Drawing is arduous work

Drawing can be arduous, taxing work so I like it whenever the subject matter is willing to help me out.  Here, an obliging little frog is getting ready to jump right into the picture.

[Top of the post:  Upclose view of my work station]

Half Fish Myself

All my preoccupation with the koi is making me half fish myself.  This is not a dream from which one wishes to awake.  Here is a dream one wants to dream.

Koi on the Move

I’d like to go to the beach for real.  Or I’d like to dive into a pond somewhere with my friends the koi.  Can’t do either of these things right now.  Well, actually I can’t try door number two ever — unless I’m willing to get arrested by the National Park Service.  But I am up to my eyeballs in water.  And I’m not referring to my afternoon at the pool. 

I’ve been working on koi paintings.  Will be making drawings of koi, too, because painting takes too long and I need instant gratification.  I remember how much I enjoyed making the drawing above, which is fairly large, made on two sheets measuring 60 x 88 inches overall.  I have an idea for a new koi drawing so I’m beside myself with eagerness to get started.  At some future time, I’ll post them.  But for now I present these little teasers!

Work of this sort has its own frustrations, of course.  “Painting” with crayons means having to scribble or rub colors into shapes.  The upside is that it’s very energetic and provides good exercise for the forearms.  Whatever frustrations to instant gratification exist, however, are more than made up by the delight in making lines.  Lots of ‘em — over very large sheets of paper.  It’s great to be an adult and still have so much rationalization for long episodes of play.

[Top of the post:  Last year's Koi drawing, by Aletha Kuschan, crayon on Canson paper]

Art School

I find myself often wondering how an artist ought to be educated. The old masters had workshops. You wanted to learn how to paint — you go hang out with the local guy who paints. If the local guy isn’t teaching you as much as you want, you find another artist to study with, someone who has a reputation for being the “it” guy. Thus Rembrandt found his way into Lastman’s studio.

Well, for a while. Someone like Rembrandt doesn’t really need a teacher in the ordinary sense — or rather, let’s just observe that he needs a really, really good teacher. The teacher he needs might not be alive, as indeed was the case. Rembrandt studied with da Vinci, Raphael and Rubens, and others.

Today artists go to university. That has certain obvious advantages. You learn to become technologically savvy. You make the acquaintance of professors who expect you to read a lot of books (these are usually professors in other departments). And if you stay on the straight and narrow, they give you official recognition in the form of a degree (something the old masters never had).

Whether the university art department has something valuable to offer: that’s another question and varies greatly from place to place. We could call it the Rembrandt factor.

Today art is supposed to be about what’s hip and happening now. Press this idea a little and you see that many artists fully embrace the concept of planned obsolescence. Let’s face it, if the old masters have as their over-riding fault the fact that they are old, then certainly one’s own art (regardless how hip it was in its moment) will someday (perhaps in a week or so) be old too. What’s the point?

Or, art is supposed to be about doing something no one has ever done before (to accept this notion it does help to have been born yesterday, quite literally). We’ll call this the Guinness Book of World Records approach. Guy who has eaten the most worms. (Yuk) First artist to make a picture out of styrofoam. First artist to paint with ketchup, and so on through many heady firsts!

The problem with the Guinness artist is that it’s hard to see exactly why the young art student’s parents should be paying all that hefty tuition just so that junior can do what cannot be taught. If, after all, you are boldly going where no one has ever gone before — how is someone to teach you? Isn’t the thing that can be taught, by definition, academic? And isn’t the academic approach the icky route to be assiduously avoided?

What the young artist needs clearly, and this is especially true for the hipster crowd, is a garret. But garrets are lonely places and if you’re making stuff out of old car parts the last thing you want is solitude. It helps to have a few fellow enthusiasts around to cheer you on — especially with the obsolescence thing biting at your heels.

[Top of the post:  An Artist at his Easel, by Rembrandt.  This post originally appeared at Art Writing Bold Drawing.]

Mirrors into Thought

I’m busy painting koi these days, doing my own version of Monet’s Nympheas idea, living as it were in imaginary pools of water, becoming it sometimes seems a fish myself, so immersed I am in a world of blue.  So, it’s intriguing to reencounter a work like this drawing of flowers and to find so many similarities in it to the fishes and the pool. 

Though the colors are entirely different and the associations are quite opposite, this picture bears a mirror likeness to the koi ponds.  This similarity is made all the more mysterious by their oppositions.  One takes place outdoors, the other inside the house.  One is natural, the other is civilized and artificial.  One is vertical, the other horizontal.  But inside both pictures are formal means of ordering the visual idea.  Both images have a “swirl” of sorts as its schematic center.  The implicit visual movement of the flowers in their design, both the flowers in the vase and the ones arranged on the design of the cloth, echo the swimming motions of the fish in their pond. 

I’ve noticed this kind of visual metaphor before in my paintings.  I have no idea what it means.  Beneath the subject matter lies a process of ordering and arranging that is as much the subject of the painting as are the objects depicted.  Somehow in the precise ways I order things, my personality lies hidden. 

It might seem that a person’s way of ordering ideas would be the last thing about themselves that they would “hide,” and yet I only discover these facts of self-hood for myself by this very indirect means.  And without even realizing I was doing so, naturally I reveal something of myself to others also by these tacit devices.

We project ourselves outwards upon the world in myriad ways.  Just that sense one has of knowing people, of taking the measure of them, even of people that we just meet when we make those crucial “first impression” judgements — all these effects are signs of the self that is foisted out.  Even a shy self is thrust onto the stage of life despite one’s efforts to seek shelter. 

We are all actors on the stage as William Shakespeare once keenly observed.  For the artist the picture is but another kind of garment one wears to demonstrate and manifest the self to the world.

A picture is a strange mirror because it distorts as much as it reveals, pressing ideas outward into the world in a thousand disguises.  Yet behind all forms of concealment, one person peeks through.  Paint.  Do paint, and I guarantee you’ll gain self-knowledge though you may not always recognize the face you see in painting’s strange mirror.
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[Top of the post:  Drawing of Flowers in a Vase, by Aletha Kuschan, Caran d'ache on Canson paper]

Fuzzy details

The upclose of first marks on a canvas can be kind of exciting.  When everything is possible still…

[Top of the post:  detail of a Koi picture (see Anne Sophie Mutter and her Opposite) by Aletha Kuschan]

PS – My “Cheat Sheet”

Searching for the answer to the riddle Kitsune offered, I doodled a bunch of trials that make nice hieroglyphics.  Looks like the Rosetta stone for space alien languages!

[Top of the post:  Cheat Sheet for solving a riddle, by Aletha Kuschan]

Stream of Consciousness

And this is the stream of consciousness!

Pixel With Colors

Pixel swims into so many of my pictures.  Here he is all colored with crayon.  He usually lives and swims in this painting.  “Il faut refaire la meme chose, dix fois, cents fois ….” Degas said.  I took it very much to heart.  I’ve lost count how many times I’ve drawn Pixel.  (“You must redraw the same thing, ten times, a hundred times….”)

[Top of the post:  Pixel with Colors, by Aletha Kuschan, pencil and crayon]

This is not Alice

This is just an ordinary cat, attracted here perhaps because of all the fish.  The fish had better watch out!

[Top of the post:  Drawing of a Cat, by Aletha Kuschan, pencil]