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.

Another Copyist

Here’s a drawing after an Ingres portrait by Kirstin Lamb.  Her copy has become an entirely new image, quite in its own right, with wonderfully loose lines and frank directness.   It’s certainly fun for me finding it and being able to demonstrate someone else’s use of copies.  You discover how fully inventive Lamb’s copy after Ingres is by comparing it with its original.  Mrs. Hayard has had a good make-over, as a consequence becoming a thoroughly modern Millie. 

[Top of the post:  Copy at Ingres's Madame Charles Hayard, by Kristin Lamb]

Time as Discipline

A few posts ago I explained how to begin a painting, using Monet’s Sunflowers as an example of something we could copy in imagination.  I wrote a rather longish account, and still I could only draw my theme in the most sketchy way.  To really paint, you must look deeply into the image — peering into its details discovering relationships between the parts and the whole.

To learn to see your aim should be to set up a motif that challenges you to notice as much as possible.  Eugene Delacroix described the goal as “to prolong the sensation.”  Obviously choosing a subject that can engage your thoughts and feelings in the fullest way has the greatest potential for inducing you to look deeply.  Choose something you love.  Choose something you find enchanting.  Not every painting has to be of this challenging sort, of course.  Different paintings aim at different things. But an artist who wishes to see as much as possible in nature has to seek the challenge that stretches his or her powers of observation.

One aide to the goal is time.  Setting a time limit means that you don’t pound your visual cortex against nature’s photons indefinitely.  You know that if you strive as rigorously as you can that, after a session, the gong will chime, and you’re done.  Closure offers this psychological boost that cannot be underestimated.  In tandem with setting a limit, it’s also helpful to make a rule of not being too fussy.  Moving a picture along, even working as quickly as your skills allow, helps too.  You force yourself to “aim and shoot,” again and again.  Working a little bit fast means that rationalizations have little time to interfere.  You try to make the connection between eye and hand as seemless as possible.  You allow a few “mistakes” to creep in, if they must, for the sake of the larger goal of seeing intensely and recording directly.

Certain subjects in art will prod you along mercilessly if you let them.  I used to paint bunches of flowers from the yard or from the florist.  I found that the most time I could ever spend upon them was four hours, maximum.  After that, all the blooms had drooped a little — or they had shifted so much from their initial positions, even the hardiest, as to comprise an entirely different ensemble of relationships by session’s end.  Shadows, of course, change too.  Nature has its own clocks that make an artist nimble.  You should use these clocks to help you.  They are great forms of discipline.

[Top of the post:  Lilacs in a Vase, by Aletha Kuschan, oil on canvas]

Blank Canvas

Lately I’ve been reading books about writing, among them Ralph Keyes’s The Courage to Write.  I was wondering when I saw it why writing would require courage.  If you are writing a powerful exposé on a dictator and you have the misfortune to be a citizen living under the dictator’s rule, I can understand why writing would take courage.  But why would the writing of ordinary books evoke authorial fear?

The blank page has something to do with it.  Mr. Keyes has a nice quote by James Baldwin: “You go in with a certain fear and trembling.  You know one thing.  You know you will not be the same person when this voyage is over.  But you don’t know what’s going to happen to you between getting on the boat and stepping off.”  Seeing writing described in that way makes me want to get on the boat.  It provokes such longing.  Doesn’t Baldwin make writing seem like an breathtaking adventure?

Certainly various kinds of self exposure can evoke fear.  And embarking upon a project which has no predictable end to it could definitely seem daunting.  But in other respects I like the idea of the blankness of beginnings.  I am never afraid of starting a picture.  I am sometimes afraid of “wasting”materials.  I worry that the canvas I’m using is too expensive and maybe the painting will be a flub.  But the pursuit of a new idea always makes me feel like a kid — it’s better than childhood because I have ever so many fewer qualms than I had when I was a child.

The first lay-in of an idea seems like the most open and vibrating moment.  In those early steps, anything is possible.  A painting closes down as choices follow upon each other.  It comes to be more definitely “this” or “that.”  But even the narrowing of the path doesn’t faze me because by the time I arrive there I find that different kinds of new possibilities arise.  The surface lends itself to a million interpretations.

It’s not that I’ve never felt this artistic fear.  I used to approach a new project with fear and trembling.  But these days my worries run more toward concern whether I will succeed in finishing the many things I have started.  The starting of things is so delightful that it’s hard to discipline oneself to stay the course with any particular one.  I have, however, one painting that is taking me years to finish.  It is full of details, and I can imagine a circumstance in which the details keep yeilding to others more minute.  Yet I have no reluctance to work on the picture.  Indeed, it’s one of my favorite pictures.  With it I experience the opposite of my financial qualm:  had I known it would become so complex I would have used a better canvas!

I don’t quite understand the whole “fear” thing.  I have no wish to denigrate it, though.  Perhaps I should write a book.  Maybe then I’ll know what they’re talking about, they who say that writing takes courage.  But of those who say that painting takes courage — and we have our fair share as well — I cannot understand them, I have to admit.   I only used to feel that way when I was younger, and I had so many things that I didn’t know how to do.  I was afraid of getting everything “wrong.”  I feared making mistakes.

I have none of that fear now.  It is not that I know how to do everything!  My ego is not that big.  It’s just that I’ve learned how to learn.  When I don’t know how to do something, I find that some path toward it appears, and I just start going down that path.  Anyway, I’m much less hung up about “mistakes.”  A mistake is such a subjective thing.  Sometimes “mistakes” have such lovely ideas hidden inside them.  They are still mistakes, mind you.  They are those parts of the picture that look out of place.  But I find that a willingness to live with them can open all kinds of doors of thought.

After all “reality” in that sense of what an optician means when he says you have 20/20 vision is all around us, and we can look at it all day long.  But thoughts are so personal.  I like a picture that is full of thoughts.  And we so often find them in our mistakes if we will but look, for what is a mistake except something one aimed for and missed?  Or did you even miss?  Do you know what the idea even is?

Contemplate your mistake a little, and you learn what it was you aimed for and what you desire. 

[Top of the post:  Early stage of a painting posted earlier in this blog, Woman in White, by Aletha Kuschan]

One Weird Lizard

There are many paths to invention.  My daughter made this lizard by one of them.  Let me see if I can recall the details because it was a complex process. 

I made a line drawing based on a photograph in a book that sort of resembled this guy to click.  Then I xeroxed the drawing I’d made and cut the xexored copy into several same-sized squares.  I reassembled the squares in random order as individual blocks and taped them down onto some pages.

All together they composed a “drawing test.”  The objective was to redraw each, now very abstract looking individual square, using a set of blank squares (the test paper) the same size as the originals. 

My daughter took my “test” and afterwards we reassembled her lizard “copy,” putting all the boxes into their proper order.  Then she made a new drawing that copied the newly assembled lizard made of little squares.  (Are you still following me?)  The lizard above was the result.  We rexeroxed him to have bragging copies, one of which I put into a collage that became a detail a large painting.  That lizard in the collage is the one pictured above.

I think he’s a perky looking little guy!

You know, funny thing, but I don’t get a lot of people asking me for driving directions.  I wonder why ….

[Top of the post:  Very complicated reconstruction of a Veiled Chameleon, by Aletha Kuschan and daughter]

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]

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]

Half Fish Myself

All my preoccupation with the koi is making me half fish myself.  This is not a dream from which one wishes to awake.  Here is a dream one wants to dream.

Koi on the Move

I’d like to go to the beach for real.  Or I’d like to dive into a pond somewhere with my friends the koi.  Can’t do either of these things right now.  Well, actually I can’t try door number two ever — unless I’m willing to get arrested by the National Park Service.  But I am up to my eyeballs in water.  And I’m not referring to my afternoon at the pool. 

I’ve been working on koi paintings.  Will be making drawings of koi, too, because painting takes too long and I need instant gratification.  I remember how much I enjoyed making the drawing above, which is fairly large, made on two sheets measuring 60 x 88 inches overall.  I have an idea for a new koi drawing so I’m beside myself with eagerness to get started.  At some future time, I’ll post them.  But for now I present these little teasers!

Work of this sort has its own frustrations, of course.  “Painting” with crayons means having to scribble or rub colors into shapes.  The upside is that it’s very energetic and provides good exercise for the forearms.  Whatever frustrations to instant gratification exist, however, are more than made up by the delight in making lines.  Lots of ‘em — over very large sheets of paper.  It’s great to be an adult and still have so much rationalization for long episodes of play.

[Top of the post:  Last year's Koi drawing, by Aletha Kuschan, crayon on Canson paper]

PS – My “Cheat Sheet”

Searching for the answer to the riddle Kitsune offered, I doodled a bunch of trials that make nice hieroglyphics.  Looks like the Rosetta stone for space alien languages!

[Top of the post:  Cheat Sheet for solving a riddle, by Aletha Kuschan]