Telephone Time

I have been busy the last few days, and I haven’t had much time for drawing.  But while I talk to people on the phone, I can heedlessly draw in a little notebook. My eyes and fingers are not troubled by my preoccupation. Hardly caring how the lines fall, I draw as naturally as I would look at the things which I set up on the table for the still-life-in-progress that I haven’t time to do.  I gaze, I draw.  Scribbling lines wander around like ants at a picnic.

Mom and I talked about a half-hour this morning when she first woke.  We talked and my absent-minded gaze produced pen lines without my full participation.  And though I didn’t on this occasion, one could tell the other party “I’m looking at the blue compotier.  The reflections are very fine! And the glass is so clear in this light.”

What fine light spreads over the earth daily from the nice star around which our planet revolves.  I notice a peck of that light while I breathe the sweet air, drink my coffee and chat with Mom on the phone.

It is not exactly “art” in this case, just a bit of the time captured.  And now in reflection I have not only the drawing to enjoy, but other pleasures added.   Have you ever noticed the lovely sheen that comes off the pen from a ball point pen?  And the color of my notebook’s paper is very golden in this night’s lamp-light.  And the paper feels so smooth as your fingers pass over it.

These things are not “art” either, and yet drawing has such pleasures that far transcend even the great joys of art.  I must tell Mom all about it tomorrow.

On not being rude to the Fish

I remind myself that I made this drawing expressly to be crude, by which I do not mean to insinuate anything about my beloved koi, rather I mean that my motive for drawing was to get at something very sketchy — only to do it in a larger scale — to give myself the same freedom I would own when working small.

I need to remind myself as I go, for the sake of each of those times when I step back, experience surprise and silently tell myself, “oh, that’s a bit abrupt.” 

Well that was the whole idea.

Like a real pond

After working on my drawing at the secret bunker studio, I took photos as I usually do.  Then got an odd notion.  Why not photograph the picture from below as one might see it if it were mounted high upon a wall.  (Sometimes that’s the only way you can photograph pictures when they’re housed somewhere.)  And as I saw how distorted the image became, I inclined to indulge the distortion in extravagant ways.  After that I was in search of distortion, the stretchier the water’s topography, the better.

When you’re photographing the real fish, their movements and the wave patterns are often stopped artificially or alterred greatly from what our brains tell us we see.

Photographing the drawing from every angle across its flat plane, I saw the fish begin to “swim” even more — round the curved edge of the earth’s watery.  Like koi explorers they looked to drop off the edge of the space-time.  And the blues widened like a curtain furling.

If I were to use these distorted photos of my drawing as reference images for other pictures, I could draw the distortion right in and jazz riff something new.  Or one could combine the distorted sections into a new “whole.”

Collage is possible, or rescrambled puzzle pieces made more puzzling.  Lots of improvisations possible as one follows the path.  Or the wave.  The fish wave.

I decided to treat my drawing like it was a real pond.  With real fish, who move.

My day at the beach of thought

I needed a day at the beach real bad.  So I went there in imagination by drawing my favorite object of nature.

This was mostly a left-hand day, too.  I wanted to be very carefree.

Looking for all the angles, I turned my shell upside down.  I think.  Actually, I’m not sure it has an upside.

Looked at the lines.

Looked at forms and shadows.

Tried one path and changed my mind.

Smudged.

And then I had to go home.  The beach of the imagination has less sand than a real beach, less of a wonderful breeze, but it still has magic.

Me of Long Ago

Before I let my hair grow very long and looked in profile toward the left, I looked like this.  This image is a photo of a xerox of a drawing that I made at an uncertain date long ago.  I don’t know where the original drawing is now, but since I inherited from my Depression Era-surviving parents a deep reluctance to throw anything away, I’m fairly confident it will turn up.

The blue is an exaggeration of a picture of a picture.   I think it’s very jazzy, very Miles Davis.  I was Kind of Blue, you see.

I have a whole box of ancient drawings.  Sometime, I need to go through them and do my walk down Memory Lane.

More Big Hair: in the zone with Stuff Smith

Well, what can I say?  We were listening to Stuff Smith.  The doll really let her hair down, the big hair.

And she’s got some really big hair.

Cats!

The kid and I were up late into the night drawing cats.  I drew one — assuming that a fake cat counts as drawing a cat.  And the kid drew bunches!

Hey.  Don’t anybody tell the hamsters about this.  (It’s kind of a sensitive topic for them.)

Remembering: Putting Names with Faces

While I’m on my memory theme, I took this face from some old master, but I can’t remember who or where.  (Other than that, and the continual dance of hide and seek that I play with my car keys, I have a great memory.)  I think it’s from a Degas portrait.  (Is there an art historian in the house?)

The advantage of drawing from old masters is that you get such neat ideas.  If I draw from life, I can use what this image teaches me.  Of course, I’m usually drawing fish.  But, hey, they have such fine chiseled profiles, they really do.

Anyway, my violin hero Stephane Grappelli used to play a Bach duo with Jean-Luc Ponty, de temps en temps.  They called it their “Bible.”  So, I take a break from my jazz koi to draw a little classical Degas sometimes.

Another Garden

I drew the garden again.  Made this one a little bigger.

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!