Life in Bits and Pieces

The beauty of materials is a good starting point in art.  It parallels the beauty of materials in life.  Look at the textures of life’s things, seen at any focal length, they are amazing.  You see the fish.  Closer in, one sees the scales.  Deeper into that, the cells.  The atoms.  The quarks … the whatnot of smallness in whatever scientific discipline has spied structure by means of an intense myopia.

Get in close to art, and you find the beauty of the drawing’s mark or the stroke of a brush.  The chalky texture of oil paint.  The luminosity of watercolor.  The spare bracing Attic logic of a pen’s pure line.

Marks are like thoughts, they pile on one upon another, coming from the unseen textures of mind. “Who has seen the wind/neither you nor I/but when the trees bow down their heads/the wind is passing by” was a nursery poem my mother read to me, but who sees thoughts except as we say them or craft them into this and that, and where do they come from?  If you want to get close to a mystery in nature, you need do no more than try following the thread of a dream back to its source.

The details of my pictures are like snap shots of the whole.  The pieces seem like echos.  I was thinking the same things, whether big or small.

The early stages of a drawing have a certain charm, too.  It’s narcissistic to gaze in this mirror, I’ll admit.  But when you go to the trouble of trying to make something, you might as well get to know the maker.  Yet I have so little clue what I’m doing as I draw, and this mystery fascinates me.  I think the artist preserves something of a child-like spirit.  They way that a small child can content herself with watching someone tie a shoelace.  (Well, it really is pretty amazing when you think about it — and children unlike us — well, they think about it.)

When you look into nature, even human nature, sometimes it looks back at you.  Kind of spooky, that!

A pond’s surface has no up or down

I dug some large drawings out of storage to have a new look at them.  Old koi more scribbly than their more recent cousins.  These were made one fish removed from the real, abstractions formed of abstractions.  What can I say?  I like to scribble.  In these exercises in thought fish, it’s hard to identify the top of the picture, so it doesn’t strictly speaking have an “up.”  I made these somewhat like my old Aussie pal, the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, my teacher I never met — anyway, I sat on the floor and drew with the fishes spreading out horizontally (as fishes should).

And so I compared the scribbly with their firmer finned friends — all this taking place, of course, at my secret studio in the capital of the USA.

Before and After

Sorting through the photo records of my pictures, I found these before and after details of one of the big koi drawings.  It’s nice to gaze backwards sometimes.  I feel like I did something.

Life in the Fast Lane

Spent some time around the koi pond meditating on the agile delights of quickness.  Sometimes you’re just of a mind to play.  Today I drew fast swimmers.  The fast study is very different from other kinds of drawing.  Nicolaides called it gesture drawing when you seek out the essence of the thing from the inside out.  I’m not embarrassed to call it scribbling, though it’s scribbling of a high order.

Made a couple of these today, as well as rediscovered a couple that I’d made in notebooks as exploration for previous paintings.

The gesture of the lines can take on a life of their own.  It’s like listening to the syllables in a word.  The beauty of the activity is something that the artist should continually seek.  We are not just drawing things, we are drawing our thoughts, and discovering the forms and gestures of which thoughts are composed .  Along the way one discovers a world of inner hieroglyphs.

My work began today with this drawing above — a study for the “Big Guy” of the koi pond featured in my previous post. 

Agenor surfaced, too, while I was turning the pages of the notebook.  He’s the star of my first big koi pond.

Here’s the view of the koi studio today with a few of the fish that jumped out of the pond.

Swimming in Slow Mo

It was just a day or so ago I announced the beginning of the “last” koi painting (with “last” being understood as a relative term).  I am in finishing mode, I said.  The picture above, stored at my secret bunker studio in an undisclosed location in Washington DC is among those in need of the finishing.  Having established that fact, I promise I will not discuss the koi pond every day between now and the final strokes (of either the brush or the crayon).

Finishing the pictures is a task unto itself, with its own erratic schedule, creative whimsy, strategies and longish time spans.   Finishing is like Phase II in relation to which creating the first overall image (or “blocking in”) was just the framework.  Everyone is different.  I seem to never start a picture and continue straight through to its completion.  I start a whole bunch of pictures, often supposing that various ones are “almost” done, only to go back to them again and again realizing that the topic held much more than I ever supposed.

On one level, one could say that finishing a picture involves adding more details — except that the details are as variable as the whole picture is, as amorphous, as open to discovery.  Indeed, it’s in the discovering of whatever “details” there are that I seem so often to find out what the painting is.  As though the painting were a large flat surface filled with doors, each detail seems to provide an access to some kind of world lying behind the picture’s surface.

I often don’t know where to start when I recommence work on a picture.  I just pick somewhere and get to scribbling.  It’s almost as though you could play a piece of music by beginning arbitrarily upon any measure and still turn out okay!  (A reason why I prefer painting to music.) 

Since the koi are (and must be) based upon photos, this opening of doors, happens when I translate sections of photos into the picture.  The transcription of a photo into a picture can be a very creative endeavor, and the same is equally true about the details of a photo.  I find that the details become virtually pictures in themselves or almost pictures within pictures. 

I look at a bit of photo that is perhaps a few centimeters across as I hold it in my hand (enlarged above) and draw whatever features I notice, whatever strikes my fancy, exactly in the order in which my fancy is struck.  You can see a fish that swims underneath what looks like a reflection caught in the wave crests.  The warm orange colored koi with black spots and stripes slides under and also (it seems) through this dark veil.  The reflection both reveals and hides the fish. 

Translating it into crayon, as seen below on a different koi, I draw and scribble out shapes of colors.  Later I go back into these passages with other colors, that adjust or contrast with them.  The drawing with crayon resembles a warp and weft of fabric strands and can produce the most astonishing color effects, that seem naturalistic from a distance, but which are a crazy quilt of transpositions up close.

It’s both naturalistic and abstract simultaneously.

Later in the morning I was turning round in my mind the question of whether to add a large koi to the lower left of the picture.  I have a good candidate, but I wasn’t sure whether to put him in there or not.  I decided to rough him in, drawing over top an earlier idea that I had for that section.  When I was younger, I would never have attempted to put something so haphazardly into a drawing of this kind, but these days I know I can draw the guy.  It’s just a question of yes or no.  Slopping him into the pond with a few scrubbly colors doesn’t faze me because I realize my drawing skills are up to the task of rendering him, and I know these crayons are tough enough to take enough layers of work to “forgive” a few tactical changes.

The fish shapes get his size and position.  I’ll put more fish into his form on another occasion.  In the picture above he still floats over the shape of the earlier version.  By the time I got finished this morning’s work, some of the earlier drawing had already begun being covered up.  I’m going to draw the guy, too, on a separate sheet to get to know him better.  I can’t help begin thinking of these fish as individuals, almost as though they were pets. 

Still standing back to see how the new guy will get along with the rest of the pond.  He’s a big guy, a regular Moby Dick.

Big Blue Water

I had a big piece of canvas draped over an empty stretcher for a long time.  Well, finally got the staple gun loaded and got to work.  The canvas was stretched, the idea was laying there ready to begin, and I’ve begun work on the last large koi painting of the season.  I know that I’ll want to do others, maybe next year or a few years hence, but for now I’m in finishing mode.  All the koi are coming up to the surface — so to speak — getting their last layers of paint.  The pond will be stocked.  The fish can just swim.  And afterwards I’ll begin a new series on some other topic.

The last koi picture has perhaps some added allure for me.  Call it the finale.  Accordingly, for me, this canvas feels most like a dip in the water.  The innate beauty of the color blue captivates me now while I work.  This picture is one in which the water and its fluidity will provide the central theme.  Added to the indulgent pleasure of the motif, I’m using acrylic paint this time so that the work goes much faster.  Usually I love oil for the exact opposite reason — its slowness, its nuance — but I’m dolloping large puddles of color, pushing loaded brushes at this canvas, letting the shapes happen fast, thinking and reacting in one gesture.  It’s really a lot like swimming — which seems just about right. 

The painting is still new, lots of work ahead.  It sits at the end of a long gallery of fellow fish.  It’s my delight to see in the morning.  It reminds me why I first began painting.  This big pond will, I hope, make the spectator feel as free a fish!  Oh, may we truly know the delight of life on our blue planet.

Back at it

Evidently I was working on this back in April or thereabouts.  At least that’s when I first displayed the image here at a post entitled Do Clean House Occasionally.  I’ve been working on this picture again, bringing it up from its roughed-in beginnings, and gosh darn, I’ve been cleaning again too.  Is that weirdly psychological or what?

I’m getting so organized I scare myself.  I’m in serious danger of losing my membership in the Phyllis Diller fan club (where bicentennial cleaning is the ideal).  Well, organized or not, I cannot have been cleaning all that much because look how much progress I made on my painting.

The whole fish we caught

In the previous post I showed just the eye.  Here is the entire fish.  We caught him on paper about ten years ago.  We caught him and now he just swims in this one spot forever.  Immortal fish.

Testing, testing, testing

Got to test the camera once in a while.  I was trying to see how up-close I could get and still keep it in focus.  I love magnification.  Love to see the texture of the paper and the pigment dragged across the paper’s ragged surfaces.  And regarding the fish one draws, one cannot but love the eye that gazes back at you.

One out of Four Odds

One out of four people in this country is mentally unbalanced. Think of your three closest friends; if they seem OK, then you’re the one.

 

So said Ann Landers.  Well, I spent all day drawing fish.  (I wonder what group that puts me in??)  At least I can say that I’m very happy.