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 ….)

Molly Dreaming About Herself: what dogs dream

I used to imitate the old masters very self-consciously.  I used to think — and it was wise instinct working — that whatever the old masters did, they did for good reasons, reasons that one could only hope to understand through emulation, of walking a few miles in their shoes.  So, you find artists like Rubens and Ingres who draw figures over top other figures, and I thought to myself: “got to try that.”

I didn’t have a model handy.  But I had a dog.  So I drew one Molly sleeping over top another Molly sleeping.  My dog was happy to oblige my artistic requirements by fidgeting around in her sleep.

Now with self-generated art lessons receeding into the background, she looks like two companionable dogs together, or one dog perhaps dreaming dog dreams.  Molly was such a smart and lively canine, I’ve no doubt that her dreams were indeed rich with Molly memories of her many Molly adventures.

Now only one question remains “which dog is the dreamer and which one the dream?”

Giant Koi Sketching

The latest large koi drawing has come this far along.  It’s approximately 60 by 55 inches — somewhere in that range — and it’s drawn using Caran d’ache water soluable crayons on Arches watercolor paper.  I decided to make some of the new koi drawings as “sketches” even though they are large.  By saying that they are sketches, I mean that I am working with more freedom and spontaneity throwing caution windward.  Sometimes the size of a picture can tend to make the artist more cautious — or sometimes the materials have this effect — whenever you are doing something in which you feel there is greater risk, somehow, you might tend to slow down and be more deliberate.  And, I decided that for experiment’s sake, as well as simply for the joy of it, that I would approach some of these large koi drawings more boldly since I like the appearance of a “sketch” and equally much I like the spirit of invention and want to exploit it to the full.

A detail of the central section demonstrates how many textures are in the picture so far.  It’s made in a rough manner.  I got the blocking in done today (all the paper is more or less covered with something) and I will continue piling on the pigment, but my approach is one of ”just have at it.”   It’s through this manner that I get ideas.

At a much earlier stage, when it was only half-way as far along as now, it looked like this.

Starting and stopping

You don’t always know what you’ll do and what you won’t.  Sometimes you start something, fully intend to finish it, but something stops you.  And truly not every drawing is one that you can go back to — even if it had good ideas, or you liked it a lot — not even if you’re a workaholic can you finish everything. 

But the drawing that you stop, doesn’t just arbitrarily end.   It has a certain identity, a certain something that was the sum total of what you were thinking by that point in time.  It holds suggestions in it of what was coming next, I think.  It’s a fingerprint of the mind, a trace of a cloud, of an emotion or a will.

I’ve been drawing lots of flowers lately.  I wake up, I start drawing.  And the drawings are sometimes like dreams, and sometimes of course you wake up before the dream has concluded, and yet your mind has not exactly created a fragment, not entirely.  The brain is still sending you messages even in the unfinished thing, like smoke signals.

Like a real pond

After working on my drawing at the secret bunker studio, I took photos as I usually do.  Then got an odd notion.  Why not photograph the picture from below as one might see it if it were mounted high upon a wall.  (Sometimes that’s the only way you can photograph pictures when they’re housed somewhere.)  And as I saw how distorted the image became, I inclined to indulge the distortion in extravagant ways.  After that I was in search of distortion, the stretchier the water’s topography, the better.

When you’re photographing the real fish, their movements and the wave patterns are often stopped artificially or alterred greatly from what our brains tell us we see.

Photographing the drawing from every angle across its flat plane, I saw the fish begin to “swim” even more — round the curved edge of the earth’s watery.  Like koi explorers they looked to drop off the edge of the space-time.  And the blues widened like a curtain furling.

If I were to use these distorted photos of my drawing as reference images for other pictures, I could draw the distortion right in and jazz riff something new.  Or one could combine the distorted sections into a new “whole.”

Collage is possible, or rescrambled puzzle pieces made more puzzling.  Lots of improvisations possible as one follows the path.  Or the wave.  The fish wave.

I decided to treat my drawing like it was a real pond.  With real fish, who move.

Time Management for Artists, number three’s a charm

Theme and variations.  Pick something, doesn’t matter what it is so long as you care about it (feel it tug at your heart or your curiosity — I prefer curiosity but some people are emotional).

Make one you like (this could take a while, enjoy the ride).

Make the next one either bigger or smaller, in a different medium; redo the oil painting into a watercolor; remake the color version as a monochrome; turns the masses into lines; change the format from a rectangle into a square, et cetera.

Play it in every key signature.

[This post is dedicated to the life and memory of Paul Squires of Gingatao, a great poet of the early 21st century.]

Time Management for Artists, numero deux

Count.

Oddly enough time divided up makes more time, time that can be seized and used.

Time sections are Jerusalem artichoke-like:  you cut the bulbs in pieces and get more plants.  Each piece will grow, and you’ll live in a forest of the plants if you’re not careful, a vast sea of waving heliotropic flowers continually turning their faces toward the light on the earth’s great sweeping clock face.

Count how many versions you’ll do.  (Set a goal.)  Count the amount of time that you’ll spend on each drawing. (Set a length goal.)  Set a timer, run your drawing like a race (get ready, get set, go!).

Redo the same thing thinking to turn yourself dumbly into a machine, a Xerox copier (all the versions will be different, humans are subtle).  This should be a separate rule.  I’ll repeat it later (which is also wise time use, repetition, we are a forgetful species).

[This post is dedicated to the life and memory of Paul Squires of Gingatao, a great poet of the early 21st century.]

Time Management for Artists, numero uno

First know that there is never enough time.  You have to use what is available.  I have tried different efficiencies over the years, but what I found most effective was having a child and obviously that won’t work for everybody.

But when I had my child, I learned quickly — with Nature as my teacher — that children require intense care, which gobbles up a day’s time very fast.  You have left over chunks of perhaps five minutes here and five minutes there.  And I began seizing those minutes.

Five minutes can be a lot of time, I discovered, perception being such an amorphous, stretchy and variable thing.

A child grows and time quantities change, and one must adapt to new measurements.  Still I’ve kept the fundamental insight: use the time that’s at hand.  One handful will do.

[This post is dedicated to the life and memory of Paul Squires of Gingatao, a great poet of the early 21st century.]

Life in Progress

Sometimes life throws you for a loop.  You have plans to do such and such, and it doesn’t work out.  Maybe your driver’s license comes up for renewal, and you have to postpone your paradise so that you can stand on line for endless hours.  That’s not what happened to me, but that’s the other loop I’ll be thrown into when I get free of this one.

Anyway, I’ve learned with the years that for an artist the key to dealing with life’s unexpected and sometimes unpleasant surprises is to have plans B, C and even D safely tucked in one’s pocket. 

I had to interrupt my lovely work’s momentum to do something perfectly mindless for onwards a week now.  But I have picked myself up (figuratively), dusted myself off, and I’m mentally swimming the koi pond again, if not in fact, then almost in fiction.

I had an image I stole (top of the post), that I cut into four segments, rearranged, and to which I later added things, new fish.  It’s a mode of invention I borrowed from Peter Paul Rubens (and from whomever he borrowed it from).  I come back to it now as a thirsty person comes upon a clear stream (or these days comes upon a little store that sells cold drinks).

In this picture I see the possibilities for endless others.  And when possibility is what you’ve got, you take it. 

Possibility first, reality after.

Count!

Sometimes the key is to count.  To make many, to make merry, count! In music you count the beats or the measures.  You can count the number of drawings you make and become prolific.

As you replay an idea, you can change it a little.  Variations on a theme works with a line as well as with a melody.  Yesterday was my day to take a break from other things, and I found myself too fatigued as well as too lazy and distracted to make much sense of the daylight.  So I picked the charming ceramic Spanish guitarist off the shelf and played a few riffs off her shape.

I decided to be as lazy in my drawing as I was in my head and let the pen lines venture where they willed.

Some of the drawings got a little crazy.

I turned her this way and that, then she began to sing as well as play.

Sometimes your art should be play!  Why be so serious?  Sometimes a glass of wine — or perhaps just as intoxicating a cup of tea! — and let the pen lines play havoc with life!

I always have a few games to make my fingers dance — to escape the leaden moods — to wind my way back from the forest of duties into some quiet, airy place composed entirely of lines — folding and coiling lines!

Count!  Dance, sing, tap the beats —  measure, measure, clap and step until the music stops!