Climate Change

Though the weather hasn’t really been all that bad (today’s high was 57 degrees) in my notebook I have been wandering around in warmer climes.  Was taking a hike down memory lane, as well, revisiting motifs that I have drawn before in other media.  You see, I found a trusty old pen that I used to draw with, so I whipped out my 30 year old super-sized bottle of India ink (still works) and decided to give the old pen a new go.  Been kicking the can down the road in other ways besides these.   Been looking for subjects, motifs, something a little bit different yet also pleasantly familiar.

Been trying out drawing with and without my precious crayons.  (It’s hard to leave go my beloved crayons.)

So, I have crepe myrtles with and without colors!

A Smoother Blue in the Skies

I posted this painting earlier in its first “pochade” state.  I’m continuing to work on it.  Thought it would be interesting to smooth it out.  I have decided to follow Corot’s tracks for a while — Camille Corot, the great mid-19th century French painter. 

Even though I’m working from a photograph, I don’t know exactly where the painting is going since one makes little changes.  After enough little changes, one has a lot of changes!

I’m working from someone’s photo now ( just as the old masters painted landscapes in their studios) and its being someone else’s photo explains  why I must change the image — since I’m loath to steal another person’s clouds.  And once the weather warms up, I’ll be doing some landscape outdoors.  But I only work outdoors when Mother Nature presents me with a perfect day.  I don’t like to get my toes cold or my brow all sweaty.  That’s why we’ve got windows.

Okay, just kidding.  Every day that Mother Natures presents IS a perfect day.  (She made me say that.)

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.

Fast Landscape

During the last several months my schedule has become one of almost constant interruption so I’ve been tinkering constantly with ways of trying to hold onto ideas.  Last paintings that I tried stalled because just as I get “fired up” I have to stop and turn my attention elsewhere.  For a time I was hardly painting, taking refuge in drawing (admittedly NOT a bad refuge) and other things (reading, study).

Well, I still have a large partly begun canvas on the easel — and I’m NOT giving up on it.  Far from it.  But I did sit myself down one day and gave myself a heart-to-heart talking to (I find that an integrated personality is highly over-rated).  I decided — or me, myself, and I decided — that any painting is better than none.

What’s more I have tons of materials left over from some old projects that I no longer need for their original intended use.  I decided that I was going to crank out something.  Whatever it was, some of it was going to be fast and free.

It’s better to be painting than not painting.  It is better to be making line and color decisions than no decisions at all.  I decided that I’d rifle through old photos — better working from photos than not working at all — and I was going to paint whatever I could — whatever I wanted to — I was throwing caution to the winds.

Needless to say, I’m beginning to really have fun.  And I’m getting more jealous of my painting time than formerly.  Sometimes I’ve got fifteen minutes.

By golly, I whip out the brushes.  Fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes!

Colored Surfaces

Quand on couvre une surface avec les couleurs, il faut pouvoir renouveler indefiniment son jeu, trouver sans cesse de nouvelles combinaisons de formes et de couleurs qui répondent aux exigences de l’émotion. — Pierre Bonnard

[When you cover a surface with colors, you must be able to renew its game indefinitely, tirelessly finding new combinations of forms and colors that respond to the urgency of the emotion.]

I made this drawing for the pure fun of drawing the colors and having my happy emotion.

Come visit my store on CafePress!

Life Landscape

The drawing one makes from life is often sloppy.  Well, sometimes life can be sloppy.  Nature is often sloppy with leaves and branches going this way and that way.  I can’t recall where I was or when I drew this, but I can see that I was in a hurry.  Yet I was able to grab a lot of specific impressions of the place and its colors.  Something of the mood, too, of the bare trees — and perhaps a cold day — comes across in the form of a bracing sense of air – and ambiguous contrasts of solitude and almost frantic energy.

One of the wonderful things about working outdoors is the sense of connectedness you get to the moment, the specific time of day, the temperature of the air, the sense of the air around you and the emotions inside you.
Come visit my store on CafePress!

Mirror of Water

I switch topics around.  While my large drawing of flowers sits on the easel slowly blooming, I’ve turned to smaller drawings for the pleasure of a distraction.  I find that switching around among several topics helps keep an image alive.  (I still have my koi paintings in the works, too, but I’m letting the layers of paint dry some before I continue them.)

This drawing is based upon a photograph and is also partly invented.  With luck I may get a chance to do some drawing outdoors this week, and the drawing of other landscapes — even from photographs — helps me warm to the subject.
Come visit my store on CafePress!

My little trees in a row

On a bright spring day of this century, I drew this row of young trees.  They are clothed in pink veils of flower-before-the-leaf.  And much of the silvery bark (that will soon disappear in leaves) is still visible and bright.  Their own branches and the variegated greens of more distant trees mingle on the page.  You can sense the space between near and far, yet everything is depicted in spare lines and haphardly rubbed tones.  It’s all very abstract.  Yet it’s all very “there.”

Whenever I draw something like this, it’s like taking the whole morning home with me and having it forever as a keepsake.  Spring morning-to-go!

[Top of the post:  Row of Trees in Spring, by Aletha Kuschan]

Scribbly and Leafy

Art is an interpretation of things.  Whenever we draw from life we confront one idea of reality — that highly acute (thanks to optometry) clear world with sharp edges and infinity of focus.  Our eyes light upon different things and the mind blends them into one continuous idea of what’s “out there.” 

In the arts of drawing and painting, by contrast, the world exists in two dimensions, and it has a finite size.  Maybe it’s just 11 1/4 x 8/7/16 inches like Raphael’s Saint George and the Dragon at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.  Maybe it’s 1.50 x 1.97 meters like Monet’s Nympheas at the Musee Marmottan.

However big or small it is, a picture represents a little world in itself — very much in finite and usually rectangular terms.  So the artist always needs to be aware of the differences between the world as he sees it before his eyes, verses the world as it exists in pictorial imagination.  Then too there’s the difference between the artist’s intention and the picture itself, which sometimes takes on a life of its own.

And the artist needs to be alive to the qualities of the medium used to make the picture as well.  Not all media are equal to all tasks.  Letting the picture travel to those ideas that the medium itself suggests (by virtue of its unique qualities) is one way that artists learn to invent ideas.  Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention.  Sometimes the medium limits what is possible and thereby creates the forms the picture will take.

Crayons are scribbly.  They can produce continuous tones, too, of course.  But line is their hallmark and their characteristic virtue.  And nature too is composed of a great many lines.  So the marriage of material to subject, where crayons are concerned, often leads to scribbles of one sort or another.

And one needn’t resist this.  Because scribbles can actually be quite beautiful.

[Top of the post:  a quick study after nature, Scrubs at the Arboretum, by Aletha Kuschan]

Drawing a Peaceful Sky

I think this place looks peaceful, though I have no idea where it is and what source I used for this drawing.  Was I looking at a photograph?  Or maybe I put my own colors into someone else’s drawing?  Or maybe I made the whole thing up?  It doesn’t really matter. 

Drawings take on a life of their own.  Whenever the artist starts seeing the drawing as simply what it is, then she begins seeing the drawing the way other people see it.  I’d love to visit this place.  To see the radiance left in the twilight sky that is richly mirrored in the water.  It looks so quiet, so clear, so calm.  It is dusk or dawn?
Come visit my store on CafePress!

[Top of the post:  Landscape at Twilight, by Aletha Kuschan, crayon drawing in a notebook]