surprise. 

When I first began doing art, I never would have guessed I’d draw so many pictures of koi.  But they are my “abstraction,” my excuse for dealings in pure color and pure line.

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.

Tapestry of the garden myrtles

I have a favorite painting at the National Gallery of Art, a dear old favorite friend of a painting.  Me and this painting go back years!  It’s Vermeer’s Girl with a Flute.  The tapestry in the background, in particular, amazes me.  The background alone contains some of the most astonishing bits of painting that I’ve ever seen.  In the softly articulated, indistinct shapes of the fabric behind the girl, you find much of the painting’s music.  Its flute notes are all piped in blending, meandering riverlets of color and tone.  They are so out-of-focus as to be completely unrecognizable, yet they are persuasively, pervasively “real.”  Whenever I see the painting I’m reminded that all of life is like this one scene.  The world is luminous and mysterious, indefinite and mutable, meaningful and inscrutable. 

And in something like this spirit of inscrutability I enter my garden of crepe myrtles.  I don’t of course own the garden.  I own the scribbles that establish the garden of my pencil.  Though I have to follow the park rules about when I can visit my trees, with my pencil they transform into personal, imaginative property.  I wander through them like the lady of the manor.  And I abstract them with all the freedom that Vermeer taught me to feel before nature.

My pencil lines are thoughts about form.  I say that the tree boughs shall grow to such height!  I will that the greens be bright!  I indulge all my whim for foliage and fond.  If I want significant swaths of bright white paper peeking through, so be it!  It’s my dream, my vague and transcendent fabric!

An Artist’s Strange Favorites

About ten years ago, maybe longer, I stapled a piece of canvas paper to some cardboard and began drawing my blue compotier in quick strokes of paint.  And what happened after that?  The phone rang?  I dunno.  Whatever it was, I quit working and never resumed the painting.  And it has stayed in this haphazard condition ever since.  Of course it was only a study from the beginning.  The canvas paper is torn and oddly shaped.  But I love this unfinished picture.

It’s the kind of thing you do strictly for yourself, the way that humming in the shower is distinctly different from a recital.  I made a record of forms and linear contours in whatever order they struck my notice.  I was unconcerned about the identification of the object, about whether anyone can tell what it is.  I observed instead its visual properties, and they held my gaze perfectly well in all their abstract purity.

The beauty of a sketch offers dangerous temptations.  It can make one timid about going forward.  The sketchiness can be so beguiling that one becomes reluctant to make that necessary journey toward finishing an idea.  In my youth the buzzword was “over-worked.”  It was the great terror.  God forbid one overworks a picture.  New bugaboos have replaced that idea now.  Of course, there does exist a genuine fault involved in finishing something in unmeaningful ways.  Yet we must bite the painterly bullet and go forward with ideas, willing to make mistakes of judgment in the interest of learning real visual lessons.

An artist definitely needs to learn how to go beyond the beauty of impulse, ephemera and accident.  Certainly.  But equally truly, one must have one’s moment of daliance with these delights.  Or else one forsakes the encounter with pure form.  It cannot be got any other way.  Sometimes it comes just so fleetingly.

Artists learn to accept the stops and starts of discovery in order to get the knowledge that comes hidden in the different places — in the mind’s different corners of impulse and deliberation.

My Diebenkorn, My “Berkeley”

Blogger June Malone posts a copy she made after an abstract Gerhard Richter watercolor, saying that she wasn’t sure she understood Richter’s abstraction, but that copying one taught her more about achieving depth and richness of color in the watercolor medium.

It inspired me to pull out my copy after Diebenkorn above.  The original, Berkeley #57, painted the year I was born,  lives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  There’s a great many differences between my copy and Diebenkorn’s original painting which I’m aware of even though I’ve never seen the actual painting.  I’ve seen enough Diebenkorns to know that his oil painting’s surface is very textural whereas I kept the acrylic paint I used to make my copy fairly thin.  The scale of the paintings is radically different.  Diebenkorn’s painting is 58 3/4 inches square and mine (not truly a square) measures 18 x 24 inches.

However, like June, I found the practice of copying an abstract painting very intriguing.  My approach to copying Diebenkorn, not withstanding the paint, is rather more like a drawing in feeling.  I drew his lines and shapes, felt my way through the image’s forms, and ignored (of necessity) the layerings that I know exist in the original.  Also, my copy has a lot of “me” in it. 

Copying his painting was somewhat like taking a short walk with him in a Berkeley of imagination (I’ve never even been to California).  And while we walked, suffice to say we had a brief and pleasant chat. 

Diebenkorn’s painting is abstract, having no identifiable subject matter.  But it contains many feelings about natural forms, some of them landscape .  Equally it has many touchstones to early European and Euro-american painting: indebtedness to de Kooning, for instance, and through de Kooning more remotely to Picasso.  The SFMOMA site has some videos of Diebenkorn being interviewed and working.

More scribbles: Yesterday’s Drawing Updated

The drawing I posted yesterday in its first rough lines now looks like this.  I might be doing some other versions as well.  With this drawing I am figuring out what the reflections of the upper corner of the painting should look like: their design.  The reflections are from trees that overhang the pond and the ways that the water’s motion catches and breaks up these dark greens. 

The pattern is very abstract and doesn’t have to follow any particular pattern.  It is entirely adjustable to whatever shapes seem most striking.  So I draw different ideas — all of which are based upon the source photo — but which become slightly amended and distorted versions of it.  The “reality” in this study that will finally matter is the one that evokes the pond’s mood.