Tree at Night

Taking walks at night has sometimes provided my summer form of exercise.  The heat of day has dissipated.  City crowds have dispersed.  A few lingerers provide a companionable backdrop without interfering with one’s desire for solitude.  Appearances change.  The shadows of evening going into night, added to a city’s desire for constant illumination, make for interesting contrasts.  Trees usually lit from above in the sun’s brilliance are lit from below or from other odd angles, which makes for unexpected shadows and textures.

This painting arose from memories of walks I used to take when my daughter was little.  Some evenings I was able to slip away for a brief interlude of exercise and quiet thinking while she slept and was watched by others.  We have some enormous old trees in the city and I had a favorite which back then I sometimes drew.  Revisiting it now in memory adds something also, a touch of nostalgia and meaning that comes with the passage of time.  Reflection and reverie have changed the tree from a real one into a dream with branches.

Koi Mountain

These fish are vying to reach the center.  Something’s going on there.  Others of them swim around this activity, not participants exactly, yet aware in waves of concentric bustle.

Oddly enough, this used to be a painting of a mountain.  Now it’s fish.  The mountain just wasn’t working out.  An artistic real estate transaction needed to take place.  The mountain moved out.  Fish moved in.

[Top of the post:  A Study of Koi Swimming, by Aletha Kuschan, acrylic on canvas]

Computerized

Ever since discovering, by golly, that our computer had photo collage software on it (who knew?), I’ve played around with images by combining things on the computer and then altering them via the computer’s many interesting graphic features.  This “fishwave” is one result.  A photo of a heavy drapery is blended with some pictures of koi swimming and all that has been run through the washer on the permanent press cycle until it looked as you see it above.  Sometimes I paint from images like this that I’ve created on computer.  After they become paintings, they can be photographed and rerun through the same computerized process again to be transformed into something else.   Metamorphosis.

Then, too, there’s the computer between the ears with which we can attempt daring things.

My Compotier

When I found a blue compotier at a second hand store I felt as though perhaps I might bump into Bonnard in the next aisle.  It’s not often that buying glassware feels like fate, but then most people buy a compotier to use rather than to paint.

While I am doing koi pictures, I post other things and this image is another where I discover that the subject matter has elements in common with the fish I paint now.  The cloth on this table is one that I’ve loved ever since I first saw it, and it reappears time and again in my pictures.  Perhaps it is not odd then that its big roses spiral in waves of floral pattern like my koi in the water.  My koi are roses swimming in water.  And my roses are koi dancing across a table cloth.

Sometimes it seems that one repaints the same picture over and over in many disguises.

[Top of the post:  Floral Still life, by Aletha Kuschan, oil on paper]

music from a little shell

I have been listening to music I hear coming from inside a small shell.  It seems to sing me advice concerning the painting of my koi fish.  Its music comes from a great distance, whispering from far inside its small architecture, and it winds round chamber upon chamber to reach the outer air of the world.  Yet the delight it produces is commensurate with something much louder and grander.  It’s really quite an amazing little shell.

[Top of the post: drawing of a lonely shell, by Aletha Kuschan, ballpoint pen]

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]

Sorry, of Late

Sorry I haven’t posted any art today.  Of late, I’ve tried to post something everyday.  However, today the frogs have taken up all my time.  They’re quite unruly. 

[Top of the post:  the frogs at home]

Little Pond of Dreams

This might be the pond where I threw my keys, from which I caught three fishes.

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]