Shell Topography with Coffee

I have  a shell I like to draw.  It’s my old friend, the subject I return to when I want to rediscover something.  When I want to find a new way of thinking about visual things, I go back to my shell.  It’s familiar shapes hold many mysteries — all new. 

Meanwhile turning from my ”serious” drawing, I pause and have some coffee.   I doodle during my break.  I let my pen go willy-nilly along whatever paths whimsy chooses.  So I drew this while I sipped coffee.  It was my break from a longer, more studied drawing.  I tried to let my pen follow across the contours of the shell’s surface — along it matters not what directions — zig-zagging this way, that way.  The technical name is “cross-contour” drawing.  I was thinking along the lines too of something that computers are more adept at making, topological drawings.

In any case, these lines were lazy coffee, idle thoughts talking, stream of consciousness with a pen line,  taking a break, kind of drawing.

By the sea, in thought

Still collecting sea shells far from sea.  The colored pencil scribbles have won my heart.  The merits of any particular medium draw one in — but sometimes also the way that a tool resists helps one think.  The blunt ends of the pencil have made me look at all the edges in the picture as more porous than I had hitherto considered them.  And then the shell itself becomes porous as well.  It seems to enlarge in its associations.  Do I hear the sea inside its chambers?  Does its pearlescence tell of other kinds of light, of dawns and twilights in distant skies?  What lies behind the veil of any drawing — or more’s the point — what lies behind the veil of the object itself?  The photons it scatters into my vision.  And what is its meaning?  Especially after the creature who made it has long left it behind?

In search of freedom

Our summer mornings have been so fine.  We open the windows early during this the mildest summer of my recollection.  Washington DC is famous for its humid, boiling summers (which I have always loved like a turtle loves the sun).  But this year our summer will be famous for its mildness, and we have savored this mildness for the rare loveliness it offers.  The breezes waft through the rooms, rattling the blinds, rustling papers, scattering thoughts and dreams. 

I sat in this ocean of air and drank my morning tea like a rich monarch, wealthy beyond counting in photons and molecules of atmosphere.  With all this heady luxury, I plotted out my course.  I decided that I would rule with a kind pen, but that my empire should be vast and free.  What if one’s thoughts roamed wildly?  To draw whatever one pleases.  The drawings can come from anywhere: from photos, from life, from bits of paintings one sees in the museum, from imagination and memory, from dreams and wishes. 

Wherever you are, with whatever medium you possess, on sheets of any size, in colors of any hue, to make careful tight drawings of a world you love with obsession or fast, frivolous, whimsical drawings tossed off as fast as thoughts fly.    Blind drawings proddingly, probingly made as though stumbling and fumbling through a fog or mist, the mist — the world.  The world a shining veil before one’s eyes.

What if you drew whatever popped into your head?  What if you took all your limitations and used them?  Push everything to the edge.  Let whimsy rule.  To draw anything, anytime, anywhere.  And to seek a perfect freedom of line in a royal realm of images.

Invention is the Mother of Necessity Fille

It started out with Necessity.  She was invention’s mother as in you need something, you make something.  She was like some mothers who say, “go make something of yourself.” 

So Invention did.  Invention made so many things.  And then we got used to the things and decided we couldn’t live without them.  (We’re like that with computers now — remember back when we didn’t have computers…?)  So, soon the inventions are necessities, which in turn become mothers to more inventions. 

Got that?

It’s a classic mother/daughter resemblance.

I found this image in my book on Annibale Carracci.  I used to not own a book on Annibale Carracci, then someone invented this particular book, and it became my necessity, and I couldn’t live without it.  And I don’t.  I bought a copy — where I found this picture — which now I share with you.  Actually, to be picky, it’s only attributed to Carracci.  But what the hey?

We should all be making something like this.  It’s very modern.  Faces looming out of landscapes.  Feeling the inspiration yet?

Drawing and Dream Fishing

I have been painting koi, and some might wonder what techniques lie behind the paintings.  Ever since the French Impressionists, we’re accustomed to the idea of painting landscape from life “en plein air.”  And I do sometimes visit my friends the koi with a notebook and make sketches. 

However, most the drawing and painting I do of the koi grows out of photographs.  Indeed, I could not pursue the images I make without the camera.  And the use of photography in these koi paintings I make leads me closer than ever backward into the techniques of old masters.  Prior to the 19th century when paint was first put into tubes, artists made sketches from life, but all their serious painting of nature took place in the studio and depended greatly upon drawings, imagination and imitation of works by other artists.  Art has always been influenced as much by other art as by “reality.”  And it’s still true, of course, though we are not always aware of the subliminal kinds of imitation in which we indulge.

My paintings develop from photographs because the camera can stop time, and thus it captures a natural effect that I cannot see with my eyes.  For instance, while one can makes lots of drawings of individual koi swimming about (which is hard enough), one cannot capture the complex relationships of many moving fish to each other.  Yet when I study my photographs I find that the koi navigate their watery paths in herd-like ways.  Their passages through their “fluid-scape” is more than the sum of individual parts.  Beautiful patterns emerge as they swim sometimes in concert, sometimes in solos, and sometimes in gentle and amicable “collision” courses during which they bump into one another and exchange a brief but cordial greeting.

Thus I need my photographs, yet I do not just copy them.  I often make drawings — studies — from the photographs, just as one makes studies from life.  Through this process of preliminary drawing, quite often new visual ideas emerge, and sometimes it’s these ideas that affect the painting as much as the source photo(s).  Then too, I sometimes recombine elements of several photos to invent a new composition and in this regard I find myself doing a modern revamp of a very ancient “old master” process. 

Sometimes I make “quick” sketches from the photos (as in the picture at the top of the post) — though I have “all the time in the world” to copy a photograph.  I find that the quick interaction with what I see helps me seize some aspects of the imagery and — equally valuable — to ignore other features, distracting details perhaps, in the search for whatever visual gesture finally expresses this “je ne sais quoi” that I want.

The painting you make is never exactly the same thing as “reality.”  Whether the artist stands before the motif, or works in the quietude of an insulated studio, the real subject of the picture is the interior landscape of the painter — the one inside one’s head.  As Degas said: ”L’air qu’on voit dans les tableaux des maitres, n’est pas l’air respirable!”  And that goes double for the water!

More Fast Landscape: Repetitions

This painting actually bears little resemblance to its reference photo.  It’s a distant cousin from its source.  I will be going outdoors again (someday, alas!) to paint in front of the motif.  But until that happy day, I work from photos and alter them to suit my whimsy.

Painting landscape by whatever means is great practice for dealing with Mother Nature’s more urgent and changeable moods.  But it also reminds you that art is art.  In the final analysis I must persuade the spectator that this water and these clouds are like the ones he carries around in his heart.

Meanwhile, I have done this landscape before.  Using the same photo, I produce different pictures.  It is as though I visit the water again on a different day under different skies.

More Fast Landscape: Water is a Mirror

Anything with water in it seems very psychologically suspicious to me!  Water is Nature’s great big mirror, and all landscapes with water strike me as sideways alllusions to Narcissus! 

Look into these waters and see the waves in my mind!  Cause I’m deep!

But, really.  Blue is such a rich, luxurious color.  We are all wealthy beyond our dreams on a day when we stand beneath a deep blue sky.  I make this series of landscapes in my apartment studio from photographs and imagination.  Sometimes the weather outside has been frigid and grey.  But indoors its 72 degrees, humid and mild beyond measure beside the river bank of my thoughts where many singing birds sound out their bright chorus.

First Lines

The first lines of my canvas look somewhat like these dream scattered lines of my notebook.  In the morning over tea I drew my still life from memory.   Now at the end of the first day, I realize that the first lines I drew with paint were rather like these precursors. 

First lines are the gathered essential thoughts, the first impressions, the longed for idea bundled up like flowers.  In their still vague dress of make-believe they merely point towards hopes and longing.  I will love this painting once it’s underway.  I am already enjoying work.  Looking into the depths among my objects I find the hints of so many possibilities.  One small corner of a room can contain radical amounts of color and tone, shape and meandering line, hidden questions and enigmas to satisfy the needs of a hundred painted pictures.  Yet soon after I had finished assembling my still life I found that one core set of forms had drawn my heart into this idea, so I’m inching along, laying down lines, trying to gain enough ground to see the first reward.

Perhaps hiking a mountain is like this?  There’s a lot of work with your head down before you get to enjoy the view.

My first fumbling sketches are a crude map toward my destination.

Rocks and Potatoes

Back in May, I posted a still life I made many years ago of a cabbage and potatoes.  This drawing is its distant cousin. 

I drew this from a photograph, and like the lake of two posts ago, I find it provides a good practice for some drawing outdoors that I’m hoping to do — en plein air.  But it also has the same basic forms as the earlier still life.  Indeed, I was thinking of getting some potatoes and inventing a landscape from a still life perhaps?

One of the wonderful things about drawing is the way it lets you take imaginative journies.  I can vicariously visit the rocky outcropping by drawing it from a photo.  And I can travel there even with some potatoes too?  I don’t necessarily need a travel agent to find a locale that’s very bucolic and peaceful where I can bask in the warmth of the sun. Come visit my store on CafePress!

A Real Mountain

The folds of the cloth in the previous post have become a true mountain here.  You could almost just invent a landscape from start to finish by laying out some heavy cloth on a table, letting it pile into a crest, watching the daylight from a near by window carve out its fissures and cliffs while changing the colors a little to something stony and grey.

The forms of nature bear resemblances that are more than just skin deep.  In the mountain as well as the drapery, what the artist really draws is gravity and light!

[Top of the post:  Mountain of Imagination, by Aletha Kuschan]