My Compotier

When I found a blue compotier at a second hand store I felt as though perhaps I might bump into Bonnard in the next aisle.  It’s not often that buying glassware feels like fate, but then most people buy a compotier to use rather than to paint.

While I am doing koi pictures, I post other things and this image is another where I discover that the subject matter has elements in common with the fish I paint now.  The cloth on this table is one that I’ve loved ever since I first saw it, and it reappears time and again in my pictures.  Perhaps it is not odd then that its big roses spiral in waves of floral pattern like my koi in the water.  My koi are roses swimming in water.  And my roses are koi dancing across a table cloth.

Sometimes it seems that one repaints the same picture over and over in many disguises.

[Top of the post:  Floral Still life, by Aletha Kuschan, oil on paper]

Fish Caught

Sometimes a fish jumps out and flies above the surface of thought,  a flash of light on wet scales.  He looks at you and dives back underneath the water, sinking into that dark obscurity of beauty and darkness into a liquid night.

What some might call just a drawing of a fish, why does it seem to me like a form of travel?  This sharp intensity of attention that lets you draw the fish, it takes you somewhere — to some strange place in thought.  There is this place to which you travel that lies somewhere between yourself and the page.

[Top of the post:  Study of a Fish by Aletha Kuschan, watercolor]

Red Idea

Sometimes I use a computer to get ideas, as here where a collage of images has been alterred in lots of fun ways.  I use things like this as sources from which to draw and paint.  It’s then that I fiddle around with the image using my own computer (the one between my ears).

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.

Mirrors into Thought

I’m busy painting koi these days, doing my own version of Monet’s Nympheas idea, living as it were in imaginary pools of water, becoming it sometimes seems a fish myself, so immersed I am in a world of blue.  So, it’s intriguing to reencounter a work like this drawing of flowers and to find so many similarities in it to the fishes and the pool. 

Though the colors are entirely different and the associations are quite opposite, this picture bears a mirror likeness to the koi ponds.  This similarity is made all the more mysterious by their oppositions.  One takes place outdoors, the other inside the house.  One is natural, the other is civilized and artificial.  One is vertical, the other horizontal.  But inside both pictures are formal means of ordering the visual idea.  Both images have a “swirl” of sorts as its schematic center.  The implicit visual movement of the flowers in their design, both the flowers in the vase and the ones arranged on the design of the cloth, echo the swimming motions of the fish in their pond. 

I’ve noticed this kind of visual metaphor before in my paintings.  I have no idea what it means.  Beneath the subject matter lies a process of ordering and arranging that is as much the subject of the painting as are the objects depicted.  Somehow in the precise ways I order things, my personality lies hidden. 

It might seem that a person’s way of ordering ideas would be the last thing about themselves that they would “hide,” and yet I only discover these facts of self-hood for myself by this very indirect means.  And without even realizing I was doing so, naturally I reveal something of myself to others also by these tacit devices.

We project ourselves outwards upon the world in myriad ways.  Just that sense one has of knowing people, of taking the measure of them, even of people that we just meet when we make those crucial “first impression” judgements — all these effects are signs of the self that is foisted out.  Even a shy self is thrust onto the stage of life despite one’s efforts to seek shelter. 

We are all actors on the stage as William Shakespeare once keenly observed.  For the artist the picture is but another kind of garment one wears to demonstrate and manifest the self to the world.

A picture is a strange mirror because it distorts as much as it reveals, pressing ideas outward into the world in a thousand disguises.  Yet behind all forms of concealment, one person peeks through.  Paint.  Do paint, and I guarantee you’ll gain self-knowledge though you may not always recognize the face you see in painting’s strange mirror.
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[Top of the post:  Drawing of Flowers in a Vase, by Aletha Kuschan, Caran d'ache on Canson paper]

Fuzzy details

The upclose of first marks on a canvas can be kind of exciting.  When everything is possible still…

[Top of the post:  detail of a Koi picture (see Anne Sophie Mutter and her Opposite) by Aletha Kuschan]

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]

Sorry, of Late

Sorry I haven’t posted any art today.  Of late, I’ve tried to post something everyday.  However, today the frogs have taken up all my time.  They’re quite unruly. 

[Top of the post:  the frogs at home]

Stream of Consciousness

And this is the stream of consciousness!

Little Pond of Dreams

This might be the pond where I threw my keys, from which I caught three fishes.