Finishing Fish

I have begun finishing koi paintings.  It’s a strange process finishing a painting because it’s such an open-ended and uncertain process.  Of course, in truth, finishing is nothing more than continuing to paint until one is “done.”  If you have a very specific notion of what the image should look like, arriving at “done” is mostly a matter of nose grind-stoning.  But it’s very possible for a picture to be elusive right until the very last minute, which is kind of what I’m up against with these koi — and this is all the more ironic since I’m painting some of them from preexisting images.  All I need really do is just copy my image (the painting’s are enlargements of something), but somehow mystery enters during the translation.  I don’t recognize the paintings being at all identical to their sources — indeed they are so different that I can honestly say I have no idea how they will turn out.

I get some sense of what novelists talk about when they describe their characters taking over a novel while it’s being written.  I knew I was making progress on a painting when the koi started swimming — and that’s a good thing.  I want them to swim.  But I don’t know where they are going.  And you’d think I would know.

Why is the artist always the last to know?

Above, still unresolved swimming going on.

One out of Four Odds

One out of four people in this country is mentally unbalanced. Think of your three closest friends; if they seem OK, then you’re the one.

 

So said Ann Landers.  Well, I spent all day drawing fish.  (I wonder what group that puts me in??)  At least I can say that I’m very happy.

In the clouds

A giddy sensation of photons.  The clouds are soft.  Variations of white, shades and regions of white.  Edges that blend into cyan sky, edges rimmed in pale pearl blue-grey or edges of fine, filtered, pale spun gold.  Around the clouds blueness of blue — a theatre of air, a bowl of quickening molecules, like beads of life rounding, spinning out time, thought, creation, presence, sentience — rolling and rolling round the rims of the bowl.

Sentences.  The clouds float across the regions of airy blue like words on a bright living page, a god vocabulary, scrambling and unscrambling in grammar that resists translation.

One looks and then you step into the sky.  You thought walk yourself up there.  Not with feet, but with imaginating. 

It was totally silent and joyful.  I was alone, but not lonely.  My whole self filled the sky, yet I was small.  Quite small, like a bird, I was there, but I was not weighed by things as on earth.  I was air, too.

Fluid.  Look and delight.

When I was eight, we celebrated my birthday.  I was the hero.  My friends laughed and smiled, squeeled and clapped their hands.  At my party we ate ice cream and cake.  Our jaunty cardboard party hats shimmered like rainbows this way and that with our waving our heads.  I feel the band under my chin.  My cake was white with pink and blue swirls of icing.  Sweet pink roses and rich pale green leaves.  Doric swirls and corinthian cake architecture of white on white.  The spoons of brilliant pink plastic!  The spoons were half the size of real spoons as we were half the size of real people.  Decorated paper napkins.  A flat horizon stretching along the broad expanse of the table.  Happy children, we!

Light came streaming through the windows.  The air filled with our laughter.  We ate cake and ice creams and filled the room with bright noise and child light. 

My cake — oh, my cake like clouds.  We ate the sweet clouds.

Now this sky of endless blue from horizon to zenith and back — and around and the air is an upside down dish filled with sweet clouds.

You all know that the clouds will soon probably swim and turn into fish. 

Look down.  The air is filled with fish that fly through the water on their strong wings, pushing themselves through the denser molecules with strong muscles.    I thought maybe I was painting fish, but they were perhaps a flock of birds instead?  Or does it matter?  Fish or fowl?

No.  Listen to reason. 

Calm yourself.  These are clouds.  Look they are quite clearly, quite comfortingly bright white soft clouds, air dust, spun thought, whisps, whisps ….

Did you forget something?

God’s thoughts are not your thoughts.  And his ways are not your ways, says the Lord.

Look.  Some of God’s thoughts are bright molecular air with spaces between the spaces.

The Very Big Pond

On another wall of my secret Washington DC studio, I have this pond teeming with koi.  There’s alot of two dimensional splashing going on at my secret Washington location.

Here’s another view

Here’s another view — a close up — of the drawing I reworked while waiting on interminable hold today as I both drew and addressed financial matters at the same time (see previous post).

The drawing is made using Caran d’Ache wax crayons.  They are very messy and smudgy in a lovely, descriptive way.  Very blendable and versatile for drawing, the crayon color effects are almost as rich as painting.
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Alternatives

When I walk around the easel and look at the still life from the other side, it looks like this.  I think this is such a pretty view.  Sometimes it’s hard not to jump at doing this view right now.  But I have to finish the other one first.

And, you never know.  The fish might start to beckon again.

Fish?  Flowers?  Fish?  Flowers?  It’s tough!
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Recapitulation

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Even as I’m working on koi paintings, I think ahead to new projects.  One of those projects will be flower paintings. 

Some years ago I began doing flower bouquets that ranged in size from about 30 x 40 inches to 36 x 48 inches large.  It’s a size in which the flowers can be portrayed life size, and the scene as a whole can have some real punch.  I wonder to myself how an artist can make flowers iconic, and what do flowers mean when one tries to put them into a spotlight like this?  Is it the transcience, the beauty, the delicacy of flowers?   It’s subject that I’ve wanted to come back to, and I’m thinking now’s the time.

And as I prepare to begin this motif again, I see similarities between the koi and the flowers.  How strange is that?  Have I got fish in my eyes? Yet, the formal similarities relate to the positions in the canvas where one tends to place things.  Thus, the flowers on the cloth seem to me to “swim” across it just as the fish swim through the blue paint that pretends to be water.  The way that flowers dangle or splay away from each other is also like the koi scattering out into different directions.

Both subjects have wonderful abstract possibilities — flowers perhaps more than fish — for you can put almost any color you want into the canvas and still create something that is “real” and plausible.  By arrangements of cloths and the selections of flowers you can devise any color harmony you like.  Flowers are truly a form of pure painting.
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Can you see his whisker?

So far, this fish face has just a whisper of a whisker.  But it’s there!

More Fish Face

I remembered what it was that I loved about painting the koi — the abstractness.  Everybody paints these things differently.  Other koi painters love detail.  But I had looked to the koi as a subject in my first koi painting because I wanted something that was abstract yet represented something.  I like to paint stuff.  And koi are great stuff!

And the faces.  I find the abstractness in the small parts of the painting.  Maybe when they are finished, I’ll have represented them whiskers and all… who knows?  But this playing around with planes of color — and all the delicious difference of a color that is a nuance warmer or yellower or something-or-other-er than its surroundings — all that play of paint just delights me like a kid with a crayon box.

This, friends, is why I became a painter!

Summer Reading

Just finished reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.  Won’t spoil it for those who haven’t read it, but it’s kind of like Moby Dick — only a whole lot shorter!  It is really extraordinary what a great writer can do with a little bit of theme.  Basically a fellow goes fishing, in Hemingway’s story, and yet the tale reveals bits of an entire life.

Also in recent weeks, I’ve read John Hilton’s Lost Horizons and Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven — both wonderful stories.  I had not meant to become seriously diverted with reading, but I’m on a roll.  One trip to the library netted me a pile of books (still thinking in fishing terms), and they chanced to be so good that once I began a story, I couldn’t quit!

Back to Hemingway’s tale though, if you’ve read it you know it’s very visual.  And if you’ve read this blog, you know that I’m often preoccupied with the topic of fishes.  So, diving deep into this story I was confronted with some issues of my own life.  Was beginning to wonder if I’d need to illustrate something from the story. 

I like monumental art.  But would I really do a fish that large?  Are all fish stories questions about magnitude?  Does my fish affectionately named Pixel need to grow?  And would my apartment studio accomodate him?  Would anyone ever purchase his picture if I did it?  Or would I live with a giant painting of a fish the rest of my life?

Got to mull over these and other questions.  Meanwhile, I’m moving on to the next book.  My next Hemingway selection will be Moveable Feast.  I can manage that much.  Food. Still life.  Been there, done that. 

Meanwhile, wishing you safe seas.

[Top of the post:  Two Men in a Boat, by Aletha Kuschan, aquatint]