Flowers Old and New

The end of the year is a time for reflection.  As I pour over internet postings, I am astonished to notice that “representation” is no longer an oddity.  When I was a youth, in contrast, it was axiomatic that picture-making was passé, “nobody” (one was told) “is doing that now.”  There was an avant garde that did not include renderings of the visible world.  And that was that.  While it’s true that the art world was governed by a kind of anything goes, what it really meant was “anything but that.”

Anyone looking at art today easily sees that the old rule is gone.  I am astonished how much figurative painting is unabashedly made now.  And I blame the Internet.  The “art world,” as has happened to so many other Establishments, has lots of competition now.  While it was always true that private galleries sold representational art, probably sold more representational art than abstract art, yet in the old order all the prestige accrued to whatever ArtNews crowned.  But that’s just not true anymore.

Well, it never really mattered anyway.  If you loved whatever it was, you were inclined to do whatever it was.  Lots of artists have persisted in my generation following their heart’s desire.  All I say is that it’s good they did because “ding dong the witch is dead” and Dorothy’s got her slippers, the Wizard of Oz has taken off for parts unknown, and the midgets are singing their hearts out.  And life goes on.

Before long, painting a simple vase of flowers is going to be the ne plus ultra.  It’s just a matter of time.

Ah, and you will have known me when!

(As for koi, don’t get me started ….)

These flowers aren’t shy

These flowers, unlike the ones I mentioned in my previous post, are not shy.  Moreover they comprise another “junk painting” that I’m doing.  And junk paintings are definitely not shy.  This picture appears over top a canvas that I painted and rapidly learned to hate.  The subject of the underpainting was totally different. But the materials were swell –  oil primed linen on sturdy stretchers.  So I turned the thing sideways and discovered that it became the perfect format for the development of a junk painting based upon a beloved junk drawing:  a marriage made in heaven, surely.

I love my junk drawing.  So far the junk painting looks different from its source, stiffer though bolder; and perhaps it will strike out its own path, yet it’s near enough to the junk drawing to have me feeling giddy and light-hearted about wielding the paint brush.  You really have to set your sights on delight sometimes.  Seriousness is important, but we cannot live in that place all the time.

Meanwhile the source for both the junk painting-in-progress and the junk drawing holds some sway over the process.

They each carry memories of this drawing.  And this drawing in turn was based upon another painting of the same subject.  I am incorrigibly addicted to redoing the same motifs …

Not knowing

I got a bouquet of flowers and discovered that I have forgotten how to draw real flowers after so many occasions of drawing their fake counterparts.  Interesting thing is that the flowers are not wilting nor are they in any way uncooperative.  Therefore I surmise that I have not really forgotten how to draw them.  Instead I have forgotten something more fundamental.

It’s a wonderful befuddlement.  Sometimes after all these years, I really surprise myself.  It’s difficult to come at old experiences in a new way. But here I am turned ingenue of flowers just like that!  Poof!  Voila!

After some desultory efforts, among which is the version posted here (the above is a detail), I re-considered that when I don’t know how to do something I can nonetheless  immediately begin taking it apart.  I know how to learn now. Do some little sketch — on a napkin, with whatever pen happens to be lying about. Draw it very small.  Or scribble away on a regular sized sheet and just put down whatever linear-visual thoughts pop  into my head.  Visual wondering has its own free association.  Had Freud owned a paint brush, he’d have known this.

I also decided that just having the flowers there is one way of beginning to walk a path back into transient subject matter.  I can look at it, think about it, remember it, pout when they begin to fade (which gives one a healthy sense of urgency).  I guess I re-discovered that all the solutions don’t have to announce themselves upon the first decision to begin a new thing.  I can wade into this circumstance.

I don’t know how any other artists out there think about their art.  But the hesitancy of drawing is not something I want to shy away from.  To look at the thing, not knowing what to do, brings me back to a beginning that I celebrate.  I feel like I am confronting something wonderful for the first time — again!  To throw down lines where I think they belong and correct them soon after, leaving the old lines there, records thoughts as they make passage through my brain.  It is as though one recreates the reality of the flowers in one’s mind, through one’s hand, over the course of time spent thinking and having trial of this and that.

I want to have this newness.  Sometimes you even get a good picture from it.  But even the newness all stripped bare of success has its marvel.  And that’s the place I’m at right now, feeling marvel-ous.

Blooming things

Isn’t it astonishing that year after year the earth renews itself?  That spring keeps coming back delights and amazes me more than I can say.  It never loses its enchantment.  That flowers occur at all is a wonder and a marvel.  Is all this loveliness just for the sake of the bees?  What majestic creatures they must be.  How certainly they must rank to be the foremost beneficiaries of so much extravagant and gratuitous beauty.  The cosmos bending down to small, busy creatures?

Perhaps we figure into the scheme as well.  Such beauty wants an audience.

Finding your inner will o’the wisp

I find myself pursuing the same themes over and over.  They come in many guises.  Sometimes they are subjects as in my koi pictures.  When I did my first few paintings of koi, I thought I was doing something brand new, but over time I began to notice that “fish” were a part of my artwork from a very early date.  They were just less numerous in my apprentice days.  (I’ve become a more adept fisher-person, though I have yet to experience  my Hemingway-esque  ”one that got away” moment.)

Currently I’m still doing flower painting — or all kinds of studies-for-flower paintings.  (Why must I always be doings “studies for”? — another mystery for the psychologist’s couch where I am both patient and doctor.)  I find that my flower paintings are not like some of the flower paintings I see other artists do.  Other artist have rather more respect for actual flowers than I do.  Me, I seem to be positively mesmerized by just the shape of the bunch itself.  How do I know this?  I see it here:

This is a photograph I took of an image on the label of a Snapple Bottle.  Is a snappy image on this Snapple bottle, don’t you think?  I was playing with my daughter’s camera and its high-resolution micro feature and needed something to photograph so I grabbed a random object that was near at hand — or so I supposed.  But there it is again, that “bunch” shape that so often comprises the form of the bouquet in my flower paintings.  I seek these things out evidently: these shapes that are a little like the canopy of certain species of trees. 

Don’t know if it’s important for artists to discover their personal inward visual obsessions or whether discovering them has any impact at all upon making art.  But I’ve gotta tell you, that scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind has always resonated with me.

Did I mention that I always eat all my broccoli.  Why it’s practically my favorite vegetable.  Would somebody pass the mashed potatoes, please?

Today’s catch is flowers not fish

I was supposed to paint today, but I never got the lid off the paint tubes.  Instead I just had to draw.  I am drawing the stuff that I am going to paint — that I have already started painting.  But before I even did that, I took my walk.  Did my “walk” drawings.

Have a little notebook to carry.  Now just for the record, these were not made with the favorite pen.  It’s a very nice pen that I used, but was not the favorite.  The favorite pen stays behind when I walk.

Made a couple little “detail” scribble thingys.

One of these, surely, ought to be turned into a postage stamp.  Is about the right size.  Wouldn’t you want to put this on your envelop?

Then back at the ranch, I drew some more.  My flowers are so patient.

They’re also very cheerful.  Or maybe it was me that was cheerful.

Got the vase to stand for one alone, too.

After that, the grand finale … for today anyway.

Chasing down the stray thoughts of life’s dream

I used to paint flowers this way.  I got some from the yard or bought them at the store.   I put them in a vase.  And I painted them.  It was very straightforward.  After a bit, the flowers had all changed positions (they move around a lot more than one would think), and since I didn’t know how to paint something unless I was looking at it (that’s still essentially true), I had to be firm in deciding what I was doing.

Once the flowers or their shadows and colors have moved around enough to confuse my composition, I had to call the picture “finished.”  Since speed was the skill I needed, I learned to see and decide quickly.  My technique was all about finding a visual shorthand for whatever aspect my idea I wanted.

The paintings varied, they looked different, because I deliberately tried different things.  Different colors, sizes, compositions, different imitations of different artists, different materials.  But I still painted from real flowers.  I still worked quickly. 

After I fell in love with a particular Cezanne still life of flowers, I tried doing the set ups with artificial flowers because that’s what Cezanne had done, at least that’s what he did for his late Vase de Fleurs at the National Gallery of Art.  But as I was making my own set up, based loosely on Cezanne’s iconic image, I was also visiting the museum a lot, making drawing after drawing of Cezanne’s amazing image.  Everytime I have drawn it, I have felt as though I see it for the first time, and yet I never understand it.  It always seems to hold more than I can catch.

I’ve made big drawings, little drawings, big paintings, little paintings, so many ways I have longed for my own version of Cezanne’s idea — of that aspect of it that continually fascinates me.  I find myself in a spell, and Cezanne is the hypnotist.  Some images float by like wisps of dreams.

And some are dense and vivid like those dreams that seem more real than life.

I drew a magnolia flower from life last summer, it hung on a lower limb at eye level.  I felt no awareness of its being like the white flowers of Cezanne’s painting,  the partly opening flower ethereal white against impossible darks.  The connection was there, but I was sleeping, drawing like a sleep-walker.  Awake now, I ask myself what could I do with this?  Could I learn to make a bouquet from composites? 

It’s like searching for a kind someone that you met in a dream, someone who is not real.  Who was he like?  I’m sure I’ve met someone like that.  It was so familiar ….  It was, it was.  I was asleep and “it” was not real.

All pictures are just colors.  You put bits of color here and there.  You assemble them.  They assemble you.  It’s not always clear what is going on.  I knew this picture, it seems so familiar, where did we meet, what did it portray?

I’m still learning how to paint, and still waking while sleeping.

The Rose of Indecision

The painting I displayed in a previous post has gotten the ax.  I turned it over and painted this quick study of a rose — with a few flower friends faintly adumbrated on the sides.  Just couldn’t get the first study going, so I ditched it.  Meanwhile, this rose is the same one I’ve drawn over and over. 

There’s even a new “study” drawing that I made this week:

And another more developed small painting:

I have stared at this plastic flower so much I think it’s beginning to feel self-conscious.

Learning to fiddle fast

What I did with the creamer, I thought to do with my flowers on a larger sheet of paper.  These drawings are made on Strathmore 400 series 18 x 24  sheets.  It’s difficult to work as fast on the larger sheet — though I haven’t given up.  Without switching to other media, staying with my sharp and steady Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, I want to gain a greater ease and freedom with the larger scale drawing — approaching the subject in the same manner, with a point-and-shoot, see-it, draw-it swiftness only doing it bigger. 

This size sheet is too small for me to do this particular still life at actual size.  If I got a vase of flowers that fit into the 18 x 24 format, that might speed things up further.  (Let’s see, do I have any admirers who could send me flowers?)

(Um, no.)

Anyway, the first attempt is rather pointedly out of scale — a problem that would be fixed by switching to something smaller that I can fit into the sheet without downsizing (and we thought only corporations downsized).  In the second drawing, I was more self-consciously determined to deal with the proportions before scribbling into separate passages.  Nevertheless, mistakes or no, it matters not.  The point of this whole foray into drawing is that I shall have no fear, feel no scrupples, and draw until I drop.

I had a third drawing that I began last night under different illumination, and I would display it here — except — I dropped.

Doll’s Day Off

I drew the doll all day yesterday and was so pleased with the results.  I fully expected to continue the theme, but the doll would have none of it.  So I drew this potted plant instead.  At least Doll left me this clementine.

Did a little warm up before I took on the whole plant.