Another visit down Memory Lane

I was going through one of my big boxes of stuff and found a little booklet called “Landscape Painting in Oils,” by Leonard Richmond published by Pittman Publishing in 1962.  I was only seven years old in 1962 and not yet painting, so I’m guessing that I acquired the book (however I acquired it) somewhat later.  Certainly by the time I was in high school I was attempting landscapes that had a bit of the feel of Richmond’s work — so, possibly he was among my “early influences”??

Be that as it may, everyone has had that experience of the sudden rush back through time.  Whatever opens the door to the past brings with it a set of ineffably wonderful related memories.  For a second, it was like being young again — like breathing the air of my childhood:  Mom in the kitchen fixing supper, Dad with his head under the hood of a car in the back yard, and my cat somewhere nearby available for petting.

I had stored the book with the page open to the image above, thus I infer that it was something of a favorite at the time, much later on, when I packed the big box of stuff.

Richmond died in 1965.  An internet site selling one of his posters describes him as “a British graphic artist and poster designer. He studied at the Taunton School of Art and the Chelsea School of Art.”  He was born in 1889.

Revisions

In my “getting back to work” phase, I have been doing a bit of this and that.  Here’s a bit of this.  After a session during which I resumed work on a large koi painting that I had abandoned months ago, I picked up this small landscape above, which I had initially painted very fast and I gave it a second going-over.  I’ve been away from my work for a while, and thus I use this and that to get my head back into the game.

I am browsing and nibbling at art.

Going Vertical

The format of the picture sometimes just seems to be there.  It isn’t typically the subject of very much scrutiny.  But I have been doing landscape so often in a horizontal format, that I wondered if it was time to think about vertical life.  The tall trees seem even taller when you let the sides of the picture reinforce their vertical stretch.

I like tall trees.  I like anything that inclines my mind upward.  For someone who so frequently paints the koi, I am actually (it may surprise you to learn) a very skyward inclining person. 

Of course even the koi pond reflects the sky, you know.  I’m on a campaign to get people to look up!

Dark Trees Dreamings

Arching branches and dark shadows on the ground and in the air, veiled skeins of amorphous shade.  The geometry of the topography of trees mapped out in sentinel positions, each one staking a meaning.  So many meanings planted, growing in a mind’s forest around which a wanderer in wakeful dreaming pleasantness muses upon so admirable a stand of trees significant, though of what am not quite sure.

ébauching the ébauche

The ébauche is the first fast sketch when you cover up the canvas, when you put things into their places.  It’s a “point and shoot,” direct from the hip kind of painting.  I guess every artist loves that aspect, the part where you mould reality, when you allow yourself to respond to what you see with minimal intervention between thought and execution or between feeling and intention.  Indulgent, I can not wait to finish one picture before beginning another.  Instead I have lined my canvases up,  a regular “Monet,” me and I move from one idea to another– then make the circuit again as though playing the child’s game of musical chairs. 

And when the music stops, one of the pictures will be done, and it’s time to put on some more music.

When trees are koi, can koi be trees?

My kois in progress and my landscape in progress, below.

Don’t know if it’s just me, but I see a bit of koi in my landscape and a bit of landscape in my evolving koi drawing.   They sit next to each other on a shelf.  I think they’re conspiring.  They want to dream themselves into twins.

My Italy of Thought

Years ago I began a large painting, one of my first large pictures.  Painted it in the living room of my parents’ North Carolina home using a ladder as an easel.  The motif was based on a parcel of land down the street from their home.  I tried to transform it into Renaissance Italy, the sort of place one of Giorgione’s gals would hang out.

These are samples of the several compositional drawings.  (There was a bunch.  I’m not sure what happened to them all.)  Looking through old notebooks, I found this one made in pencil (above) and this other in conte crayon (below).  The crayon adds to the Italian feeling, don’t you think?

More Variations of a Theme

A picture of hills with fuzzy little shrubs and trees that wend their way down to a stream is the subject I’m developing in one of my paintings.  I’ve been making several versions in drawings to sort out ideas.  Here’s two I did today.

An earlier drawing looks like this:

All three pictures have as their source the same reference photo.  You can look at the same image — a static photo, in this case — and create different things since there are many roads to invention.  I’m even finding a new one that I know some other artists have already discovered before me: running out of supplies.  I once knew a guy who used color in the most amazing way, but he was impecunious to the most unfortunate degree.  Whenever he ran out of paints, not being able to immediately run out and replenish his supply, he just continued along with whatever colors he still had.   The colors he achieved using Necessity as the mother of his invention was astonishing.

And, now, I’m starting to run out of certain key pigments — but for some of the drawings, I continue along with what remains.  More on that another day.

Meanwhile, a hillside looks different in a picture depending upon whether its silhouette is near the edge of the paper and achieves a different effect when more sky floats above.  Similarly changes in hue or temperature affect the mood.   Having many delineated, nubby little shrubs or a few generalized lumps also make one’s hillside change in personality.

Many moods to find in a little hillside by the stream.

Crayon Burn

All in a rush about work!  The morning begins with drawing and the evening ends with drawing.  I have to make several paintings this week and next, and the only way I can do it is to draw.  First I draw, and I can develop ideas without having to think very much.  And at the moment I do not wish to think!  I haven’t the time!

Some of the drawings I made today might reflect a bit of intellection.  But mostly, it was see, point, shoot.  Still — even just looking can become wearying even when it makes one feel delightful and buoyant!  Though I am tired, I have to keep running!  So, I made these drawings to be quicker than quick, drawings which I can attest are completely devoid of any thoughts at all!

Van Gogh says something that describes my day and its speed, though he was less lifted by it:

I’m also utterly incapable of judging my own work. I can’t see whether the studies are good or bad. I have seven studies of wheatfields,5 unfortunately all of them nothing but landscapes, much against my will. Old gold yellow landscapes — done quick quick quick and in a hurry, like the reaper who is silent under the blazing sun, concentrating on getting the job done.  [To Emile Bernard. Arles, Wednesday, 27 June 1888]

He felt, for the reasons of his time and circumstances, that he must judge his work and not being able to do so was wearying.  For me, however, modern girl that I am, not judging is part of my whole goal for these drawings.  Merely to draw, to draw a lot, to draw quickly, to get down many things, to pass through many images, to keep my fingers moving, moving, moving.

Quick, quick, quick!

Translating Pronouns

Writing about my art presents me with a daily challenge: how to keep being interesting?  How do I translate my experiences, my humble quotidien, personal, repetitive experiences into something that various unknown others can feel.  So often my first impulse is merely to say, “I did thus and so.”  I, me, myself did this marvelous happy artist thing today.  And the pronouns glare at (me) as (I) sit here tapping away on (my) keyboard.

Make it about something else, about someone else!  (I say.)

Making it about you is more challenging.  Oh, it makes my brain hurt!  (After a long day.)

And, that’s part of what the painting is for — for you.  My pronouns transformed into colors and forms are my quotidien razzmatazz intentions carved out into colored air, something we can both see, and something I can say — oh, so earnestly — without my brain having to work too hard.

The above is a painting based on the drawings of a previous post.  I’m still working on it.